He lived a long time, did Gobhlachan, latterly sitting on his ancient anvil outside the door, like a memorial of himself. The anvil, like the forge, was cold and unused and all the young people would pity him as they drove by, for ‘having that bit of cold iron sticking right into his arse’. But Gobhlachan himself was oblivious to the cold, as he watched the young people drive by.
And then one day, something happened. Planes deliberately flew into buildings, and folk began to shake as they watched it all unfolding before their very eyes. Only those who had already lived through The Great Shaking kept a sense of perspective, knowing that they’d seen it all before, somewhere else – where was it now? – in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades, or at the Somme in the timeless sunshine, or when the young girl was taken away by the white bull and used and abused for years and years and years before she was finally rescued and taken back home to live happily ever afterwards?
Archie was one of those who both shook in his boots and remembered. Unemployed now for years – obviously there was no need of him at a smithy which no one used – and with the tangle market having long gone, conquered by plastics and technology and cheaper markets, he spent his time in that half-world between guilt and hopelessness which is the map of the unemployed.
‘Why don’t you move off your backside,’ his wife would shout at him now and then, ‘and get a job like everyone else?’ As if jobs were that easy to find in this wilderness. ‘That Gobhlachan messed you up is what I say,’ she would then mutter, ‘with his mad stories and his mad wife. Your problem is that you spent far too much time with that good-for-nothing eunuch when you were younger. Turned you into a useless dreamer instead of a man who can do a damn thing around the house.’
As with all stories, these were fabrications, of course. Hadn’t he built the house in the first place, concrete block by concrete block? Hadn’t he drained and fenced and ploughed and harrowed and harvested the land for over thirty years? Hadn’t he built the boat which lay dry-docked at the end of the house? Hadn’t he built the shed and the henhouse and the pigsty and the barn and the outdoor aviary which housed all their livestock, from cockerels to goats? Hadn’t he actually married her, against all his better judgment, in a moment of weakness, and fathered that useless son of hers, spoiled by her, who now lounged about every day watching television and trawling the inter-net as if nothing on earth or in heaven mattered except what came out of a screen?
When the smithy unofficially closed down all these years ago, Archie was devastated. By that time he’d been there for ten years – was now twenty-four years of age – and had known little else but the bellowing of the forge and the pouring and the moulding of ore.
Those freezing days cutting the tangle on the shore were an ancient memory and the ten years at the smithy had seemed both an instant and an eternity. Gobhlachan and Olga were, of course, living as man and wife, even though people muttered that they still didn’t know which was the man and which the wife. The initial great repairs done, in these years the smithy increasingly turned to the making of domestic furniture and car parts, all of which seemed – to Archie as well as to Gobhlachan and Olga – like the gods turning to croquet, or like making a puddle out of the ocean.
So Archie would spend hours welding a wing onto a car, or polishing the bumper of a lorry, or sawing wood for garden furniture, while his mind was ablaze with the former glory when the hot ore was poured like a waterfall into the mould to emerge, scalded then frozen, as a sword or a ploughshare.
But even the crumbs of the gods mouldered and faded, and within the ten years official garages were set up which undercut and outworked the old smithy. Domestic furniture was the same. Who now wanted a roughly crafted chair or bed or table from Gobhlachan or his man Archie, when a beautiful, smooth chair, at half the price and less, could be bought in the local store, or sent by courier through the post?
Latterly, Gobhlachan and Archie would just sit by the warm forge making nothing but stories which in the end proved more durable than even the iron, which now lies rusting in forgotten fields.
On his last day working with him, Gobhlachan took the burning tongs out of the fire and said to Archie, ‘Before you leave me, I have one thing to teach you, which may be even more valuable than the stories. Bring me that board of wood.’ And Archie fetched over an ancient board which had lain unused in the corner of the smithy for all these years.
‘Watch,’ said Gobhlachan, and plunged the burning tongs into the barrel of cold water. He began to make scratches in the wood, burning black marks deep and narrow, curved and rounded, large and small. ‘The alphabet,’ he said to Archie, proudly, staring at the eighteen Gaelic letters. ‘Do you know that out of these eighteen signs you can make the whole world?’ he smiled. ‘Not quite as good as pictures, but useful. And always remember that you’re from a disadvantaged culture – an oral one. After all, they tell me the English have twenty-six of these signs and the Chinese five thousand!’ He laughed, putting the tongs back into the fire, where they began again to simmer and glow.
‘Did I ever tell you the story about the magic of words?’ And while the tongs burned, Gobhlachan said this to Archie:
Once upon a time, there lived a man at Appin in Argyllshire and he took to his house an orphan boy. When the boy was grown up, he was sent to herd; and upon a day of days, and him herding, there came a fine gentleman where he was, who asked the boy to become his servant and said that he would give him plenty to eat and drink, and clothes and great wages.
The boy told him that he would like very much to get a good set of clothes, but that he would not engage till he would see his own master first. But the fine gentleman wanted him engaged without any delay. This the boy would not do, however, upon any terms until he had first seen his own master.
