The Road to McCarthy (3 page)

I order calamari and scallops in ginger and tomato something, followed by roast hake with pickled things and braised fennel. The food is exemplary, but the waiter thinks I am a time-wasting wanker. This is one of the prices you pay for asking for a table for one, but it’s worth it. I know some people can’t bear the thought of dining alone in public, sitting there advertising your Johnny-No-Mates status, isolated among the gleeful groups of friends and couples of ever-so-slightly inebriated lovers. I have to say, though, that I love it. To pretend to be laughing at something in the book you appear to be reading, while in reality tuning in to the conversation at the next table, is one of the great gastronomic pleasures, with the added advantage of being entirely unreliant on whatever’s turned up on your plate. Restaurant
critics frequently warn that it’s impossible to get a good table if you’re eating alone; but once you understand that “good” actually means “close to that couple over there who look a bit angry and drunk,” dinner for one becomes a very entertaining option.

I’m pretending to read a book about Tangier when a couple in their forties finish their coffee and get up to leave. They look urban and modern. She’s quite svelte, while he’s noticeably overweight. At the table between me and them sit an ancient English couple. She’s in elegant black, with a single string of pearls, and he’s got a cream linen suit, a military tie and a twitch. They must be pushing ninety, and good luck to them for being this far from home, even if home is only a suite on the third floor. They’re making no attempt to disguise the fact that they have temporarily abandoned their sherry trifle to stare at the couple who are leaving. Suddenly he speaks in a booming, John Gielgud voice.

“Good God! Look at the size of him! He’s absolutely enormous!”

“Extraordinary!” exclaims his wife. “How on earth could she bear to let him make love to her? He’d crush her like an egg!”

“Well, she’d have to, and that’s an end to it.”

As each table empties, the departing diners get the same treatment: “Do you think they were Belgian?” “What bizarre hair!” “I can’t abide that sort of thing.” I decide to hang on until they’ve gone so that they can’t say anything horrid about me. As they leave, they give me a dignified but restrained “Goodnight” and totter towards the door, where he says something vicious-sounding that I can’t quite hear. She scrutinizes me, then mutters in agreement. The moment they disappear the guitarist stops playing, the big lights come on and I’m left to eat my crème caramel while contemptuous waiters reset the tables for breakfast all round me.

To tell the truth, I made two of those street names up.

At breakfast I’m served
by the same guys who were setting the tables when I went to bed. They still hate me. By eight o’clock I’m down at the port for the ferry to Tangier, but there will be no boats today. Winnie
and the Estonians are checking out as I check back into the hotel I’ve just checked out of. A phone call confirms that there’s nothing sailing from Algeciras, just along the Spanish coast. I have to face the fact that I am not going to get to Tangier today. Still, I was there for a few minutes yesterday. Mustn’t grumble. I’ve been presented with the opportunity to spend a windy February day in Gibraltar and I should make the most of it. It’s just that I’ve absolutely no idea what to do.

A leaflet in the hotel lobby claims that no visit to Gibraltar is complete without a trip up the Rock to see St. Michael’s Cave and the Other Attractions, and I decide to believe the propaganda. Of course I can walk if I do not want to call a taxi, says the man at the concierge desk when I ask. “Just keep going up and up,” he says. “You are fit? Well, it is very easy.”

The road does indeed go up and up, and up, following the coast with spectacular views over the harbor and ocean. The lush vegetation concealing hillside government buildings reminds me of Hong Kong. After half an hour there’s a sign that says upper peak nature reserve. It warns that you enter at your own risk. What risk is that then? apes, it says. What—the Barbary apes? There’s a picture of one of them on the leaflet. Are they in a zoo up here, then? Or are they free-range? I have vague memories of learning something about them at school, but I can’t remember what it was. Are they vicious predators, or gentle companions? Carnivorous, or herbivorous? An endangered species, or farmed commercially for supermarket salami? I realize I know nothing at all about them except that they live here, rather than in Marbella or Málaga. I half thought they were mythological. Are they big or small? Must be small, eh? So why are they called apes, then? Apes are big, aren’t they? As big as us, at least. If I’d had any sense I’d have bought a guidebook and studied up on them, but I didn’t. I’m completely unprepared, and have no idea what to expect.

I’m also the only person walking.

There have been occasional taxis and tour minibuses passing me on the way up, but I seem to be the only person on foot.

