The Last Tour of Archie Forbes

by Victoria Hendry

  Dr Clark flipped through his chart. ‘You’re on an increased dose of the SSRIs to stabilise you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Feeling better?’

  ‘I suppose so. It’s a bit like a sea wall. I know the storm is crashing on the other side, but I can still go to the chip shop.’

  ‘So, you admit there’s a storm,’ he said. ‘Shall we go to my office? Or take a walk along the corridor. I know you’re an active sort of person. Would you like to walk in the grounds?’

  ‘I don’t want to go out,’ said Archie. ‘I’ve only just got back. I lived out there for a while, near the orchard.’

  ‘I know,’ said Dr Clark. ‘You were spotted. David, the head gardener, called the police. They were primed to bring you here.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Archie.

  ‘You’d broken your restraining order, and after your tour of the cells, well, let’s just say they were keeping an eye on you. I think it’s important that we talk. The NHS can give you two more sessions with me and then you’ll be passed to a community psychiatric nurse. You’ll have to go private after that, or go through the ex-services support network. You were lucky to get a bed.’

  ‘I could always drown my sorrows,’ said Archie.

  Dr Clark made a note in his notebook, his fingers tapping on the keys. ‘You’re cyberising me, Doc,’ Archie said. ‘Is that site even secure?’

  ‘The data is encrypted,’ said Dr Clark. ‘Your notes are confidential, and you can have access to them at any time.’

  ‘To read what a nut-job I’ve become? I already know the story. I wrote it.’

  ‘Or maybe it was written for you, Archie?’

  ‘By the powers that be, or a mighty Hand?’

  ‘Perhaps. It depends how you view it.’

  ‘How do you view it, doc?’

  ‘I think you’re the only one who can unravel it. As I say, you need to talk. Put the whole thing to bed and get on with your life.’

  ‘You only get one life, eh? You only live once. YOLO.’ He remembered the teenagers dancing.

  ‘Shall we get started?’ Dr Clark held out his hand to indicate the direction to his office. ‘It’s the first step on a long journey.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s the gang plank. Spare me the psycho-babble,’ he said.

  * * *

  The room was as he remembered it. The television was still playing outside in the lounge. He waved at Joy, who was sitting there, but she didn’t acknowledge him. Dr Clark noticed his gesture. ‘Don’t expect too much,’ he said.

  A woman reporter on screen was saying peace talks between the Pakistani government and the Taliban had fallen through.

  Archie lay back on the couch in Dr Clark’s office. His life was becoming horizontal. He was a salamander in his own dark place. He was a creature on all fours. He was a turtle on its back. He sniffed his jumper. It still smelled of leaves and rain-soaked turf.

  ‘Before we start,’ said Dr Clark, ‘Remind me of your role in Afghanistan.’

  ‘Stan,’ said Archie. ‘Life in the Great Afghan Fuck All.’

  Dr Clark was silent. Archie’s abdomen rose up and down as he drew in deep breaths to counter the tension building under his clavicles, the tightness under his ribs. ‘I know you’re waiting for me to fill the silence, Doc,’ he said. ‘What do you call it – reflective listening? Empathetic silence? Create a vacuum and something will fill it.’

  Dr Clark remained silent. Archie sat up and walked over to a plastic chair in the corner. He rested his arms on his knees and leaned forward. ‘I was assigned as one of six bodyguards to a certain chief of staff,’ he said. ‘We travelled all over – he headed up one of ISAF’s provincial reconstruction teams. We were trying to get the locals to plant wheat instead of poppies. Cut that industry down to size, and stop it funding the Taliban. Only problem was, ISAF never thought to put roads in to get the new crops to market. All that grain, and fruit and veg, went to waste. They couldn’t shift it. The schools we built were abandoned. The Kajaki dam was almost indefensible, five hundred million US dollars and counting. The infrastructure programme was … misguided.’ He paused. ‘I can’t tell you how beautiful the place was. Snowy-white mountains, green ribbons of crops, incredible skies. We were running around like ants, stirring up the dust.’

  ‘And you saw fighting?’

  ‘I saw death.’

