I assumed he’d taken into account that I would be slowed up a little by the fact that I was pulling a fridge behind me. Six or seven minutes there, and six or seven minutes back. That left under a quarter of an hour to win the hand of a princess and I didn’t hold out much hope. Even if her name had been Princess Slapper I still would have had my work cut out. Then again, I could stay over…
As I pulled the fridge up the hilly dirt track which led to the King’s residence, I decided that unless I fancied the princess something rotten, I was going to take the boat back with Rory McClafferty. The sun was still shining brightly but even so there was a bleakness about the place vfhjch said anything but ‘Come, stay, and enjoy’.
A man in a pair of dungarees, resembling an extra from the Waltons, confirmed that I had followed the old man’s directions correctly.
‘That’s right. He lives right there,’ he said proudly.
If there were any perks for being the King of this island, then superior accommodation wasn’t one of them. I was now looking at a white bungalow which fell some way short of being a palace. I knocked on the door and seconds later there appeared a stocky, rugged looking man with a fair moustache and a peaked cap where his crown ought to have been.
‘Hello, are you Patsy?’
‘Yes indeed.’
‘Patsy, I’m Tony Hawks.’
‘Ah-failte, failte!’
I took ‘failte’ to be the Gaelic for ‘welcome’ but it could just as easily have meant ‘Get lost!’. If it did, Patsy must have been impressed with my riposte, ‘Thank you.’
I had an answer for everything. Boldly, I went on, ‘I’ve got some flowers for your daughter because she’s a princess, and princesses merit flowers.’
‘Oh dear. She’s not on the island. She left this morning to go to the mainland for a couple of days.’
They say that liming is the secret of good comedy. It can be advantageous in other areas of life too.
‘She would have been here,’ Patsy explained, ‘but she went with Patrick Robinson because the Americans wanted to leave early.’
That decided it, I was going back with Rory.
‘Well, you can have the flowers then, Patsy—or give them to your wife, let the Queen have them.’
‘My goodness, tank you. Tank you very much.’
‘It’s a shame about your daughter not being here, I was hoping to many her and then become a prince.’
‘Oh my goodness, well I don’t know that it would be so easy but you would have to do a lot of talking and a number of meetings and so on. Would you like a cup of tea?’
It felt like this was being offered as the next best thing.
‘I’ve just about got time for a very quick one, but then I’ve got to get down to the pier otherwise the boat will go without me.’
And so tea was taken in the palace’s cramped kitchen and five cordial minutes were spent discussing the life of the islanders and their struggle to remain on Tory during the 1970s and 1980s when the Irish government was doing its best to get them to leave. Not so very long ago there had been open sewers running down the island’s streets, and hot water and electricity had only been acquisitions of the last twenty years. We talked of how Patsy Dan came to be King, the story being that after the last King had died, his son had turned the job down on the grounds that there was too much responsibility, and Patsy had landed the position pretty much because no one else on the island could be bothered to do it. No protracted and bloody power struggle here, instead a plethora of forged sick notes and new versions of evergreen excuses used to get out of things at school, cleverly modified for the purposes of evading the throne.
‘I’d love to become King but I have a verruca, and also my mother doesn’t aflow me to wear anything metal on my head like a crown, or else I get a migraine.’
On a couple of occasions Patsy leant in towards me to emphasise a point, and a whiff of his breath suggested to me that his predilection was for drink a little stronger than tea. I looked at my watch and was impressed that I could smell this much alcohol on his breath by only twenty past one. Twenty past one! I had to get going. I jumped to my feet and my stomach emitted a loud rumble almost by way of reminding an indolent brain that it would appreciate some food sooner rather than later. Realising there were two more hours at sea immediately ahead of me I scanned the work tops until my eyes alighted on a fruit bowl.
‘I wonder if I could have one of your apples?’ I asked the King. (I apologise for this last sentence sounding like an excerpt from a children’s book, but it’s what happened.)
‘My goodness, oh aye, go ahead.’
