The Last Tour of Archie Forbes

by Victoria Hendry

  ‘I wonder if I could have some of that, pal?’ he asked a teenager.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Piss off.’

  ‘Please. I’m desperate,’ he said.

  The young guy pulled one earphone out of his ear, looked at Archie’s muddy legs and wet shoes. ‘Come back later,’ he said, ‘but don’t say I told you.’

  36

  Petal was shivering when Calum came back with a glass of hot chocolate, carried in on a tray, held up shoulder-high. He was a waiter in a Viennese café, a high priest. ‘Madam,’ he said, presenting it to her with a bow. She took it in both hands, warming them on the glass. His eyes were bright again as he looked at her. ‘Drink up,’ he said.

  She looked at the brown, frothy liquid.

  ‘You want to get out of here, don’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Then drink it.’

  ‘Is it poisoned?’ she asked.

  ‘This isn’t a fairy tale,’ he replied.

  She thought of her life stored behind him, wondered if he was a barrier she could pass through, a neutrino flying unnoticed through the mesh of his being.

  ‘You have to get through me to get out of here, Petal,’ he said.

  She raised the glass to her lips, too tired to care. ‘I would rather die playing your stupid games because I choose to, than spend one more minute here, because you choose to keep me.’

  ‘You’re being very melodramatic,’ he said.

  She waved a hand at the flooded room in the half light, and then raising the glass in a mock toast drank the first sip.

  ‘Good?’ he asked.

  ‘Fucking marvellous,’ she replied.

  He gestured to her to drink the rest, moving closer. ‘It’s Madagascan chocolate, hand ground …’

  ‘… from the finest cocoa beans,’ she finished.

  ‘By me. I’m a connoisseur of the good things in life.’

  She looked at him. He seemed to be shrinking. He was watching her, his dark chocolate eyes, cavities in the mask of his face. Their blankness drank her in, drip by drip, drop by drop. Her limbs grew heavy and he stepped forward and lifted her up. ‘Close your eyes, Petal,’ he said, and he carried her up the stairs, one at a time, each jolt taking her closer to the light. And then there were more stairs to another floor, and she glimpsed a front door behind her, from the corner of her eye that was oh, so heavy, the lid powering down to rest on the rim of her sight.

  The water in the bath was warm and scented as he held her head in the crook of his arm and rubbed her body with his free hand, slick with soap. His hand was gentle, rolling over the line of her breast, across her belly and between her thighs. There was glorious light and her mind and her body floated there, willing nothing to be other than it was. It was a strange eternity. He lifted her out, dried her with her silk evening dress and pulled it over her head as if she were a child. He brushed her hair with his fingers, pulling gently at the resistance in her curls. He propped her up against his chest and arranged her shawl around her shoulders.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Sending you home,’ he replied. ‘You’re not suited to my world after all, and the real thrill, as I say, is eluding the chase. You were merely the appetiser.’

  His voice was growing more distant. ‘Anyway, this was all I really wanted from you,’ he said, kissing the fingers of his left hand, which he bunched to his lips, a diner praising the food, ‘to taste your nectar.’

  * * *

  At the front door, he pulled her arm over his shoulder and guided her out onto the street. It was deserted and they walked, stumbling, along a quiet road, two drunks, two lovers on a date, holding each other up, unremarkable in the city. As they neared the junction with a busy road, he hailed a taxi. ‘Get this one home, will you mate?’ he said to the driver. ‘Here’s twenty pounds and her driving licence from her purse. I found her a bit the worse for wear on the street. Don’t want anything to happen to the little lady.’

  The driver nodded and glanced at the licence. ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘but she’ll have to get herself to her front door. I’m not allowed to touch her.’

  Petal heard the thud of the cab door and felt herself gliding along the road back to her old life. Home. It was all so remote, so simple. She was the passive player in events framed by others. She would be home soon. She was going home. The cab’s tyres jolted over the cobbles on her street. Like a sleep-walker, she saw the dead heads of the sunflowers on her path, her red front door, the key in her hand. She pushed it into the lock, heard the teeth lift, admitting her to her old life, and stumbled into the hall.

