‘It is in Belfast,’ DeLorean said.
Randall pointed out that, from what he had seen of it, Belfast, Northern Ireland generally, was incidental to the election campaign, aside from promises – stock-sounding even to a newcomer and varying little from party to party – to get tougher with the IRA. Neither Labour, nor the Tories, nor the smaller Liberal Party were fielding candidates in the Northern Irish constituencies.
‘Which kind of makes you wonder what they wanted with it in the first place,’ said DeLorean.
Randall listened to the radio long into the election night as the results came in, first a trickle then a torrent, entranced by both the place names – the Wrekin, Sutton Coldfield, Epping Forest, Thanet East, Thanet West, Angus South, Clitheroe, Cirencester and Tewkesbury – and by the repetition of the commentary: Conservatives gain, Conservatives hold, Conservatives hold on an increased majority, swing of 9.9 per cent from Labour red to Tory blue. The outcome was beyond doubt long before sun-up. Jennings and the opinion polls were right. Callaghan – Mason – and Labour were out, the Conservatives, Thatcher and whoever she decided on as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland were in.
*
Robert did not much like Margaret Thatcher, but he liked that buffoon Jim Callaghan even less. To his mind anybody would have been an improvement.
‘Even a woman, you mean?’
‘Oh, come on, Liz, Margaret Thatcher’s never a woman, she’s a man in a dress.’
Liz was not sure what to make of it all. She had long ago given up on politicians in this part of the world – take your pick from old men, angry men, or angry old men – and the ones across the water always seemed, and not just by virtue of the water, remote. Part of her responded to the sound of a woman (whatever Robert called her) commanding attention, shouting down the hecklers – encouraging them in order to shout them down was how it sometimes came across – but another, larger part feared Thatcher’s certainty. Liz’s granny had a saying (her granny had a store of sayings; it was, besides her children, the principal achievement of her life): the higher you build your tower the harder it is to climb down.
Margaret Thatcher by the sound of her was still building and had no intention of stopping any time soon.
*
Turned out what had DeLorean in Utah earlier in the year was Imps and Sprytes – Thokiol Imps and Sprytes, to be precise: specialist snow vehicles built in Logan by a company that had got a lucky break in the Space Shuttle programme and were looking to offload their terrestrial holdings at a price that was too good to pass up, even for a man with a new high-concept sports car on his hands.
It was in Utah again, on Mountain Time – a couple of hours closer to the start of his day, in consequence, than had been intended – that Randall tracked him down the morning after the election. Despite the time disadvantage he sounded more alert than Randall felt: already had a full workout under his belt, in fact.
‘We should have staked some of that money the last government gave us on the result,’ DeLorean said. (He sounded as though he was on speakerphone, quite possibly still on an exercise bike.) ‘We could have paid the new one back and still have had change to finish off the factory with.’
‘About that,’ said Randall.
‘You are going to tell me that we are nine months into the eighteen. As I have already said to Dixon and Chuck, our glass is half full.’
‘Jennings—’
‘—inclines to the half-empty point of view, that’s why he is a civil servant, a checker of things. We are makers of things.’ Randall was ambushed by a tingling up his spine at these words, their conviction and their inclusiveness: we. ‘At Chevrolet at one point the parts manual was nineteen inches thick: there were a thousand options just for the dashboard. We’re giving our owners four options and half a dozen accessories for the whole car. Do you understand what I am saying? We are not just trying to build a factory, we are rethinking an entire way of doing things and, barring something totally unforeseen, we’ll hit our target.’
*
Viewed through the full half of the glass, the foundations of the factory had now been laid. The stream dividing the fields – a tributary of the river that bordered Warren House – had been diverted and culverted and thousands of tons of stone had been brought down from the quarry at White Mountain, which formed – and daily deformed – part of the skyline to the west.