I took an apple, which came to feel like the physical embodiment of all that I had achieved here. I made apologies for a ridiculously short sojourn and Patsy countered with his own for not having been at the pier to greet me when I had arrived. We quickly posed for a self-timer photo outside the palace, and goodbyes were postponed when Patsy insisted on coming to see me off, making it his business to pull the fridge for me so that I could, in his words, ‘take a rest from it’. He was filled with admiration for my fridge journey mainly because he was convinced, despite my two attempts to persuade him otherwise, that I was walking round Ireland with it As if I’d take on a project as stupid as that.
As the fridge rattled satisfactorily down the hill back to the sea, I felt pleased at the way the audience with the King had gone. It had been considerably more successful than my previous encounter with royalty, and I had an apple to boot By Appointment. My only regret was that the parley with the King had come close to matching for brevity the one I had had with a Prince. At the quayside a huge pile of bricks signalled that the boat’s departure was imminent.
Patsy shook my hand and uttered his most memorable words, ‘You know Tony, I may be the poorest King on Earth, but I am a happy one.’
This had a nice ring to it and a fair measure of profundity. Of course, it might just have been a line that rolled off the tongue for tourists, and the truth might have been altogether different, but as the boat pulled out of the harbour and he stood on the pier smiling and waving, I liked to think that he understood better than some, how to handle life, love and monarchy.
9
Bandit Country
Gary didn’t seem to have much time for my desire to have an early night.
‘Ah, don’t be so silly, come and have a couple,’ he said. ‘I’ll pick you up at nine.’
‘But—’
It was too late, he’d gone, and he was sure to be back.
Gary lived in Dublin and was thin, around thirty years old and a TV sound engineer by trade. He had landed the job of my driver for the following morning as a result of having a good friend in this area and owing somebody at Live At Three a favour. Before he had arrived, ostensibly to say ‘Hi’ but in reality to offer to take me up the pub in the evening, Antoinette had phoned and told me that under no circumstances was I to allow Gary take me up the pub in the evening.
‘Yes, she said the same to me,’ said Gary in his strong Dublin accent as he sat down alongside me and popped two pints on one of Hudi-Beag’s sturdy tables.
‘What?’
‘She said that under no circumstances was I to take you up the pub hi the evening.’
‘Oh right. Do you know, if she hadn’t have said that I probably wouldn’t have come. She just made me curious as to what havoc you could wreak.’
‘Antoinette thinks I drink until I can’t stand up, and insist on bringing people down with me.’
‘And do you?’
‘Oh yeah. But don’t worry about that now, that’s hours away.’
I had a feeling ‘Houdini’s’ was going to live up to its name tonight.
§
We were joined by five or six of Gary’s friends, a couple of whom I had met the other night when, over a quiet pint, we had tried to secure the use of a helicopter.
‘Did you get out to Tory?’ one of them said.
‘Yes, thanks.’
&nb
sp; ‘How was your flight?’
Their faces were pictures of incredulity when they heard that no offer of a helicopter had been forthcoming.
Another voice piped up, ‘Did you have a good time out there?’
‘Yes, I met the King and he gave me an apple.’
‘Good. So it wasn’t a waste of time.’
This last remark was delivered without any hint of sarcasm, the speaker simply not listening to my reply and automatically offering a response of anodyne approval. A few of the others looked a little bemused by the mention of an apple, but chose not to pursue the matter further.
Gary informed me that our destination for the TV interview was going to be by a roadside just south of Armagh in Northern Ireland. Apparently the RTE mobile unit were filming just outside Newry in the morning and so we were going to record an interview for Irish television in a province of the United Kingdom. It was definitely a little odd, and it meant my going back on myself, but I was learning to go with the flow and not question anything too fully. The subject of Northern Ireland being raised, it prompted a short discussion on ‘the Troubles’, with Gary revealing himself to have quite strong views. Although he wasn’t candidly anti-British, I decided I didn’t wish to cross him on the subject after several more pints had been downed.
