Archie and the North Wind (6 page)

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 immediate 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.

‘Why, right here, just where I’m standing, your majesty. Right here under my feet.’

All that, and so much more, was inside Archie’s head, though he was of course very anxious whether any of that stuff would be any good whatsoever to him once he set out on his great adventure, out there into the big wide world. At the bottom of the sea, the boat sank. While everyone sailed, the boat sank. While they were having their tea. An old woman looked up, a scone in her mouth, and seaweed sailed past the window. Fish, as in an aquarium, floated outside the glass. Bodies floated upwards, till he reached the bottom of the sea where he sat, whistling. But no one drowned as they blogged, imagining that they were on board a submarine. No one noticed that the hatches were all open, ready to swallow them.

But you’re mature, he would tell himself, bubbling underwater. You’ve nothing to be afraid of. But he knew enough about dragons and monsters and devils to know otherwise. Were Gobhlachan’s wild stories really stories? Were they true somewhere else, as in those olden books he often remembered where maps were drawn with big capital letters marking
DANGEROUS SWAMPS HERE
And
MONSTERS
And
THE LAIRS OF DRAGONS
?

Of course, no monster or dragon would be idiotic enough to stick such huge warning signs up, he was sure of that. In this coalition age, ideology was nameless. No one had the guts to say they really despised the poor.

More likely, if the Bible were true, and he had no reason to doubt it, danger would come unmarked, temptation would come glistening, death would come not in the form of an ugly serpent but – what was it said again? – in the guise of light.

COME IN HERE,
it would say in sparkling lights.
SEXUAL THRILLS A-PLENTY,
the signs in London had said.
GOOD GIRLS, CLEAN GIRLS. ASIAN. SOUTH AMERICAN. EAST EUROPEAN. MCDONALD’S – THE FINEST BURGERS IN THE WORLD. ROLEX. CHRYSLER. MARLBORO – THE GENTLEMAN’S CHOICE. CHEQUES CASHED. FREE BANKING. CHANGE THAT WORKS FOR YOU. EIN VOLK, EIN REICH, EIN FÜHRER. THAT’LL DO NICELY.

What a manifesto! The water-horse was always beautiful and sleek until it rushed with you, mane flying and nostrils on fire, beneath the ocean. The gorgeous red-haired woman who lay beside you in bed had her claws in your eyes before sunrise. The cheery small green man who piped you into the knoll, then kept you locked there forever, trapped in an endless dance. Some forbidden joy always led you astray.