In places the stone was four feet deep. On top of this the skeleton of the factory itself had begun to take shape. There were to be two main sections, the body-pressing building – the word they used here was ‘shop’ – and, sitting at right angles to it, the assembly or ‘build’ shop, the two connected by a system of mobile cranes. The bodies aside, no actual manufacturing would be done on site. Instead, as many of the components as possible would be sourced locally, further boosting employment. The stainless steel panels had been sub-contracted to a factory near Limerick, which as Jennings ruefully observed, meant the southern Irish had contrived to get a slice of the pie without having to buy any of the ingredients.
For the moment, all of this was being coordinated and administered from the ‘carpet factory’ – the red-brick building before which the press conference had taken place the day Randall arrived – or from Warren House itself, where Randall had been joined, now that the refurbishment was complete, by Chuck Bennington. ‘Think of me as the son that never moved out,’ Randall said, although Chuck was a largely absent parent, with a schedule that could not have been more punishing if it had been handed down by a court of law.
Besides the private access road, the contractors were laying a new road to one of the two entrances they were building into the factory: the first to the south-east for workers who would be coming from the Seymour Hill direction; and the second – to be served by the new road – pretty much due west for those arriving from Twinbrook. Except no one was buying the convenience story (the gates were no more than a couple of hundred yards apart), although to be honest no one was trying very hard to sell it either. The Protestant and Catholic gates was what they were.
‘It is the only way you are going to get both tribes to buy in,’ was the way Dixon Hollinshead had justified it.
Buy in, mind you, did not look to Randall as though it was going to be a problem. The applications had started coming in the morning after that first press conference – long before there was such a thing as an application form or even a list of job descriptions. By the time the forms were ready and the recruitment ads went into the newspapers midway through the first spring they already had three or four sackfuls sitting in a corridor in the carpet factory waiting to be read.
Then the deluge began.
Some of the envelopes didn’t have stamps, so hasty were the senders, or so unaccustomed to sending letters of any sort. A lot of them carried no address beyond DeLorean, Belfast – or Dunmurry, as some preferred, including one would-be worker who had underlined the place name three times to ensure the letter did not go to a different DeLorean. A sizeable number of the forms inside were lacking vital information, like the contact address, the name. But even after Stylianides and his staff had weeded out those they still had twenty applications for each of the first nine hundred positions that had to be filled.
Stylianides reckoned that you could probably have learned more from those letters than you could from a whole library of history and sociology books, although for Chuck the only pertinent fact to draw from them was that there did not exist in the whole of that country more than a few score people with the training or the experience necessary to assemble stainless steel sports cars – any kind of cars.
‘So, think of all the bad habits they are not going to have to unlearn,’ DeLorean told him when the matter was raised on his next visit, and Chuck’s moustache and beard closed ranks with the perpetual cigarette to keep his mouth from saying anything else.
The interviews took the better part of two months. If you made it that far you still had less than a one in three chance of landing a job
. Randall took his turn on the interview panels same as everybody else. Whatever about no bad habits, it was a struggle at times not to give in to Chuck’s misgivings.
He lay this side of sleep some nights, playing the interviews over in his head, got up more than once to write something down before it slipped away.
*
Woman, 45, according to her form (mistake, had to be: tens and units transposed?)
Stylianides: You say in your application that you used to work in a pram factory?
Woman: Well, we called it the Pram Factory, but mostly what it did was bikes.
Stylianides: Bikes? Right.
Woman: And cuddly toys.
Stylianides: Bikes and cuddly toys. And what was your own area of expertise?
Woman: The cuddly toys.
Stylianides: So, like...?
Woman: Stuffing, mainly.
Stylianides (slowly): OK.
Woman: It all had to be done by hand, you know. It’s a lot trickier than you think.
Stylianides: You realise that most of our upholstering will be done offsite?
Woman (ages another five years): I didn’t realise that, no.
Stylianides: The seats and so forth, the ‘stuffing’.
Silence... long silence.
Woman (smiling, a girl again): What about the canteen?
*
Heavy-set Man, buzz-cut.
