The Road to McCarthy (49 page)

“It’s not for eating, silly.”

“What’s it for?”

“It’s for throwing at the villain.”

The show went by in a blur of color and unlikely harmonies as I made as many trips to the bar as I could manage without causing an incident. One line from the show has lodged itself forever in my mind: the saying Alaskan women have for the fact that their state has so many more men than women.

“The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

I’m going up in the elevator when I realize I’m still holding the popcorn. If I bump into the Princess of Thailand, maybe I’ll throw it at her.

Back in my room there is a message waiting.

“I checked the Alaskan census records, but couldn’t find any mention of our James McCarthy. I suspect he must have been somewhere else when the census was completed, making him very tough to track. Good luck on your journey.”

“Have we ever had
a bald Taoiseach?”

“I don’t believe we have. What’s your point?”

“Well, that’s my point. Hair matters to the voters.”

“Are you bald yourself?”

“Ah, no. Not completely anyway. I’ll admit to follically challenged. If anyone says it’s a bald patch, I tell them it’s a solar panel for a sex machine.”

I’m listening to one of my favorite talk- and phone-in programs as I head south and west from Dublin airport. It’s sunny, but the windshield wiper on the rear window is going like fury. As I have never owned a vehicle less than a decade old, the up-to-the-minute technology of rental cars is a source of constant grief. I can’t stop the wiper because I don’t know how I turned it on in the first place. I’ve tried pressing and pulling the little stick on the steering column that has a picture of wipers on it, and so far it’s sounded the horn, flashed left and squirted water on a couple who were pushing airport luggage trolleys over a zebra crossing. There were also problems with the radio. In a desperate attempt to escape the techno music on the presets I hit
search, but the wretched thing just kept racing through the FM numbers without stopping. The combination of wiper squeaking behind and digits flashing in front was too much to bear, and I was reduced to jabbing at the stereo with my left index finger as if I were threatening it with a fight until it finally latched onto a station.

We’ve already had an item about a guy caught in possession of cannabis who claimed he only used it as resin for rubbing on his guitar strings, and now we’ve just moved on from the bald Taoiseach debate to a discussion about whether George Lucas is a filmmaking genius or the Antichrist. “I’ve seen it seventeen times, but I’m not a
Star Wars
anorak. I don’t dress up in the costumes or anything mad like that,” says the guy calling in. “I just collect the little people.”

It’s Sunday, and the roads are packed. Most of the cars are as new as the one I’m driving, and the speed, volume and sheer affluence of the traffic is a potent reminder of the relentless pace of social change in Ireland. We did this drive often when I was a kid, and once you left Dublin there were no traffic lights until you arrived in Cork. Today you wouldn’t know you were in the same country. The new wealth has provoked a fierce national debate about whether Ireland is on the point of losing the values that once made it distinctive, in a headlong materialist rush to be like everywhere else. The Bed and Breakfast signs tell their own story. Once upon a time they just said “B&B,” then they added “TV” and “En-Suite.” I just passed one that said “Jacuzzi.” Mind you, it didn’t mention whether it had gold taps. They really should tell you. You wouldn’t be wanting a jacuzzi without gold taps. It smacks of poverty.

“Children are born
with their backs to God and their feet towards hell! God wouldn’t have given them backsides if he didn’t believe they deserved chastisement.”

Well, it’s a point of view, I suppose. I turn off the pastor from Antrim, and the ignition, outside the courthouse in Clonmel. I’m expecting the wiper to keep on going, like fingernails growing on a dead man, but it seems
to have thrown in the towel. I get out of the car and take a deep breath. What’s that peculiar smell?

The building where Meagher, O’Brien and the rest were sentenced looks in fine fettle, its stately columns and arches gleaming much as they might have the day the men were marched down here from the jail. The court’s not in session and a caretaker’s just closing up, but he lets me nip in for a quick look at the room in which they were tried. The modern fittings can’t conceal the fact that it’s essentially the same grand Georgian space, and I give an involuntary shiver as I remember Maria Island and Port Arthur. Out in the entrance lobby I spot a lady in an academic cardigan with serious-minded spectacles dangling from a cord around her neck, so I sidle up and ask her if she knows anything about the Young Irelanders.

“Yes.”

Ah, I say, then would you know about the Widow McCormack’s Cottage, the one with the cabbage patch?

“I do.”

“Do you know if it’s still there?”

There’s a pause, as if she’s weighing up whether I’m the right kind of person to be in possession of such sensitive information.

“I’d say it’s been gone a long time now.”

It’s what I’ve been expecting to hear and my heart sinks a little bit, but I’m determined to get something positive from this encounter.

“How about Hearn’s Hotel?”

“Twenty yards away, at the end of the street.”

As I come out into the half-light I notice an underfunded-looking modern building directly across the narrow street. arts centre, says a sign above the door. I walk across to take a look. It’s closed and the place is in darkness, but there’s a tiny handwritten note on the front door. tonight

8 p.m.—shane macgowan discusses his songwriting. tickets on door. I remember his triumphant performance in the dance-hall in Greenwich Village, and Chris and Rachel and Seanchai and Phil and the actors, and think how strange he should turn up again here, in the wrong part of my story, while I’m trying to find the historic cabbage patch. Perhaps it was meant to
happen like this. Maybe Shane knows where the Widow McCormack used to live. I walk up the road to Hearn’s, check in, and come back and form a queue behind three young Pogues fans who are sharing a liter bottle of cider.

It might be my imagination, but, now I think of it, the whole town seems to smell of cider.

