McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (12 page)

‘Six hundred and thirty-two pounds?’

‘Yes, sir. Six hundred and thirty-two pounds thirty-four pence. But that’s punts remember, Mr McCarthy, sir.’

Everything’s turning woozy with the nausea. For a moment I can’t think straight. Punts? What’s he on about? Perhaps it’s rhyming slang and he’s talking about his bosses.

‘So, if you allow for the exchange rate, sir, that’s only…’

‘Six hundred and thirty-two pounds to hire a tiny bloody embarrassment of a car for two weeks? Why the hell is car hire so expensive in this country?’

‘Well, sir, it’s not two weeks, it’s only thirteen days.’

‘That’s right, so there should be at least a day to knock off then, shouldn’t there? This can’t be right.’

‘Well, sir, no, sir, because you got the first week at the weekly rate, which was, let’s see, ₤210 plus tax, but the second week isn’t a week at all now, if you follow me, it’s only six days, and at the daily rate, I’ll just check on the calculator, that’ll be £223.95 plus tax.’

‘So, it’s more for six days than a week?’

‘That’s right, sir, yes, because of the discount, you see, sir.’

‘But can’t I just pay for a week and give you a car back a day early and then everyone gains, don’t they?’

‘I can’t do that, sir, not unless you hang on to it until tomorrow, and then it’ll be cheaper all right. Would you like to do that?’

‘But, bloody hell, what are all these extras anyway?’

‘Well sir, there’s £11 a day insurance.’

‘What?’

‘Ah y’see, you initialled for that, here and here. It’s fully comprehensive and there’s tax here and here and here.’

And on it goes. A litany of charges. Optional insurance, special insurance, roadside insurance, home contents insurance, booking fee, room service, adult video, gas bill, optional tip and two Four Seasons pizzas, all adding up to the final breathtaking total.

‘But what’s this here?’

‘The daily rate, sir. That’s the special BBC rate.’

‘But I’m not working for the bloody BBC.’

‘Well, the computer has you down as BBC, Mr McCarthy.’

‘I’m not from the BBC. I worked for them here once a couple of years ago. That’s all.’

‘Well, that’ll be it then. It’ll be in the computer and you qualify for that rate.’

‘But it’s ₤30 a day. I booked at £22.95.’

Well, that is the special BBC rate, sir.’

‘Seven quid a day more than the standard rate?’

‘Seems to be, sir, heh, heh. I’d say it’s time they renegotiated that deal now. They probably haven’t looked at it for a long time there.’

Suddenly a shifty youth with spots, jug ears and a company polo shirt materialises from out the back and hands a slip of paper to Ruaraigh.

‘Look, what I’ll do, Mr McCarthy, is I can put in a request to Head Office to bump your rate down from the BBC rate to the normal rate, like. I can’t promise anything now, but maybe they’ll send you through a discount on the old credit card.’

‘Thanks, Ruaraigh. I appreciate that.’

‘But the thing is, sir’—looking ominously at the paper Jug-ears has slipped him—‘it seems there’s damage to the car, sir.’

‘But there can’t be. I only just bloody parked it outside.’

‘I know that, sir, but our operatives have just been checking it out, sir.’

Jug-ears is out the back, staring like a vindictive gargoyle.

‘And there’s a cracked windscreen, sir.’

‘A tiny crack, yes, the size of a match head. A pebble hit it but I’ve got your comprehensive insurance.’

‘You still have to pay the first £75 of any claim, Mr McCarthy.’

I’m near to tears now, realising the only thing round here that’s comprehensive is the way I’ve been stitched up.

‘And the tank’s not full, neither, sir. So there’ll be £7.50 for petrol. You’re always better off filling up before you bring it back because we have to charge top whack.’

The bloody thing hadn’t been full when I drove it away. Hire cars never are. The needle drops from full to three-quarters when you’ve barely left the airport, because behind the phoney smiles of the front desk, in airport car parks all over the world, spaced-out jug-eared school-leavers, whose meals taste of nothing but petrol, are sucking on siphon pipes to swindle you.

‘So that makes it £714.84 to be exact.’

Less non-BBC discount, of course, if it comes through. I could have bought a car for less.

The flight, on the other hand, was £21.30 one way, Cork-London, one of the new no-frills deals that makes you wonder how they can afford a pilot who’s passed his test. Just before take-off, but well after take-off time, the family we’ve all been waiting for finally turns up. I spotted them in the bar earlier: three kids, mum and dad, and an out-on-parole brother-in-law, all in various combinations of Manchester United replica kit, except for mum, who’s gone for Glasgow Celtic, though I think one of her tattoos is United.

Seats on these flights are unreserved, like being in a bus, or the casualty department of a hospital. The family, who are clearly in high spirits, having presumably given Social Services the slip earlier in the day, base themselves a few rows up to my right; the eldest boy though, a nine-year-old sociopath, is banished down the aisle to sit next to me. When he complains, then shrieks, his uncle—carry-on beer in hand ready for take-off—comes down and threatens him, then gives him a can of Coke and a family-size bag of what smell like prawn cocktail and Russian cigarette-flavour cheesy corn snacks. The kid chugs the Coke and guzzles the technicolour chemicals in the few minutes we’re sitting on the tarmac, then as we begin to taxi, he starts wailing, ‘Ma, Ma, Ma’ in a monotone crescendo that goes unnoticed by the increasingly lively, and indeed arm-wrestling, family group up front. He blurts out the words, ‘Ma, I’m gonna do a sick,’ just a split second before blurting out the Coke and cheesy snacks from, I can’t help noticing at such close range, nose and gob simultaneously. Fortunately a woman across the aisle is quick to react with a no-frills sick bag, and I get away with minor traces of splashback.

