Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  Eight minutes’ worth of fuel was all that it was to have in its tank, that being to the precise second what was required to take it through the Emissions and Vehicle Preparation shed, whatever that was, once round the test track and up the ramp of the transporter that would carry it to the docks.

  Liz learned it like a catechism, recited every night with the prayer that Robert was wrong, that tomorrow or the next day or the next week at the latest they would start and build a bloody car.

  *

  Randall was crossing the open ground between the two shops one afternoon when he saw coming in the opposite direction the woman who had said the thing in her interview about the doors making her want to smile. She wore the grey version of the company coveralls, the collar – deliberately he supposed – flipped up. Her hair was held back from her face by a large clip at the crown.

  He slowed as she drew closer. ‘Liz, isn’t it? I’m...’

  ‘Mr Randall, I remember.’

  ‘I don’t usually bother with the “mister”.’

  She nodded.

  ‘So,’ he said, because he had stopped now, he had to say something, ‘you’ve been finding your way round all right?’

  ‘Are you kidding? All those walks? I could give other people tours.’

  ‘I’ve realised the mistake I made when I moved here.’

  ‘You didn’t get out walking enough?’

  ‘I didn’t have someone to show me around properly.’

  She had been looking over her shoulder – they all did it, embarrassed to be seen talking to the bosses – but turned her head again now, sharply.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t suggesting...’ Which of course made it sound even more as though he had been.

  She nodded again, acknowledgement of his clarification or confirmation of her first suspicion, who knew? ‘I should probably be getting on here.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you should. I mean, we should. I mean, I should too.’

  She was gone before he got the last word out.

  *

  He did not sleep properly that night or the next, now telling himself that the fault was entirely hers, that it had been a perfectly innocent remark, making small talk, now wondering who he thought he was fooling: something within him had quickened seeing her walking towards him. Maybe he had meant to leave the invitation hanging.

  Gossip was what he feared rather than an official complaint. (He was not so paranoid as to think he had stepped that far over the mark.) He was grateful for the inventory that had started to arrive, the clipboard that as often as not he was obliged to carry with him when he ventured forth, checking, reconciling, pushing everything – everyone – else to the periphery. A busy man at a busy time, head down, focused.

  A week this went on. No complaint – he had been right about that – but no sense either out the corner of his eye of workers nudging one another as he passed: did you hear what your man there’s supposed to have said...?

  He was standing late one morning genuinely absorbed in the clipboard at the newly connected Tellus control station when he heard a voice.

  ‘Anyone would think you were trying to avoid having to talk to people.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  She was closer to his shoulder than he had anticipated. He had to take a step back in turning to avoid treading on her foot. She held up her hands close to her face in imitation of him.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was...’ What? Really looking at it this time? ‘Miles away.’

  ‘Well, you’re back now.’ She had folded her arms. Defensive. ‘I just wanted to let you know... the Botanic Gardens are lovely this time of the year. If you wanted to get out and about more, I mean.’

  ‘The Botanic Gardens.’

  ‘Right. Especially on a Sunday morning.’

  ‘Sunday.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  *

  She had no idea what possessed her. She had been on the point of passing him by – he had his nose stuck in paperwork – and then she thought, no, I’m going to say something here and then her mouth was open and instead of giving out to him she was telling him about Sunday mornings in Botanic Gardens.

  Absolutely no idea at all.

  There had been a shift in the tenor of their training of late, less now about getting to know the ins and outs of every stage of the assembly, more about getting to know one particular task. Hers – whatever it was the people in charge of the training had observed in her in the previous weeks and months – was seats.

  Right down at the end of the assembly line. That was where she had been going when she saw your man Randall at the Tellus control station and suffered the rush of blood to her head.

  A pair of seats was sitting there waiting for her, positioned as they would be when eventually the computer brought the carrier to a halt, a fully fitted car mounted on top, doors raised.

