The Road to McCarthy (4 page)

I’m just thinking that someone at the tourist board should collect all these quotes and stick them on the front of a nice glossy brochure when the Spanish taxi driver catches my eye in the rear-view mirror. I look up from the book I’m reading.

“You been in Tangier before?”

I tell him I haven’t.

“Take care, my friend. My cousin is in prison there for smuggling tobacco. Eight years. All food and clothes must be taken in to him, or there is just bread and water. Naked. If you want even to wash your friends must bring the water. This place makes
Midnight Express
look like a top hotel with pool.” Perhaps noticing that I’m about to burst into tears he turns his head, looks me in the eye and grins.

“But don’t worry. Morocco treats tourists very well. You want to change some currency?”

It’s early evening as the ferry leaves Algeciras under a cover of gray cloud, with a late winter chill in the air. I seem to be the only English speaker on board apart from a backpacker across the bar who’s reading a novel called
Backpack
. This is depressing. Surely he can think of other ways to enrich his travels. He really shouldn’t be reading books about the activity he’s currently engaged in. It is an existentialist nightmare that will end in chaos. If there were a book called
Three Fat Truck Drivers Drinking, Smoking and Playing Cards
, then the three guys at the next table would be reading
it, rather than doing it. Nothing would get done, society would grind to a halt, and it would all be literature’s fault.

The idea of arriving in Africa by ferry was to help me feel a spiritual connection with the traders and smugglers, pirates and soldiers who have been navigating these legendary straits for countless millennia. The exotic atmosphere of this floating bazaar would give me time to prepare myself for the ancient mysteries of the casbah. I’m reminding myself of this as I sit in a harshly lit plastic and vinyl bar, listening to Phil Collins, surrounded by screaming children, and drinking a small gin and tonic that’s just cost me more than a liter of duty-free. We’re heading for a Muslim country, so I’m the only one drinking alcohol.

The bar closes as we approach Tangier, and I go for a walk on deck. Even though it’s dark I can see the white buildings of the old town, the medina, framing the port like an amphitheater. I’m trying my best to luxuriate in this special moment of arrival by ship in the most notorious port in North Africa, when the purser replaces Phil Collins with some superannuated bat from Nashville warbling, “C’est la vie, say the old folks, It goes to show you never can tell.” You certainly can’t. Travel can be full of surprises. Sometimes they’re not even the surprises you expect.

At the port there’s no one to meet me, just a scrum of taxi drivers hungry for business. Backpacker Boy shows a moment’s fatal indecision, hesitates, and is immediately mobbed. I scan the drivers’ faces and make a decisive move towards the first one that appeals. It does the trick, and in moments I’m heading off in a white Merc.

As we set off I ask the driver
“Combien?”
to give the impression I know what I’m doing, which of course I don’t. The drive feels like a scene from an exotic film noir. The streets of the port are lined with decaying hotels and cafés, their sidewalk tables full even on a winter’s night. The air hangs heavy with the promise of adventure, intrigue and the thrill of the unknown. I suspect that, whatever your purpose, arriving in Tangier by night will make you feel like you’ve come to the right place.

The driver seems delighted at the childlike pleasure I’m taking from the street scenes and boasts that Tangier is
“une ville internationale.”
The king is in residence, he says, which is why the streets are decorated with fairy
lights, bought, if I understand his French correctly, from a bankrupt seaside resort in Lincolnshire.

My hotel room has been booked for a week, but this doesn’t stop reception denying all knowledge of me and saying that they are full. This always happens when I try and book anywhere half-decent. The more elaborate the preparations and the more upmarket the hotel, the less likely they are to have heard of me. Perhaps if I had matching luggage, fewer carrier bags and a jacket draped around my shoulders with the sleeves hanging loose, it wouldn’t happen so often; but I suspect that even if I arrived by Ferrari with Nicole Kidman, a butler and a masseur, I’d still come across as an impostor.

After a quarter of an hour of arguing they suddenly remember me and ask me to fill in a registration form headed “Please write very legibly. This is applicable to married women even when accompanied by husband.” This is my fourth check in or out of the day. It’s after ten when I drop the bag in the room and hit the streets.

