Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  Anto gave TC a boost and he clung to a pillar long enough to report that it looked as though there might be a ruck. A fella from the engine-dress line had already been despatched to find out more and returned breathless a few minutes later (the clamour had subsided a little) with word that the skins didn’t fit – ‘curling like the lids of sardine cans’, was what he had been told – and that the Tellus operators had been desperately trying to override the settings on the carrier, which kept wanting to move it on to the next stage. People were practically standing with their backs against it, others spreading themselves against the skins to keep them flat, and then some wee man from Rathcoole had produced a fistful of penny washers from his overall pocket (no one asked what he was doing with so many on his pocket to begin with) and started replacing the standard issue washers, or in some cases just firing the penny washers on over the top of them. They seemed to do the trick: the lids were back on the cans. Now fellas from all the sections were running to the stores looking for buckets of penny washers.

  ‘So,’ Anto said. ‘What are you waiting for, TC? Go and get us a bucket of washers.’

  ‘Me go? You go!’

  ‘Forget it, I’ll go,’ Liz said and would not hear then of them not letting her.

  It was as she was making her way back, slowly (who knew there was so much weight in a bucket of washers?), that the word started going round that DeLorean and his wife had arrived – the secretary of state and his wife too – which would have accounted for the sudden competition again from noise without.

  Liz set down the washers, with an inadvertent thump, between her and Anto. The Tellus carrier was moving again, past the doors section now, heading straight for them.

  ‘My palms are sweating,’ Liz said.

  Said TC, ‘My cheeks are.’

  ‘What way’s that to talk?’ said Anto and seemed to shift uncomfortably inside his own overalls.

  And then there it was in front of them and there they were at last, the three of them, hoisting the first of the black leather seats, their tools, the galvanised bucket of washers, and immersing themselves in the interior.

  ‘Wait a second... Wait a second.’

  ‘Watch! No, lift that... A bit higher... A bit higher... Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!’

  ‘Where’s this supposed to...?’

  ‘Look: down there. Remember?’

  ‘Do you want me to hold it for you?’

  ‘Quick, chuck us a couple more washers.’

  ‘The torque, the torque! Use the torque wrench!’

  And, almost before they had time to think, they were out and the car had moved on. For the life of her she couldn’t remember the second seat even going in. A couple of minutes after that it was through the wheels section too and up on the ramp for fuelling. (One third of an imperial gallon those eight minutes amounted to. They would have been better off with a dropper than a pump.) There had been talk of Jackie Stewart or Stirling Moss coming to drive the first car out, or even – they should be so lucky – James Hunt. Instead that honour went to one of the test drivers, Barry, Liz thought it was you called him, who walked to the car like the astronauts at Cape Canaveral to their rockets, that same expression on his face of anticipation mixed with dread. As he got in, left side, to the driver’s seat, TC and Anto were running to help open the roller doors.

  *

  DeLorean stepped up to the microphone, to the right of the grandstand, as though – Randall had observed it before – he moved through a different medium, or was being shot on a different speed, to everyone around him. He had never looked more impressive, his hair spun, you would almost have thought, from the same guaranteed rust-free stuff that sheathed the cars that bore his name. And as for his jaw... it was his conductor’s baton, his wand, wherever it pointed there was a reaction, a jumping to attention, a rush of colour to the cheeks, an instant abashed smile.

  ‘Mister Secretary of State’ – forget the syllables now: every letter nearly was drawn out to a sentence in its own right – ‘Missis Atkins, Distinguished Guests, Members of the Local and International Press, Friends and Well-wishers...’ From somewhere at his back there came a muffled thud. His eyes flicked towards Don, then Randall, but he carried on without noticeable hesitation and only a fraction louder than before, ‘...Ladies and Gentlemen. Thirty years ago, when I was a young man just beginning to make my way in the automobile industry...’

