Gibraltar Road

by Philip McCutchan

  Some fifty miles away by road Mr Ackroyd was in an attitude of listening.

  Goats trailed along the high, narrow streets of Vercin, stinking to heaven, an ancient man and a boy chivvying them along in the rear as their sure feet took the stone steps easily. Every now and again they stopped, to have their dugs stretched into buckets outside the dwelling-houses, their restless bells adding to the chattering clamour which was Vercin waking up to another day.

  Goats apart, the air at this height was beautifully fresh and invigorating, with the wonderful tang of the early morning in a hot land; the sun was up, but not yet strong enough to bring more than a friendly warmth into the bones. Everything stood out sharply in the clear, crystal mountain atmosphere, though there was a light mist in the valley below the old walled town, a mist which the mounting sun would very soon chase away. The goats moved on from below Mr Ackroyd’s window, taking their smells and bells with them, those bells that tinkled slowly and enchantingly away into the distance down the steps of the street. Voices floated up now—raucous, shrill, and happy and full of life as the stall-holders began setting up the market beyond the end of the street, in the flatness of the town’s main square.

  A cacophony of badinage and back-chat heralded an old woman with withered, yellowed cheeks, shrivelled and wrinkled into a million little ingrained seams, drooping from high cheekbones beneath the white hair and the black shawl which fell from her head. She came slowly from the square towards the steps, making for the doorway of the house where Mr Ackroyd lay. The news had gone right through Vercín like a flash of summer lightning four days before that there had been a spectacular car crash, that two men had died, and had been left alone for the routine (and eventual) inspection by officials; and that one—here was the important thing— had lived, but was out of his mind; and, even more important than that, that he now resided in that room in the Calle Salamanca where he was being looked after by no less a personage than old Señora Gallego herself.

  Admittedly, Señora Gallego could on occasions be a scold—you couldn’t get round that, and the late Señor Gallego in trying to do something about it had come off second-best every time; and there were some among the citizens of Vercín who, when they heard the news, felt pity for the unfortunate madman. Others pointed out that scold as she might be this childless woman had a very strong maternal instinct; this job of caring for the madman would be after her own heart, and she had got it because of that, and because in days past—as the whole of Vercín knew, but never tired of reminding each other—she had been the mistress of Señor Luica, the late Chief of Police. Señor Luica had been gone a long while since, but Señora Gallego remained, and she was still on excellent terms with the Guardia Civil. The most pious put this down to the belief of the police in the señora’s intercessionary powers with the spirit of their departed chief, Señor Lucia, who would of a certainty look with sympathy upon his struggling comrades-in-arms in this earthly world below—especially if requested to do so by his former mistress; the less pious—there were, of course, no impious in Vercin—ascribed it to Señora Gallego’s excellent cocida, which, with its vegetables and rich olive oil and succulent scraps of good meat, was an angelic stew, and certainly well worth the rough edge of her tongue, scold or not.

  All agreed on one thing, and that was that the madman could have done very much worse.

  When the Guardia Civil and some townsmen had found this poor madman—which was luckily before the hill-bandits got wind of the car-smash—-they hadn’t know what to do with him in the comisaria; but of course there was always Señora Gallego, and she had been approached officially without delay. It would, said the sargento, (who wanted nothing so much as to get back to bed), be the greatest favour if the señora would look after the unfortunate man, at least until other arrangements could be made.

  So there it was. And the uninhibited crowd cat-called after the good old woman as she went home with some rudimentary medicaments which she had gone out to get; they cat-called after her only because—poor señora—it was so obviously many, many years since the unchaperoned possession of a man under her roof had been the cause for scandalous gossip.

  Mr Ackroyd, lying in the window, was above and beyond all this in the mental sense as well as the physical. He heard the shouts and the laughter but he wasn’t paying any attention to them. For one thing, he was very thirsty. But something seemed to have happened to his vocal cords, or at any rate to his control over them, and he couldn’t say what it was he wanted. The odd thing was, he could still hum that little refrain of his. Mr Ackroyd had a feeling that if only he could overcome something—he didn’t know what—he would be able to speak. But his mind was going round and round in so many circles; he was in that nightmare state in which all his thoughts made nonsense, one thing on top of another and nothing getting him anywhere, and he couldn’t fix on anything.

