Archie and the North Wind (9 page)

They opened one of the brochures.

Day 1 – Meet at Longyearbyen Airport, Norway. Transfer from airport to Lodge. Unpack gear and relax. Opportunity to explore Longyearbyen. Welcome reception and dinner.

Day 2 – Final equipment review, warm-up ski/dogsledding near Longyearbyen. Last chance to get goodies and/or clothing or equipment in town!

Day 3 – Fly to 89 degrees North latitude. Depending on weather conditions, we may immediately depart for 88 degrees north (by helicopter) or we may set up camp and spend the night.

Day 4 through 14 – From 88 degrees, we’ll dogsled and ski the final 2 degrees to the North Pole! Days are spent mushing the dogs.

‘The last thing on earth I want to do,’ said Jewel, ‘mushing the dogs, whatever that means.’

Good God, thought Archie, how sweet she smells.

…
and skiing. Generally, one or two people work with each dog team while other participants ski.

Jewel: ‘But I can’t ski!’

Evenings are spent setting up camp, feeding and caring for the dogs…

‘And I really hate dogs!’ she said.

Day 15 – Arrive at the Geographic North Pole! Enjoy a Polar celebration with champagne…

And I don’t drink! thought Jewel.

This itinerary is highly dependent on a number of factors and is subject to change. Price: 22,500 euros.

‘I haven’t got
22
,
500
euros,’ Archie wrote on a slip of paper, ‘and I also hate dogs.’

Jewel opened the fourth brochure.

Seasonal Specials
,
Santa Holidays,
it said.

‘Look,’ said Jewel, ‘that’s cheaper. £
249
for a round day-trip from Glasgow!’

He was amazed how quickly he was learning to lip-read. He read with her:

At last the elves have revealed the location of the original Post Office of Santa Claus which can be found in a forested setting to the north of Rovaniemi above the Arctic Circle.

How beautiful her fingers were, moving so faithfully across the words.

This day visit will evoke memories of brass counters, sealing wax and Santa’s original star navigation system for letter deliveries.

The night was clear and even through the orange streetlights they could see the stars far to the north.

Here in the original Post Office, Santa continues to handle letters from all over the world with the assistance of his elves and looks forward to welcoming you on this auspicious occasion.

What was permitted?

Your day begins with a flight from your local airport to Rovaniemi. Breakfast will be served during your outward flight and where possible aircraft equipped with video entertainment systems will be used.

He remembered another way of travelling. By bonnet. The shepherd who lived by himself in Kintail, in a small bothy, at the back of the ben.

One evening, having lit a fine, the shepherd lay down in the heather-bed he’d made up in the corner. So cold outside, all the animals began to creep in. Twenty cats entered and sat round the fire holding up their paws and warming themselves. One went to the window, put a black cap on its head, cried ‘Hurrah for London!’, and vanished.

The other cats, one by one, did the same. But when the last cat put the cap on his head, it fell off and the shepherd grabbed the bonnet, stuck it on to his own head and shouted ‘Hurrah for London!’ And he too disappeared.

He reached London in a twinkling, and with his companions went to drink wine in a cellar. He got drunk and fell asleep. In the morning he was caught, taken before a judge, and sentenced to be hanged. At the gallows he entreated to be allowed to wear the cap he had on in the cellar: it was a present from his mother, and he would like to die with it on. When it came, the rope was already round his neck. He clapped the cap on to his head, and cried ‘Hurrah for Kintail!’

He disappeared with the gallows about his neck, and his friends in Kintail, having by this time missed him and being assembled in the bothy prior to searching the hills, were much surprised by his strange appearance.

Wasting nothing, they set to work dismantling the wooden gallows round his neck and turned it into the stern and keel of a boat, which may still be seen fishing in the area in the half-light between sunset and darkness.

It was all there: darkness, loneliness, witchcraft, fleeing, drunkenness, judgement, salvation, humour. He knew it was all before him. Even with a cap, he would not get her, except as a skiff in the memory in the twilight. Jewel’s finger said,

Following arrival at Rovaniemi Airport, transportation will be provided to Santa’s secret location. To protect all members of the group from the cold, appropriate arctic clothing consisting of an all-in-one-suit and boots has been organised. The elves have previously advised us that during December Santa may be seen regularly, close to his post office, supervising the handling of all his present requests, and that he will always spare time to meet with visitors to his Arctic homeland.

Jewel looked up from the text, her face glowing. She was almost translucent: like one of these gossamer days back home in Gobhlachan’s forge when a sudden gust of wind would catch the liquid iron coming out of the kiln and sent fragments of flames up into the sky. You could see through the fragments as they flew, and the remarkable thing was the way in which they transformed the colour of the air. The world altered. That which was dark or red or blue was suddenly luminous and green and yellow. Things invisible became evident.

‘Would you teach me?’ he wrote on a slip of paper.

‘Teach what?’ she wrote back.

He splayed his stubby fingers out in a fan-shape in front of his face, holding back the tears. Those thick working fingers which had frozen so long ago in the seaweed. Which had never really done anything gentle or sweet or completely selfless. He wanted to cry out, ‘To teach me how to love!’ but the words remained frozen inside him. He knew fine he was the deaf-mute, not this limpid, articulate woman sitting before him.

‘Damn it,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it!’ And taking the sheet of paper she offered him from her handbag, he wrote, ‘Teach me how to be. How to speak. How to feel. How to love. How to hold you.’

She stretched her hand across the table, wiping the solitary tear away from his cheek, and took hold of his hands.

‘A,’ she mouthed, raising the thumb on his right hand off the table. ‘B,’ she said, raising the forefinger on the right hand, and in a much gentler way than Gobhlachan, taught him the complete alphabet she knew, from beginning to end.

