The Road to McCarthy (51 page)

“Fockin’ nonsense it is! Jaysus, but they must think that we’re idiots! If that’s what we’re expected to believe, then where the fock has the rest of it gone!”

Then he pretends to notice me, as the
Good Drinker’s Book of Bar Etiquette
demands. I nod and smile back as required, and he says, “Is it on holiday y’are? So what part of England would ye be from?” So I tell him and he asks, “Is that pub still there just across from the dog track in Hove? We did some drinking in that place. Years ago that was now, mind.”

What were you doing in Hove? I wonder.

“Sure I was on tour with the circus.”

This is pub chat of an extremely high caliber. Unhindered by the conventional topics of sports, weather and politics, eager to get off-script as quickly as possible, in seconds he has transported us into a magical-realist world of life as an itinerant circus hand in the Britain of the 1960s and 1970s, and he isn’t going to stop while he’s ahead, which may be most of the afternoon.

“ ’Twas a great life all right, but because I was Irish they thought I knew everything about animals. I soon learned, mind. Shetland ponies? Fockn’ vicious bastards they are. People buy ’em for their kids, but they get to six years old and they’ll bite fockn’ lumps outta ya.”

The dog opens one eye, possibly in rigor mortis, maybe in agreement.

“Chimps? Fockn’ bastards! They’d go up the pole in the center of the ring, then drop down into our arms. Heavy, nasty bastards they were. And the fockn’ ostriches! God Almighty! You wouldn’t want to go near those fockers!”

He starts to rock forward on his stool with laughter at the memory of it. The beer’s already come down my nose twice.

“The fockn’ ostriches fockn’ escaped once in fockn’ Southsea. We had to chase ’em, the nasty bastards”—he can’t quite finish the sentence, and has to pinch the center of his forehead between his thumb and first finger—“chase the bastards with fockn’ nets through the center of fockn’ town.
Took seventeen elephants to the sea for a publicity stunt while we were there. Couldn’t get the bastards out of the fockn’ water. You’ll have to excuse my language, but that bull elephant was a right cunt. And we had a fockn’ rhinoceros!”

What did a rhinoceros do in a circus?

“I had to feed it fockn’ cabbages!”

Dear God, I don’t think I can take much more of this.

“I used to go to the fruit and veg shops, get all the rotten stuff for the chimps, fockn’ nasty bastards that they were. The PG Tips chimps? Loada fockn’ nonsense that was. The owner comes to me one night and says, ‘the fockn’ chimps are drunk. They won’t do their fockn’ tricks. Fockn’ pissed, every last one of ’em.’ I’d given ’em peaches that were, you know, when they go fizzy up your nose.”

Fermenting?

“That’s it. Oh, dear God. We had two giraffes on a bus. Holes cut in the roof to stick their heads through. The fockn’ driver skidded and turned the fockn’ bus over on a roundabout. Jesus, Mary and Joseph! The fockn’ things are concussed. The boss comes along with a fockn’ gun this time, because they’re licensed to have ’em in case the lions go berserk. He says, ‘You’re a fockn’ dead man if anything happens to them giraffes.’ Ah, Jaysus. And we had five tiger cubs. Little things. Like hats.”

Hats?

“No. Like cats. A guy sold one of them to a publican in Hampshire so he could buy drink. We didn’t earn much money, but Christ, the craic. I didn’t know anyone there who had money as their god. Lovely men. All very generous people. But those fockn’ chimps were bastards.”

It’s my round, which provides a welcome hiatus for the wiping away of tears, and a natural change of subject.

“Did ye ever go to Cheltenham?”

I don’t think he means the Book Festival.

“I was in Baltimore in County Cork—they’ve a McCarthy’s there as well—delivering a cement mixer for them to take out to Sherkin Island and we’re having a few drinks in the evening, and one of the lads accepts a £100 bet that he can’t get from Baltimore to Cheltenham on a fockn’ Honda 50.
Anyway didn’t he go there on the fockn’ motorway from the ferry? Mother of God! Turns up in the Queen’s Hotel with a head on him looking like this! The bike was knackered and he wanted to send it home on the train, but the driver wouldn’t let him put it in the fockn’ taxi. We stayed at a convent, the five of us.”

What?

“Well, the Mother Superior is from Listowel. She only wanted fifty quid, but we gave her a hundred to kip down in a dormitory. It’s more than that for one night at the Queen’s, no matter how many you squeeze in the fockn’ room. And once you’ve got your head down it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the Ritz or a bloody hostel. Got up at seven, went to the shop for a paper, got a bottle of whiskey for Madge and four flagons of cider, you know, the plastic ones.”

