The Road to McCarthy by Pete McCarthy

twenty other channels to watch, when they could be spending it on proper terrestrial TV programs about decking and water features instead. This is terrible. I’d rather watch a still photograph of the hotel lobby. Luckily they’re showing one on Channel 3. After a while it gets a bit predictable, like watching a repeat of a program you already saw repeated not long ago, so I drain my glass and settle for an early night. Wisconsin beat Notre Dame, by the way. Massacre, by the sound of it.
    Next morning at ten I slip out of a side entrance through the hotel garden and car park and go and hide in the medina a long way from Boulevard Pasteur. It’s a wasted effort, because Mohammed finds me anyway. I’m outside a café watching a woman carrying a goat under her arm and leading a sheep on a rope, and wondering how she settled on these particular priorities, when I realize he’s standing in a doorway across the road watching me, like Harry Lime in
The Third Man
, only scruffier. Slowly, painfully slowly—this guy’s a master of suspense—he comes across to join me. He exudes a colossal sense of wounded pride and hurt and disappointment. “So, Peter. You do not come this morning like you promise.” So I tell him a lie, a pointless lie which gains me nothing. A small amount of money changes hands, and we go our separate ways. In one masterful stroke he has established the basic ground rules: Wherever I go in this city he will find me, I will let him guide me and then I will give him some money. Even if he doesn’t guide me, I’ll have to give him money for finding me. That’s just the way it’s going to be.
    It’s lunchtime, and I’m about to enter a promising-looking restaurant on the edge of the casbah when I notice an old man sitting daydreaming in the street. I turn into the doorway and he totters to his feet and goes into what is either a large cupboard or a small office, where he presses an antique bell-push. As I reach the restaurant at the top of a flight of stairs an ancient retainer in green fez and maroon pantaloons has responded to his call and is there to meet me. He shows me into a dazzlingly ornate room with tiledfloors and walls, green and yellow glass skylights, embroidered wall hangings and cushions, marble fireplaces, Islamic arches and hand-made rugs. It’s empty apart from five Berber tribesmen in traditional dress sitting at a table in the center. They’ve probably been bringing animals to market and have popped in for lunch before heading back to the mountains.
    I’m congratulating myself on my unerring ability to sniff out the most authentic places when the doors open and a party of about forty tourists in terrifying leisurewear pile in, tooled up to the eyeballs with video and photographic equipment. The authentic tribespeople burst into action, producing an extraordinary selection of nose flutes, radical ukuleles and camel-skin timpani from underneath their seats and robes. The tour party, an uneasy alliance of French and American—though under interrogation I couldn’t rule out the possibility that some of them might be Swiss—burst into action, shooting the shit out of everything that moves with state-of-the-art idiot-proof camcorders. Some of them have those digital stills cameras that display instant pictures, so that now people can take their holiday snaps and bore their friends with them at the same time.
    The authentic tribespeople from the mountains, who I now realize are a coach-party cabaret turn from a block of flats up the road, are playing wonderful music, wailing and pounding and drawing haunting, searing melodies from their strange instruments. It’s a thrill to be in the same room as them, a fact that hasn’t been lost on the visitors, who are lining up to use the band as props. They are poking their heads in between the musicians, grinning and gurning as the flashbulbs pop, treating them for all the world as if they’re one of those