The Road to McCarthy (37 page)

Friday night is traditionally the busiest night at Jack’s, when anyone from the fishermen to the governor might drop in. I hope he doesn’t pop in tonight. A surprising number of people seem to have heard the lecture on the radio, and the consensus is that he won’t have been thrilled to have been put on the spot by an uppity tourist.

Bob is from New York and took early retirement a few years ago, at the age of about thirty by the looks of him, and moved to Montserrat with his wife, another retired lawyer, and their young family. I’ve met them because I’m sitting with John and Bridget, who live half the year in a house on stilts in the jungle of Montserrat, and the other half in Wigan, unstilted and jungle-free. Also with us is Gary, who has a rum shop up the road in Salem that is known as Gary’s Wide-Awake, because Gary has a day job as a plumber and is usually asleep behind the counter.

Some bars are blessed with a mood that allows strangers to meet as equals, and stories to be told, and Jumping Jack’s tonight is that kind of place. The conversation moves on to car theft not happening in Montserrat, due to there being just the one road, so that anyone …. you get the idea.

John tells us what happened one night in Wigan.

“I was in the house cooking dinner when I heard my car start up in the drive outside. I ran out and there was a lad trying to drive it away. He panicked when he saw me, and stalled as he was reversing. I ran and pulled the door open, and tried to drag him out, but he wouldn’t budge. He was either very strong or very scared. I couldn’t think what to do, so I got in and sat on top of him. We live up a lonely lane and there was no one about, and I couldn’t sit there like that all night. So I turned on the ignition, and drove up the road to the pub. He didn’t struggle much. There was a bloke coming out of the pub, so I shouted for help. Turned out he was a solicitor. The kid was so shocked he just sat there till the police came.”

I want to ask him if the solicitor invoiced him, but the grilled waloo arrives and I’m so excited by the bottle of chili banana ketchup that it slips my
mind. He’s lucky the kid stayed around, though, and it didn’t go to an ID parade. “I can’t be absolutely certain, Officer. Could I sit on number 3 again, please?”

The rain’s stopped
, the bass is still booming, and it’s eyes down for a full house as I trudge wearily up the hill to my bungalow, wondering what would happen if the mountain blew in the middle of the night. I’ve met a lot of people this evening. In many places I’ve been, expat is a perjorative term for a right-wing throwback who likes the idea of having native servants. I’ve been impressed by the Brits and Americans and Canadians—no Irish, strangely enough—who’ve chosen to live here. They give freely of time and financial and engineering expertise, grow orchids and keep bees and coach tennis, and clearly love the place with the passion you must need to buy a house in the shadow of a volcano. Some of them seem quite well connected. Perhaps they could persuade the British government to send some of those golden elephants. It’s never too late. Just two or three would come in handy.

These toads are really very impressive. A Tasmanian hippy would be spoiled for choice if he wanted to make himself a pair of loafers.

Next morning
everywhere looks like it hasn’t been dusted for five years. My feet make footprints on the tiles. Someone has drawn a shamrock in the dust on a poolside table. I was woken twice in the night by the rain—you don’t get to be an emerald isle through drought—but with the rain came volcanic dust and ash. When the sun’s at the right angle, you can see the particles hanging in the air like midges at sunset. I’m writing these words sitting out at the office, but my shirt is covered with a gray film and my pen is crunching on the page, as if I’m trying to write on a gravel path. The air tastes like emptying the ash pan the morning after you’ve had a coal fire. For the first time since I’ve been here I’m going to have to shelter indoors in daylight. Mind you, I’d rather have a bit of volcanic ash at the poolside than an aerobics class.

I click on the TV to catch up on some international news, and hit upon the live coverage of the New York St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which is where I was this time last year. It looks a lot cheesier on screen than it did in the flesh. They’re singing the songs that Middle America thinks are Irish, but you never hear in Ireland any more. A young man in a green tie is standing on a podium warbling “Danny Boy” in a voice that could empty a mall in twenty seconds. He’s just done that awful holding-a-long-note thing, like the needle’s stuck. “Yes I’ll be
heeeeeeeeeeeeearrrre …
.” He’s also wearing a tweed cap. He’s being watched admiringly by fat-faced triplets in Aran sweaters and bonnets, each one draped in a green ribbon, like prize parsnips at a country show. There’s really no excuse for this kind of carry-on.

