Archie and the North Wind (10 page)

So instead of the building site, he found work in that other great refuge of London: in one of the kitchens of a fancy restaurant fronting on to Soho Square. Here all language was really immaterial, for it was full of all kinds of workers from all parts of the globe who couldn’t verbally understand each other. What a relief to be in this immigrant heaven of illegal workers, skating around the kitchen in the noise of a thousand languages. What matter if all the words were still fuck, which sounded so variable in all these other languages. In actual fact, the word was hardly uttered, except by the loud-mouthed (and better paid) chefs. They ruled the roost like cockerels in a barn, strutting backwards and forwards demanding this, that and the next.

‘Wash that fucking pan, properly! Mix these fucking eggs right! Wipe that pot clean, you bastard! Clear out of my fucking way!’

But their excursions into the kitchen were swift and momentary, and for the most part Archie and his accompanying army of Chinese, Koreans, Latvians, Poles, Nigerians, Kenyans, Moroccans, and God – or Allah – only knows who else, were left to rush around in the Babel of their own languages, washing dishes, scouring pans, wiping floors, peeling potatoes, skinning fish, mashing fruit and a thousand and one other tasks which all served to present a beautiful dinner to these who came though the front door to pay their wages.

And what a crowd they were! The rumour would sweep like a wind though the kitchens: Angelina Jolie is in tonight! Michael Douglas and Zeta! Prince William! Tom Cruise! Sean Connery! Victoria Beckham herself! ‘Not arff,’ they all shouted, and almost stamped on each other to peek at her through the peephole into the restaurant, to discover whether her tits really were as small as they looked in all these magazines.

On their night off, this international kitchen-staff would all meet down the pub, which is where Archie learned that China and Nigeria and all the rest of these nations also had a Gobhlachan who sat astride a cold anvil, or under a withered eucalyptus tree, or behind a bamboo wall, telling tall tales. The sky was made out of rice in China, while in Malaysia the pores of the apple trees were where Knowledge lived, ready to be scattered or sown all over the world. Ododgubu told him that back in his native village in Kenya the Battle of the Birds (
Cath nan Eun
) had taken place: the tikitikikoota, the lightest bird in the universe, had won by harnessing a lift on the tip of the great Breasted-Eagle’s wing. ‘He was furthest away from Grugrasinda, the spirit of the mud.’

Arsenal – Arse’n’All, they all pronounced it – was the local football team which they all cheered whenever it appeared on the small television in the pub. Unlike the Glasgow bar, this place in Soho had remained curiously old-fashioned, without music or video screens, so the clientele imagined they were local and treasured. Few of the kitchen staff knew anything about football and cared even less, but nevertheless fell into the pattern of cheering those distant, wealthy heroes whenever they appeared in their red warrior uniforms on the screen.

As it happened, the kitchen uniform was also red: red overalls for both the men and women, which made them all sweat like pigs but made them appear like bright angels in the background to diners who caught a glimpse of them washing and scouring through the eternally swinging kitchen-doors.

Archie became friendly with a Romanian potato-peeler called Sergio and an Irish woman called Angelina, originally from Derry, who specialised in gutting the fish which came fresh every few hours from the Billingsgate market.

‘Fresh!’ she would guffaw. ‘I’ve seen fresher socks on a tramp after five days!’ And she would explain how the fish had come thousands of miles from the Baltic and the Falklands, frozen – ‘maybe even several times’ – on the way. ‘How we haven’t killed half the diners already is beyond me. But then again, they’re probably impervious to poison by now. As they used to say in the Republic: the rich don’t choke on gold!’

Her raw humour was – of course – a cover for her grief. Her parents and two sisters and brothers had been taken in the Omagh bombing when she was ten.

‘I happened to have gone inside to the toilet and I heard the bomb go off as I sat there, but by the time I managed to pull my pants up and get back outside they were all dead, scattered in bits all over the street.’

She smoked endlessly, despite the smoking ban, out through the kitchen window, claiming that though her body was inside, all the nicotine was outside.

‘After all, I don’t smoke through my arse.’

‘The smoke was almost the worst thing that day,’ she told Archie. ‘All klaxons and sirens and police in uniforms.

