Archie van Gogh

Archie is an unknown, London-based writer who is obsessed with van Gogh's creativity. He visits the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam in order to add authenticity to the copies he’s tossing off of paintings from Vincent’s awesome Arles and St. Remy periods. And he immerses himself in the letters to brother Theo that tell of Vincent’s humiliating struggle against poverty and neglect. However, Archie’s own fight for a place in the sun rubs his flatmates up the wrong way. Step by self-absorbed step, Archie creeps towards the abyss into which Vincent fell...

Duncan comments:
'This work was written in 1990. Twenty-one years on, in order to finish the book to anyone's satisfaction, I need to travel to France, preferably with Kate, revisiting the key sites of van Gogh's life in my own quasi-maturity.' 

‘What follows is how the book begins. I’ll add bits every time I get the chance to turn some more of the typescript into a word processing document. Do make allowances for the point of view. I know Archie is a living nightmare!’

 

ARCHIE VAN GOGH

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

Archie was sitting in a coach travelling from London to Amsterdam. Travel was futile – hard to do and not worth the trouble. But Archie had exceptional reason for undertaking this particular journey.

He was sitting by the window. The seat beside him was empty apart from his bag, thank goodness.  Two people sat in front, other pairs sat opposite and behind, in fact the coach was almost full of passengers, people so ordinary that it struck Archie afresh how lucky he was to have the double seat to himself. He didn’t need to check passports to be sure that he was the one and only artist on board.

The air inside the coach was stale. Archie was using his passport as a fan but although this made the air seem cooler it didn’t change its composition. How was Archie’s brain supposed to cope with half-ration oxygen? Archie feared a reduction in the quality of his thought between then and whenever they’d arrive at whatever port it was they were heading for.

He looked around. The ordinary people sat reading or chatting or listening to music. They breathed as often and as deeply as Archie did. Why wasn’t there a system whereby Archie had enough real air to think with while the others shared the leftovers – more than enough for dozing off with? True, one or two passengers sat staring into space as if at thought, remembering past meals and envisaging future ones, no doubt. Call that thinking? No, that was Archie’s whole point. But then sitting, thinking Archie-style, was out of the question for them.

The look around had brought to Archie’s attention little nozzles embedded in the roof of the coach. There was one above his head, so he raised his non-fanning hand and fiddled with it. A jet of cold air blew onto his face. Good, but the coach was so badly designed that the air-nozzle above the seat in front, and the one above the seat behind, couldn’t be made to blow his way. Still, the air from his own nozzle meant he could give his passport-waving wrist a rest. Time would tell if this new air was good air.

A passport was a peculiar object, mused Archie, opening his. Page one stated Archie’s name. Incorrect, but so what, turn over. Pages two and three described him. All wrong, but fair enough, turn over. Pages four and five were for ‘validity’ and ‘observations’. Nothing to get excited about, but fair enough, turn over. Only from then on it was blank pages headed up ‘visas’ until page 30 and stop, end of passport.

Archie decided to use the blank pages for notes that he would reference to the information on page two. He’d little choice. Page two was full of old lies about himself and the last thing Archie needed if he was to get to Amsterdam was a bum passport.

‘Occupation: Chartered Accountant.’ That was an old lie if ever there was one. Archie was a writer and had been for as long as it takes, surely. Better write down the name of his first novel. Work and Welcome To It! This was a serious book, really literary in places, about Archie working his balls into a sweat for all the wrong reasons. The book wasn’t published. Archie noted this preposterous fact, but lack of space prevented him from listing the publishers that had rejected his novel. Archie sighed. It had taken him a full year to rewrite the book. But it hadn’t taken a new list of publishers anything like as long to reject it. It had taken Archie another year to completely revise his own rewrite, God damn it! But again publishers had given it short shrift. Apparently one problem would be finding enough readers to make publishing Archie’s book commercially viable. Or some such bollocks. Oh well, Archie could lead horses – a whole herd of them – to water, but he couldn’t make a single one of the old nags drink.

