‘If you mean spirometry,’ said Dr Clark. ‘It’s about lung function.’
‘What’s your name again?’ shouted Archie, as the doctor closed the door behind him.
5
‘Stick it to me, Doc,’ said Archie, rolling up his sleeve for a second injection the next day in the cell.
‘Sorry we couldn’t find an emergency bed for you last night,’ said Dr Clark. ‘There will be one for you at Greenford Hospital later today, and we’ll do a full assessment of your needs and balance your medication. I’m based there and would like to take on your case, so, in the meantime, I’d like to try a technique on you that has had some success with PTSD sufferers. It’s called The Counting Method – originated by Dr Frank M. Ochberg in 1989 at Michigan State University.’
Archie nodded. Whatever had been put in his arm was working.
‘It’s maybe a bit early in our relationship, but I think it’s worth a try following our chat yesterday. So this is how it works – I’m going to start counting, and you are going to recall a troubling memory. This will take a count of one hundred, so your memory, your remembering, will be restricted by a time parameter, giving you a sense of containment, of safety.’
Archie’s heart rate increased and he rubbed his chest. The doctor noticed his gesture, read his body language, and continued. ‘This will help you, Archie. I can call you Archie, can’t I?’
‘You can call me anything you fucking like,’ said Archie, grinning his death’s head grin.
‘Language, Archie. There will be a beginning, a middle and an end,’ continued Dr Clark.
‘That’s what you say,’ said Archie. ‘I’m still stuck in the middle.’
‘Just listen,’ said Dr Clark. ‘My voice will anchor you to the present as you enter the difficult waters of the past. You may experience feelings of terror, of horror, of helplessness – I don’t know the exact nature of your memories, or what is unsettling you.’
Archie tipped his head back in his chair, exposing his throat and breathed in through his mouth.
‘Can you look at me, Archie?’
He looked at the doctor through his pinprick eyes. The doctor looked very far away.
‘You’ll find that you can begin to control the memories by revisiting them in this controlled way – gain mastery over them.’
‘Yes, Massa,’ said Archie.
Dr Clark took a deep breath. ‘Do you want me to terminate this session?’ he asked.
Archie looked up from his hands. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
‘That’s better. You can’t push me away, Archie. I’m here to help you.’
‘Sure,’ said Archie.
‘This is going to take several sessions. I’m not promising you a miracle, but you should find that next time the memory pops up, you gain some control over it. I hope I might also have your permission to write up my findings about early intervention using this method for a government study I’m involved in?’
Archie nodded.
‘Shall we begin?’
‘I already have,’ said Archie.
‘In a moment I am going to start counting,’ said the doctor. ‘Try to fill the one hundred seconds with your memory, letting the worst memories come in at the forties, fifties and sixties.’
‘Do-wa-be-bop,’ said Archie. ‘A shang-a-lang-a-ding-dong.’
The doctor continued, a smile hovering about his lips. ‘Letting yourself gently out through the nineties.’
Archie opened his mouth. ‘Don’t go there,’ said the doctor. ‘Joke’s over. Do you think you can do that?’
‘Yes,’ said Archie.
‘Now settle yourself comfortably.’
Archie stretched out his long legs. His feet scuffed Dr Clark’s chair and he pulled them back. His heart was racing so fast it seemed it would bounce through his T-shirt, cartoon style, like Road Runner. He wondered about getting one printed with Jesus’s heart, or tattooing a sacred heart on his chest and letting its raw pulp jump and dance. ‘Boing, boing, boing,’ said Archie, ‘Beep, beep.’
Dr Clark clasped his hands together and began to count. He was a talking head, a side-show fortune teller, a wise man, turbaned, in the desert of this tile-lined cell. ‘One,’ he said, ‘two, beat, three, beat, four …’ The counting continued, a caravan of numbers, inexorable. ‘Five, beat, six…’ – the pause between the numbers a void – ‘seven, beat.’
The memory was growing closer: the open door, gaping, flapping, no bolt to close it, his steps taking him closer to that dazzling place of horror.