‘Relatives took me, but I never took to them. Then sent me to the nuns, though you’d have thought they’d have known better. Ran away when I was fourteen, joined the Kilkenny circus. Well, when I say the Kilkenny circus I don’t mean, of course, that it was a circus from Kilkenny, oh no. Just a small shitty show that was passing through that small shitty town. Not even an elephant. Three small horses they’d picked up in Connemara and a man who juggled his balls all the time. Called himself Marvin the Magnificent. His real name was Bert Slater. He was from Sunderland, which seemed magnificent enough to me. And two Spanish transvestites, Alquino and Alberto, who masqueraded as Alphonse and Ariadne, the king and queen of Spanish acrobatics. God, you should have seen Alberto stuffing cotton wool inside his purple leotard and crushing his balls into a leather pouch strapped tight between his legs. But he did look magnificent, twirling and glittering on that high-bar like the Queen of Sheba, all snaky and sexy. Remarkable what razzle-dazzle can do to your brain.’

Archie knew fine she was talking about him as much as about everything and everyone around her. Like Gobhlachan, for her, the more colourful the story was, the better.

Wasn’t there any kind of bare story, which revealed rather than hid the truth? Fact, not fiction. Standing, not running. Staying not moving. But who was he to judge anyone else’s tale? Didn’t it belong to her, and to her alone? Especially in the telling.

‘The Troubles!’ she would spit out. ‘Now there’s a show for you, to be sure. Appearing tonight at your village, no names, no pack drill – The Troubles! Starring Merlin the Magician, who can make thousands disappear at the drop of a bomb! Johnny the Jolly Juggler, who can spin all the Six Counties and make them appear like thirty-eight! Philomena the Fabulous, who can change Terrorists into Freedom Fighters. And of course the Ringmaster himself, who pretends to be in charge. Oh, and don’t forget the Clown, who can make us all laugh.’

She often cried at that point. Real tears that came unwanted, without performance, without any whip cracked. She didn’t have to say that she was the clown, covering herself with paint and flour and water, walking about with her courageous bravado, in her over-large shoes, her dotted costume, with her bucket and sponge.

On and off, Sergio was her boyfriend, though neither of them ever revealed how they came to be an item, as the saying has it. Maybe it really was as simple as it looked: as if these two young people had bumped into each other in this kitchen, had talked to each other, and became lovers.

Sergio the potato-peeler was a unique breed in the kitchen. While everyone else, Archie and Angelina included, had to be Jacks and Jills of all trades (obviously the restaurant manager, in his weekly briefing, called it ‘multi-skilling’) Sergio was given an exemption. Some said – and this was just a complete pack of lies – that he was given preferential treatment because Luigi (the restaurant manager) fancied him. Others said that he was given the sole job of potato-peeling simply because he was too dull and stupid to do anything else, though still others argued that it was the very opposite, and that no one else in the whole wide world could peel potatoes so sharply, so swiftly, so accurately and so beautifully for so long.

Which certainly looked like the truth, for to watch him for even a few seconds, potato in one hand and screw-knife in the other, was an utter joy. Like watching Einstein himself in that old newsreel, scrawling that stuff,
E
=
M
C
2
, so very rapidly in chalk on to the old blackboard. One moment the potato would be there, all lumpy and dirty-skinned, and the next, with what appeared to be a single flick of his right wrist, the peel was cascading off in exquisite loops and circles, like a ballerina’s leg when she does that swift rolling movement, the
rond de jambe,
which spins against gravity.

‘Hey, they should put him out front of house,’ all the kitchen staff bellowed. ‘What a joy that would be for the diners! An added attraction! A free extra! A bonus! An individual stamp of triumph for this restaurant! Value added!’

Luigi was reluctant at first, but they persisted: ‘Don’t these foreign restaurants have fish tanks next to the dining tables for you to choose which fish you’ll have for your dinner? Go on, sweetie, darling, coochie-coochie-pie.’

And then, appealing to his baser instincts, they all shouted, ‘You can dress him up nice and sweet, and give him a new name. One that rhymes – why not Pedro the Potato-Peeler? Or Sergio the Super-Skin-Slicer?’

Luigi finally agreed, raising Sergio’s basic salary by
10
per cent and putting him on an extra
20
per cent bonus per night, according to the number of extra customers he would attract into the restaurant by sitting next to the window magically rolling the skin off the potatoes.

