by Peter Corris
'You're in the zipper club?'
'Yep. A while ago now. I had a heart attack in America. Lousy medical system if you're poor, but probably the best in the world if you're not.'
'That's what killed my dad. Quite young, poor bugger.'
'Mine too. You look fit, Pat. You are fit, but you must be about the same age as me and with the family connection and all it wouldn't be a bad idea for you to have a check-up. I didn't see it coming.'
'I'll do that.'
He rang me a few days later to say that he'd had the tests and they'd found a blockage.
'Not as serious as yours must've been,' he said. 'I have to have this thing called a stent. No big deal. But I'm glad you alerted me. Look, they want me to go into hospital for a day or two. D'you mind if I put you in as next of kin? Just a formality.'
'Sure. I never asked-no wife or kids?'
'Divorced years ago. No kids that I know of.'
'I'll visit you.'
I did. He had a private room in Strathfield Private Hospital. The nurse who escorted me to the room looked at me with wide, startled eyes.
'I know,' I said, 'we're cousins.'
'You look like twins.'
He came through the minor procedure with no trouble but was annoyed to learn that he'd be on a couple of medications for the rest of his life.
'You get used to it,' I said. 'And the daytime ones you can wash down with a glass of wine.'
He grinned. 'Is that what you do?'
'Between us, yes, sometimes.'
'Well, thanks for coming and not bringing grapes.'
I handed over the Hemingway novel, which I'd finished, shook his hand and left. At the nurses' station I heard a man asking where Patrick was. He was pale and ginger-haired and he did a double-take when he saw me.
'I'm Patrick's cousin,' I said. 'He's doing fine.'
'Glad to hear it. God, I thought you were him making a break.' He laughed and stuck out his hand. 'Martin Milton-Smith, a colleague of Patrick's. Good to meet you.'
We shook. 'Cliff Hardy.'
I thought he reacted to the name but I couldn't be sure. He smoothed down a silk tie that nicely matched his suit, and went down the corridor in the direction the nurse had given him.
'Does Mr Malloy get many visitors?' I asked the nurse.
'So far only two-you and him.'
A few days later Patrick appeared at my door in the late afternoon. He had two cans of draught Guinness in a paper bag and the Hemingway book in his hand. He came in and we went out to the back area I'd bricked amateurishly years ago. I could have had it relaid when the other work on the house was done but there was something about it, lumpy and with grass growing through the cracks, I liked. We lifted the tabs on the cans and poured the brew carefully into glasses.
'Cheers,' he said. 'Looks to me as if you're doing bugger-all.'
I drank. 'That's about it, Pat.'
'Me too, more or less. I've got an idea. I'm thinking of going to Ireland to look up the Malloy Travellers. Why don't you come with me?'
3
We flew Qantas business class to London. Patrick had grown a beard and had his hair cut short so that more grey showed. With that and his smarter clothes, we didn't look as much like the Bobbsey Twins as before. We hung around London for a few days. We'd both been there before and we went off separately renewing old memories. In fact we didn't spend much time together. He was a late sleeper and I'm an early riser. I used buses to get around and he used the tube. We had dinner together only one night, but here again our preferences were the same-Indian in Old Brompton Road, with hot curries, plenty of naan and cold beer.
The dollar was fairly strong against the pound but neither of us was economising. We'd arrived in May and the weather was warm, much warmer than I'd known it to be there before.
'They'll be having to take their socks off and just get around in their sandals if this keeps up,' Patrick said.
'When were you here last, Pat?' I asked.
'About twenty years ago.'
'Doing what?'
'Why?'
'Just curious.'
He ate another mouthful before answering with another question. 'How about you?'
I shrugged. 'Twelve years back. Missing persons case.'
'You find him?'
'Her. No.'
'I was dumb,' he said. 'I missed the army when I left. The marriage had finished and I was pretty pissed off. Would you believe I signed up in Sydney with a mercenary outfit?'
'That was dumb.'
