The Road to McCarthy (10 page)

“You insult me.”

We’ve been less than an hour and this is more than an official guide would earn. But Mustafa is sneering now.

“I am better than official guide. Official guides all from south. I am from Tangier Bay.”

I’ve found some change. Another eight. That’s thirty-eight dirhams, altogether.

This only makes it worse.

“Four hundred, Americans pay me.”

Silly sods, spoiling it for everybody else.

“But I do not expect that. Two hundred only.”

I haven’t even got that much on me. I’ve got a 100-dirham bill, and the thirty-eight I’ve already offered him. So I produce the hundred and take back the thirty-eight. Naturally he refuses, and he’s angry now because he knows I’ve got the other thirty-eight and he wants the lot. There’s a guy in a hood by a stall on the street and he’s heard us arguing. He turns round and says something to Mustafa in Arabic. Could be, “Leave him alone.” Could be, “Make the bastard pay.” I’ve no idea. I’m sweating hard now, wondering what he’ll do next, clutching at the straw that if he really does work in the hotel then I’ll be able to find him and have him taken away to that horrible prison for bread and water in the nude. Look, I tell him, take the hundred, but thirty-eight is all I’ve got left and I need that for tea and a sandwich. And a massive brandy, though I don’t mention that.

“Sandwich is only seven. You think you need thirty-eight for sandwich? I must feed three babies!”

And all the years of liberal guilt about African famine, and images of child labor and civil war and refugees come flooding in, even though he’s turned mean and this is not a pleasant situation, and I give him the lot.

He refuses.

“No. You must give with love in your heart.”

He’s just rubbing it in now.

“I am. I am. With love. With love! Look!”

He smiles. And we do the clenched-fist handshake thing again.

“With love. Like brother. Goodbye, William.”

He disappears with the cash and I notice the brass plate. We’ve been conducting our negotiations in the doorway of a firm of lawyers.

Back at the hotel I change out of my fear-soaked clothes, shower, then reach for the caramel-flavored comfort of the Soberano. I turn on CNN and discover that the skiing championships in Salt Lake City have been abandoned because of heavy snow. Over on BBC Bland International there are pictures, but for some reason no sound. I’m tempted to say that this is an improvement, but in fact it’s worse. Only marginally, though.

I go to bed, but lie there in the dark unable to sleep. I’d been hoping the brandy might calm me down but I’m still feeling alert, albeit a little rattled and frayed around the edges. Why aren’t I sleepy then? Maybe it’s low-alcohol brandy. That’d be a dirty trick. I must check the label in the morning.

As I drift into restless half-sleep I keep thinking how stupid I’ve been this evening and asking myself the same question.

Where was bloody Mohammed when I needed him?

Next morning
I’m feeling a bit lonely and blue so I go down to the front desk and ask if there have been any messages for me, which there haven’t. This isn’t surprising, as I haven’t told anybody I’m staying here. I feel even worse now.

I decide to make a final concerted attempt to find the MacCarthys. If it fails I will give up and go home. The cell-phone number is still unobtainable and the pension doesn’t exist, so I phone the only other contact number I have, the café in Belfast. Mark the Pagan says that Terence is a friend of the king of Morocco, so perhaps I should contact the palace and ask him. This doesn’t strike me as a promising line of enquiry, so I head to a travel agent’s to check the availability of flights home.

As I’m waiting to speak to someone it strikes me that this office—the fan, the blinds, and the two heavy men with mustaches sitting behind the desk in
perspiration-marked shirts—is another scene from the North African B-feature film noir in which I’ve fetched up. I ought to strike a match on my thumbnail and light an untipped cigarette to show them I mean business, but I’m not even wearing a hat. Mind you, I have just had an idea.

“I’m trying to contact a friend of mine who flies from Tangier to Ireland quite often. His name is MacCarthy.”

“MacArthur?”

“MacCarthy. His passport says he is an Irish prince.”

“Prince? Prince MaCarthur?”

“No. MacCarthy. Prince of Desmond.”

“Desmond? Ah, Desmond!”

There’s a burst of animated conversation, a flick through an address book, a spool through a computer-screen passenger list and then he dials a number.

“Desmond? One moment please.”

