The Last Tour of Archie Forbes

by Victoria Hendry

  Hector was sniffing round his feet, his plastic muzzle scratching on the terrazzo floor.

  ‘Look, I don’t have time for this,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, okay?’

  ‘That’s right, just walk away when things get uncomfortable.’

  He opened the door to the street and walked out. It banged shut behind him.

  ‘Charming,’ shouted the granny, her voice muffled. He heard something further about manners as he paused at the foot of the step wondering where to go. He walked towards Karim’s café. Karim was playing backgammon with a customer and stood up when Archie came in, walking forward to shake his hand. ‘What can I do for you, my friend?’ he asked.

  ‘I need a serious drink,’ said Archie, ‘and something to eat.’

  ‘Not licensed, I’m afraid,’ said Karim, ‘but I have some lamb tagine through the back. I’ll get you a plate. Thanks for the publicity on your website.’

  Archie nodded to the other man and sat down opposite the counter. Hamid Karzai flashed up on the TV in his green striped robe. It seemed he didn’t think NATO and the US and British actions had helped Afghanistan: 14,000 civilians had died. The Afghan people had suffered. Archie looked towards the man, who shrugged. Archie put his jacket back on and walked out. He sat down with his back to a tree near the door and put his head on his knees. He was numb. Karim walked towards him. ‘Are you OK?’ he asked, crouching beside him.

  ‘No,’ said Archie. It was a full stop. A dead end, a fixed point in the universe, which had stopped turning. ‘No,’ he said again, because it was the only true thing in his life.

  ‘Sooze said you were in the army?’ asked Karim. ‘Did you see service?’

  ‘Service?’ said Archie. ‘I fought the Taliban. Now I’m fighting myself, and they’re all talking about talks. It doesn’t make sense any more. I don’t know what happened.’

  ‘It’s all in God’s hands,’ said Karim.

  Archie looked at him. ‘Well, they must be red and bloody hands,’ said Archie, ‘because I sure as hell don’t see him here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Karim, waving his hand towards the Meadows, with the trees standing in long rows under the clouds, stars visible in the navy-blue spaces between them.

  ‘Believe me,’ said Archie. ‘I have never been more sure.’

  ‘Come back in and eat,’ said Karim. ‘You’re hungry. My tagine will put everything right. He who eats alone, chokes alone. Come on. You’ll be as good as new.’

  ‘Don’t hold your breath,’ said Archie.

  Karim put a hand under his elbow and helped him to his feet. ‘We’re pals now,’ he said. ‘You saved Sooze from that mad dog. I still see it around here. It should be put down. Once they turn, you can never trust them again.’

  Archie looked into his eyes. They were hazelnut – a Mediterranean brown. Warm. He looked away, afraid of seeing them change, then looked back. Karim was staring at him, frown lines appearing on his brow.

  ‘How about that food?’ said Archie, for something to say.

  ‘Yes,’ said Karim, releasing his arm and stepping back. He cleared his throat but didn’t speak.

  * * *

  Archie washed up for Karim after the last customer left. He didn’t want to be alone in his alcove, shelved and isolated from the world he used to know. Mike’s vulnerability depressed him and when Mike smiled or made a joke about it, something in Archie twisted with pain, like metal under stress. This wasn’t how it was meant to be.

  The hot, soapy water grew greasy and Archie tipped out the basin to refill it. ‘You’re doing a good job,’ said Karim. ‘I might get home in time to get some sleep before I have to be back in for breakfast.’

  ‘You’re working too hard,’ said Archie. ‘You need to get a dishwasher.’

  ‘Can’t afford it yet,’ said Karim. ‘My priority is to get mum over here. That takes cash.’

  ‘Right,’ said Archie. ‘How’s that going to work?’

  He paused. ‘I’m in touch with the Syrian Embassy. They’ve got information on all the refugee camps.’

  Archie remembered Camp Bastion, the long rows of tents in the sand, regimented behind perimeter fences. He heard the roar of the generators and air traffic. It had grumbled in the silence of the desert nights, a great canvas and steel hive. ‘As long as she’s safe,’ he said.

  ‘Let’s hope so. I left mum in Damascus when I got my Chevening Scholarship to Edinburgh Uni just as the war broke out, and then got hitched to someone on my course and stayed. This place was my father-in-law’s.’

  ‘Where’s your mum now?’