The show’s over
, and I’m sitting on a stool at the bar in the hotel. MacGowan is four stools away, staring into a drink. Two musicians are setting up at the far end under the TV, but the people in the room have eyes for only one man. These are not rock’n’roll fans, but the ordinary crowd of unassuming middle-aged drinkers you’ll find in any small-town bar in Ireland, yet they seem mesmerized by his presence. Occasionally someone approaches and asks him to sign a beer mat or cigarette packet, which he does with good grace before reassuming the morose slump and staring back into the bottom of his glass.

It was an intriguing evening. Sixty of us sat in neat rows in a tiny upstairs room, while Shane and a local journalist faced each other on a little podium across a half-pint glass of clear liquid with a slice of lemon in it. At first he seemed unwilling, or unable, to speak, leaving the interviewer with some withering pauses; but then he removed the rock-star shades and seemed to warm to the task, his lived-in eyes shifting in and out of focus as he spoke of songs inspired by bar-stool conversations, and of lyrics forgotten for want of a pencil and paper. Someone in the audience asked what’s the most recent song he’s written, and he grinned before launching into an a cappella rendition of a ballad about being buggered by a bishop, which had the whole place in stitches. He was most passionate when talking about Irish culture, Irish music and the things he hates about England, despite the fact that a life lived mostly in London has left him with that city’s accent. In his black drinking suit—possibly the same one he wore in New York—with drink and fag constantly in hand, he seemed almost consciously to be casting himself as the new Brendan Behan, a rough-and-ready man of the people gifted with poetic brilliance. In an era of boy bands and stadium rockers
he makes a convincing keeper of the Irish tradition, despite having been born in Kent and attended Winchester public school. Songwriters are under no obligation to sit in front of people and explain their work, and I admired him for being prepared to do it, especially in his grandparents’ county of Tipperary.

I know it’s probably a mistake to approach him here in the hotel bar, but I’m intrigued that our paths should cross at such different points in my journey. I’ll only regret it if I don’t, and I do empathize with his English-Irish dilemma; and anyway haven’t I still got that Very Important Paddy laminate from New York, and isn’t it the least I could do to thank him? So I edge along the bar and say his name, then say it again, and this time he looks up from the drink and already I feel foolish. Why didn’t I just leave the guy alone, but I’m here now and I’ll have to go through with it, so I say, “I’m a friend of Chris and Rachel’s.”

Nothing.

“From New York.”

Nothing.

“From Rocky Sullivan’s.”

Nothing, though I think I’m sensing contempt.

“I saw the St. Patrick’s Day show last year. It was really good.”

And he stares at me, eyes half closed yet at the same time full of dislike, and says, “I already bloody know that.”

As I turn to go a guy standing behind him catches my eye. Perhaps he’s the bodyguard. He shrugs his shoulders and says, “I think an English accent is the last thing he wants to be hearing in South Tip.” A woman ordering at the bar hears and turns to me and laughs and says, “Sure doesn’t he have one himself.” This is the only occasion in a lifetime visiting Ireland that my accent has ever been an issue, the very first time, and isn’t it marvelous that it’s come from a guy who sounds like a Brit himself. Funny business, this identity thing.

Half an hour later the musicians are still playing as Shane gets up from his stool, focuses on the door, then heads slowly towards it. The whole room bursts into a round of applause. Some of them are standing. It’s extraordinary. They’re clapping him for being him, for existing, for writing
those songs, for still being alive. If it’s a populist Irish hero he wants to be, then he’s got it. Happiness, though, might be another thing entirely.

Though it’s seen better days
, Hearn’s turns out to be a fine place to stay. There’s an air of down-at-heel gentility that’s reflected in the low price of the rooms, and an all-round mood of atmospheric shabbiness that I find alluring. The place isn’t showing off and nobody’s trying too hard, and at its heart is an excellent bar with original fittings, and possibly some of the original customers. It is an old coaching inn, and was the hub of Ireland’s first public transport system, founded in 1815 by Carlo Bianconi, an Italian who as a boy had walked across the Alps and France on his way to Ireland. Understandably peeved at the discovery that unless you were rich you had to walk everywhere in Ireland as well, he bought a job-lot of horses from the army, who were selling them cheap after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and set up a stagecoach business. By the mid-nineteenth century the whole of Ireland was linked in a network with its epicenter at Hearn’s. It can’t be long before it’s swept up in the tide of affluence washing down from Dublin and is turned into a smart heritage hotel with prices to match, and a plaque saying that Shane MacGowan once drank here, but I have to say I like it fine the way it is.

When I was checking out I solved the mystery of the smell. According to a woman at reception, the all-pervasive fragrance of a carpet after a two-day cider party is a consequence of there being a cider factory in town, and sometimes that’s the way the wind blows. I expect it’s quite pleasant once you get used to it. It’s certainly reassuring to discover it’s not just me. When you start smelling cider for no apparent reason, you can be certain the juvenile detention center isn’t very far down the line.

The soft rain is falling hard this morning, but even in this dank light the river and the wooded hills rising up beyond it look wonderful. Like the hotel, the town itself has resisted homogenization. There is a pleasing collection of old buildings and shopfronts, interspersed with the occasional kebab outlet to remind you how things could go if people aren’t careful. I walk along O’Connor Street as far as Westgate, the archway through which
the Irish were required to leave the walled Anglo-Norman town each day at dusk—the area beyond it is still called Irishtown—and then double back to Jailgate. The prison where the Young Irelanders were held is long gone. All that remains is a gate marked by an inscription.

The prisoners would have walked past Hearn’s to get from here to the courthouse, which is what I do now as I head back to the car to go looking for the widow.