Just the one for the apes to concentrate on, then?

So what am I supposed to do if they attack? I seem to remember something on a BBC wildlife program about showing apes your bottom when
cornered. Or is it that they show you their bottoms? You’d want to make sure you got it right. You’d probably only get the one chance.

After another quarter-hour of much harder foot slog than that swine of a concierge had even hinted at, I come to a ticket booth where I have to pay five pounds to get in, even though I’m not sure what I’m getting in to. Will it be some wretched safari park full of wild animals, with me the only pedestrian? There’s a monument ahead, looking south towards Africa over the best view so far. There’s also a group of about ten people, English by the look of it, who’ve just got out of a minibus together.

“If you wish, you may take a picture of the Pillars of Hercules,” says their dapper little guide, with the grim resignation of a man who knows he is wasting his life.

“Try and bloody pretend, Lisa! Just try and look as if you’re having a good time,” says a woman to her companion, her daughter perhaps, or maybe a recently released prisoner placed under her supervision by the courts. “It’s the Pillars of Bloody Hercules, you know.”

A sign on the monument says that in ancient times this point was indeed known as Mons Calpe, one of the Pillars of Hercules, entrance to Hades and the end of the known world.

A little farther on up the road I come to another sign.
DO NOT FEED THE MACAQUES
.

What? What the hell are macaques, then? They’re parrots, aren’t they? Or are the bloody macaques in fact the bleeding apes? They’ve always got another name for things, haven’t they, to make you feel ignorant and inadequate for calling them Barbary apes, or sausage dogs, or Eskimos or whatever? The sign continues:
THERE HAS BEEN AN EXCESS OF MONKEY
—oh, I see, they’re monkeys now, are they?—
OF MONKEY/HUMAN INTERACTIONS. THIS RESULTS IN THE MONKEYS BECOMING STRESSED AND THEY WILL BITE
.

Blimey. Not might. will.

DO NOT CARRY VISIBLE ITEMS OF FOOD. THE MONKEYS WILL
—there’s that sense of certainty again, just when I don’t want it—try and steal these items and become aggressive.

It doesn’t specify how aggressive, but it doesn’t have to. I already understand why no one else is walking to the flaming caves. I don’t even like
caves that much. I’ve only come because there didn’t seem to be anything else to do. Come to think of it, when I paid my five pounds the man at the ticket booth asked me what vehicle I was in. When I said I was walking he looked baffled, as if I had said I was walking to Tangier, which at this rate I might have to.

Suddenly they’re standing there in the road in front of me. Two of the bastards. I was hoping they’d turn out to be tiny and ornamental, but they’re actually rather big, like a couple of stooped, overweight hairy jockeys. They’ve got me on my own now, just like they’ve been planning, one to keep lookout while the other frisks me for food. Luckily I’m not carrying any—but what if they think I am?
What if they mistake my fingers for bags of sausages they think I’m trying to sneak past them?
They won’t be happy. They probably hate that kind of thing. No doubt about it, I’m in a difficult situation. There’s a sign saying that this is where the queen and Prince Philip stood on May 10, 1954. I bet they didn’t get harassed by bloody monkeys. The prince probably thought they were just inbred locals and made a joke about them to somebody from the High Commission.

And then, thank God, a tourist minibus, rejoicing in the splendid title of Parody Tur, comes round the corner and stops for the inmates to admire the view. And wouldn’t you know it, my two would-be muggers have started acting all cuddly and cute, as if they hadn’t really been planning to do me over for the sausages in the first place. One of the devious little buggers jumps on the roof of the minibus and starts showing off. Its friend doesn’t seem interested, probably seen it all before, and just sits on the wall picking insects off its well-fed tummy. The one on the roof’s having a whale of a time, cavorting round like a very drunk uncle at a wedding reception, when without warning the minibus drives off. The monkey seems delighted. Perhaps this is their equivalent of riding on the roofs of underground trains. Feeling a new surge of confidence, I take a long hard look at the one that’s been left behind, but the sneaky little bully isn’t looking quite so cocky now he’s on his own. He’s adopted a self-effacing “you must have imagined it” air that suggests he isn’t keen to take me on for the sausages single-handed.

As Parody Tur disappears round the next bend, the monkey on the roof
appears to be breakdancing. It’s clear he hasn’t considered the possibility that he might be on his way to Seville, or Stuttgart.