  37

  Archie waited for the shop assistant to go back into the store, swiping a card round his neck on the security sensor to open the door. He had a quick look round and lifted the lid on the huge bin. There was less in it than he had expected. Raw chickens gleamed at the bottom, their plucked skin pressing against plastic wrapping on trays, date-marked and priced. Rotting satsumas and soft vegetables lay in a midden heap in the corner and near the top, just within reach, were squashed, premature Christmas mince pies, still boxed. He put two packets in his rucksack and closed the dumpster lid. It was beginning to rain, like Nad-e Ali in winter, cold and muddy. He opened his mouth to catch the first drops of water and let them trickle down the back of his throat. He swallowed and saw himself from the outside, a man by a bin drinking rainwater from the sky. It had been a long fall. He shook himself and walked round to the front of the store, straightening his back as he marched in past the barriers to go and fill his water bottle from the sink in the gents. He hoped the security cameras would be scanning the aisles and not the front door. The security guard was leaning on the customer service desk, chatting up a young assistant as she pulled size tags from empty coat hangers.

  A jet of air-freshener released into the air as it sensed him come into the toilet, filling the air with a citrus scent that sickened his empty stomach. It was the hiss of soldiers spraying cans of air-freshener at Camp Bastion to cover the smell of the latrines. It was the fake lemon of his desert home. His hand shook as he reached out for the tap. He stood his water bottle on the back of the sink and looked at his reflection in the mirror. A derelict stared back at him, mud on his jaw-line and grass stains on his sweatshirt. He only ever saw his face in tiled, public spaces these days. He had lost the intimacy of his connection to himself, those private moments trying to glimpse the man in the mirror that other people saw: trying to tilt his head to the best angle that might catch that elusive expression that had made him attractive to others. It was the mystery of self, experienced only from the inside, and never seen objectively, and now this nightmarish synchronicity between inside and outside that he couldn’t hide, as the shattered, inner man overpowered the outer, and looked at the world without dissembling – with a frankness that terrified, and a knowledge of death that had no place here. His was the land of the human abattoir and he walked it as a butcher with sharpened knives.

  The air-freshener sighed behind him as the door opened. An old man came in and walked over to the urinals. Archie leaned over the sink and splashed his face, cleaning the mud off his sleeves with a damp paper towel. He swished his mouth out with water from the tap. ‘You don’t want to do that, son,’ said the old man.

  Archie looked into his rheumy eyes.

  ‘You don’t know what you might catch,’ he added.

  Archie nodded, and shouldered his bag. As he left the store, the sky was dark grey, a theatre back-drop behind the fields. The rain had stopped. Traffic was running south along the main road out of the city. A car transporter carrying damaged cars splashed him. He had left the spade by the bin, but still had the orange jacket. He picked up his pace and swung along the road to Roslin, hoping he looked like a man on his way home after a long shift.

  Bungalows and pubs lined the street of the village. Old poppy wreaths lay
at the foot of the war memorial, and he turned down the lane to Rosslyn Chapel. Beyond the hedge, on green velvet, the chapel was a jewel box of pink and yellow sandstone studded with carvings of gargoyles and angels. He skirted the new visitor centre, plastic knights gazing from the window, and climbed over the back wall into the grounds. The side door was open and he slipped inside. There was a last knot of tourists at the altar with a guide. He beckoned to Archie to join them but Archie shook his head, genuflected to the altar and sat in a pew at the back as if in devout contemplation. He wondered how the nuns were doing, feeding their flock at St Phil’s. He reached into his rucksack and popped one of the mince pies into his mouth. The raisins were cinnamon-sweet and sugary, and a tide of saliva washed to the back of his throat. Even now, raisins were drying in their huts in the Green Zone, small houses of dried fruit with slits cut into the walls to let in the warm autumn air. The air there smelled of Christmas pudding and cordite. He sat back and focused on the ceiling of the chapel. It was covered in carved daisies, lilies, marigolds and five-pointed stars. A single crescent moon clung to the sandstone. ‘You can see the face of the donor, Sir William St Clair, carved to the left of the gentleman seated at the back,’ said the voice of the guide. ‘And if you stand beneath Sir William’s portrait you can see the face of Christ hidden among the stars.’

