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 experimented 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