Hollinshead: You left your last job, let me see...
Heavy-set Man: In 1975. Third of March. A Monday.
Hollinshead: Is it not more usual to work through to the end of the week?
Heavy-set Man: I had a spot of bother.
Hollinshead: Do you mind me asking what sort of bother exactly?
Heavy-set Man: The foreman was always on my case. Didn’t matter what it was went wrong, it was me he gave the blame to. In the end I just threw the head up.
Hollinshead: You quit?
Heavy-set Man (absentmindedly flexing right hand): I lamped him.
Self: Just so we’re clear, when you say ‘lamped’...?
Heavy-set Man: I flattened him. One punch.
Hollinshead (clears his throat): And you don’t think maybe you should have mentioned that in your application?
Heavy-set Man: I told myself I wasn’t going to let that... so-and-so ruin my life.
*
Teenage Girl (first interview!!): My boyfriend dared me to apply. Here he was, Sure why not, I am, and here’s me, Me...? Aye, dead on, and now here’s me has the big interview and there’s him sitting in the house moping. He’d probably chuck me if I was to get a start.
Bennington (removing cigarette from his mouth): That’s what you say here for ‘dump’, ‘break it off’? ‘Chuck’?
Teenage Girl: Aye.
Bennington (raises his eyebrows): Well we wouldn’t want that to happen.
Teenage Girl (a sigh, like here is a man who understands): I know. Six weeks we’ve been going.
*
Slouching Man... he slouches, that’s it.
Stylianides: Are you comfortable there?
Slouching Man: Fine, fine. Tell you the truth, but, I had plenty to keep me busy on the brew*. You know yourselves, you can always find something to do. I only wrote off for the form to keep Her quiet.
*A drinker?
*
Twitchy Man (nicotine to the knuckles): I was on the sick there for a lot of years with my nerves.
Hollinshead: I’m sorry to hear that.
Twitchy Man (nods): Some fella in the place where I used to be foreman went buck mad one day and attacked me for no reason at all.
*
And that was all in the first week.
Somewhere in the middle of the second Randall looked up, a heartbeat after the door opened, from the notes he had been making, to find a woman already installed in the chair across the table. He half expected her to glance away, or even get up and leave. It was her: the woman from the wedding reception in the Conway, the sister-in-law. The rest of the panel were looking at him expectantly. He was supposed to lead on this one.
‘So.’ He found her form. ‘Elizabeth, is that correct?’
‘Liz is fine.’
It wasn’t her at all, he saw that now. He frowned.
‘I’m looking at your application here and I see you haven’t really worked...’
‘Since my sons were born, no.’
‘And they are...?’
‘Fourteen and fifteen now. I can hardly believe it myself.’
‘So what, after all that time, made you decide to apply to DMCL?’
‘Funny,’ she said, without the expression, facial or vocal, to support it, ‘that’s exactly what my husband asked me.’
*
She had been upstairs changing the boys’ beds (the joys of Saturday morning!) when she heard him calling from the hall.
‘Liz?’
‘Coming!’ She bundled up the dirty sheets along with the socks and underwear lying about the floor and stuffed them into the pillowcases.
‘Liz!’ Not just louder, but higher, from a point closer to her. He did that sometimes, foot on the first stair for extra projection.
‘I said I’m coming.’ She came. Along the landing to the head of the stairs. Stopped. He was actually on the third step. Straight away she saw what it was that had raised him to such a pitch. The application form was trembling with the force of his rage in his right hand. If she had leaned forward far enough she could have grabbed it off him, or at least have had the satisfaction of taking him with her if she fell in the attempt.
‘You left this on the table,’ he said.
‘I left it in my bag.’
‘You left your bag on the table.’
‘You have no right to go looking in there.’
‘I have every right. Whatever’s under this roof is ours together.’ He closed his fist tighter around the application. ‘So are you going to tell me what you think you’re playing at?’
