Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? Read online

  In terms of car selling, Youghal hadn’t originally been high on the agenda. I’d already written it off as the sort of place where I’d have to spend all afternoon in one of the pubs and then end up swapping the car for a couple of greyhounds (but only if I could stick around for a few days because the greyhounds had to be fetched from the bloke’s cousin in the midlands). I’d done some research on the area and located two or thee used car garages. But, as I’d already discovered, there is something not quite right about a scruffy, unshaven bloke with bags under his eyes, driving a nice shiny girl’s car and looking to offload it quickly.

  But although I knew we didn’t look good together, I had to make an effort to make a sale. Back in Youghal it was starting to rain. On my little crumpled piece of paper I had the name of a garage on the main road. I parked in the middle of the forecourt, which was full of cars of every description and age, all looking just a little bit worn out. At the end of the forecourt was a little hut with big glass windows. Four people inside were deep in conversation. As I got to the door I could see them more clearly. There was a big bloke with a red face and dark blue blazer, with silver hair and longish sideburns for a man of his age in the late 1990s (they were seventies’ leftovers). A skinny guy with scared animal eyes with a ’tache and a Barbour jacket stood to his left. I knocked on the door and walked in. To the left of the door was a fat farmer type with a face that was waiting to laugh in that explosive way that people do when they laugh at anything – ‘a ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’ – and on the other side a small sandy-haired bloke who looked like he might have been a welterweight boxer, with a denim jacket and a little black woollen hat. As I walked in the farmer was just speaking – ‘a ha ha ha ha ha!’ Then the conversation abruptly stopped and the Blazer, who was behind the desk and therefore ostensibly In Charge, asked what he could do for me.

  I’d said this little speech so many times and had so many negative responses that I felt a bit embarrassed – I had this idea of myself as a sharp wheeler-dealer who would convince these country folk of the great deal I was offering, but all that came out was the usual articulation of a Loot advert, interspersed with lots of hesitations ‘… Vauxhall Corsa … er … not mine … er … selling it for someone else … er … one previous lady owner … er …36,000 miles … er … sunroof …’

  There was a pause as Blazer breathed in sharply, then smiled with his eyes and winked over at Woolly Hat.

  ‘I suppose it’s got a condom machine fitted,’ he said. There was a brief pause, a sweet silence before Barbour Moustache started a little wheezy heeeh heeeh heeh, Blazer smiled broadly at his joke and Woolly Hat raised his eyebrows. But it was Farmer who really startled me. If Monty Python and Woody Allen had turned up there and then in that room and presented us with their funniest gag that they’d been secretly working on for years, with Seinfeld doing the script editing, Farmer couldn’t possibly have exploded with mirth any harder. Tiny droplets of fluid, which I hoped were spittle, flew past my face against the side wall.

  And, of course, he was the sort of bloke who would laugh at anything. I replied with a rather thin, ‘No, I’ve had a vasectomy so we’ve just got the basic model,’ but like those crap sitcoms with an over-zealous studio audience, in which the actors can’t carry on until the laughter from the pissed-uncle-figure-from-the-suburbs-who-doesn’t-get-out-much-but-is-in-town-for-the-day had subsided, so I had to wait as the blobs of spittle and orgasmic laughter died down.

  ‘So, what do you think?’

  Woolly Hat, whose name was Brian, then knocked me sideways with the magical words that everyone wants to hear. ‘Yeah, I might be interested.’ A mere chuckle from Farmer indicated that this was indeed a serious answer to my plea. We went outside to check the car. Brian, a really nice gentle bloke (even if he looked like he could punch your lights out if you fibbed about the MOT), looked it up and down as he asked me the usual questions about the car’s history. I knew the form. Years ago I’d done some car-looking-up-and-down for a friend in Norwich who was into buying up old Beetles. All you had to do was frown, stroke your chin and occasionally check under the wheel rims, then ask how many miles it had done and what sort of price was wanted. It was a ritual.

