McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (33 page)

The thing is, he’s Chinese. I wait till he takes a break, then collar him.

‘I grew up in Seattle, but mom and dad both came over from China.’

His voice is tinged with incongruous elements of a Galway accent. He says he’s classically trained, but just wanted to come to Ireland ‘to learn a few tunes’. He’s been in Galway five months, drifting round the bars, playing with whoever happens to be there.

‘The musicians in this town,’ he says, ‘are the best I ever played with.’ He writes his e-mail address in my notebook—even though I haven’t got a computer, which strikes him as a very amusing concept—and invites me to stay next time I’m in Galway. Now I know two people here; four if you count Billy and Pat from Belfast, who’ve moved on to Southern Comfort and red lemonade, a terrifying-looking drink that tastes even scarier.

‘Hey,’ says Pat when I join them at the bar. ‘Is that the Chinese fella out of the Chieftains?’

‘No,’ says Billy. ‘That’s a different Chinese fella you’re thinking of. So shall we drink up, or will we stay for one?’

Some time after dark, but before morning, we find ourselves in the upstairs room of a back-street pub that I couldn’t find again if my life depended on it. A semicircle of men who look like history teachers and professors of linguistics are playing a traditional session. As we arrive, they’re joined by a guy who’s so fat he can’t breathe properly, yet still manages to sing an exquisitely beautiful ballad in Irish. The crowd is the usual mix of solemn Scandinavians, Teutons and Mediterranean types at the front, and Irish at the back. The German couple at; the table next to us—a heavily made-up woman in fur-fabric animal prints, and a man with a serial killer haircut and a Tom Selleck moustache—look like low-budget Hamburg porno stars whose best years are behind them. He keeps throwing us withering looks of disapproval for making a noise, but this doesn’t stop Billy and Pat talking nineteen, possibly more, to the dozen.

‘Ssh!’

The sour-faced German ex-stud is looking daggers as an enormous blond man in an interesting variation on the shell suit goes up and stands next to the musicians.

‘Good efening. I am from Copenhagen, and I would like to sing for you a song.’

Suddenly he launches into ‘The Leafing off Lifferpool’. The musicians sit holding their instruments. A couple of them seem to be chuckling. The Irish people at the back have stopped talking now, and are watching with keen anthropological interest. When he gets to the chorus, Sven conducts the crowd with his enormous arms, urging them to sing along. The international contingent tentatively join in with an extraordinary ragbag of accents.

So vear ye vell, my own true loff

Ven I return united ve vill be

It’s not the leafing off Liffapool that leefs me

But my darlink when I finger thee.

There’s a big cheer when he finishes, but not, I fear, for the reasons he thinks. The musicians get stuck into something downbeat and melancholy. Billy looks across at the tables of benign, well-behaved, affluent European tourists.

‘That’s the great thing about the Troubles. Keeps all these stupid bastards away from the North. Right. Who’s round is it then?’

I wake up in Nuns’ Island feeling as if I’ve lost a day of my life, like an alien abductee. There’s a guy at breakfast, from San Francisco, who’s bought a farm in Kerry. I ask what he does, and he says he designs museums. He doesn’t ask what I do.

To clear my head I take a stroll round the shore. It’s a warm sunny morning, and three boys are splashing about in the water with their dad, a thickset man with a vest-shaped suntan. Two men in old-fashioned swimsuits have climbed high up on to a disused railway bridge, and are daring each other to dive in. It’s like a black and white snapshot of the past.

Back in Nuns’ Island I fire up the thunderously revving Tank and rattle off past the Poor Clare convent.

‘Jesus Christ!’ says the Mother Superior, speaking aloud for the first time in seventeen years. ‘What the hell was that?’

I drive west out of town, past the new seafront developments at Salthill, and into Connemara. The road hugs the coast, so for the next half-hour I’ve got Galway Bay on my left, with the Burren and the mountains of County Clare in the distance beyond. It’s a glorious day, and the incongruous mix of brand-new houses and ancient stone walls is bathed in languid early morning sunshine. Soon the houses thin out, the countryside gets wilder, and the road swings north with the coastline. The Benna Beola and Maumturk Mountains are glowing an unearthly pink ahead of me as I turn left, for Rossaveal and the ferry to the Aran Islands.

I never used to be sure where the sweaters came from, because I never really knew if Aran was off Scotland, Northern Ireland, or the west of Ireland. In fact there are Aran Islands in all three places, including a cluster off Galway: Inishmaan, Inisheer, and the largest of the three, Inishmore, site of many early Christian and pre-Christian antiquities, which is where I’m heading. I leave the Tank in a car park and buy a ticket from a hut. I’m the last person to board the small ferry before it leaves its mooring next to a trawler and a muddle of lobster huts at the end of the jetty.

The boat isn’t full, but that may be because earlier embarkees have already thrown themselves overboard to escape the penetrating buzz-saw drone that envelops the whole passenger lounge. Its source is a student from Chicago sitting several rows away from me, though mere distance can do nothing to deaden the impact of her relentless nasal monologue. She has a voice that could bone herring at twenty fathoms. As she bores her travelling companion into submission, the rest of us, cowed into silence, sink deeper into our seats, our books, or the trough of despond. When we dock at the end of the fifty-minute ear-bashing, we are familiar with every detail of the semi-formal ball she attended recently, the Chateaubriand—‘it’s like, really good beef—on which she gorged herself, and the new boyfriend she met. He, like her, is a student of literature, though she confesses to being intimidated by his passion for the subject.

