McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery in Ireland (5 page)

Now, if I’m gored by a bull here, within horn-tossing distance of the spectacular, but at this moment invisible, stones, no one’s going to leap in and punch me; but no one’s going to save me either. There isn’t a soul to be seen in any direction. So I try to convince myself to be law-abiding, that I did my best, got as close as I could, so I can give up with honour; but I just feel pathetic. I’m scared of dogs, too. And geese.

I walk back up the steep lane I’ve just driven down until I can once more see the stones on the horizon, calling me to them. I’m now in a position to survey the land all around, and there isn’t a bull to be seen.

It’s clear that the DANGER! BULLS!! sign is just a ruse, a scam to keep New Agers, Pagans, Crusties and Whiffies from tramping all over the fields to paint each other’s faces and drink Scrumpy Jack in a ritualistic manner in the centre of the stones. There isn’t a problem here for me. It’s just over the gate, up the hill, check out the stones, no bulls, back in the car and find a nice spot to eat my sandwich.

The first thing to catch my eye once I’m over the gate is a freshly spent shotgun cartridge, presumably fired from the gate at the back of the last person who trespassed.

Bullshit.

Not my thought, but the stuff I’m standing in. Masses of the stuff. And in the soft ground all around me, footprints I can only describe as bull-shaped. Nauseous but undeterred, I press on up the field, then surprise myself by going commando-style under an electric fence—a bit panicky, this bit, so I’m left with extensive grass stains, and a minor pulled muscle in the small of my back.

I’m now on a half-obscured path between two fields. Humming to myself in order to ward off total mental collapse, I follow it up the hill at a brisk stride, adding a little semi-cantered hitch-kick every few steps, presumably in the hope that this will render me impossibly elusive to shotguns and bulls. At the top of the hill there’s a wall to the right, and beyond it, perfectly positioned to survey the countryside billowing away at 360° below it, the Bohonagh Stone Circle: thirteen slabs of granite, some of them taller than me, standing where they’ve been for 4,000 years.

But the dry-stone wall is lined with a single-strand electric fence, with a second wire encircling the stones themselves. Bastard farmers. What a vindictive way to treat people who only want to experience the stones at first hand. But then the thought occurs: what if the motivation was something quite different? What if it’s just an attempt by a small farmer, earning an honest punt—plus massive EC subsidies, obviously—to protect the country’s ancient heritage from animals?

But what animals?

The bellow comes from over my right shoulder. The beast is black and white, barrel-chested, eighty yards or so away, diagonally down the field. The gate, the repmobile, and the rest of my life are somewhere in the middle distance beyond. As is the electric fence, which I’ll have to get under to give myself a chance. Anyway, can’t bulls jump them? Or if not, surely they’re so bloody hard that they can just crash through the flimsy tape as they thunder down on you in the mistaken belief that you’re some kind of Spanish exhibitionist.

Heart pounding, back twingeing, bowels suddenly keen to get involved, I turn my back on the stupid bloody stones that have got me into this mess, and begin to edge down the hill, to my left. The bull backs off, head down, in that way that suggests backing off is just a momentum-gathering preliminary to charging forward. I speed up and head for the nearest point of the electric fence, all the while making a pitiful squeaking sound as I run, mentally reliving childhood promises never to do anything wrong ever again if only God will let me off this time.

As I go to throw myself under the electrically charged cable, I stumble in a rutted hoofprint, and catch the wire with my forehead. Nothing. Except relief. The fence is just for show. The current isn’t even turned on. All over Europe, animals are being conned by farmers anxious to keep their electricity bills down, though I’ll bet they’re claiming the full whack from Brussels.

But what if the bull knows that?

The tape is between us, but the brute has now started to execute a distinctly threatening amble in my direction. Sprawled on my back, legs akimbo, I must make an inviting target. I couldn’t feel more vulnerable if I were wearing skintight Spanish jeans with red arrows pointing to the crotch, marked ‘Insert Horns Here’.

But surely the gate to the lane, and safety, must only be yards away. Keeping my body perfectly still, I begin—slowly, ever so slowly, so as not to alarm the bull—to turn my head.

