3

ARCHIE SPENT HIS first night in Glasgow in a fine hotel.

He counted his money, and discovered that – really – he had plenty. This was not going to be a poverty-stricken, penny-pinching expedition, surviving on dead rats and old bits of hardened broken biscuits. Such deprivation had broken the spirits of greater men: Savonarola going mad for lack of air, Galileo dying for sight of the sun, Captain Scott for a deficiency of fruit.

This he knew: for want of a nail the world was lost. Archie fingered the nail he’d brought with him from the old forge, just in case.

On the other hand, he didn’t want to go to the other extreme either. Excessive luxury was just as deadly. Genghis Khan growing fat and corpulent on cheese and wine. Alexander the Great overdosing on women. Or was it men? He couldn’t quite remember. Not that it made much difference in the end.

In the inter-net zone in the lobby of the hotel Archie sat at his booth and Googled in the simple things. ‘Where does the wind come from?’ ‘What is the North Pole?’ ‘What is north of the North Pole?’ He sat studying the answers, which were almost as remarkable as Gobhlachan’s eternal puzzles.

There was the Geographic North Pole, of course. But also, apparently, the Magnetic North Pole and the Geomagnetic North Pole and the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility. But the only thing that remained with Archie was this: ‘Geographic North defines latitude 90 per cent. In whichever direction you are travelling from here, you are always heading south.’

‘That’s it!’ said Archie. To go forever south, even if it was west or east or north or south. But then again, he realised, these notions would be completely meaningless at the Pole itself. There would be no north or east or west – just south. Maybe that was the case everywhere. Perhaps there was no north or west or east or south anywhere. They were just ways of putting things, like the ways in which Gobhlachan would put things in a story, or in the smithy. Where this thing larger than yourself was called a giant, and this other thing smaller than yourself was called a dwarf, and this thing that took you away was called a bull or a horse or a fairy or a toad. And the thing that was dangerous was called an enemy, though sometimes too he was called a friend.

And if that was true of the Pole, must it not also be true of the wind? This thing that swept across the globe and had killed so many that day, taking every roof and outhouse, every cart and plough, every living being with it in its outstretched arms? Which then stroked your face on a summer’s day. Did it really have sinewy muscles and full-blown-out-cheeks as in the old illustrations, or was that just a way of putting things? Did it actually start somewhere – was there an oven, or a forge, or a smithy, or a hole, or a machine out of which it came, like a baby, or a foal, or a calf or a potato, which, after all, grew and grew and grew from a small seed? The great story of God and the seed of the wind.

He looked about him in the airless lobby, men all crouched over their laptops or terminals. A singular woman sat in the corner fanning herself with a newspaper. Flies buzzed about the rows of strip-lights above the computer booths. Through the thick double-glazed windows vehicles moved soundlessly outside. There must have been a wind, for suddenly a discarded chip-box flew through the air and a garage door opposite began to open and close haphazardly.

How it would come in the early spring, sprinkling the ground with blossom and flowers. And how it would serve as a magic carpet for the bees in May-time, moving them from one purple clover to the other. And how – during those hot days when he bent over the peat in the heather – the warm wind would come and relieve him instantly of the flies and midges and clegs which lay in their thousands all over his bitten body. And then there were those autumn days when he used to go fishing, and he had to literally push the boat out into the water because it was so still and calm and how he had to row out for miles beyond the Lighthouse Point (Rubh’ an t-Solais) before he could catch the wind which was trapped behind the high ridge, but once you hit the Point there it came, that old friend, softly touching your face and riffling his fingers through your hair and raising the collar of your cotton shirt before he punched the sails which all of a sudden filled with his spirit and flew, like a kite, across the water as you flung out the net behind, in the vain hope of catching the silver darlings.

And one night – oh, this was a long time before Bella – how he had lain with Christina in the barley sheaves, with the wind flinging the awns about their heads and the grain in their eyes and ears and hair as they lay twined in the stubble which neither of them noticed or felt till afterwards, when they lay back awkwardly staring up at the breeze moving the golden spikelets between them and the sky.

That was the day of the wren: the day the wren came and rested on Christina’s hand as she lay sleeping, with not a breath of air stirring in the whole universe.

So Archie typed in ‘wind’. Or, more precisely: ‘Where does the wind come from?’

And this marvel before him displayed an answer which convinced him.

‘It all starts with the sun,’ says Professor Kimberley Strong, an expert in atmospheric physics at the University of Toronto. Solar radiation emitted by the sun travels through space and strikes the Earth, causing regions of unequal heating over land masses and oceans. This unequal heating produces regions of high and low pressure.

The atmosphere tries to equalise those pressures, so you get movement of air from a region of high pressure to a region of low pressure. Scientists call this the pressure of gradient force, and it is the fundamental force behind wind.

Earth’s rotation adds a twist to the story. While wind would normally move in a straight line, the spinning of the planet beneath makes the wind appear to follow a curved path. This is known as the Coriolis effect, which deflects winds to the right in the northern hemisphere and to the left in the southern hemisphere. There is no Coriolis effect at the equator. The faster the wind blows, the more it is deflected by the spinning of the Earth.