  ‘Archie, I want you to close your eyes now and we’ll start counting. You remember the routine?’

  ‘Yes, it wasn’t very helpful. No offence.’

  ‘None taken. Nevertheless, I want you to try it now.’

  Archie closed his eyes. Dr Clark’s voice started counting. ‘One, two …’

  Archie opened his eyes.

  ‘Shut your eyes,’ said Dr Clark.

  Archie was spinning towards a black hole. Time was stretching and he was pulled thin across the miles of darkness. Debris was flying out at him, as the vortex unravelled; the meaty scraps of battle; the glint of light from a drone hanging in the sky; a child’s remote-controlled toy; the distant hum of a motor. Dust filled his eyes and his nose. It suffocated him in clouds of grey particles. It was hard to breathe; harder to breathe as he fell into the vortex; spinning, spinning away into that day when his wife held Daniel over the landing’s banister, and there was nothing below his son but air. He groaned.

  Dr Clark had reached seventy. Seventy-one.

  He was running up the stairs. Seventy-two, seventy-three. His legs were moving in slow motion, too slow to stop her. There wasn’t enough time. He was screaming her name. She was turning to look at him with the blankness of a sleepwalker. His fist was connecting with her jaw and she was falling as he pulled the child from her arms. His Daniel. His Daniel. And the policewoman was talking and it wasn’t making sense, and his colleagues were turning away as he was walking into the board-room to hear the judgement on his performance – the deal that went pear-shaped, the wife-beating, the civil action against him, bankruptcy. Ground zero.

  ‘Begin to come out of the memory,’ Dr Clark’s voice said, from a great distance.

  Archie couldn’t find the door. His eyes were screwed tight shut. The stock-market shares were falling in red light. His wife’s knees were buckling. It was taking him down to a place where he was flat-lining.

  ‘A hundred, Archie,’ said Dr Clark. ‘Archie,’ said Dr Clark again. ‘Can you open your eyes?’

  Archie sat behind his lids in a closed room. His stomach tightened and he leaned forward and spewed onto the floor. There was nothing in his stomach but tea. It lay in a brown, acid pool at his feet. He looked at it from a great height. Snapshot. Dr Clark was kneeling on the floor mopping it up with a wad of paper towels. Snapshot. He passed a handkerchief to Archie. Snap. Shot.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It happens. Cathartic. Very natural after a period of emotional stress. Can you make it over to the couch?’

  Archie got to his feet and, leaning on Dr Clark’s arm, walked across the room. ‘Don’t ask me any questions,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t.’ said Dr Clark, ‘but I think we’ve got there.’

  Archie nodded. ‘I should have been there for Daniel,’ he said. ‘For Hannah.’ The silence filled the room. ‘It was a difficult birth. Life and death got all mixed up.’

  ‘That must have been hard,’ said Dr Clark.

  ‘I don’t need your sympathy,’ said Archie. ‘I’m trying to tell you something.’

  ‘What are you trying to tell me?’ asked Dr Clark.

  ‘She was postnatally depressed and no one knew. No one except me, and her mum.’

  ‘Did she get help?’

  ‘No. It was a secret. Her mum told her not to say. It’s like combat stress, except it’s called depression, like it’s a kind of failure.’

  ‘Depression isn’t a failure.’

  �
��It is in the pull-yourself-together school of medicine.’

  ‘No, Archie. It’s not.’

  ‘Well, it is out there. They think you’re weak. Mums are meant to be happy, aren’t they? Grateful.’

  ‘It doesn’t always work out like that.’

  ‘And soldiers are meant to be brave, and war will put things right.’

  ‘I think we know life isn’t like that,’ said Dr Clark.

  ‘But you think it will be,’ said Archie. ‘You think it will be simple, the way you expect it to be, and when it’s not, it’s a shock.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Dr Clark.

  ‘Life and death get mixed up, and when you’re on the front line, or pushing your sprog out, and no one ever mentioned you could die, it’s a shock.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘It doesn’t fit with the happy picture. The warrior and the mother.’