  Mr. Ackroyd’s window happened to overlook the walls of the town across the little stepped street, and the valley below; and by raising his thin body on one emaciated arm—the other hurt if he put any weight on it—he could see part of the track leading up to the town’s gates. Just off the track he could see a patch of ground which seemed a little greener than its surroundings, as though some one cared for it specially; this patch of green was enclosed by walls of a massive thickness in which were set rank upon rank of big tablets interspersed with a few gaping, black-looking holes. Mr Ackroyd didn’t realize it, but this was where the people of Vercín stowed their dead. The coffins were just slid straight into those holes in the stone walls, all ready for easy and convenient emergence on Judgment Day. Mr Ackroyd’s attention, however, was not on Judgment Day; and when he saw a movement on the road near the burial walls his attention wandered right away from the primitive cemetery and fastened itself upon the low, squat, brightly coloured slug which was crawling up the white, uneven track towards Vercín’s gates. After a while it passed from view round a bend in the steeply climbing roadway, and Mr Ackroyd stopped thinking about that as well.

  He was whimpering with the pain of his arm and his head now, and he felt quite faint and very weak. Occasionally, when he twisted on the rough bed or strove to avoid the attentions of a particularly persistent bug, deep lacerations on his back gave him a nasty twinge too, but really they were better now . . . he’d quite forgotten now how he’d come by those. And, come to that, he couldn’t for the life of him make out where he was at this moment. He’d remembered very little after that crash, except the desperate urgency to get his hands on that little piece of metal (almost instinctively he tightened his grip on it as he thought of it) and then, vaguely, of being dragged out of the car by a big man in a dark-green uniform who had handled him surprisingly gently, and then of finding himself surrounded by a lot of ruffians with guns in their hands—guns which certainly were not being pointed at him, but even so Mr Ackroyd, who had never in his life known anything like this in Pocklington or Liverpool or even London, hadn’t cared for the look of that crowd; they’d looked so scruffy, and very dangerous—like the boys who’d made his life hell at school—but they’d been all right really, as he had to admit now. Decent enough lads.

  His next memory was of standing in the cool night wind which funnelled lightly down the valley, the tatters of his suit—an over-padded suit which he didn’t even know he’d got—flapping round his meagre body. He’d shivered, he knew that—he remembered shivering violently, perhaps with shock, until one of the lads had stepped forward and slung a kind of smock round his shoulders—almost like a sack, it was really, but it had kept him warmer. Another thing he recalled was that he’d hummed his little tune to these chaps, just to be friendly like, and they’d seemed rather astonished and looked at one another a bit funny like, and then after that he just went blank until he found himself in a nice warm room, dark and friendly and cosy like his mum’s kitchen, where he was lying on a table without a stitch of clothing on his body, and a woman was washing him all over with steaming water from a copper and plenty
of coarse soap.

  A woman!

  Sick and weary as he had been, he hadn’t liked that; in fact, it had given him quite a little shock. She’d looked old and withered enough, but still, in all his life Mr Ackroyd had never been bathed by any woman—not counting his mum—except Mrs Ackroyd, and that only when he’d caught chickenpox from Annie when he was too old for it to be as funny as Annie had seemed to think it when she saw her dad all spotty. What those lads would think if they could see him so undignified—those lads that worked for him in—in . . . Gibraltar. That was it, Gibraltar! Just for a moment, during that washing process, Mr Ackroyd’s thoughts had fined themselves up a little.

  Suddenly, through the mists and the pain and the misery and the indignity, Mr Ackroyd had recalled something of desperate urgency and importance, something to do with a test and Gibraltar’s and N.A.T.O.’s top brass, and maybe the Minister of Defence and vitally important defence secrets, something which, if that fault should develop again and he didn’t get back there before the machine overran itself, might come to a question of life and death—literally. In a flash—and only for a flash of time—memory had partially returned to Mr Ackroyd’s tortured mind, and he knew that he had to get back to Gibraltar at once, and no nonsense, in case something should go wrong. He’d sat up on the table, giving a little cry. At once and firmly a big, hot-water-reddened hand had descended upon his chest; soapy water had splashed into his eyes, and he’d been pushed flat.