  ‘She’s stuck in a UN camp in Turkey. I want her here. There are a million like her. I’m not holding my breath. She wants to go home. They all do.’

  ‘Home,’ said Archie, ‘is a precious place. It’s not always easy to get there.’

  ‘What’s holding you back?’

  Archie tapped his head. ‘I’m bonkers. Hadn’t you noticed?’

  ‘You’re not bonkers. The world is bonkers.’

  ‘We know that, but it gets in the way. It got between me and my wife and I don’t know how to stop it.’

  ‘Give it time, Archie.’

  ‘Any other clichés you’d like to throw at me? Something Syrian perhaps? The son of a duck always floats.’

  ‘You’re not being funny.’

  ‘I’m not trying to be.’

  ‘So I see. I’ll finish the dishes, okay.’

  ‘Are you mad at me?’

  ‘I’m not mad at you, Archie. You can’t blame a pot for being broken.’

  ‘Is that one of your clichés?’

  ‘No, I just made it up.’

  ‘So we’re still friends?’

  ‘We’re both in a tough place. We both know the world isn’t always kind, so let’s not add to the trouble.’

  ‘You’ve got yourself a deal,’ said Archie. He put the apron on the counter. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he said. ‘Maybe help out again?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Karim. ‘We’ll see.’

  25

  Archie lay in bed the next day counting the air bubbles in the glass bricks after cancelling his class on Facebook. Thousands of trapped bubbles, thousands of burst lives. At 6pm, Mike brought him a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea. He sat on the end of Archie’s bed, shaking his head. ‘You’re in a worse state than me, man,’ he said. ‘I’m positively full of the joys compared to you: a regular fucking comedian. I thought you were the rock.’

  Archie shut his eyes again and pulled the duvet over his head.

  ‘Why don’t you get this butty down your throat, log onto the computer and cheer yourself up. Business is going well, isn’t it? You’re probably making more than me, and I’ve got a degree.’

  ‘You’ve got a degree?’ said Archie, sitting up.

  ‘Yes. Why should that be a surprise?’

  Archie waved a hand at the charred kitchen beyond the glass wall.

  ‘Okay, maybe philosophy and the magic weed weren’t the best choices for a future life course. I thought I could scale the heights and ended up plumbing the depths – no pun intended.’ He slapped his rump and grinned. ‘Why do you think there was a copy of Diogenes in the bog? Total shit misogynist bastard, of course. Hated women. Saw one drowning in a river and said an evil end for an evil bitch. Still, I couldn’t bear to part with him when I sold my texts – not much money for second-hand books by prosaic Greek bastards.’

  Archie sipped the tea, and took a bite of the food. Mike had put it on his best plate.

  ‘I’m enjoying my new copy of Davidson’s stuff on truth-conditional semantics.’

  ‘What?’ said Archie.

  ‘Truth-conditional semantics. “Snow is white” is true if, and only if, snow is white. Get it? It’s a big debate.’

  ‘Life is shit only if life is shit
. I get it,’ said Archie.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Mike.

  There was a knock at the door. Mike looked at him. ‘Are you expecting anyone?’ asked Archie. Mike shook his head, and then went to answer, smoothing his hair back.

  ‘Archie Forbes,’ said a voice at the door. ‘Police.’

  Archie grabbed his jeans and sweatshirt from the floor.

  ‘No. I’m Mike …’

  ‘We have reason to believe he’s residing with you,’ said the voice.

  There was no answer.

  ‘So do you mind if we come in?’ asked the voice. ‘We’d like a word.’

  ‘It’s not convenient,’ said Mike.

  ‘It’ll just take a minute of your time, sir.’

  ‘Okay, then.’

  Archie had a vision of himself in Petal’s flat and the poster on the tree. They probably wanted him for breaking and entering, or abduction or worse. He moved towards the kitchen window, pulling on his trainers. He heard Mike take the police into the living room and then excuse himself. He came into the kitchen, nodded his head towards the back window, then took a travel-sized bottle of mouthwash out of his latest food-bank bag and winked. ‘Cheers,’ mouthed Mike, ‘you’re my Judy.’

  ‘No, Mike,’ whispered Archie, making a swipe for it. It wasn’t alcohol-free.