As we gain altitude and my pebble-dashed chinos begin to crisp up nicely, I consider the reasons for this hiatus in my journey. I’m planning to spend a lot more time travelling round the west of Ireland, but not in a hire car; and I can’t make the Loch Derg pilgrimage before they open for business in June. And anyway work calls.

Well, not work exactly, but one of the management-imposed charades that plague many industries these days, and television more than most. Every few months the senior executives at BBC and Channel 4 and ITV leave to take up similar jobs at a rival channel, where they immediately sack the existing staff and bring in their mates from their last job. They then cancel programmes, and commission focus groups of unemployable daytime TV-watchers with personality disorders to try and find out what viewers want.

Meanwhile, writers are summoned from all over the country to dream up ideas for vibrant, new, original programmes, which are then ditched in favour of the braindead pet, cookery, gardening and home improvement shows that have come to dominate the British airwaves. This time I’m considering pitching an idea about two sick dogs who swap homes. While they’re away they get looked after by sexy vets, and their gardens and kennels have makeovers. Then they die and get barbecued by Ainsley Harriott. I’ll need about a month in England for meetings with various chancers, charlatans and posh boys calling themselves producers, then I can go back to Ireland for as long as I like.

As we come in to land at Stansted there is a vicious fracas involving the three-year-old in the middle of the row in front of me, who has spent the entire flight standing on her seat slamdancing and head-butting the shoulder of the woman in the window seat. The child’s mother, sitting in front of Sick Boy—now working his way through his second Snickers Bar with 7-Up chasers—is an odd one, and no error.

Thirty-something, white and Irish, she’s dressed in a full-length embroidered biblical gown with striped pyjamas showing underneath, desert sandals, and a blue nativity-play headdress. The whole ensemble is nicely complemented by two-inch-thick orange foundation—like one of those scary women at a department store cosmetics counter—pouting pink lip gloss, and Dusty Springfield mascara, which appears to have been applied with a table tennis bat.

In England, we’re used to being able to place people socially at a glance and it’s frustrating when, as with this woman, the totality of the image simply does not compute. The best I can come up with for now is that she’s from one of those obscure fundamentalist Christian sects who don’t believe in books or paracetamol. The poor woman has probably endured baptism by immersion, possibly in red-hot coals, and has been forced to practise serial polygamy with thin blokes with white beards and crocheted hats in poorly heated outbuildings in places like Sligo and Suffolk.

This lifestyle has clearly had its effect on the child, who is disturbed, and enjoying every minute of it. For the duration of the flight, her mother has half-heartedly attempted to control her by repeating the mantra, ‘Do you want a smack?’ fifty or sixty times. Or perhaps it was ‘some smack’. It’s hard to be sure. In any case, mum was the one who got the smacks: first, when the child carefully considered the hard-edged plastic toy she’d been given to placate her, then launched it at her mother’s face from a distance of two feet; and a second time, when, without warning, she landed a sickening right cross to her jaw. You got the feeling that once she got her on her own back at the ashram, she’d really lay into her.

‘So what was that on the plane about a smack?’

‘Nothing, dear.’

‘Come here a minute would you, mother?’

As the wheels come down and we’re preparing to land, mum, the woman by the window, and two hosties are still trying to force the kid to sit and fasten her seatbelt, while she emits a stomach-churning keen. At any rate, it’s stomach-churning for Sick Boy. This time he dispenses with the formality of a warning. He simply honks once, like a poorly goose, then chunders with tremendous violence. Foaming Snickers fragments hit the back of the nativity headdress like a flock of starlings. Then the kid’s mother runs down the aisle and belts him.

The glamour of airline travel is beginning to wear off. Next time I’ll recapture the serene atmosphere of my childhood.

I’ll go back to Ireland on the ferry.

A little more than six weeks later and I’m in a pub in Wales waiting for the night ferry to Cork. It’s more than two decades since I last arrived in Cork by boat, and I have a strong sense of what I can only describe as nostalgic anticipation. For reasons I cannot fathom, the telly in the corner above the bar was showing Jimi Hendrix in black and white when I came in. He was playing ‘Purple Haze’ then. He’s doing ‘Hey Joe’ now. Look—there’s Noel Redding standing next to him. The half-dozen men in the pub are watching as if they’re a new act. Perhaps driving to the ferry has somehow taken me through a time warp to the 1960s. This bar contains no indication that the last thirty years have happened. The most modern things in it are Formica and pork rinds. I’ve never understood the appeal of a snack that has hair growing out of it.

Hope the car’s safe outside. It’s a big tank of a Volvo saloon, nearly twenty years old, chunky, blue, deeply unfashionable, and it only cost £290. How do you like that then, Ruaraigh? Less than a week’s hire price. I found it in Brighton in a little back-street garage up from the station. I test-drove it, knocked him down from £400, did the deal and drove off. Six hundred yards away the clutch failed, the gears wouldn’t change, and it broke down in the middle of the Old Shoreham Road. I had to call the AA—the Automobile Association, not Alcoholics Anonymous. As I hadn’t yet worked out how to open the hood, it was quite embarrassing. The AA man didn’t disguise the fact that he thought I was a twat. Yet, when I was a kid, they used to salute you if you were a member. What went wrong there then?

Still, it’s a bargain, I keep telling myself, especially if you don’t count the £720 I’ve spent so far on repairs. Plus tax, road test fees, punitive insurance, add Ruaraigh’s bill—and the non-BBC discount never materialised, by the way—and I’m almost two grand down already. And I’m not even in Ireland. As I’ve said, I’m in bloody Wales.