  A cross voice—the old woman’s voice—had told him (though he didn’t follow the lingo, he’d taken the meaning) to lie down and be quiet, to rest and to submit for his own good. He’d protested volubly, but it was no use.

  The moment had gone then. There had been no more strength left in his body, and no further recollection in his head. He’d just closed his hand tight over that little piece of shiny metal until the teeth on it bit into his flesh and left a little semicircle of blood-pricked dents. He wouldn’t let them take that from him whatever happened.

  After that, though he wasn’t aware of this, he’d begun to cackle stupidly, and then he’d hummed a little. Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. . . .

  Afterwards Señora Gallego had plenty to say to a crowd of her cronies that she’d met in the market.

  “He will not speak one word that I can recognize.” She looked about her; she was speaking rather loudly, shrilly, glorying in her new-found notoriety as the keeper of the madman from the outer world; never since Señor Luica’s death had the citizens hung so closely on her words. Dark old eyes glittered as she went on, “He only hums a tune, and now and then, in delirium, he says things in a tongue which I do not understand. The sargento says he has papers telling that he is Spanish, but that he talks in what the sargento believes is English.” She shrugged, then flung her arms wide. “I do not know. I shall, however, pray to Our Lady to help him. Of a certainty he is mad. He clings like a child to a little piece of shiny stuff which he holds in his hand, and he will not let me touch it—even me! One would think his very life depended upon it.”

  The good old woman laughed shrilly. Some one inquired what the sargento intended doing about the madman.

  Señora Gallego said, “He will be kept as he is, if the charity of the good people of Vercin will recompense me for looking after him.” She glanced round keenly; the crowd edged away a little. “A poor widow,” she went on, rather more loudly and forcefully, “cannot easily feed the extra mouth. If no help comes the sargento says he will have to be sent where any other lunatic would go. There is but the one place for madmen so far as I know—the prison, at Ronda or Cadiz.”

  A little while after Mr Ackroyd had seen that fat, scarlet-and-silver, slow-moving slug on the road he heard voices outside the room in which he lay.

  Of course, he didn’t understand what they were saying, and his voice-recognition was all jumbled up. A danger-signal flashed, but only momentarily, in his addled brain as he heard one voice, a woman’s, which seemed to be expressing relief over something or other.

  They were talking very excitedly, and Mr Ackroyd wondered what could be up now. But as they went on talking his mind wandered off them again, and he lost interest. In his mind’s eye he saw, indistinctly, a mass of rock and some white, flat-roofed buildings climbing up the side of it, and then a long, dark tunnel and a cavern leading off it. Mr Ackroyd couldn’t think what the cavern was for. There was so much noise—a noise which seemed to be getting louder even as he listened to it . . . dum-da, dum-da, dum-da . . . yes, that was it, and there was something about a fault which he’d reported on—how long ago?—which had to do with that noise.

  Mr Ackroyd giggled weakly to himself when he realized that the noise had only been his own humming.

  He stopped humming, and he felt a tickling sensation on his eyebrows. It stopped, and a fly buzzed in the air, circling his face. It irritated him, that fly, and he began trying to slaughter it as it zoomed near the end of his nose, and then tickled his ear; he hit out at it with his little piece of oddly shaped metal, but the fly was too smart for him . . . after a while it came down on his straggly moustache. Mr Ackroyd blew and hit.

  Dum-da, dum-da, dum-da, dum-da. . . .

  The noise was there again, and then, when it faded, Mr Ackroyd became aware of something dreadful. He smelt that heavy scent in the room, and for the first time since that car-crash Mr Ackroyd made an attempt to speak lucidly.

  He cried out, “No, no—please, please go away. I can’t stand any more of it, honest I can’t, really. . . .”

