The Last Tour of Archie Forbes

by Victoria Hendry

  ‘Slim for Jesus.’

  Karim raised his eyebrows. ‘You know that’s one of the signs of the end of the world, trading faith for gain.’

  ‘Do you think so? Is it Gog and Magog?’

  ‘Keep your hair on,’ said Karim. ‘I’m just saying.’

  ‘I’m doing what I have to do to survive.’

  ‘You’re a bit touchy today,’ he said.

  ‘Anyway, you’ve got a picture of Jesus on your wall. What’s that all about?’

  ‘I never got round to taking it down when I took over this place,’ said Karim. ‘It reminds me of mum. Christian. Caused a few ructions when she married my dad, I can tell you. He died a few years ago now.’

  Archie sank his chin onto this chest and breathed out. A tear dripped onto the table. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a lot on.’

  Karim touched his shoulder. ‘You wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you sorted out.’

  * * *

  Karim’s food had spread an unfamiliar warmth through Archie’s limbs, and he wandered over to a bench on the Meadows to enjoy the moment. Beneath Prince Albert’s sundial, three students with long hair waved wooden swords at each other. One appeared to be called Frost-light, and he blocked his opponent’s blows with a round shield cut from a piece of hardboard. They circled each other in a slow-motion imitation of a film fight, balancing on the balls of their feet. A blow landed on the shield and a bit of the Celtic knot painted there flaked off. Frost-light wiped at it with his index finger. ‘You’ll pay for that,’ he said, and ran at his opponent, who stabbed him in the gut.

  Archie thought of the ANA recruits fixing bayonets to their SA80s. The top of the blade was blunt like the students’ swords but could slide between the ribs and part them, leaving the heart a sitting duck. The sharp point would pierce the beating muscle, emptying the blood from its chambers to rush in a chaotic waterfall into the gut. He had seen the veins of the victim become flaccid and close, their vital energy fatally disrupted. He had seen the lassitude of death glaze their eyes.

  ‘Frosty,’ shouted a voice.

  Archie opened his eyes. Frosty was staggering about pretending to die, his legs taking stagey strides as he dropped to his knees and rolled over onto his back. His eyes stared up at the sky.

  Archie stood up and clapped. The dead Frosty threw him the bird. Archie took a step towards him. Frosty’s friend raised his sword above his head, its point towards Archie. ‘Come on then,’ he said, ‘if you think you’re hard enough.’

  Archie dropped into a crouch. There was something in his eyes.

  The student straightened up and dropped his sword arm to his side, ‘For fuck’s sake, man,’ he said. ‘It’s just a game.’

  Archie stood up, pushing his thighs upright. He was growing taller, gigantic; his head shot into the trees; the height was dizzying. ‘Sorry,’ he said, holding his arms out, palms up. ‘Sorry.’ He was the wrong size. What had Dr Clark said about side effects? He tried to laugh but it came out as a groan.

  Frosty grabbed his bag. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said to his friends.

  16

  After counting the fifteen records on his ceiling for the third time, Archie sat up in his bed behind the glass wall and dialled the first help-line number he had googled. His memories were flying down the line in the shooting game of his mind: big purple shapes, dismembered limbs, pink regrets. He couldn’t hit them out of the air – zero points for a miss; twenty-five birds and counting. No score.

  ‘Good evening,’ said a voice. ‘FCC – Frontline Compassion and Care is committed to your well-being. Jo speaking. How can I help you?’

  Archie was silent. ‘If you could give me your name, in your own time,’ said Jo. ‘There’s no rush.’

  ‘My name is Archie.’ It was all he had left.

  ‘Hello, Archie.’

  There was that silence again. The listening silence. He didn’t know how to fill it.

  ‘How can I help you?’ Jo asked.

  His throat felt tight.

  ‘Would you like to give me your number in case we get cut off and I can ring you back?’ Her voice was Bitchin’ Betty on a good day, clear and measured, leading the Apache into attack.

