McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (13 page)

When I came in I had to ask three times for a pint before the barmaid understood me. They’ve never liked me, the Welsh. I went to a Wales—England rugby game at Cardiff Arms Park once, too crowded to move, and at half-time the people on the tier above us pissed on us for being English. I tried to explain I was a fellow Celt, but had to settle for turning my collar up.

Oh Christ, Hendrix has finished now and Marmalade are on, singing ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. This can’t be what all the telly’s like down here, can it? Mind you, these blokes don’t seem to notice. They’re up playing darts now, four of them, big buggers, with enormous beer bellies poking through skin-tight leisure tops. That one there, you can see the shape of his navel through it, and Christ, can they swear. These people swear more than the Irish. The only words I can hear as they’re throwing the arrows are swear words. The barmaid’s swearing now too. They probably think I’m some terrible ponce, sitting here with an English accent and writing things down. Hope they don’t come over.

‘Hey, what are you writing, butt? Give us a look, will you?’

‘Oh, it’s nothing. Just some stuff about what fat bastards you are. Hey, come on, lads, only joking…’

Nah, smashing people the Welsh. St Patrick came from here, didn’t he? There you are then. Nancy Sinatra’s on now; this is all getting a bit weird. Better not have any more to drink till I’m on the boat. Walk to the door. Whatever you do, don’t look back. They might take it as a sign of weakness.

8.20 p.m.
I’m sitting in the queue to get on the ferry between a Saab turbo and a Land-Rover Discovery, listening to the top news story of the hour.

Thirteen members of the Ivory Coast youth rugby team have defected, or at any rate run off, during a tournament in Cardiff. One went after the match, six during dinner and another six during a shopping expedition the next day. They’ve no money, no English and only the clothes they were standing up in: bright turquoise tracksuits. So police are looking for thirteen enormous black youths in dayglo suits who don’t speak the language and have no money.

‘They seem to have disappeared without trace,’ says a senior Welsh cop ‘So far we have no leads. We are taking this very serious.’

I’ve just had the third degree from a policeman or customs officer or some such. He was Welsh too. They’ve always had it in for me. I was in a pub in Merthyr Tydfil once, years ago, with my friend Rod, and people in the public bar heard a rumour there was an Englishman in the lounge. They came through and formed a little queue to make fun of me. Mind you, I did stink of urine at the time, having been at the Cardiff Arms Park that afternoon.

The bloke just now was asking all kinds of questions about the purpose of my visit. Naturally I wasn’t going to tell him I planned to wander around for an unspecified length of time going into every pub I saw called McCarthy’s and undertaking a sadomasochistic pilgrimage, while trying to work out whether I was on some metaphysical level Irish, due to the collective genetic memory of my ancestors living on in the innermost reaches of my soul. So, I just said, ‘Holiday’, and he thought, sad lonely English bastard, then started asking questions about the blue Tank. How long had I had it? Made a note of its registration. Clearly thought I was exporting it illegally, which I may well be, but I’m not about to give him the satisfaction of telling him that.

9.20 p.m.
Happy Shillelagh Theme Bar on boat. We’ve just left port.

Thirteen tall black blokes in bright blue tracksuits are standing at the bar trying to get served. Nah, just joking. It’s actually weirder than that. The place is like a Hogarth engraving. It’s as if hundreds of alcoholics who’ve been drinking all day have been given massive injections of adrenaline and amphetamine and herded into an enclosed space with cattle prods. The din is deafening, the energy level terrifying, but Guinness is only ₤1.75 a pint, so, as it takes so long to get served, I’ve just got two. I’ll need a few more to have any hope of catching up with everyone else. If this lot get seasick it’ll be a catastrophe. On balance, I’d settle for the vomiting cattle.

It’s a ten-hour voyage and I haven’t got a cabin. Neither, it seems, have hundreds of other people. On the way up from the car deck, every acre of available floor space, and this is a big boat, is covered with sleeping bags, pillows, duvets and air-beds. Airbeds? Don’t people know how to rough it any more? They’ve got foot pumps some of them, the mollycoddled bastards, and I saw one lump of a lad with pyjamas on. All I’ve got is one of those hopeless little velvet aeroplane pillows, and I’ve left that in the Tank. Too late now. The plan was to find a nice comfy sofa or luxuriously upholstered banquette to sleep on, but there’d be more chance of that in a refugee camp. Cholera might be an option though. I was swept along in a tide of thirst-crazed bugeyed humanity to the bar where I now find myself. The barmaid here didn’t understand me the first two times either. Bloody Welsh, I suppose, though I have to say she sounded more—what’s the word—Russian?

