The Road to McCarthy (14 page)

That must be it. I’m getting high on passive dope-smoking. Orange juice wouldn’t have this effect. Now I’ve started thinking that the big unglazed window that looks out onto the street is itself a kind of screen. It frames the action! I can just sit and watch the rich cast of characters enter and leave the movie as they walk by: a man on crutches, a boy in a Nike anorak with three live chickens, a blind man begging, a cleaning woman with a bucket, a kid on a scooter in an Obi Wan Kenobi costume, a prophet Isaiah look-alike. I’ve started feeling hungry now.

I take a stroll out through the medina to the
ville nouvelle
. The streets seem much busier at night than by day. At one corner a man has laid out his stock of wallets and alarm clocks on a blanket by the curbside. An old Mercedes sedan reverses out of the side street and runs over them. The alarms on the clocks start going off indiscriminately and the argument is gathering momentum as I turn the corner.

As I walk I realize how fond I have become of Tangier. Like Mohammed, it has crept up on me without my really noticing. It’s the closest African city to Europe, but it never features in those lists of fashionable places to go for the weekend. It has no famous attractions that must not be missed; which, in a strange way, is the biggest attraction of all. Freed from the tyranny of sights that must be seen in the company of lots of other mugs with cameras, the city itself becomes the star. I realize I’ve become familiar with it without making any conscious effort. Petit Socco and Grand Socco have come to feel like home from home. Landmarks are now taken for
granted. There is Matisse’s famous window; here is the Great Mosque; that is where Tennessee Williams rented an apartment. As I scout the street for a restaurant likely to serve wine, it feels as if I’m no longer walking with an affected sense of purpose and belonging, but have subliminally acquired a genuine one. It must have been good stuff the old man was smoking.

I climb a flight of stairs to a Spanish restaurant. The landing opens into a bare and noisy bar full of men who look like truck drivers, captains of smuggling boats and mercenaries on leave for the weekend. Everyone is shouting and drinking brandy and eating tapas off paper napkins. I adjourn to a calmer though no less spartan dining room, where I have salade niçoise and calamari. It’s served with a half-liter jug of rancid white wine that you wouldn’t use to dress a wound. I enjoy it enormously. There’s a charming old waiter who looks and dresses like Bela Lugosi in
Plan 9 from Outer Space
. When I’ve finished eating he pours a complimentary digestif of half a pint of Muscatel to take away the taste of the wine.

I’m flying in the morning, but it’s Saturday night and I’m frightened I might miss something if I go to bed early. I head back to Café Central to find the place has been transformed in my absence. It’s packed to the rafters with men watching Real Madrid on the giant screen. I sit outside as their cheers and roars echo through the alleyways. An old man in a hooded robe sits alone at the table next to me. He’s either speaking into a concealed hands-free cell phone, or talking to himself. After a little while an old woman in a veil appears from around the corner and starts giving him a tremendous bollocking. She shouts and shouts for two or three minutes and then, bollocking complete, leaves as quickly as she’d appeared. He decides, wisely it seems to me, to stay put for a while. A few minutes later she appears again. This time, though, she doesn’t even give him the time of day, but just blanks him and walks right on past. I’m trying to work out what’s been going on between them when I notice that this time she’s also carrying a toilet seat looped over her left arm, like a handbag. Once again I’m completely out of my depth. The certainties of Europe seem far away, even though that continent is visible from the end of the street.

My thoughts turn to poor old Mohammed. I haven’t seen him for a couple
of days and I’m leaving in the morning. I wonder what’s become of him? I hope he’s all right. A few days ago I sat for a quarter of an hour at a second-floor window at the front of the hotel watching him trying to watch me. Though he always finds me eventually, I’ve become more accomplished at avoiding him, and more brazen about giving him the slip. I’ve been going in and out of the hotel through the garden or rear car park entrance. Sometimes I’ve tried getting up unnaturally early, or hiding till he’s gone. Once I spotted him in the street and just turned and ran away through the crowds, hoping he hadn’t seen me, but thinking how I’ve always enjoyed this scene in the cinema, the one where the sweaty bloke in the safari suit gets chased through the souks by the bad guys. I managed to escape without knocking over a single souvenir stall.

And then I remember that first taxi journey, and its sense of being in the opening scene of a movie, and I understand what Mohammed has brought to my trip. He has helped turn a documentary into a drama, by giving it character, conflict and a through line. And because I never see him come or go, it actually seems as if he’s been edited in and out. He has plagued my life with his stalking and lurking; but he’s also put me in my own film noir, constantly looking over my shoulder, never able to relax when walking the streets. It would have been a much poorer movie without him.

The match ends, the crowds disperse and I walk back to the hotel for the last time, realizing that the shadows hold no surprises any more. As I walk, I find myself wondering about Mohammed. Where is he? I hope nothing’s happened to him. I feel a slight pang of regret. Perhaps he’s met someone else! That’s it. I’m jealous.
He’s seeing another tourist
. Someone richer than me. More generous, at any rate. I should have given him more than I did. Even my loose change is a fortune to him. I’m kicking myself now. And in a strange way, I’m missing him.

“So, Peter! You go tomorrow?”

The voice comes hissing out of the darkness, and scares me rigid. Just twenty yards from the hotel, and he’s come out of a doorway I didn’t even know existed.

“Please, you must help me now. Please. Give me five hundred, Peter, for blanket. Where I live, no furniture, no blanket. Five hundred! Some tourists
give me money for nothing, but I have been helping you. Please. Your shoes! Take them off. Yes! Give me your shoes! You have trouser for me? Old trouser? Please, trouser, trouser ….”