The boulevards of the fin-de-siècle new town are thronged with men promenading and packed into cafés watching football on TV. The astonishing thing for a visitor from Britain, apart from the absence of women, is the fact that it’s Saturday night and
all these men are sober
. I’ve walked several hundred yards, and no one has urinated in a shop doorway or thrown a litterbin across the street while singing “No Surrender to the IRA.” It’s hard not to feel a faint pang of nostalgia for the colorful traditions of smalltown England.

In a snack bar that’s trying to be a restaurant I order a seafood pizza, then ask for the carte des vins.
“Oh, pardon,”
says the waitress,
“pas d’alcool.”
I’m faced with the distressing prospect of eating pizza without the wine that’s the only way of making it seem like food. Surely the only point of pizza’s existence is to encourage the consumption of cheap red wine? Unspeakable rot-gut that would otherwise end up in Andalusian pickle jars and Romanian cigarette lighters tastes like premier cru when accompanied by a pepperoni-and-chili thin crust with extra garlic. Looks like it’ll have to be water, then. Mind you, the young Moroccan at the next table has got a Quattro Staggioni that he’s just covered in ketchup and is now washing
down with a liter of Coke. I’ve always been disturbed by people who drink Coke or Pepsi with a meal, but perhaps he’s got the right idea. Pizza is children’s birthday party food, and deserves no respect.

Back in my room, the dough still expanding inside me, I combat the pizza afterburn, heart palpitations and flashbacks of genital mutilation by macaque with a glass or two of the wittily named Spanish brandy, Soberano. Mysterious chanting and the cries of cockerels float across the night sky to my palm-fronded balcony as I sit propped up in bed, glass of brandy in hand, and consider the strange series of events that have conspired to bring me here tonight.

When I was a kid
I couldn’t understand how Irish aristocrats with Irish names who lived in big houses in Ireland came to be sitting in the British House of Lords. Still don’t, to be honest. Nor did I have any real notion of an ancient Gaelic aristocracy. But I do remember my uncle telling me, when I was over in West Cork on holiday, that McCarthy was a royal name and we were descended from ancient high kings of Ireland. Nothing special about that, mind. Everybody else called McCarthy was royal too, which from what I knew about Ireland in those days—West Cork, basically—meant about 80 percent of the population. There were a few Crow-leys and O’Donovans about the place, but apparently they were just McCarthys who’d changed their names. And either all of us were kings, or none of us.

So it came as a surprise when some years later a BBC Radio producer told me that I had a clan chief to whom I owed my allegiance; but the head of the McCarthy family, he said, was not Irish. He was a Moroccan, who lived in Tangier, and was known as the McCarthy Moor. Fantastic, I
thought. A Moor! Like Othello! We discussed it over a few pints, and decided that the original McCarthys must have been a nomadic tribe from North Africa who sometime in prehistory had, like the Celts, emigrated north to Ireland. Over Singapore noodles and a couple of bottles of wine we further deduced that the unaccustomed moistness of the Irish climate must have broken down their skin pigment, a kind of genetic rusting process that led inevitably over the centuries to red hair and freckles. And so it was that I began to tell anybody who’d listen that the ancient kings from whom I was descended were Moroccans, and that one day I would travel to Morocco and share a water pipe and a bowl of couscous with the Moor himself.

I gave the matter no further thought until I was in Galway a couple of years ago browsing in one of those shops that sell bogwood-in-poteen keyrings and Irish family coats-of-arms for tourists to sew on to their golf bags, when an article in a cheaply photocopied Celtic fanzine called
Caledonian Fringe
or
Gael Force
or
Diasporic Paddy
or some such caught my attention.

The North American MacCarthy Clan Gathering in August will be presided over by the MacCarthy Mór, Dr. Terence MacCarthy, Prince of Desmond
.

Not Moor then.

Mór.

Probably a Gaelic word meaning “Moroccan”! Now I’d be able to prove to my uncle that I’d been right all along, and that everyone in West Cork was, if you looked at things from the right angle, African. The gist of the article was that hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans and Canadians called McCarthy, MacCarthy and McCartney would be gathering for a weekend of clan-related activities by a river somewhere in deepest Nova Scotia. It sounded too good to miss. There would be esoteric ceremonies, and indiscriminate bonding, and business cards embossed with shamrocks would be exchanged. We would dress up in strange togs, learn the magic words and discover where we came from. With luck there’d be re-creations of ancient Celtic rituals featuring half-naked bank managers covered in
green paint, and I would be able to drink heavily with policemen from Boston and mental health professionals from Toronto who had never been near Ireland in their lives. We would sing the old songs together, to which none of us knew all the words. In Nova Scotia!