‘Well,’ says the gentleman, ‘in the meantime, write your name in this book.’ On saying that, he put his hand into his oxter pocket and, pulling out a large red book, he told the boy to write his name in the book. This the boy would not do. Neither would he tell the gentleman his name till he spoke with his own master first.
‘Now,’ says the gentleman, ‘since you will neither engage, nor tell your name till you see your present master, be sure then to meet me about sunset tomorrow, at a certain place.’ The boy promised that he would be sure to meet him at the place about sun-setting.
When the boy came home, he told his master what the fine gentleman had said to him. ‘Poor boy,’ says he, ‘a fine master he would make. Lucky for you that you neither engaged nor wrote your name in his book, but since you promised to meet him, you must go. But as you value your life, do as I tell you.’
His master gave him a sword, and at the same time told him to be sure and be at the specific place mentioned a while before sunset, and to draw a circle round himself with the point of the sword in the name of the Trinity. ‘When you do this, draw a cross in the centre of the circle, upon which you will stand yourself. And do not move out of that position till the rising of the sun next morning.’
He also told him that the gentleman would ask him to come out of the circle to put his name in the book, but that upon no account was he to leave the circle. ‘But ask for the book, saying that you will write your name in it yourself, and once you get hold of the book, keep it. He cannot touch a hair of your head if you keep inside the circle.
So the boy was at the place long before the gentleman made his appearance, but sure enough he made his appearance after sunset. He tried all his arts to get the boy to step outside the circle, to sign his name in the red book, but the boy would not move one foot out of where he stood. But at long last, he handed the book to the boy so that he would write his name therein himself.
The book was no sooner inside the circle than it fell out of the gentleman’s hand. The boy cautiously stretched out his hand for the book, and as soon as he got hold of it, he put it under his oxter. When the fine gentleman saw that the boy did not mean to give him back the book, he grew furious; and he transformed himself
into a great many likenesses, blowing fire and brimstone out of his mouth and nostrils. At times he would appear as a horse, other times a huge cat and a fearful beast. He was going round the circle the whole length of the night. When day was beginning to break, he let out one fearful screech; he put himself in the likeness of a large raven and he was soon out of the boy’s sight.
The boy still remained where he was till he saw the sun in the morning, which no sooner he observed than he took to his soles home as fast as he could. He gave the book to his master, and that is how the far-famed red book of Appin was got.
Gobhlachan smiled again, taking the red-hot tongs out of the fire. He drew a huge, perfect circle round the eighteen letters of the alphabet, then handed the tongs to Archie, saying, ‘And remember, Archie, the circle can be as big, or as small, as you like. As big as the whole world, if you want. As small as a sixpence, if you choose.’
Archie remembered the globe he once saw in the school, which now seemed so small and far away.
2
SO WHEN ARCHIE left to go on his travels to find the source of the north wind, he was pretty much an innocent abroad, yet as wise as the oldest owl in the universe.
He was forty-seven years of age, but had hardly ever been to what was called The Mainland, though that didn’t mean that he had cabbage growing behind his ears. He’d been there, of course, a few times: to a football match and a wedding and a funeral and to various offices to sign various forms. And during these forays, he had seen all the usual things which were less than marvellous to him: trains and planes and hovercrafts and violence and snogging and mobile phones.
He’d never stood gobsmacked as a train chug-chug-chugged out of a railway station, or as yet another jumbo jet ascended into the skies, or as yet another pornographic film rolled by on the screen, as it did that time he was in London. He could take it all or leave it. If truth be told, he missed the wind and the rain and the sea and Gobhlachan’s stories and John the Goblin’s small attempts at extortion every time he set foot in the large cities.
Of course, he would transport his own world with him: the green- and blue-jerseyed football players on the park were really Olga’s old grey and dappled horses galloping from one goalpost to the other. The advertising boards flashing messages across the skies were clouds signifying westerly rain: mackerel-shaped haze meant stormy weather; a flashing rainbow signified coming thunder.
Only once, ever, did he see something that really astonished him, and that was when he saw a group of youths kicking an old crippled woman in a doorway, for no reason that he could tell. They didn’t even take her handbag or purse, as thieves did in the old stories, before they were executed.
So when Archie decided to go and find the source of the north wind to stop up the hole it came from, his journey was taken neither through ignorance nor through some kind of great existential quest.
He knew full well the very latest meteorological truths, or fictions – he had checked all the dictionaries and the atlases and the search engines, and fully knew that modern scientists claimed that the wind did not just come out of a hole, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
When you built a wall, and left a tiny chink in it, where the hell else did the wind come from except through that tiny hole?
When you bought the latest all-weather, all-singing, all-dancing, thermal, Gore-tex, technology-force jacket with aquafoil pockets and retractable hood system, where still did the wind creep in except through that tiny hole next to your neck which had been pierced by the screwdriver you unfortunately left in the pocket of the attached fleece that last time you washed it, even though the washing instructions clearly stated that it ought not to go anywhere near a washing-machine but ought, instead, to be dry-cleaned and air-dried? But still the hole was there, sending a millizilchmetre of wind right into the hollow of your neck, like a nozzled cold spray straight from the Arctic, or was it the Antarctic? You never quite could remember which.