  When I told him how much I wanted – about six grand – he didn’t look too fazed. Inside I was shouting ‘YESSSSSSSS!’ but tried to look cool. He’d got a couple of garages further in the town, and gave me directions and a plan of action. I was to drive to it and show the car to a guy called Damon. I did as instructed and met Damon, a youngish lad in his early twenties who immediately started telling me what he thought of the Corsa. The English model had been superseded by the more recent Irish Opel version, but my 1.4 SRi still had a few features to be proud of and an engine that could give much more powerful cars a run for their money. Apparently.

  ‘It’ll be great with all the kit, a good pair of speakers, alloy wheels an’ that.’

  I had visions of money. I’d stay in Yoogerl that night and take Farmer out on the town, challenge him to a laughing competition. ‘Did you know, Farmer, that in Mongolia they do circular breathing when they laugh at funny jokes so it sounds like a really deep vacuum cleaner? Can you do that, Farmer? Can you?’ Damon informed me that we had to go to yet another garage, where his boss (I was getting confused) was based. Damon hopped in and we drove to the other side of town, with him trying to explain to me exactly why alloy wheels were so desirable. (‘They’re just really cool, like.’) When we got there Damon disappeared into the bowels of a greasy smelling workshop, then a couple of minutes later emerged with a small sandy-haired guy in blue overalls, who could have been a welterweight boxer. It was the same guy – Brian – with different clothes on, I was sure of it. And I became more convinced as he started to openly slag the car – it’s more a woman’s car (don’t I bloody know that already pal!), it’s too small, its engine’s too big, it would cost too much to insure in Ireland because they’d have to put all the kit in like electric windows (ooooh) and alloy wheels (a quick glance at Damon – he was smiling slightly and nodding) and sell it as a sports car to blokes and young blokes would have to pay £1,500 on insurance for a sporty car like that. It was the old ‘nice used-car dealer/nasty used-car dealer’ routine. One gives you a cigarette and says, ‘It’s a lovely car,’ the other knocks it out of your mouth and scowls, ‘You slag – it’s in terrible condition you useless bastard!’

  ‘How much do you want for it?’ asked Nasty Brian.

  ‘I’m looking for six, what with the exchange rate the way it is at the moment.’

  ‘Ah I can’t give you more than four and a half for it.’

  Damon bit his lip. He was genuinely disappointed and I felt more upset for him than for myself. He had convinced me that it surely would have looked great with all the kit and alloy wheels and that.

  ‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘that that’s only about three and a half in Sterling.’

  Nasty Brian shook his head and cursed.

  ‘The Punt is fucked, absolutely fucked. Those bastards have managed to wreck a perfectly good economy.’

  He made it seem like the collapse of the global free market system. A barrage of insults at various politicians, filling their pockets, feathering their nests while the likes of him just wanted to do an honest day’s work.

  The pessimism was infectious.

  ‘And,’ I said, ‘then there’s the Import Registration Fee, or whatever it is you call it.’

  This was £1,200 that I would, officially, have to pay before I could sell the car.

  ‘Ah we’d get round that. We’d tell them the car was damaged and you sold it as scrap and you’ll be fine. But I can still only give you four and a half. You’re not interested then?’

  I drove Damon back to the other garage. We talked about the different types of engines in cars and the insurance premiums involved for various models, the acceleration/handling/size equation. I rarely had conversations like this. As he got out he gave me a little, rueful smile. ‘Som
ebody’s gonna get a nice deal on that car. I tell you, alloy wheels. Pheeew!’ He shook my hand, then he was gone. I thought about continuing west straight away, to go and talk to Nice Brian again. But I knew the garage wouldn’t be there anymore. It’d be a sweetshop or newsagents, run by Farmer, who would look at me sternly and deny all knowledge of ever meeting me. Never again would I try to sell a woman’s car in a town famous for its celebration of root vegetables.