There’s a man at the gate, watching me.

‘Have ya fallen and hurt yourself, or are ye just afraid of the cow?’

Up at the farmhouse, surrounded by sixteen or seventeen of his children, it was clear that Mr Goggin hadn’t been making fun of me. It had been a concerned enquiry. He seemed devoid of any malice, quiet and painfully shy, with the look of a man who lives in constant dread of being asked if he plans on having any more kids.

Next to the house was a nineteenth-century sheepshed, recently converted into a three-bedroom holiday cottage, with open fires, old wooden furniture, and iron bedsteads painted bright as Clonakilty High Street. Mr Goggin showed me round, blushing every time I asked him anything, even though it must have been clear there was no chance of my asking him to impregnate me. Just not used to strangers, I suppose.

He’d done the conversion himself, with a dozen or so of the older children. The paint had been dry two days. There was a booking next week, but now I was to be the first guest. The children were sniggering, and muttering to each other behind hands. I noticed they all had extraordinarily rosy cheeks, as if they’d inherited their daddy’s blushes as a permanent physical feature. The air of impudence, though, definitely came from their mother’s side.

She was in the cottage sitting-room as we finished the tour. She’d lit a peat fire, and somehow had produced a loaf of soda bread, still hot from the oven. She smiled and introduced herself, and politely offered me her hand to shake. So I shook it.

‘Sure, ye can see ye’ve never done a hard day’s work in your life.’

She was fingering the soft palm of my right hand, with a mischievous, possibly demonic, glint in her green eyes. As an opening conversational gambit to a paying guest, this was breathtakingly original. The conversational ball was now firmly in my court.

I withdrew my hand and looked at the callus-free palm. I caught a glimpse of Mr Goggin edging towards the door, foetal with embarrassment, and decided to lie.

‘Well, you know, there’s not a lot of manual work involved being a sales rep. Mostly just sit in the car. You know.’

You could see the repmobile through the window. There was a hanger full of clothes dangling by the rear window, which added authenticity to my story.

‘I suppose ye spend a lot of time parked in laybys, pretending y’ere on appointments.’

Two of the reddest kids were watching through the window now, gurning menacingly.

There was the sound of a latch as Mr Goggin finally cringed through the door, followed by a sigh, or it might have been a whimper, from outside. Then Mrs Goggin was suddenly gone, before reappearing like a genie on the other side of the room. ‘Here are the towels and bedlinen.’

‘Oh. Right.’

She was all smiles now.

‘Would ya like me to make up the bed?’

Too bloody right I would. What did she think I was paying ₤18 for? Time to let her see who was in charge round here. ‘Oh. Yes, please. If it’s not too much trouble.’

Just for a moment, she leaned back and narrowed her eyes.

Then she said it.

‘Lazy, are ya?’

Nothing can prepare you for this kind of thing when all you’re doing is booking some accommodation, a transaction that in most countries and circumstances is emotionally neutral. But I don’t think there was anything malicious about Mrs Goggin; she was just interested, and not in possession of the mental filter system most of us put our thoughts through before they emerge as words. She just said whatever popped into her head.

‘Well, I’ll leave ya to it. I’m sure there are
things
ye’ll be
wanting to do
,’ she said, with what seemed to be a pornographic leer. Then suddenly she was gone, only to return almost immediately with a wild salmon steak, and salad and potatoes, and a bottle of stout, and eight or nine of her small red daughters, who stood giggling in the doorway at the strange man who was paying money to stay in their sheepshed.

‘There y’are, now. Ye look as if ye’d be needing a decent meal. If ye like to take a drink, and I’d say ye do, there’s a pub below. Beyond the crossroads there. God bless, now.’