'Yeah. A bunch of us came over here. Did some training in Yorkshire and the word was we were going to Angola. I'd wised up a bit by then. It was a gimcrack mob, half pisspots and half psychopaths. I went to Australia House, dug out some newspapers and read up on the civil war in Angola. There was no way I was going to get into that.'
'So what did you do?'
He laughed and took a big swig of lager. 'I fuckin' deserted, mate.'
We took the train to Liverpool and caught the ferry to Ireland. It was a rough, four-hour crossing and we spent most of the time in the bar.
We were drinking Irish whiskey, getting in the mood. After a particularly rough spell I said, 'We could have flown and avoided this.'
'I wanted to make the crossing the way our people coming out to Australia would have done back then. No aeroplanes.'
No Jamesons or hot snacks either, I thought, but let him have his fun.
Patrick read his way through a batch of newspapers he'd picked up and kept me abreast of things in the UK. I liked the response the new Lord Mayor of London made to the standard tabloid interview question 'Have you ever had sex with a man?' Boris Johnson replied, 'Not yet.' Great answer.
I was reading Tim Jeal's biography of Henry Morton Stanley, the man who 'found' David Livingstone. It was interesting, particularly the stuff about the way people in those times could completely reinvent themselves. Like Stanley, like Daisy Bates, like 'Breaker' Morant. Stanley, the American, wasn't Stanley and wasn't an American. And he probably didn't say, 'Dr Livingstone, I presume.' I suppose people can still myth-make, but it must be harder these days. I looked up from the book from time to time to study our fellow passengers. They mostly seemed comfortable, even affluent-had to be to pay the bar prices. The English and the Irish seemed to be on good terms, which would have surprised and angered Granny Malloy.
We'd booked a hotel and arranged to hire a car. We were sharing expenses, but Patrick had his top-of-the-range notebook computer and was in charge of such things and doing it well. We'd agreed that I'd do the driving and he'd do the navigating. I was surprised that he accepted the more passive role and asked him about it.
'I had a pile-up a while ago, Cliff. People got hurt. I don't fancy driving these days.'
'You drove me home from the fight.'
'I was being nice.'
Dublin was cold, misty and wet but the car, a big Mitsubishi SUV, was delivered to the hotel door. We loaded our light luggage into the back and there looked to be room for three or four times as much.
'Why the monster?' I said.
'The Travellers are impressed by big vehicles. We don't want to look like pikers, and we might have to go off-road here and there.'
That made sense and I enjoyed the feel of the powerful engine and the comfort of the car-air con, CD player, hands-free telephone set-up, GPS facility. Patrick had equipped himself with a map, plotted our route, and only resorted to the GPS for confirmation.
We took our time driving across to the west. The weather was typically Irish-damp and changeable. We experienced different kinds of weather within a period of a few hours. It was nothing like driving in country Australia, no long straight lines to the horizon. Off the major roads, the narrow bitumen and clay stretches bent and curved and rose and fell and crossed creeks that bubbled and would never run dry. We went south to County Clare and visited Tipperary like the tourists we were. We stopped here and there to take in the scenery, have a drink and some food. I experime
nted with the new phone camera Megan had given me as a birthday present but had trouble sorting out its functions. As befitted men for whom the cardiac alarm had sounded, we went for longish walks around the stopping places, climbing some pretty steep hills and not rewarding ourselves too handsomely in the pubs and eating and sleeping well. The Irish have the bed 'n' breakfast thing down to a fine art.
It was evening when we reached Galway. Good time to arrive, with mist shrouding the bay and giving the town itself a nineteenth-century feel. Like mine, Patrick's mental image of Ireland had been formed by reading about the slaughters under Cromwell and William of Orange, the famine and the troubles; by films and photographs and music-the Clancy Brothers, the Chieftains, Sinead O'Connor. The strange thing was that the picture in the imagination and the reality were pretty close. The green of the fields and hills was intense, almost too much for Australian eyes used to more muted colours. And the sea was grey-blue and I imagined I could hear Ewan MacColl's voice as I looked at it.