  Don being too close to the dignitaries and the cameras that were trained on them, and too far from the source of the thud (for that was what the rapid movement of the eyes had signified: go, one of you), Randall backed slowly towards the assembly shop and, avoiding the main doors, ducked inside. It took him several moments to make sense of what he was seeing.

  The car was wedged at an angle between the door pillar and the wall. The test driver stood, hands gripping fistfuls of his hair, at the centre of a crowd of horrified workers.

  ‘The brakes just weren’t responding,’ he said.

  ‘But we tested them,’ said the man at his left shoulder, practically in tears. Randall was not far off joining him.

  The test driver’s hands tightened their grip, pulling his features into a dreadful grimace. ‘They weren’t responding. I was pressing and pressing, and nothing... nothing at all.’

  ‘We’re fucked,’ somebody said. Randall glanced round at him. One of the union leaders. Always had a book with him at meetings. He was looking straight at Randall, who was thinking in that moment Don, and how to get him away from those cameras out front without alerting everyone that there was a problem.

  Oh, Christ was there a problem.

  ‘Wait,’ he said and turned to the driver. ‘There are still a couple of those mules around, aren’t there? Steering wheels and all already inside? Go and get one of them. And, here’ – this to the workers gathered round looking instantly a little less horrified – ‘get the skins off this.’ He leaned over the hood to have a look at the damage. The licence plate at least was salvageable: DMC1. ‘And the licence plate too. Time and a half for everyone if you can get a car out of here in the next quarter of an hour!’

  Liz was the first to respond. Not a flicker as she rushed past him. Too focused.

  He slipped out the side door again.

  DeLorean was still on his feet, still talking (he had only just left the fifties behind for the thrill that was his first Car of the Year, the 1960 Tempest), his instinct and his experience telling him that if something was not going right there was every chance it was going very wrong indeed, but telling him too that the best people to deal with it were almost certainly already on the other side of the doors. What else was all the training for?

  Randall, ignoring the frown Jennings turned his way, placed himself in DeLorean’s line of vision. He showed him the fingers of both hands then of the left hand alone. As before there was barely a pause, although maybe a careful observer would have seen his jaw jut out a fraction further. Fifteen minutes? He could do that. And how. From the Tempest to the GTO – a generous word for Bill Collins, in absentia, who had been part of the Pontiac too, a nod to Ronnie and the Daytonas, who had taken ‘this modified little Pon-Pon’ to the top of the Pop Charts as well as the auto sales charts – from the GTO to the GM kiss-off (here lightly done: this was not a day for recrimination), to the Vision that had guided him this past seven years and more... Randall could have flashed him a half dozen more handfuls of fingers and the store would not have been exhausted.

  On fourteen and a half minutes, though, the mechanism controlling the assembly shop doors kicked in.

  ‘But now, ladies and gentlemen’ – you would have thought, so seamless was the transition, that the opening of the doors had been timed to fit his words and not the other way about – ‘this is the moment they told us we would never live to see, the moment they told us we were mad to dare dream we would live to see, and the moment that, but for the faith of my wonderful wife Cristina’ – she pressed a knuckle beneath each eye in turn – ‘I might even have g
ot to thinking once or twice myself I was mad to dream I would live to see.’ Never more impressive, never more vindicated. ‘I present to you all...’ A final dramatic pause, or a catch in the throat, ‘the DMC-12 sports car.’

  Randall uncrossed his fingers to join in the applause, which grew as the doors opened wider then, as the nose appeared (complete with licence plate), lost the run of itself completely. People were whooping and hollering, Irish people, British people. The press were whooping and hollering loudest of all. The secretary of state put his hand to his tie, patting the knot, when it seemed from his expression as though what he wanted to do was yank the thing loose or tear it off altogether.

  The test driver was steering (hair again smoothed flat), but the engine was silent. The power instead was being provided by the six workers pushing from behind.

