Archie and the North Wind (20 page)

‘Are you alone?’ he asked Donald.

‘Yes.’

‘Where’s your wife?’

‘She’s gone where she needn’t have troubled to go, to see if she can find the cow. I’m sure you’ve heard about the cow already.’

‘Indeed I have. It’s a terrible business.’

‘Well, I never heard of such a thing,’ said Donald, ‘and may it be long before I hear the like of it again as long as I keep my sight and hearing. It was bad enough to hear about, let alone to witness.’

‘Indeed it was; the world is surely changing.’

‘It certainly is; we never heard the like of this.’

‘Well, a thick mist has come down,’ said Hector, ‘and you’d better go to look for your wife, or else if she starts flying off it will be worse for you than the cow was.’

‘Providence protect me, I was never in such a fix. Will you stay in the house along with the children for a while?’

All the press corps had now gone, bored if not baffled by Gaelic. Only Ted Hah and Archie remained, Archie at the heart of the story, Ted Hah gazing at the screen as if it contained some secret clue. Gobhlachan continued, the gun still hanging at his head, but the kidnappers arm evidently tiring and the gun beginning to droop. Staring tight at the video lens as he continued his tale:

‘So Donald went out and stood on the top of the mound, and began to shout for his wife,’ Donald shouted, ‘
HO, ISABEL
!’ (and here the kidnappers stepped ever-so-slightly back) ‘
ARE YOU THERE, ISABEL? HO, ISABEL
!’

The gloomy crags opposite him echoed back
HO, ISABEL
! as loud as himself.

‘God help me with my wife lost and my cow in the sky and the night falling,’ said Donald.

He went back to see if he could find anyone to send to look for his wife. When he got back his cow had come home by herself, and was standing at the door chewing her cud. Donald looked at her.

‘Here you are, you witch,’ he said, ‘sniffling at the door, but by your nose you’ll get no further inside. God between me and you!’ he said, going past her into the house. His wife was sitting there, having already come home.

‘The cow has come back,’ she said.

‘Let the cow come or go,’ said Donald, ‘but you keep away from her. Don’t go near her.’

His wife did not dare go near the cow.

As soon as day dawned, Donald went over to the farm to see his master. He went into the byre where the servants were milking the cows. He asked them if his master had got up, and they said he had, and that he was in the big house.

‘Hello,’ said Corrie, the master. ‘Is something wrong with you today that you’ve come here so early?’

‘Yes, indeed there is,’ said Donald.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Didn’t my cow fly off into the sky last night? I’m sure you’ve heard about it now. I’ve come over to ask you to shoot her, if she can be shot – I don’t know – if she can’t be shot, we must think of some other way to destroy her.’

‘Tut, tut,’ said Corrie, ‘you’d better put that nonsense out of your head. Go home and take care of the cow.’

‘Take care of the cow!’ replied Donald, angrily. ‘Not another drop of that creature’s milk will go into my children’s mouths. I’ll put an end to her at once. If lead won’t kill her, something else will. She’s not going to be flying over the world like that!’

When Corrie saw that nothing could put this idea out of Donald’s head he said, ‘Well, bring her over to the farm, and I’ll give you another cow in exchange.’

‘Well,’ said Donald, ‘that’s very good of you; I don’t know what she’ll do for you, unless you fatten her and send her to Glasgow around Hallowe’en. That’s if she can be fattened. I’m told that the people of Glasgow will eat anything. Likely they’ll even eat the Evil One!’

So Corrie gave Donald as good a cow as he had in his fold in exchange for Donald’s cow. And Donald believed ever afterwards that his own cow had flown in the sky!

At that point, the video did the usual sizzling and crackling and ceased in a blur of horizontal lines.

Ted Hah switched it off and he and Archie sat in the great silence.

‘Well,’ said Ted Hah, ‘whadya make of that?’

Archie shrugged. ‘ Hard to say. Could mean anything. Could mean a thousand and one things.’