  He gave her the number, numbers like coordinates. He saw his finger tracing on a map at school. What is at map reference 159, 261? A church? A post office? An ancient monument with old ghosts, their faces turned up to the stars? More coordinates – fast air, explosions, danger close and deadly.

  ‘I’m having a few problems,’ he said. His voice was rough. His nose was filling with water and he began to cry. He lay back on the mattress, the tears pouring down his face, running onto the sheet.

  ‘Just let go, Archie,’ said Jo.

  ‘That’s what I am afraid of,’ he said. ‘Letting go.’

  ‘Are you getting any help at the moment?’ she asked.

  He nodded. The glass wall swam. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A bit.’

  ‘Can you tell me where that is?’

  ‘The Greenford Hospital in Edinburgh with Dr Clark. I have three sessions left.’

  ‘And are you on any medication at the moment?’

  ‘SSRIs.’

  ‘Serotinin specific re-uptake inhibitors?’

  ‘Yes.’ He wondered when he had begun to speak the language.

  ‘And is that helping?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it would be like without them.’

  ‘I’m assuming you’re ex-army as you chose to call this help-line, so I am inferring that you might have been prescribed SSRIs for a traumatic injury, or PTSD.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘PTSD.’

  ‘Then I can tell you that Lady Justice Hale set out sixteen propositions relating to an employer’s duty of care in her judgement on four cases of stress-related psychiatric injury in 2002. This means that you are entitled to help. I would strongly recommend that you get in touch with Combat Stress Now, the veterans’ support group.’

  It was the one that Dr Clark had recommended. ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘Do you have anyone at home to help you, Archie?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘Can you tell me more about that?’

  ‘I can’t talk about it.’ He pressed the red phone symbol to end the call. The phone rang back, but he didn’t answer.

  Behind the glass-brick wall, the microwave floor show began again, sparks flying. He could see Mike shadow dancing to the music on his headphones, sketching the outline of a figure in the air, and singing, ‘Hey, angel.’

  17

  By morning Karim had emailed him his mother’s recipes, along with a picture of her outside the Grand Mosque in Damascus where John the Baptist was buried. She was smiling at the camera. He wondered where she was now, if she had left Syria, like Karim. The pictures of the shattered cities of Homs and Aleppo had vanished from the news. There were no more pictures of civilians choking on gas. Perhaps she was in a desert camp. Perhaps she was trapped somewhere. He wondered whether, if Obama bombed Damascus, John the Baptist’s head would blow right into the air like a football. American style. Would anyone be there to catch it? Touchdown in the end zone with no interception. The end of an era.

  He got a drink of water from the kitchen, then came back to the computer and deleted half the sugar from Karim’s recipes, credited the café and set out for his appointment with Brenda. ‘It’s 07.05,’ she said, when he ran up. ‘You’re late.’ The sky was pink and blue with thin wisps of cloud drifting across its face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again.’

  ‘You’re lucky I’m in a good mood.’ She pulled her ear-plugs out and pocketed her phone. ‘The best news: it looks like Miliband is going to lose Labour the next election. He’s gone all Red Ed, freezing fuel prices an
d stopping the swing voters in their tracks. Until his conference speech, they were all set to vote him back in. He’s sent the seventeen per cent drift from the Con–Dem coalition running back to Cameron with their tails between their legs. Cheers, Ed.’ She gave a mock salute. ‘Shall we get started? I know, shouldn’t mix politics and pleasure. Just had to share.’

  He tried to smile, moved his lips back over his teeth and then looked down, unable to relax his cheeks. He drew a deep breath. ‘I want you to pretend you’re exercising in water,’ he said. ‘Take the warm-up slow, and stretch through the length of the muscle.’ He jumped his feet wide, raised his arms in a starburst across his face in slow motion and lifted his chest up. ‘Lift the chest to open. Chin to chest and then open your arms out to the side and repeat. Now, drop the heel of the back leg to stretch the calf.’

  ‘Let’s skip the warm-up,’ she said, ‘I have a meeting at eight thirty.’

  Archie ignored her comment. ‘Imagine the water is up to your chest.’