‘Ninety-nine, one hundred,’ the doctor said. Archie’s eyes were tight shut. ‘Archie? When you’re ready, become aware of the room. Let your awareness of the space around you increase. Listen to the sound of the cars passing outside, and hear my voice here, with you, now that the counting has stopped.’
Archie opened his eyes. ‘I need a drink,’ he said.
The doctor passed him a bottle of mineral water. ‘In your own time, what was the first thing that came into your mind?’
‘Chicken tikka,’ said Archie. ‘I’m fucking starving.’
Dr Clark typed on the notebook balanced on his knee.
‘With a side of naan,’ said Archie, ‘if you’re taking orders.’
Dr Clark looked up. ‘What thoughts came to you at ten?’ he asked.
Archie shook his head.
‘At twenty?’
‘I’m in a boat.’
Dr Clark remained silent.
‘I’m in a boat,’ said Archie. ‘And it’s cold.’
‘Cold?’
‘Very,’ said Archie. ‘We’ve been holed. There’s a siren going, and it’s inside my head. Whoop, whoop, whoop …’
‘At thirty,’ said the doctor.
‘We’re being towed into the bay. I can see land, a port. The sky is dark but there are flames on the water from the oil that’s pumping out. Burning water. How fucked is that?’
‘What’s happening now?’
‘The other corvette has gone. It wasn’t meant to take us in. They were to keep going. I’m in a lifeboat. Our ship’s going over. It’s turned turtle. My mates are still inside. No one is coming to rescue us. We can see the houses on the shore, but no one’s coming.’
‘Where are you, Archie?’
‘Russia.’
‘Russia?’
‘Murmansk. There are U-boats. Two channels on the approach. Take your pick. They’re sitting pretty in one of them, but you might be lucky. You might pick the lucky one. The one they didn’t target.’
‘Where are you at ninety?’
‘I’m with my grandpa. We’re in a hospital. He’s dying. He was the navigator who picked the wrong channel.’
‘So this isn’t your memory?’
‘It’s my memory of what he said. Of what he told me, seventy years after it happened, because after seventy years of saying nothing, about anything, it was the first, last and only thing he wanted to talk about before he died. The last thing he wanted to talk about was always the first thing. It was roasting right here,’ Archie touched his forehead. ‘Roasting right here with his men in the black water; water so cold they froze before they burnt. Crispy enough for you, Doc? Is that how you like your memories? Toasted? A wee side of horror? Terror? The words are easy, but they don’t fit the truth. They aren’t big enough.’
‘It has obviously elicited a lot of emotion from you, Archie,’ said Dr Clark.
Archie noticed he had pressed the bell.
‘And we can explore that next time,’ he continued.
‘Will there be a next time, Doc?’ he asked.
The doctor closed his notepad. ‘God willing,’ he replied. ‘As I said, I’ll ask for your case to be assigned to me.’
‘I’m not going to any fucking looney bin,’ shouted Archie. ‘Tony Blair i
s why I’m here, George fucking Bush … why aren’t they in the bin? I’ll go if they go.’
‘I’ll see you soon, Archie,’ said Dr Clark. ‘I’ll try and get someone to bring you a cup of tea.’
‘What about the tikka?’ shouted Archie.
‘Two sugars?’
‘Just shoot me,’ said Archie. ‘I’m dying here.’
6
Archie had seen the Greenford Hospital’s central tower from walks on the Blackford Hill. It sat like a sugar cube in the valley that ran from west to east, caught between the wind bowling in from the Atlantic past old pitheads, and the Forth – tranquil and cold, a grey finger of the North Sea – poking into the land. A quarter of the building’s windows looked south, bathed in the sun that crept along the Pentland Hills, separating Edinburgh from the Borders and England beyond. To the north there was a green slope of trees and mansions: happy families who rode the crest of the wave. He remembered seeing the patients on Morningside Road, their tongues swollen with lithium, and he remembered waiting in the corner shop while their most able representative bought their fags with sweaty fivers and loose change, under supervision, from the Indian bloke behind the till. Now he was on the inside looking out.