The tables are all packed with great circles of career drinkers, laughing and shouting and generally behaving as if they’re celebrating early release from a secure mental institution. There are hordes of marauding children, all acting as if they’re drank too. Some of them have crept up on a laughably optimistic woman who has lain down on an air-bed in a corner, and are trying to make the sound of an air-bed deflating. When she doesn’t react, they jab it with a fork. Several dozen tellys seem to be on, all showing different football matches and pop videos simultaneously. There’s clearly nowhere to sit, let alone lie; but then, against the odds, I spy a five-foot length of cushioned bench seat free, slightly removed from the vortex of the melee. I decide to stake my claim and, despite the pints I’m carrying, I narrowly beat two crack addicts in an exciting foot race. Pausing only to buy a Big Issue from a passing busker and his dog, I get stuck into the Guinness. So this will be my bedroom tonight. Ideal.

9.50 p.m.
I now realise why this seat was the only one free on the entire boat. Sitting, standing, and dancing on tables immediately behind me are thirty men in matching green polo shirts who I now know to be Yokel Rugby Football Club from Nether Sheepshagger in Mummerset. They’re going on an end-of-season tour to Ireland, and seem quite excited at the prospect. I have chosen the worst seat in the whole of the Irish Sea. Some of them have just taken umbrage at my writing things down in a book, a process which, in their village, is probably associated with witchcraft, and are shouting things at me and clearly contemplating reprisals. I decide to drink up and go for a wander round the boat.

As I leave, a shrieking gang of eleven- and twelve-year-olds turns up. They are black and white, boys and girls, one on crutches, one wearing some sort of leg iron or calliper—an Equal Opportunities gang. For some reason they’re all dressed in Tam o’ Shanters and ginger wigs. Not an hour out of port, and the voyage is already taking on an unpleasant hallucinatory quality. Is this what the prospect of arriving in Ireland does to people? God knows what it must be like in August at the height of the tourist season. They must need water cannon, or issue the bar staff with Mace.

10.20 p.m.
Out in the main thoroughfare two nuns are saying the rosary outside the disabled toilet. The booze supermarket is as packed as Safeway on the Friday night before Christmas. Four fifteen-year-old girls in stilettos, with pierced navels and goose-pimpled cleavage, are sharing a joke, and a bottle of Bailey’s, with two guys who look like South American death-squad hit-men.

I seek refuge in a tiny bar near disco hell and order a drink. Sitting on a stool in the middle of the room is a man who looks like a parody Irishman from a Hollywood movie: red face, battered trilby, threadbare tweed jacket, clumpy boots, wooden stick. It’s unclear whether he’s a passenger, or some manner of traditional ornament or themed decoration laid on by the tourist board.

As I take my seat, the Tam o’ Shanter gang march past the doorway, clapping and chanting like goblin football hooligans looking for a ruck. Look at us all, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh—raucous, wild-eyed, up for it, bouncing off each other like actors in a surreal pageant of the history of our islands. What would Italian, or Cantonese, ferry passengers make of these appalling visions?

There are two crew members over there, eating ice-cream and drinking vodka. Perhaps they’re Russian too.

10.40 p.m.
I take a short stroll outside, past the lifeboats. There don’t seem to be many. Hope I don’t have to fight all the other mad bastards on the boat to get in one.

10.50 p.m.
Last orders in a restaurant on B deck. I’ve ordered two starters, on account of wanting to kill some time, but not being hungry. There are two restaurants to choose from, one Irish, one Greek, both serving exactly the same menu. I’m having garlic mushrooms and Caesar salad, neither of which is Greek, or Irish. Together with the French house red, they are vibrating alarmingly from the motion of the boat, which creates the interesting effect of making you feel sick as food goes down, rather than up.

On being asked which part of Greece he is from, my waiter tells me he is Polish. There are many Polish on this boat, he says, also Latvian and Russian, confirming my suspicions. At the moment, my waiter and two of his colleagues are standing in a line, backs to the wall, staring intimidatingly at me in an eerily accurate reconstruction of restaurant service in the old Soviet Union. To be fully authentic, there’d have been a fourth member of the team, to stop me getting into the restaurant in the first place.

