Free The Road to McCarthy by Pete McCarthy

these things out loud. Maybe he’s just reading my mind. It’s possible. He could be part Vulcan. Morocco’s exactly the sort of place aliens would make for. I haven’t been here long, but already it seems to have far more that would be of interest to intergalactic life forms than Roswell, say, or Wiltshire. It certainly seems to encourage extravagant thought processes.
    “Rue des Postes,” he says. “Yes. I know this place.”
    But he’s pausing. He looks unsure. He doesn’t know, does he? He’s just trying to humor me. He doesn’t bloody know!
    “Where is it, Peter?”
    See, told you.
He’s
asking
me
where it is. But I don’t know. That’s the whole point! That’s why I’m asking him. So why am I saying, “I think it must be quite near the port.”
    His face lights up and he starts walking on the spot again.
    “The port? This is good. Come. Come. This way.”
    We plunge off down a side street, Mohammed leading the way. It’s too late to try and explain that this is just guesswork and that the person who may or may not be the head of the MacCarthy clan, and therefore a potential contender for the throne of Ireland if it should ever come up for grabs, though at the moment it has to be said that doesn’t seem likely—that this person had only mentioned in passing that it was no problem to meet me at the port, “because it’s not far at all.” He was probably just being polite, and anyway now that I’m here I can see that nowhere in Tangier is actually that far from the port. This nonexistent street could be virtually anywhere. No matter though. We’re off, and if not exactly running, walking very briskly. We pass the gloriously dilapidated Spanish-looking Théâtre Cervantes. Below us the bay gleams in the sunshine and I’m thinking it must be wonderful to live in a city where the water is always visible from the center like this. And then two men walk past, one in a fez, one in a little gold embroidered hat, and I stop thinking about the water and start thinking how lucky these guys are to come from a place where you can wear headgear like this without any sense of irony or fear of looking ridiculous. I don’t seem to be able to stick with any thought for very long at the moment. Perhaps my powers of concentration aren’t what they used to be.
    “Maybe it is near here.”
    He asks a man selling grilled fish, but he looks hostile and shakes his head, so we thread through the traffic to cross the narrow street and end up at one of the archways leading into the medina.
    “You like to see casbah?”
    No, I don’t want to see the bloody casbah, I want to see the MacCarthyBleedin’ Mór, Prince of feckin’ Desmond, and to be perfectly frank it’s looking less likely by the minute. On an impulse I pause in the middle of the street and ask a policeman or soldier or traffic warden or bus conductor, a man in a uniform anyway, but he shakes his head too, then takes a couple of assertive strides, blows a whistle and points at a lad on a moped. I’m hot and bothered now with all this charging about, and also conscious that I’m the only Western face on the street. We’ve wandered into a part of town with no carpet shops or MasterCard stickers. They clearly don’t cater to tourists round here, unless they’re tourists looking for hardware or electrical fittings or coffins who are prepared to pay cash.
    After a few minutes I’ve had enough and decide to hail a taxi. Mohammed pushes past me and gets in first and the driver nods at the mention of the street name. Back up the hill we go, away from the port, obviously, past my hotel, naturally, past the spot where I met Mohammed a little while ago, inevitably, and then we pull over at a crossroads. We’re 100 yards from where we started, in the opposite direction from the way we walked. I pay the driver, who smiles and waves as he drives off. The street signs are all in Arabic.
    “So which street is it?” “It is one of these.”
    “But there are