There’s a café and shop when you reach the cave, with a handful of coach and taxi drivers hanging around outside, talking about football, and what scum their passengers are. I’ve been fantasizing about a cold beer and a nice snack—some olives and Serrano ham and Manchego cheese, that kind of thing—but the sign says
BURGER EGG BACON SAUSAGE & CHIPS
. O
R PIE CHIPS & PEAS
. There are two kinds of pie:
STEAK & KIDNEY, OR MACAQ
—I mean
BEEF & ONION
.

The shop is also advertising “Souveniers,” but it’s never a good idea to buy something from a place that can’t spell it. Lots of cafés these days are advertising “Expresso,” and there’s a takeaway in Brighton that sells “Chickin.” Not to me it doesn’t.

All things considered, the cave is very nice. It’s top-notch, as caves go. It’s got stalagmites and stalactites in the appropriate places, wherever they are. I’m not sure I’d build a day round it though.

There’s spooky Muzak, and moody low-level light that would be atmospheric if it weren’t for the Muzak. The information cards say that the Romans and Phoenicians were familiar with the cave. They believed it to be bottomless, a gateway to the Underworld and an undersea link to Africa, which is how all the apes, monkeys and macaques got here. The Victorians used to have picnics, marriages, concerts and even duels down here, illuminated by soldiers “perched” on the stala …. er, the ones that go upwards.

In a niche in the rocks is a tableau of waxwork figures. A Stone Age man is holding up a leg of some kind of meat to his weather-beaten family around a campfire, or perhaps it’s the Glastonbury Festival and he’s barbecuing tofu. I’m about to move on when two women and a man sidle up next to me.

“Hey, this is nothing,” says the first lady, turning on her heel to go.

“Sure it is, there’s some little guys,” says the man.

“Okay,” she says and gets her camera out.

“Hey, stand back so you get them all in.”

“Okay.”

Click.

Gone.

As they disappear up the damp steps in the direction of Lisa’s voice, I realize that at no time did they remark, or even speculate, on what the figures might be. What will they say to the folks back home when they show them their vacation pictures?

“Here are some little guys in a cave.”

“That’s neat.”

“They’re kinda cute. Who are they?”

“I dunno. And this is us outside the cave with a gorilla.”

Back outside I discover that the road is a circular one, so I just continue straight ahead to go back down into town. For the first couple of hundred yards there are lots of people, their numbers almost matched by the free-loading, panhandling apes. One of them is sitting on a railing with a big view behind him, having his picture taken with the people from Parody and Bland. There’s a parked van with six of them sitting on top. A little girl is crying inconsolably. Her father is telling her mother that it’s nothing, it’s just that one of them leaped out in front of her, but it didn’t mean any harm. Yeah, right. Some father. He hasn’t even considered the possibility that the beast was after her sausages.

I head off down the hill and soon it’s deserted again, with no sign of people or monkeys. I take the opportunity to stop for a pee in the lush vegetation, and suddenly one of them is standing there, watching me. It seems interested. Bloody hell. How am I meant to behave? Brash? Embarrassed? Mysterious? Under the circumstances I don’t think I can do mysterious. What if ….? What if ….? Fingernails like razors, apparently. They fancy a snack, they get a snack.

It lets me finish though, and when I do, I swear it winks.

I’m back at the hotel eating an apple from the ornamental display at reception and planning what to do tonight—according to the paper, Scrabble Club meets in the hall in the square at 7:30—when the concierge tells me he’s just heard that the Algeciras-to-Tangier ferry is running again. There’ll be nothing from Gibraltar for at least thirty-six hours, but Algeciras is only forty minutes across the border by taxi. Once again I check out of the hotel I checked out of and into earlier in the day.

In less than ten minutes I’m in the back of a taxi heading for the Spanish border.

“Sodom was a church
picnic and Gomorrah a convention of girl scouts compared to Tangier, which contained more thieves, black marketeers, spies, thugs, phonies, beachcombers, expatriates, degenerates, characters, operators, bandits, bums, tramps, politicians and charlatans than any place I’ve ever visited.” So wrote Robert Ruark in 1950. Samuel Pepys made Tangier sound pretty sexy too: “A nest of papacy where Irish troops and Roman bastards could disport themselves unchecked.” “Spectacular view,” raved Tennessee Williams, “every possible discomfort.”