Archie and the North Wind (14 page)

The Statue of Liberty as the eagle of freedom. Or was it Gobhlachan, or Ludo, who still stood strong up on the high deck, or old Brawn himself who guided all the ropes through his own leathery hands?

Brawn was still there, as part of the vessel and indeed as part of the ocean and seas through which they sailed. He never left the ship. He didn’t go ashore in Liberia or in Cape Town, nor in Panama nor even in New York.

‘He’s been sailing now for fifty years, non-stop,’ Ludo said. ‘Never takes a day off. Never goes home on leave. Do you know that Brawn has never actually set foot on land since the day Yuri Gagarin died?’

And Brawn himself spoke it all out as they sailed that August evening up past the statue, heading for the St Lawrence. All the rest were down below, sleeping or watching telly. It was a clear, starlit night with New York bearing as many lights as the heavens themselves.

The maiden’s outstretched hand, gloriously lit, reminded Brawn of Michelangelo’s painting, and the fragments, like the helper’s gold and silver and copper emerged.

‘Adam,’ he said. ‘Finger. God.’

And everything was clear.

He was the man who drank the rivers and ate the oxen and listened to the grass. Who descended into the hole and confronted the giant. Who stayed for a year and a day and a year and a day and a year and a day. Who went down into the Gulag to labour thanklessly for the giant. Whose freedom was stolen. Who cut down the trees which instantly grew again, not because he’d refused to give the bannock or cockerel away, but despite it. Because the beast knew he’d grabbed the large bannock with his curse. And he spoke all of that out with clarity as they moved north up past Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod with Boston shining to port in the starry night.

‘But maybe, if truth be told, it was all the other way round,’ Brawn then said. ‘It was impossible for him to kill us all. For where one – or a thousand – or a million – died, another one – or thousand – or million sprung up to take their place. And where is he now, the Beast who reigned over the known world? Gone, like a wisp of smoke. Like a bad smell out of your arsehole. The thing is, Archie, the symphony always wins through in the end. The music always overwhelms the silence.’

And he began to cry. Huge drops of water, like rain on a winter’s day, poured down Brawn’s cheeks as he stood there gazing out at New England beginning now to turn a coppery-silver in the early dawning of the day. And he began to hum, a deep sweet music which neither of them could imagine existed. It was, of course, the first movement from his own great symphony, and as he sang the music Archie could do little else but go over to him and join him in the dance, and so they waltzed along the empty deck of the ship with Ludo up on the bridge looking down on them, smiling, while the stars blinked out and the sun rose, shining all white on the blue sea before them that was the Gulf of Maine, that would take them round
Alba Nuadh
, Nova Scotia, to the mouth of the St Lawrence and the final entrance to the North Pole itself.

6

NORTH STREET IN
TORONTO
turned out to be a figment, naturally. There had, of course, once been a North Street, which became Yonge Street, then Highway
11
, and mythic references declare it to be the longest street in the world. ‘Sure, if you start walking from right there you’ll eventually end up at the North Pole,’ the saying went, from old liars who sat on the pavement chewing tobacco and remembering stories of the gold rush from scores of years ago.

Which was true of anywhere in the world. ‘Just start from here,’ they say in Dingle in the west coast of Ireland, ‘and walk straight, and eventually you’ll emerge at the North Pole itself.’ ‘From here,’ they say in Ankara – ‘actually, to be completely precise about it, from that exact spot over at that side of the broken bridge where the old market starts.’

From Edinburgh, you walk south, down the coastal road through North Berwick and on to Northumberland, or alternatively inland down through these lovely Borders towns – Galashiels, Jedburgh, Hawick and on to Carter Bar, – where you can see the whole of England – and therefore the whole of the world – before you.

Despite Ludo’s assertion, North Street – then Yonge Street, and now Highway
11
– was not one long, flat, straight road to the end of the cowboy film. It may one time have held the saloon and the leaning awnings and the girls in parasols waiting for their men to come back from the Yukon, but now it was a complex shopping centre with malls and escalators and lifts. A world going up-and-down as much as a-long.