We walked down to the water's edge, crunching across the pebbles, and Patrick unzipped his fly.
'I swore I'd do this,' he said. 'It's out of respect.' He let a strong stream of urine arc into the lapping water.
I picked up a pebble, worn smooth and white by wind and waves, and put it in my pocket. 'I'll settle for this as my symbol,' I said.
Over a pint in O'Leary's in Eyre Street, Patrick filled me in on our destination. He'd spoken vaguely about Galway and I'd been happy to go along with that. Who, visiting the Emerald Isle, doesn't want to go to Galway? My mother had vamped the chords of the Bing Crosby song on the piano and warbled the words with an accent thicker than any Irish stew.
'We're heading for Ballintrath-inland a bit, back towards Dublin.'
'Okay, why?'
'They hold a big fair there-not as big as the one in October but pretty big and a lot of horse trading goes on. I mean, literally. The Travellers are great horse breeders and traders and the Malloys have a reputation in that game.'
'So we just bowl up, find some Malloys and say, "How're you going? We're Malloys from Australia"?'
'Something like that. Why not?'
Strange to say, that's pretty much how it worked out. Ballintrath was a well-preserved medieval town geared up for tourists and visitors. This fair was a scaled down version of the one in October apparently, but it was pretty busy with the usual market stalls, events in pubs and other venues around the town and the equestrian side of things taking place on the Fair Green-a big expanse that was slowly turning to mud under the pressure of feet and hooves.
The events centred on competitions for the best in a number of categories, most of which didn't mean anything to a city man like me. Best foal I understood.
Patrick hunted out an organiser and asked if there were any people by the name of Malloy present.
'To be sure. Why're you askin'?'
Patrick explained.
'Travellers, is it? Well, they keep pretty much to themselves. They have a camp outside the town somewhere. But Old Paddy Malloy you'll find over yonder at the farrier judgin'. He's a judge and plays the fiddle as the shoein' goes on.'
We wandered over to where three farriers were engaged in a competition to see who could shoe the horses the quickest and the best. The crowd was four or five deep around the roped off area where the contestants, but not the spectators, were protected from the drizzle by a sail. It was only that Patrick and I were taller than most of them that we were able to see much at all. The fiddle cut through the muttering and murmuring of the spectators with clear crisp notes. Through the nodding heads I glimpsed a white-bearded man fiddling energetically while watching the competition. The farriers seemed not to hurry but they were getting the job done. One finished clearly ahead of the other two. The music stopped when the last hoof went down and the crowd applauded enthusiastically.
'Pretty good,' Patrick said to a man standing in front of him. 'Who'll win?'
'Why, Sean Malloy,' the man said. 'Always does. He's not the fastest but he's the best.'
The winner was declared, the dark nuggetty type who'd finished second. It didn't seem to worry anyone that the judge and the winner were related. The crowd drifted off to other attractions or perhaps to get under cover, although the drizzle didn't seem to have bothered them, as the horses were led away. With our coat collars turned well up, we approached the fiddler and Patrick introduced himself and supplied some details about our origins.
'You're never Mick Malloy's grandson-him as went to Australia?'
'I am,' Patrick said-the idiom was catching.
The dark eyes, young-looking in an old face, turned to me. 'And you. Christ, you're like peas in a pod but for the beard.'
'Grandson of Aideen Malloy,' I said.
'Aideen. There was a one, so I've been told. Well, well, all the way from Australia. That's famous, that is. You have to come to the camp and meet us all.'
We ferried a couple of car-loads of Malloys and others to the camp a few miles to the east of the town. The track was muddy and Patrick's opting for a 4WD proved to be the right decision. The Travellers clan had campervans and trailers rather than anything resembling gypsy caravans, but they'd decked them out and painted them in ways no ordinary tourers ever would, with banners and slogans proclaiming their identity.
Sean Malloy, the winning farrier, had a grip of iron and bore a few boxing scars. So we talked fighting and over cups of strong tea and door-stop sandwiches we roughly established the relationship of us both to the thirty or so people in the camp. Then it was off to a nearby tavern for the adults where a ceilidh was scheduled, with a few of the Malloys slated to sing and play.