  ‘It’s basically held together with washers and duct tape,’ one of them told Randall out the corner of his mouth. ‘There’s bits of wood and all sorts in there.’ But that was not how it looked at all. The gull-wing doors lifted and every person present smiled.

  ‘You will excuse us if we don’t start the engine,’ DeLorean said, though it was doubtful that many heard, ‘but this is a high-performance car and with so many of us gathered this morning space is maybe a little tighter than is strictly advisable.’

  Jennings materialised at Randall’s shoulder. ‘For a moment when he was spinning us those yarns about Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis Jr I thought he was going to hit us with another delay.’ But even as he was saying this DeLorean was inviting the secretary of state and his wife to come closer – to get inside – and Jennings was forced into an undignified shuffle to take Mrs Atkins’s bag, which he held as a man might a severed head that had been thrust into his hand, at arm’s length, by the hair, that is to say the straps.

  *

  Liz sat on the toilet with her head firmly between her knees. It was the only way she could think of to keep her legs from shaking.

  Jesus, they had got away with it.

  For the past half-hour, since the dressed-up mule had been pushed out the front, she had been waiting for the doors of the assembly shop to burst open again and every cop standing guard outside to come charging in and arrest the lot of them for fraud.

  Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

  She squeezed out an excuse for her occupation of the cubicle, hitched up her overall, and flushed. She opened the door and almost closed it again straight away.

  Cristina Ferrare was standing at one of the sinks, a small make-up bag balanced, open, between the taps.

  She looked up into the mirror, meeting Liz’s eyes next to the half-closed door, after which of course Liz had no option but to open the door fully and carry on out to the sinks. (If only she had been a man she could have headed straight for the exit. As Robert said to her once when she called him on it, ‘It’s not as if we hold the end of it or anything.’) She chose a sink two along on the exit side. Cristina Ferrare did not look round, or track her walk, but examined her own reflection for signs of imperfection and incredibly found one, high on her left cheekbone. She went at it with powder from a deep-red tub. Liz concentrated on the action of soaping her hands, folding them over one another, interlocking fingers and thumbs, thumbs and fingers, rinsing them then, thoroughly. Anything to avoid having to meet herself in the mirror, having to make the comparison.

  She turned off the tap, shook the excess water into the basin then turned, hands aloft, to the roller towel. Pull a yard, dry, dry, dry, pull a yard again for the person after you.

  She watched her feet as they tiptoed towards the door. She saw them stop, as though the decision to speak came from them.

  She faced about.

  ‘Don’t mind me asking, but he’s serious about this, isn’t he?’

  Cristina Ferrare paused in the act of returning a brush to a bottle of lip gloss. Only her eyes moved, a slight frown forming above them as they sought out Liz’s a second time in the mirror.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Your husband, Mr DeLorean, well, I mean some people’ – she made the singular plural – ‘still can’t quite believe that he came here at all or that he is going to stay, you know, for the long haul.’

  And now Cristina Ferrare turned so that they stood finally looking at each other, face to face, woman to woman.

  She was more beautiful head on than seemed right or fair. Liz couldn’t tear her eyes away.

  ‘Of course he is going to stay, we bought a house here.’

  ‘I know,’ said Liz, hardly able to credit it was her talking at all. ‘So have a lot of the people I’m working with, the first house they have ever owned, most of them.’

  ‘Well, then.’ Cristina Ferrare smiled: a brilliant smile, and despite the reapplied lip gloss, entirely without artifice. ‘We are all in this together then, aren’t we?’

  Liz saw her again a quarter of an hour later, holding tight to her husband’s arm as together they tried to make their way through the workers who were lining the corridor between the machinery, cheering and clapping and whistling through their fingers. DeLorean in the end climbed on to a workbench, raising himself still higher above the heads that surrounded him.

  He held up his hands, but the cheering and clapping and whistling through fingers for a time only grew in volume. He spread his own fingers, made a tamping motion – Please – and now, at last, they let him speak.

