Archie and the North Wind (18 page)

The job was precisely as Ted Hah described it: Archie stood at the bottom of this huge elevator all day, pressing one button for it to ascend, another for it to descend. Worker after worker, all clad in hoods and helmets with what appeared to be oxygen tubes on their backs and anti-gravitational boots on their feet, climbed in endless streams into the elevator. Once the regulation one hundred and fifty were crammed in, Archie pressed the button –
Ping!
– and away the elevator went, up into the sky. After a while the
Ping!
sound would be heard and Archie would press the other button, and –
Ping!
– in would come one hundred and fifty different workers (at least he thought they were different workers – it was pretty hard to make out beneath all that gear) and stream back down the hill past the endless queue of workers waiting to ascend.

Archie had no notion where they ascended to or where they descended from. No one spoke, for they were all too busy working, ascending and descending.

Maybe they’re going up to heaven, he thought idly, or digging a hole up there in the sky, rather than down there in the earth. Drilling upwards and not downwards. Maybe that’s what all that stuff about north meant. All that stuff about there being no further north once you got to
90
per cent north, only south. Maybe they had to go up to go down. When there was no other way to go, folk would go up.

Maybe they were now actually drilling the heavens themselves. Making a hole in the curtain of the sky so that the very dewdrops of heaven could be harnessed. No wonder Ted Hah wished to call it The Oil of Gladness! But then again, maybe Hah was just mad. Completely mad. Bonkers
A1
. But what do I care? What does it really matter to me? thought Archie. I’m happy enough here, pressing this effing button and –
Ping!
– off they go up into the sky. And then pressing it again and –
Ping!
– back they come, right out of the sky.

That evening, after supper, Ted Hah asked him how he’d gotten on.

‘Excellent,’ said Archie, truthfully. ‘I just did exactly as you said, and it was easy-peasy. Press and whoosh!
Ping!
– up the elevator goes! And press and whoosh!
Ping!
– back down it comes!’ He paused. ‘Bit boring, though.’

Ted Hah smiled. ‘I know, I know. Sorry, but that’s life. Can’t always be songs and roses. Sometimes it just has to be done. The less we know about how sausages are made, the better. As Otto von Bismarck once said, “I am bored; the great things are done. The German Reich is made.” Sometimes the boring jobs have to be done. Press pull off on up down in out… that kind of thing. Necessary though. In fact, essential. Critical. We can’t all be Caesars, crossing Rubicons and making grand speeches for posterity. Somebody needs to sit on the sidewalk to applaud the princess as she goes by. Where there’s real work to be done, son, that’s when we need real workers like you. Those who can stand and wait. Those not seeking any glory for themselves. The button-pushers. The diggers. The shovellers.

‘And remember this,’ he said, drawing himself up to his full six feet, ‘without you, the whole operation would crumble tomorrow. For want of a nail. That kind of stuff. You know the rest.’

‘But a machine could do it,’ protested Archie. ‘Surely it could be mechanised – computerised?’

‘It could – of course it could,’ replied Ted Hah. ‘But that’s not what the ascending and descending men want. Or need. What they need at that critical point of entry and exit is a human face, not a machine. What they need to see before they depart into the skies is the last sight of a real, warm, living human face. To reassure them. And that’s exactly what they also need on their return from the Great Journey – a real, warm, living human face to welcome them back to earth. It may seem just like pressing two buttons to you, son, but in reality it’s the difference between life and death.’ He drew nearer Archie. ‘
Ping!
is the difference between production and nothingness.’ He was now intimately close to him. ‘In fact, Archibald Grierson, you are the difference –
Ping!
– between heaven and hell.’

Archie really wanted to ask something, but was afraid. Where actually do they go to up there in the sky? What are they at? What do they do? These questions seemed so simple as to be foolish. Surely everyone must know already. It must be obvious. Everyone else must just have worked it out. Why was he so stupid? Besides, you simply never just asked the giant – ‘Hey you, you big lump, what have you got there, up at the top of that beanstalk?’

