The Last Tour of Archie Forbes

by Victoria Hendry

  ‘You bastard,’ roared Archie and launched himself at him, but Calum side-stepped and tripped him up. Archie put his hands out as he fell.

  ‘You’re not as quick as you used to be. Not quite the big man you were. Where’s your power now? You can’t even live with yourself, can you? Is that why you’re here in this ruin, all alone?’ His voice had slowed to the patronising pout of an adult talking to a child. ‘Eeyore in his thistle patch?’

  Archie closed his fingers over a rock as he climbed to his feet. ‘Put it down, Archie,’ said Calum. There was a movement over his hand and something protruded from his coat sleeve before sliding out, a dark length of pipe. Calum braced its end against his chest. His finger on the curve of a trigger. Archie saw he had a pipe gun made from an old ball thrower for a dog and a length of steel tubing.

  ‘Good, eh?’ said Calum. ‘Up-cycling is so à la mode. Home-made and untraceable.’

  ‘You don’t scare me,’ said Archie.

  ‘Not as much as you scare you. I’m guessing again, of course. I’m guessing you scare yourself more.’

  Archie’s face looked more murderous.

  ‘Look in the mirror, Archie. We’re the same – you and me. Animal men. We got here by different routes, that’s all; but the answer is really simple. Embrace it. I love that counsellor speak, don’t you?’ His voice was American now, a New York drawl. ‘Embrace your inner animal. Don’t fight it. It’s the new world that can’t accommodate it, not you. And if he gets an outing in a war, let out of his cage and used by the state as a trick circus animal in their game of Realpolitik, then why should you be surprised? Why should any of us be surprised if he doesn’t want to be locked up again? Let’s face it, it’s fun being out. He’s too big for his old world – his office, his living room, the evening bath, his children’s nursery, his bar stool.’

  ‘There’s more to me than that,’ said Archie. ‘There’s more to me than teeth and sinew and hate.’

  ‘I have to say, I’m not seeing it just now,’ laughed Calum, and his voice was holy, self-righteous. ‘I mean, have you seen your eyes recently, Archie? They’re not a pretty sight; not for the faint-hearted.’

  ‘You don’t know me,’ said Archie.

  ‘I don’t need to,’ said Calum. ‘I can read it all plain as day in your face. It’s there for everyone to see, but believe me, it’s not a story they want to read. There are some chapters of human history no one wants to read. They don’t want to be reminded of it by the illustration of your face. It’s not a pretty picture. You’re the page everyone wants to turn over.’

  Archie slumped back against the wall. Calum stepped closer, his gun pointing straight at him. Archie knew he could bat it out of the way, get in under his guard, and live, but there was something hypnotic about the depth, the dark depth of Calum’s eyes. Death looked like a restful place, a soft, velvet vortex in which he could float. Death was a friend to the friendless, a final refuge. He could lodge with the innkeeper of silence. There were no noisy neighbours, no voices shouting in the night.

  ‘You can’t cheat Death, Archie. It’s coming. You can deal it, but can you take it?’

  Archie closed his eyes, felt the small circle of the end of the gun rest on his forehead. He was peaceful. Here was the full stop, the solution to the puzzle – the end point and the beginning – peace.

  ‘Shoot,’ he said.

  The pressure eased off his head. He opened his eyes. Calum was walking away. He paused in the doorway and turned back to face Archie. ‘Death is the soft option for you, Archie,’ he said. ‘You’ll have more fun here.’ He laughed. ‘You’ve got one huge fucking puzzle to solve. I’m leaving you in the labyrinth with your monster. He’s hungry, Archie.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ shouted Archie.

  Calum turned. ‘I’m a game master,’ he said, ‘and the game’s over. Perhaps you could tell Petal I’ll dispose of her phone. Your number’s on it, in case you’re wondering. Good of you to call. You’re on her new tracker app. Top of the list. I call it locate a loser.’