The audio backdrop to our conversations was provided by Dave, a drunk whose intoxication had led him to believe that he could still remember his entire repertoire of traditional Irish songs, and that this was the time and the place to present them before the public. Fortunately for him, the public were good-natured and long suffering. Obviously it was only a question of time before Dave’s musical 10,000 metres was over and he could be seen draped over a bar stool, but he wasn’t ready for the finishing tape yet, not whilst this final, interminable lap was still causing others a modicum of discomfort. He was selfless in that regard.
I didn’t want this evening to turn into an all-nighter, but Gary had other ideas, and at closing time declared as much.
‘Let’s all go down to Dodge’s and get really pissed.’
‘No, I really must go now,’ I said, sensing that Dodge’s wasn’t going to offer a sophisticated finale to the night’s proceedings. Naively, I looked to the others for support It wasn’t forthcoming, and I faced something of a barrage of viewpoints which weren’t wholly in favour of my calling it a night.
‘Tony, it’s completely at odds for a man who travels round Ireland with a fridge just to go home to bed.’
‘I know, I know, it’s just that I’m really tired and—’
‘Yeah, yawn, yawn, we know that, but we’ve got to do the ‘One for the Road’ thing.’
‘I’ve got to get some sleep, I really must.’
‘So it’s true that English people are wimps.’
‘I’m sorry but I am tonight, I really am.’
I stood up, hoping this might help matters but Gary was quick; ‘Sit the fuck down, cos you’re not going home.’
I sat down. This was ‘Houdini’s’, and my escapology skills fell some way short of what was required. In the end it was my own sozzled befud-dlement which brought about my liberation. I stood up again, turned to Gary, and tried to look determined.
‘I’m going to go now, I’ll see you in the morning, James.’
James. I called him James. Oh, it was a reasonable enough mistake to make, getting someone’s name wrong at the end of the evening, but of all the incorrect names available to me, I had to go for James. Gary’s expression seemed to change and I became momentarily anxious that he had taken my error as a Freudian slip, and that I saw him as ‘James’, my subservient Irish underling and chauffeur for the morning. I felt conspicuous, the old English landlord figure, benevolent maybe, but still a symbol of centuries of injustice.
Tiredness had made me paranoid. Everyone was laughing, and although there may have been a hint of the riled in Gary’s demeanour, his parting shot to me was delivered in a genial enough tone. It also bought me my freedom.
‘Tony, after calling me James, you should definitely go home.’
The walk home was exactly the one I had made when I had first arrived in Bunbeg three days ago. It ought to have been easier now, without a fridge and rucksack, but somehow it seemed further, no doubt the meandering gait of a man in the trough of physical condition doubling the distance to be covered. Back at the harbour, I sat on the quay and looked up at the stars, and then down at the gently shimmering water, the green and red lights of the harbour entrance providing a dash of technicolour to this, the tableau for a black-and-white movie about idyllic rural life. I decided I liked it here, and I felt a fellowship with all those who had left Ireland for London, New York or wherever, but had still maintained an unfaltering devotion to this, their pure and precious motherland. I let out a loud belch which rather brought my romantic reverie to a vulgar conclusion, and reminded me that thinking was best done in the morning, and sleeping was always the best option at night.
§
At 8.30 am I woke with an erection. There was no call for this—I wasn’t in the company of a beautiful woman, nor had my awakening interrupted an erotic dream, it was simply my body’s chosen way of saluting the new day. This phenomenon of an unwanted, unnecessary and more often than not unsightly erection, is undoubtedly a design fault by God. God did pretty well all round, creating oceans, clouds, wind, snow, whales, tigers and obstinate sheep. He had a heavy workload and no one could deny that the Almighty turned in a top-notch performance. But in one particular area—the design and implementation of the workings of the human penis, his work was sloppy. God, bless him, was accountable to no one, but if he had been, what would his school report have been like?
GEOGRAPHY…. 10⁄10 Excellent. Especially well done with the Ox Bow lakes.
HISTORY….10⁄10 Very well done. If you hadn’t created Time’, this would have been a free period.
MATHS…. 10⁄10 Everything seems to add up.
ENGLISH….9⁄10 Good, but you could have made them better at ‘making a scene’.
