Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  On the opposite side a goods yard piled high with metal beer kegs gave way to a stadium – as inviting in its concrete fastness as one of their neighbourhood police stations – hard by which was a wall entirely covered with a painting of a man in a scarlet coat and voluminous black wig, smiling blandly astride a white, rearing charger.

  I think I might have seen a buddy of yours in London yesterday. Looking OK for his age, but maybe a little off-colour in comparison.

  A voice came over the speaker at the head of the carriage: the next stop was Botanic Station, Botanic Station was the next stop (twice they said everything, everything, in a different order, they said twice). Eight pairs of eyes watched Randall alight. He had overheard a couple of the contractors building the factory talking once about Americans and their shoes. A dead giveaway, one of them said to the other, you don’t even have to wait for them to open their mouths. He looked down at his own. Florsheim Royal Imperial Oxfords. They might as well have been painted with Stars and Stripes.

  They carried him, the Oxfords did, along the platform, at the bottom of a steep cutting, thick shrubs overhanging, and up a flight of steps to street level. Past a ticket booth they went then, through a turnstile, and out on to a shabby avenue of nineteenth-century townhouses – about one in two a shop or office, all, this Sunday morning, closed – with trees not so much lining the pavement as interrupting it, angled like arrows fired blind by a giant in one of their old tales.

  (There was a thing that no one had explained to him, how a people that claimed such heroes in their lineage had come to be burying fathers of teenage girls face down in shallow graves.)

  After a moment or two getting his bearings (away from the city centre: so, left), he strolled up the avenue, passing behind what he assumed was the university and into the Botanic Gardens by a narrow side gate, a sign beside it informing him that after five o’clock this evening there was no way out again. He passed a sunken garden, water trickling nearby, a down-at-heel glasshouse – two long wings with a dome at the centre – and a roofed-in man-made ravine, the doors to which, like the doors to the glasshouse, like the doors to the museum they shared the gardens with, were currently chained shut.

  All the same, the woman, Liz, was right, it was – they were – lovely. He spent about an hour, until past noon, just sitting on a bench before the glasshouse, arms stretched out along the back, or forward, resting on his knees, watching the people come and go: the young, it seemed, and the very old, and not much in between.

  He tried not to let it harden into conviction, but he felt about getting up from the bench what he had felt earlier about walking away from the railway platform with the melted timetable, that it would make happen – and therefore make him miss – the very thing he was waiting there for, though with even less reason for hope in this instance. (She had said it was a nice place to visit on a Sunday morning, that was all.)

  As it was when he could wait no longer – could scarcely physically sit another minute – he looked back over his shoulder every third or fourth step until he had reached the little gate once more.

  And it didn’t happen. And the train would have come when the train did come whether he had stayed on that platform or walked away.

  *

  In the middle of the following week DeLorean sent Chuck Bennington to Coventry. The official line was that he was to start work on the development of a right-hand drive model of the DMC-12 – why shut the gull-wing door on a third of the motoring world, after all? His work in Belfast was done. Randall couldn’t imagine, though, that Chuck would have chosen to go before the first cars had even come off the line.

  Thinking back to the conversation in Soho Square, he was afraid that he might inadvertently have hastened his departure. It was a short step from taking a lot on to taking on too much, spreading yourself too thin. Chuck, however, on the one occasion that their paths crossed in the house after the announcement, appeared willing to shoulder the blame himself.

  ‘We’re more than six months behind. Someone has to take the rap.’

  But the circumstances, Randall said, the complete overhaul of the design...

  ‘That’s what you say to your financiers, but they still expect to see you make changes. Anyway’ – he paused to crush one cigarette and light another – ‘John’s right, we need that right-hand model.’

  A new managing director arrived – straightway: further proof, Randall consoled himself, that the decision had already been made before the conversation in London – a Canadian, Don Lander, who had done time with Chrysler in Africa and the Middle East. Less edgy than Bennington, more communicative. ‘I have been brought in to get the cars out, as simple as that,’ he told Randall and the other senior staff, gathered in the newly fitted out boardroom. ‘And you are here – thank you very much – to make sure I don’t fail in the attempt.’

  He took Randall aside. ‘I understand from John that you have been here from the very start.’

  ‘Practically the only one left,’ Randall said, ‘now that Chuck has moved on.’

  Lander nodded. ‘L & L, right? Logistics and Liaison.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Would it surprise you to know that some of your colleagues call it Looking and Listening?’ He pre-empted Randall’s response with a raised hand. ‘Whatever works in this business works and from what I can tell whatever isn’t working here just now has got precious little to do with you.’

  *

  With all this going on, Randall was not exactly in the best of spirits when the end of the week rolled round again. (Did they really think that was what he did? Looked and Listened?) The steady rain he awoke to on Sunday morning was just the soggy frosting on a rather unappetising cake.

  A rabbit – little more than a kitten it looked like – came out of the warren and, ignoring the lure of the plastic bags and discarded cans, raised its twitching nose to the sky and went straight back down the hole again. Randall might have followed its lead and stayed put had he not while searching in an understairs cupboard for batteries for his shaver come across an umbrella, left behind by Chuck – Lotus F1... well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? – and feeling in that instant as though he had been deprived of that particular excuse; in the next was telling himself he ought at least to give the Gardens one more go.

