Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  *

  The news bulletin that evening mentioned the protests only in passing, thank the Lord, preferring to focus on the car, which looked, through the filter of the camera and the television screen, even more convincing than it had when it was pushed out of the assembly shop to meet its public. Robert sat through it, as he had sat through dinner, in complete silence. Actually he barely said a word all night. Liz waited until they were getting ready for bed.

  ‘You never asked me how it went today,’ she said when he came into the bedroom from the bathroom. She was already in her nightdress, a jar of face cream uncapped in her hand.

  ‘Sure I know how it went. Didn’t I see it on the TV?’

  ‘You didn’t see everything,’ she said. She was leaning over looking in the mirror on top of the chest of drawers. She saw him glance up. He knew that tone of voice. After all these years he ought to. ‘I met the model wife.’

  He had his trousers in his hand. He folded them the way he did, using his chin to hold the waistband flat, but there was a greater than usual deliberateness about his movements. And though the mirror didn’t let her see far enough down to be certain, well – after all these years – it didn’t need to.

  ‘Her?’ You’re kidding me?’

  ‘Uh-uh. Standing at the sink in the toilets, like this, putting on her make-up.’ She set down the face cream and licked the tip of one finger and brushed her lips with it, glossing them. Purely for the purposes of illustration, of course.

  ‘Did you speak to her? What did she say?’

  ‘She said you had better get used to being a kept man.’

  ‘Did she now?’

  He was round her side of the bed by this time. The reflection in the mirror now was all his chest in his white vest, rising and falling with the quickening of his breath.

  ‘Like a servant you mean?’ Hands on her hips beneath the nightdress, nudging it up, moving her a few inches to the left, getting the angle. (He knew that too of old.) ‘A gardener, maybe?’

  And – dear God – he was in – as quick as that – right, right in. She could hardly breathe and yet she thrust back wanting even more. The face cream and all the other bottles and jars were scattered. The mirror tilted, toppled. She bit her forearm and the world went white.

  *

  The phone call came while Randall was still at dinner in the residents’ dining room. Most of the journalists had already checked out, but he went out to the lobby anyway to speak rather than have the phone brought to the table.

  ‘I didn’t get a chance to say before we drove off,’ DeLorean said, ‘but there has been a change of plan.’ In the background at that moment a flight was being announced, gate now closing. Randall saw again the expression on Cristina’s face as the car drove through those women in their blankets, put the two together. It must almost, in the pause that he left, have been audible – a more-than-mental click – because DeLorean at once began steering him towards a different conclusion. ‘There is a dealers’ convention, starts tomorrow, in Long Beach. I had been thinking on the flight across it would be too good an opportunity to miss with that first shipment coming due.’

  ‘No, you’re right. It makes perfect sense.’ And it did, of course. It really did.

  There was a further and final call for passengers intending to travel.

  ‘I’ll talk to you from Long Beach,’ DeLorean said. ‘And, Randall... thank you.’

  He moved back into Warren House that same evening, with – cold though it was – the familiar firefly-dance of cigarette tips across the valley to greet him. The red satin bows were still attached to the bay trees at the front door. Inside, not a grape had been dislodged from the pyramid of fruit in the crystal bowl on the sideboard, not a petal had dropped from the white peonies in the vase on the console of the bathtub beside which Randall undressed, letting his clothes fall to the floor where he stood. He reached into the bath and turned the dial to close the plug before opening the hot tap all the way. Steam billowed around him. He watched himself in the mirrored tiles disappear from the knees, the thighs, the waist up, knowing that all he had to do was pull the cord on the fan to begin to reverse the trick, but not yet (chest now, shoulders, neck, chin... bye-bye eyes), not just yet.

  10

  The Botanic Gardens rendezvous continued through what remained of the winter and into the spring. Liz told herself she was doing nothing whatever wrong. She would have been there on a Sunday morning anyway, or not a million miles away, and it wasn’t as if they did anything apart from talk, sometimes not even that, just sat, a careful distance apart, people-watching.