There’s a commercial break, and the American advertising industry has an opportunity to restore some sanity to proceedings. “Totally make over your entire body in six weeks,” says a woman who appears to have been assembled from parts of other people that have been stretched to maximum tension. “Eat more, exercise less. Worth $400, but yours for only $59.99.” I can’t work out what she’s selling, but it doesn’t matter, because the next ad has started, and this is $59.99 as well. Maybe it’s a figure with mystical numerological significance. A couple of career chip-eaters are sitting on a sofa smiling in a self-congratulatory manner as they strap Walkman-size devices around the wobbly folds and flaps of their velour-tracksuited stomachs. “Wear this energizer system while you watch TV,” says the voice-over, “and lose three inches off your waist in a week without exercising.” Perhaps it’s packed with maggots, or a Tasmanian devil.

Watching this kind of dross fills you with a deep sense of shame—partly for belonging to the human race, partly for watching TV without wearing an energizer—so I flip channels, to be confronted by a troupe of puke-cute eight-year-olds in pigtails and shorts and dungarees and ra-ra skirts doing Osmondesque dance routines in a hay barn, jiggling and grinning and shaking their booty and doing the backstroke. It appears to be some kind of God channel. “Just take my hand, we’ll find the door. Together we’ll find strength in the Lord,” they sing, through stage-school grins that make Britney Spears look like Samuel Beckett. “It’s a good thing God’s my friend, he’ll stay with me till the end!” “Uh-huh! Oh yeah! Walk with Jesus!” Then
they all do the splits. It’s disturbing to watch this stuff when there’s no one to share the experience. I feel like the guy who sees a UFO when he’s on his own and knows that no one’s going to believe him. They’re clapping their hands now, and shimmying like jelly on a plate, while two sinister grownups watch from behind a hay bale.

Back on Fifth Avenue the commentator’s having a shocker. “Welcome back to the 248
^th
St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York,” she simpers. “I love saying that. It makes me feel so historic.” The camera cuts to a close-up of a woman with twenty or thirty shamrocks on her sweater. “Say, will you look at all those clovers.” You’d have to ask serious questions about the selection procedure that landed her this gig. “Sixty-Fourth Street would be the place to come if you’d like to hear the minute of silence. By the way, I’ve been imported from LA for the occasion, but I understand that if you’re really into it here in the Big Apple, you start the day with a green bagel—isn’t that right, See-mus?”

“Er, that’s pronounced
Shay-mus
,” says Seamus bitterly, as his big day disintegrates like a dried-up clover.

She falters for a moment, then earns my eternal admiration as she delivers, without a hint of humor or irony, a line that you could spend your entire career as a broadcaster honing and perfecting, yet never get a chance to use. “The cardinal,” she says, “looks very comfortable in that golf cart.”

The advertisement says six
, the tickets say seven, so the dinner begins at six-thirty Two hundred people fill the open-plan bar and lobby of the Vue Pointe, spilling out to the poolside to admire the glow of the volcanic fireworks that are more spectacular than usual tonight. The Céad Míle Fáilte banner is fluttering in the breeze of a ceiling fan. John from Wigan is helping out behind the bar with the overworked Mr. Wilson, who is decked out in a previously unseen bow tie for the occasion. Two black ladies from Montserrat and a white lady from Lancashire are singing “The Mountains of Mourne” and I’m propping up the bar with a British expat.

The first arrivals tonight were the snowbirds, the handful of silver-haired North Americans who still winter here despite the acts of God. Determined
to get full value from the buffet, they took their seats at six o’clock, teeth poised and sharpened on the tablecloth beside them. After them the place quickly filled up with white men in Hawaiian shirts, black men with silver beards, glamorous young local couples in skin-tight trousers and spangly tops, English lesbians, sensible West Indian mums in spectacles, kids, clergy, aid workers, an estate agent in a floor-length tie-dyed gown and a Japanese architect. It is the most good-natured, spectacularly cosmopolitan and deeply weird St. Patrick’s Day gathering at which you could ever wish to be present. An elderly English lady with a cut-glass accent tells me about her days working among “the bog Irish” in Liverpool. A West Indian man asks me, What’s Irish and stays outside all summer? “Paddy O’Furniture.”

