Archie and the North Wind by Angus Peter Campbell Page A

sweep like a wind though the kitchens: Angelina Jolie is in tonight! Michael Douglas and Zeta! Prince William! Tom Cruise! Sean Connery! Victoria Beckham herself! ‘Not arff,’ they all shouted, and almost stamped on each other to peek at her through the peephole into the restaurant, to discover whether her tits really were as small as they looked in all these magazines.
    On their night off, this international kitchen-staff would all meet down the pub, which is where Archie learned that China and Nigeria and all the rest of these nations also had a Gobhlachan who sat astride a cold anvil, or under a withered eucalyptus tree, or behind a bamboo wall, telling tall tales. The sky was made out of rice in China, while in Malaysia the pores of the apple trees were where Knowledge lived, ready to be scattered or sown all over the world. Ododgubu told him that back in his native village in Kenya the Battle of the Birds ( Cath nan Eun ) had taken place: the tikitikikoota, the lightest bird in the universe, had won by harnessing a lift on the tip of the great Breasted-Eagle’s wing. ‘He was furthest away from Grugrasinda, the spirit of the mud.’
    Arsenal – Arse’n’All, they all pronounced it – was the local football team which they all cheered whenever it appeared on the small television in the pub. Unlike the Glasgow bar, this place in Soho had remained curiously old-fashioned, without music or video screens, so the clientele imagined they were local and treasured. Few of the kitchen staff knew anything about football and cared even less, but nevertheless fell into the pattern of cheering those distant, wealthy heroes whenever they appeared in their red warrior uniforms on the screen.
    As it happened, the kitchen uniform was also red: red overalls for both the men and women, which made them all sweat like pigs but made them appear like bright angels in the background to diners who caught a glimpse of them washing and scouring through the eternally swinging kitchen-doors.
    Archie became friendly with a Romanian potato-peeler called Sergio and an Irish woman called Angelina, originally from Derry, who specialised in gutting the fish which came fresh every few hours from the Billingsgate market.
    ‘Fresh!’ she would guffaw. ‘I’ve seen fresher socks on a tramp after five days!’ And she would explain how the fish had come thousands of miles from the Baltic and the Falklands, frozen – ‘maybe even several times’ – on the way. ‘How we haven’t killed half the diners already is beyond me. But then again, they’re probably impervious to poison by now. As they used to say in the Republic: the rich don’t choke on gold!’
    Her raw humour was – of course – a cover for her grief. Her parents and two sisters and brothers had been taken in the Omagh bombing when she was ten.
    ‘I happened to have gone inside to the toilet and I heard the bomb go off as I sat there, but by the time I managed to pull my pants up and get back outside they were all dead, scattered in bits all over the street.’
    She smoked endlessly, despite the smoking ban, out through the kitchen window, claiming that though her body was inside, all the nicotine was outside.
    ‘After all, I don’t smoke through my arse.’
    ‘The smoke was almost the worst thing that day,’ she told Archie. ‘All klaxons and sirens and police in uniforms.
    ‘Relatives took me, but I never took to them. Then sent me to the nuns, though you’d have thought they’d have known better. Ran away when I was fourteen, joined the Kilkenny circus. Well, when I say the Kilkenny circus I don’t mean, of course, that it was a circus from Kilkenny, oh no. Just a small shitty show that was passing through that small shitty town. Not even an elephant. Three small horses they’d picked up in Connemara and a man who juggled his balls all the time. Called himself Marvin the Magnificent. His real name was Bert Slater. He was from Sunderland, which seemed magnificent