Brèagha ach gun fheum – beautiful, but useless, as Gobhlachan might have put it – and as he often did when presented with a gashed plough, or a cracked cart, or a splintered shoe.
Gobhlachan had once repaired broken things, thought Archie. Once upon a time. A long, long time ago, which seemed like an hour ago, a second ago, as on Yukon Joe’s watch. When time had travelled backwards, not forwards. Was circular, not linear. Was he too merely going round in circles? Would he, in a minute, finally discover the North Pole, and actually only find Gobhlachan sitting there on a freezing anvil under a flag, hammering away? Were these folk with him mere hallucinations, mere memories or dreams? Brawn, striding ever onwards, up ahead. John the Goblin hirpling to his right, Yukon Joe flashing his iridescent watch to his left. Angelina over his shoulders. Sergio and Jewel and Ludo plodding on behind. Was he going crazy?
Really crazy, he meant. Not that metaphysic craziness connected to memory and imagination, but real woo-woo-wah stuff, real crying in the wind stuff, the bleating and empty chaos, the dissolution of all things, despair. The bedside clock clicking at 3.22Am time. And he would then plunge into the melting waters, drown in a sea of floating ice, having mistaken it for the imagined green lawn of Chelsea, where he’d once walked through Hyde Park on his way to the only football international he’d ever attended, that time Scotland beat England 3–2 with Jim Baxter scoring the winning goal, from a penalty, if memory still served him right.
‘There’s a band of gold round them islands,’ Gobhlachan used to say, referring to the fishing-grounds. ‘A band of gold plundered by pirates from the east,’ he would then add, referring to the east coast trawlers which had sailed in and swept all the fish in the world away. Always how they came, the pirates – from the east. The raiders from the far side. From some other place. From the far side of the island. From the other side of the mountain. From outside the song. From the story which didn’t belong to us.
‘All the gold is gone too,’ he heard Yukon Joe say. ‘The only gold that is now left is black. Black gold.’
And maybe that’s when it began to dawn on Archie that the hole to the north was connected to oil. Was an oil hole. A black hole. A golden hole. Maybe too that was the moment when that strange word ‘ozone’ came to him. The hole in the ozone layer. Maybe, he thought, the hole is actually up above, in the sky, and not down below, in the earth or snow?
So he began looking upwards, but of course the sky was as white as the earth beneath him.
What if the north wind came from out of a hole in the sky and not out of a hole in the earth? How could he then fling his jacket over it and cover it, as in the old story? Maybe it was out of his reach. Too high up for him. Too far away from him. Invisible and unattainable. In light inaccessible, hid from his eyes. And even if he were to fling his jacket so high, how could it ever cover a hole so big, and what would it hold on to anyhow? He could hardly expect a jacket peg or a coat hanger to emerge right out of the sky, could he? Oh to believe in the ram, even like Jacob, the deceiver. There’s the ladder. Reach out. One. Two. Jump. The great leap of faith. A giant step for…
In the old story, you see, Archie – tired of the incessant north wind – sought to extinguish it. So he left home and travelled for several days and finally found the wind whistling out of a small hole just to the north of the North Pole. So Archie did the sensible thing: he flung his jacket over the hole, saying to himself, ‘That’ll sort that!’
And he tramped back home, telling all the world that he’d fixed the north wind forever. And he lay that night in his bed listening to the utter silence until he fell asleep. And when he woke in the morning there it was again: that thin low whistle, coming, without any doubt, from the north.
So his neighbours all laughed and scorned him and mocked him: ‘Amadain – Fool,’ they called out to him, ‘I thought you said you fixed that north wind? Going around here boasting how you’d covered it with your Harris Tweed Jacket! What’s that then?’ and they all cocked their ears theatrically, as if they needed to do that to hear a wind which was roaring down on them, right from the bitter frozen north.
‘Ah but,’ said Archie, smartly, ‘you see, it was only an old jacket I had with me, and it had a few holes in it, and that will be what the wind is seeping through. If only I’d taken a new jacket with me – or even a coat,’ he would say, ‘that would really have done the trick. That would really have sorted it out. A brand new jacket or a great big overcoat. That’s what I ought to have had!’