No longer could men stand at the end of the long linear street shielding their eyes from the sun and see Ole Smokin’ Joe, or maybe Dingo Johnny Blue, or perhaps even Buckskin Bill himself come straight out of the north, loaded with gold. Now they came texting out of the glass lifts in the sky, laden with virtual gold from the global mines.

But since he was there now, Archie knew fine that this was the final road north. Through the shopping precinct, right along the pedestrianised mall, past the elevators and the glass buildings to the other side, where the coffee-shops and the university quarters began, then through that to the Viscount Park which brought you out on the edge of the northern suburbs, which then led out on to Highway
11
and from there to the very top of the world.

He knew fine other highways did the same – he’d checked them all on the inter-net. Route
37
, known as The Cassiar Highway, which took you from British Columbia to the Far North, or the famous Dempster Highway, which took you from Dawson City in the Yukon Territories right to the Arctic Circle, but these were not his predestined ones. These were other routes, other lovers, other places.

On this road, which he now walked doggedly, emerging from the far side of Viscount Park into the thinning suburbs, his own friends walked with him, not strangers. He could see the huge Ontario prairie before him, the corn blowing in the breeze, the wheat ripening. Gobhlachan and Olga and John the Goblin striding and riding and hirpling up ahead: he could already see Gobhlachan sitting on the next milestone, his legs dangling between the legend ‘The North Pole:
580
kilometers’. John the Goblin stood by the roadside, rolling a fag, and out slightly west of him, right through the rolling prairies he could see Olga Swirszczynska with her string of horses weaving through the high wheat. There had never been any Clearances. Eviction never happened.

Others were on Route
37
and on the Dempster Highway, but here on Highway
11
was where Jewel was, her slim beautiful hands carving out a language of her own. He glanced behind him, where Angelina and Sergio and Ludo and Brawn walked, now wrapping their aquafoil Arctic Peak jackets around them, tightening them against the coming breeze, the sure onslaught which would come from the north once they entered the tundra and the cold wastes where nothing – absolutely nothing – lay between them and eternity.

Brawn, his bald head bent into the wind, passed him, racing onwards.

‘At the very least put gloves on,’ he heard Angelina say to Jewel, as the wind began to bite, and she pulled a pair of beautiful silk gloves out of the side pocket of her rucksack and slipped them on, continuing to gesticulate silently in the now falling snow. The flakes were diamond-shaped and fell in slow-motion swirls. They moved octagonally westwards, like fairies do in the early twilight, pretending not to hurry.

Their feet made no noise and left clear marks in the snow. Each of them gazed ahead at the beautiful whiteness. How could anything be so white? How could white produce so much other whiteness, white upon white upon white? Was there a factory producing whiteness up there, pouring it out from the assembly line, like steel or whisky or newsprint? Were these glittering snowflakes really the tears of God frozen on the descent to earth? This meteorological reality outwith the old smithy. This atmospheric vapour frozen into ice crystals and falling to earth in light white flakes, as the
OED
has it. And what is atmosphere? The gathered breath of all the angels of mercy, as old Angus Gunn of Lochinver once put it. This envelope of gases surrounding the earth, and other planet, or substance, as the
OED
again has it. And vapour? – that moisture or substance diffused or suspended in the air, and so the definitions went on and on and on, one tautology after the other, going round in endless circles mentioning ‘moisture’ and ‘substance’ and ‘air’, in ever-increasing druidic rings, as in the famous Book of Kells.

People passed by, going south – homewards – heads bent deep in their cagoules, burdened with loaded rucksacks. Jeeps and trucks and lorries and even buses roared by, smiling faces peering at them through the glazed windows. Brawn walked first, his head bent, his body straight, his feet sure. Always first, no matter the pace Archie went at, no matter how much Jewel and Angelina ran, no matter even that time Sergio found a pair of abandoned skis by the roadside and launched himself off into northern space at the speed of lightning. Brawn was still there ahead of them, marching onwards steadily, his huge body bent into the wind, cutting a furrow through it like an ancient plough, casting the snow banks to either side. All they had to do was follow Brawn.

