McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (22 page)

Town is buzzing and seems to be getting fuller and fuller the later it gets. I enjoy a splendid dinner of freshly-caught, local, organic, free-range toasted cheese and ham special, and a bowl of chips, on the window ledge of a friendly pub with a mostly local clientele. As I’m about to leave, the crowded room is suddenly filled to bursting point as the Tweedles come in with great commotion, accompanied by an even heavier couple. The four of them appear to have dressed for a cocktail party hosted by Zsa Zsa Gabor on a yacht in Acapulco, but if the locals have noticed, they don’t bat an eyelid. I suppose they must have seen everything by now.

‘So how are you enjoying your holiday?’ asks the barman, as he pours whiskey for the men, and something green for their partners.

‘Oh, it’s just gorgeous,’ says Tweedledee.

‘Yeah, terrific,’ agrees Tweedledum. ‘So old-fashioned.’

‘And so unspoiled,’ says Dee. ‘Say, do you have a rest room?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Guess I’ll wait then,’ says Dee. ‘We don’t do stairs.’

‘So, where are you folks from?’ asks the barman.

‘Oh, we live in Chicago,’ says Dum, ‘but my father was Irish.’ There’s a general murmur of approval and I feel ashamed. This man I’ve been mocking as a stereotype of mindless tourism turns out to be as authentically Irish as I am. I feel like apologising, though we’ve never even met.

‘Sure, that’s great,’ says the barman. ‘So where exactly was your daddy from?’

‘He was from Texas.’

Outside, the streets are really heaving and I’ve half a mind to go back to Dead Kid’s Room for an early night. However, I realised many years ago that, home or abroad, whether I go out or stay in, I’m temperamentally incapable of going to bed before the local closing time, for fear that someone out there is having fun, and I might miss it. So I prowl the streets in search of good things to say about Killarney, and realise that, if you took all the visitors away, you’d be left with a beautiful and virtually intact eighteenth and nineteenth-century country town, unvandalised by planners and developers.

I walk past a big, white, posh hotel called the Killarney Bay. In an attempt to present itself as authentically Oirish, its bar, which looks out on to the street, has been christened ‘Scruffies’. Through half-open picture windows I can see elegantly dressed young people, with lifestyles and unnecessarily expensive wrist-watches, nibbling olives and sipping wine and designer lager. A couple of bouncers with brutal haircuts and black bomber jackets stand in the doorway, presumably to stop anyone scruffy getting into Scruffies.

Round the corner, in the front bar of the Killarney Grand, a saintly-looking young woman and a rather debauched-looking young man are playing fiddle and guitar. Immediately in front of them, several rows of French, Italian and Scandinavian tourists sit and stare in reverential silence. One of them is taping the session. Behind them stand the English, Americans and Australians, listening all right, but also occasionally chatting, much to the annoyance of a sour-faced, curly-haired Viking in cycling shorts, who keeps shushing Nordically. Further back still, stretching the full length of the enormous and luxuriously refitted bar, stand the young professional Irish, chattering like speed freaks and ignoring the music completely, as they discuss work and house prices while trying to get off with each other.

Sitting on her own in a corner at the music end of the room is a wild, red-faced woman in her fifties who’d never get into Scruffies in a coat like that. She’s drinking pints of Pils lager, and giggling and chatting to herself in an amiable enough way. In between songs, she launches into a traditional ditty of her own, originally recorded by Dean Martin. The fiddle player smiles as she retunes her violin, but the intrusion is too much for Viking-on-a-Bike, who hasn’t travelled to the mystical Celtic heartlands to hear ‘Li’l Ole Wine Drinker Me.’

‘Ssh!’ he hisses, bringing half a century of Scandinavian social engineering to bear on the situation.

‘Ah, feck off, ya silly tourist cunt,’ comes the laconic reply. The musicians crack up.

I fall into conversation with a thirtyish couple, perfectly turned out in the Barbour ’n’ Brogue style favoured by rich young Italians. They come from Venice. ‘It must be nice to get away from all the tourists,’ I joke.

‘But I think there are also very many tourists here,’ says the woman, impassively.

To loosen things up, I offer to buy them a drink, and find myself in the unprecedented situation of ordering two glasses of mineral water in an Irish pub at half past ten at night. My new friends watch with fascination as I take a gulp from my pint. I feel like an exhibit. This must be what it’s like to eat sausage and chips in a bus shelter while Princess Anne watches and takes notes.

‘In Venezie, there is nothing like this’—she gestures gracefully with one hand, taking care not to spill the precious water—‘where many people meet to, how you say, get drahnk?’

I tell her I like Venice very much, and, for some reason, she tells me that her mother, who is a countess, has Alzheimer’s, and that she is caring for her. As my first joke has gone down badly, I decide against the Alzheimer’s gag, even though it’s a cracker. Her husband, who’s a journalist, speaks five languages, the flash bastard, but seems happy just to observe us talking. I become paranoid that he’s weighing me up so he can write a vicious caricature after I’m gone. I’ll probably play a key role in his article about xenophobic, monolinguistic, heavily perspiring Englishmen boozing their philistine way round the cultural hot spots of Europe. Just as I’m thinking it’s unethical for people to write about you if they don’t tell you that’s what they’re up to, she asks me what I’m doing in Ireland; so I tell her I’m a physics teacher on holiday.

‘So, why are you travelling alone?’

