‘Where’s Petal?’
‘Sorting out the studio. She’s going to Spain with her mum.’
He watched the patients drill holes in the earth with muddy fingers and drop in seeds. A man was making his way towards them, skirting the beds and kneeling patients. Archie hoped it might be the takeaway he had ordered for lunch, but it was Mike.
‘I got your text. What the fuck are you doing here?’ Mike asked as he drew closer, and flopped onto one of the dining chairs someone had painted with butterflies. Mike sat very upright for a moment, and then moved onto an old deckchair and leaned forward.
‘I handed myself in. Got tired of running,’ said Archie.
‘From the police?’
‘No, from the shit circulating in my mashed brain.’
‘You seemed okay to me. I thought you got a new place. It had an echo. Must have been pretty grand.’
‘Far from it,’ said Archie.
‘Well, look on the bright side. Your current place is fucking huge. A real eighteenth-century pile.’
Archie laughed. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said. ‘How are things?’
‘You know,’ said Mike, ‘needs must.’ He bit his lip. ‘I’ll get it sorted, Archie. It’s taking a bit longer than I thought. Hard to get a break.’
‘Still sober?’
‘As a judge.’
‘Good.’
‘Yeah. So when are you coming out?’
‘I don’t know. I’m still under observation. This is my key worker.’ He waved a hand at the nurse smoking by the portacabin and leaned forward and whispered to Mike. ‘I can’t remember his name.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t have one,’ said Mike, ‘maybe he’s a robot.’
‘You’re insane,’ said Archie, laughing. ‘Compared to you, I really don’t have any problems.’
‘As long as you’ve got options, eh? That’s the main thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s all temporarily shit; it’s whether you can get out of it that counts. After all, as I say, life is not shit. Shit is shit.’
‘I want to sort it,’ said Archie, ‘but I keep seeing things I don’t want to see again in my mind and I don’t know when they are going to start playing, or when I’ll want to deck someone. There’s no off button. That’s the problem. It’s tiring.’
‘Problems are always tiring,’ said Mike, ‘that’s why they’re hard to fix.’
‘Sometimes, I want to die,’ whispered Archie.
‘And that’s the one thing you’re not allowed to say. Jump around shouting you’re John the Baptist, or a purple balloon. Be a bit creative. Be nuts, but be alive. That’s what matters, Archie. It’s all too short anyway. Even you and me will be old blokes on a park bench one day, and we’ll be peeing into empty fabric conditioner bottles on long car journeys and wondering why no one finds us attractive any more.’
‘That’s the best you’ve got?’
‘Yup. Apart from reminding you of your unique selling point.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’re still a dad. There’s work to do Archie-boy.’ He had raised his voice to the level of a sergeant major. ‘You’ve still got some capital to realise.’
Archie looked up to see his key worker watching him. He wasn’t sure when he’d started listening to their conversation.
‘I’ll get this soldier back to the ward now,’ he said to Mike.
‘I’m waiting for my takeaway,’ said Archie.
‘You’re out of luck, I’m afraid,’ said the key worker. ‘They can’t deliver here. Food hygiene rules among other things.’
‘But they said they would,’ said Archie
‘That’s what they always say to keep you sweet. If you didn’t fill out your menu card this morning, then we’ll go via the volunteers’ café on the way back.’
It was full circle. More kindly ladies handing him cups of tea. ‘It’s still nineteen-fucking-eighteen,’ he said. ‘It’s the end of the war all over again. Same war, different name. Same burnt bodies. Surgeons sticking on face transplants that don’t stick. I saw it on telly. Boys looking out through holes cut in skin from their back and dying on the operating table because there are some things that can’t be patched up.’
‘Try not to get excited,’ said the nurse.
‘Or what?’ said Archie. ‘I’ll be the next guy sprinting for the wall with you in hot pursuit.’
Mike reached out and touched his arm. Archie had forgotten he was there. ‘Hold it together,’ he said. ‘This is important.’
Archie nodded. The nurse blew a last smoke ring into the air and they walked back to the sugar cube in a small procession.
Mike said goodbye at the door of the café. It smelled of baked potato. There was an honesty box for poppies on the counter. Archie ate from a polystyrene plate and drank a cup of tea, watched by the nurse. The Formica table-top was chipped. A television was playing a soap opera in the corner. An actress was pretending to cry, squeezing tears from her eyes. A woman was comforting her. He finished his roll and they took the lift upstairs. Hannah would come soon. The nurse popped into his station and left Archie to go back to the ward at the end of corridor but, with a glance over his shoulder, he took a quick left turn and wandered along to Petal’s studio. She was carding wool and crying. She sniffed as she heard him come in and looked up, trying to smile. ‘Thank God, it’s only you, Archie. I had to hold it together for Joy and the new intake. It’s a conveyor belt and half the time we release them just as we’re beginning to make progress.’
‘Sod’s law,’ said Archie. ‘I heard you’re going to Spain with your mum.’
‘That’s right.’ She took his hand. ‘They’re going to get someone to stand in for me until I decide what I want to do. You can guess why. I can’t forget what happened. I can’t stay here wondering if that bastard is going to pop out of the woodwork.’