But how to contact them? There was a website address, but that was no good to me as I haven’t got a computer—not because I’m some sort of technophobe, but because I know them to be the spawn of Beelzebub—so I phoned a friend in Cork who logged, as I believe it’s called, on, and he came right back with the news.

Sorry, clan gathering cancelled.

Some sort of problem with the main man.

Seems he’s staying at home.

In Morocco
.

A whole arcane world of medieval Gaelic princely shenanigans—quite probably involving the wearing of emerald-colored tights—of whose existence I had been completely and sadly unaware had revealed itself to me, only to snatch itself away at the last moment. I felt cheated. I decided to go to Morocco, meet the Moor, and lay claim to my roots.

It turned out to be impossible. Phone calls and letters to likely-sounding contacts went unanswered. Nobody in the mysterious world of Gaelic heraldry wanted to talk about it, while Irish people living in the real world told me it was a load of unbelievable old shite, and I’d be better off steering well clear of these mad feckers unless I wanted to end up minus large amounts of cash Riverdancing in plaid trousers in a Holiday Inn at two o’clock in the morning.

Then a friend who’d been making some enquiries for me got a call from someone claiming to represent some manner of ceremonial Celtic Guard, an order of armed Gaelic gentlemen who accompany and defend the Mór on all his overseas trips. And the word was that the man himself was indeed in Morocco, but would speak to no one.

No one. Understand?

Then two things happened.

First of all I managed to get hold of a book on Gaelic history with a foreword written by the MacCarthy Mór himself. There was also a photograph.
He wasn’t a Moroccan fella at all. Rather pale and Irish-looking, in fact; and decked out in a dinner jacket covered in fancy badges and decorations.

The second was an article in the Irish edition of the
Sunday Times
saying that the Irish government had withdrawn “courtesy recognition” of the MacCarthy Mór, whom it described as “a Belfast historian of humble origins.” Suggesting that his genealogy had been declared suspect, the paper said that MacCarthy was indeed in Morocco, adding ominously: “He may yet face legal challenges from dozens of disgruntled Irish Americans to whom he sold and rented titles.”

The ceremonial Guard also got a mention: “A uniform of rust kilts, gray military shirts and black berets. One member carried an axe.”

What in God’s name could it all mean?

I was hooked, but my attempts to make contact with the Mór were, if anything, making reverse progress. The Tangier hotel in which he had been a long-term resident denied ever having heard of him. I did succeed in making contact with a count who had for years been one of MacCarthy’s supporters. “When you phone him, make sure you’ve got a donkey handy,” advised the intermediary who gave me the number, “so that he can talk the hind leg off it.” In a series of extended telephone conversations—during which I took on the role of donkey, none being available locally—the loquacious count denounced his former mentor as a charlatan, and urged me to avoid any contact with him. He saw no contradiction, however, in continuing to use his title, despite the fact that it had been bestowed on him by MacCarthy himself. On the other end of the phone I ee-awed in disbelief, but I don’t think he noticed. I had entered a peculiar realm in which, as I was to learn to my cost on more than one occasion, interested combatants armed with vast quantities of minute, unverifiable and unlikely-sounding historical detail talk and talk and talk at you until you have a very bad headache indeed.

After several weeks I was no closer to the elusive Mór, but I had managed to piece together the essential facts of the story. Since 1948 the Irish state has been conferring “courtesy recognition” on the proven heirs of the traditional Gaelic chiefships that were swept away under Anglo-Norman, later British, rule. In 1991, after a decade of petitioning, the chief herald of
Ireland authorized Terence MacCarthy, a historian and the son of a Belfast ballroom dancing instructor, to use the title MacCarthy Mór, Prince of Desmond. In some eyes this made him potential heir to the high kingship of Ireland, even though the job no longer exists, on account of the inconvenient existence of a republic. Throughout the nineties MacCarthy adopted a high profile, publishing historical books, proselytizing for Gaelic culture, being photographed with dignitaries, and making public appearances at clan gatherings in North America. And then, as reported in the
Sunday Times
, the Irish government withdrew its recognition, and the chief herald issued a statement: “It appears that reliance was placed to an excessive degree on uncorroborated statements and uncertified copies, transcriptions, or summaries of documents, the originals of which were not produced or were said to have been destroyed by fire, flood or explosion.”