  She folded her arms. ‘I don’t buy this water metaphor. It’s fitness class not a rehearsal for global warming. Talking of which, did you see that intergovernmental report, the IPCC; claims we’re ninety-five per cent responsible. The sea will be up eighty centimetres by the end of the century. Lucky we won’t be here.’

  A picture of his son floating past in orange arm-bands popped into his mind. He laughed. He had been the only dad at the water babies class.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder about you,’ she said. ‘You don’t seem quite right.’

  He stopped waving his arms about. ‘Let’s run,’ he said.

  ‘Amen to that,’ replied Brenda.

  18

  The next day Archie was surprised to see Petal standing with Sooze and Louise beneath the unicorn pillar. ‘Hello, stranger,’ he said to Petal as he came to a halt beside them.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Archie,’ she said. ‘I never thought you ran Slim for Jesus, not in a million years. This was the only local class that fitted in with my time off.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Part-time nut-job, part-time personal trainer. It’s a balancing act.’

  She took his arm and leaned forward to whisper. ‘I can’t stay. It’s against the rules. Professional distance.’

  ‘How about one session now you’re here? You don’t need to pay me.’

  She stepped back. ‘I suppose that might be alright,’ she said.

  The women smiled at her. The Papillon pushed his head out of the rucksack on Sooze’s back. ‘Couldn’t you leave him at home?’ Archie asked. ‘If you’re serious about this?’

  ‘I’m not serious about this,’ she replied, ‘I’m here to give Louise some moral support.’

  He sighed.

  ‘But I could leave him with my cousin at the café, if it’s bothering you,’ she added.

  ‘You know Karim?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘I’m sure I told you, he’s my cousin.’

  Archie felt like he was missing so many connections these days, simple social connections that everyone else could see. His brain was still hard-wired into the past; searching for tell-tale movements as he walked down streets, the shadow of a raised arm that heralded sniper-fire, half-glimpsed, before the red-hot searing of a bullet passing too close. He saw Sooze’s lips were still moving in a slow-motion continuation of their conversation. He had tuned her out – ‘… so no clever-clogs stickers for you,’ she finished, and smiled. ‘Like at school.’

  He stared at her, her allusion clear now, and remembered Prince Charles pinning a medal to his chest last year, when he still found sand between the pages of books he had read in Afghanistan; and he saw Birkhall over the Prince’s epaulets, its gingerbread-house perfection iced in white; its gardens; its old-world order; the smiling monarch-in-waiting presiding over it all. There on the Meadows, as the women waited, re-tied shoe laces, fussed over the dog and stretched, all the while watching him, his own home came into focus, just as it ever was, and he wondered why he didn’t fit in there any more; which piece of him was missing; what event had fired that key connector out of his life so that everything was jumbled?

  Petal was rubbing the dog’s ears and it yelped and tried to lick her hand with a small, pink tongue. ‘Get down,’ Sooze said, reaching behind her shoulder to push him back into the bag. Archie flinched and crouched, throwing his arms over his bent head – the trip-wire of words triggering small and deadly explosions of memory that continued to maim him. There were so many pitfalls. He dropped his arms and touched the ground. The women were staring at him now. ‘Just checking the going,’ he said, drawing a deep breath. ‘It’s fair.’

  ‘We’ve not had rain for ages,’ said Petal, frowning.

  He jumped up. ‘Let’s start with a thought for the day,’ he said. ‘Let’s try “He knew me in my mother’s womb”, and let’s think of our perfection before we were born into the complicated choices of this life and ask when did we begin to make the wrong choices.’ He looked at the group of women: Faith, Hope and Charity. ‘The wrong food choices,’ he said, correcting himself. ‘You two aren’t too bad,’ he said to Sooze and Petal.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Louise.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Archie.

  ‘You’ve got a lot to apologise for,’ said Louise.

  ‘You’re probably right. Intervals?’ said Archie, and they began to jog on the timings he had introduced in Brenda’s session. As they slowed to a walk behind him, he heard the women chatting, Petal saying something about replying to a lonely hearts column. ‘For God’s sake, don’t do that,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘He could be anyone.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking to you, nosey,’ said Petal.

