Free The Road to McCarthy by Pete McCarthy Page B

if, say, Oxford Street were also called the Meadow Where a Thousand Petals Bloom, only in another language with an entirely different alphabet. Many locals are oblivious to the French names, which is why nobody had heard of Rue des Postes. Shameful ignorance of such crucial local information is one of the joys of traveling alone. Like near-castration by Barbary ape, it’s the kind of meaningful interaction with local culture that makes it worth getting out of bed in the morning.
    I do what I can to find the elusive Irishmen. I try and look for T. MacCarthy in the telephone book, but the hotel switchboard and the international phone-fax bureau at the top of the street both tell me that Tangier doesn’t have a telephone book. I’ve been here less than a day, but already this seems plausible. I walk to the tourist office to make enquiries, but it has a broken window and is closed, or possibly abandoned. I’m not sure what else to do. Perhaps I should try and start acting like a private detective. I put on a jacket and sit at the hotel bar looking as mysterious as I can manage. In the film I would slip the barman a bank note and he would give me the information. In real life, however, he ignores me.
    Early in the evening I head down towards the medina in the most purposeful and preoccupied manner I can manage, and this time nobody bothers me. I stride briskly through the street traders in Grand Socco, their alarm clocks and belts and handbags laid out on the ground, and take a seatoutside a café. All around me there is shouting and laughter, hustlers selling crêpes and Islamic CDs and underwear, women carrying carpets and boxes of oranges. Half the people in the city are frantically busy doing things, while the other half are sitting at cafés watching them. Men keep coming into the café to greet and hug other men, join them for a quick mint tea, then move on. I feel as if I’m at the theater, separate from the action that’s unfolding before me. The actors all know precisely how the play fits together and understand the significance of everything, while I can only sit and observe the spectacle.
    As I get up to leave, marveling at the exotic and impenetrable foreign-ness of it all, I notice that the café has filled up with rows of men staring impassively at a TV in the corner. Curious as to what is exerting such a powerful spell over them—the king perhaps, or a spiritual or military leader—I poke my head round the door. They are all watching an old episode of
Cheers
. The mood is serious, almost somber. Perhaps they’ve just heard that Coach is dead and have been overwhelmed by the hollow emptiness of life.
    On the way back to the hotel I stop at a bakery and buy some kind of custardy-creamy-filled croissanty-type affair which I smuggle past the room service police and eat in my room for dinner. It’s rather strange. I can’t work out whether its savory lemony-cheesy flavor is intentional, or whether it’s just a sweet one that’s gone rancid in the heat. Never mind. The role of tension and uncertainty in gastronomy is frequently underrated, particularly late at night. I pour a decent-size tumbler of Soberano to chase the ambiguous pastry, and turn on the TV.
    Hotels all over the world now have CNN the way they used to have trouser presses and Gideon Bibles. I’m hoping for a global political update, but instead I get the result of the University of Wisconsin football match, proving once again that CNN has no equal when it comes to providing world news from all over the United States. Over on BBC Bland International there’s some pleasure to be had from wondering whether the anchor or the viewer will lose the will to live first. This is a pale shadow of the BBC as we have known it, like turning up to see Manchester United and getting a schoolboy team instead. I’m halfway through the brandy now and gettingangry, unable to understand why they’re spending license payers’ money on hotel guests who have