An Irish potato is a wonderful thing. Dry, fluffy, bursting with flavour, it bears no relation to its English cousin, which tastes in comparison as if it’s been grown in a dark factory and over-watered with too much watered-down water. Yet in England these days we import vegetables from all over the world. ‘Air-freighted for freshness’, it says on the mangetout from Zimbabwe. ‘Specially grown for flavour’, claim the supermarket’s Dutch tomatoes. Well, what other reason is there for growing tomatoes? Speed? Comfort? An ability to glow in the dark? We import baby corn from Thailand, yams from the Caribbean, choi sum from Korea. We even import potatoes from Egypt—Egypt!—potatoes that taste like old train tickets, and pay £1 a pound for Jersey Royals that seem to grow in unusually large quantities for a place the size of Jersey, and taste suspiciously Egyptian to me. But in the midst of the global foodie culture that has swamped England in recent years, no one has thought to import Irish potatoes, one of the most delicious and distinctive vegetables in the world, and growing right on our doorstep. Bloody supermarkets. We get the tasteless shite we deserve.

To my amazement, I’d said all this to the landlord within ten minutes of walking into the pub at the crossroads. There were only two other customers in there. One of them looked up and said, ‘Feckin’ Dutch red peppers.’

In Dingle, County Kerry, there’s a bicycle shop that’s also a pub. You can’t miss it. There’s a bicycle in the window, and a Guinness sign above the door. And in the wild west of Cork, on the very edge of Europe, is a draper’s shop selling lengths of cloth, farm clothes, wellies, stout and spirits. And in that uniquely Irish way, this too was both a pub and a shop. I’d struggled to find it. The lanes outside were pitch black, and I didn’t have a torch. I’d been reluctant to borrow one from Mrs Goggin in case she said, ‘Scared, are ya?’ or told me I must be a great disappointment to my mother.

It was arranged as a traditional grocer’s shop, with displays of tins, pyramids of cereal packets, rows of sweets and some tired oranges, and a large open sack of spuds that were giving off a tremendous earthy smell that permeated the whole room, as if the whiffy musicians from Cork were hiding behind the counter. There was a plain wooden counter with an open drawer for the cash, and two beer taps, one Guinness, one Harp. There were four spirits optics, next to the combs and pantyhose.

The barman-shopkeeper was in his sixties, and a cardigan. Two of the four barstools were occupied by a bearded, weather-beaten farm labourer and a clean-shaven, red-veined schoolteacher, both old enough to remember pounds, shillings and pence. They went quiet when I walked in; not in that ‘who’s this stranger walked into the Slaughtered Lamb this cold foggy night, let’s deny everything, then take him out the back, skin him, and feed him to the badgers’ way, but simply to make room for me in the conversation. Despite the encroachment of the modern world—Premiership football on Sky TV, and microwaved Cajun chicken wings, and Recently Invented Traditional Creamy Pisspoor Irish Ale—there are still many pubs in Ireland that exist primarily as venues for conversation, and this was one of them. And I don’t even know what it was called. I was going to go back and write it down the next morning, but you know how it is. I could give you directions, though. You know the Dunmanway road? Well, halfway up there’s a tumbledown old…

He half poured my pint of Guinness, then let it stand for three minutes, in the time-honoured way. This lets the stout settle. It also allows the barman to ask you who you are, where you’re from, and why you’re here. The other customers listen and nod. Then, he fills the pint, smooths off the head with a table knife with a parchment-coloured handle, and waits for you to take the first sip.

And then the conversation continues.

‘We were just talking about that Charlie Haughey there. Used to be the Taoiseach. Y’know, the Prime Minister. Would ya know him? Ah, ya do? Well, a real slippery bastard he was.’

‘Sure, the man was a terrible gobshite.’

‘But he was a clever gobshite. Didn’t he buy his own island, now?’

And so it went on. The EC, and the billion pounds we’ve had from them. Or is it 34 billion? Laughter all round. Then Sinead O’Connor.
Riverdance
. That Terry Wogan. Adams, Paisley and Blair. The internet. Clinton’s sex addiction. Spanish trawlers. And all the time, what did I think? Really, now? Is that so? It was a long time since I’d had a conversation like that. A sharing of opinions, to be digested, rather than differences, to be confronted. No music, no slot machines, no TV, no food, no till. Just three interruptions, two from kids buying sweets, one a woman buying tights and a cabbage. The perfect evening, in the perfect pub. The kind of evening that leaves you with a warm feeling. Especially when accompanied by seven pints of Guinness.