  Dr Clark looked out the window. Archie followed his gaze. The seagulls were floating on the wind from the west, calling to each other in a throaty, unearthly cry.

  ‘We’ll get your wife help,’ said Dr Clark.

  ‘You’re too late,’ said Archie. ‘I think her mum got her through it. She moved in after I was barred.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I used to watch them from the end of the garden. Surveillance. Easy. Hannah loves that boy. I do too. They look fine together now. He’s sleeping through the night by the looks of it.’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ said Dr Clark.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ said Archie. ‘Everyone is someone’s child. That’s the problem. That’s my problem. I didn’t get it until I became a dad and my wife broke the rules. The rules of engagement.’ He looked back at the room. ‘I can’t live with myself. I’m afraid I’ll hurt someone. I know how to do it. Take their son. I’ve killed someone.’ He drew a finger across his neck. ‘It’s quick,’ he said, ‘but the replay’s in slow motion.’

  ‘You won’t do it, Archie,’ he said. ‘You won’t do it because you are aware of your problem. Your conscious mind is monitoring your thoughts. You’ll make the right choices.’

  ‘But when people look at me they can see what I’m thinking. What I know.’

  ‘Well, maybe they can. Maybe they can’t. We can work on that. The key thing is to be at peace with yourself and that will come with time.’

  ‘And pills.’

  ‘Again, maybe. Maybe not. The key thing is, do you want to get well?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Archie. ‘I want to get back to my real life.’

  ‘This is your real life, Archie.’

  ‘And that’s the best you can come up with?’

  ‘It’s all anyone’s got.’ Dr Clark leaned back in his chair. ‘I’m not a miracle worker,’ he said. ‘I leave that to the man upstairs.’

  In the next room, Joy laughed. ‘What’s she got to laugh about?’ asked Archie.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Dr Clark.

  ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles,’ sang Joy. Her voice was reedy, it pierced his head.

  Archie strode over to the door. It was locked. He banged his fist on the wood. ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he shouted through it. A shadow passed in front of the keyhole. He bent down and Joy’s eye stared back at him. It was blue, a summer ocean. ‘Hello, my lover,’ she said, holding his gaze.

  41

  Archie stretched out in his bed, held his arms up above his head and flexed his fingers. He was still young. He could come back from this. Rolling over onto his side, he picked up his phone and accessed the YouTube video of the Slim for Jesus Fan Club. Sooze had been busy while she waited for Louise. He was doing squat thrusts at Louise’s feet; they were wandering along a path under the trees like Pooh bear and Piglet; he was inexplicably running ahead of her; he was eating egg rolls and shouting ‘Hooah’ and ‘Hallelujah’. Granny and the killer mutt tutted from a nearby bench as Archie performed a star jump in the last frame. It zoomed in on his sunglasses and the screen went blank.

  He laughed and was filled with a new optimism. Dr Clark had said he could make a call to his wife in the presence of a member of staff. The call had been arranged for 16.00 hours, so as not to coincide with Daniel’s tea-time and bath. Perhaps he could rebuild the bridge between them, cross its dizzying fall to his home, however ruined, and rebuild the walls of his castle, brick himself back into his place of safety. Hannah knew the truth and would forgive him. They had both survived unimaginable stress. They had that in common: a bond of knowledge not commonly shared, in the anticipation of parenthood or battle. Aftermath. He knew now what the knowing had been, written on the faces of teenagers in the trenches of France – grainy films on hand-wound cameras – the Boy’s Own adventure of war. It was the same stillness visible on the face of the birth-mother: the knowledge of the abyss, narrowly missed, but there for another day, and every other day, for someone to fall into. They had leapt the smooth, mossy walls, the drop, the stream gurgling over rocks at the bottom, its unimaginable depth. Urban runners. Free-runners.

  Archie wandered along the corridor to find the nurse. The pink and silver lino lay flat under his feet, didn’t leap up to torture him. He paused and looked down at it. It was dull, ordinary. He was coming home. He had reached his Cyprus, his staging post, and was waiting for the flight to Brize Norton. He heard the patter of small feet on lino and looked up. A woman was walking along the corridor with a small boy holding onto her hand. He waved. She smiled and pushed open the door of the women’s ward. It wasn’t Hannah. He found the nurses’ station and sat down. The nurse took his phone from his hand, scrolled down to his home number and passed the phone back. ‘Put it on speaker phone,’ he said, ‘so we all know where we stand.’

