The Last Tour of Archie Forbes

by Victoria Hendry

  ‘My wife’s not well,’ he said.

  ‘Well, let’s all get inside and we can sort this out. Hello, Mrs Forbes?’ He took her arm from Archie and steered her towards the living room, ‘Are you alright? Let’s get that cut seen to and then we can sit down and talk. Perhaps you could put the kettle on, Mr Forbes?’ It was an order.

  Archie nodded and walked through to the kitchen. His wife had copied the furnishings straight from a department store catalogue: the French dresser, the gingham blind, the hand-thrown pottery tea caddy. It was picture perfect. His wife was bleeding next door and his son lay crying upstairs; his voice was the mewling of a kitten.

  ‘I’ll get the child,’ he heard the officer call. There was the thud of feet on the carpet. When Archie came back through to the living room, Daniel was in his wife’s arms. He put the tea tray down on the coffee table and handed her a cup. The glass compartments of the table were filled with souvenirs from their wedding day and shells from their holidays. ‘We’d like to talk to you both separately,’ said the doctor, ‘and see if we can establish what’s happened.’

  Archie nodded and followed the officer back through to the kitchen. ‘Nice place you have here,’ said the officer.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nice place,’ she repeated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your wife says you’re ex-forces?’

  ‘A lieutenant in the Reserves,’ said Archie, ‘Afghanistan.’ His voice trembled.

  ‘That must have been tough.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Difficult to adjust to being back?’

  ‘No,’ said Archie. ‘Until today.’

  There was silence.

  ‘I was glad to be home.’

  ‘But you must have been affected?’ said the officer.

  ‘Not as much as you might think,’ said Archie. ‘I got used to it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Death. If I didn’t know the guy who got it, or he was the enemy, then it was just tough shit. Chance. He fired at me. I fired back. I could still eat and sleep. Still laugh with the boys.’ There seemed to be an abyss opening up at his feet. His legs were shaking.

  She sat down at the table and pulled out a small black handset and stylus. The screen glowed green. She tapped it. ‘Do you mind if I take a short statement?’ she asked.

  He sat down.

  ‘Where did you spend the day?’

  ‘At work – Forbes, Stock and Wilson in the city centre.’

  ‘And what time did you return home?’

  ‘Eighteen hundred hours.’

  ‘And your wife was here with the child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘I saw her on the landing with the baby. I thought she was going to throw him over the banister.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘I ran up the stairs and punched her to the ground. I knocked her out.’ He flexed his fist remembering the impact. ‘And I got Daniel and put him in his cot and phoned the doctor.’

  ‘And what time was that?’

  ‘I don’t know, about eighteen-fifteen?’

  ‘So you believed your wife might have been about to harm the child?’

  ‘Daniel.’

  ‘Did you have grounds to suspect that she might have been capable of this?’

  He didn’t answer. He remembered her taking her hands off the buggy at a busy crossing when they were shopping. He remembered the pram rolling towards the traffic. He remembered catching the handle and turning to her as she said, ‘Sorry. My hand slipped.’ And he remembered seeing that something was not right. ‘I’m tired,’ she had added. ‘Completely knackered.’

  He looked at the officer. ‘I don’t think she was coping after the birth.’

  ‘So she was depressed?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it was. She didn’t want to pick him up. She often asked me to do it, said she was a bad mother.’

  ‘And was she?’

  ‘No. I didn’t think so, but then I’d never done this before either. First-time parents.’

  ‘And you were just back from the Front? And it was hard to adjust?’

  ‘No, not really, as I said. I was glad to be back. To lie in a real bed, have a bath, eat fresh food, go out for a drink.’

  ‘So did you have any other reasons to suspect your wife was unwell?’

  ‘No,’ said Archie. ‘Nothing concrete. I heard her mother say to her when I walked in on them talking once, that she shouldn’t say anything or they would take the baby away.’

  ‘What do you think she meant?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think about it very long. I was very busy at work – trouble-shooting, catching up. There was a big deal going down.’

  She read his statement back to him. ‘You returned to the house at eighteen hundred hours to see your wife at the banister upstairs with your baby, Daniel. You believed she might be about to throw him into the hall below and punched her to the floor to stop this happening. You then phoned the doctor. You have recently returned from active combat in Afghanistan to your job with Forbes, Stock and Wilson. Sign here please.’

  ‘What about the bit about her strange behaviour?’ asked Archie.

  ‘That testimony would have to be given under oath to be used in evidence.’

  ‘Evidence?’ said Archie. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you could just sign the statement please, sir, and wait here while I speak to your wife, and the doctor next door.’

  He had finished his second whisky, standing at the back door looking down the garden when the officer returned. The gate was flapping. ‘I’m sorry to say, Mr Forbes, that your statement doesn’t tally with what your wife has told me and the doctor. She says you arrived home in an excitable state, took issue with the fact that she was still in her pyjamas and attacked her. Her injuries corroborate her account.’

  ‘It’s not true,’ said Archie, jumping to his feet. ‘That’s not what happened.’