Not instantly, but over the course of the days and the years, so that he learned how to speak out of the silence, how to communicate with more than mere words. Not just how to hear, as with Gobhlachan, but how to tell. And not just how to tell, but how to conceive and invent.

A universe gathered in her fingertips. And when she touched his forehead or arms or face with her fingers, how electrified he became, and how she removed gravity from him, like a magnet shifting iron. Electromagnetism. The Hadron Collider of Love, as St Paul once put it.

But still there was no union. Despite – or perhaps because of – the quarks and protons, they divided. Despite every fastening, every tactile signal, the gap was too wide. The sea-channel was too broad, and they couldn’t quite work our why, except that it was so. Rocks in the way, seaweed clinging to the propeller, the oars uncoordinated. No known bearings, the compass outdated and unreliable, the tiller awry, the lanyard torn. The galleys that had sunk in the Sound of Barra! The burning Viking longships which had foundered on the reefs. She was too young, maybe, or too beautiful, or too perilous. He was too old, perhaps, or too demanding or fearful or fixed. Bearing too many burdens, too much history. Too familiar with the old story to learn a new one. Too rigid for a new fiction, a different gospel.

And that wind began again, small and thin and narrow and far away at first, but so well known to the ear. Maybe that was the problem: the permanent anxiety which fed every movement. A hint of a breeze. A gasp of oxygen. Where doubt enters, certainty departs.

And they separated, like summer from autumn: before you notice, you are in another season.

4

HE REMEMBERED THAT
the streets of London were paved with gold, and so took the night bus to the big city through the dark shires of England.

When he woke, it was raining on the motorway. His watch read
05
.
23
and a sign rushed by saying
J63
Service Station. He put his face flat to the darkened window, but could see nothing except more sweeping lights and rain.

He used to sweep the sand dunes with a torch, hunting for rabbits. In those long-ago, pre-television days when all was wind and rain and hope. It took skill. To stalk the hollows by moonlight, the unlit torch gripped in the palm of the hand, listening for the eternal scratching. ‘There it is! There!’ And with one flick of the switch the whole machair was illuminated.

And caught in the full torch-beam, how the rabbit froze, his eyes bulging with terror before the club fell on his skull. Those glorious pre-myxomatosis days when Archie and all of nature were one.

At Waterloo he checked into a bunkhouse and immediately made his way to the Job Centre. There were loads of jobs for chefs and receptionists and telesales, but finally he spotted something that suited his skills: labourers required for an extension to Terminal 5 at Heathrow Airport. Whatever else he could do, he knew he could push a barrow and wield a spade and mix cement with the best of them.

By the following morning, Archie was where hundreds of thousands of Scots and Irish and Jamaicans had been before: head down a hole, making concrete. You can say what you want about modern technology, and state-of-the-art machinery, and computers-which-design-and-build, but this development still depended upon the thousands of Archies carrying hods of bricks up ladders, screwing scaffolding together, hammering wooden sarking into the ground, sweeping up the rubbish, painting walls, erecting makeshift toilets, nailing notices to the floor, digging holes, filling them up, draining sewage away, clawing underground like wolves, swearing, drinking, betting, cursing. The pay was good.

‘Not as good as them fuckin’ bastards up there,’ the squad would shout, as they watched another jumbo jet set off into space high overhead.

‘Think they would fuckin’ give us better fuckin’ earplugs to fuckin’ protect our fuckin’ ears, for fuck’s sake,’ he would hear through the bad ear-muffs the company gave to the workers.

‘Daft and deaf, that’s us,’ someone else would shout. And then, the invariable song:

  We’re the fucking navvies
  Treated like the scavvies,
Building fucking lavvies
  For the Ruling Class.

‘Away with you, you bastard – we are the Ruling Class,’ someone else would shout, before the next mob began their own indecent song:

  Heigh-ho, heigh-ho,
  We are the working boys!
  Heigh-ho, heigh-ho,
  Playing with our toys!
  We push them and we pull them,
  Stick them right inside!
  We’re talking ’bout our trowels,
  Hanging by our side!
  Heigh-ho, heigh-ho
  We are the working boys!

And they would laugh, rather than cry.

Archie realised that this was a new, brutal vocabulary he had to learn, just as he’d learned Jewel’s beautiful sign language and Gobhlachan’s fictions. A crushed, broken language, as if everything in the world was reduced to the size of a ball which you hit against… well, take your pick. Themselves. Women.

He’d heard this language before, of course – he wasn’t quite that stupid or innocent. But that was from a distance – in the pub, certainly; those other times he’d been in the big city, certainly, and also through television, but he’d never really lived at the centre of it, in this close proximity where it was the rule rather than the obscene exception. And he joined in, of course. Not just because Archie, when in Rome, does what Angelo does, but because it was impossible not to. As with sign language with Jewel, effing this and effing that and effing the other was the only way he could communicate: otherwise when he spoke there were just huge voids in his sentences.

What depressed him was the sheer constant intensity of this language. Working from eight in the morning till six at night gave no respite, no distance, no separation, except for complete silence, for which he would be ridiculed and mocked and shunned. ‘You stuck-up, conceited bastard. Who do you think you are? Lord fucking Haw-Haw?’ So he just joined in, effing and blinding with all the rest of them as if all language was a stone. Smash smash smash. Whack whack whack. Hah hah fucking hah. Thump thump thump. F f f f. F f f f.

After a week he’d had enough and left, despite the daily dreams that one morning one of those wealthy women he could see high up in the skies in the
VIP
Lounge which sat high above the building site would break open the triple-glazed glass and shout down, ‘Hey, you – Archie! Yes – you with the rippling muscles down there, come here and accompany me to Hawaii. I’m going there for six months and I need a man just like you to drive me to the beach daily!’ Despite that myth he could bear it no longer, and left.