And they were silenced by his audacity.
But now, here – now that it was real – Archie really feared. He knew fine that not even his aquafoil Arctic Peak jacket would be sufficient. Even if he found the hole and it was small enough, he knew fine that before he could even turn away his aquafoil Arctic Peak jacket (with all its quadruple-insulation and five-fold anti-freeze polytetrafluoroethylene lining) would be blown to kingdom come, become yet another miniscule piece of non-biodegradable rubbish floating about the universe.
Myth was one thing, he knew, this was another. Maybe Brawn had the answer. He might – he surely would – know what to do.
Archie shouted, but Brawn marched relentlessly onwards, without even turning his head. There was no point, he knew, in asking John the Goblin or Yukon Joe: all they would do would likely be to try and sell him his own jacket.
So he stopped and waited, till Sergio and Ludo and Jewel caught up with him, their heads buried deep inside their hoods, bent into the wind. Try as he might, Archie just couldn’t make out what Sergio and Ludo were saying, or trying to say, but Jewel’s gloved hands moved in the blizzard, slicing this way and that, pushing snowflakes up, pressing floating drifts down.
‘Don’t worry,’ she was saying, in her magic language. ‘You just have to believe the old proverb which says that a bird’s feathers grow as needed. If you’ll need a jacket, you’ll have a jacket, if you need a greatcoat, a greatcoat will be provided.’
Each moment has its solution, Archie thought. Is that what she’s saying? Nuair a thig latha, thig comhairle – when the moment comes, counsel will come – as Gobhlachan never tired of saying. Foolishness, others said. Lack of foresight. Laziness. Stupidity. Trusting in Providence. The something-will-turn-up philosophy, as if you could feed off hot air and vague hopes. As if magic genies really existed, ready to pop out at any moment to fix your own disastrous dreams.
There is no magic jacket, Archie thought to himself, still pushing onwards. No ram will appear out of the thickets of this whiteout. No magic lamp. No magic wand. No magic feather. No talking cow which will lead me to the cave. No dragon’s extracted teeth which will turn into an army of soldiers for me. Salvation from the outside. Miracle, not endeavour. Providence, not labour. Law. Grace.
How much the cèilidh house had been the inter-net cafe of the time. Walking to Gobhlachan’s forge to log-on to the stories. Click Gobhlachan stories. And news and speculation. The similarity between fact and fiction, between story and science. And how they would all sit round the open terminal of the kiln fire, trawling through the myths, that amazing website sourced in Gobhlachan’s head. In Gobhlachan’s heart. Though, of course, he too was just trawling from ancient resources, harnessing the past.
And here Archie was now, nearing the source of the web, trampling through the snow to reach the invisible, to see if he could catch a glimpse of that spider who wove the web, silently moving backwards and forwards above the ether, leaving that thin trail behind him which then sparkled beautifully in the sun as if it had been woven for pure pleasure, when in reality it was but the arachnidan trace simply designed to capture insects as food. Though even that was miraculous, Archie thought. Imagine. That a spider could invent that.
He felt a pair of freezing-cold hands slip inside his gloves next to his own. Jewel entwined her fingers round his, taking him literally by the hands and leading him gently onwards, to her vision of God. This was no Eve, Archie knew, for despite all that other stuff about Satan appearing i
n the guise of light, and about Eve the Temptress – that silky, slinking, sensuous, sexy serpent – this Jewel was pure light, ‘as pure as the light of the Gospel itself’, as Gobhlachan used to say when he wanted to emphasise the complete truth of any tale.
And all of a sudden, there it was, glittering ahead. The snow had stopped and the stars shone in all their glory in the endless sky above and Archie could see the perfect arc of the North Pole, just as it had always appeared in pictures, blue and limpid and translucent, and as perfectly shaped as in the globe he’d once seen hidden inside the glass-fronted book cabinet in the teacher’s study.