One evening Angelina fell, exhausted by it all. She lay back in the snow, like the corpse of Ireland in history, like that time the millions lay in the ditches of Dingle and Kerry and Connemara, hallucinating about that last single potato, that last single wet and withered potato which was of course all rotten and non-existent inside, like the poison of nothingness which they still tried to eat, ravenously, to assuage the great hunger, where clay was the word and clay the flesh.

Somehow Archie managed to get down on his knees beside her and tried foolishly to persuade her to rise when she was beyond all rising. But he placed his arms behind her and raised her up and set her on his shoulders, convinced of the resurrection not just as a theology which would miraculously reassemble the dead from all the known and unknown quarters of the globe – those who had been atomised into a thousand million pieces at Hiroshima along with his grandfather, torn to shreds at Ypres – but as a truth which he could personally witness, if he could bear her long enough, far enough, to that place where all things could be made new. It had always been posssible.

Unexpectedly, there was a roadside motel right in the middle of that wilderness. It shimmered dark out of the white wasteland and they took it to be a mirage, even though Brawn stood in the middle of the whiteout pointing and shouting back at them, ‘Hotel! Fire! Food! Sleep!’

Sure enough, the window panes really rattled, the door really creaked and slammed. Inside, an old Indian woman appeared bearing steaming blankets and jugs of boiling water, guiding them into the Arctic saunas which stretched right across the back of the motel, where clouds of vapour enveloped them.

They all stripped naked and climbed into the perfect luxury of the hot tubs, lying back in ecstasy as the warmth invaded their bodies and made them remember home, and forget Janet Leigh. What a long way to have come to remember home. That time the new pillows came, the brand new duck-feather ones which curved right into the nape of your neck when you lay down and smelt like hay on an autumn morn, like fresh bread out of the oven. That time he – Brawn, that is – played his one tour of the west and walked the sun-scorched pavements of Paris after the garret-rehearsals releasing music, like jazzy pigeons, through the fully-opened windows.

Even the snow seemed warmer when they went back outside, Brawn leading with renewed vigour, as if the silence between the movements had reminded him of his purpose. Occasionally, he glanced back over his shoulder to beckon the others on: the deep cello movement of Archie, Jewel’s strings, Gobhlachan’s percussion, and Olga and John the Goblin and Sergio like flutes between the snowdrifts.

A bald man playing electric pipes stood by the roadside in the far distance. They all expected a lament, of course, but soon the gorgeous sound of marches and strathspeys and reels filled the sub-Arctic air, causing them to increase their speed through the drifts, like men floating across a universe.

‘I lost my breath,’ the bald man shouted to them as they passed by. ‘Don’t have the lungs any more, but this invention is marvellous. Permits me to play the great tunes without drawing breath.’

And he played on. Archie recognised ‘Father John MacMillan of Barra’, ‘Crossing the Minch’, ‘
Dòmhnall Beag an t-Siùcair
’
and ‘The
79
Th’s Farewell to Gibraltar’, amidst the now fading glory.

John the Goblin came hirpling up from behind, tugging a man by the sleeve.

‘Archie!’ he shouted, through the rising wind. ‘Archie!’

Archie glanced round, and beckoned him onwards with his head, without stopping.

‘Archie!’ panted the Goblin, now beside him, ‘this is Joe – Yukon Joe, he calls himself. He got lost in the snow, but I said he could come with us. Will that be okay?’

Archie nodded into the snow and the three trudged on abreast, John the Goblin to his right, Yukon Joe to his left.

John the Goblin pulled a tiny machine out from beneath the sleeve of his jacket.

‘Brand new,’ he whispered to Archie – presumably, so that Yukon Joe on the other side couldn’t hear. But maybe he’d really shouted and the wind had just swallowed the whole world of his words. ‘See – you just press this button here, and the whole universe is at your fingertips. It’s a Berry, an Arcticberry. It works under any conditions.’ And he pushed and flicked several buttons and the tiny touchscreen lit up in an explosion of light. ‘Fifty pounds is all it would cost you. The
RRP
is £
150
, so it’s a real bargain. Tweets and all!’