The lads by the door have gone now so it’s just the two of us, the barmaid and the dog, which appears to have had a relapse. “Here,” says the barmaid, “would you like a T-shirt?” mccarthy’s fethard county tipperary, it says. publican restaurant undertaker.

Undertaker?

“Ah, yeah,” she says. “Has he told ya about the time he was barred? Tell him, Jim. The letter’s on the wall in case you don’t believe him.”

It seems he was once barred by Mrs. McCarthy, Publican, Restaurateur and Undertaker, for some nonspecific misdemeanor. Distraught at being refused entrance to his home from home, he attended his local political representative constituency session to ask him to intervene. And where was the session held? Here, in the very pub from which he was excluded. His elected representative duly wrote to Mrs. McCarthy. The officially embossed letter is displayed in a frame on the wall at the far end of the bar.

“You know the monsignor who built the airport at Knock? Well, didn’t he die at Lourdes? So a few of us decided to go to the funeral, you know, to represent South Tip. We set off at night, in a Transit full of cider with a cooker in the back. Anyway we got lost, and couldn’t find fockn’ Knock anywhere. Ended up getting guided there behind a woman garda with a flashing light on her car. We went for breakfast in a café full of retired priests and nuns. One of the lads asked the waiter where was the best pub in Knock for the craic, so I said, ‘We’re not here for the craic, we’re here for the fockn’ monsignor’s funeral, so show some fockn’ respect.’ So we went to the pub when it opened, bought some of those disposable razors on the way. One of the lads goes into the toilet and doesn’t come out. So in we go, and isn’t he only trying to shave without taking the little orange plastic things off the blade, throwing all the razors away and saying ‘useless fockn’ things.’”

“Did he tell you about the duck?” asks the barmaid.

“What duck?”

“They reckon he’s the only man in Ireland ever had a duck that drowned.”

Drowned, in what sense?

“Well, I took it indoors for the winter, then put it back on the pond when spring came. Its feathers must have dried up, its natural oils like, in front of the stove, because the poor thing got waterlogged and fockn’ keeled over and drowned. Sure it made the newspapers.”

As I head for the door he says, “I promised Mrs. McCarthy she can have my funeral, all paid in advance, just as long as we don’t take fockn’ Cromwell’s route through the town. Good luck now. And remember, you see any Shetland ponies, don’t take your kids within a hundred yards of the bastards.”

“Will you visit Cashel?”
Terence MacCarthy the ex-Mór, had asked me. I’ve taken a short detour so I can approach it from the north and
get the full effect of the Rock, towering above and dominating the surrounding landscape. It’s the single most impressive sight between Dublin and the south coast, a cluster of ancient ecclesiastical buildings standing high above the town and surrounding lowlands like some medieval fantasy of Ireland. It was here that St. Patrick preached when he used the shamrock as a metaphor of the Trinity, and where Cormac MacCarthaigh, king of Desmond, built a spectacular Romanesque chapel in the early twelfth century. The cathedral that adjoins the chapel was sacked by Cromwell, repaired, then abandoned and unroofed in 1748 because the archbishop of the time could not drive his coach and four up to the door, and decided somewhere flatter might be more convenient.

I park outside a branch of Paddy Power, the chain of bookmakers that sounds like a revolutionary political movement, and walk up towards the Rock. I go through a small housing complex and past King Cormack’s Restaurant, which is offering soups, sandwiches and hot meals. I hadn’t realized he’d built a café as well as one of the most beautiful Romanesque chapels of the Celtic Christian world. He picked a good spot as well, right on the approach to the Rock itself, so that those coming to visit this most celebrated of ancient Irish sites would think, “May as well have one of his pies while we’re here.” Vision, you see. That’s the key to a top-class tourism product.

There’s a fierce wind blowing up on top, and I spend a little time watching clouds scudding against the sky through the ruined cathedral windows. The shadow of a bird of prey hovering high above plays on the grass close to my feet. The view over the town and countryside is breathtaking, and must have served to underline the sovereignty over the people of the kings, and after them the clergy, who held sway up here. In Cormac’s Chapel some traces of the original frescoes remain, enough to hint at how magnificently ornate it must once have been. I also can’t help thinking how close the blues, reds and yellows are to the paints that have been used to revamp Irish towns and villages. Perhaps I’ve stumbled on evidence that the colors really are traditional after all.