Dinner is a buffet that everyone has prepared at home and donated: baked fish, jerk chicken, sweet potato pie, pumpkin fritters, peas and beans. I’m sitting eating with Ian, a British civil servant, and Atsumi, a Japanese architect working for the United Nations, when the ad hoc multinational singing combo who’ve just been murdering “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” finishes, and Ian and Atsumi get up to take their place. Ian begins playing one of those Yamaha keyboards that produce squelchy wah-wah chords and a cabaret drum backing track. In his white shirt and droopy black bow tie, his hair slicked back and a sandy mustache perched on his lip, he looks like a cruise ship entertainer from the days before rock-’n’-roll. The fact that he is a senior British government official adds a strange, Graham Greene-ish quality to proceedings, as does the presence of Atsumi on vocals. She’s a slim woman in her thirties who has just designed Montserrat’s new police station, but is now crooning “The Look of Love” in a Japanese accent, while Ian crouches over the keyboard like Dr. John and vamps away behind her. They finish with “There Will Never Be Another You,” then just when I think I’ve got the measure of proceedings, Ian whips out a clarinet and plays Acker Bilk’s “Stranger on the Shore,” before leaving the podium to applause, followed by a heartfelt Caribbean singalong of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” I check the reading on my strangeometer, but it has exploded.

Just as I’m thinking that all that’s missing is an Irish Irish person, you know, from Ireland, someone introduces me to Simon Sweeney, a young
man who lives in a lighthouse in Mayo but is currently crewing a yacht that has just sailed from Cork to Antigua. He bumped into Danny Sweeney from Jumping Jack’s, who invited him to come and stay because his name was Sweeney. They’re heading up to Gary Wide-Awake’s rum shop, and offer me a ride. In the interests of research, I reluctantly agree.

Gary’s is a pretty pale blue wooden bar, with a big sound system and TV, and shelves stacked with tins of meat and fish, toilet paper and cooking oil. I’m disappointed to find that Mr. Wide-Awake isn’t asleep behind the bar, but delighted to hear that he used to play on the Montserrat golf team with a man whose nickname was Sleepy. We get some drinks, and Danny tells me how he taught Sting to windsurf.

“It was early in the eighties, and I was down on the beach, trying to teach this wrong-shaped Englishman whose arse stick a long way out how to windsurf. Day after day he keeps falling off the board, and I’m saying, ‘Keep your bloody arse in, man.’ Sting and the band are all on the beach laughing. One day George Martin comes across, and says, ‘Look, it’s not very polite to keep saying arse like that. Don’t you realize that man is the attorney-general of Great Britain? Perhaps you could say bum instead.’ Next day he gets his right honorable arse, bum, whatever into gear, keeps it in, windsurfs out to sea, turns and comes back. That’s when Sting said, ‘You can teach him, you can teach anybody. I want you to teach me to wind-surf.’”

It’s after eleven and somebody has just told me that the Dire Straits song “Walk of Life” was actually written about Danny, when I see Wide-Awake smile and wave a greeting to a couple who are framed in the open doorway.

It’s the governor and his wife.

They come in, buy some drinks and join the company. I pull my mouth into a strange shape and cover my face with my hand, hoping I’ll either become invisible or they’ll think I’m someone else. I’m just starting to think I’ve got away with it when I realize his wife has me fixed in a sideways stare, and I know that I haven’t. I develop a twitch to throw her off track. The Gov, meanwhile, has asked Gary to play the video of the Albert Hall Concert for Montserrat that was held after the disaster, and Paul McCartney, Sting, Eric
Clapton, Mark Knopfler and John Elton are singing “Hey Jude.” Suddenly he turns to me.

“It’s Kansas City next.”

What’s he on about? Does he mean that’s where the Foreign Office or the queen or whoever organizes these things is sending him? To Kansas? What’s the poor sod done to deserve that?

“I’ll bet you’d prefer to stay here.”

He looks down at me like a Latin master at a failed conjugater, and we both know I am pond life.

“Kansas City. The old rock-’n’-roll song. You should hear Elton play piano on it. Just listen to this. Sshh!”

So with the British governor calling for quiet for Sir Elton in a rum shop in the Caribbean, another St. Patrick’s Day dinner drifts to its predictable conclusion. The Gov’s clicking his fingers now, and doing a little boogie-woogie thing with one foot while maintaining his dignity with the other. He hasn’t had a go at me. Perhaps he doesn’t remember.

“By the way, thanks for dropping me in it the other night.”