  Youghal Survival Kit

  Potato

  Cigarette

  Music

  ‘Car Wash’ – Rose Royce

  ‘Go West’ – Village People

  ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’ – Grace Jones

  Places to visit

  Cromwell Arch

  Big Blazer’s garage

  Nice Brian’s garage

  Nasty Brian’s garage

  * * *

  1 Raleigh was a terrible businessman by all accounts and eventually sold his land to Sir Robert Boyle, who made his fortune in pig iron. The joke is that they have a potato festival in the town and not a pig iron festival. It’s not a great joke, but certain people – fat, farmer-type people – probably find it amusing.

  The Beach

  Tramore, Co. Waterford

  On Tramore High Street I stood in a chipper and stared without expression as a bloke in chip shop gear lifted a bag of sliced potatoes into the deep fat fryer. Cunningham’s chipper is the best in all of Ireland, so say the experts on these matters. If the Gaelic Athletic Association held a Fish and Chip shop tournament, Cunningham’s would, it is said, walk it. The night before had been an early one, my first proper sleep for over four days. Annie’s parents had listened with patience on the phone to my tales of cack-handed car-selling attempts (though I made sure not to tell them about the singing leprechaun – you never know how people will react). Her mother then said that she was thinking of selling her car and would Annie let her have the Corsa for free? I can’t do that, I said. I have a duty, a mission, to get the best price possible. Well, why didn’t you try to sell it in England? said her father, gently yet rationally. Hmmm. It’s the spirit of the thing, I tried to explain, with furrowed eyebrows. It’s a quest. It’s an excuse to travel around and hang out with your mates for a few days more like, he laughed. I went a bit huffy and quiet and with great precision began to attack my fourth baked potato, pretending I hadn’t heard him.

  The chips were great but very hot – I walked down to the strand and sat down on a bench to eat them, watching the people stroll by and burning the roof of my mouth, thus combining two of my favourite hobbies. At the edge of the beach, amongst the pebbles and plastic bottles, where in a few months’ time fat people would sit baring their hairless shins in the weak sun, a little lad was knocking a football about, dreaming of some future World Cup glory in a green shirt. A small dog of indeterminate breed ran past, its lead dangling, headed for nowhere in particular. Then three well-built old lads swaggered along on a post-pub jaunt, slightly jelly-kneed after a lunchtime pint. Bloated and brilliant faced in their Sunday best, they chattered and laughed away, probably about old timers’ business – Jackie Kyle’s genius, cars, the war and real drinking days when they would have been hell-raising local boys about town. A little bloke with a black ’tache and insistent beer gut waddled into view down the strand like a baggy bullfrog, his family in tow, parading the latest in tracksuit style. It must have been said before but it seems that the idea of the tracksuit has got lost somewhere along the line. Why does it only seem to be fat-arsed no-hopers with a lard addiction who wear sports gear nowadays? Or is it simply another triumph for aspirational advertising?

  Tramore provides old-style holiday entertainment – amusement arcades, shops full of little kids’ fishing nets, chippers – and takes you back to the 1950s or 60s, before the days when people could fly away to Spain more cheaply than have a three-course meal in a seaside restaurant back home. The difference down here is that you rarely see the German, Italian and American tourists who swarm all over other more historic or orthodoxly beautiful parts of the country.

  At one stage Tramore was regarded as the seaside capital of Ireland, the Blackpool of Erin, the Skegness of the Emerald Isle, the Scarborough of the Old Sod. People would come from all over the country for their annual two-week holiday, then sit out on the pebbles and try and get their hairless shins a bit brown. Like so many Irish places the old Gaelic name is simply an expression of the town’s setting which has been misheard or misunderstood by the dozy English at some point in time – Trá mór means ‘big beach’, and the strand here is one of the most immense in the whole of Ireland. A walk along it on a wild day is the best hangover cure going.