A curious trade-off is taking place here. In the late eighties and early nineties the Irish got a foothold in Russia, running pubs and hard-currency supermarkets in Moscow and other major cities. Duty free and airport catering were all run by the Irish. So you could eat Irish stew and drink Guinness at Moscow airport, while waiting a couple of days for your internal flight to find fuel, or a sober crew. Nowadays, all the amiable Irish barmen who used to staff boats like this are on their way to their first million in Warsaw, St Petersburg and Budapest, leaving the displaced persons of the Soviet catering empire to recreate an authentic cold-war dining experience in the middle of the Irish Sea.

Midnight
Back in the bar, the rugby club have joined forces with the ginger-wigged midgets and are teaching them the obscene version of ‘Allouette’. Many of the rugby players have the strange walk of gym fanatics—no neck, shoulders hunched, arms curved out from the body like cowboys poised for the draw—an absurd self-conscious affectation exacerbated by too many steroid milkshakes.

On a plush banquette not ten feet from the caterwauling rugger buggers a young couple are making elaborate preparations for sleep. He’s your standard grey-faced, brutal-haircutted contemporary youth in a tom Blur T-shirt. She is slender, brunette, dark bob, angelic smile, twenty years old, the most beautiful woman on the boat. While she coyly takes out a hair-band, he removes his trainers and sniffs them. Next off are his pale-blue towelling socks, so moulded to his feet you can hear the skin peel off with them. These he doesn’t so much sniff, as ingest. Bafflingly, she then kisses him firmly on the lips and they lie down in a face-to-face embrace, the socks three inches from their heads. I lie down on the carpet underneath a table and ponder the arbitrary cruelty of life.

6 a.m.
What’s left of the air is filled with the horrible sounds of people with chest infections regaining consciousness.

When you wake up hungover, or on the floor of a bar, or both, it’s important to remember that this is the worst you’re going to feel all day. Nothing will top the moment you press down on the carpet with one palm in an attempt to sit up, and stale beer oozes up between your fingers as if from a giant sponge.

All around me on the floor are people who weren’t there when I went to sleep—except for the woman behind me, whom I remember lying down with her son in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She’s lighting up again now, while the lad sleeps soundly on the scorched carpet. Across the room are several rugby players, in comas, on window ledges. Of the ginger midgets, there is no sign.

It has been, by the most optimistic definition, a fitful night’s sleep. Though I barely stirred when the drugged-up public schoolboy spilled the ashtray on me, I was jerked bolt upright by the sound of the fire extinguishers going off, and the screams that accompanied them. I looked up to see several rugby players standing on seats in clouds of dense white smoke, lit from behind and shrieking with laughter, like demon kings in some kitsch opera. Suddenly through the smoke a vision appeared in peaked cap, gold epaulettes and braided uniform, gesticulating and shouting in an East European accent, distracted from his purpose only briefly by the sight of a naked yokel carrying an ornamental potted palm. Showing immense courage in the face of overwhelming odds, the former Warsaw Pact officer threw down the gauntlet to the unacceptable face of rural English team sports, and confiscated their bottle of Jameson’s. An ‘ooh’ of foreboding echoed round the bar. But Mummerset’s finest decided to leave it there and backed down, mumbling curses. From across the bar came a flurry of sneering abuse from the twelve-year-old Tam o’ Shantered underclass. ‘Chuck’em off, chuck’em off, chuck’em off,’ they chanted, their faces contorted by hate and E numbers. Maybe I’m mistaken, but two of them appeared to be waving crutches in the air.

God help us all when they start drinking.

Now though, through those windows that aren’t obscured by the reclining bulk of liver-damaged rugby players, I can see the day’s first light. I pick my way unsteadily across the room through the human flotsam that litters the hideously stained carpet. Half-finished pints afloat with fags and partially digested food clutter the sticky tables. The TVs are showing the shopping channel, motorcycle scrambling and a Daniel O’Donnell video. A bewildered multiply-pierced youth, hair matted like a sheep’s arse, peers out anxiously from his skidmarked, joint-singed sleeping bag. He seems genuinely baffled by the ragbag assortment of truck drivers, labourers, students, tinkers, businessmen, schoolgirls, nuclear families and second-row forwards scattered on the floor around him, looking and smelling like victims of a late-night poison gas attack. It’s possible he has no recollection of how he got here.