  He timed his setting forth this week so that he was on the platform of the local halt a quarter of an hour before the train had arrived last Sunday, in case it might have been running late then. It arrived at the exact same time, the exact same distribution of passengers, even though the urine stench had gone from the carriage in front: Randall checked then sat in the rear one anyway in case the other passengers knew something he did not.

  The rain had eased to less than a drizzle – a spit they called it here – by the time he emerged a second time on to Botanic Avenue. He kept the umbrella furled.

  As before not a single shop was open. He remembered, though, having noticed a man sitting on a stool at a corner, selling newspapers. They were covered this week with polythene sheets, held in place by a brick. Randall bought the Sunday Times – the thickest newspaper the man had – and when he had arrived at his spot in the Gardens took out the sections he had no interest in reading and laid them on the wet bench.

  Lander’s arrival as managing director was accorded a single paragraph – little more than a press release (the hand of Bill Haddad?) – on the bottom left of a front page dominated by more horror stories from inside the prisons. (Women prisoners in Armagh had added menstrual blood to the palette of dirt on their cell walls.)

  He had been sitting for less than ten minutes when Liz appeared. One moment she wasn’t there, the next moment she was. She wore a fawn-coloured raincoat, darker at the shoulders, the belt’s keeper lapping itself, tucking in finally above her left hip. He could imagine its having been given a determined yank.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he said and thought that he meant it.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting me either,
’ she said and sounded as though she thought she meant it too.

  He handed her the sports pages. A moment. ‘Thank you,’ she said then. She folded the pages, smoothed the seat of her raincoat and sat.

  ‘My mother lives just over the river,’ she said and nodded, sideways, in the direction of the sunken garden and – apparently – eventually – the river and its far side. ‘I take a stroll here the odd Sunday on my way over to see her, get my strength up.’

  ‘Is she very old?’

  ‘Sixty-three, but to hear her you would think she was a hundred.’

  They were both taking pains, now that there were only inches between them, to look dead ahead. A dog trotted by with a stick in its mouth, head jerking from side to side, looking for whoever had thrown it.

  ‘Do you still have your parents?’ she asked.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. They separated when I was six. I haven’t seen too much of my father since.’

  ‘And if you don’t mind me asking, have you...?’

  ‘Children of my own? A little girl. Tamsin.’

  ‘Nice name.’

  He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t my choice. Very little to do with her life has been. Her mother and I mainly communicate through lawyers.’

  ‘Carrying on the family tradition.’ Now she did turn to look at him directly. ‘Sorry, that came out the wrong way.’

  ‘Believe me, I have wondered about it myself.’

  Something caught her eye. His followed. The dog again, passing in the opposite direction, faster than before, head jerking more frantically. A church bell rang. Liz stood.

  ‘I had better get going.’

  ‘So soon?’

  ‘Siegfried!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She had clamped a hand to her mouth. ‘When we were at school, any time anyone said “so soon” we all shouted “Siegfried!” He was a poet we studied. Siegfried Sassoon. First World War.’ She handed him the sports pages. Warm. ‘There you go, don’t say you didn’t learn anything.’

  ‘Another couple of Sundays I’ll be ready for my Literature paper.’

  ‘No, I mean learn anything about me.’

  8

  Since his arrival in Belfast Randall had not made it back home for more than three or four days at a stretch. That Christmas he managed five. As before it took him the first couple to adjust to not seeing soldiers, and cops in body armour, at every turn. More than once he was bawled out by people trying to get in the door behind him after he stopped in the entrance to a store for a search that never materialised. Mark Chapman had shot John Lennon outside the Dakota two weeks before, since when another seventy or eighty men, women and children had been shot, stabbed, strangled or otherwise done to death in New York City. There had in that time in Belfast been a single killing. He was at a loss for how to explain the difference to people. It was not just a question of comparative size for, even allowing for that, New York was ten times more deadly. Something to do instead with the unpredictable nature of the violence, the daily – or at least weekly – reminders that for all the searches in shop doorways, for all the cops in body armour, the soldiers on round-the-clock patrol, there was no guaranteed safe zone. Coffee-jar bombs. Maybe that was what it came back to. Maybe that was all he needed to say. Coffee-jar bombs.

  He got to spend three hours of Christmas Eve with Tamsin, who was turning out to be a better kid than he and Pattie had a right to hope after the way they had conducted themselves, were still conducting themselves.

  Pattie made him wait on the sidewalk by the car until she released Tamsin on to the porch. He barely even saw his ex-wife’s face. Tamsin seemed not to know at first what to do with her feet with so much path to cover. About halfway down she decided to skip.

  Randall wrapped her in his arms. ‘What would you like to do?’ he asked her. ‘See a movie?’

  He was thinking maybe Popeye.

  ‘I’m good just going for a ride and talking,’ she said and for a minute or two afterwards he didn’t trust himself to say anything in case she took his laughter the wrong way.

