His mind in a welter of confused thoughts, Shaw turned back for the Bristol. There were things to do before he crossed into Spain.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Physically, Mr Ackroyd was not so very far from Shaw — and, since he seemed to be tied down, he couldn’t have moved farther had he wished to; but mentally the little physicist had travelled a very long way in a short time.
Mr Ackroyd was in dreadful pain, for the woman, who’d seen his terrible agitation when she’d taken away that vital part of AFPU ONE, had tried flogging him into some explanation of it. And he seemed to be quite naked. And he was thinking of Liverpool (not that there was any connexion). He’d spent some time thinking of Pocklington, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, too, for he’d been born there nearly fifty years ago. Something had come to his aid in the last few hours and, though he was certainly getting things confused, his memory, while remaining bright, even sharpened, for things long gone, had become stagnant for the very immediate past. So he thought of Pocklington for a while; though mostly it was Liverpool, for that was where Mrs Ackroyd lived with their girl Annie, a thin, bespectacled, and lanky-weed of sixteen who was the apple of her dad’s eye. There was a chap courting her already, a certain Ernie Spinner whom Mr Ackroyd didn’t greatly take to. Apart from the matter of Annie’s age, his main objection was that young Spinner was a bit of a teddy boy, and Mrs Ackroyd’s recent letters had bewailed the fact that Annie looked like becoming somewhat beatnik-like, what with her too tight black jeans and untidy hair and general air of not having washed for a week. And she’d given up wearing her glasses, preferring to blink like an owl instead. It had worried Mr Ackroyd a lot. And the mere fact that he was worried had the effect in itself of making him even more worried; for Mr Ackroyd was the worrying sort, and once it started it became a kind of vicious circle from which there was no escape. That in turn interfered with his concentration on his work and he hated anything, even Annie, to come between him and his beloved atoms. And, in particular, AFPU ONE.
Some vague twitch at the back of his mind now made him uneasily aware that something dreadful might happen before long if he didn’t get back to somewhere or other… and then, back again like a treadmill, his confused thoughts returned to Ernie Spinner and his lank, oily sideboards. The trouble was that by this time even young Spinner wouldn’t stay still in Mr Ackroyd’s mind, and every now and again he seemed to get caught up with the trams which clanged, in Mr Ackroyd’s mind, past the Adelphi Hotel, or turned left by Lime Street station to go down to the docks, banging and clanging along with Ernie until they too faded and whirled, whirled and faded into a Clan liner coming out from the Bidston Dock over on the Birkenhead side; the Clan liner faded incongruously into the big backside which had belonged to Mrs Siddlewick, who had been Mr Ackroyd’s mother-in-law until overweight had weakened her heart-muscles and carried her off.
Mr Ackroyd then thought of his schooldays, when the other boys had teased him practically out of his mind, and indulged in a good bit of physical bullying on the side. In some ways that had been the start of it all. Instead of toughening him up, his daily ordeals of terror had driven Mr Ackroyd into a very thick shell indeed, and constant habit had made him run a mile from pain or the threat of pain. It hadn’t been much better at home. Mr Ackroyd had loved reading, an exercise, however, which had had largely to be carried out by torchlight under the bedclothes at night, for Mr Ackroyd senior had nourished a rooted objection to reading at any time, and also had a very thick leather belt. Mr Ackroyd senior had said that his son was an obstinate little cuss, and so he was; to his credit, he had a certain underlying determination to stick to his guns and get on, and there was an unsuspected toughness somewhere in his make-up. All the same, life — or rather such aspects of it as took place outside the actual school classroom — had been sheer unmitigated hell for Mr Ackroyd; and even when diligent application to work had earned him a scholarship to a grammar school, where he had done brilliantly on the science side, things hadn’t been much better.
After that, he’d gone on to Leeds University on a scholarship to study physics, and things had changed — up to a point. It was no longer a question of the boys not wanting to be chummy with Mr Ackroyd; but it was very much a question of Mr Ackroyd wanting desperately to play with the girls, and finding an almost total lack of co-operation. Young manhood had struck Mr Ackroyd a sudden and vicious blow in Leeds University, and his frustrated desires had nearly driven him out of his mind; he had in fact practically made up his mind to do away with the skinny, undernourished, undersized body topped by a pale and spotty face which inhibited all his approaches to the opposite sex. But, at the last moment, as he’d crouched, in an agony of indecision, half-way down a cutting, the London express out of Leeds had thundered by in a steamy whirl of gigantic wheels and pistons and a derisive shriek of its whistle and a rattle of carriages and a blur of yellow light with expensive-looking diners momentarily glimpsed in the restaurant-car… Mr Ackroyd had watched the train go with a terrifying feeling that he hadn’t even the courage to end his misery. Perhaps he didn’t himself suspect that underlying toughness — a toughness which even in extremity wouldn’t quite let him give up.
It was in such a trough of his life that the lady who was to become Mrs Ackroyd had found him, and, for the span of a longish courtship, had lifted him high to the crests. However, after a year or two of marriage to Mrs Ackroyd, the physicist had given up in the face of what had become her determined sexlessness after the creation of Annie had justified the union, and Mr Ackroyd had become totally absorbed in his work — for which England had cause to be thankful.
Mr Ackroyd at this moment was having periods of lucidity, but they were very short, and then the mad whirl began all over again… Annie, AFPU ONE, young Spinner, the trams, the incredible backside of old Mrs Siddlewick being so mysteriously formed out of the bluff stern of that Clan liner; then the juke-box which they’d got in the little pub off Water Street last time he’d been back in Liverpool — all mixed up, and hateful. His head burst into a myriad stars, and he didn’t know where he was. Most of the time since the pain had started there had been a nasty drumming in his head, but it wasn’t always there, and nearly every time it stopped something else filled his ears, filled them, in some peculiar way, from within. A rhythmic sound, a drumming again only different: Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da… he knew that sound, but somehow he couldn’t quite place it. And where was it coming from?
As Mr Ackroyd broke through the clinging mists of his pain for a little he realized that the noise was coming from his own mouth, and quite loudly too. He kept on with it, because for some reason which he didn’t understand it pleased him; after a while the pitch-dark of the room was broken by a streak of yellow light which made his head ache and sent stabs of pain through his red-rimmed eyes.
When Mr Ackroyd caught the smell — the perfume of Je reviens—he cringed back.