‘Ah,’ thought Archie, ‘it all starts with the sun! So I need to go to the sun.’ But he knew the things that were impossible. He would burn. Even at night-time. In the old Gaelic story the wind and the sun had a contest.

A small boy is going to school on a cold winter’s day, with his coat wrapped tightly around him.

‘Of course I’m stronger that you,’ boasted the wind, swirling around the weak sun. And there, hidden behind the dark clouds, the sun brooded, like Gordon Brown; quiet, fully aware of her own strength and power.

‘I’ll show you,’ roared the wind. ‘Do you see that small boy down there? That insect-like creature crawling along the ground down there on the earth? I bet I can force his coat off before you can!’ And the wind filled up his lungs and puffed out his cheeks and blew and raged and roared and the more he blew the tighter the wee boy fastened his coat round his body, turning his back to the angry, exhausted wind.

‘Ah!’ said the sun, stretching herself out beyond the clouds, her million slender fingers pushing all the darkness to one side, ‘Now let me glow.’

And she shone, bright and red and hot. And the small boy, steam rising from his soaking coat, began to perspire, finally flinging off his coat and lying down on the drying grass, staring up into the electric blue sky, a grass stalk idly stuck between his whistling lips.

And the wind sulked, off back into his cave, to regather for another day.

Archie left the hotel and walked down Sauchiehall Street in the evening light. Incredible how short the girls’ skirts all were. He stood a while in the doorway of a store called Topshop looking at folk streaming by, much like tides on the shoreline. He caught sight of himself in the shop mirror, the beard stubble rooting white, the hair thinning. How had he grown so old all of a sudden? In a single night. He remembered John the Goblin, who would have been well over eighty now, had he survived. Cancer, after all these roll-ups. Though he was still leaping across the sand dunes in the mirror, his fag tin shimmering in the sun in the back pocket of his trousers.

Was he John Goblin to those rushing by? If he existed. Where did the old go on a Friday evening, anyway? Did they abandon the town centres – were they bussed out to the bingo-halls in the suburbs – or had they been shipped out there anyhow a long time ago, never to return? How they had all gone to Canada, sailing like handkerchiefs.

He went into a pub, but it was like nothing he remembered. No smoke. Poor John Goblin. No one playing dominoes or pool or cards: just huge throbbing music and vast video screens perched above every corner of the room, where even more young women with bare navels gyrated across the heavens. These were no giants, but giantesses, lithe and lissome and willowy. On some of the screens men played football, as seen from above: they moved like pawns, or warriors, across the starry sky.

Archie asked for a beer and was given a bottle, without a glass. He looked around him and saw that all the young people in the bar were drinking just like that, right out of the bottle. He felt at home. That’s what he’d always done, swilling down a whole bottle of milk in the heather, or a whole bottle of ale at the machair, or a whole half-bottle of whisky at the fank. This was just home with different pictures and music.

He smiled at two young women standing at the bar next to him. They smiled back. ‘Noisy,’ he tried to say to them, but the music drowned out the word and by the time he thought of another word they’d gone, carrying their drinks on a tray into the darkness.

A man was standing on the other side, so he tried the same word on him, but he just put his hand to his ear and shook his head, meaning: ‘Listen, mate, there’s absolutely no point in trying to talk in here. We’re like fish underwater, gawping at each other. Words can’t be heard here, so don’t even bother trying.’ And he too had gone, carrying his single beer bottle in his hand to the middle of the floor, where a crowd was dancing in sacred circles of their own, gesticulating to one another.

Don’t do it, a voice inside Archie’s head said. Whatever you do, don’t make an idiot of yourself by going out there and dancing. And since it was the only voice which he could hear, Archie listened. But then the surprising thing happened – this girl came up to him and handed him a piece of paper on which was written: ‘Hi. My name is Jewel. Would you like to dance?’

‘Yes. Yes, of course I would,’ he said as she took him by the hand and led him to the centre of the crowded floor, where all the young people moved backwards and forwards, each with an open bottle in hand.

Jewel swayed to and fro in front of him like – well, like a jewel, of course, all glittering and shining in a silver top with sparkling purple trousers; though Archie thought of her more as a spray of the ocean, the way in which on a late spring day when the tide changes, the sea itself rises higher and moves in, splashing senselessly against the rocks.

Holding on to his bottle, he managed to keep sight of Jewel as she moved round the floor, occasionally making rapid hand signals to friends she passed as she danced, occasionally pecking other girls on the cheek, occasionally greeting other dancers with a sharp clapping noise of her palms, going rat-a-tat-tat, tat-a-tat-tat. It took Archie the whole beat of the dance and more to realise that all these young people were actually talking to each other in sign language.