  The town, originally a fishing village, was set up as a resort in the 1780s by a Waterford merchant called Bartholomew Rivers, who also set up a racecourse near the beach at around the same time. In the 1850s a fellow called Lord Doneraille, who was no doubt attracted to the area by the fact that there is a pub there called The Doneraille (what a coincidence), relaid and improved the course in response to the area’s popularity as a tourist destination (helped by the opening of a railway line to the town a year or so earlier). By 1912 the sea had proven too strong and the course became completely submerged into an area of water known locally as the Back Strand. The sea is very powerful here – deceptively so, with rocks hidden at the bay’s entrance. Many ships have ended their journeys, mistakenly, in its thrashing waters. In 1816 the Seahorse, a troop-carrying ship, came into the bay thinking it was Waterford Harbour, hitting the rocks and going down with all 363 of its passengers and crew. Now on the cliff top there is a beacon called the Metalman, which informs shipping that this is fierce Tramore Bay.

  I drove up out of the town along the cliff road and headed for the old segregated swimming area where, the winter before, we had stood to watch seals in the bay. When I first came to Tramore almost ten years ago you were quickly out of town and in real countryside – small gentle hillocks, pastureland, old farmhouses, a dolmen here and there, the sound of foxhounds and hunting horn on a cold crisp winter’s day, birdsong in summer. Now there were new houses everywhere, gaudy and expansive and mostly packed into lucrative estates with small gardens and side windows looking into each other’s property.

  The Irish may be a beautiful race of artists, poets, writers and musicians but they’ve no idea how to build a bloody house. Up until recently there were two kinds of Irish house: the trad stone cottage and the trad farmhouse. Cottages are low and made of stone with whitewash on the front and are now usually owned by rich American widows or German artists. Many of them will only be used for about four weeks of the year, but they were always there for local people to look at and admire. This must be particularly great fun for young couples who can’t afford to actually buy an old cottage. They can move to a housing estate and come and look at the cottage at weekends, perhaps.

  Farmhouses are made of brick and have a blocky layout and are inhabited by English hippies or, in very rare cases, farmers. A farmhouse should by law have bits of old machinery and cars lying around in the garden, perhaps an old bathtub as well. The bits of car, if stuck together, should in no way be able to form an actual vehicle, taken as they are from many different models of car from different eras. It is some kind of rural ritual that when people visit they leave a part of their car in a far-flung part of the garden so that it can rust. A bit like those modern art sculptures you sometimes get outside libraries and public buildings.

  Now it’s all changed and the country is full of bungalows, chalets, ranches, castlettes, turrets,1 mini-chateaux that eat into fields and meadows, taking away the ring of breathing space that every community needs, so that what was once rural becomes part of town. There’s not even bits of machinery and stuff out in the gardens anymore, just nice shiny new cars. It’s not nice to say but the only attractive houses in Irish towns seem to be ones left over from British rule, when perhaps only a certain class and religion would get you an attractive dwelli
ng. Certainly in Dublin for a while there was no love for the fine Georgian buildings in the centre of the city – they were seen as symbols of British oppression and were left to rot for decades. Now the attitude has changed and they are, rightly, regarded as being an integral and beautiful part of Ireland’s heritage.

  And yet, perhaps this thing about pretty houses is a red herring. It could be just a traditional difference in attitude to life. If Irish people have always been more into community activities, craic, drinking, going out and enjoying day-to-day existence than stay-at-home English in their self-styled castles, maybe the need to live in something impressive is not so great.

  I went off for a walk for a few hours. Tramore, so gaudy, bright and fish-and-chip noisy in summer, was a different proposition off-season. It was quiet and peeling and so very melancholy, my own bittersweet nostalgia mingling with that of the place itself. On this day, the sea at Tramore sounded like Hammersmith Broadway – no, to be more precise, it was like the Westway. A constant roar, wind driving the banks of water back into the long shore, the acoustics intensified because of the horseshoe bay. Another Quink sky, blue-grey-brown splodges, running at the edges into light grey, smattered with a clumsy brush. The only colour that departed from the greyish was the yellow of a giftshop, closed up for the winter months, a quarter of a mile away. I leaned against a handrail, the old white paint flaking off in my hand, revealing the rust beneath, like scabs. Big houses loomed over the cliff at the Protestant end of town. There was a deathly stench of seaweed.