As I take the phone I notice the blind is playing horizontal lines of sunlight and shadow across my face and body. Very
Maltese Falcon
. This is perfect.

“Hello? Is this Terence MacCarthy?”

“Bitte?”

“Terence. Prince of Desmond. The MacCarthy Mór?”

“Desmond? I am sorry? Desmond has returned in Germany. He is in Köln. Who is speaking please?”

They’ve given me the number of a German antique dealer called Desmond and I’m speaking to his boyfriend. I make my apologies and decide to leave this film before the end. As I thank the men and turn to leave, one of them is looking at his computer screen. It’s a confidential passenger list, which he is not allowed to disclose to me.

“Look here. Two MacCarthys. C and T. In twelve days they return to Belfast. And here, a phone number in Tangier.”

Conor and Tommy
are already in the hotel lobby when I arrive, smoking at least one cigarette each. When I met them that night in Belfast it
seemed I was the only person in the city not chain-smoking, apart from the girl cartwheeling along the white line, and I expect her friends had one on the go for her when she’d finished. At half past seven the following morning at Belfast airport a sickly-looking man who smelled of closing time asked the girl at the cash register for “twenty of your cheapest please, love.” Entering the fog of smoke that engulfed the dangerously crowded Beer & Fried Breakfast Zone was like walking back into a long-vanished decade when signs said spitting prohibited and cigarettes were widely believed to be good for the throat. Unseen coughers hacked and gruffed somewhere deep in the fetid smog, reinforcing the impression that Belfast might be a bit of a smokers’ town. I didn’t have time to check, but it’s possible that little knots of nonsmokers were huddled pariah-like in doorways outside the terminal building, indulging their shameful habit.

“Aye, well, maybe that’s what thirty years of killing does to a town,” says Tommy as we leave the hotel, crushing my glib observations like a tab end on a grease-encrusted breakfast plate, before lighting up a couple more.

It’s Tommy’s first time in Morocco, and he can’t have enough of it.

“I love the chaos. It’s like Ireland, only with more colors.”

Lots of people in Belfast had warned him not to come to Tangier, mind. “They said it’s meant to be a very dangerous place.” He laughs, effortlessly blowing smoke out of his nose as he speaks. “‘You don’t want to be going out on the streets there at night, Tom,’ they said, ‘not with some of those fellas around. Can’t get a drink, so they’re all on the whacky backy. Cut your throat soon as look at you.’” He laughs again, and smoke comes out of his ears and through the top of his head.

We’re on our way to the pension that doesn’t exist. Even against the riotous backdrop of Tangier’s streets they’re a stand-out couple of guys, and it’s a miracle I haven’t bumped into them sooner. Squat and mischievous in one of the few Donegal tweed jackets in Morocco, Tommy has the air of a rough and ready Belfast lad who hasn’t wasted his money on health clubs and grooming products. Conor, angular and serious-looking in his de Valera specs, is dressed in the defiant long black raincoat of a Nick Cave fan on holiday in a sunny place. They’re good company, and completely unfazed
by the several days of noncommunication which has almost sent me home early.

“Ah, we knew we’d bump into each other one way or another,” says Conor disarmingly. “If you hadn’t found us we’d probably have come to the hotel at the weekend. We thought you’d probably be staying there.”

As we turn into Rue des Postes, the same man is cleaning the same car as last time I was here. He smiles and waves and generally greets the Mac-Carthy brothers like long-lost relatives as we turn into the gateway of number twelve, the house where the Moroccan lady gave me the bum’s rush on my previous visit. I tell them what happened, expecting them to be outraged.

“Ah, yes, that would be the Fatima,” explains Conor.

“She’s been trained to deny everything,” adds Tommy helpfully.

“It’s a very delicate situation,” concludes Conor.

I’ve no idea what they’re talking about.