  39

  When his legs stopped trembling, Archie began to walk. He didn’t know if Calum was lying in a depression in the earth with the gun pointing at his back. He felt the prickle of a gun-sight between his shoulder blades, a caress on his skull. ‘Pop,’ he said out loud, but nothing happened. The sense of waiting in him grew, a long elastic of expectation stretched tight. It stretched from the cottage towards his old life, pulled as he walked until it snapped, and, snaking towards him through the air in great loops, it laced itself round his mind. It set up a pressure in his skull, coiled behind his eyes, which he felt must burst. If only he could cry. He thumped his forehead with his fist.

  He walked down to the main road, stood into the side to let a 4x4 pass as it performed a three-point turn in the road-mouth to the ski centre, and drove off – its two red lights receding into the dark. Eyes travelling backwards. He was so hungry; his stomach had shrunk onto the inside of his ribs where it stuck like a limpet to the rocks. He ignored the pain and walked to Petal’s on feet of lead. The world was as he remembered it: bright shops selling chocolates; tables outside bars for smokers; a poster trapped under wire on a newspaper board – ‘Marine on trial for insurgent shooting’; joggers on the Meadows; the glow of lights from jewel-case living rooms with open curtains.

  Petal’s flat was dark. He rang the bell. No more windows. No more tricks. There was no answer. He rang again and was about to turn away when he heard the slow shuffle of feet across bare boards.

  ‘Who is it?’ her voice called through the door. It became a whisper. ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s me, Archie,’ he replied.

  ‘I’m not feeling well,’ she said.

  He rested his hand on the door handle. ‘Petal,’ he said. ‘Thank God, you’re back. Can you please open the door?’ He looked down. The elves were clinging to the stems of the sunflowers as they drooped towards the frosty ground. The moss on the pots gleamed green and silver.

  There was silence. ‘One of these elves is going to get it if you don’t open up. Just for a minute,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  A bolt slid back and the door opened. She was leaning against the door-post, ethereal, ashen-faced, as if she had returned from a long journey.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he said.

  Tears poured down her cheeks, and he put his arm around her, pressing the light switch by the door with his free hand. Light flooded into the hall and they blinked, surfacing into a new domestic reality. He guided her into the living room and helped her to lie down on the creaking chaise in the window. ‘I’ll get you a hot drink,’ he said. Was it always like this, that times of homecoming and crisis were punctured with small actions of no import?

  There was tea in the kitchen cupboard, soft apples in the fruit bowl on the counter. He bit into one, piercing the wrinkled skin with his teeth. The sweetness filled his mouth even as the texture gave way. In another cupboard, he found a bottle of whisky and downed a glass with two of his pills. He filled the kettle. The familiar click of the switch connected him to his old world – a sound and muscle-memory so familiar to his daily routine it had gone unnoticed. It heralded a return to a place he wanted to be. A simple, non-elemental place away from nature that had inspired and terrified him, holding him down with cold fingers that could crush him under the beauty of her night sky. It was safer here. If he could sort out his two halves, mesh his inner selves, inner worlds, into one tiny whole, even if it was of a density packed with energy that might not hold but, equally, which might exist safely within, if his will was strong enough; if he could find enough words to speak and an ear to listen to relieve the pressure; if he could stop feeding his own black hole with fear – then it might recede, become a quiet and distant object in his universe. It was, and would eternally be, a place that might suck him in if he flew too close, but one that might also be distantly obs
erved, a place he had once thought a bright and heroic star before it imploded and collapsed, his dream of his own heroism, the great adventure when he never knew he was so tiny a man and thought life and death were forces he could control.

  He carried two cups of tea laced with whisky through to Petal. She had fallen asleep and he covered her with a rug and then lay down on the sofa in the quiet room. The tea warmed his stomach, and he closed his eyes and drifted off.

  Was it a day later that he woke? Petal was sitting in an armchair with her feet propped up on the sofa. The warmth of her feet against his calves comforted him. ‘Archie,’ she said. ‘You’ve slept a long time. I need to speak to you.’ Her eyes were huge, shocked. ‘I need you to phone the police for me.’

  ‘Now?’ His head was a heavy reminder not to mix medication and booze. He sat up and drank a glass of water from the table.