  One February Sunday, caught in a sudden downpour, they fled to the relative shelter of the sunken garden, and straight away wished (his body language echoed hers) that they had taken their chances with the rain, and took them, in fact, the moment the rain stopped bouncing on the paths above their eye level.

  Her sister Vivienne in Melbourne was having an affair, Liz was pretty sure, with a man at her work. She had not come right out with it in her letters – they had never been the type of family to come right out with anything – but it was there between the lines, even just in the frequency with which the letters had started to arrive: she needed to be talking, just as she had on those nights in her teens, coming home from dances, shaking Liz awake (Vivienne had five years on her little sister, was already bringing home a wage before Liz had finished primary school), spouting nonsense about everything under the sun – the moon, make that – when the thing she really wanted to tell her, the thing she could not come right out and say, was whose arms had wrapped themselves around her, whose hands when the lights had gone way down had found their way up – defying elastic and latex and metal underwiring – there.

  Liz had taken to ripping the letters up and burying the pieces in the bin, several bins even, the minute she was done reading them for fear that Robert would pick one up, (accidentally it would have to be, but still, accidents did sometimes happen), and read into it the same thing she did.

  Because if he was to ask her to her face – ‘What does that sister of yours think she’s at? And what about Ivor? Do you not owe it to him to write and let him know?’ – I mean, seriously, how could she fail to give herself away?

  The odd Sunday she went straight to her mother’s, skipped the Gardens altogether. Show him he wasn’t to depend on her coming. Show herself she wasn’t dependent on seeing him.

  Monday to Friday and half of every other Saturday she built cars.

  Eventually they would be turning out seventy or eighty a day, but for the first shipment they had a shade over eight weeks to manufacture three hundred they could swear by on the American market. The same car could come around two, three times, sometimes more, before the inspectors were content to let it out, or out as far as the Emissions and Vehicle Preparation shed at any rate. She knew what the shed was for now. EVP was their A&E. There weren’t many cars that didn’t come out of there better than they went in.

  They were all still learning.

  An assembly line is an exercise in rhythm, individual and collective. Like an orchestra, she was chuffed with herself for finally saying the day she tried to put it into words (tried to put it into words while simultaneously wrestling with a tension spring). Aye, said Anto, or like galley slaves.

  The important thing was to distract all but that part of the brain required for the task in hand. Some people whistled – no: a lot of people whistled, a disproportionate number of them through their teeth – some people sang, or made noises approximate to singing in words only occasionally approximate to the ones committed to vinyl.

  Anto had a game – ‘Where in the world?’ Where in the world would you be if you travelled five hundred miles west of such and such a place, then veered north for five hundred more?

  Liz thought he must have invented it himself, for it was always him that won it. TC hated it – ‘Change the record, will you, for fuck sake’ – but he knew that the rhythm was better in the pit, or th
e galley, if they were all distracted by the same thing.

  (Car arriving.)

  ‘You’ve come out of Stockholm, heading due south, you hit land... Where in the world would you be? Liz?’

  ‘Stockholm, you say?’

  ‘Stockholm.’

  (Passenger seat in position.)

  ‘Stockholm, Stockholm, Stockholm...’

  ‘Due south.’

  (Upper and lower shields aligned.)

  ‘It’s not Denmark?’

  (Cap screws through the slide runners.)

  ‘Correct, it’s not.’

  (Washers, nuts.)

  ‘I give up.’

  ‘After one guess? Come on! TC?’

  (Tighten, tighten, tighten.)

  ‘Bangor?’

  ‘Ha-ha.’

  ‘Not our Bangor, the other one.’

  ‘Tell me’ (Driver seat in) ‘you’re not serious.’

  ‘If I wasn’t serious I wouldn’t have said it.’

  ‘Wait! Is it Poland?’

  (Cap screw one, cap screw two.)

  ‘The land’s right, the Po’s wrong.’

  ‘What other land is there around there?’

  (Washers, nuts again.)

