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About Gull
About Glenn Patterson
Reviews
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
For CC – co-conspirator and friend
Author’s Note
I made this all up, apart from the bits you just couldn’t.
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
Ecclesiastes 9:10
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Ephesians 6:12
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
Acknowledgement
About Gull
Reviews
About Glenn Patterson
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
1
On the morning of the day it all ended, Randall stumbled out of the elevator on the thirty-fifth floor of 280 Park Avenue to find Carole, DeLorean’s secretary, holding the outer-office fort on her own.
She came round from behind her desk as he passed at his best, jet-lagged version of a run.
‘You missed him,’ she said. ‘He left for LA forty minutes ago.’
Randall thought of the delay before take-off on the runway at Shannon, the longer than usual lines at passport control on landing in New York.
Forty minutes.
Another day he and DeLorean would have been standing here laughing at how close they came to missing each other. Instead their cars must have passed somewhere on the Van Wyck Expressway north of JFK.
‘Mr Hoffman called first thing to fix a meeting,’ Carole said, and Randall’s legs went from under him.
*
Already in Belfast it was mid-afternoon. Liz sat on her bed listening to the pips for the three o’clock news: one hour until the boys got home, two hours until Robert did, four hours, said the newscaster, until the deadline expired on the DeLorean Motor Company Limited. Either John DeLorean came up with £10 million by seven o’clock this evening or the factory at Dunmurry would cease to exist.
Liz reached under the bed and pulled out a suitcase, dust all over the top.
She set it sideways on the bed, snapped the locks (dust all over the bedspread) and began to pack.
The last hanger she dragged up from her – left – side of the wardrobe had her spare overalls folded over the horizontal bar. She thought a moment then packed them too, DMC crest up. You had to have at least one thing to remind you. She pushed down the lid of the suitcase: snap, snap.
She was out of the room before she remembered she had left the radio on. She didn’t go back.
*
Randall leaned for support on DeLorean’s own desk, next to the bust of Lincoln. He had driven through the night to make the flight and had not closed his eyes between the first fasten-seat-belt sign and the last. He took from his inside pocket the envelope Jennings had given him before he left Belfast, dyed pink now from contact with his shirt, his sweat.
Useless.
Here and there about the room, paintings taken down in the move from the forty-third floor were stacked against the walls. Only one had so far been rehung, next to the spade that forty-eight months before had broken ground in a Northern Irish field: a not-quite-life-size photo of DeLorean, kicking through the surf, holding his infant son’s hand. A caption ran along the bottom, Joni Mitchell, ‘Both Sides Now’, It’s life’s illusions I recall...
Commit all this to memory, Randall told himself: Lincoln, the photo, the ground-breaking spade, the stacks of paintings, the brass telescope in the corner, pointed at the ceiling, as though to track the distance already fallen.
He was pretty sure he would never set eyes on any of it again.
2
He had first set eyes on John DeLorean ten years before, at the 1972 Chicago Auto Show: the launch of the ’73 Chevrolet Vega. Randall felt an almost sentimental attachment to its predecessor, the ’72 being the car on the cover of the copy of Motor Trend that he had bought on the way to his interview at the auto pages of the Daily News (RIP). Pattie had spotted the ad. Randall until that moment had had no particular interest in cars. He did not even at that stage of his life own a car himself (a bone of contention with Pattie). But he had begun to drift a little, he knew that without Pattie having to tell him, and now there was a baby on the way and the Daily News auto pages was the first opening that presented itself, or that was presented to him, on the breakfast table, circled in red.
‘Tell them you used to write for your college paper,’ Pattie said.
‘About track, and even then I didn’t understand half of what I was saying.’
‘So? It was a paper. You wrote for it. Tell them.’
‘Can you tell us,’ the chairman of the interview panel asked before Randall had a chance to say a single word, before he was even settled in his seat, ‘the name of the current Car of the Year?’
Randall hesitated, wondering if this was not in fact some kind of a joke, if the panel had not – don’t ask him how – watched him from the moment he stepped out of the drugstore on Wabash, all the way up here in the elevator, reading his magazine, stuffing it in the wastebasket only when he arrived in the corridor leading to the candidates’ waiting room.
‘The Chevrolet Vega?’ he said.
The chairman looked to the men sitting on either side of him. His left eyebrow curled itself into a graphic surtitle of disdain, for everyone, it seemed, bar Randall himself. ‘You would not believe,’ he said, ‘how many people coming through that door today were unable to tell us even that.’
Randall shook his head: the chairman was right, he could not believe it.
And so there he was, four months on, an Auto Show virgin in the vastness of McCormick Place, beyond Ford and Dodge, their Pintos and their Demons, looking over the shoulders of more seasoned reporters at the dais on which the ’73 Vega stood, still under wraps, while before it a comedian who had had a couple of Hot 100 novelty hits in the early sixties tried to wring every last drop of drama out of the moment. (He had already, judging by his patter, given up on the humour.)