Archie sat back, right the way back, so that his knees could rest comfortably on the seat in front of him. He adjusted the flow of air so that it was coming down on his face again. What else did it say on page 2 of his piss-poor passport? Archie’s height in feet and inches, five of one and nine of the other. So what! Physical height was one thing, spiritual dimensions quite another. Archie’s rule of thumb was to multiply his physical height by 1.2 to arrive at his true height. A giant of a man! All the more so, relatively speaking, since the multiplier in the case of those around him was 0.8. If Archie had been a physical foot shorter nothing would change in respect of his large stature because the factor to be used on himself would have been increased to 1.4. But as this wasn’t strictly relevant, nor properly thought out on account of the lack of oxygen in the fucking coach, Archie scored the sentence out. Unlike him to stray from concise rendering of a point.

Archie looked up and around. It wasn’t only the air he was breathing that stopped him thinking clearly. There was that tinny buzzing noise coming from more than one set of headphones. Some folk had no consideration for others! That Archie was able to ignore it all and go on improving his passport spoke volumes for his self-discipline. Distinguishing marks, nil! He could hardly believe what he was reading. Did he mean that? No, rather he could hardly believe what he’d just read. His forehead shone like an iceberg, didn’t that distinguish him from the rest? Of course it did. Also, he was teetotal, wasn’t that a mark of distinction? Of course it was. Archie noted down his two distinguishing marks and then read them over. Fucking hell! He scored out number two because having a drink now and then wasn’t against the law or anything to be ashamed of. Why had he lied? The bad air in his system was screwing him up, it really was.

Archie looked out of the window. Where was the sea, for Christ’s sake? It should have been in sight long since. The driver was hopeless. Archie focused on the man. It seemed to Archie that the driver was gripping the steering wheel too tightly, moving his head unnecessarily, and concentrating too hard on the road. What a waste of oxygen. Look at the big breaths the driver was taking. Anyone would think the fat bastard was pulling the coach instead of guiding it. No wonder Archie asphyxiated by degrees. And just because the least aesthetically enlightened person on the bus insisted on filling his lungs to capacity at every opportunity.

Archie visualized the driver’s passport. ‘Occupation – non-reader.’ ‘Distinguishing marks – squat, fat man.’ As if this wasn’t bad enough, the pages for notes were left blank! The coach would have to turn back because of the driver’s inadequate documentation. So Archie visualized the man’s passport again more slowly. There was a page of notes. Concerning distinguishing marks. ‘Pot belly’, was first and foremost. ‘Pot arse’, wasn’t far behind. ‘Pot neck’, ‘pot thighs’, ‘pot head’ were all listed correctly. ‘Pot cock-n-balls’ even, the driver was nothing if not honest. But all this detail, true as it was, took away from the main point. So there was a separate page of the passport that said simply ‘pot belly’ and was accompanied by a rough sketch of the postman known to the art world as Roulin. Not such a bad passport after all. Nevertheless it was with relief that Archie turned attention back to his own.

Archie wanted to say something about the purpose of his visit because immigration control would be interested in that. However, he didn’t want to mess up any pages now that he wasn’t thinking clearly. He made do with writing ‘Why Amsterdam?’ at the top of the next free page. Archie would give the answer verbally if he were asked for it. Of course, this would lead to a further question that he wrote on the top of the facing page, ‘Why Vincent van Gogh?’ The answer to this was not simple, but if Archie was asked, and if his questioner proved to know the first thing about the relationship between an artist and society, Archie would answer at length and with pleasure. On the next page Archie wrote ‘Why despise the bus driver?’ The easy answer to this was to do with air pollution and the destruction of the environment. The full story was all part and parcel of ‘Why Vincent van Gogh?’ and Archie would not attempt to go through it with the passport officer even if specifically asked. It was none of his fucking business.

Archie put passport and pen in his bag. He smiled – all the other passports would be put to shame. Archie hoped the petty official wouldn’t make too big a fuss of him.

*

Archie was whiling away the ferry part of his journey to Amsterdam in the bar. The table he had to himself was covered with cans he’d drunk of the piss-weak lager the ferry bar specialized in. There was just enough room on the table for Archie’s brim-full glass.

As soon as Archie had been allowed out of the coach he’d explored the boat until he’d found his way up onto the deck. Fresh air, all the fresher for the smell of brine and a touch of drizzle, had done Archie a power of health. He’d stood breathing deeply for as long as it took his mind to clear and then had made his way back indoors, whistling.