RELIGIOUS INSTRUCTION….8⁄10 You could have been a bit clearer about which is the right way, but most humans seem to worship you anyway, so you’ve got away with it.
BIOLOGY…. 2⁄10 Design of the human penis, poor. See me.
After breakfast, The Gerry Ryan Show called and asked if I could give them a quick update on how I was getting on; presumably his listeners had been on tenterhooks as to whether I’d made it to Tory or not I relayed all the news and told Gerry I was heading for County Sligo today, conveniently forgetting to mention the extraordinary route I was going to take to get there.
‘Will you be watching the FA Cup final tomorrow?’ he asked.
I’d forgotten about that.
‘Well, yes I’d like to. Is it on TV over here?’
‘It is. I’m sure you and your fridge will find a suitable pub to watch it in. Have a good weekend now, won’t you?’
‘Yes, and you, Gerry.’
I was pleasantly surprised when Gary turned up only half an hour late, proudly announcing that he had gone to bed at 6.30 am. My appearance on Live At Three had depended totally on Gary being ‘Live at Ten Thirty’, which at 6 am must have been an evens bet, at best. I looked at him, frail and gaunt, his blood vessels coursing with alcohol, and began to wish that I did have a driver called James, with boiled sweets by the dashboard, a flask of tea and a rug in the back seat. Instead I had a wild man who was about to turn me into a road accident statistic.
‘Get hitching then!’ he croaked, in a voice about an octave lower than I recalled.
The previous night we had agreed that it would be wrong for me to accept a lift from Gary without having ‘worked’ for it, in the form of hitching. So, as Andy assembled his family for a formal seeing-off ceremony, Gary drove off to turn the car around and I dumped myself by the side of the road and stuck the old thumb out.
Seconds later a car pulled up. The window was wound down, and a frail, gaunt man with alcohol cou
rsing through his veins called out to me, ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m headed for Northern Ireland, just south of Armagh.’
‘That’s lucky, so am I. Jump in.’
My goodness, what a lucky break.
§
I was sad to leave Andy, Jean and family, Bunbeg House having been home for an eventful three days and three nights. Andy had refused to let me pay for my accommodation, and only after a long struggle had he finally accepted some money towards a phone bill which I expected to have been doubled by the whole ‘helicopter incident’. As Gary drove me away up the narrow lane with which I was now so familiar, we passed a van coming the other way with ‘Donegal Plumbing Repairs’ written on its side, and I felt proud that if nothing else, my legacy at Bunbeg House would be a better quality shower for those in Room Six.
Gary entrusted me with the map reading but was unforthcoming when I asked for our exact destination.
‘Just get us to Armagh, and we’ll worry about the rest after. I’ve got a fax somewhere with all the details on it.’
I proposed a route which Gary approved with a worrying insouciance.
He was only concerned with specialising on his half of the bargain—driving. I hoped he was up to it.
‘Are you not knackered?’ I asked.
‘Ah no, I’m grand. I only need three and a half hours’ sleep.’
Gary was a vigorous driver. He should have had a sign on his wind: screen saying ‘No Concessions’, because he was uncompromising in pursuit of the shortest route between two points, and paid little heed to the discipline of driving on any particular side of the road, or to the well being of his passenger. What made things worse was that this was a hire car and Gary cared little about the future state of its suspension, and so I was bounced along Donegal’s roads at excessive speed to meet my TV crew, or if it pre-empted it, my maker.
Even though the scenery was passing quicker than I would have liked, I was still able to observe its wild beauty. Be it the impressive Errigal Mountain, its quartzite cone almost making it appear snow-covered, or the dramatic cliffs and marshy valley of the darkly named ‘Poisoned Glen’. As we hurtled past, Gary told me something about a vengeful British landlord who had deliberately poisoned the waters of the glen, but I failed to take in the finer details, finding it difficult to concentrate when each bend in the road threatened my very existence. We overtook on another blind comer and I felt my appearance on Live At Three was about to be usurped by a slot on Dead At Noon.
1998 - Round Ireland with a fridge Page 10