‘I’m not “playing” at anything.’ She pushed past him, forcing him back against the banister. Forget that form, she’d send away for another one. She would send away for as many as it took.
He followed her through the living room and into the kitchen reading aloud. ‘“I would consider myself suitable for any position although I would prefer something on the assembly side of things...” You’re not serious?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Do you know where that factory is?’
‘Dunmurry.’
‘It’s Twinbrook: West Belfast. Remember the last factory to open around there? Remember Grundig? It’s not safe.’ He paused, big sorrowful lip on him. She knew what was coming. Pete. ‘You above all people shouldn’t need telling.’
‘Oh, Robert, don’t.’ She hated him using her brother’s memory against her like that. Pete would have hated it too.
‘Anyway’ – he wasn’t prepared to let this go yet – ‘what are you going to tell them at the interview? That the nearest you’ve come to the assembly side of things is pushing two chairs together for the boys to “drive” when they were wee?’ He jabbed the heel of his hand in the air in front of her face. ‘Beep-beep, Noddy!’
‘Stop it, will you. It’s not funny.’
The boys came in the back door at that moment from their football, grown men nearly the two of them, to look at, wrapped up in a smell of sweat and mud and Wintergreen rub.
‘What’s not funny?’
‘Remember the wee cars your mum used to make you?’
‘In the dinette, you mean? With the chairs?’
‘Flip, yeah!’
‘Where was it we were always driving to?’
‘The McGillycuddy Reeks!’
Robert howled at this forgotten detail. ‘Don’t forget to tell them that at the interview as well: your car made it all the way to the McGillycuddy Reeks.’ In her face again. ‘Beep-beep!’
She went to knock his hand out of the way but she was still holding the damned pillowca
ses. She threw them on the ground at the boys’ feet – ‘You’re big enough now you can pick up your own dirty laundry’ – then turned on the tap over the sink, hard, spraying water in all directions.
‘Flip sake!’
‘Watch what you’re doing!’
She turned the water off again, swung round to face Robert.
‘You know what I’ll tell them if they give me an interview? That it’s the first thing that’s made me smile in this bloody country for years.’
*
One of the Americans on the other side of the table was frowning, the older one: hadn’t spoken a word yet. ‘Smile?’ he said now.
‘A sports car made in Belfast?’ she said. ‘Whoever heard of that? And those doors, the way they lift up... The very first time I saw them on TV, I don’t know, I couldn’t help myself.’
The man’s expression changed. He tossed his copy of her application (the second one she had sent away for) on to the table and locked his hands behind his head. Maybe he thought he was a film director. Maybe he thought this was a couch she was sitting on.
‘That’s as good a reason as I have heard all day, all week in fact.’
‘Then there is the engine, of course,’ she said.
‘The engine makes you smile too?’
‘It intrigues me. The position of it, behind the rear wheels, same as the Corvair and the Porsche 356.’
The man unlocked his hands and sat forward again, picking up the application. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get the impression reading this that you were interested in cars.’
‘I’m not, or at least I didn’t used to be. I’m interested in getting a job.’
‘You had it for me on the “smile”.’
‘I know.’ She gave him one in real time, but not for long. ‘But I didn’t want it on the “smile” alone.’
The other American, the younger one, who had stared at her almost as though he knew her when she came in, made a noise, a snort, she was almost sure, that he tried to pass off as a sneeze. ‘Pardon me.’ He reached forward for his water glass.
The older man cleared his throat. ‘Yes, well, thank you, Elizabeth.’
‘Liz,’ she said.
‘Of course: Liz.’
*
Randall watched her go. He wanted to say something, he didn’t know what. (‘I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable, staring, you remind me of a woman I wish I had slept with’? ‘I’m sorry if I nearly laughed, you remind me of myself, many years ago, going for an interview’?) Instead as soon as the door was shut Bennington beside him covered his eyes with his hands. ‘I must have looked an ass there, but that line of hers, it completely threw me, and then when she started talking about the engine...’
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