‘The police will get him,’ said Archie.
‘Will they?’ asked Petal. ‘I’m not so sure. I’m going to look for work in Spain, but first I’m going to take some time out to get over what happened. I need to work out why I was such a fool.’
‘You weren’t a fool. It’s not foolish to want love.’
‘But when you can’t find it, Archie, what then?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Keep looking, I guess.’
‘Keep looking. “The miserable have no other medicine but only hope.” Shakespeare.’ She put the coloured strands of wool into a plastic bag and tied it shut. ‘I help other people to find answers all the time, but I can’t find the answer for myself. How great is that?’
‘Fan-diddly-astic,’ he said, in a sudden memory of the teenagers’ conversations outside his log-pile house.
She laughed. ‘If you’d been single, Archie.’
‘If I’d been single I might not still be around.’
‘My point exactly,’ she said. ‘After a while, it gets hard to fill the days. To make them meaningful. I won’t forget you, you know.’ She held out her hand. ‘I hope you make it.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll give it my best shot.’
‘I know you will,’ she said.
* * *
On his way to breakfast the next day, the Rosslyn knights clanked past him in the corridor on their way to the Holy Land. They bowed, bending their stiff bulldog necks over their swords. When they looked up, their eyes were burning embers in the chimney of their helmets, their ostrich plumes nodding feather-light over their heads. He saluted as they passed on. He was a solitary figure standing to attention in the empty corridor. The ghosts of war. His mind was a larger maze than he had thought. The solution wasn’t going to be simple. As he walked, Archie trailed his right hand along the wall, trying to find his way out. ‘Always turn right to find your way back to the entrance,’ he mumbled, but the start had been his fist connecting with his wife’s fac
e, the woman he loved. It was hard to slip past it and escape.
Dr Clark appeared, and steered him to his office. There was a man waiting who stood as Archie came in. His left forearm was missing. ‘This is Brendan Fraser from Combat Stress Now,’ said Dr Clark. ‘It’s a veterans’ support organisation.’
‘I don’t need any more counselling,’ said Archie. ‘I need results.’
‘I’ve arranged for Hannah to come and see you at the weekend. The missed call was a bit of a setback. You want to be as well as you can be for your reunion, don’t you?’
Archie nodded, embarrassed in front of this stranger.
‘Brendan is a veteran like you. I treated him a number of years ago.’
‘It’s been a long war,’ said Archie.
Brendan nodded. ‘I was in Iraq. I’m part of a peer-to-peer counselling programme,’ he said.
‘All boys together,’ said Archie.
Brendan looked at Dr Clark. ‘I don’t know if he’s ready.’
‘Speak to me,’ said Archie. The men looked at him: the man in the snow globe. He was banging on the glass. He could see them through the sticky finger-prints that handled his tiny world. His voice was muffled. ‘Speak to me,’ he said.
Brendan touched Archie’s shoulder. ‘Let’s get a coffee,’ he said. ‘You can tell me about your last tour.’ He steered him along the corridor.
‘I could do with something stronger,’ said Archie.
‘Don’t blame you,’ said Brendan. ‘We’ll go down the pub when you get out of here. Deal?’
‘Deal,’ said Archie, pushing open the door to the café and wandering over to a seat in the far corner.
Brendan brought two polystyrene cups of coffee, balanced on a tray in his right hand, over to the table and slid it onto the surface.
‘My wife would be here by now if she wanted me,’ Archie said. ‘I’ve nowhere to go.’
‘We’ll fix you up with temporary accommodation. Bed and breakfast.’
‘Like I’m a tourist?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that.’
‘How would you put it?’
‘Okay, just like that, but we’ve all been there. There are some good ones.’
‘With buxom landladies who crush you to their bosom?’
‘Sadly, no.’
‘I’m not interested.’
‘You can’t sleep rough.’
‘I did before.’
‘Look out of the window, Archie.’ The sky was black and heavy with rain. ‘It’s not an option.’
‘And I’m short of options?’
Brendan tore open two packets of sugar with his teeth and poured them into his coffee.
‘Let’s talk about you,’ said Archie.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘What tipped you over the edge?’
‘Direct, aren’t you?’ Brendan looked straight at him. ‘Do you really want to know?’
‘I’m agog,’ said Archie.
Brendan laughed. ‘You’re a comedian. I’ll keep it brief. I was tasked to destroy an abandoned vehicle stuffed with electronic counter-measure equipment. Let’s just say the drone wasn’t on the coordinates I called in.’
‘Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance.’
‘Send three and four pence, we’re going to a dance.’
‘It got lost in translation.’
‘Or they’re not that accurate.’
They fell silent.
‘The problem is there’s no front line any more,’ said Brendan. ‘It used to be a straight line. You knew where it was. It was finite. Now no one knows where it is. It could be anywhere and no one knows how big it is. It could be huge. It could be tiny. That’s what creates the fear: the bad decisions. It’s not knowing where the threat is located. They’re not standing in a row on a particular day, at a particular place, at a particular time waiting for us. They could be anywhere; they could be next door having a special chat online.’