  ‘Please control yourself, Mr Forbes. I need to tell you that the doctor will speak to you himself, before we draw any conclusions, but it seems likely your wife will press charges.’

  ‘Ask her mother,’ said Archie, ‘ask Frances. She’ll tell you she wasn’t well.’ Even as he said it he knew that Frances would back her daughter. It was a kitchen-table conspiracy of silence; it was a dangerous, middle-class game of happy families, of make-believe. ‘I was told it was a difficult birth,’ said Archie. ‘A really long labour.’

  ‘But she was discharged okay?’ said the officer.

  ‘Yes. She got out after three days. I wasn’t here.’

  ‘So there was additional stress?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Archie.

  ‘For both of you?’

  The words cornered him. The doctor had come through and was standing at the door. ‘Don’t stereotype me,’ Archie said. Walls were crumbling inside him. He had to save his son. Guns on the other side of the embankment were sending sizzling-hot bullets to bite into his skull. He was firing back. The picture was breaking down. The worlds were getting mixed up. It had been right, but now it was going wrong. He was the good guy. It was simple – goodies and baddies playing at war in a poppy field. Pop. Pop. Pop.

  He poured another whisky. ‘She’s lying,’ said Archie. ‘It’s a ruse. She’s afraid you’ll take the baby away.’

  ‘We wouldn’t do that,’ the doctor answered, sitting down and screwing the lid back on the whisky bottle. ‘There are specialist mother and baby units. Not as many as we would like, of course. Anyway, she seems fine.’

  ‘She’s not fine.’

  ‘She’s the one who was beaten. You don’t deny that.’

  ‘I di
dn’t beat her,’ he said. ‘I had to get Daniel. She was going to drop him.’

  ‘She says she was taking him to bed.’

  ‘Yes. She says she was taking him to bed.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Forbes, but you can see this is a very confused picture. As a precaution, I wonder if you could stay somewhere else tonight? At a friend’s? A relation’s?’

  ‘She’s not safe,’ said Archie. ‘Daniel’s not safe.’

  ‘Her mother has agreed to come over and stay.’

  ‘She’s in on it too,’ said Archie.

  ‘In on what?’

  ‘The cover-up.’

  ‘Mr Forbes, I don’t want you to distress yourself further. I really think it would be better if you left the house tonight. I can call you a taxi, if that would help.’

  ‘I can manage,’ said Archie.

  ‘I can assure you, we won’t leave until her mother arrives.’

  ‘It’s a missed opportunity,’ said Archie.

  ‘What is?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘To get her help.’

  ‘I think we’ve been over this,’ said the doctor. ‘If you could pack up what you need for the next couple of days, we’ll take it from there.’

  ‘Can I at least say goodbye to my family?’

  ‘It might be better if you just go,’ said the doctor, standing up.

  ‘I hate you,’ shouted Archie, ‘and people like you. You think you can see what is going on but you can’t because you don’t really listen. You want everything to be alright, because you know then that you won’t have to spend any of your money trying to put it right. But you leave people like me out in the cold, and you leave people like my wife and my son in danger.’ He smashed his fist into the table. ‘She’s not coping.’

  The officer reappeared with her hand on her radio. ‘I think it’s time for you to go, Mr Forbes,’ she said. ‘We can revisit this in the morning, okay?’

  Archie grabbed a jacket from the coat stand and opened the back door and walked out. ‘You’re fucking insane,’ he shouted. ‘I’m not the one that’s dangerous.’

  * * *

  He realised that Petal had stood up and come to sit beside him. She took his hand. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, Archie, but we need to phone Dr Clark. The police can wait. You look like shit.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve felt better,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d found all the answers out there. Looking up at the sky I thought I’d worked it out. Everything here is just the politics of the ants’ nest. It doesn’t even feature in the scheme of things. Everything that’s going on up there in the sky is so much bigger than us.’

  ‘But it matters to us, Archie.’

  ‘I worked out that if I am just a soldier ant then I’m not really to blame, am I?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For killing other ants.’

  ‘Except we’re not ants, Archie.’

  He smiled. ‘No, but we are super-tiny. Could you cut me some slack here? I’m trying to work something out. Something that will let me go on living.’

  She took his hand.

  ‘I worked out,’ he said, ‘that Hawking was right. If the whole universe can be reduced to what he called a singularity, then, when it exploded in the Big Bang, and became many things, the things were still part of the single, original whole. I think that’s it.’ He was talking very fast. ‘So I’m not uniquely responsible for what I am. I’m part of a bigger whole, although it’s fragmented, and that whole thing is all of us. We are all responsible for the way things are. The brokenness.’

  ‘That’s illogical, Captain,’ said Petal.

  ‘Don’t Star Trek me. I’m serious.’

  ‘You are responsible for your actions.’

  ‘Yes, but not the context and if my actions make sense in the context, then I’m not responsible for the whole thing, am I?’

  ‘So who is, if not you?’

  ‘Let’s say God,’ said Archie. ‘If he exists and, if he doesn’t, then all of us are responsible in this mad place we call the Universe. We’re all hurtling through space and everything is fragmented, or imploding, or unravelling, or being born, or dying, and no one can control it, or put it back together again. It’s one massive Chinese puzzle that’s gathering more pieces as it goes on. It’s a nightmare.’ He clutched his head and stood up.