Walking around, Archie had noticed that passengers were lying on seats. They were aleep or trying to sleep. There was the coach driver, flat on his back. And what was he doing? Just his usual. In went the fresh air, inflating the stomach. Out went the poison, in a loud snore. Archie had hurried on past towards that well-known air pocket known as the bar.

Archie sipped from his drink. Passport inspection had been an anti-climax, he recalled. A man in uniform had glanced at Archie, then at the photo of him on page three, and had handed the thing back with a polite nod. Everyone else had been treated to the same nonchalance. So much for immigration control.

Archie took a sip, which turned into a good, deep slurp before replacing his glass onto his passport, which was an OK beermat. Soon he would write down what he was about to think through. Why Amsterdam? Well, van Gogh painted nearly 900 pictures in his lifetime but managed to sell just one according to the book Archie had under his table. Archie had seen plenty of reproductions, now he wanted to see more of the 879 in the original. So where were they? A handful had been destroyed in the Second World War. About sixty were ‘whereabouts unknown’. Quite a few, a quarter of them, were privately owned. Archie didn’t approve of this because he didn’t own a single one. He consoled himself in the knowledge that none seemed to be in private collections of more than half a dozen. So where were the large majority? In public ownership. There was a collection of ten in New York, one of twenty in Paris, one of ninety in the middle of Holland. And, biggest gathering of all, was the 200-plus kept in Amsterdam’s van Gogh Museum.

Glass empty, Archie returned to the bar. ‘Duty free’ was the type of beer he was drinking, cheap because of how weak the stuff was. There were a few people in the bar, some from Archie’s coach and some not. Archie ignored the lot of them, could easily do so, everyone was widely spaced and there was adequate air-conditioning.

Sitting again, mouth full of beer and passport open before him, Archie considered the ‘Why Vincent?’ question. He wrote simply ‘see article alongside’. Archie flicked through the pages of his reference book until he came upon the photocopied sheets he was on about. The article, written by Albert Aurier, the only words on van Gogh to be published during the painter’s lifetime, hit the nail on the head, if only now and again. Archie read an extract:

‘He is a fanatic, an enemy of bourgeois societies and petty details, a kind of drunken giant, better suited to moving mountains than handling knick-knacks, a brain in eruption, irresistibly pouring its lava into all the ravines of art, a terrible and maddened genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always close to the pathological.’

Archie never would have written like this himself. Too wordy. According to this one sentence Vincent van Gogh was a fanatic, an enemy, a giant, a brain and a genius. Archie considered each description. ‘Fanatic’. Was van Gogh excessively enthusiastic? Well, enthusiastic, yes. But excessively so? Not in Archie’s opinion.

‘Enemy’ was the next term. Of bourgeois societies and petty details. Now, societies and details weren’t usually bracketed together, but they had been here and it worked fine.

‘Giant’. Drunken. Better suited to moving mountains than handling knick-knacks. Better suited to scattering knick-knacks and grinding them into the ground with his heel, than to handling the unnecessary things.

‘Brain’. In eruption. Pouring its lava into all the ravines of art. Archie pictured ‘lava’ and ‘ravine’. He tried to link the images with ‘brain’ and ‘art’. To do this he needed to add the image of a volcano to the first pair of words and thought to the second pair. Was this worth the mental effort? No,not at all. Glib metaphors were not Archie’s cup of tea.

From cup of tea to glass of lager. Archie took a slurp. How far had he got with Aurier’s overwritten sentence? Four down, one to go.

‘Genius’. Terrible and maddened. Often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always close to the pathological. Archie didn’t like this. Too many words concerning extreme thought. Why elaborate and contradict and repeat within the same sentence clause? No good reason.

To celebrate getting to the end of Aurier’s lengthy sentence Archie decided to summarize the thing. ‘He is a mover of mountains and has no time for knick-knacks.’ This was good. So good that Archie was brought back to the point of all this. Vincent van Gogh.

Archie’s reference book contained a small black and white picture of every one of the 879 paintings. Archie opened the book and flicked from page to page. Living a hundred years after an artist had the advantage of allowing familiarity with Complete Works. There were disadvantages too, though. Archie was unable to give his fellow artist a few words of advice. Or thanks. Or support. Or comfort. Or a beer even.

Archie had been drinking quickly but was fairly sure it was only a matter of finding the remaining full can amongst the empties. Sure enough, Archie had one left. Better get to the bar, however, since he didn’t know what the time was. The boat might dock at any moment! The bar might close regardless! One or two cans? Archie wondered. He tried to imagine how he’d feel after more beer. Better make it four, he decided.