And then, out of the perfect silence, the noise started. The noise of motor engines and vehicles and machinery, up ahead, in this blue heaven. A vast convoy of cranes moved from left to right, followed by hundreds of articulated lorries on caterpillar tracks and thousands upon thousands of men driving backwards and forwards hauling all the world’s machinery behind them: cogs and chains and cables and pistons and tubes and hydraulics and all the rest of the magic equipment which drills down into the heart of the earth – even the frozen earth – to draw up the liquid oil.
A man with the facial features of a Chinese, but with a slow Texan drawl, came up to Archie, doffed his cowboy hat and said, ‘Howdy.’ Really. He smiled broadly, extending a large, ungloved hand. ‘Welcome boys,’ he said to Archie and John the Goblin and Yukon Joe and Sergio and Ludo and Brawn and, smartly noticing that Jewel, despite her aquafoil Arctic Peak jacket, was a woman, lowered his hat even further, adding, ‘And you too, Maaam. There’s no discrimination going on up here, Maam. No siree.’
He whistled sharply and loudly and a jeep bearing two medics raced across the snow. ‘Take that poor soul straight up to Med HQ.’ The Chinese-Texan indicated the almost frozen Angelina, still borne like a lamb across Archie’s bowed shoulders. ‘She’ll be right as right in no time.’
And off the medics sped with her, past the canteen and the sleeping-sheds.
‘No one’s ever died up here,’ he said, ‘and we don’t intend to start that bad habit right now. ‘My name’s Ted,’ he said, ‘and if it’s work you want, you’ve come to the right man, at the right time, in the right place. We start drilling in a month’s time and we can use as many hands as we can get. All hands to the deck, as they say. Many hands make light work, as others say. And that’s why we’re here – literally to make lights work! Without us, the lights would go out all over the world. Hah hah.’
And that’s what he really said – not a laughing sound, or even a kind of hah-hah-noise, but actually and literally, ‘Hah hah.’
‘That’s why they call me Ted Hah,’ he said without smiling, ‘though my mother really was Chinese. Her name was Li Ha. Hah hah.’
And he really laughed, even though it seemed well rehearsed to Archie.
He led them to their sleeping quarters, showing them each into their own room.
‘Comfort, folks,’ he said, ‘that’s what it’s all about. No crowded quarters here, folks. This is my motto: a bad sleep and work slips; a good sleep and work shifts. Compressed sleepers make crushed workers. We want you to be clean and free. Everyone with his and her own room. Even scented and with fresh flowers daily,’ he said, smelling the sweet air. ‘The flowers are flown in from California each morning.’
As he lay in his warm bed that night, Archie was aware of the dream. How comfortable this bed was. This was life, life in all its fullness. There was nothing like it. He would forsake the whole world for it. The laundered sheets smelt of pine.
Strange, how we always want to cage nature.
He could hear the sound of the drills going through the night. He had signed no contract, so why should he stay? He could depart – take his leave, as they put it in the old stories – in the morning. Surely he wouldn’t stay just for the comfort and warmth? He would tear the world for what? For central heating. For a car under his backside, a sweet little bedside lamp, a washing machine for his wife’s stockings?
But that was only a tiny part of it. The bourgeois conscience which had the luxury of choice. What about the poor of the world who had no choice? Was there any truth in the claim that they too were dependent on oil, upon the crumbs of the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table? Would the poor man starve twice over if the fat man grew lean?
But he knew that had nothing to do with it. The poor can do what they like. Let them starve twenty times over, as long as the lights glitter in Paris. No. They would ask him to sign a work contract in the morning, not for the sake of the poor, but for the sake of the rich. He would go a-drilling not for Africa’s sake, but for America’s. For his own sake. He would help find oil which would make gasoline for cars, and which would heat houses in Times Square. And Tiananmen Square. And every other square and hovel in the developed and undeveloped world.