Next morning
Conor and Tommy are in the lobby to see me off. They have a full complement of cigarettes, though Conor claims to be on the point of giving them up.

“You wouldn’t want to be catching cancer in a third world country.”

As my taxi drives off from the front of the hotel, Mohammed is watching from a doorway. I don’t see him, but I know he’s there.

The road to the airport, as is traditional with roads to airports, takes us through the drabbest areas of town. Flocks of sheep are grazing on wasteland outside cheap concrete apartment blocks. Some have their own shepherds. The driver says they will all be slaughtered next week inside the apartments, and the bay will run red with their blood.

We land at Gatwick in the dark, in driving rain. Inside the terminal everything looks gray. On the journey home from the airport no one follows me, there’s foot and mouth on the radio, and I don’t see a single person wearing a fez.

Sometimes
home movies can seem very dull.

A few days
after returning from Tangier, I received a phone call from a woman who was organizing a literary event in Manhattan. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world when I accepted her invitation to participate. How glamorous, I thought, to say I’d be doing a gig in New York City. It would conjure up images of Carnegie Hall or Madison Square Garden with Woody Allen, Norman Mailer and Frank McCourt in the front row. Now I know the reality: I would be standing on some beer crates in a bar full of baying jet-lagged drunks, very few of whom were likely to be avid readers.

The woman’s voice made it clear that something was, in fact, wrong. She was trying hard to sound upbeat, but had the unmistakable tone of someone who was concealing the terrible truth from a patient, or a victim.

“Our literary events are very popular.”

“Good.”

“It’s just…. look, it’s nothing, you’ll probably be okay—but, y’know, it’s the Wednesday before St. Patrick’s Day ….”

I said I knew that. That’s why I was coming.

“Oh, okay, so you know that all the Celtic boys will be in town.”

Which Celtic boys? Don’t say it. Oh, God, no! Please don’t say it.

“Oh, y’know, the soccer fans? From Glasgow? They come over every year for Paddy’s Day for the whole week, and they go kind of crazy. It’s wild. Thing is, they use this bar as their headquarters. By Wednesday there’ll be a whole bunch of ’em in here. It might not be like a regular reading. They kind of, drink a lot? And that, like, frightens away the regular audience? So you might be faced with a lotta very drunk Scottish guys. But hey! Some of them are pretty cool. Just wanted you to know. I’m sure everything will be okay.”

So I told her I was sure everything would be okay too, and then she said it again, which is when I knew I was really in trouble. And then she said, “Hey, you’ve got an Irish name, but you sound like, English?”

I said she had a good ear for accents, and she said, “I wonder if the Scottish guys will notice your accent, only, y’know, they can get a little, like—boisterous?”

Oh, I doubt it, I said, as my bowels turned to acid rain and my mouth dried up and shriveled like a Christian Brother’s heart. I doubt it.

My happy-go-lucky trip to New York to experience the world’s biggest St. Patrick’s Day celebrations had been transformed into a journey to the heart of darkness.

It’s a bitterly cold
morning as I wait for the train to the airport, so cold that a pool of last night’s sick has frozen to the platform. I’m only guessing that it’s last night’s. Most British railway stations aren’t manned these days because it isn’t cost-effective, so there’s no one to collect the tickets, or the sick. Official policy is to rely on gradual dispersal by rook and magpie, unless they strike lucky and someone slips and mops it up with the back of their overcoat. Mind you, hardly anyone on the platform is wearing an overcoat. It’s below freezing but a young man has just walked past me, hunched and wincing against the cold, wearing a thin polyester suit. A few feeble nylon anorak affairs are in evidence, and a sprinkling of those piss-poor raincoats that aren’t even waterproof. There are few hats or gloves.
Everyone is displaying the distinctive body language and corned beef cheeks of terminal hypothermia. We really should know better. If it drops below sixty in the south of France the fur coats are out and the shitzus are togged up in designer thermals with sequined piping and flared trousers. Is our national aversion to high-quality winter clothing caused by poverty or machismo? Or could it be an act of defiance? Unlike cashmere and lambs-wool, nylon jackets and manufactured-fiber suits are nonabsorbent, which means that if we take a tumble on an icy, poorly maintained platform, they won’t mop up the vomit. Good thing too. That’s someone else’s job.

As we pull out of the station the conductor announces that refreshments will not be served today because one of the wheels has fallen off the trolley. This beautifully-chosen metaphor for the entire railway system provokes a burst of spontaneous laughter and gives everyone a lot more pleasure than they’d have got from one of the tea-flavored drinks. Announcements on British trains remain the best reason for choosing rail travel over the car, or mule. “Complimentary tea and coffee is now being served in the buffet,” announced the steward on my two-and-a-half-hour-late West Coast Express recently. “Any passengers wishing to purchase complimentary tea and coffee please make your way to the buffet now.”

One night I was on a train packed with commuters that came to a stop in a dark field for no apparent reason. The world-weary conductor announced that he was sorry for the delay, in one of those voices that lets you know he isn’t really. Then he came back on, said there were two trains stopped on the line ahead of us and one backed up behind, and he had “absolutely no idea” when we’d get moving. By the third time, his patience had snapped and he had made an executive decision to disregard his terms of employment and tell us the truth. “Well,” he said in a sardonic sing-song, “I’ve still no idea how long we’ll be stuck here, because apparently there’s someone ‘threatening to commit suicide’ on a bridge up ahead.” People lowered books and newspapers at this point, looking at each other as if to say, “Did he really say that?” Then he continued. “Suicide? Suicide? Looking for bloody attention if you ask me. I’ll keep you posted if he jumps.”