‘Folks! Folks! I know you are all as impatient as I am to see what is under these covers, but bear with me, bear with me, I guarantee you, you will not be disappointed.’
A flashbulb ignited, perhaps prematurely, but the comedian turned on it anyway his once instantly recognisable slantways smile.
‘This is a truly special car,’ he said to that particular quarter, ‘and a truly special car deserves a truly special person to perform the unveiling. Folks, will you please join me in welcoming out here the head of General Motors’ Chevrolet Division, Mr John Z. DeLorean!’
And now the cameras flashed in good and earnest as he strode out, pale grey suit, sky blue shirt, blacker than black hair, frowning, as though burdened by the increased weight of expectation, a very tall young woman – with heels, nearly as tall as him, which was saying something – on each arm.
/> A reporter in front of Randall took the cigarette from his mouth to bark into his friend’s ear beneath the whistles and the cheers. ‘What year would you say they were, ’53, ’54?’ The friend closed a red-rimmed eye, assessing. ‘Fifty-two at the outside.’
The young women stationed themselves on either side of the car while DeLorean raised his hands to still the audience.
‘Thank you, Bob,’ he said with a backward glance (the slantways smile turned sheepish), then facing forward once more, ‘and thank you all.’
The voice was deep, drawly, the mouth from which it emanated a little downturned towards his slab of a jaw.
‘A head of division is really only as good as the team he has around him.’
The friend of the reporter in front of Randall cupped his hands about his own mouth and earned himself a few laughs, hollering, ‘Come on, John, don’t be getting all modest on us.’
Up went DeLorean’s hands again. Up briefly went the corners of his mouth. ‘No, no, it’s true, I am blessed with a great team at Chevrolet who have all been hard at work with me the past twelve months trying to improve on the ’72 Vega. Now, some companies with a Car of the Year on their hands would be content with a tweak here and a tweak there, but at Chevrolet we don’t believe in resting on our laurels – I believe that’s the polite word for it – we keep looking to the future, and for the brand new Vega my team have come up with – wait for it – three hundred improvements, friends: three, zero, zero.’
All around Randall reporters were scribbling in notebooks, although he had not heard anything yet that could not be carried in the head.
‘But what am I talking for?’ DeLorean said, hamming it a little now. ‘Why don’t you have a look for yourselves?’ He half turned to the young women. ‘Will we show them, ladies?’
As one the two of them bent low, grasping opposite corners of the sheet covering the car, and as one they rose again and with three steps backwards laid it bare. Coupé. A blue so metallic it was practically neon, the body’s long, slow slope up from the trunk breaking like a dune at the top of the windshield, falling sharply to the hood, which curved away between raised headlights to the grille.
In style, in other words, not a whole lot different from half a dozen other cars on display elsewhere in the Convention Centre and – bar the finish and perhaps the depth of the bumper beneath the grille – to Lucas’s eyes pretty much identical to the photo on the front of the Motor Trend he had discarded on his way into the interview at the Daily News.
The reporters were writing faster, the photographers pressing closer to the dais. DeLorean was still talking.
‘Now I recognise a lot of the faces here at the front – you’ve been in this business nearly as long as I have. You boys remember what we did with the Pontiac back in the sixties. The Old Lady’s Car, isn’t that what they used to call it? Well they weren’t calling it that by the time we were through with it.’ No one ribbed him this time about that modest ‘we’, although they would have had greater cause to. Sure, there was a team there too, but he, John Z. DeLorean, more than any other person, had remade the Pontiac, and more than any other car the Pontiac had made his name. Even Lucas knew that. ‘The Vega’ – DeLorean had changed register again, this was the sales pitch – ‘is going to be for this decade what the Pontiac was for the last. Take my word for it.’
The audience took it: hung on it.
The young women had opened the car doors and were perched sideways on the front seats, long legs elegantly crossed.
‘So,’ said DeLorean, ‘does anyone have any questions?’
The first one came from so far to the right it was practically in Dodge territory.
‘Is it true that you’ve been promised the presidency of General Motors before your fiftieth birthday?’
‘Hey!’ DeLorean’s eyebrows rose theatrically. ‘Let a guy get used to being forty-seven before you start talking to him about fifty.’
‘But it’s only a matter of time, right?’
‘The birthday or the presidency?’ The comedian, banished now to the sidelines, could not have bettered it for timing. ‘But what about this beauty here behind me, anything you want to ask about that? Yes, at the back there.’