  For now, though, it was mules and anatomy lessons. She had to learn how to take the seat apart and put it back together again. Thirty named parts, some, like the Nyloc nut, its washer and cap screw, in multiples of four per seat. The seat covers were black and made from the hide of she preferred not to think what, so soft was the leather. (She wouldn’t have said no to a pair of gloves made out of it, all the same.) Hand-stitched, she was pretty sure. This wasn’t work, she sometimes thought, it was a window on another way of living.

  Along with the clearly defined role came clearly defined workmates. Taking the seats apart and putting them back together with her were a fella by the name of Anto Hughes and a wee lad, not much older-looking than her own boys, Tommy Cahill, who went by TC.

  Liz had never noticed either of them on the way in in the mornings or on the way out again at the end of the day so figured they must be coming and going by the other gate, the Twinbrook one.

  ‘No kidding?’ Robert sarked. ‘Tommy Cahill and Anto Hughes and you think they might be from West Belfast? Go to the top of the class!’

  ‘God help us,’ she said, ‘if our names should ever be all that define us.’

  She would have put Anto a year or two either side of her – mid to late thirties. Always had a book sticking out of his overalls’ pocket, which he would read, sitting quietly off to one side, any time he had a spare moment.

  ‘Jack London,’ she said into one such lull, glimpsing the name on the spine. ‘I remember getting him out of the library when I was a kid – The Call of the Wild.’

  He looked at her, she thought a little embarrassed. ‘I haven’t read that one.’

  ‘There’s another one, isn’t there, with a dog in it? What’s this you call it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He frowned and folded back the cover on the book he was reading, which she saw in that movement was called The Iron Heel. A huge black boot for an illustration. She wondered if she had got the right Jack London. She wondered if some of Anto’s discomfort was for her, not him.

  TC, the morning after the three of them were first teamed together, was late getting in. ‘Sorry if I kept you. I had a pass out for an hour there to go up to the Tech for my exam results.’

  ‘Exam results?’ Anto said.

  ‘Level Two City and Guilds, Welding and Sheetmetal Fabrication.’

  ‘And?’ said Liz.

  ‘I got a merit. I’ve already put in for my Level Three.’

  ‘Well done.’

  Anto made a face. ‘Aye, well done, but in case you hadn’t noticed they’ve been turning us into jacks-of-all-trades since we got here. What are you planning on doing with a Level Three City and Guilds in a place like this, or even a Level Two?’

  TC drew himself to his full height, six inches shorter than Anto, a couple shorter than Liz, even allowing for the arches of hair rising up either side of his centre parting. ‘I’ll tell you what I plan on doing – training to be your supervisor, that’s what.’

  Anto nodded: sure thing. ‘You in a union, TC?’

  ‘O
f course.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Which one, he says,’ said TC to the world at large; to Anto, ‘Which one do you think? The big one.’

  ‘Well then, man-who-would-be-my-supervisor...’ Anto punctuated each word with a light tap on TC’s breastbone, ‘I’m your union rep.’

  Light or not, TC looked like he was about to return the taps with interest until Liz intervened.

  ‘Hold on, you two chiefs, are you telling me I’m the only Indian here as well as the only woman?’

  They turned to face her, but before either of them could speak the safety goggles went up on to the forehead of the worker who had been bent over examining a pressurised cylinder a few feet away.

  ‘If it’s any comfort, love, I’m an Indian too,’ she said.

  In fact, as Liz well knew, there was no shortage of women about the place, and not only where you would have expected to find them in other factories: typing letters, answering phones, though mind you even in DeLorean she never saw a man do either of those things. More astonishing still, there were enough cubicles in the toilet blocks (of which there was one about every hundred yards throughout the factory) that she didn’t have to stand in a line reaching halfway down the corridor, watching as any amount of men came and went from the toilets next door. They had been prepared for this, in other words, the management. Her and all the other women, they were not here by chance but by right, on equal footing.

