The Road to McCarthy (7 page)

And we all joined in on the chorus, really, really quietly, like a murmur of conversation from a distant room.

“All together now!” he shouted, and we sang even quieter. Some of us were just humming. My God, it was embarrassing. The Dairy Gangster was turning redder as he built to what I can only describe as a climax. It seemed possible he might explode all over Mulvena. She’s a nice lady, though. I don’t expect she’d have complained.

Back at Napoleon’s
doctor’s house a few of us sat up for a quick nightcap that lasted till almost daybreak. What happens to all the late-night conversation that goes on in Ireland? There’s far too much of it for anyone to remember. But I do recall someone telling me about the sinking of the
Lusitania
, when one of the bodies laid out on the quayside at Cobh got up and walked away; and about the cabaret turns on the nineteenth-century transatlantic liners, which he swore included performing polar bears; and the waterfront flophouses, where musicians were hired to wake the sleepers and make them dance while another shift slept in their beds. And I learned that the John Mitchel imprisoned on Spike Island was a famous political activist, who was transported from Cobh to Van Diemen’s Land, which we agreed sounded much scarier than Tasmania; and that Cromwell, in an early pilot scheme for ethnic cleansing, transported the Irish to work as slaves in the West Indies; and that the
Titanic
was only moored in Cobh for an hour and a half.

“Mind you,” said someone, “we tend to play that down a bit.”

Before I went to bed I wrote myself a note: VDL, NY?17/3?/or WINDIES?? MORROCCO????

With any luck it would still make sense in the morning. As I was falling asleep I remembered something.

There’s only one
r
in Morocco.

Next day
on the way to Belfast I found a marvelous story in the newspaper.

A Dublin supermarket had been closed down the previous week because of infestation by mice. Vermin relations representatives, or whatever they call rat-catchers these days, were called in and the problem was quickly eradicated. But now the shop had been closed down again because the mice had been replaced, in a pleasing piece of synchronicity, by an elusive and incontinent stray cat. “The cat has been urinating on the food,” said a supermarket spokesman, “but we don’t know which food.” You can see their
problem. I’ve always had my suspicions about prawn cocktail crisps, and supermarket coleslaw, but it’s very difficult to prove anything. Staff, continued the report, had engaged in a sit-in to try and capture the creature and conclusively identify the pee-soaked food. “The cat may be the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said the supermarket spin-doctor, in the first suggestion so far that infestation by dromedary was also a problem.

I haven’t spent much time in Northern Ireland apart from once seeing Daniel O’Donnell stripped to the waist and covered in shaving foam in a toilet in Coleraine. Other than that, the place is a bit of a mystery to me.

“It’s a mystery to most people here too,” said Mark the Pagan. I once made a television series, three in fact, in which I encountered pagans, wiccans, dowsers, Odinists, witches, shamans and druids. The Kaos Magicians were rather alarming, stomping round in moonlit woods brandishing human skulls and bones; and so was the woman who ran the bed and breakfast in Glastonbury and claimed to be growing a second spine, which she said proved she was from Atlantis. Other than that the British pagans seemed bright and sincere, and I liked them. I also enjoyed Iceland, where a majority of the population believes in elves, the elf stones in which they live and the existence of parallel dimensions in which the elf population operate, and into which we occasionally experience slippage. After the series I got letters from anti-pagans congratulating me for showing them up as the dangerous loons they really are; letters from pagans thanking me for giving them a fair crack of the whip; and a letter in six different colors of felt-tip from a bloke in Doncaster who said I was going to lose my immortal soul. I was invited to speak at pagan gatherings, and to open a new coven in Birmingham, just round the corner from the Bull Ring.

And now my occult credentials were having an unexpected payoff. Ireland is a small country, and people soon knew that I was asking questions about the MacCarthy Mór. It seems Conor MacCarthy, the brother and heir of my clan chief in exile, had heard of my interest and was determined to avoid me, until his friends in Belfast’s tiny pagan community—of which there is no mention in the Good Friday Agreement—gave me a glowing reference. Without my sun-worshipping, sweat-lodging, spirit-channeling
shamanistic past I would never have got to meet him. Perhaps the Earth Spirit was guiding my progress.

I arrived in the afternoon and made my way as instructed to a pagan café in a shopping arcade. As he poured my coffee the guy behind the counter said, “The druid who used to wear the fox on his head says hi.” I was sorry to hear he’d stopped wearing the fox. It suited him, and was a big hit when we went for a pub lunch in Oxfordshire. I might not recognize him without it.

After half an hour Conor arrived, a scholarly-looking thirty-something with a nose and hairline that made him look alarmingly like my own younger brother. He was accompanied by his brother Tommy, an entirely different physical type, stockier, sandier, with less of the academic and more of the street lad about him. One of the first things he told me was that he was planning to move away from Belfast because so many friends had been killed in the course of the Troubles. After he bombarded me for an hour with the kind of incomprehensibly complex historical and genealogical detail that I now know is par for the course in the bitterly contested world of Gaelic heraldry, I felt another headache coming on, and suggested we adjourn to the pub. As well as being able to get a drink, there was the bonus of loud music, so if they started going into too much detail I could just keep saying “What?” without appearing rude.