‘You’re making me paranoid. You’re meant to be helping me.’
‘I’m just saying.’
‘I know.’
‘Or they might all have shelved their plans.’
‘True.’
‘How would we know?’
The men lapsed into silence. ‘I miss the guys,’ said Brendan.
‘Yes,’ said Archie.
43
He was dozing in bed when Hannah arrived, having sat by the window all morning looking for her. ‘Hello, stranger,’ she said.
He opened his eyes and smiled. ‘Pud,’ he replied. He tasted her old pet name in his mouth. Her betrayal was a bitter sauce. She read it in his smile.
‘I’m sorry, Archie,’ she said. ‘Mum had a fall.’
‘You didn’t phone.’
‘It was a bit crazy. I had to find someone for Daniel and…’
He cut her off. ‘And?’
‘And? Cut me some slack.’ She waved a hand at the ward. ‘I can’t adjust just like that to all this.’
He didn’t reply.
‘Can I sit down?’ she asked, pointing to the end of his bed.
He nodded, unexpectedly tearful. Her weight settled onto the mattress, depressing the end as if the corner might break off and she would float away on a piece of popping candy foam.
‘I don’t want to lose you,’ he said, pushing himself up, so that he was leaning against the headboard. ‘Come here.’
She slid along the bed, moving closer.
‘No, here.’ He patted the space beside him and stretched out his arms.
She slipped off her shoes and sat beside him. He put his arm across her shoulders. The familiar smell of her skin reached him. There was a faint scent of baby shampoo, and a new, floral perfume that smelled like their garden on a hot day.
‘What’s that scent?’ he asked.
‘Gentian violet,’ she said.
‘Gentian violet,’ he repeated. The blue-purple of the flowers lay between them. It was a bower in the antiseptic of the ward. Hannah sighed. No one else was around. ‘It’s funny to see things from your perspective,’ she said, looking round.
‘Hilarious,’ he replied.
Joy passed the doorway with a tattered felt square in her hand, back-tracked, pointed two fingers at her eyes and then at him, and walked on.
‘I’m a marked man,’ he laughed, kissing Hannah’s hair.
‘Who was that?’
‘Joy,’ he said.
She looked up at him. ‘Can you forgive me?’ she asked. ‘You know I thought they would take Daniel away.’
‘We don’t need to talk about this now.’
‘Is there a better time?’
‘Okay. You were ill. I should have seen it sooner. Done something.’
‘What could you do? We were both falling apart.’
The silence returned. She reached across to the bedside table and offered him the plastic beaker of water.
‘After you,’ he said.
She drank. ‘I let you down too,’ she said, passing him the cup. ‘Not at first when I was ill, but later, when you were crawling round the garden like some kind of beetle.’
‘You saw me?’
‘Of course.’
‘It was surveillance.’
‘It was crap. The gate squeaked every time you opened it. It wasn’t rocket science.’
‘You phoned the police.’
‘Mum did. She was more scared than me. I knew what happened that time you hit me. She didn’t. I knew it was to save Daniel, but I don’t think I was going to drop him. I was testing myself to see if I could face down the fear that I was going to hurt him by holding him over the banister and not dropping him. Does that make any sense? It did to me at the time. I must have been really unwell. I see that now.’ Sh
e pulled a tissue out of her pocket and wiped her eyes. ‘Did you really have to punch so bloody hard?’
‘Did you really have to lock me out?’
‘This isn’t the right time, is it?’
He shook his head.
She pushed herself to the edge of the bed. ‘I can only say I’m sorry, Archie. I’m better now and you will be too.’
‘So they keep saying.’
‘These things aren’t irreversible. They feel that way at the time but they aren’t. I wrote an angry letter to the hospital about how long they let me labour on all their drips and induction fluid and it made me feel a bit better. It was a three-day spectacular. I let some of the anger out and that left a little bit of space to let some healing in. Anger can make you ill. Mum was great.’
‘Not to me.’
‘No.’ Hannah took his hand. ‘She’s sorry too.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘Aren’t you going to ask how she is?’
‘How is she?’
‘On the mend. Broken wrist.’
He lay down again. Hannah slipped off the bed, pulled up his covers and tucked him in. ‘I’ll sit for a bit,’ she said. ‘If that’s alright? It took me an hour to get across town on the bus and, to be honest, you’re better company than Daniel. You don’t burp and dribble all over me or pull my hair.’
He smiled and sketched a halo above his head.
‘I brought you some photos,’ she said, ‘of the bits you missed.’ She passed him pictures of Daniel standing for the first time, his arms outstretched for balance, tiny lace-up sneakers on his feet. There was a close-up of his first baby teeth, a gummy dolphin smile. There was a picture of him sliding backwards down a chute in the park, laughing up at the sky.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ said Archie.
‘Or course,’ she replied. ‘Like his dad.’
He began to cry. ‘I don’t feel I have a right to be happy any more.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Say something.’
‘I don’t know what to say. I can see it hurts.’
‘It does. It didn’t at the time. In the heat of battle, but it does now.’
‘You’ll need to learn to live with it. We both will.’
‘Yes.’
The Last Tour of Archie Forbes Page 23