  He turned back to the path and increased the pace, glancing at his phone. One minute would take them to Middle Meadow Walk. His mind drifted back to his wife. Hannah had looked so beautiful on their first real date; walking up Schiehallion, picking the first of the brambles on the way down and putting them in his mouth. They had stopped at the world’s oldest yew tree near Glen Lyon. Its roots had self-renewed for two thousand years, tangled snakes coiled in the black, crumbly earth.

  Louise’s voice was shouting something on the margins of this happy place, and he looked back to see the bike crash into Petal. She fell in a tangle of arms, legs and wheels. The guy was picking up his bike, rubbing his knees and shouting, ‘It’s a fucking cycle path, you morons. You have to give way.’

  Archie ran over and punched him; felt his fist connect with his chin; enjoyed the flesh giving way under his knuckles, the contact.

  ‘Archie. Stop,’ shouted Petal. She was clutching her ankle. ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘Yeah, get the facts right,’ said the cyclist, swinging his leg over his bike and cycling off. ‘I could do you for assault.’

  Archie pulled Petal to her feet. Her ankle buckled and he lowered her back onto the grass. ‘Do you think it’s broken?’ he asked, pressing gently along the line of the bone. ‘Is that painful?’

  ‘I think it’s just sprained,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll need to ice it,’ he replied. ‘The sooner the better.’

  ‘If you could help me home,’ she said, pointing to the flats of Warrender Park Terrace, ‘I’m just over there, and there are lots of bags of peas in the freezer. Organic, of course,’ she joked.

  He looked at Sooze and Louise. ‘Do you mind?’

  They shook their heads. Sooze lowered her rucksack to the ground and let the dog out. Archie hoisted Petal onto his back. She laughed. ‘I haven’t had a piggy back since I was five,’ she said.

  He enjoyed her warmth as he straightened up, his forearms under her thighs. Sooze and Louise wandered off to the café. ‘No charge for today,’ he called after them and they waved, the dog running at their feet, his little ears flying.

  * * *

  Petal lived on the ground floor; her flat was
reached by a tiled path that crossed from the pavement over the concrete garden of the basement flat below. Plant pots full of sunflowers, with beans twisting round their stems, lined the path. Small plastic figures hiked up their stalks, roped on with garden wire. ‘What’s this?’ he laughed, pointing to a green, plastic elf no bigger than a pea-pod.

  ‘It’s a modernist twist on the garden gnome,’ she said. ‘I’m a gamer. Frankie the Conjurer after the wonderful Francine Shapiro, the therapist, you know?’

  He nodded at the tiny figures climbing towards the sun. ‘Blink and you miss them,’ he said.

  ‘Something like that,’ she replied.

  Her flat was full of antiques, old throws and felted wall-hangings. ‘How can you afford a place like this?’ he asked.

  ‘It was my Granny’s,’ she replied. ‘I looked after her at the end of her life and she left me this. The family are loaded, so no one objected.’

  ‘So the fluffy, green thing is just an act?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Are you really that stupid?’

  He put her down on an old blue velvet recliner in the bay window and propped a cushion made from a faded shirt under her foot. ‘I’ll get that ice,’ he said.

  Her kitchen was full of pots of herbs and windfall apples, their green skin mottled with black spots. In the garden, two hens scratched round a plastic igloo.

  ‘You must have fun keeping them safe from urban foxes,’ he shouted through the hall. He heard her laugh.

  ‘The neighbours are more of a pest. I have to bribe them with eggs so they don’t report me to the council.’

  He carried the ice, and some painkillers he had found in a cupboard above the sink, through to her.

  She had a controller in her hand and was logging onto some kind of game. Options scrolled up the screen. Luminous green numbers flickered and bleeped as she selected them.

  ‘Would you mind turning that off?’ he asked, rubbing his forehead.

  ‘I thought it might distract me from the pain,’ she said.