  Archie looked up – a bearded face peered over the lintel into the world below with a hand raised in blessing. The guide’s voice continued, ‘To the right, in the far corner above the door, you can see the face of the master mason and, to the left, that of his apprentice. As you are no doubt aware, the master was absent for a considerable time during the work on the columns. On his return he discovered that his apprentice had carved this elaborate column by the altar. It didn’t match its companion on this side, which the master had completed before his departure. Enraged, the master mason raised his mallet and struck the apprentice a fatal blow to his forehead.’

  There was silence. The tourists looked from one column to the other and back to their guide. Archie’s eyes ran over the ribbons and curlicues of the apprentice’s column, thinking of each hammer blow carrying the young man nearer to his death. The carved animals of his destruction chased each other in an eternal circle round the base. ‘The master was hung,’ said the guide, ‘and his portrait head doomed in perpetuity to gaze at his apprentice’s work.’

  Archie looked up at the blank eyes of the master’s face in stone, and back to the asymmetry of the columns flanking the altar. All of the other columns lining the chapel were plain, holding up the heavy canopy of stone flowers. The building smelled damp with centuries of rain. The guide highlighted the carvings of shells worn by pilgrims to Santiago with the luminous green dot of his laser pen, and the tracer light danced over Archie’s head to a single teardrop carved on the wall. ‘Beneath our feet,’ said the guide, ‘lie the bodies of the earls of Rosslyn in a tomb sealed over two hundred and fifty years ago – some say it is three layers deep. Within the catafalque, it is rumoured, lie not only the true Stone of Destiny, but the testament of Mary Magdalene.’

  The tourists gazed down at the ground as if they could catch a glimpse of the lost treasures. Archie walked along the transept and down into the crypt below the altar. He stood by the tomb of a sleeping knight. He crouched down and traced the words, ‘Knight Templar of the Thirteenth Century’. A cherub balanced on a ball on the next carved tombstone, the grim reaper behind him, pointing at a praying man. Archie looked at Death’s bony finger, remembered the duck shoot of taking down leakers from the high ground as they tried to escape the killing zone. He heard the banter of the marines shouting ‘hoofing’ as each man fell, targets on a coconut shy. Death wasn’t a harvest, it was a sport.

  ‘The chapel’s closing,’ called the guide’s voice from the top of the stairs. Archie jumped. ‘Sorry to cut short your visit,’ he added. ‘We’re closing, but you are very welcome to return to our Garden of Eden, Monday to Saturday.’

  ‘What?’ said Archie.

  ‘The flowers and animals,’ said the guide. ‘The carvings. A Garden of Eden cast in stone. We’re pretty much open every day except Christmas and New Year.’

  Archie looked round the vault. There was nowhere to hide. Nowhere to stay warm among these old knights, these sleepers who still dreamt of wars, buried with prayers and their families’ tears. He envied them sleeping secure in their beliefs. Archie climbed the stone stairs, waved to the guide as he passed along the edge of the chapel to the side door and slipped out. It was almost dark. The light faded as he followed a winding path down towards Rosslyn Castle away from the village. He kept to the raised green grass in the middle of the track in case of IEDs and then forced himself to walk in the earthy rut, breathing in time to the swing of the metal detector of the soldier ahead of him, a transparent companion who walked in his waking memory, comforting, his desert camouflage bright against the tree trunks and the dark spaces between. The path ended in a bridge over a gorge. Its parapets were only knee-high, and on the other side he could see an old house sheltering in the ruined walls of a much bigger castle. A dog was barking on the drive. A chain was stretched across the road like one of the Mujahideen’s on the Kandahar Road after the Soviets left. He looked at the canine toll-keeper. Some kind of lurcher. It ran towards him and he knelt down to greet it, murmuring, ‘Good boy.’ It skidded to a halt against his knee, and licked his face. ‘You’re not much of a sentry,’ he said, turning its face up to rub its ears. Its eyes were mismatched – one blue, the other brown. After a hopeful sniff at his bag, it turned and bounded back to the house.