I’d have thought that was fairly obvious. I mean, how many friends do physics teachers have, apart from the reps who sell them the lab equipment? But solo travel is a deeply puzzling concept for Italians. In many years of travelling I’ve never met any Italians away from home on their own. Indeed, the Twenty-sixth Rule states that
Any Italian Travelling Abroad Will be Accompanied by an Even More Glamorous Person of the Opposite Sex
. When two couples are travelling together, at least three of them will be wearing sunglasses on top of their heads.

I tell her I’m on my own because my wife has left me.

‘But why did your wife go away?’

‘Because I am a physics teacher.’

She’s uneasy now, not certain whether I’m joking or not. I decide to make amends by telling her something true. I confess I’m fascinated by the worldwide boom in all things Irish, and I’m wondering whether it’s possible to belong in a place where you weren’t born and didn’t grow up. Perhaps she can shed some light on my dilemma?

‘Oh, I think this is true, yes, many Italians are now coming to Ireland. We feel very close.’

‘What, because you’re both Catholic countries?’

‘No, no, eez more than that. I think in both countries we have—how you say—healthy disrespect? for authority? This makes me belong.’

Oh God, no. She’s misunderstood me. I meant can
I
belong, not her. People can be so self-centred, can’t they?

‘And also here in Ireland they value? Yes, value, the important things in life—children and grandparents. The very young and the very old. This too is much like Italy.’

But not much like England. Mind you, the bloody Romans never even came to Ireland. Much too scary for them. She takes a careful sip from her mineral water and looks out across the sea of alcohol.

‘So yes, I think I can belong here.’

‘Oh, right, no, what I was thinking, and I don’t know what you think about it, but an outside opinion might help’—she’s starting to look a bit baffled—‘but is it possible for me with, you know, Irish ancestors, that I can belong here? Or am I just a sort of romantic fool?’

She pauses to think, then gives me a big, friendly smile. ‘Why, yes.’

Phew.

‘Yes, fool, I think. You are English, yes? So you are always wanting to fight with Irish, to beat them.’

Hey, come on love, you can’t pin that one on me. My granddad threw stones at the Black and Tans.

‘You cannot belong, you and the Irish, you are like Jock.’

Like Jock? What the hell’s she on about now? She turns to her husband for reassurance that she’s using the right expression. He smiles and raises a supportive eyebrow.

‘Yes, the English and the Irish, like Jock, and cheese.’

Lying on Dead Kid’s Divan, I lick my wounds. I’ve been laughed out of town by an Italian aristo who thinks she’s got more claim on the place than I have. This seems to be Ireland’s power. After about ten minutes, everyone feels like they belong here, so there’s nothing special about me. Diaspora: it’s a romantic word, but perhaps to be truly part of it your ancestors had to walk to Appalachia or the Yukon, or get deported to New South Wales. Perhaps having a mum who came over to be a nurse during the Second World War just doesn’t count: not enough romance, not sufficient active and deliberate oppression on behalf of the English, to make the story sad enough.

It can be a bloody gloomy business you know, travelling on your own.

Before I left the bar, Gianni and Hortense gave me a business card embossed with full-colour coat of arms and two e-mail addresses. I gave them half a beer mat with a phone number in felt-tip. You never know, one day they may need to call ABC Taxis in Brighton.

Lying on the bed, I decide to use their card as a bookmark, and turn to Chapter Eleven of Thackeray: ‘Killarney, Stag Hunting On The Lake’. But I’m asleep within minutes. Half an hour later I’m woken up by my own snoring, which really is about as sad as it gets. I clean my teeth and undress, which people in books hardly ever do, and get into bed. It’s not long enough. My feet are sticking over the end. Before I go to sleep I get up and check the walls for bloodstains.

There aren’t any.

Poison, maybe?

‘Yeah, yesterday was a pretty good day; we did the, er, Ring of Kerry?’

The guy at the next, indeed only other, breakfast table is a skinny, baldy, fifty-five-year-old New Yorker with two twenty-something daughters, or incredible sexual magnetism. He’s talking in the fastest-spreading dialect in the English-speaking world—Californian/Australian Universal Interrogative.

‘Today I guess we’ll do the, er, Gap of Dunloe?’

The daughters or lovers are in agreement.

‘For sure.’

‘Sounds cool.’

I have come up with a plan of my own.

I will go outside, wander about aimlessly, and see what happens.

It’s ten a.m., and people are struggling along the streets with their luggage, desperate to leave before the next lot arrive. The town resounds to the thwack of daintily-wrapped soap and miniature shampoo being bunged on to freshly-swabbed sinks. Outside the big hotels, the medieval assassins are shouting and touting among the traffic, while their ponies fantasise about life in a field. Inside the biggest hotel, in a ₤350-a-night suite, Hortense is eating
pain au chocolat
in a complimentary towelling bathrobe while Gianni taps away at his laptop and chuckles. By now, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, still on target for twelve countries in ten days, will be somewhere on the Grand Canal, in a gondola that’s rapidly shipping water.

It’s a warm, sunny day, with high fluffy clouds, and the light plays dramatically across the mountains that ring the town. Apart from some new shopfronts, and replacement windows, and new hotels, and the traffic, it’s probably much as it was when Thackeray was here. But surely there couldn’t have been this many visitors? Even the people without luggage don’t seem to live here. They’re all looking up at buildings, or rifling through guidebooks, or pausing tentatively on street corners, behaviour which in more ruthless countries would be taken to mean, ‘I’m not from here, so please rob me.’ And once somewhere has more tourists than local people, more knick-knack shops than newsagents or groceries, then equilibrium has been destroyed, the game is up, and the balance has irrevocably shifted in favour of revenue, occupancy and the forces of darkness. Real life may continue, but to the visitor it’s all but invisible.