I walk down through the grounds of the Cashel Palace Hotel and back to the car. I’d been hoping to meet Conor MacCarthy here; the seat of the
MacCarthy kings seemed an appropriate place to renew my acquaintance with my aspirant clan chief, but letters and messages to Belfast have gone unanswered. It’s a pity, for I enjoyed his company and had something to show him; a package that arrived recently from Tasmania, containing the prison records of all the McCarthys who were incarcerated in Port Arthur. It’s a colorful read.

Whenever I see
that ruined abbey standing at the water’s edge, I feel like I’m coming home. It’s just two minutes up the hill to the Convent, the peerless hilltop guest house that is really called something else. I stay here whenever I’m passing through West Cork, and also quite often when I’m not. I rang a couple of nights ago to book and the phone was answered by the gardener, who has some idiosyncratic traits. He handed me over to Con, chef, proprietor and raconteur.

“Was the gardener naked?” I asked.

“He was wearing a kind of minikilt this time,” said Con.

Fair enough.

It turns out to be a busy night in the tiny restaurant in the former nuns’ chapel, and they’re a bit stretched for staff, so as well as being a guest I’m also the waiter serving a party of twenty female psychics and mystics from the United States. They arrived on a coach, which seemed a little prosaic. “We are the Celestials,” said their leader, or possibly their democratically elected spokesperson, as they entered.

Resisting the temptation to say “I can see that,” and resolving not to go down the no doubt well-worn road of denying them a menu because they must already know what they’re having, I showed them through. There was an uneasy hiatus for a while, as the minority of nonteetotalers debated whether eight people would be able to finish a whole bottle of wine, or whether that was just excessive. I pointed out as discreetly as I could that the English couple at the corner table were already on their second bottle between two, but as far as they were concerned this was beyond the realms of the possible, and they refused to believe me. They eventually decided to take a chance on the wine, along with fifty or sixty cups of ’erb tea. In the
course of my duties I’ve been able to glean, among other things, that they are on a three-week tour of the sacred sites of Ireland. “Sometimes people think we’re a regular package tour, which is kinda embarrassing.”

So where are they staying tonight?

“Gee, I dunno,” says the Celestial. “Some hotel, I guess.”

Upstairs in my room I take out the plastic file that contains the picture of James McCarthy and friends with the giant nugget, and also the prison records from Port Arthur in which the exploits of Patrick, Timothy, Jeremiah, John, Denis, Edward, Florence, Daniel and Francis McCarthy in Van Diemen’s Land are recorded. “Stealing a handkerchief—transported ten years.” “Making away with his slops—10 days in cells.” “Idleness—4 days solitary confinement.” “Misconduct in having soap improperly in his possession—2 months hard labor in chains.” “Being at the theatre after hours—4 months hard labour.” I don’t recognize the idleness, but the McCarthys have always had a reputation for being fond of soap and the theater, so I suppose it was inevitable that one day it would get them into trouble. And then of course there’s the drink.

John McCarthy was transported in 1844 for stealing gas fittings, though he did have priors for stealing a pane of glass, so you can see what society was up against. His fourteen reoffenses in Van Diemen’s Land have a relentless quality about them: “Drunk and insolent.” “Drunk and out after hours.” “Drunk and representing himself to be free.” “Drunk.” “Misconduct in giving a pot of beer to another prisoner.” “Misconduct in being in public house on a Sunday.” Given his hobby, the offense that deviates from the pattern comes as no surprise. “Misconduct in having his clothes on at night in his berth and having a lighted rag in his possession.”

The most shocking record of all is that of Timothy McCarthy, transported in 1835 “for stealing a cap.” Over the course of the next six years, twenty-six separate offenses and punishments are recorded. “Disorderly conduct immediately after being tried—15 stripes on the breech.” “Drunk and disorderly—3 days solitary confinement.” “Blowing out the lamps—5 days solitary confinement on bread and water.” On and on it goes, so brutal that it starts to read like a work of dark comic genius, a twisted satire by
Monty Python
. “Having a thimble improperly in his possession—3 days
solitary confinement on bread and water.” “Making away with some thread and some leather—3 days solitary on bread and water.” A dastardly pattern of needlework-related crime is beginning to emerge. “Conniving at a fellow boy having thread improperly in possession—48 hours solitary on bread and water.” I’m about to turn the page to continue this pitiful criminal burlesque when something stops me in my tracks. “A fellow boy?” I look back over his record, and there it is again. “Striking a fellow boy—3 days solitary.” I check the cover page, but although the dates of trial, transportation and arrival in VDL are all present, the date of birth is blank.