  Archie slithered down the steep, leafy slope to the foot of the gully and walked towards a small doorway he had glimpsed from the bridge. It was an abandoned ice-house. There was an iron grille just inside the doorway. He pushed against it, but it was secure. The dog barked at him from the parapet, looking down, its head on one side – its blue eye staring, and then its brown. Turning his back on the dog, he picked up a rock and crashed it against the padlock. The dog barked as the stone grated on the metal. He wished he had a charge to blow a way in. He brought the rock crashing down again, and the gate swung open. He switched on the torch on his phone and looked round the walls before jumping down into the pit. The curved dome of a beehive-roof rose above him, crowned with the face of a green man, a vine sprouting from his mouth. He sat down and, opening his bag, raised a mince pie to him in mock salute. ‘Bon appetit, my stony friend,’ he said and his voice echoed in the chamber with a dull boom. ‘My friend,’ said the echo, ‘My friend.’

  He pulled bracken from the slopes outside into his ice-house to make a bed and then lay down, pulling the vegetation over him to keep warm. He couldn’t feel the wind blowing here, but heard it whooshing under the bridge, turning over the dried leaves on the floor of the gorge. He put on his phone and dialled Mike’s number. The phone beeped on low battery, the handset signal flashing as it tried to connect. ‘Hello,’ said Mike’s voice.

  ‘Hey, it’s Archie. Just wanted to hear a friendly voice.’

  ‘This isn’t a great time, mate,’ said Mike. ‘I need to keep the line open for business. No rest for the polyamorous.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Archie. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You okay?’

  Archie swallowed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s that echo?’ asked Mike.

  ‘It’s my new place,’ said Archie.

  ‘Sounds big.’

  ‘More bijou,’ said Archie. ‘It’s near Roslin.’ He gave a laugh that echoed. The dog barked outside.

  ‘Look, do you mind if I phone you back another time?’

  ‘No,’ said Archie. ‘That’s fine.’

  ‘Glad to hear you’ve got a place.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Archie. ‘Bye.’

  ‘Cheers,’ said Mike.

  The line went dead. Archie tried Petal’s number again but there was no reply. He put the phone in h
is pocket, forgetting to switch it off to save the battery. He was thirsty and longed for a forbidden desert beer to wash the dust from his throat. He closed his eyes and heard the guide from the chapel describing another William St Clair carrying Robert the Bruce’s heart to Jerusalem, carrying the excommunicated Scottish king’s heart encased in lead, sweating on its journey, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He thought of the Scottish knight dying on the end of a curved sword, the crescent slicing through his flesh, the lead heart baking on the Spanish earth where it fell among the hooves of the Moorish cavalry. So many disputed lands, so many challenged thrones.

  Archie looked out at the sky, a narrow strip at the top of the gorge. A star jumped in the oasis between the urban clouds puffed orange by the city lights beyond. He gazed at the star and felt nothing. One star. One star when there had been thousands above him in Afghanistan, the Milky Way a smudge in an extravagant sky. Why care about one when there were so many? He was no more than an ice crystal, a frozen man, a temporary shape, and these chemicals and hormones that made him were polluted with fear. It would all melt away one day. He was no more than a puddle of water to be absorbed into the grass of his grave. Why did any of it matter? How long could he live a horror that replayed in his head on a loop? A loop-the-loop of internal anguish; of unanswerable questions; of the trick the politicians had played on him, to make him a pawn of empire in a tussle across the silk routes of Afghanistan, a shadow in the orange groves. There was supposed to be no empire now. He was an ant on the parapets of Alexander the Great’s ruined forts. He was the bogeyman running through the mouse-holes blown in the walls of the compounds of sleeping children and screaming mothers. He still stood in their nightmares. He still stood in his own nightmare. Those jirga meetings with the elders to capture their hearts and minds never made him feel he had a right to be there, to travel on the road the Mujahideen had denied the Soviets. They had seen camel trains and steel travel along it from India to Persia, and Pakistan to Iran, for generations. Only names changed. He rolled onto his side and sat up. Tears he couldn’t shed were pounding in his forehead. His throat was tight and he couldn’t breathe. He stumbled outside and pulled at his jacket. Someone was shouting and groaning. He fell onto his knees and curled into a ball, jack-knifing and curling as if he could give birth to a new man. ‘Hey,’ shouted a voice from the bridge. ‘If you don’t clear off, I’m going to call the police.’