  Not that she seemed to notice. Whatever spaces he left she filled with her chatter, about school mostly, complicated stories involving groups – ‘tables’ she referred to them as – named after forest animals and losing good-behaviour acorns because Nate (his name came up a lot) kept making a sound with his hand in his armpit and saying it was someone else, and not their armpit either.

  They stopped for a soda. (He remembered as he always did now his first time asking for one in Belfast, the shop assistant directing him to a bakery down the street where his request was this time rewarded with a triangular bread loaf, an inch and a half thick.) The Ronettes were singing, ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’. Tamsin frowned. Here it comes, he thought. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  The frown deepened. ‘Will this ever happen again?’

  ‘Us, you mean? Together?’ This wasn’t what he had expected at all. ‘Of course.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘will I ever pick this soda in this diner, with that song on the radio?’

  He laughed. ‘Well, not the exact same soda, no, because you already have most of it finished...’

  ‘Will anybody else?’

  He tried to find a form of words that would console her, for he knew now that what she was grappling with could not be laughed away. ‘Maybe some day you will be somewhere else and you will lift a soda or hear that song and it will be like you are right here again, like we are, together.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, as though it was just as suddenly a matter of no importance, and leaning forward to her straw, drank.

  He must get back here, before she was grown up entirely.

  He had bought her a ballet-dancer doll with straps to go over her feet and hands so that they could dance together, face to face, or face, judging by how much his daughter had grown, to somewhere between breastbone and chin. (He had never watched it, so couldn’t say for sure, but he had a feeling anyway that face to face was not the way the actual ballet worked.) He took the box out of the trunk, wrapped, when they arrived back at Pattie’s place.

  ‘I’m not supposed to open my presents until tomorrow,’ Tamsin said.

  ‘That’s all right. Take it in and put it under the tree.’

  Tamsin looked at it a little doubtfully. How was she even going to pick it up?

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ll carry it for you.’

  She looked over her shoulder at the door. Pattie must have been as precise to her as she was to Randall in her rehearsal of the arrangements. ‘I’ll just set it on the porch for now,’ he said, and she nodded. That would do.

  He leant it in the end against the doorframe while he rang the bell then pulled his daughter to him for one last hug. ‘Happy Christmas,’ he whispered.

  The screen door did not open until he was safely in his car once more. A hand ushered Tamsin inside and then a second later the girl came out again, pointing at the package and behind her a man Randall had never seen, dressed in white-T and sweatpants and moccasin slippers. He tucked the box under his arm and turned to look down the path straight at Randall, raising his hand in a no-hard-feelings way, before letting the door swing to again.

  The previous day Randall had joined some of the DMC New York staff for drinks in the Waldorf Astoria, on the other side of Park Avenue from two-eighty. Haddad was there and Marion Gibson, the English woman who for the past while had been in overall charge of what she liked to refer to as the ‘front of office’ operations. It was the first time Randall had been in their company without DeLorean being there. He had left town earlier that afternoon. ‘Cristina and I are taking the kids to the ranch for the holidays,’ he explained to Randall. (The face of Jim Hoffman floated across Randall’s mind’s eye. He blinked it away. If that’s what went with a ranch they were welcome to it.) ‘If next year goes the way I’m expecting it will it might be the last chance we get to be all together for a while.’

  Haddad was one
of those guys, whatever the subject, he knew more than anyone else around the table. If he hadn’t seen it or done it himself he had learned it from the Kennedys. He interrogated Randall about Belfast, about the factory, about Warren House. Seemed there was no end to his curiosity, or his antipathy. He had something against Roy Nesseth, something even greater than he had against Maur Dubin, whose ‘excesses’ – to say nothing of his access – were in danger of making DeLorean a laughing stock among CEOs: apricot carpet, indeed!

  Disliking Roy of course was not unusual, although in Haddad’s case Randall got the impression that he believed Roy was standing in the way of his elevation to a position of greater (and rightful) authority. I mean, he, Haddad, had worked for the Kennedys, the United Nations Peace Corps. What had Roy ever done except hustle people into spending more than they had intended on their new cars and accepting less than they had hoped for on their old ones? (There had been another complaint, from Wichita, an elderly couple had signed a blank lease form on the understanding that the terms they had agreed in the lot would be written in. They weren’t. They said. Roy said he would see them in court sooner than pay them the $9000 they were claiming he had overcharged.)

  ‘Who would you rather have going in with you to a meeting with the British government?’ Haddad said.

  It was a long couple of hours.

  Truth be told, he had spent happier Christmases. Not even much in the way of snow to help create the mood. All in all they had had a pretty easy time of it the past couple of winters. Every cab driver he had while he was in town said the same thing: they were due a really bad one some year soon.

  In Belfast too – it was no surprise on his return to learn – it had been mild for the time of year.

  He had not been back at work more than a few hours, the bulk of them spent with Don Lander in Lander’s office, a sort of 280 Park Avenue debrief, when the devil he had so far avoided talking of (talking of how he had been talked of), Nesseth, rang.