As a change from sitting on the staircase with the other patients, Archie wandered into the felt-making class run by a woman with a nose-piercing, who introduced herself as Petal.
‘Is Petal your real name?’ he asked.
‘Does it matter?’ she asked. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Archie,’ he replied, ‘but you can call me Flower.’
He took a seat at the table where he could cover the window and the door; see anyone trying to sneak in. The woman next to him had on a pair of pink rubber gloves and was rubbing washing-up liquid into a mass of wool trapped under a bit of netting. She was tall and loose-limbed with dyed blonde hair.
‘Could you pass Archie a pair of gloves, Joy?’ asked Petal, placing a tray of dry wool in front of him. ‘Add a little water and washing-up liquid,’ she said, ‘and rub vigorously through the net to felt the wool. When you have a good base then we can felt on some colour.’
‘What for?’ asked Archie, enjoying Petal’s perfume and her bare arms with the tiny blonde hairs sticking up. ‘I bet you grow your own,’ he added, looking at the daisy chain tattooed round her wrist.
‘Veggies?’
If that’s what you want to call it,’ he said, pretending to smoke a joint.
‘I’ll ignore that insinuation.’
‘Doesn’t fit with the picture,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘We make our own pictures,’ she said. ‘That’s why we’re here.’
‘Does there always have to be a reason?’ he asked. ‘Why we’re here?’
‘Quite the philosopher, aren’t you?’ said Joy.
Archie ignored her, and began to rub the wool under the net; small bubbles appeared. ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles,’ he sang. ‘Shut up,’ said Joy. ‘I need to concentrate.’
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘I’m hungry,’ said Joy. ‘I want some crisps.’
‘You can eat at break-time,’ replied Petal.
‘I’m hungry now.’
‘At break,’ repeated Petal.
‘I could eat your bodies,’ said Joy.
Archie laughed and held out his arm. ‘Tuck right in,’ he said. Then he stood up and bent over, ‘Or some rump?’
‘A word, please, Archie,’ said Petal, indicating the door.
He followed her into the corridor, a naughty schoolboy.
‘Take it easy,’ she said. ‘You’re agitating Joy.’
‘Sorry,’ he said on his default setting. ‘So what’s wrong with her?’
‘You’re smart enough to know I can’t tell you. Patient confidentiality. But I can tell you that the stories here are like felt squares, Joy’s especially. You think you get the picture. It looks simple, two-dimensional, but underneath there is a tangle of a thousand different threads and they’re all hooked into their neighbour. The problems become homogenous. It’s not easy to unravel.’
‘No,’ said Archie.
‘All I can do is give people some expression for that tangled place. Let images come to the surface and be seen, actualised, and that gives the patient some sense of control. Perhaps one day it will lead them towards an understanding of what is troubling them, what’s driving the delusions and the voices. Let them tease it all out. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ said Archie, although he didn’t.
‘If you come in and start joking around, you unsettle people like Joy. The control goes. The sense of calm that lets the troubling image come to the surface where it can be seen and tackled – that sense of calm is destroyed.
‘I thought it was a felt workshop,’ said Archie.
‘It is and it isn’t,’ said Petal. ‘Shall we leave it there?’
Archie sighed. He longed for the desert; the miles of emptiness peppered with stones and the night skies salted with stars. It hadn’t been all bad. He looked up at the polystyrene tiles on the ceiling and the strip lighting. He rested his hand on a water fountain sponsored by a drug company, a name like a cleaning fluid emblazoned across it. He began to spell the letters out in his head.
‘Do you want to go back in?’ asked Petal.
He looked along the corridor; the polished lino gleamed, embedded with strands of pink that could be flesh, and something that sparkled. Flecks of metal. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Take a deep breath,’ said Petal. ‘One, two, three.’
‘Don’t start that,’ he said, and opened the door.
‘You’re back,’ said Joy. ‘Had a little word with Miss?’
‘Yes,’ said Archie, sitting down in his place.