‘But they’re in danger,’ said Hah, standing up. ‘Mortal danger. These men holding them are animals. We all know that.’ He walked towards Archie. ‘Friend of yours, ain’t he?’ he asked nonchalantly.

‘Yes, yes. A great friend of mine,’ said Archie. ‘Came here with me. We go back a long way.’

Ted Hah sat down beside Archie. Wearily, with a terrible sigh, as if all the world’s burdens were on his shoulders.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘it gets kind o’ lonesome out here. Day after day, year after year, pushing the very limits. Hoping for that great strike. The oil of gladness! Huh!’

He laughed quietly – a warm, human laugh. A true lower-case laugh. ‘I miss the wife and kids, son. I miss them like an ache wider than even that hole in the ozone layer. You know, sometimes I think it’s actually the same hole. A great void. Hey, you probably think I’m going crazy,’ he stood up again, ‘because I’m not.’

He looked dolefully down at Archie.

‘Right now I’m saner than I’ve ever been.’

He walked over to the window, from where you could see the entire drilling-operation. ‘Vermont is where we stayed at first. Pretty little town called Ashgrove. Bets are you’ll have never heard of it. No one has. It’s just one of those run-of-the-mill American towns. Millions of them. Or used to be.’

He slapped his hands together, laughing that natural lower-case smile again. ‘May the Good Lord pity me, I’m already beginning to sound like that guy in the movie – what was his name again? Willy? Willy – that was his name! Willy Loman! “The world’s an oyster, don’t crack it open on a mattress,” something like that.

‘Oh, you shoulda seen us the day we married. Marion was as pretty as a summer’s day. The proverbial polka-dot dress. The stamping white horses. The little flags on all the verandahs. A real American dream, not an imagined one. And the kids came along too – Good Lord, now that I think of it, we even called one of them Biff! His real name was Jeffrey. Then came Bill and beautiful little Lucy.’

The sun was shining though the window: that pale Arctic sun which is all light and no heat. Ted Hah was standing in the rays as if they had been distributed just for him for this moment. Archie had never noticed before how old he really was. His shoulders, which were always held back erect, now looked hunched and small. His thinning hair was almost invisible in the bright shafts. The lines on his face were etched like granite, all bends and folds and bumps and holes.

‘Then it all fell apart, of course. Bush – I blame Bush, but then again, he was likely as much a victim as all the rest of us. The downturn in the economy, the car factory closing, people leaving, squeezing the last drop of gasoline into the tank.

‘Marion left, taking the babies with her. Said there were no prospects in Ashgrove – no future, no decent schooling, no neighbourhood any more. Sounds pathetic, doesn’t it? The very word “neighbourhood”. Now so uselessly old-fashioned. You must think I’m just a sad old man…’

‘No, of course I don’t,’ Archie wanted to say. Except that he did think exactly that: a sad, self-pitying old man. ‘You’re no different from the rest of us, Mr Hah,’ he managed instead. ‘When it comes down it, aren’t we all in the same boat? Even Mrs Hah – Marion, I mean.’

How little room there was for sentiment, and how dangerous it was too – sticky and cloying, gluing you down when you needed to be hard and agile to survive. Good Lord, he thought, what grand speeches we could all make.

He looked around at the sumptuous press room, hiding so much nothingness.

‘Is that the reason for all this palaver then?’ he asked, feeling like that little boy shouting ‘naked’.

But Ted wasn’t thrown. Instead he laughed.

‘No no no. Don’t be so daft… so stupidly romantic. We may have created typing pools and all that shit, but don’t worry son, it really is all hard-headed business. We really are, beyond the pulleys and the elevators, digging right into the core of the earth, and up into the middle of the skies. Don’t be deceived, lad: it really is all about power.