Back at his table, Archie read more Aurier on van Gogh. ‘This strong and true artist, a real thoroughbred, with the brutal hands of a giant, with the neurosis of a hysterical woman, with the soul of a visionary, so original and so apart from our pitiful art of today, will he know – anything is possible – the repentant cajoleries of fashion?’ Archie frowned, Aurier was at it again. Using five words where one would do.

So. From the fanatic-giant-enemy-genius-brain van Gogh of the last sentence, to the artist-thoroughbred-giant-visionary-woman of this one. So many descriptive words. Still, ‘repentant cajoleries of fashion’ had a certain zip to it. Stripped down the sentence read, ‘This artist, will he know the repentant cajoleries of fashion?’ and Archie knew the answer to that one all right.

Archie recalled that van Gogh’s Sunflowers had been sold at auction for a world record amount to a Japanese insurance company. The painting hung on the wall of the company’s boardroom. Fucking hell! Archie tried to calm down.

A whole can of beer later, Archie was asking himself which was worse, the society that had given nothing for the complete works of the painter, or the one that boasted Fuck Limited rich enough to pay £20 million pounds for a single decoration. They were as bad as each other – terrible!

After a few minutes drinking, Archie returned to the article and read its last paragraph. ‘He will never be fully understood except by his brothers, the true artists, and by some happy ones among the simple people, the wholly simple people, who will, by chance, have escaped from the well-meaning teachings of public education.’ Archie cut the crap and came up with the meaning. Van Gogh will be understood by true artists and by some simple people. The key word here was ‘some’ in front to the simple people. By no means all the simpletons would like van Gogh. The bus driver and his kind didn’t stand a chance of doing so. In fact the sentence was completely wrong. Van Gogh will be understood by true artists. Full stop. No mention of the simple folk and sound omission.

Archie drank very fast when he was musing on van Gogh. None left! This wasn’t a catastrophe because the bar was still open and Archie had most of his holiday money intact. Finished with the article, Archie folded it once, twice and fitted it into the correct place in his beermat. The passport was better than ever.

Archie’s bladder was full and there was no toilet on the coach. Three pisses in the ferry toilet over the next half hour and a change to drinking little whiskies should get things under control. Archie smiled, he was beginning to think of himself as a seasoned traveller.

*

As soon as everyone was back on the coach it sped off from whatever-port-it-was they’d sailed into. Archie felt good about progress but not at all good in himself all of a sudden.

Archie leant forward and pressed his head against the rear of the seat in front. This made him feel a lot better. Wishful thinking, because before Archie could do anything about it he was sick. The vomit fell to the floor and splashed about his feet. Archie tried to be discreet about his condition, after all it was nothing to be proud of, but the retching noise that was forced out of him was distinctly audible. Too bad. Archie shut his eyes. Ten minutes of driving on the wrong side of the road and he’d been overcome by travel sickness. What fucking awful luck.

Archie leant back in his seat. A face or two were turned towards his. Archie smiled but didn’t say anything, didn’t feel like chatting, wasn’t up to explaining that too much alcohol might have contributed towards his present difficulty but that not having his full quota of oxygen all the way to that first port was the real problem. He had never got over that. A lot of passengers arms were raised vertical, hands fiddling with the ventilation nozzles embedded in the roof. No-one seemed in a hurry to switch on Archie’s jet of cold air for him, even though he was at the epicentre of the obnoxious smell. So much for common decency.

To cheer himself up, archie remembered a scene from the ferry crossing. He was on the way to the toilets for the first time and had taken six of his empty beer cans with him. He deposited the lot on the table beside the recumbent coach driver. On the way back from the toilet Archie paused to admire the scene. Just how drunk was the fat bastard?

Archie was forced to lean forward again and to be sick once more. He spat into the mess pool. More memory, Archie instructed himself. His second piss in the ferry. Three more empties for the driver’s table. As Archie stood admiring the scene around the oblivious man, a fellow passenger walked by. “Look at the state of our driver!” said Archie.