  *

  Randall took a call on Thursday evening. DeLorean in LAX. The irresistible lure of the last phone booth before embarkation. ‘I am going to be in London this weekend. I was hoping you could meet me... You’re not doing anything that can’t be dropped, are you?’

  What was he going to say? ‘Funny you should ask, I was hoping I might take a stroll in the Botanical Gardens.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not at all.’

  He flew over on Saturday morning, later than intended. The flight was delayed due to the cancellation of the previous night’s last inbound flight from Heathrow: a regular occurrence in Randall’s limited experience. ‘Any time there’s an emergency on another route they pinch a plane from Belfast,’ the woman who took his ticket said with a smile. ‘I suppose they think, sure who’s going to notice?’

  He rang the Ritz from the arrivals lounge. Mr DeLorean had already gone out, but he had left a message to meet at three p.m. in Soho Square.

  ‘Soho Square?’ Randall asked. ‘What is that? A restaurant?’

  ‘No, it’s a park.’

  Randall did not think he had ever seen DeLorean out of doors when there was not a factory to be an announced or a car to get into. He was half expecting to find a film crew in attendance, or at the very least a photographer, but instead the only cameras on display in the square (‘park’ was maybe stretching it a little) were being wielded by tourists arranging others of their party around the plinth of the statue of the man in stockings and wig at its heart, or trying to get an angle on the curious half-timbered building out of which the gentleman on the plinth might have stepped moments before he was petrified and in the lee of which (and not, Randall thought, incidental to the photograph being composed) stood three bona fide London punk rockers, all spikes and studs and sideways snarls.

  He had sat on a wooden bench for almost twenty minutes before he spotted DeLorean coming – walking... alone – along the narrow street to his right. He was carrying a paper bag under his arm. A book it looked like. ‘Instructions from Maur,’ he explained as he sat and placed the bag on his lap. He eased the book out part way. Faded blue slipcover, an eight- or nine-line title, of which Randall took in only the words in larger font: Morris Movement and Fiftieth Anniversary. ‘Hard to come by, he tells me, even in New York.’

  DeLorean looked about him, filling his nostrils with Soho Square air, nodded, yes, this was exactly how he had he expected it. ‘What I like about London is how inconspicuous it lets you be.’ He turned a smile on Randall. ‘Even the sex shops I passed are discreet compared to Times Square. You could take your grandmother for a walk around here.’

  ‘Without someone trying to buy her off you, you mean?’

  They sat a moment or two more. ‘What do you know of Lear Fan?’ DeLorean said then.

  ‘The plane?’

  ‘The factory.’

  Randall shrugged. ‘Only what we have already discussed. I met Moya Lear at a reception a few weeks back. A handshake, nothing more.’

  DeLorean’s nod this time was slower, shallower. ‘I knew Bill better.’ Bill Lear had died a couple of years earlier. His wife had made a mission, at an age when most people were thinking of retiring, of seeing his plane through to production. ‘Another guy I know, Morgan Hetrick, used to fly people down to parties in his house.’ Randall had heard that name Hetrick somewhere before. He must have frowned trying to dredge it up. DeLorean took it the wrong way. ‘Oh, it was quite the thing then flying people in for parties. I guess Moya was just never around for Bill’s. I sometimes wondered if that wasn’t where he got the idea for that little jet of his... Eight guys bouncing down to the Caribbean for the weekend... Or girls...’ A sideways glance as he said this then a shake of the head, he was straying from the point: the factory. ‘I’m worried that Thatcher has made it her pet project. I was assured she didn’t much care for other women, but she seems to have made an exception for Moya. As long as she doesn’t try to use her to make an example of me as well, you know: Good American, Bad American.’ He straightened the book bag on his lap. ‘What I’m trying to say is you are there day to day, you talk to people, they talk to you, anything you pick up that might be of interest let me know.’

  ‘I think you are maybe overestimating my social circle, but OK, I will let you know if anything comes my way.’