Because you knew fine what he had right up there at the top of the beanstalk: gold! Unless, of course, it was all a diversion and this was just a false tree, a false move, a false sky and the real tree and the real gold was elsewhere, hidden away where you least expected it, right in front of your eyes. Was it all a sham? A charade?And Archie remembered that great story of the emperor’s new clothing, and the whole universe applauding nothing. Maybe that’s what Ted Hah himself meant by that intense phrase he’d used a moment ago, when he’d stared right into his eyes and said: production and nothingness.

Were these really the alternatives? Extracting every last ounce out of the earth, out of Angelina and Brawn and John the Goblin, out of whoever – or nothingness? Archie had cut enough seaweed and stoked Gobhlachan’s peat fire long enough to know that was a lie. You never cut all the seaweed. You never took all the fish. You never burnt the last peat. You never told the final story. No potatoes grew out of unfurrowed ground. Calves died without milk. The Irish starved without food. A people without vision perish.

So he asked the question: ‘What are they doing up there in the sky?’

‘Have you never heard the song?’ Ted Hah replied, in his singsong southern-eastern, Texan-Chinese, clipped drawl, and he sang in a high falsetto voice:

 
‘“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
  Was there a man dismayed?
  Not though the soldiers knew
  Someone had blundered:
  Theirs not to make reply,
  Theirs not to reason why,
  Theirs but to do and die:
  Into the valley of Death
  Rode the six hundred.’

‘You mean you don’t know?’ Archie asked, and Ted looked mournful, as that emperor must have looked that bright morning when the small boy shouted ‘Naked!’.

‘No one knows,’ he replied. ‘At least, not here. We just do our jobs. And fine jobs they are too.’ But then he brightened. ‘But likely they’ll know at
HQ
. Yes,’ he said, brightening even further. ‘Yes, of course they’ll know there.’

‘And where is this
HQ
?’ Archie asked, now actually feeling some pity for poor old Ted Hah. All soundbites and bluster, all hot air and paper.

‘Oh – everywhere,’ said Ted, clearly and simply. ‘They have branches everywhere – Taiwan, Washington, Rio, London, Stockholm – you name it. I’ve been there, of course,’ he said, smiling. ‘Been to them all. Once you get to my level you do get some special treatment. Beautiful cities. Beautiful galleries. Beautiful women. You’ve already seen some of them here – I believe Barbara the San Franciscan gave you your croissants this morning, no?’

‘Yes,’ said Archie. ‘She was lovely. And the croissants were excellent.’

‘Oh, I’m glad you think so – we have them specially flown in from Paris overnight, every night.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Anyway, son, this won’t bring the peats home – that’s what they’d say in your own country, eh?’

Archie laughed.

‘Yep,’ he agreed, ‘that’s certainly what they would say in my own country – this won’t bring the peats home.’ And he returned to his air-conditioned room to rest for the rigours of the next day, pressing more – well, actually, the same – buttons.

Brawn was happy too, having also been given an outdoor job, though much more strenuous than Archie’s. Instead of pressing any buttons, Brawn was part of the team which physically hauled the elevator up into the sky through a complicated system of ropes and harnesses and pulleys and weights and counterweights. To the unskilled observer the job might have appeared all brawn and no brain, but actually it required tremendous dexterity, ingenuity and judgment as well as courage and strength.

It wasn’t merely a matter of dragging and hauling like an ox with a plough, but a job which involved the essential complexities of hydraulic engineering and physics alongside the necessary mathematical calculations. You could hardly just kick a horse and hope he’d head off and bring the peats home for you. You had to nurture him. Become the horse whisperer, the one who could smooth down the fevered flank. The elevator and harnesses were rather like the machinery you see on ski slopes, all wheels and gauges and flanges, except that here in the frozen north eternal vigilance was required to keep the wheels smoothly turning along the frozen wires.