Archie retched again, hopefully for the last time, or at least not so loudly the next. More memory was what Archie needed. Third ferry piss. The remaining empties, another three, plonked down around the sleeping head of the driver. Archie waited in the vicinity until a ferry official walked by. “Is there a limit to how drunk coach drivers are allowed to get on a ferry?” asked Archie, innocently.

Where were they? This was a lot later. Archie had been sleeping and was now acceptably well. He stayed with his head forward listening to the conversation between the pair in front of him. God, his shoes needed a good clean, or at least a quick wipe. Anyway, they were saying that the coach was in Belgium. You had to go through Belgium to get to Amsterdam, supposed Archie. Sure enough, because now they were saying that the Dutch border was coming up. Archie knew that the countries in this part of the world were identical. But he’d no objection to showing his passport again if required.

The passport officer clambered on board. Archie had to laugh because the man was the spitting image of Captain Birdseye whose face appeared on the fish fingers that other people ate. While the Captain walked down the coach looking at the ordinary people’s passports, Archie felt it politic to change seats with his bag. Unfortunately, by the time this manouevre was complete Archie’s passport lay on the dirty floor. Archie was wiping the thing clean when Birdseye came alongside. The Captain spent a long time inspecting Archie’s passport. Archie had time to consider whether prime cod and only prime cod really was served at the captain’s table. Pollock, all pollocks, reckoned Archie.

Birdseye handed back the passport and made a snotty remark about the sick on the floor. Not a word about Archie’s artist status, nor about Archie’s spiritual height calculation, nor about the marks that distinguished him from everybody else on the coach. What a moron! Archie kept his mouth shut, however, was minding his Ps and Qs now he was abroad in case they tried to stop him getting as far as the Van Gogh Museum. But Archie couldn’t see what Captain Haddock had to complain about – the man was on the coach for only a few minutes. Try travelling for hundreds of miles beside that muck! That was what Archie would have suggested. Other things being equal.

The coach was off again. And then it was stopping for refreshments. Archie could hardly believe it – the last thing he wanted was any more to drink. Passengers trooped past. One or two were rude to him but the comments were innocuous. “Goodnight, Vienna,” said one idiot. Archie changed his mind and followed them out of the bus. A breath of fresh air and a tidy up in the washroom were what he was after. He hadn’t changed his mind about the question of more to drink.

Archie was late back onto the coach but was that reason enough for the black look he got from the fat driver? It seemed to Archie, having resumed his seat, that the driver had mopped up. The fool should have let sleeping dogs lie because the smell was atrocious, much more pungent than before. Archie sat back and tried to ignore the stink. Perhaps the driver was upset because there had been another passport scrutiny while Archie had been sprucing up. Archie saw himself as a passport chief-inspector checking the coach driver’s passport.

“It states ‘pot arse’ here”, mentioned Passport Archie, business-like and loud enough for everyone on the coach to hear.

“That’s right,” mumbled the driver.

“Enormous pot arse is the correct expression in your case,” pointed out Archie, only doing his job.

“Enormous?” asked the driver, foolishly. 

“Or exceptional,” granted Archie. “You can write ‘enormous’ or ‘exceptional’ or ‘extraordinary’ in front of pot arse. Its all one to me,” added Archie, who had no axe to grind. “But pot arse in itself is not a sufficient description of this distinguishing mark of yours.”

The driver took passport and pen in his pot hands and began to write. Archie watched closely so as to make sure the tricky bugger didn’t write anything ridiculous in front of pot arse, like ‘neat’ or ‘small’ or ‘normal’. Or anything irrelevant about the coach’s lack of air conditioning. Or any fucking lies about Archie having been sick everywhere. Satisfied on all this, Passport Archie moved on to his next customer.

The coach sped on and things freshened up. Pure, Dutch air was swirling all about them thanks to whoever had finally got round to opening the big window in the roof. Last leg of the journey. Archie thought about organizing a sing-song but why should it always be him that made the effort? Instead he went to sleep again. He was woken by the driver making an announcement. Amsterdam! What a fucking awful journey but it was finished now. Archie took gracious leave of those around him. He spoke slowly and through a grin so that even the foreigners might take away a favourable impression of their travelling companion. Handshakes in thought to the passport officer and the bus driver. No hard feelings. Archie would be glad to get to know them better in the van Gogh museum. Ha! Archie was in fine form as he disembarked.