  They talked a while longer. Maur wanted some more photographs of the house. Dick and Roy were still racking up the dealer numbers: getting on for four hundred now. Eventually there was a silence. They seemed to have exhausted everything.

  DeLorean looked at his watch. ‘How’s Chuck?’ The question – addressed more to his wrist than Randall’s face – took Randall almost as much by surprise as the earlier one about Lear Fan.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I mean, I hardly see him. You know Chuck, how much he takes on.’

  DeLorean breathed in audibly through his nose: he knew all right.

  A heavily bearded young man in a plaid work shirt had crouched down beside an olive drab gear bag on the grass about ten yards away. He proceeded to take from it a camera with a hole where the lens ought to have been. The lens came from a separate smaller nylon bag on his other shoulder: four, maybe five inches in length. He wasn’t intending to take tourist snaps with it.

  DeLorean clapped his hands on his thighs, tucked Maur’s book back under his arm. ‘Listen, I have another appointment now.’ The young man stood as DeLorean did. So there was a photographer after all. ‘I would say stick around, but I fear the next half-hour or so will be immensely dull.’ It was as though he had forgotten in the novelty of walking that Randall hadn’t just strolled down to this square this afternoon too. He leaned a little closer. ‘The only thing that keeps me smiling is the thought that if this winds up on a cover it’s worth eight million dollars to us in publicity.’

  And he smiled, half, shook Randall’s hand, and walked out to do again what he had to do to make the world want his car.

  *

  So that was it. He wasn’t expected to stay the night. He got about fifty yards down Oxford Street, vaguely intent on the British Museum, when he saw a London cab coming his way, its roof-light lit. He stuck out his arm. ‘Heathrow Airport, please.’

  There was a traffic accident just beyond the start of the overpass at Chiswick – a ‘proper pile-up’ the taxi driver called it. ‘I hate to tell you, mister, but you ain’t going nowhere at this rate.’ Randall looked at his watch twice a minute for a quarter of an hour then resigned himself. An ambulance passed on the shoulder, a fire tender, another ambulan
ce. The taxi driver whistled through his teeth, breaking off every now and then to toss a question into the back. Where had Randall been, then, in London? What did he reckon to the food? The weather? Then, ‘Hang on’, the car in front rolled forward a foot, braked, rolled forward another two, braked before rolling again, and in that stop-start way they covered half a mile in first gear until the flashing blue lights and the tow trucks were all behind them. He made it to the airport minutes before the last flight of the day was scheduled to leave, although as the airline was still making up the time lost earlier in the day he had another hour to wait. It was well past eleven by the time he got back to Warren House. No sign of Bennington.

  No sign either the next morning.

  Sunday.

  Randall decided to take the train. There were so many restrictions on parking – so few secure car parks – he was surprised anyone drove into the city ever. The train halt (it was no more than a couple of benches and a Plexiglas shelter) was less than a fifteen-minute walk, but once there he stood for almost four times as long without seeing a train in either direction. After the twenty-four hours that had preceded it he would nearly have been surprised if it had been otherwise.

  Someone had set fire to the post on which the timetable was mounted; vandal or amateur surrealist, the melted glass had a Dali-esque appearance, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Hope, perhaps. The instant I walk away a train will come, he told himself for the last thirty minutes of the fifty-five that dragged by before the train finally arrived: two carriages, the first of which was completely empty, for the very good reason – as he discovered before joining the other eight passengers in the second – that it stank of urine.

  (No way was that a single person’s doing. There had to have been a gang of them: jump on, pee like fury, jump off again... Or sit in the adjoining carriage as though they had never met one another.)

  It was one of those days that could turn up in any of the city’s seasons: warm for one, cool for another, about average for the other two. The train window offered him an overview of Belfast’s pastimes and preoccupations, garden sheds and vegetable patches, succeeded at length by yard walls – soccer goals here and there etched on the bricks, jerry-built pigeon lofts balanced on top or, more precarious still, kitchen chairs angled to catch the sun.