And Archie’s brief contribution to it wouldn’t affect things that much: he would hardly make a wick for a lamp, when you thought about it. The harm – could you really call it destruction? – wouldn’t amount to much, after all. For who, or what, was he anyway, in the large scale of things? One small, weak man – one little Archie, even if he had Brawn and Sergio and John Goblin and all the others at his shoulders.
He walked over towards the window. He spread the curtains and looked out at the heavens. A large, white bear stood yards away, looking at him. An Arctic hare sat in the snow a little distance behind the bear. All the stars that ever existed blinked above. He thought he saw a row of penguins marching past till he remembered that was at the other end, to the south, at the different Arctic called the Antarctic. Just as they call South Uist one island and North Uist another.
Maybe the two had met. Maybe both polar ice caps had now melted and all was one. Norway without the fjords. The magnetic fields had shifted and all was now north, or south, or neither.
How vast it all was out there. How wide and white and long. Eternal even – one endless whiteness after the other. In such immensity, surely a little, or even a lot of drilling would do very little damage. A drop in the ocean really. Only the removal of a single star from the vast and limitless sky. Only the taking of a single flower from the machair, the removal of a single shell from the shore, the subtraction of a solitary letter from the cosmic alphabet. When the village postie took a notion for strong drink, he too would just dump the letters and parcels under the nearest pile of stones. Nobody really missed them. And if anybody wanted them, they knew where to find them.
Archie could hear Brawn rumbling in the room next door. Apart from that, all was silence. The machinery had been set for the night and work was not scheduled to really begin till tomorrow. That much he’d learned from Ted Hah, who’d personally come round the sleeping quarters at bedtime, like Florence Nightingale: ‘The show starts tomorrow. Night-night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bugs bite!’ And off he went down the long hall, repeating his soothing words like a benediction.
The room was centrally heated and a brand new pair of pyjamas had been laid out for Archie on the heated rail beside his dressing cabinet. He was now still in his pyjamas, gazing out at the white world. Far to the north he could see the Pole Star itself, winking. False stars were stuck to the wall and ceiling which then illuminated for a while once you turned the light off.
Archie climbed back into bed and put the light out. The imitation stars were shining on the ceiling: stars with five points and crescent moons, all in different colours. An orange moon and a yellow one. A red one and a blue one. The Star of David. Archie lay back, his head on the downy pillow. Was this it – the source of the wind, the lion’s den, the giant’s awesome abode? In the warmth, beneath false stars?
How do you behave in the lion’s den, he wondered? What do you do at the giant’s table?
How do you sleep in the dragon’s bed? Do you pretend? All the images – all the stories he’d ever heard – raced though his brain in kaleidoscopic sequence: George and the Dragon, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Do you slay, or pray, or run?
He had no sword. Had he faith? Could he run?
He was tired. And old. And lazy. And it was unfair to rely upon his friends.
Be wily, he told himself. That was always the chief virtue. The thing that was praised. Craftiness. The greatest skill. Courage. Courage certainly, but cunning was more important. Never attack a giant head on. You stood no chance. Always find his weak spot, his Achilles heel – wasn’t that the way they put it? Achilles, who found the tiny spot which made the invincible giant mortal. Right behind his ankle. The monster’s hidden weak spot. For every monster had a weak spot. Sex. Greed. Ambition. Pride. Sloth.
There was a king over Èirinn once, who was named King Cruachan, and he had a son who was called Connal MacRigh Cruachan. The mother of Connal died, and his father married another woman. She was for killing Connal, so that the kingdom might belong to her own posterity.
He had a foster mother, and so Connal went to live in the home of his foster mother. He and his eldest brother were right fond of each other, and the foster mother was vexed because Connal was so fond of her big son.
There was a bishop in the place, and he died. And he desired that his gold and silver should be placed along with him in the grave. Connal was at the bishop’s burial, and he saw a great big bag of gold being placed at the bishop’s head and a great big bag of silver at his feet, in the grave. Connal said to his five foster brothers that they would go in search of the bishop’s gold, and when they reached the grave Connal asked them which they would rather – go down into the grave or hold up the flagstone.
Archie and the North Wind Page 11
