The Road to McCarthy (2 page)

We’re crossing southern Spain when the pilot comes on the intercom to tell us that the weather isn’t very nice in Gibraltar. Very windy, apparently. More than fifty miles an hour.

“Under the circumstances it would be hazardous to attempt a landing. We’ll get back to you in a few minutes to let you know what’s happening.”

“
WINDY
!” shouts Winnie the Pooh at the Estonians. “
NOT LANDING! DANGEROUS! GO! SOMEWHERE! ELSE!
”

He’s using his right hand to mime what he thinks is a change of direction, but the Estonians think is a plane crash. They have taken on the haunted look of men who are about to plummet from 36,000 feet and don’t know whether to use their last seconds to proposition the hostess or order more gin and port.

Before they can decide we enter a cloud and the plane starts pitching and bumping in the most terrifying manner. It feels as if the controls have been seized by two teenage boys who are pulling and pressing everything in sight to see who can make a wing fall off first. Clouds look such gentle, fluffy things, so what the hell’s inside them that can cause aircraft so much grief? Monsters? A giant anvil? Gods who are displeased with us? Not for the first time I find myself wondering whether you pass out as soon as the fuselage cracks and you hit the cold air, or whether you remain conscious and have a brilliant but eye-watering view all the way to the ground, or sharks.

We ricochet down through the clouds and suddenly we’re clear of them, descending rapidly but seemingly still in control. The PA system bingbongs and the pilot is back on the airwaves.

“We’ve decided we’ll try and give it a go anyway.”

His voice is alarmingly casual. I suppose he’s hoping to reassure us, but his words couldn’t be more worrying if they’d been spoken with a slur and preceded by the phrase “Ah, sod it.” Though we’ve spent the last two hours flying over land, we’re now very close to something that looks like the sea. I can see white tops on the waves. I can see individual drops of water, but no sign of land anywhere, as we go into an abrupt gung-ho bank to the right that suggests our man may be a frustrated fighter pilot who failed the psychological profiling. All around me passengers are exchanging panicstricken glances with complete strangers with whom they’ve so far been scrupulously avoiding any kind of eye contact.

And now there it is in front of us, the Rock itself, massive, gray, broody, windswept; but, above all, very solid-looking. The PA pings back on.

“I’m afraid this may be a little bumpy.” And that’s it. He’s gone quiet. Perhaps one of the stewards has managed to force a towel into his mouth before he could add, “but I really couldn’t give a toss.” We’re hurtling flat and low across the water, straight towards the Rock. Why are we so low? To get below the radar? Are we going to bomb it? They’re on our side, aren’t they? We’re so low over the spray that I can feel it on my face; or is that just the Estonians crying? And now there’s the airstrip straight ahead of us, immediately beneath the enormous bulk of the Rock. At close range it really does look dauntingly dense. If we do hit it, it seems unlikely we’ll have the option of surviving for ten days by eating each other.

A brutal gust of wind strikes the plane, tipping the wing on my side up towards the Rock, then down towards the seabed. We’re dropping ever lower, rolling from side to side in newer and scarier ways, when without warning the G force sucks back our stomachs and flattens out our internal organs like offal on a dinner plate as we surge into a steep, last-minute climb. I can see people in Gibraltar going to work in their cars and thinking, “What in God’s name was that?” But they’re receding rapidly into the distance as we climb back to a safe, or possibly unsafe, height. Confident now that he’s given the Red Baron the slip, our man is back on the PA, but sounding strangely low-key and matter-of-fact.

“Well, as you can see ….”

Pause.

“We were unable to land at Gibraltar. We’ll keep you posted.”

He sounds curiously post-orgasmic, and we have to suppress dreadful images of what’s been going on in the cockpit.

Ten minutes later, we’re dropping down over calm sea and miles and miles of pristine deserted sandy beach to land in Tangier, which is where I want to be tomorrow, but not today. As I’m wondering whether to accept the fact that I’m already in Morocco and save myself the bother of going back to Europe by plane just so that I can come back to Morocco by boat, the pilot comes back on the speaker and says that we are just refueling. We can’t get off until we arrive at our new destination, which may, or may not, be Málaga. Terrific. I’m going to spend the rest of the day retracing my steps so that I can pay extra money to come back here a slower way first thing tomorrow. Good plan.

“And can I ask you please not to use cell phones while we’re refueling?” he adds.