He pointed straight down the room, straight at Randall, who was as surprised as anybody, looking up, to find that his hand was indeed raised. He cleared his throat. ‘It’s not a question so much as an observation. I hear what you say about looking to the future, but the only thing that looks different to me from last year is the depth of the bumper.’ The reporters immediately in front had turned to look at him – to scowl – and the reporters in front of them and in front of them again. Randall faltered. ‘I mean, is that the most we can hope for from the future?’
DeLorean held his gaze, jaw set. It was a weapon, that jaw. (Randall later learned that he had had reconstructive surgery on his chin. ‘The people who say it was vanity don’t know the pain I used to be in.’) He kept it trained a moment or two longer then smiled. ‘Well, you see, it was a question after all,’ he said and when the laughter had died down turned to address the audience at large as though Randall had been a mere plant. ‘Like I said, there are three hundred improvements and if you care to come on up here I am sure these two delightful ladies would be only too happy to point them out.’
The words were no sooner out of his mouth than there was a rush towards the dais. Randall, still smarting from the put-down, took advantage of it to lose himself in the Auto Show crowd, or that at least was the idea.
‘Hey! Hold on there!’
He looked over his shoulder to see GM’s president-in-waiting striding towards him. The stride was something else he had in his armoury. The stride and the height – six four or more to look at him, closing fast – that powered it.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Randall. Edmund Randall.’
‘What do your friends call you, Ed? Eddie?’
‘Pretty much everyone calls me Randall.’
DeLorean nodded (hair could not grow that black) as though it were a marketing matter they were discussing. ‘I prefer Edmund,’ he said and before Randall could respond had offered his hand. ‘John DeLorean.’ Randall’s hand in comparison was like a child’s. ‘You’re new to this, aren’t you, Edmund?’
‘Well, if you mean what I said back there, I didn’t mean to offend, but I thought it was my job to ask questions.’
DeLorean rocked back on his heels as though amused at his innocence then snapped forward again, bending at the waist and speaking out the corner of his mouth. ‘Your job is to print the lines the manufacturers spin you in return for getting your cock sucked.’
Randall pulled his head back out of range. ‘What makes you think I want my cock sucked?’
(A woman passing too close put her hands over her grade-school son’s ears.)
‘I never met a man yet in this industry who didn’t.’ DeLorean drew himself up to his full six-foot-four-or-more and glanced back at the Vega stand. The reporters on the dais were paying as much attention to the very tall young women as they were to the car. His eyes slid round on to Randall again. ‘Actually, there is a party later, ought to be a blast.’
‘Thanks, but I have a review to write.’
The weapon of a jaw shifted to one side then the other. Another nod. ‘I should probably be getting along myself. I’m expected back in Detroit for dinner.’
This time it was Randall who called after him. ‘What about the party?’
DeLorean barely broke stride to answer. ‘Oh, I only like organising them.’ He waved above his head, his voice already three strides fainter. ‘Be kind!’
‘I’ll be honest,’ Randall shouted, though whether it reached its intended target is anyone’s guess. Still, plenty of other people heard him, and after that, well, what else could he be?
‘What is this crap?’ the auto pages editor asked, handing him back his copy. ‘Three hundred improvements and all you can talk about is the bumper?�
��
Two days later a memo landed on his desk informing him of his transfer, a week Monday, from autos to real estate.
‘At least I am staying in the building,’ he told Pattie.
‘For now you are,’ she said.
They were both beginning to realise that they had maybe married in too much haste. The marriage counsellor they had started seeing dwelt a lot on the timing of their meeting, a mere month after Randall’s return from his tour of duty. She had seen it before, she said, with vets. Despite all that they had been through over there they missed the heightened emotions... ‘They used those exact words?’ Randall asked. ‘“Heightened emotions”?’ Maybe not those exact words, but the point was they would do anything, some of them, to make the colour flare again, even for a single (wedding) day.
‘Talk about being wise after the event,’ said Pattie.
‘And what was your excuse?’ he asked her.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Just don’t.’
So when a few years later the phone rang on his desk early on the second Wednesday in June – the middle day of the middle month of the middle year of the decade – Randall was a recently divorced father of a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Tamsin, who he had to go through a lawyer to see.
He picked up the receiver on the third ring. ‘Apartments and Condos?’
‘Edmund?’ said the voice. ‘So this is where they have you hidden away.’
‘Who is this?’ he asked, though he already knew the answer: no one had a voice quite like that, and no one, other than his mother, called him Edmund.
‘John DeLorean.’
‘This is a surprise.’
‘Is it? I was thinking we might have lunch.’
‘You’re in Chicago?’
‘Detroit. If you leave in the next forty-five minutes you can make the eleven-thirty flight. There’ll be a ticket in your name at the desk. Tell your editor you are comparing prices in Kenilworth and Bloomfield Hills.’
Randall pushed his chair back from the desk. The motion only added to his feeling of light-headedness. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Where will I meet you?’
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