  Mike downed it in one and grinned. His face began to flush and he went back through to the officers. Archie heard vomit splatter onto the vinyl in the hall, as he climbed through the window and lowered himself onto the flat roof below. He dropped onto the ground, edged past the bins and an abandoned sofa, and began to run. When he reached the main road, he slowed to a walk. He wasn’t sure where to go. He walked along the edge of the industrial estate past the cat and dog home towards Portobello and up London Road to Abbeyhill. He skirted along the foot of Arthur’s Seat, and made his way through the walled streets of the Grange with its mansions tucked up tight behind high walls and automatic gates. He had been to parties here. Events he thought boring, with small talk and crudités handed round by students working for elite caterers. The rooms were awash with nibbles for guests who weren’t hungry. They ate to be polite, and exclaimed at the flakiness of the pastry, the tenderness of the shrimps, and the richness of the wine – its bouquet, its plum notes, its chestnut finish. When had there ever been time to do that? To stand with a glass and feel warm by a fire, and clean, and well-dressed, with his wife in her evening dress and the strappy sandals he had bought her in Italy. The sandals that were her favourites, and it had mattered to him, pleased him, that she was clothed in their shared history.

  The gates he passed were closed now. The key pads of friends a magic sequence of numbers he no longer knew. The same cars were parked on the drive, and only his planet had been hit by a meteorite; somehow they had all survived in their own orbit and he was the one drifting, drifting away from it all. Everything he had ever valued and hated at the same time: the social concord swallowed with his peers and their tacit agreement that all was as it should be; his gilded bird-cage life shared with friends. He was alone now and he couldn’t work out how it had happened. He had made all the right choices. The warrior going to war, his rifle slung on his shoulder, had been an honourable estate, evinced admiration in the eyes of his friends, who were still at their desks on another Monday as he strode out into the desert to save the world. He was the fearless warrior who embraced a war that was not as he thought it would be, should be. People died; people who also ate and shat and desired. He had seen the Green Zone become a killing field, the orchards full of death, bullets that shot like hornets from trees against the intruder – Afghan bees. He had seen the elders come to a jirga in army tents to ask permission to harvest their crops, which ripened and rotted yards from their deserted villages. They had all fallen from the garden into the desert. They all longed for peace and a full belly and love because, at the end of the day, what else was there? They had that in common.

  He pulled out his phone, wondered about calling some of his old friends and scrolled down their numbers, but most had made it clear that violence against women was a bridge too far, even if combat stress might be a factor. He knew that, even should they still hold some affection for him, he would only bring trouble to their door. Position was fragile. People knew who you knew, and whispers could pull a business down overnight. He wandered on, skirting the walls of the Astley Ainslie Hospital, and crossed over to the mental hospital grounds via Comiston Road, away from the security cameras. He wandered past the playing fields of the private school and climbed over the wall into the community garden. It was dark and quiet. He splashed his face at the stand-pipe by the tool shed and took a drink. The water was cold. Under the starlight, he picked some peppery green mizuna leaves and some raspberries and ate them sitting in the circle of chairs laid out for the weekly lunch with volunteer gardeners and patients. It was peaceful. The chairs were all mismatched: old metal waiting-room chairs with canvas backs and flaking, grey enamel; wooden kitchen chairs with blistered paint; a park bench. It was a meeting place for memories and he presided over it alone. Near the hut there was a huge pile of wood and vegetation cleared for the hospital’s redevelopment project, and scattered among the lopped branches and bits of old board were some timber palettes. Archie began to excavate himself a hole near the back of the mound and lined it with the palettes. They made a good platform, insulating him from the ground. He dragged over more old boards and branches to make a door and roof, and then lay down inside. The bed space was just long enough for him to stretch out. It smelled of rotting vegetation, but enough air filtered in to breathe. He found some old tin cans and filled them with a supply of water, then walked over to the orchard to collect windfall apples. Someone had pinned poems to the trees. He pulled the edge of the paper towards him and read: it was about joy in the harvest. The apples he gathered in his sweatshirt rolled together. He looked down at his crop, remembered shopping online; the apples that arrived in his house on plastic trays and tasted of nothing. He lifted his head – voices echoed over the gravel path that passed between his den and the orchard. There was a smell of cigarette smoke, a girl’s voice and the rumble of teenage laughter. He dived across the path and walked down the side of the mound, trying not to stand on any branches that might crack, crawled into his hole and pulled the board into place. He held his breath. They were talking about gaming; some eejit had lost them the league and they were back to stage one.

  ‘We ran double burst assassins last night to break the game,’ said the boy.

  ‘That’s hilarious.’