Over a few pints, a Thai meal, a few more pints and dozens of cigarettes, Conor explained his family’s position, with Tommy on back-up vocals. In 1905, they claimed, at a clan gathering in Nantes in Brittany, the title of MacCarthy Mór was passed to their grandfather under the ancient Gaelic principle of tanistry, by which authority is passed on by consensus to the most able, rather than to the male first-born. He in turn passed the title to their father who, despite his humble circumstances as a dancing teacher and proprietor of the Cordoba nightclub in Belfast, exercised the office of clan chief until 1980, when he abdicated in favor of Terence. Aware of their family’s chiefly status, they grew up in a Catholic Gaelic monarchist household, apart from Tommy who was fostered and raised—“in keeping with an old Irish tradition,” they told me, somewhat mysteriously—by “one of the few
Republican Presbyterian families in Belfast.” Are you with me so far? Good. Because since then all three brothers have converted to the Eastern Orthodox Tridentine Church of the Western Patriarchy, of which they are passionate devotees.

After several hours of this it all started to sound quite matter-of-fact, and I was able to give a half-decent impression of a man who has conversations like this all the time. I’d no idea how much of it I understood, but I couldn’t help liking their company. They were impassioned and funny and unpredictable, and, as pub talk goes, it was a lot more fun than football or the lottery or the fact that the same Ikea bed costs much more in the UK than it does in France or Spain.

They walked me to a minicab office and, ever the perfect hosts, insisted I take the first car. The driver said my bed and breakfast was in a mainly student area. As he dropped me off, the students were mainly off their faces and trying to find their way home from one of those nightclub promotions where the first fifteen drinks are free. Two English girls were shrieking and dodging the traffic and trying to walk the white line in the middle of the road, while their friend performed cartwheels and handsprings along it.

My room had three single divans with low-budget porno headboards, and enough melamine wardrobes and dressing tables to stock a mediumsize junk shop. As I lay in bed listening to a high-spirited young academic vomiting in someone’s garden, I realized that Terence MacCarthy had hardly been mentioned. There’d certainly been no suggestion that I might be able to make contact with him.

Ten days later I got a phone call from Conor asking if I’d like to come and meet them in Morocco. VDL, NY and WINDIES would have to wait.

Tangier is the oldest city
in Morocco, by tradition the place where Hercules wrenched apart Africa and Spain to create for his son a city protected by the sea. It was a Roman capital, before being disputed for centuries by Arabs and Berbers, and subsequently a possession of Spain, then Portugal, which gave it to Charles II of England as a wedding present in 1661. Samuel Pepys was appointed treasurer of the city, and hated it with a passion. “A hell of brimstone and fire and Egypt’s plagues …. a place of the world I would last send a young man to, but to hell.” Britain abandoned it in 1684, having first blown up the quays and burned down the casbah, presumably as part of some philanthropic job-creation initiative designed to help the locals.

The city is blessed with both Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlines, big beaches, an ancient medina and a French-style
ville nouvelle
. A large European population was established in the nineteenth century, but it was from the 1920s to the 1960s, during its years as an international tax-free port, that it gained a reputation as an anything-goes playground for the decadent,
the artistic and the generally whacked-out. The city echoes still to tales of Matisse and Saint-Saëns, Marlene Dietrich and Errol Flynn, Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde, Barbara Hutton and Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Gertrude Stein, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. “In Tangier,” wrote Kerouac, “everything is possible—and everything that isn’t possible is possible too.” And he only went there on his holidays.

I’ve been catching up on my Tangier reading during a languid breakfast of fruit and pastries and fresh-squeezed orange juice in the hotel dining-room, looking out on the Med through dazzling winter sunshine. At the far end of the almost-deserted room a loud bohemian-posh English woman is eating, smoking and talking at the same time. She is also sketching the waiter, who has been required to pose, tray on upturned hand.

“Big mouths are always a problem, dahling,” she bellows, and there’s no one in the room who’d disagree.

After breakfast I try and plan my day, but it isn’t proving as straightforward as I’d hoped. The MacCarthy brothers were to meet me at yesterday morning’s ferry, but my delayed journey meant that they were long gone when I arrived. They don’t know where I’m staying, and I have only two ways of contacting them in Tangier: a cell phone number, which I have been trying all morning and which doesn’t work; and an address written in pen on a scrap of paper that I have either left behind in England, or lost. Luckily I can remember the name of the street: Rue des Postes. They’re staying at a pension, possibly number twelve, that’s run by an Irish woman. The two men at hotel reception, however, have just assured me that there is no such pension in Tangier, and that the street does not exist. Under the circumstances, it’s hard to see how I’m going to find them, short of walking around until I bump into them. I eventually settle on a plan that is more coherent than that, but only marginally so. I will go out and search for the street that doesn’t exist, pausing occasionally to phone the cell number that doesn’t work. Relentless pursuit of the nonexistent by the clueless armed with the unworkable is bound to turn up something sooner or later.

I walk out of the hotel into a sunlit confusion of the medieval and the modern, business suits and veils, djellabahs and Levis, T-shirts and fezes, wondering which way to head. I plunge into the crowd trying to look as if
I’m in control but feeling like a character in a period movie whose plot I don’t understand, half expecting Peter Lorre to pop out of a doorway at any moment. By walking as if I know where I’m going and it’s important to get there quickly, even though I’m lost already, I’m hoping to avoid all hassle. I know that in many Moroccan cities unofficial guides and street touts can be the bane of your life and that it is important to see them off politely but firmly, unless you want them to shadow every waking moment of your trip. No problem. I will discourage their attentions by being aloof, preoccupied and terribly British. “Leave me alone,” my sophisticated body language will say, “I am not some naïve tourist. I’ve been about a bit, so don’t mess with me.”