Half an hour later and Archie banged on the door of the museum to let the staff know he wanted inside. “Too early,” according to the lazy doorman. “Come on, come on, come on!” said Archie, banging on the door again. He only had so much patience.

*

 Archie was walking from one van Gogh to another. Travel of the highest order. Remarkably fresh he felt, and well at heart.

First time around the place had been to record the layout on a double page of his passport. After sketching in the walls, Archie had approached each picture, read its F number, and recorded it in small, neat writing on the correct bit of his diagram. Tiresome? Too true. But the book in his bag referenced F numbers to black and white reproductions. So when Archie was back in coach-ferry-coach returning to London he could keep himself out of trouble by recreating in his mind the Vincent Van Gogh Museum, painting by painting, juxtaposition by juxtaposition.

Archie was in between paintings. He let his eye travel down a long wall and over 20-odd pictures. Lost for words of admiration he turned the pageso f his passport until he came to the article by Albert Aurier. Archie unfolded the sheets and read:

‘The external and material aspect of his painting is completely at one with his artistic temperament. In all the works the execution is vigorous, exalted, brutal, intense.’

Archie focused on a nearby painting. Vigorous? Yes. Exalted? Yes. Brutal? Possibly. Intense? Well what the hell did Aurier expect?

‘His drawing, passionate, powerful, sometimes clumsy and sometimes heavy, exaggerates the character, simplifies, leaps over details, like a master tradesman, like a conqueror.’

Archie looked at the nearby picture again. Passionate and powerful? Yes. Clumsy and heavy? No. That was the exaggeration, the simplification, the leaping over of details, like a master tradesman, like a conquering hero.

‘His colour we know already. It is unbelieveably dazzling. He is, as far as I know, the only painter who perceives the chromatism of things with this intensity, with this metallic jewel-like quality. He is not always able, however, to avoid certain disagreeable crudities, certain disharmonies, certain dissonances.’

Archie looked up at one, two-three, four paintings. The color was fine. Was the sky blue or by God was the sky blue in the first one!

‘As for the facture itself, his procedures in colouring his canvas, they are, like the rest of him, fiery, very powerful, and very nervous. His brush operates by enormous impasto touches of very pure colour, by accumulations, sometimes clumsy, of a very glowing masonry, and all this gives to some of his canvases the solid appearance of dazzling walls made of crystals and sun.’

Archie put the article away in his passport. The remarks were along the right lines but Archie was getting pissed-off with how often words like nervous, clumsy and crude were cropping up. Archie walked along another wall of the gallery. There was fuck-all crude or clumsy about any of the pictures that came into view. Nor anything nervous. Look at that one, for example. Archie loved a big sky. A gnarled tree and a walled field under a big, red sky. What more could Archie ask for from a picture?

Nobody near the Mona Lisa of van Goghs. Archie walked into optimal viewing position. Yellow flowers in yellow vase on yellow table against yellow backdrop. Not exactly a rainbow, but then the yellow was so striking why ask for the rest of the spectrum? A rigorously symmetrical composition into the bargain, once you’d spotted the organizing principle. Archie stared long and hard at the style and structure.

Fourteen large blooms and a bud. Archie’s book had told him that Vincent had painted 3 then 6 then 12 and finally 14 blooms. Realizing he was onto a winner and that, sooner or later, everybody would be wanting a version, he painted two ‘exact’ copies of the 14 bloom picture. Archie was looking at one of the copies. The National Gallery in London had the ‘original’ and Archie had already taken a good look at it. The other ‘copy’ was in the crude, clumsy nervous yellow hands of the Japanese insurance company. Archie hoped they would look after it. With the same skill and attention with which it had been brought into existence by Vincent.

Standing looking at the Sunflowers. Staring at the picture with mouth open, all the better for filling both lungs to the brim with field-fresh sunflower air. Gulping it down like there was no tomorrow. Breathing out but only to enable breathing in once more. Coughing, a temporary setback, air no sooner expelled than sucked back in again.

Standing still again. Head calm and never so clear. Gazing at the sky-kissed sunflowers and breathing in the fruit of their labour. A person walking by, say the coach driver, yawning widely, Archie’s breathing continuing deep and even. The coach driver passing in another direction, yawning desperately, Archie’s breathing taking this in its slow, regular stride. The coach driver standing alongside, yawning in utter, terminal boredom, Archie’s breathing going on as if forever.