  Archie nodded. The ring tone was a pulse in his head. He counted the rings. It would be eight until the answer phone kicked in. He swallowed. It was a long time since he had made a call to his old world. There was a hiss of static on the line. ‘Please leave a message after the tone.’

  Archie was silent. He held out the phone to the nurse who shook his head. ‘Archie, you speak,’ he instructed.

  Archie hung up and sat looking at the screen.

  ‘It happens all the time,’ said the nurse. ‘We’ll try again later, okay?’

  ‘She doesn’t want to speak to me,’ said Archie.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said the nurse.

  ‘Want a bet?’ asked Archie as he tried to smile.

  42

  His bubble of happiness receded as the clock on the ward ticked towards evening and there was no message from Hannah. When the nurse came to see him with his tablets, he lay on the raft of his bed pretending to be asleep. The ice blocks of his memories bumped against its foot. Time mattered less here. It became the squeak of the tea trolley, and the sticky peel and release of the rubber soles of the nurses’ shoes as they walked along the corridors. They were anonymous in flowery surgical scrubs or white coats, and only ran when there was a beep on their call button, or a sudden scream. The screams came singly here, not a battlefield roar of men punctured by bullets or dismembered by mines. The wounded here were artists. Their cries were virtuoso solos of pain; they were opera singers performing to the crowd in an unknown language. The notes soared above Archie and became the crescendo of his own pain. The A Flat and C Minor carried across the water to his raft as he drifted.

  In the morning, he let his hand fall over the side of his bed as if he could paddle to safety, a lonely survivor unsure of his direction. Dr Clark’s office was a light on the shore; his disappointment about the failed call a headwind; his clothes a ragged sail. Now the adrenalin of Calum’s manipulation had passed, and the police hunt – which had never been a hunt, but zookeepers rounding up a wounded animal – was over, he could look around and try to recapture the frankness of his reunion with Petal and the admission he had made to Dr Clark. There was a fa
int dawn. Hannah would find him. The truth was a beacon. He moved onto his bedside chair and sat looking out of the window.

  ‘Archie,’ said a voice from the doorway. It was his nurse. ‘Your wife called. She’s sorry about yesterday. Her mum had a fall and she couldn’t make it. She’ll reschedule, okay?’

  Archie nodded, and looked down at his feet. He lay back on his bed and watched the day pass round the sundial pendant of the light in the centre of the ward until it grew dark. The nurse took away the tray of uneaten food from his bedside table, leaving the cup of cold tea and a menu card for the next day.

  Becalmed in the night, his Grandpa came to him and stood at the end of his bed, a young navigator on the bridge of his doomed corvette. He had a black beard and sparkling, blue eyes and was wearing the slippers he had walked home in when the war ended. Burning his uniform in the back garden had not expunged his memories, put the bees of his rage to sleep in the curling smoke. He shared Archie’s world, a world of thoughts that stung. Archie opened his lips and moaned, a small bubble of pain. It had no fixed shape but it had a sound, a huge sound. It was growing, filling his chest. It was powerful, it was erupting from him in great folds. It burst as he threw himself onto the floor. The squeaking feet came running. Strong arms caught him up and delivered a shot to his buttock. It restored silence to his world. It was beautiful.

  * * *

  The next day, a nurse appointed as his key worker walked him to the garden past the mortuary and the greenhouses. He was on the inside now, not the outside looking in. Life was a two-way mirror. Dave was still orchestrating his volunteers. Archie’s nurse stood smoking at the portacabin door. His log-pile house had been bulldozed and a builder’s yard established on the site behind a wire fence.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked the nurse.

  The nurse shrugged. ‘New hospital. The garden has a year’s grace, then they’ll have to move it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘They’ve got a new site. Not as big.’

  ‘Is my wife coming today?’

  ‘No word yet.’