The Winnie-the-Pooh businessman immediately gets out his cell phone and phones Kirsty at head office to tell her she can’t call him with any messages for the foreseeable because we’re on the runway at Tan-bloody-gier and aren’t allowed to use phones for safety reasons. The call continues for about seven minutes while he explains to Kirsty exactly why it is that he isn’t currently able to use the phone and would she be a poppet and call Jonathan direct and tell him it looks like he’s going to have to cancel the 2:30 with Telecom and the fucking Spaniards? Thanks, love. As he snaps the phone shut, he throws a defiant look in my direction for listening to his conversation. He’s glowing with the it’s-a-free-country-so-why-shouldn’t-I stroppiness you get when you try and reason with someone whose dog has just fouled the pavement outside a kindergarten.

There is an unspoken agreement that requires us all to collaborate in the pretense that we are unable to hear the conversations and monologues that other people are having into their cell phones. In one of the more unpredictable shifts in British social behavior of the last decade, a hitherto reticent nation has taken to shouting intimate details of its social, emotional and sexual life into the faces of complete strangers, who are required to pretend that they aren’t there and haven’t heard. Under no circumstances must you
acknowledge your existence by joining in and saying, “She sounds a right bitch,” or “What a coincidence, I’m on a train too.”

I recently found myself crammed into one end of the London Victoria-Brighton service with a shy-looking Sikh couple, their three young daughters and Grandma. At East Croydon a bare-midriffed multiplypierced teenager came striding along the platform arguing with her phone. She climbed in through the nearest door, which she left open for a customer liaison operative to slam violently shut behind her, and sat down opposite Grandma.

“Bollocks!” she shouted as the girls gazed on, mesmerized by her fashion sense. “Bollocks! I never? I bloody never!” Grandma caught Mum’s eye for a second but no one said anything. “Twat!” she continued. “Twat! Lying twat!” before bursting into tears, gurgling and snottering into the phone. “You don’t know why? You don’t know why? I’ll tell you why then shall I? Shall I? Right. Because I fakkin lav you, you cant, that’s why. Now fakk off and leave me alone.” Then she sat there and pretended that we hadn’t heard, and so did we. She got off at Redhill, in case you’re ever in the area.

When we finally land at Málaga we’re herded onto three waiting coaches and given mineral water and egg sandwiches from a big cardboard box. The Estonians have managed to get a six-pack of San Miguel from somewhere, while Winnie is tapping away at his laptop, because a top executive can never rest. The driver waits until almost, but not quite, everyone has got on, then takes us on an extended coach tour of the Costa del Sol. This isn’t something I’d have booked for, but it turns out to be quite diverting. I thought they’d finished the Costa del Sol years ago and started on somewhere else by now, but apparently not. The scale of unfinished construction is astonishing. Motionless cranes and half-built apartment blocks litter the coast to Marbella, yet there’s not a builder to be seen. Like the migration of lemmings and the homing instinct of salmon, the disappearance of builders from unfinished jobs remains one of the unfathomable mysteries of our time.

Traffic is heavy, and we’re held up at roadworks outside an Irish pub called Rory’s Taverna Irlandesa, so one way and another it’s five o’clock in the evening when we get to Gibraltar, rather than ten in the morning as
planned. So much for my day exploring the Rock. I’m going to have as much time to get an intimate feel for the place as a coachload of camcordered Korean pensioners who are having a cream tea in Anne Hathaway’s cottage and are due at Beatrix Potter’s house for dinner.

BLAND TRAVEL
, says the big sign across the street as our coach pulls in at the airport, and it has been. Our bags are taken from the bus and put on the airport luggage carousel in a desperate attempt to hoodwink us into thinking we’ve just arrived by plane. A bit of Zen helps at times like this. It’s important to remind yourself that life, death, money, happiness are all an illusion, as is the feeling that you left England much, much earlier in your life—sometime in childhood, probably—and all your adult years have been spent driving through building sites in glaring sunshine on a coach full of angry people who smell of egg sandwiches.