  ‘I am so proud of each and every one of you today,’ he said, ‘so humble in your presence,’ and humble was exactly how he sounded to Liz: looked it too, more elbow and knee joints all of a sudden than he knew what to do with. ‘That car out front has my initials, sure, but make no mistake, it is your car. A few...’ he stroked the side of his nose, a sign that he was in on the secret, ‘...glitches today, but we can all work on those. We’ll write off today’s car and the next however many it takes as training exercises, but if you can get me three hundred top-notch cars by the start of April we will have a shipment leaving here bound for the US and the American market. What do you say, can you do it?’

  ‘Yes!’ Liz shouted, though she could barely hear herself, so loud and numerous were the yeses on all sides. They could, they would.

  *

  Randall held the door for them to pass through back outside. DeLorean paused before him and rested both hands on his shoulders. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to.

  Don Lander, coming behind, did have something to say, sotto voce. ‘I don’t think you’ll have to worry any more about the Looking and Listening jibes.’

  The secretary of state had not accompanied the DeLoreans on their tour of the factory. ‘Their moment,’ Randall had overheard him tell Jennings. (Perhaps it was time to revise that view of him as a man of constant sighing.) Randall could not imagine that he and Mrs Atkins had simply stood and waited, but wherever they had been in the interim they were here now, by their official car, to hear the last resounding cheer before the door to the assembly shop closed again.

  ‘You appear to have made quite an impression with the workers,’ Mrs Atkins said, that same smile on her face she had worn when she stepped from the car ninety minutes before.

  ‘I can tell you,’ said Cristina, ‘they have made quite an impression with me.’

  ‘Shame!’ another woman said – shouted – through a loudhailer, it sounded like. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’

  Cristina’s head turned. Mrs Atkins’s head turned. Everyone’s head turned. The gates it was coming from, Twinbrook side. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’ The woman with the loudhailer was flanked by two more women, who seemed to Randall to be wearing nothing but blankets. There were other women, children too, holding up large photographs of bearded men – prisoners, of course – clad in the same coarse blankets. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Atkins, at the end of a long sigh. ‘I think maybe it is time we were going.’

  A detachment of cops was already at the gates, trying to keep the roadway clea
r. Others closed in around the official cars, hands variously clutching radios, baton handles, the stocks and the perforated barrels of the guns angled across their chests.

  Cristina’s expression curdled. She seemed to stumble as she took a step towards the car and had to grab hold of her husband’s sleeve to keep from falling.

  ‘I don’t imagine those shouts are directed at you,’ Atkins said, although from the look on her face this was scant comfort to Cristina. She had reached the car now and at once slid across the back seat, almost for the moment disappearing from view. DeLorean got in after her and leaned forward, speaking animatedly to the driver.

  There was jostling now at the gates, which the cops were trying to force fully open against the wishes and the weight of the protestors. The jostling became scuffling. A cop had his cap knocked off and he reacted by shoving the woman closest to him on the shoulder.

  ‘Brutality!’ yelled the woman with the loudhailer. ‘RUC brutality!’

  The cars and their police escorts meantime were heading in convoy towards the exit, press photographers trying to keep pace, Randall trying to keep pace with them. As the lead Land Rover went through the gates it took a hit on the left side of the security grille from a bag of flour, which exploded in a white cloud that the secretary of state’s car drove through, windshield wipers going at maximum speed. An egg hit the roof, and another, and another.

  It was as though someone in the throng was systematically emptying a bag of groceries.

  The fourth egg overshot and broke, spreading its mess against a window of the car carrying DeLorean and his wife. Randall, who had drawn almost alongside – close enough that he had managed to get his hand in the way of the lens of the photographer dropping to a crouch to fire a shot off – saw Cristina’s head pop up, as though propelled by shock, or outrage. He was not inside the car so had no way of knowing for sure, but he saw the look on her face, he saw her mouth moving, ‘Away,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘Away!’