‘No, of course I don’t,’ Archie wanted to say. Except that he did think exactly that: a sad, self-pitying old man. ‘You’re no different from the rest of us, Mr Hah,’ he managed instead. ‘When it comes down it, aren’t we all in the same boat? Even Mrs Hah – Marion, I mean.’
How little room there was for sentiment, and how dangerous it was too – sticky and cloying, gluing you down when you needed to be hard and agile to survive. Good Lord, he thought, what grand speeches we could all make.
He looked around at the sumptuous press room, hiding so much nothingness.
‘Is that the reason for all this palaver then?’ he asked, feeling like that little boy shouting ‘naked’.
But Ted wasn’t thrown. Instead he laughed.
‘No no no. Don’t be so daft… so stupidly romantic. We may have created typing pools and all that shit, but don’t worry son, it really is all hard-headed business. We really are, beyond the pulleys and the elevators, digging right into the core of the earth, and up into the middle of the skies. Don’t be deceived, lad: it really is all about power.
‘Here are the facts, boy, and not the froth: 25 per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves lie right here under the soles of our feet in the Arctic. That’s 375 billion barrels of oil, which I know won’t mean much to you till the last barrel runs out and you’re there freezing or fighting over the last flicker from the last piece of wood in the world. It’s 200 billion dollars a day’s worth, but I won’t screw your head in with all these statistics. Just believe me – it’s real oil for real life or death, to power real cars and real industries back home, in all the pretty little Ashgroves of all the world, so they’re no longer reduced to empty towns with torn billboards flapping in the wind.’
Quite the poet when he got going, was old Ted Hah.
‘So what’s the do with the elevators and the typing pool and all that facade then?’ asked Archie. ‘What’s all that to do with extracting oil and hard cash and all that stuff?’
Ted laughed at him. ‘After walking all that way across the globe, how can you be asking that question? Listen, son,’ and he came back over from the window to sit beside Archie, ‘the only Ashgroves we have left are the ones we create. Do you really think any of that exists any more – Marion, with her polka-dot dress and the knees-ups on the Saturday nights, and the apple pie and all that stuff? Gone with the wind, as a better woman than I said, boy. Who the hell do you think we’re extracting oil for – some imaginary Marion in some imaginary town? Of course not. But it’s the only thing that makes it bearable for any of us, including the ones you’ll never see, sitting in their real boardrooms. They too must dream that it is all for a beautiful Marion somewhere, raising her kids as decent law-abiding citizens. Otherwise, our tears would melt even this frozen waste.’
Another spin, thought Archie. The story about the story. The dream about the dream.
Though he was unsure. Surely postmodernists weren’t ruling the world. The bastards wouldn’t really be that smart. Or if they did, they’d be far too hard-nosed to care about it. These guys know all about the American Dream and would be far too smart to get sucked into that particular myth.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, but Ted Hah just looked straight at him.
‘Oh – it’s not for any romantic, mythic reasons, though. It’s purely a monetary, financial decision. You see, field studies showed these guys that creating exactly the conditions we have here – the typing pool and the ancient elevators and the barber and the air-conditioned rooms and Forces Favourites and all the rest of it – was much more economically productive. In the grand scheme of things, the dream is a very small investment for the huge returns underground. You ought to go there sometime,’ he said, standing up to leave.
Just as he was by the door he paused and turned.
‘Oh, I almost completely forgot what your old pal was saying in that video. You must have understood him. He must have been asking for something.’
Archie was tempted to say that Gobhlachan was asking for a million dollars, or for Ted Hah himself to be exchanged with him, but instead, he just told the truth.
‘No. He wasn’t asking for anything. He was just telling a story.’
‘A story?’ said Ted Hah. ‘What kind of story?’
‘A story about a balloon,’ said Archie. ‘How Hector made a balloon in the shape of a cow, and then floated it across the sky.’
‘So what was the message?’ asked Ted Hah. ‘What was the subtext?’
‘Oh – just that things can change. Things can be transformed. A simple paper bag, for instance, can become a cow.’
‘That you can build a new world out of fragments?’ asked Ted. ‘That we can survive on wind and air? On zero energy, son?’
And he opened the door and went out into the snow.
8
WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, Gobhlachan and Olga and Yukon Joe were released by the kidnappers, dispatched downhill on a reindeer-driven sledge with a note attached to an the antler.
‘Sorry, mistake,’ the note said; with a handwritten scrawl on the other side saying, ‘These three people are not of the earth, so we have decided to release them. But beware. We will be back for you real guys.’
It was unsigned.