Brawn’s basic job was to keep an eye on the permafrost, to judge where the fatal sticking point might next appear. It required a sharp eye and alacrity and then courage and strength to leap up and unshackle the moving wires from the frost which threatened the constant movement of the elevator up into the sky. More often than not it involved Brawn and his compatriots physically holding the elevator, with the one hundred and fifty workers inside, at bay, while they hacked and tore at the frost which threatened to put the whole operation in jeopardy. Brawn soon took on heroic proportions for his willingness to climb higher, reach out further and move heavier weights than anyone they’d ever known. In fact, because of his speed at reacting to things, his co-workers took to calling him Brains. Maybe it was the permafrost, but he’d given up both smoking and farting. And he never spoke, either brokenly or like liquid poetry. Archie began to call him Fionn.

Angelina and Jewel were instantly offered work as bunny-girls, but they refused, so they were cast into the deepest recesses of the pay-office to fill in endless ledgers about income and expenditure. This accountancy department was run by a Welsh girl, Tanya, who used to be features editor for
Cosmopolitan
.

‘The same reason as everyone else – the money,’ she said.

Surprisingly, they used typewriters instead of computers.

‘Much more trustworthy,’ Ted Hah whispered. ‘Ribbons and fingers. New technology is always breaking down. The cables and
USB
ports hardly last minutes in these frozen wastes.’

Angelina and Jewel were placed at the back desks in the office, where they were engaged in registering all the details of the new workforce: date of birth, place of birth, marital status, insurance numbers and so forth. The full data was gathered somewhere, though no one was really sure where.

‘Accuracy is what matters,’ stressed Tanya. ‘One tiny mistake in the numbers and the whole system falls apart. Profits tumble. Chaos ensues. Disaster follows. Unemployment, failure and poverty – the three enemies you don’t want to be walking the road with.’ She’d learned well enough to say it with a hint of sarcasm.

Angelina and Jewel bent to their work like schoolgirls, their tongues at the edge of their mouths, transferring numbers and names from one ledger to the other. Like Archie’s work, it was more important than it looked.

‘It’s very like my work at
Cosmopolitan
,’ Tanya said. ‘Very much like writing – the craft is in the tiny details, not in the big themes. Sex, for instance: that was just an advert. What really sold was romance.’

Now and again Archie saw the others going about their daily tasks. He’d see Fionn every day, his huge shoulder to the elevator, but the rest of his friends were spread throughout the drilling camp. Sergio ended up peeling tatties at the back of the vast kitchen, where Archie occasionally caught sight of him through the regular circles he made in the frosted glass window. Peering through, they would put their noses together on each side of the freezing glass, mouthing unheard words at each other across the glazed universe.

Ludo had ended up as the personnel officer, housed in an eyrie of an office perched on thick oak beams high above the camp, from where he could see everyone in the whole world. He had a huge chart on his wall which was a perfect reflection of the actual site down below, with all the barracks and beds and sheds marked clearly in blue, and everyone’s names and financial and insurance details equally clearly marked in red.

Like everyone else’s job, it seemed easier than it really was. Ludo’s experience in creating and operating phantom crews at sea was critical, for though everyone had names and jobs, the actual work they did, the tasks involved and their ultimate purpose were a complete mystery to him. But the thing he’d learned at sea was never to ask such unimportant questions: he was there to work efficiently and economically. Maybe they
were
saving the world. His job was to keep a precise documentation of who they were (or sometimes pretended to be), where precisely they slept, where precisely they worked, when precisely they started working and when precisely they finished working. That information, of course, was not used for any underhand or devious purpose – it was merely used to calculate how much time off was due, what their International National Insurance contributions should be, how much tax they should be paying, what Pension Bracket they should be in and so on and so forth.

Data was all.

Death was the difficult thing. For even in this chosen, remote community, and despite Angelina’s miraculous recovery, people died. Daily, new pilgrims arrived. Daily, seeping away hour by hour, others dropped out, departing like Captain Oates into the snow, or hitching their rucksacks on their backs and heading south, or crowding on the back of sledges or jeeps, never to be seen again, or harnessing a horse and heading out into the blizzard, to be gone some time, or tying themselves to skis and moving off, like eagles out of the Brisote wind.