I get my bag and walk out into arrivals. Three enormous British soldiers in camouflage fatigues are standing by the door, their body language suggesting that they have been sent to kill everyone on the coach. The sight of them triggers memories of Gibraltar’s most famous news story of recent decades, when the SAS shot an IRA bomb team dead on the streets. As I approach them I find myself speculating that MI5 have probably kept a list of everyone in the country who thought it might have been a better plan to arrest and prosecute the suspects rather than shoot them in the head, so I’m relieved when I manage to slip past them without incident. I get into a taxi with the subject of shoot to kill and trying the British military for murder racing through my mind. At least I’ll have something to talk about if I find myself in a pub full of soldiers this evening and need a bit of light-hearted banter at closing time.

At the hotel I accelerate past Winnie and the Estonians, who have arrived first but are struggling to get their luggage out of a minibus. Winnie spots me as I flash past, and even though I haven’t used my elbows or cut him up in the revolving door he’s obviously upset when I get the last sea-view room. Perhaps next time he’ll think to ask Kirsty to phone ahead and put a hold on a Superior Sea-view Executive Mini Suite with Complimentary Membership of the Business Centre and Health Club plus a basket of hard fruit in cellophane.

I’m delighted to discover I’m able to stand in the shower covered in luxury hair-or-body shampoo and admire an enormous battleship anchored in the Med, or whatever that water outside is called. I haven’t quite got my bearings yet. As I dry myself vigorously in possible view of the sailors, I remember that experience has taught me that you can sometimes meet interesting and colorful people in hotel bars in old colonial outposts. I head downstairs for an aperitif, only to find a Welsh businessman asking an engineer from Birmingham, “So are there still bauxite deposits to be exploited out there?” I turn on my heel and flee so fast that my Blundstones burn skidmarks in the
Bienvenudo
mat.

Gibraltar town is a curious hybrid, one part contemporary Spain to three parts the England of thirty years ago, with more cannons per square inch than any other duty-free zone in the world.

Walking through the main pedestrian street as the shops pull down their shutters for the night, the sense of being in Britain rather than the Mediterranean is heightened by the impressive numbers of UK winos setting up alfresco cocktail bars in doorways. They seem happy enough. The warm climate, laughably cheap booze and comforting familiarity of UK brand-named doorways must make this a top winter destination. After all, long cheap winter breaks featuring excessive drinking at budget prices have been attracting British retirees to hotels just across the border in Spain for decades, so it’s heartwarming to see the underclass finally getting their share. The cosmopolitan experience of sleeping rough on the Continent seems likely to produce a more discerning and sophisticated generation of street drinkers. These guys will return to Britain in the spring ready to spread the word that although turps is fine as an aperitif, especially in the open air, it’s a white spirit and really is best with fish.

Outside Roy’s II Chip Shop & Restaurant an illuminated plastic noticeboard is displaying color photographs of the food. Egg and chips have been emphatically in the public domain for many years now and really don’t need their portrait taken, but there they are. Look. An egg. And some chips. On a plate. And Roy hasn’t stopped there. Photo No. 7 is billed “Bread & Butter” and is as good as its word, featuring a round of sliced bread, cut in two, with butter. Now no one will be able to say, “What the
bloody hell’s this?” when the waiter plonks it on the table. No. 13 is a double-header, “Mushy Peas/Baked Beans,” and it exerts a hypnotic effect, featuring two round bowlfuls, one green, the other brown, peering out like strange eyes. If there’s a Roy’s II, there must be a Roy’s I, and possibly several more. The omens for indigenous cuisine aren’t good.

To tell the truth, I’d been secretly hoping for tapas or paella, or anything Spanish really, but everywhere I look there are blackboards advertising pies and full English breakfasts. I delve off into the back lanes in search of a likely-looking place and find that the street names are top class: Bishop Rapello’s Ramp, Pitman’s Alley, Serfaty’s Passage, Nelson’s Dirt Box, Boschett’s Steps, Ragged Staff Wharf, Tuckey’s Lane, The Plump, Benzimra’s Alley.

I made one of them up.

Back at my hotel, there are no photos of bread and butter outside the restaurant, but I take a chance and go in anyway. The maître d’ scowls at his watch and seems to greet my request for a table for one with a glare of sublimated anger, though I suppose it’s possible that there was so much gin in that G and T that it’s poisoned my view of mankind. It’s a big yellow room, with a guitarist who looks like Meatloaf on steroids strumming away at the far end next to the sweet trolley. Only five of the forty-odd tables are occupied, the diners cooped together in one corner of the cavernous room like fans of the visiting team who’ve been kept behind in the stadium until the home fans have been safely dispersed by riot police with dogs.