Ted Hah and some of the others in senior personnel took Gobhlachan and Olga and Yukon Joe to the debriefing station, where they were given blankets, cocoa and some apple pie and some severe questioning by a tall thin man wearing sunglasses. Ted Hah had requested that Archie be brought in as interpreter, but despite all the sunglass-man’s probing questions, all three didn’t give much away.
‘Where were you when you were kidnapped?’ he asked.
‘In the toilet,’ all three of them answered (in separate sessions).
‘Where did they take you?’
‘Out into the snow?’
‘What did they look like?’
‘They looked like kidnappers.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, they rushed in with balaclavas and guns and pushed us out.’
‘Did they have beards?’
‘Yes.’
‘Terrorist beards?’
‘No. Just little safe ones. Like grandfather’s.’
‘Did they say anything?’
‘Nothing we could understand.’
‘What did they wear?’
‘Black things?’
‘Did they smell?’
‘Yes,’ said Gobhlachan. ‘They smelt of fire.’ But this was only because all of his taste buds were completely destroyed over those years sitting next to a burning kiln.
‘No,’ said Olga, because they didn’t smell of horses.
‘Don’t know,’ said Yukon Joe, because he couldn’t really decide which was the best answer.
The sunglassed man left none the wiser, but nevertheless content, for he had a full file.
Later on that night, however, Gobhlachan and Olga and Yukon Joe revealed all to Archie.
‘They were fairies,’ said Gobhlachan, ‘who had travelled from the west on wisps of straw. The mistake we all made was to have left that west window open. I should have known better – that’s always where the host comes from. They took us with them on the back of the straw and we travelled forever through the snow, until it turned green. Their balaclavas were made of the feathers of blackbirds and their guns out of the darkened bones of murderers. They were confused by our sacred language, which, as you know, has special words to remove the tar from feathers and the smior – the essence – out of the bones. They were like naked men before us…’
‘And not a pretty sight,’ added Olga.
‘…unable to do anything to us, and of course when daylight came they had to release us, for their feathers began to moult and their guns to decay.’
Yukon Joe, with his glass eye and monocle, sagely agreed with Gobhlachan’s version of events, adding only, ‘The real miracle was that they never discovered my watch. You see, I’d hidd
en it behind my glass eye, and even though it glinted under their stare, I don’t think they ever suspected. They must have thought it was just some kind of spectacular removable eye, valuable only to its owner. For a while I thought they were going to remove my eye to find the treasure that was behind it, but they didn’t. On the other hand,’ he added, buffing up the gold with a spit and his sleeve, ‘they may already have had enough gold in that dark lair of theirs.’
From then on, it seemed like the beginning of the end of the story. Gobhlachan was the first to go, maybe actually frightened by the kidnappers, despite his long experience and his sacred language. One night, late on, just when the Arctic daylight was marrying the Arctic moonlight, he just picked up his anvil and left, the cold iron glinting beneath the infinite starry sky.
Jewel saw him, and followed, signalling with her arms that she would carry the anvil for him, which she duly did, across tundra and desert, over ocean and sea, through rivers and rapids, up mountains and down screes.
Angelina and Sergio followed her footsteps, crouching down to distinguish her footprints and the scratches of the trailing anvil from the millions of other marks in the depths of the forests or by the drying riverbeds.
‘There it is,’ they would exclaim when their probing fingers finally detected the sharp indentation of the horn or the more rounded shape of the heel, and they would rise and follow the direction of the trail. ‘This way.’
Yukon Joe accompanied them, forever flashing his pocket watch and asking, ‘What time is it?’, nevertheless always coming to their rescue by making all the native tribes across the world believe that he was willing to trade in his precious watch for a loaf of bread, or a jug of water, or a finnesko of wine; having managed to do the deal, then always making good his escape through the woods or trees, bearing Angelina under one arm and the anvil under the other, always following Jewel and Sergio’s cosmic trail to Gobhlachan.
The others left together late one night, to see Ted Hah in his lonesome cabin on the edge of the drilling-camp. They found him sitting on an upturned log by the wood fire, melancholically drinking bourbon.
‘Come on in. Come on away in,’ he shouted, but Archie and Brawn and Ludo and John Goblin stood at the door first reciting the Hogmanay song: ‘We’ve come tonight to this land to renew for you the year… Open the door and let us in…’
‘Well, howdy, folks – this is a nice surprise,’ said Ted Hah, rising to go over to the cabinet, where the crystal glasses sat beside a globe of the world. He took out four extra glasses and filled each one of them with bourbon.
‘Cheers!’ they all said together, and drank, solemnly and silently.
‘Well,’ said John the Goblin, ‘that’s it, then. Thanks very much for the work. I enjoyed it. And I made a profit too.’ He smacked the back pocket of his trousers. Brawn and Ludo remained quiet.