  To Mr Ackroyd himself it sounded just as though he did actually cry those words aloud. In fact, all that happened was that his lips parted and moved a little, and a slow drool of saliva spilt from the corner of his mouth. His hoarse, terrified attempt to speak wasn’t heard; his tongue came out to moisten his lips, lips which were sandy-dry. And then, as the door opened and a stronger waft of that perfume came through ahead of the woman, Mr Ackroyd fainted.

  There was a gloating look in Karina’s eye, but her mouth twisted dangerously as she looked at Señora Gallego’s disapproving face. The señora’s sour expression was due to the fact that now—and not for the first time since this fine lady had arrived—she had her doubts as to whether her poor madman was going to receive kind treatment when she delivered him up. She didn’t like the señorita—the señorita with the passionate eyes and the firm, uplifted breasts—breasts which were far more exposed than Señora Gallego considered decent for a lady of Spain. Moreover, at a comparable age, Señora Gallego’s breasts hadn’t been like these —they had in fact already begun to sag like unrisen bread, and the señora had been perfectly content—so had Señor Luica.

  The old woman said anxiously, “Señorita, you can see that the señor your cousin is ill, and, if you will permit me the liberty of saying it, you must treat him very gently. We have done our poor best, but—”

  Her voice quavered off. “Señora Gallego would never have confessed it in the market-place, but she was somewhat tongue-tied in the presence of the quality, and this señorita was very much quality, very much the grandee . . . except for those breasts. Señora Gallego hastily looked away and gave a disdainful sniff—that she really couldn’t restrain; what they did in the great fashion houses of Madrid and the north, even Paris, perhaps, they didn’t tolerate in Vercín.

  Karina went across to the bed, knelt down beside it, appeared to say a short prayer. But the gloating in her eyes as she bent her head toward Mr Ackroyd worried the good señora badly; she thought for a moment of appealing to the guardia who stood in the doorway chatting with the señorita’s two male escorts (yes, and what was one fine lady doing with two men of low birth who didn’t appear altogether to be servants?). Then she realized that the guardia wouldn’t be any good. The dolt—he had been captivated by the señorita, anyone could see that, and he’d already meekly said he would be glad to hand the sick man over to the relative and be saved the responsibility and the bother. It would be far better for the poor señor than go
ing to prison, he had said with a great clownish guffaw, and after that he had been content to gaze at the beautiful señorita with his silly moon face while he fell to with a toothpick to remove a piece of yesterday’s supper from his teeth. He had even guffawed through the toothpicking operation until he had caught Señora Gallego’s eye—that trout, the old woman, had been the mistress of his superior’s predecessor’s predecessor when he himself had been nothing but a twinkle in his father’s eye. She was, therefore, entitled to his respect.

  Karina’s lips brushed Mr Ackroyd’s bristly, unshaven cheek. The little physicist looked quite ghastly—a horrid pale green, and his eyes had a peculiar, upturned roll when she pressed back the lids. Viciously Karina swore under her breath. This lunatic was going to be of little use, it seemed; but she dare not leave Spain without him, whatever state his mind was in. That could be attended to later, with any luck.

  In a low voice Karina murmured, “My cousin, my poor cousin. How fortunate we happened upon the car . . . how lucky you have been, to be looked after by these good, kind people.”

  Taking his hand in hers, she found that he was clutching the piece of metal. Her heart leapt, the blood surged in her veins, triumphantly. Still holding his hand as though lovingly, she stood up and half turned to face the old woman. “You have been kind beyond words, señora.” Letting go of Mr Ackroyd’s hand, she drew some notes from her bag, held them out. “Here. This may repay your trouble.”

  “It is kind of you, señorita.” Señora Gallego’s old eyes glistened, just a very little; but she had taken a dislike to this imperious young woman and her impudent corsage. Quality or no quality, Señora Gallego had her pride—also, of course, one never accepted money at the first offering; it was mere politeness to protest—a little but not too much, as the señorita would naturally understand. She went on, “But no, I will not take it. Never. I have been glad to help the señor your cousin. He has needed me. It is enough that I, an old woman, was needed.” She held herself as straight as she could. “Our Lady will repay me.”