After symbolically acknowledging that it’s still technically the morning by drinking a foul cup of instant coffee—imported direct from Northern Ireland to improve the quality of Moroccan life—there’s unanimous agreement that it’s now morally acceptable to move on to the duty-free Bushmills, particularly if we drink it out of the same mugs. And, after all, haven’t we just managed to meet up with each other? And there does seem to be a bit of a chill in the air today. And anyway, isn’t a lunchtime aperitif a very civilized way to carry on? Well, not really, not if you don’t actually have any lunch, but it seems churlish to point out the lack of solids to underpin the alcohol as we stride confidently out into the afternoon sunshine, where the man is still washing his car. He must be some kind of secret policeman or government spy. Before he comes to do the car each day he probably sits in a café reading an upside-down newspaper—
though of course you wouldn’t know it was upside down if you didn’t read Arabic!
The crafty bastard. If I’d had just one more mug of whiskey I’d probably be feeling reckless enough to denounce him publicly and blow his cover. Luckily, I’m simultaneously both sober and intoxicated enough to realize that nonsense masquerading as piercing insight is one of the side effects of drinking whiskey in daylight on an empty stomach. It’s only a short step from here to the two-hour memory
lapses, grazed knuckles and inexplicable cuts on the forehead, and that isn’t a road we want to go down, which is why we’ve stopped drinking and come out to do a bit of sightseeing instead. We manage a quick and uneventful mooch around a market that sells flowers and meat, then adjourn to a bar for a drink.

Unlike my mint tea binges of the past week, which have been in warm, colorful, public, Islamic places, the bar is dark, chilled and completely empty except for the three of us. There’s as much indication that this is Morocco as there is in the bar of the Sheffield Travelodge. The waiter brings enough complimentary bowls of nuts, cheese, olives and pizza to stock a Harvester All-You-Can-Eat Buffet and the world starts to feel a more grounded place. Conversation, though, is completely away with the fairies. Tommy and Conor are gifted improvisers with an instinctive ability to finish each other’s sentences. One of them takes an idea from the other, runs and riffs with it in oblique and unexpected directions until it is unrecognizable, only for the originator to seize the concept anew and carry it into deep and hitherto unexplored areas. It’s ensemble playing, like jazz, but I’m not in the band yet. I’ve always been considered a bit of a lippy bastard in England, so it’s enjoyable to spend time in the company of the kind of people who make me look like the strong silent type.

But through all the conversational loops, we keep returning to the concept of Irish monarchy and of the MacCarthy Mór, the title claimed by Conor since his brother’s abdication. He says he’ll debate his family’s claim to the title with anybody, while at the same time protesting that he is a reluctant claimant to the post. All the time there is the unspoken and increasingly mysterious fact of his elder brother Terence’s exile in Tangier. I’ve come here specifically to meet him, yet so far the possibility of our getting together hasn’t been mentioned. Luckily I have a plan that has always worked before, which is: Do nothing, and see what happens.

What happens is we go to a Chinese restaurant on top of a newly built concrete block of shops. The brothers don’t want to eat—just the drinking and the smoking will be fine—but they’re aware of my obsession with Singapore noodles and feel it’s important some should be made available. And
sure enough, there they are on the menu:
Nouilles mélange fruits de mer façon Singapore
. When they arrive they turn out to be fat spaghetti tossed with mixed marinated pickled seafood. Number seventeen, the shredded roast duck, is, if anything, even more peculiar. It comes in a thick gravy of what tastes like Marmite, lard and chocolate, topped with a green glacé cherry. I know that Chinese restaurateurs like to adapt their cuisine to local tastes and ingredients, but occasionally I get the feeling that something far more disturbing is going on.

We leave, taking the second bottle of Moroccan red with us, and return to the roof of the pension that doesn’t exist, where the boys entertain me with unprintable Belfast gossip about which local politician beats his wife, which is seriously ill, who is really the head of the IRA and which assassinations were carried out by the SAS. The view over the old town and the sea must be virtually the same as the one enjoyed by Matisse when he painted
View of Tangier Bay
from a hotel room not far from here. Unfortunately it’s dark, so you can’t see anything except the arches of the illuminated golden M. I’m wondering whether there’s any chance that it might not be what I think it is and might stand for, say, mosque, when Tommy catches my eye and leans across, grinning emphatically as he lights a cigarette with the end of another.

“You know, Peter, people in Northern Ireland really don’t like the English.”

I’m immediately on edge. It’s not clear whether for the purpose of this conversation I’m English or Irish. I’ve had so much to drink I’m not really sure myself. As we’re four floors up I decide to proceed with caution. I take advantage of the rare pause to ask a question.

“But what about the Loyalists? All the people in the North who regard themselves as British?”