Archie and the North Wind
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.
    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

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