‘Well,’ Archie said, ‘it’s always like this, isn’t it? When it comes to the end, you never know what to say.’
‘Nothing. Say nothing,’ Ted said, ‘because you’ve said it all already.’ He came across to each of them, in turn, and shook their hands, firmly and warmly. ‘But could you guys just do me one great favour before you go. You see, my grandmamma was from Scotland, and I have a very warm and distant memory of us all gathering round the fire at Hogmanay to sing the great farewell song. Would you sing it for me?’
And Brawn began, in that deep baritone voice of his, right out of the drilled centre of the earth, singing: ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, should auld acquaintance be forgot for the sake of auld lang syne.’ And they all joined hands and moved in and out singing the great universal chorus: ‘For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, we’ll tak’ a cup o kindness yet, for the sake of auld lang syne.’
And they began to drift out of the house, Brawn followed by Archie, followed by John the Goblin and Ludo, for the great journey back home.
And what a journey it was! Palaces where silken girls brought sherbet, hostile cities, dirty villages; travelling at night, sleeping in snatches, and the fear that this was all folly. Down and down, down below the snow line they reached a watermill and met a preacher who told them that the hole above the North Pole was, in actual fact, a blessing and not a curse.
‘Have you forgotten Jacob’s story already? See – there’s the ladder. Angels ascending and descending for all of you. All you have to do is jump on to the ladder. Anytime, anyplace. Don’t you know the story of the Tower of Babel? Don’t you know the story of Stephen, and how he looked up to heaven as they stoned him, where he saw the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God the Father? Can’t you see,’ said the preacher, ‘that the hole is actually the door? Go back, like the leper, to tell about the beginning of wisdom.’
‘All that was a long time ago,’ said Archie. ‘Of course, I’ve forgotten some of the details, and poor Gobhlachan and Olga and John the Goblin are now too long gone to verify the truth of it all.’
‘So how and when did you actually get back home then?’ he was asked.
And old Archie replied, ‘As with all endings, it happened much quicker than any of us thought. Yukon Joe we left in Toronto. Brawn stopped off at Vladivostok on the way home. We dropped Ludo off at Marseilles, where we’d found him. We then had three wild nights of partying in London with Angelina and Sergio, where we left them and a beautiful Indian meal at the Ashoka in Glasgow with Jewel before returning back home.’
‘And then? And then?’ he was always asked.
‘Ah, and then,’ he would say, ‘we all just got the ferry and the bus home – Gobhlachan sitting up there at the front, forever chatting to the driver. Olga forever staring out the window, just in case her horses turned up. And John the Goblin trying to cut some deals with the students up the back of the bus.’
‘And you? What about you?’ we would ask.
‘Ah, me,’ he would say, slowly. ‘I came back as I left. Came off the bus at the end of the village, still carrying my battered brown suitcase, and walked right down through the village. “There he is!” you could hear them cry. “Archie! Old Archie! Well, would you believe it.” And when I came back home it was all exactly as I left it. Believe it or not, Bella was still curled up there on the sofa, cutting her nails, one huge, hardened slice after another flying across the kitchen. And the son was still sitting there too, tapping the remote control, as if some mystery would suddenly illuminate itself on the screen.’
He lived to a ripe old age, did Archie. The north wind blew and never bothered him one little bit. The earth gave way, and the mountains fell into the heart of the sea, and all Archie said was, ‘Well, I told you so. But you wouldn’t believe me. Nor would you believe Gobhlachan or anyone else before me.’
Archie increasingly spent time with his old friends. On windless, moonlit nights, he could be heard talking to Gobhlachan down by the disused smithy, laughing above the sound of the hammer on the anvil. On warm spring nights, when Olga’s horses could be heard neighing down on the machair, Archie could be seen astride a wooden pole clopping across the sand. On warm summer nights, when you passed the old well in the centre of the village, sometimes you would hear the whispering sound of voices – John the Goblin and Archie, cutting the next deal.
But those stormy winter nights when the huge wind comes howling straight down from the north were best. Then you could hear them all: Brawn’s deep baritone voice, Ludo sailing after him, Jewel and Sergio and Angelina and Yukon Joe, and even Ted Hah, laughing, like a wind which can not be discovered, or covered, like a wind which would uproot the earth, were it not held down by gravity, or reason, or complete lack of faith and imagination.
And I departed from them and they gave me a wedge of butter on a flame and paper shoes and they sent me away with the bullet from a big gun on a long glassy road till they left me sitting here.
That’s how I heard it. And I left them there.
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Archie and the North Wind Page 15