  ‘Yes. I was on a date and he took me to his house and wouldn’t let me go when I wanted to come home. He locked me in a basement. Does that sound ridiculous?’

  ‘‘No,’ said Archie. ‘I was trying to find you.’

  ‘I rang my mum just now,’ said Petal, ‘She couldn’t believe what I was telling her. She said she had a text from me saying I was taking annual leave to mend my sore ankle and could she ring work for me to let them know, and I’d see her soon. She’s really shocked. She’s on her way now. You know, that creep kept my mobile. He could be sending all sorts of rubbish to my friends.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘All the time I was in that horrible room, I thought the police would be looking for me, but everyone thought I was fine. No one was looking.’

  ‘I was,’ said Archie.

  ‘How could you know I’d gone?’

  ‘I broke in,’ said Archie, ‘at the back. Well, I climbed in the bathroom window. It wasn’t locked. There was a poster nailed to a tree on the Meadows saying you were missing. I was worried the police might come looking for you and they might think you’d gone because of me. I was the last one here before you disappeared. My prints would have been all over the flat.’

  ‘Why would that matter?’

  ‘I don’t have a good record around women. My wife has a restraining order out on me.’

  ‘Combat stress?’ asked Petal.

  ‘No,’ said Archie, ‘not entirely – not the whole story.’

  Her chin sank onto her chest.

  ‘Keep breathing,’ he said.

  She looked up. ‘He kept me in a basement room with a chain on the door and when I thought he was going to kill me, he let me go. He washed me, so there would be no trace of him or his stinking place, but I can still smell the damp on my skin.’ She breathed out onto the skin of her forearm with an open mouth and then breathed in. ‘I can smell I was somewhere else.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think he drugged me before he let me go. It was like sleep walking.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  She shuddered. ‘Average – average height, average build – completely hairless.’

  ‘I saw him too,’ said Archie.

  Petal jumped up. ‘Then phone the police now. You’re a witness.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Archie. ‘They were hunting me – are hunting me. I’ve been holed up in the Pentlands. I had a sprint through the Roslin Glen to shake them off.’

  ‘When did life get so fucking weird?’ she asked.

  Archie tried to sip a last drop of water from the glass, but it was empty.

  ‘Eh?’ she said. ‘Tell me when.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Archie. ‘Maybe it’s still normal for some people. People who shop in department stores and don’t go too far from home.’

  Petal threw the crocheted blanket off her knees and ran to the bathroom. He heard her throwing up, and walking into the bathroom, held her hair back for her as she leaned over the sink. There was nothing in her stomach but green bile. Nothing. She was retching nothing. He passed her a warm facecloth. ‘If you were in his house,’ said Archie, ‘there must be DNA all over you.’

  ‘Not since that weird fucking bath,’ said Petal. ‘He washed me and put me back in my evening dress and shawl. He’d washed those too. It’s as if I was never away. It almost seems like a bad dream.’

  ‘Except I saw him too,’ said Archie.

  ‘Who did you see, Archie?’

  ‘The same as you.’

  ‘So you saw no one. Average is not a description. He was so average they’ll never find him. God, if he slapped a wig on that slap-head of his it wouldn’t even look like him. I mean, for Christ’s sake, was he even clinically bald?’

  Archie remembered the small dots of stubble on the white skull. ‘I bet that bastard disappears,’ he said.

  ‘He might come back,’ said Petal.

  ‘Not likely. He’s had his fun here. He has a whole world to play in and an internet world within that. It’s a Chinese ivory ball of worlds within worlds. We all flirt with it, live out our fantasies. Reinvent ourselves. They’ll never find him.’

  ‘My life is still real,’ she replied.

  ‘Said the gamer with elves on her doorstep.’ He took her hand. ‘You’re not even in this world half the time, Petal. You live inside the head of some comic-book genius who has you jumping around his picture-book fantasy world online, thinking you’re living when, really, you’re trapped, sitting in your living room in an armchair – and out there,’ he pointed at the window, ‘governments are playing real games with real people’s lives while a whole generation of active individuals, who could make a difference, think they’re elves. They’re not even pieces on the chess-board, Petal. The revolution isn’t being televised, it’s real. It’s your life that’s on screen, and it’s an illusion.’