  ‘We converged into one death squad so people weren’t expecting it, and couldn’t counter us. It was fun. Fan-diddly-astic.’ He laughed.

  ‘Big old trollers.’

  ‘It’s almost not trolling because it works. We were losing pretty hard in the beginning, so we grouped up and started running team fights. It was absolutely mental. Doug kept overreacting, but we were all bigging it up. You’d be great. We need to talk strats.’

  ‘I can’t. My dad says I can’t go online until after the exams.’

  ‘Bummer.’

  ‘I know, right.’

  There was the sound of a can being opened and then the silence of kissing, the suction of lips parting, and a giggle. Through a gap in his branches he could see them looking at the view with their arms round each other. Bungalows and flats spread up the hill behind the old orchard.

  ‘Have you played that idiot called Pete?’ asked the boy. ‘He’s such a game tard. He invades all the games, gets on your team, walks onto the battlefield and refuses to shoot. I nearly wet myself the first time he did it, but it’s not funny now.’

  The girl shivered and looked round. ‘Let’s go. It’s a bit quiet here,’ she said.

  ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘We’ve only just got here.’

  She began to walk away. ‘It’s creepy.’

  The boy pulled
his jumper over his head and began to walk towards her like a headless zombie, groaning. ‘Stop it,’ she said, laughing.

  He grabbed her and picked her up, pretending to chew her neck. ‘Stop it.’ She tried to hit him and he dropped his lips to hers and kissed her again.

  Archie closed his eyes, releasing them from the beam of his gaze, his longing. They were holding hands now, walking away. Their feet rolled on the gravel, a dust trail settling at their heels. The shadows folded themselves back over the path behind them. Archie pulled his hood up over his head and fell asleep to the sound of cars passing beyond the wall.

  26

  His phone rang at 7.05 am. ‘Where the hell are you?’ demanded Brenda.

  ‘In bed,’ he said.

  ‘Really fucking professional,’ she replied. ‘You’re meant to be here, with me.’

  ‘I’m not feeling great,’ he said, rolling on to his side, and sitting up. He felt in his pocket for his SSRIs, then remembered them lying by his bedside at Mike’s. Each pill was a full stop on the daily monologue of his pain; without them the stream of consciousness that had carried him away would return in full spate.

  ‘Can you make it for our next session?’ she asked. ‘Because I am this close to firing you.’ He could see her squeezing him between her manicured fingers; bug squash.

  ‘I really don’t give a fuck,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Brenda.

  ‘I’m sorry to fuck up,’ he said. ‘It’s a bad line. I’ll see you next time.’ He ended the call and lay on his bed as the sun rose, watching the gardeners’ portacabin. A man on a bike arrived and unlocked the door, carrying his bike inside. Archie could hear a kettle boiling and the sound of a radio. ‘Syrian refugees have drowned trying to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean. The exact number of casualties and fatalities is not known.’ The channel went silent and then there was the staccato music of channels being passed over: snatched words, the first notes of a Schubert piano sonata rising into the air. Archie rolled onto his back. His legs were cold and sore. He wished he had got out of his hole and stretched before the volunteers had arrived. After eating one of his apples, he watched the day unfold like a time-lapse nature programme, watched the gardeners hoe the beans, covering them with net balanced over silver poles. He saw them plant and mulch new seedlings, rolling white fleece over them like early snow. A girl picked berries from the raspberry canes and put them in a plastic tub, holding each one up to the light before adding it to her pile. He saw an old woman in a wheelchair sit with a nurse and gaze at the plants as if she would see them grow, witness each cell swell with light and sugar and pop out in its predetermined structure of stalk, leaves and seeds, moving through its brief life, immune from the tendrils of her thoughts, which kept her enslaved. Over the wall, schoolboys yelled each others’ names in rugby matches, coaches blew whistles, and car doors slammed as kids were collected at the end of the school day. So many people passed in front of him, but there was no sign of Petal. This was her patch. He wished he had spoken to the police. He wasn’t sure why he had run, what impulse had made him drop from the window. He turned the question over in his mind. The fact was, she was missing and his finger-prints were all over Petal’s flat. He had a restraining order framed with his law membership on his virtual wall in the land of Orange James’ masters; his head was closed with paper stitches and Dr Clark was his new best friend. On the list of bogeymen e-fits, he was damn near the top. It was simpler to stay here in limbo. As he stretched out, the wood was rough under his hands and splinters caught at his scalp.