‘He’s gotta buncha books.’

‘Really? Omygahd!’

‘Yeah. He likes having discussions about, like, literature and stuff? Weird.’

As we queue to disembark she’s ahead of me, debating, at the approximate volume of a medieval town crier, whether to accompany her parents on a skiing trip to Colorado. A grinning islander reverses a pick-up truck straight into the gangplank in a spontaneous assassination attempt, but it’s too late. She’s already escaped into the huddle of pony-and-traps, minibuses and cyclists on the busy quayside.

I walk round the small harbour to the cluster of houses that make up the capital village of Kilronan, and book myself into the first B&B I see. It’s perfect. I’ve a comfortable bed, and a view of the harbour, and there’s a sparrow flying round inside the hall. The clip-clop of horses’ hooves going past my window sounds so impossibly idyllic that I have to lean out to check my landlady isn’t down there banging two coconut shells together.

I’ve made the detour to Inishmore to visit Father Dara Molloy, who came here in 1985 to assist one of the island’s parish priests. The elemental nature of the place, and its history as one of the major cradles of early Celtic Christianity, quickly led him to a radical reappraisal of his beliefs; he rejected the Roman Church and began to practise his own brand of Celtic spirituality, which I don’t think was what the bishop had in mind when he sent him. When I came here in 1995, he was operating in an interesting area where Paganism and Christianity meet and decide to try and get along. I phoned a few weeks ago to see if it was okay to visit, but he wasn’t there.

‘I’m afraid he’s over in Galway.’

‘Do you know when he’ll be back?’

‘Not really, no. His partner has gone into labour early. She’s expecting twins.’

After a splendid lunch of chocolate and tap water, I set off for Dara’s place. Across the lane an old man is working on his beachside vegetable plot in the garden of a weather-beaten house. His potato and cabbage beds have been heavily layered with seaweed. Inishmore has no native soil to speak of; what you see is a vintage blend of sand and seaweed, created by the islanders themselves over countless generations. Inches, or feet, below the topsoil, depending on the age of the garden, lie virgin sand and stone.

Rows of identical bikes are parked in racks outside the post office, so I decide to go in and hire one for a couple of days. The girl behind the counter seems puzzled.

‘I’m sorry. We don’t hire bicycles.’

Maybe I imagined the bikes. I turn round to check if they’re still there, moving slowly so as not to startle them.

‘It’s the fella a few doors down you want to see. They’re his bikes.’

I wander along to find him, but he’s gone for lunch, or he’s out fishing, or maybe he’s emigrated. At any rate, he’s not there. It’s only a couple of miles to where Dara lives, so I decide to walk.

Inishmore has a population of around 800. It’s only about nine miles long by two miles across at its widest point, so it’s a great place to walk or cycle, if you can find the guy who hires the bikes. There’s a brief flurry of traffic whenever a ferry is coming in or leaving, but today the narrow lanes are pleasantly deserted apart from the occasional minibus, and a few tourists on bikes. I wonder where they got them? I suppose I could hide behind a big stone. I could wait until someone from Barcelona or Stuttgart dismounts to take a picture of a cow, then steal their bike. Even if I got caught they’d never convict me. The bikes are all painted yellow, so the identity parade would be a fiasco.

It’s a terrific walk. Leaving the village I pass a pub painted a voluptuous shade of red, with dozens of hyperactive chickens and cockerels swarming about outside, like bewitched drinkers who are paying the price for offending the local sorcerer last night. Several cottages have lobster pots in the garden, and in one a Celtic cross from a graveyard is leaning against a shed. Everyone who passes—pedestrians, farmers in tractors, pony and trap drivers—says hello, as they have on every lane and track and path I’ve travelled so far on this trip. Like the mundane shopping transaction that becomes a social occasion, this makes a refreshing change from the south of England.

I go walking a lot on the South Downs Way, a wonderful neolithic pathway across the chalklands that look down on the English Channel. Once you get away from the car parks where dog owners take their half-mad pets, deranged from incarceration in suburbia, to shit and attack sheep and horseback riders, the path is surprisingly empty, even in the height of summer. On top of the Downs you can see for hundreds of yards ahead so you always know when someone else is approaching. For several minutes you watch each other getting closer; and then, as you’re about to pass, the other person suddenly develops a deep interest in something in a hedge or on their boot, and tries to pretend they haven’t seen you, because they don’t want any human contact with you.

‘
Hello!
’ I bellow with the most aggressive smile I can muster.

‘Oh,’ they fluster, feigning surprise. ‘Er, yes. Hello.’ Occasionally, the posher, older hikers will simply grunt and stare, as if you’ve come up the drive to the front door when you should have used the tradesmen’s entrance. What do you mean, hello? they’re thinking. I refuse to acknowledge the existence of someone who may not be my social equal.