Just like himself and Gobhlachan. The world interpreted through signs. A universe understood with a movement, and misunderstood through some invisible gesture. Archie tried to understand the conversation, but couldn’t. The girls would raise a finger, touch an ear lobe, smack the back of a hand with two fingers from the other, while the men pounded a fist against an open palm or brushed a wrist with one, two, three fingers. Archie had no idea where a word or sentence began or ended, or how you distinguished between movement and speech, or when the dance finished and the talk started, as if such mattered. It was all talk or dance.

Jewel suddenly stopped dancing and moved over to a table in the corner, beckoning him to follow.

Once seated, she made a whole series of quick movements with her hands, but halfway through she also clearly understood that he was a foreigner and that he wasn’t understanding a single thing she was saying. So she lowered the small pencil from behind her ear and wrote on the stacked pieces of paper set on every table.

‘Where are you from?’ she wrote.

‘Elitrobe,’ he wrote back.

‘Eh?’ she replied.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

‘A club,’ she wrote. ‘Deaf. But not dumb! Ha!’

‘What’s your name?’ her mouth asked.

‘Archie,’ he said.

‘Look,’ she said. She placed the forefinger of her right hand onto the forefinger of her left. ‘E,’ her mouth said, soundlessly. The same finger to the thumb of the left hand. ‘A,’ she said. The same finger to the middle finger of the left hand, and he understood that to be ‘I’.

How eloquent, the forefinger.

She was from Ayr, though her grandmother was from Lochinver. And he? Travelling. Where? O – north. North? Aye, north. North like Inverness? No. North like Spitsbergen. North like Alaska. North like Nansen. Fridtjof Nansen.

‘That far?’ her fingers said.

They stopped talking and resumed dancing. For a while, Gobhlachan disappeared.

‘Do you believe there’s a new story?’ he asked her as they danced, though she didn’t hear.

But that didn’t make much difference. How beautiful she was: tall and slim, like a pole. To carry a creel, the women wore an old còta, a loose kilted skirt, rolled up to form a dronnag, a creel pad on the lower part of the back, where the creel could rest. Along with a well-made breastband, this made it much easier for women to carry their burdens, and even made it possible for them to carry much heavier loads. The male islander of this period had no desire for women who were tall and slender. Strong, sturdy, broad-backed women who could also help to push the boats up the beaches were appreciated.

Her nails painted red, her body moving endlessly in front of him like the seismographic waves he once saw on an X-ray machine at the local cottage hospital.

Everyone at the club was going to a party at the flat of a couple who’d just gotten engaged that evening – Belfast Tommy and Frieda from Orkney. They had a flat in Ingram Street in the merchant city.

‘Come if you want,’ she said.

They all walked home together down Hope Street. McDonald’s was still open and some of them went in there. Archie and Jewel entered with them. How bright the lights were after the darkness of the pub. They bought chips and Coke and went upstairs.

‘Jewel?’ he asked.

‘Shorthand,’ she wrote back, ‘for Julie Ann.’

‘Ah!’ he said. And added, ‘Sìleas – the Gaelic for Julie. And Jewel means Seud.’

‘Sìleas Seud then,’ she said.

The conversation was broken and fragile, like all conversations. She taught him a little by hand; he wrote now and then. How the club met monthly, on the last Friday. His age. She? Don’t ask. Why the invitation-note? Just that she saw him and that he’d reminded her of someone. Her grandfather? At least a laugh. You can recognise danger, other senses compensate for the loss of some. Like the antelopes: they can smell danger beneath the savannah swamp.

‘I’ve got a fortnight,’ her fingers said. ‘Holidays. Camping in Poolewe, but the Pole will do.’

Another laugh.

‘One tent.’

‘Two sleeping-bags.’

‘Right.’

‘Sure, sure.’

‘Bird and bush.’

‘Fine.’

‘Done.’

Since the world was 24/7, a travel agency was still open next to McDonald’s, Central Station. It was called GO4U.

‘Let’s,’ their bodies said. ‘Let’s look anyway.’

And while the others walked down towards Ingram Street, Archie and Sìleas entered the shop, laughing.

Not only was there the usual row of computers where you could choose your own holiday, but the agency also had a row of desks where the agents sat. They went over to an Indian girl sitting at Desk 5, which was headed Aurora Borealis.

Had they brochures for travelling north? Near the Arctic Circle?

She opened a drawer and handed them four thick brochures – North Pole Ski Expeditions; North Pole Dogsled Expeditions; North Pole Champagne Flights, and one simply called Seasonal Specials.

‘These are the only brochures we have in stock,’ she said. ‘They’re all run by the one company – the Northwest Passage Polar Adventures Company – though there are others. They of course have a website too, if you want to check that out.’ And she wrote polarexplorers.com, in a spindly line.

They took the brochures and made their way to Thomas and Frieda’s flat. No one bothered much with them. Some danced; some ate; some watched a silent Russian film on DVD; couples hid in various nooks and crannies. The flat had a miniature roof garden and Archie and Jewel climbed up there via the attic stair. They looked at Glasgow, all lit down below them. The silent decorative cranes in Govan, the windmills beyond Bearsden.

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.