‘Here are the facts, boy, and not the froth:
25
per cent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves lie right here under the soles of our feet in the Arctic. That’s
375
billion barrels of oil, which I know won’t mean much to you till the last barrel runs out and you’re there freezing or fighting over the last flicker from the last piece of wood in the world. It’s
200
billion dollars a day’s worth, but I won’t screw your head in with all these statistics. Just believe me – it’s real oil for real life or death, to power real cars and real industries back home, in all the pretty little Ashgroves of all the world, so they’re no longer reduced to empty towns with torn billboards flapping in the wind.’

Quite the poet when he got going, was old Ted Hah.

‘So what’s the do with the elevators and the typing pool and all that facade then?’ asked Archie. ‘What’s all that to do with extracting oil and hard cash and all that stuff?’

Ted laughed at him. ‘After walking all that way across the globe, how can you be asking that question? Listen, son,’ and he came back over from the window to sit beside Archie, ‘the only Ashgroves we have left are the ones we create. Do you really think any of that exists any more – Marion, with her polka-dot dress and the knees-ups on the Saturday nights, and the apple pie and all that stuff? Gone with the wind, as a better woman than I said, boy. Who the hell do you think we’re extracting oil for – some imaginary Marion in some imaginary town? Of course not. But it’s the only thing that makes it bearable for any of us, including the ones you’ll never see, sitting in their real boardrooms. They too must dream that it is all for a beautiful Marion somewhere, raising her kids as decent law-abiding citizens. Otherwise, our tears would melt even this frozen waste.’

Another spin, thought Archie. The story about the story. The dream about the dream.

Though he was unsure. Surely postmodernists weren’t ruling the world. The bastards wouldn’t really be that smart. Or if they did, they’d be far too hard-nosed to care about it. These guys know all about the American Dream and would be far too smart to get sucked into that particular myth.

‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, but Ted Hah just looked straight at him.

‘Oh – it’s not for any romantic, mythic reasons, though. It’s purely a monetary, financial decision. You see, field studies showed these guys that creating exactly the conditions we have here – the typing pool and the ancient elevators and the barber and the air-conditioned rooms and Forces Favourites and all the rest of it – was much more economically productive. In the grand scheme of things, the dream is a very small investment for the huge returns underground. You ought to go there sometime,’ he said, standing up to leave.

Just as he was by the door he paused and turned.

‘Oh, I almost completely forgot what your old pal was saying in that video. You must have understood him. He must have been asking for something.’

Archie was tempted to say that Gobhlachan was asking for a million dollars, or for Ted Hah himself to be exchanged with him, but instead, he just told the truth.

‘No. He wasn’t asking for anything. He was just telling a story.’

‘A story?’ said Ted Hah. ‘What kind of story?’

‘A story about a balloon,’ said Archie. ‘How Hector made a balloon in the shape of a cow, and then floated it across the sky.’

‘So what was the message?’ asked Ted Hah. ‘What was the subtext?’

‘Oh – just that things can change. Things can be transformed. A simple paper bag, for instance, can become a cow.’

‘That you can build a new world out of fragments?’ asked Ted. ‘That we can survive on wind and air? On zero energy, son?’

And he opened the door and went out into the snow.

8

WITHIN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
, Gobhlachan and Olga and Yukon Joe were released by the kidnappers, dispatched downhill on a reindeer-driven sledge with a note attached to an the antler.

‘Sorry, mistake,’ the note said; with a handwritten scrawl on the other side saying, ‘These three people are not of the earth, so we have decided to release them. But beware. We will be back for you real guys.’

It was unsigned.

Ted Hah and some of the others in senior personnel took Gobhlachan and Olga and Yukon Joe to the debriefing station, where they were given blankets, cocoa and some apple pie and some severe questioning by a tall thin man wearing sunglasses. Ted Hah had requested that Archie be brought in as interpreter, but despite all the sunglass-man’s probing questions, all three didn’t give much away.

‘Where were you when you were kidnapped?’ he asked.

‘In the toilet,’ all three of them answered (in separate sessions).

‘Where did they take you?’

‘Out into the snow?’

‘What did they look like?’