For me, the evening was a bit of a blur, not so much from the drink, but from fatigue and the noise and the smoke. The tavern was an old cottage, gutted so that there was a long open space with a bar at one end and chairs and tables scattered about. The night was cold and the windows were closed so that a thick fug of tobacco smoke, sweat and alcohol fumes quickly built up.
We weren't allowed to pay for anything, which kept me going slow with the grog. The music was heady, emotional, traditional stuff that touched off tears and joy in everyone present, especially when old Paddy played the fiddle to a tenor lament from his nephew Sean. But that mood was quickly replaced by jigs and reels in which Patrick and I joined with nothing like the lack of inhibition of the locals. I opted out and went to find a corner to gather my breath and my wits.
'Hello, Aussie,' a woman sitting nearby said. 'Conked out have you, mate?'
The accent was genuine Australian.
'I'm buggered,' I said. 'A bit old for this.'
She pointed with a long, thin arm at where the dancers were. 'Your mate's doing okay.'
'He's a bit younger. I'm Cliff. You are?'
'Angela Warburton, from Coogee.'
We shook hands. 'Know it well.'
She was fortyish, dark, with a mass of red-brown hair, green eyes and a strong face. I was a bit drunk and I took out my mobile phone, still experimenting, and snapped a picture of her. Just for fun I pointed the lens here and there and took some more pictures.
'They'll be lousy in this light,' she said, 'and you should've asked permission. I'm a photo-journalist and I'm trying to do a spread on the Travellers. They're sensitive about photos. I have to go carefully.'
'You're right. Bad manners. We should be going if I can drag Pat away.'
She handed me a card. 'Look me up if you come back through London. You can tell me how Coogee is these days. I've been away for seven years.'
'I can tell you a decent house costs most of a million bucks.'
She shrugged. 'Would you believe it's getting to be the same over here.'
I put the card in my pocket and located Patrick sitting down after a dance and deep in conversation with old Paddy. When I said we should be off, Paddy wouldn't hear of it. We ended up staying another hour in the tavern and bedding down in sleeping bags in one of the vans.
Patri
ck spent four days with the Travellers. After being politely interested for the first day, I got bored with the talk of horses and which Patrick was related to which Michael. I caught a bus into Galway, booked into a hotel and spent the time walking around the town and its outskirts, fossicking in the second-hand bookshops and visiting various pubs. There were black and Asian faces in the streets and I got the impression that the immigrants were opening businesses and that Galway was in for some big changes.
Despite the Irish heritage, I didn't feel a particular connection to the place, unlike Patrick. My paternal grandmother was French, and I wondered whether I'd feel more at home in Paris where I'd never been. Perhaps next time.
I finished the Stanley biography and traded it in for a biography of Rimbaud. My taste was for the stories of people who led creative and active lives, and Rimbaud fitted the bill.
On a grey morning, Patrick collected me in the SUV and we stopped at the first bank for him to cash some traveller's cheques.
'I wouldn't say they bled me,' he said, 'but they didn't refuse my generosity. I said your goodbyes.'
'Thanks, Pat. It was interesting, but a bit rural for me. You going in for horses when we get home?'
'I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do. But it was grand.'
'It was,' I said.
We both laughed as we sprinted to get out of the rain.
4
We took our time on the return trip, followed the coast north and crossed into Northern Ireland. Patrick said he wanted to get to the place in Belfast where Van Morrison got his start and that was okay by me. We'd bought CDs of Moondance and Tupelo Honey in Galway and played them all the way. We never found the Maritime Hotel, but we heard some great music in other places.
My image of Belfast came pretty much from the film The Boxer, which proved to be fairly accurate. The city had a grim look and feel, although the military presence that had aroused such hatred was much reduced.
'One of the blokes in that bullshit mercenary outfit I told you about was ex-British Army,' Patrick said. 'He reckoned the Brits kept the trouble here on the boil as a cheap way of training troops.'