Nor was his journey Homeric, nor even Joycean. It wasn’t some epic journey to the North Pole to stand triumphant with a flag like Roald Amundsen. No – he was merely driven to it by that incessant whistling north wind, which never ceased, even on the stillest of summer days. Even then, as he lay quietly in the middle of a cornfield making music through a grass stalk and admiring the brilliant blue of the sky, he could hear that thin whistle far off, like some kind of insolent boy at the front of the class absently whistling as he rattled off yet another sum to get, once again, twenty out of twenty the smart-ass, while Archie still lumbered at the back of the class counting not just how many fingers he had, but how many toes he didn’t have and wished he had. It was blasphemous. Like whistling in church.
But mostly, if truth be told, it was her. Whining like an endless north wind, icily frigid in her talk, cold and dismissive in her comments, moaning and wheezing and complaining and droning in the corner that he was a failure. A layabout, a sluggard, a useless article, a man – if that’s what the world called it – unworthy of her love and affection and demands and presence. That’s what he really wanted to stop up. Himself. That’s what he really wanted to end, and because he did not have the courage to confess it he wandered to the outer limits of the earth to deny it.
Was that what drove Ulysses to the ends of the earth – a nagging wife or mother? What was it that really drove Hillary to the top of Everest, Livingstone to the heart of the earth, Magellan and Drake and Barents and Shackleton to their deaths?
Ulysses himself never really wanted to go off to Troy: he knew that the official reason for the war, the dissemination of the culture of Hellas, was only a pretext for the Greek merchants, who were seeking new markets. When the recruiting officers arrived, Ulysses actually happened to be out ploughing. He pretended to be mad. Thereupon they placed his little two-year-old son in the furrow. Here was the only man in Hellas who was against the war, the father of a young child.
So many stories vindicated Archie. Those stories about the wicked stepmother and the banshees and the graugaich and the seal-women and the gorgons and the temptresses. Women, all women, or half-women, who lured men to their fates. The Bean-Shìth herself, of course, and the Elle-maid and the Carlin of the Spotted Hill, the Wife of Ben-y-Ghloc, the Glaistig, the Gruagach Bàn… but my goodness, the men, those men with horns and scales and superhuman strength, these inventive scapegoats for real men’s sexual and physical and emotional abuse, you never saw or heard or believed anything like it, from the Blue Men of Mull to the Water-Horses of Everywhere, from the Three-Headed Giant to the very Devil himself.
Like all departures, Archie’s departure for the North Pole was neither spontaneous nor impulsive. It was long-hatched at the back of the cave, or deep underwater – whichever metaphor you prefer, where Archie abided in that sweet and sour place where all things are born, and die. There, the world was his oyster, or his lobster, as the other man said.
There he understood all the languages of the world and their known and unknown symbols, not just the eighteen that represented his own native language, but the thousands upon thousands that represented all the living and dead and still-to-be-invented languages of the world. There, also, he understood none of them – not even his own indigenous language, small and tiny as it was, with just eighteen simple symbols.
What, after all, did they mean? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, by and in and for themselves, until you mixed them up in the proper order, like the way his mother used to make porridge, first soaking the meal overnight, then cooking it over a slow fire for exactly seven-and-a-half minutes.
That was in those pre-electronic days when the timing was almost genetic, measured by the cockerel’s marching backwards and forwards on the spar of the barn. Backwards fifteen times and forwards sixteen times was the proper amount of time needed to bring the porridge meal to the correct consistency, when you then added a dollop of fresh milk – in those days, of course, more like cream than milk – to the top of the porridge, which he called brochan, though his i
mmediate neighbours, whose great-great-grandfather had immigrated down from Lewis, still called it by that emigrant name lit.
So you mixed the words like that, Archie knew, from the raw material you had though he didn’t know how to do it because he’d never really learnt. Oh, he’d gone to school sure enough – he remembered that, but these were different words and symbols that they had presented to him, in which he was not terribly interested at the time, and more’s the pity, for they would come in really useful now that he was setting off on this great journey and would surely go through places where he would need to know how to mix these words together to get what he wanted, or to find out where he was going, or to ask what things meant, and could mean, or might mean.
He was as ignorant really, he understood, as the celebrated gloic – the fool – in the old stories, who never knew anything about anything, but somehow always triumphed because he ultimately gave the simple, and therefore the right, answer.
Brought before the great king, the gloic was asked by the mighty one how much the moon weighed.
He thought for a moment then said, ‘One hundredweight!’
‘And how do you make that out?’ asked the king.
‘Well, it comes in four quarters,’ said the fool, ‘and everyone knows that four quarters make a hundredweight.’
‘How many stars are there in the sky, then?’ the king asked.
The fool looked up at the starry sky. He imagined the biggest number he could think of, and said ‘Seven million, three hundred thousand, eight hundred and forty-five. Exactly.’ The king looked at him.
‘How do you know?’
‘Well,’ said the fool, ‘I’m fast at counting, and if you think differently, your majesty, just you count them and see how far out I am!’
So finally, the king asked ‘A ghloic – can you tell me where the centre of the earth is?’ The gloic looked down at his bare feet.
Archie and the North Wind Page 4