He dressed him up in yellow, his favourite colour. ‘Always reminds me of the early spring flowers in my native Tuscany,’ he said. But the whole initiative turned out to be a disaster. When it came to the bit, Sergio froze and failed to perform. ‘I was a trussed-up turkey,’ he said to Archie and Angelina, ‘sitting there in that window like some kind of whore. My hand just refused to operate. I did everything I normally did, but my hand refused to move and when it did I managed to cut myself and the blood spurted all over the place and the potato itself flew out of my hand.’

And Angelina, who was there when it had all happened, would add, ‘And landed right down Victoria’s dress, giving her three perfect breasts. The guys at the peephole creamed themselves.’

‘Poor Luigi was almost sacked,’ Sergio would add, ‘but I pleaded for him and took the rap, saying it was all my fault and mistake and that it had been my idea. So they agreed to retain Luigi as long as he took a
10
per cent cut in his salary.’

‘Which he takes off Sergio’s wages, the bastard,’ added Angelina, ‘mincing around saying that it was his fault, who’s never done anyone any harm his whole life.’

Because they only had one night off a week, and worked from morning till night the rest of the time and were given cheap subsidised accommodation in endless small rooms above the restaurant, Archie managed to save quite a bit of money. Unlike some of the others who either drank or gambled, or smoked, or snorted, or injected their wages, Archie was reasonably abstemious, only drinking on his night out with Angelina and Sergio. He was offered cocaine and all the rest of it, of course, but was smart enough to know that those who accepted these offers lasted only a few weeks in the restaurant before they disappeared or were sacked.

If I’m going to get north of that Pole, I can’t succumb to any weakness, he said to himself every day, though he knew fine that weakness was what actually drove him on. But maybe weakness was at the heart of every heroism. What’s refusing a white powder compared to swimming up through the Hudson, or walking barefoot with your feet falling apart with frostbite through the Frozen North, or crawling, like that man in Australia, hrough the red-hot desert for thousands and thousands of miles? Aren’t we all now supposed to sacrifice for the greater cause?  Suffer  the pain of paying off the National Debt and all that stuff. Kill our children again in the trenches.  Pro patria mori, in the fiscal interest.  Drake was in his hammock, and a thousand miles away. ‘Captain art thou sleeping there below, an’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe,’ he chanted to himself, from some dark cave in the back of his memory. Or was that someone else too? Who the hell was it? Abercromby?
Eabarcrombaidh
? No, no. He was some general somewhere else. Montgomery? No – he was much more recent. Corunna? No, that was the battle itself. Sir John Moore, was that it? He was briefly back at school:
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, as his corse to the rampart we hurried; not a soldier discharged his farewell shot, oe’r the grave where our heror was buried.

Heroes. Glorious heroes all. Even Bobby McGee, who thumbed a diesel down. Where did they come from, these long-forgotten snatches, all jumbled up and mixed together, like crosswires, like a software – or was it a hard disk – crash?

‘Never just go by your feelings,’ Gobhlachan had once said to him. ‘Never, ever. Don’t trust them. Trust your mind, or your reason, or your knowledge, or your imagination. Or your God. But don’t trust your feelings. They will lead you astray, lead you to believe that black is white or bad is right.’ And he would then hammer the anvil once more. ‘Know right from wrong and you won’t go astray.’

As if any human was capable of knowing that. And this jaunt to the Arctic? He wasn’t just going by his feelings, was he, driven along like a wisp of straw by the wind, like a sheep by a bad shepherd, or a cow by hunger? To fall into a ditch somewhere like a blade of grass. Trust your mind. Archie laughed. Mind? What mind? Wasn’t he the dunce of the village who once – famously – had said that one and one must make eight because his father and mother had married and then had eight children? And he’d been dead serious, completely believing it because that was all he’d ever known of it, and had no idea why the teacher turned purple with rage and whacked him eight times eight with the belt continuing to bawl at him as he cried, ‘That’s sixty-four, lad! Eight times eight! Sixty-four! Hear me? That’ll teach you to be smart before your superiors, boy.’ Whack, whack, whack. No wonder these lads at Heathrow continually just bawled fuck, fuck, fuck, like magic words to protect themselves. Like an iron hoop or a druidic circle round their hurts.