29

It was raining when he met Brenda the next day, and they started running in silence. He wondered how he could face lying down in his den again, alone and outside. The thought of his face near the mud he saw squelching beneath his feet chilled him. He wouldn’t be able to sleep out for much longer. ‘You seem a bit subdued,’ said Brenda. ‘No inspirational thought for the day?’

He shook his head.

‘Have you looked at my chart?’ she asked.

‘Let’s leave it for a bit,’ he said. ‘We can’t do it day by day. You can’t measure progress like that.’

‘I found a quote,’ she said, ‘“To fail to plan is to plan to fail.” What you really need, Archie,’ she said, ‘is a good e-marketing plan. It’s not customer acquisition that counts but customer conversion and retention. You need a concrete product – an app, or a T-shirt. Print it up with your extracts from the Psalms. I’ve got it,’ she said. ‘“When you want to dip into the fridge, dip into the Bible”; “Fill your soul, not your belly”.’

‘Let’s increase the pace,’ he said. ‘Get out of this rain.’

‘Did you hear me?’ she said. ‘You want the best return on your investment. A hyper-personalisation of your product. I think you’ve got that,’ she said, ‘with the charts. That’s where the apps would come in too. You want to inspire and enlighten.’

‘I can’t really get my head round this at the moment, Brenda,’ he said.

‘It’s crucial to have a digital strategy,’ she went on. ‘Some synergy between the social media divides – Facebook and email. I’m trying to help you here.’

He stopped running. ‘I’m not taking the business further at the moment,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some stuff on.’

‘What stuff?’ she asked.

He didn’t reply.

‘Archie. You need to focus. I can’t help noticing that you’ve been wearing pretty much the same gear since I started.’

‘It’s not the outside that counts,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Brenda. ‘It’s the inside. The inside becomes the outside, Archie. Isn’t that your message?’ And he wondered where that left him with his shredded heart and his bomb-blast brain.

She looked at her watch. ‘I’ll get off now,’ she said. ‘I’m in Dubai next week, but I’ll see you the one after that.’ She ran off without giving him his money.

‘Brenda,’ he shouted. ‘The money.’

She ran back. ‘Sorry,’ she said, jogging on the spot. ‘You’re such a cheap date that I completely forgot.’

* * *

He looked like any other punter in a waterproof with his hood up when he picked up the tracker on the way back to Leith. The rain lent anonymity to the people on the street. Everyone was dressed in blue or black. Everyone was cold. Nicola Sturgeon was on a bank of TVs in the store window, ‘349 days, 15 hours and 30 minutes’ to the independence referendum ticking down on a clock behind her. Big, digital numbers flick-flacking on a board.

As he walked past the gardens of some flats on his way to Leith, he reached up into an elderflower tree hanging over the wall and grabbed a handful of elderberries. A magpie in the tree chattered at him as he stopped to pull the berries from their stalks with his teeth. They tasted bitter. The bird, in his feathered uniform of black, white and brilliant green, was staring at him. Where did this eternally perfect magpie come from? Where were all the old magpies, the sick magpies, the magpies down on their luck?

As he neared the funeral home where his grandpa had been laid out, an old warrior in a cardboard coffin, a hearse pulled out of the drive. It was gleaming grey. He stopped to let it pass and bowed his head. The driver waved a hand at him in thanks. The face at the window was pasty as if he had spent too much time with the dead. There were no flowers on the casket. Archie wondered who would mourn this soul. The expensive coffin with its brass handles must have been a last gift from the person to themself, chosen from a catalogue in the old folks’ home with a social worker kneeling at their feet, turning the pages. For a moment, Archie wished he had died in combat rather than face his internal battle alone – a battle in which, for some reason, he was now cast as a misfit, ashamed of his own inability to maintain a social front. This failure had cost him everything. It wouldn’t have mattered, he thought, if he could have contained the damage inside, fought the odd skirmish with his thoughts. It was his traitor eyes that made him a target, and the fire they returned at him was social fear. He was the warrior who could not contain his own power, fit the acts permitted by international rules of engagement back into his daily life. ‘Permission to fire, sir? I have a clear line of sight.’ The social act of death.