‘Did you sneak a kiss?’ asked Joy, puckering up her lips. ‘It’s good to get some loving. Have you ever had good loving?’
Archie nodded, remembering his wife’s arms clasped round his waist on lazy Sunday mornings in bed. The seamless days of deadlines at the office forgotten.
‘You’re quite good-looking, aren’t you?’ said Joy, moving closer. ‘I like your brown hair. It’s kind of wavy.’ She pulled a strand through her fingers. ‘What colour are your eyes?’
He kept them fixed on the table.
‘Don’t be shy. Do you want a massage?’ She stood up and slid her hands down over his shoulders.
He tensed. Her thumbs brushed the back of his neck, meeting over the vertebra, pressing down, then releasing, her fingers sliding forward towards the hollow in his neck, the soft point between his clavicles.
‘Hands, Joy,’ said Petal.
Joy released him. He breathed out and closed his eyes. ‘Remember what we talked about,’ said Petal. ‘Personal space.’
‘Outer space,’ said Joy. She looked towards the window. They were on the third floor, sliding above the trees. ‘I can’t go out there,’ she said, turning to Archie. ‘There’s a bad ghost.’
Archie looked down at the bubbles melting on the fingers of his pink gloves. ‘Would you mind if I leave now?’ he asked Petal.
She was teasing strands of coloured wool into long, thin shapes. ‘You’ll miss adding a motif to your square,’ she said.
‘I’ll cope,’ he replied.
* * *
He edged along the corridor to the common room. Nick Clegg was talking on TV about his leadership of the Liberal Democrats being secure, saying there wouldn’t have been any economic recovery after the 2008 crash without them and the coalition. Archie saw the pressure ooze from his brow, the tension in his eye bags, and recognised his own face there. ‘What about the bedroom tax?’ shouted a reporter.
‘The single room supplement,’ said Clegg.
Archie flicked the channel just as he spotted the doctor from the police station walk in looking at a clip boa
rd. ‘Dr Umbogo,’ he shouted, waving.
‘Dr Clark,’ replied the doctor.
‘Just kidding, Doc,’ said Archie. ‘Lighten up.’
‘I fail to find your humour amusing.’
‘Well, you can’t be good at everything.’
‘As I said, you’re not going to push me away,’ he replied.
‘I’m not trying to,’ said Archie.
‘And the band played believe it if you like?’ asked the doctor.
‘Touché,’ said Archie.
‘I’m preparing your care plan for your release,’ continued the doctor. ‘You’ll come once a week for a review of your medication. SSRIs should be appropriate: serotonin specific re-uptake inhibitors. I’ll start you on them today, and you can come for a weekly session with me up to a maximum of five. We can fit one in now.’
‘One of your counting games?’ asked Archie.
‘If you want to call it that.’ Dr Clark unlocked the door behind him. ‘If you’d like to step into my office and make yourself comfortable.’
Archie marked out a soft-shoe shuffle across the room and lay back on the couch near the window. It was covered with a length of paper towel that wrinkled under his body as he tried to move up the bed.
‘Now close your eyes,’ said Dr Clark, ‘if that’s okay for you, and let’s see where this session takes us. Beginning at one, hear my voice.’ He began to count as before, a metronome to a tune Archie tried not to remember. An ear-worm of a memory eating into his brain: the brass band on passing-out day, the last post at the monument to the fallen at Camp Bastion, the disco in Cyprus, the pipes on the home-coming parade, the squeeze-me-tight jingle buried in the belly of his son’s toy bear – his personal juke-box of blast from the past played on a loop. One, two, miss a few, ninety-nine, a hundred.
‘And when you’re ready,’ said Dr Clark’s voice, ‘open your eyes. Feel your lids rising up, opening to the present, leaving the past behind.’
Archie sighed.
‘Where were you, Archie?’ asked Dr Clark.
‘A graveyard,’ said Archie, closing his eyes again. The room was silent. He opened his eyes. The doctor was still there, looking at him, waiting. The silence continued.
The Last Tour of Archie Forbes Page 3