  She remembered the chequered lights drifting under the water. ‘It was a nightmare,’ she said. ‘I need to call the police. Feel like there could be justice. Stop him hurting someone else.’

  Archie nodded. He had nothing left to say. Silence fell in the room. Outside a car engine started up, a bin lid shut, a young person passed, talking in a phone monologue of pauses and sudden laughter. ‘You should know,’ said Archie, ‘that I didn’t want to hurt my wife. I was saving my son.’

  ‘I thought you punched her or something,’ said Petal. ‘Staff were warned that you had a restraining order for domestic violence.’

  He picked up his phone, which he had left to charge on the coffee table, pinched the picture of Daniel on the homepage to expand it, and surfed his finger across the dune of his cheek. His baby eyes were huge pools in the landscape of his face. Archie sank into them. He was back in his old house, hanging his coat on the peg in the hall, standing his briefcase on the hall table. He looked up and saw his wife on the landing again, lifting his son up in the air, her arms outstretched, saw her turn to face the banister, and walk towards it, Daniel held out before her, like an animal that had soiled itself, like a creature that couldn’t be held close. He remembered calling her name, her glazed eyes as she looked down at him. He remembered how fast he ran up the stairs, the blow he struck her, so that she fell. He took the child from her arms as she crumpled; took his Daniel, so tiny, swaddled in a shawl, and pulled him to his chest and held him close, breathing in the powdered, caramel scent of him. He looked down and saw his wife’s cheek was split and bleeding. She was unconscious on the rug, still in her pyjamas, and as he returned from laying Daniel in his cot to lift her up, he saw a spider-web of cracks appear in the ice he walked on and he slipped under.

  He was an Eskimo on the shoreline beneath the slabs of ice left when the tide went out, a mussel hunter. The soft molluscs were everything he had hidden from himself. They were the fragments of flesh, the misplaced footsteps on the path, a wrong turn, the sniper’s fire; they were the commands, the rules of engagement, the finger on the trigger; they were the call-signs and Apaches; they were th
e spit, spit, spit of death, the sighs and the groans, the screams of the injured; they were the morphine shots and the death knocks; they were the amputees and the regrets, the men limping in the street and the drink, the failed marriages; they were the rough sleepers, the help-line call numbers, the silence on the end of the phone. They were all these things. He was trapped here with them in the half light and he could hear the tide flowing back. Its seaweed ropes would catch his ankles if he wasn’t quick, couldn’t climb out. The icy water would lift the blocks over his head and fit them seamlessly back together above him in an ice pack that would trap him here below. He would drown beneath an ice-blue ceiling, corniced and perfect.

  He sat down beside his wife, cradled her head and cried into her hair, which smelled sour.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ she had begged him as she came round. ‘They’ll take Daniel away from me, Archie. I couldn’t live without him. Please, Archie, don’t tell.’

  ‘I have to,’ he replied. ‘You’re not safe. Daniel’s not safe. We can fix this, but we need help.’ He pushed her off, loosened her hands from his shirt. She fought him for the phone as he dialled the doctor’s surgery, but he batted her away and she fell against the wall. She lay there propped up, glaring at him, the blood running down her cheek. He gave their address. Daniel was crying, a small, reedy cry muffled by the door to his room.

  She got up to go to the baby. ‘Stay right there,’ he shouted. He heard the receptionist on the end of the phone say that someone would be there right away.

  ‘Can you stay on the line until doctor comes?’ she asked. He hung up.

  The bell rang and he answered the door, his arm gripped round his wife’s sleeve. Daniel’s cries were louder and more piercing now. There were the blue lights of a police car outside, the figure of an officer behind the duty doctor.

  ‘Mr Forbes,’ said the doctor. It was the one from the local surgery who had offered him antidepressants after his previous tour, but he had refused. ‘I believe you called us. Do you mind if we come in?’