But dying’s no easy trick. And suicide can’t be put on a list of Things to Do in between cleaning the grill pan and levelling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss blown at oblivion. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It’s for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios:
Pebble: Beach.
Raindrop: Ocean.
Needle: Haystack.
So for a few days he ignored the decision of the coin and just drove around with the Hoover tube. At nights he looked out through the windscreen into the monstropolous sky and had the old realization of his universal proportions, feeling what it was to be tiny and rootless. He thought about the dent he might make on the world if he disappeared, and it seemed negligible, too small to calculate. He squandered spare minutes wondering whether ‘Hoover’ had become a generic term for vacuum cleaners or whether it was, as others have argued, just a brand name. And all the time the Hoover tube lay like a great flaccid cock on his back seat, mocking his quiet fear, laughing at his pigeon-steps as he approached the executioner, sneering at his impotent indecision.
Then, on the 29th of December, he went to see his old friend Samad Miah Iqbal. An unlikely compadre possibly, but still the oldest friend he had – a Bengali Muslim he had fought alongside back when the fighting had to be done, who reminded him of that war; that war that reminded some people of fatty bacon and painted-on-stockings but recalled in Archie gunshots and card games and the taste of a sharp, foreign alcohol.
‘Archie, my dear friend,’ Samad had said, in his warm, hearty tones. ‘You must forget all this wife-trouble. Try a new life. That is what you need. Now, enough of all this: I will match your five bob and raise you five.’
They were sitting in their new haunt, O’Connell’s Pool House, playing poker with only three hands, two of Archie’s and one of Samad’s – Samad’s right hand being a broken thing, grey-skinned and unmoving, dead in every way bar the blood that ran through it. The place they sat in, where they met each evening for dinner, was half café, half gambling den, owned by an Iraqi family, the many members of which shared a bad skin condition.
‘Look at me. Marrying Alsana has given me this new lease on living, you understand? She opens up for me the new possibilities. She’s so young, so vital – like a breath of fresh air. You come to me for advice? Here it is. Don’t live this old life – it’s a sick life, Archibald. It does you no good. No good whatsoever.’
Samad had looked at him with a great sympathy, for he felt very tenderly for Archie. Their wartime friendship had been severed by thirty years of separation across continents, but in the spring of 1973 Samad had come to England, a middle-aged man seeking a new life with his twenty-year-old new bride, the diminutive, moon-faced Alsana Begum with her shrewd eyes. In a fit of nostalgia, and because he was the only man Samad knew on this little island, Samad had sought Archie out, moved into the same London borough. And slowly but surely a kind of friendship was being rekindled between the two men.
‘You play like a faggot,’ said Samad, laying down the winning queens back to back. He flicked them with the thumb of his left hand in one elegant move, making them fall to the table in a fan shape.
‘I’m old,’ said Archie, throwing his cards in, ‘I’m old. Who’d have me now? It was hard enough convincing anybody the first time.’
‘That is nonsense, Archibald. You have not even met the right one yet. This Ophelia, Archie, she is not the right one. From what you leave me to understand she is not even for this time-’
He referred to Ophelia’s madness, which led her to believe, half of the time, that she was the maid of the celebrated fifteenth-century art lover Cosimo de’ Medici.
‘She is born, she lives, simply in the wrong time! This is just not her day! Maybe not her millennium. Modern life has caught that woman completely unawares and up the arse. Her mind is gone. Buggered. And you? You have picked up the wrong life in the cloakroom and you must return it. Besides, she has not blessed you with children… and life without children, Archie, what is it for? But there are second chances; oh yes, there are second chances in life. Believe me, I know. You,’ he continued, raking in the 10p’s with the side of his bad hand, ‘should never have married her.’
Bloody hindsight, thought Archie. It’s always 20/20.
Finally, two days after this discussion, early on New Year’s morning, the pain had reached such a piercing level that Archie was no longer able to cling to Samad’s advice. He had decided instead to mortify his own flesh, to take his own life, to free himself from a life path that had taken him down numerous wrong turnings, led him deep into the wilderness and finally petered out completely, its breadcrumb course gobbled up by the birds.
Once the car started to fill with gas, he had experienced the obligatory flashback of his life to date. It turned out to be a short, unedifying viewing experience, low on entertainment value, the metaphysical equivalent of the Queen’s Speech. A dull childhood, a bad marriage, a dead-end job – that classic triumvirate – they all flicked by quickly, silently, with little dialogue, feeling pretty much the same as they did the first time round. He was no great believer in destiny, Archie, but on reflection it did seem that a special effort of predestination had ensured his life had been picked out for him like a company Christmas present – early, and the same as everyone else’s.
There was the war, of course; he had been in the war, only for the last year of it, aged just seventeen, but it hardly counted. Not frontline, nothing like that. He and Samad, old Sam, Sammy-boy, they had a few tales to tell, mind, Archie even had a bit of shrapnel in the leg for anyone who cared to see it – but nobody did. No one wanted to talk about that any more. It was like a club-foot, or a disfiguring mole. It was like nose hair. People looked away. If someone said to Archie, What have you done in life, then, or What’s your biggest memory, well, God help him if he mentioned the war; eyes glazed over, fingers tapped, everybody offered to buy the next round. No one really wanted to know.
Summer of 1955 Archie went to Fleet Street with his best winkle-pickers on, looking for work as a war correspondent. Poncey-looking bloke with a thin moustache and a thin voice had said, Any experience, Mr Jones? And Archie had explained. All about Samad. All about their Churchill tank. Then this poncey one had leant over the desk, all smug, all suited, and said, We would require something other than merely having fought in a war, Mr Jones. War experience isn’t really relevant.
And that was it, wasn’t it. There was no relevance in the war – not in ’55, even less now in ’74. Nothing he did then mattered now. The skills you learnt were, in the modern parlance, not relevant, not transferable.
Was there anything else, Mr Jones?
But of course there bloody wasn’t anything else, the British education system having tripped him up with a snigger many years previously. Still, he had a good eye for the look of a thing, for the shape of a thing, and that’s how he had ended up in the job at MorganHero, twenty years and counting in a printing firm in the Euston Road, designing the way all kinds of things should be folded – envelopes, direct mail, brochures, leaflets – not much of an achievement, maybe, but you’ll find things need folds, they need to overlap, otherwise life would be like a broadsheet: flapping in the wind and down the street so you lose the important sections. Not that Archie had much time for the broadsheets. If they couldn’t be bothered to fold them properly, why should he bother to read them (that’s what he wanted to know)?
What else? Well, Archie hadn’t always folded paper. Once upon a time he had been a track cyclist. What Archie liked about track cycling was the way you went round and round. Round and round. Giving you chance after chance to get a bit better at it, to make a faster lap, to do it right. Except the thing about Archie was he never did get any better. 62.8 seconds. Which is a pretty good time, world-class standard, even. But for three years he got precisely 62.8 seconds on every single lap. The other cyclists used to take breaks to watch him do it. Lean their bikes against the incline and time him with the second hand of their wrist watches. 62.8 every time. That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.