  ‘You’ve got to hold it together, Archie. Think of Daniel. He needs you.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ he said, ‘but it’s getting more difficult. You know, Emperor Qin Shi Huang, who unified China, built a subterranean terracotta army to keep the ghosts of his enemies at bay in the afterlife. He was so damn scared of facing them on his own that he spent thirty-seven years of his life making pottery men with real weapons. Did he really think that was going to work: that he could ride his bronze chariot through his own guilty conscience, all the pain he had caused? He couldn’t admit that each of those figures didn’t represent the warriors who would defend him, they represented the lives he had taken. They were all his angry ghosts, and they were at his back. I don’t know how to face it all down, Petal. It’s too big.’

  ‘Start small,’ she said. ‘Start with yourself. See Dr Clark and then look out for your son. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s all that anyone can do.’ She stood up. ‘I’m going to call him now, okay? And once you’ve gone, I’m going to phone the police.’

  He put down the jacket he had just picked up, and nodded. Surrender was a release after all.

  40

  A week later, Petal was sitting by Archie’s bed on the ward when he came back from lunch. ‘Are you going to see Dr Clark?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but I expect the bastard will still be trying to make me count to a hundred.’

  ‘One, two, miss a few, ninety-nine, a hundred.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll get there. I’m going to see him myself.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘The police haven’t got much hope of a result. I told them a man locked me in a room and made me eat toast. The more I told them the more it sounded like the deluded ramblings of someone with a high fever. They said they couldn’t take a prosecution without proving a crime had taken place, without corroboration. It’s my word against his. There was no evidence of physical harm, but I can tell you it’s made me paranoid. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel I can trust anyone.’

  ‘I could testify for you,’ he said.

  Petal waved her hand at the ward. ‘Look where you are, Archie. They say the texts received by my friends and family contradict my complaint. They said they have to keep an open mind. They can’t rule out the possibility that I have another agenda, or it’s a lovers’ tiff, or I was at home all along.’

  ‘I know you weren’t.’

  ‘I know you do. I’ve squared it away by saying that at least I got out and nothing happened. Nothing awful. You hear about those women who disappear for years. How can that happen, Archie? It’s really freaky.’

  He thought of his wife’s own disappearing act in full view. ‘People aren’t very observant,’ he said. ‘They don’t always see what’s really going on.’

  ‘You never said a truer word. Dr Clark has got in touch with Hannah too. I tipped him off. It’ll be alright. It will take time, but it will be alright.’

  He tried to smile. ‘There’s more news,’ said Petal. ‘The Slim for Jesus Fan Club went viral.’

  ‘I’ve got a fan base?’

  ‘You’ve got about a million hits. Apparently Sooze filmed your antics on her camera phone. Hundreds are testifying to your brilliance. You’ve changed their lives. There’s talk of a T-shirt. The Slim for Jesus Fan Club. Men of Clay.’

  ‘It’s all bollocks,’ said Archie.

  ‘Who cares – if it works? Maybe it’s the hand of God, after all.’

>   ‘If he exists,’ said Archie. ‘And if he exists, I’d like a word.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have advertising revenue to help you get there – build that rocket.’

  He laughed.

  ‘You look nice when you smile,’ she said.

  He looked down at the bedspread. ‘Don’t give me any cheese,’ he said. ‘Keep it real.’

  ‘I mean it,’ she replied. ‘I care about you, Archie.’

  He blushed.

  Petal cleared her throat. ‘I mean professionally,’ she said. ‘I mean I care for you professionally.’

  ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said.

  ‘I never meant to upset you.’

  ‘You haven’t. I was already upset. I’m upset that the one time I try to meet a man, try to stop staying in night after night, wondering how old I look, I end up meeting a psycho.’

  Dr Clark came into the room. ‘Hello, stranger,’ he said.

  Archie felt vulnerable. Small in the bed, or too big for it. He sat up straight, and swung his legs over the side. Dr Clark was looking at Petal. ‘You okay?’

  ‘More or less. I’ll leave you to it,’ said Petal. ‘Save some chocolates for me.’ She waved at the wrapped box she had laid on his bedside table.

  ‘I’ll catch you later,’ Dr Clark said to her. ‘Hold it together for me.’

  She nodded, and a huge sympathy welled up in Archie for her. Dr Clark was the rat catcher. He hid his net well, but he would scoop up all those thoughts that came out to feed in the night, before they could scuttle back to their dark corners; lay them out for examination – articles for his medical journals, scalps on his belt, trophies that shouted of his prowess; his uncovering of the dark, sticky places.

  He turned to Archie with a bright smile. ‘Well, soldier,’ he said. ‘We’ve caught you at last.’

  ‘You’re scaring me, Doc,’ he said.

  ‘You’re a voluntary admission,’ said Dr Clark.

  ‘Affirmative, Captain,’ said Archie, sitting up and sliding his feet into his shoes, as if being dressed would somehow make escape easier.