Archie and the North Wind (15 page)

Yukon Joe leaned over and instantly the Goblin, like a conjurer, made the palmtop disappear. But Yukon Joe now plucked out a beautiful gold pocket watch, which glittered in the blinding whiteness. With one tiny movement of his thumb, he flicked open the watch to reveal the magnificent face, with what looked like hands of pure silver within a circle of hour marks made of rubies and diamonds.

‘My real name is Albert,’ Yukon Joe shouted into the wind. ‘That was before I hit gold. This watch is worth five million dollars, but there is one tragedy in my life – I never learned to read, or write, or tell the time.’ He flashed the gorgeous watch up before Archie’s eyes. ‘So can you tell me the time? What time is it, my friend?’

Archie looked at the watch, which despite all its beauty was completely indecipherable to him. The hour hand appeared to be going forwards without ceasing, the minute hand going backwards, and the second hand swirling round to the point of invisibility. Archie, of course, had heard that magnetic fields sometimes shifted, sending compasses astray, so he connected the disarray to that geophysical reality, though (if truth be known) it was merely that the watch was broken.

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
.
22
Am 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 in 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?