  ‘Gotland.’

  ‘What land?’

  ‘Got. It’s an island, smack in the middle of the Baltic Sea.’

  (Tightening.)

  ‘Why’s it not in the World Cup, then?’

  ‘Because it’s still part of Sweden.’

  ‘That’s cheating!’

  ‘Cheating how? I never said anything about countries: I wanted the name of the piece of land, simple as that.’

  (Car gone.)

  Deep into the second month she was still able to count the cars lined up in the car park as she walked towards the gate at night. When she could no longer do it without breaking stride – somewhere around the hundred mark – she quit bothering. It would be tight all right, but they were going to do it, they were going to get the shipment out on time.

  *

  Randall had already decided that he was going to press the issue of his returning to the US as soon as the first shipment was delivered. From there on in it was all production. He had by now, he hoped, something to offer elsewhere in the company. He had a daughter he needed in every sense to be closer to. In comparison to which the business with Liz was a small consideration indeed. But even there the conviction was growing that things could not go on indefinitely as they had been going on. Nor could they – whatever thoughts to the contrary he had once entertained – go any further.

  Sundays now getting off the train at Botanic Station he found his feet occasionally dragging: what if this week he was the one who did not show up? OK, next week then...

  Across the road from the station was a broad building out of keeping with the rest of the street: flat-roofed, red-brick, metal window frames; a sign at the end nearest the station proclaiming it the home of the Belfast Arts Theatre. Maybe upstairs it was. Downstairs for almost its entire length it comprised single-window businesses: a laundromat, a bric-a-brac store in the guise of a gift centre, and, between these two, a dingy-looking record store.

  Randall had peered through the security mesh a couple of times – in those feet-dragging minutes after disembarking, or again on his return to the station with minutes still in hand before the next train – and had been intrigued to see among the album covers beginning to fade behind the glass a fair number of jazz artists.

  On the one occasion that he had found himself, by chance, on the street during the hours of business, however, there had been a crowd of school kids – schoolboys – around the door, blazer lapels basically backdrops for their button badges and safety-pin collections, and he convinced himself he was in too much of a hurry anyway.

  Then the sole on his right shoe started to go. ‘American?’ said the man in the Heel and Key Bar in Dunmurry to whom he showed it first. ‘We don’t get a big lot of these in here. Don’t get a big lot of shoes at all, tell you the truth. It’s mostly the keys. I don’t know what people do with them.’ He picked up the cigarette from the ashtray next to the cash register, squinted and blew a thin jet of smoke at the sole. Wisps of it came out through the eyelets. ‘Here.’ With the world’s smallest pen he wrote an address on the back of a docket. ‘You’d be better off taking them into Belfast, get them done right.’

  It was a fortnight before Randall found the time. A Saturday afternoon. He could only imagine what it would be like trying to find a place to park. He took the train again, carrying on through Botanic this time to Central Station, although to what exactly the windowless bunker of a building he stepped out of was central he had for several disorienting moments not the first idea. Dereliction wherever his eyes lit.

  A man approached him, red hair sprouting sideways from beneath a flat cap. ‘Taxi?’

  Randall nodded, fist closing tighter round the Heel and Key Bar docket. The man trotted to a black London cab parked twenty yards away. He held the rear door for Randall then, as soon as he was inside, shut it again and disappeared in among the passengers emerging, scratching their heads, from the station. A minute passed. Two. The man in the cap returned with three other lost souls and admitted them to the rear of the cab with Randall. He went round then to the driver’s side and got in, turning in his seat once he had settled himself, and speaking through the sliding window between front and back.

  ‘City centre, all of you?’

  The four strangers – two men, two women, two grey-heads, two in the prime, one with worn shoes wrapped in a bag on his lap – looked at one another and nodded.

  ‘Flat fare, two pound each,’ the driver said, and shut the window on the matter.

  He set them down a quarter of a mile and a couple of turns in the road later (a couple of turns impossible to divine from the sidewalk before the station) at the back of the City Hall.

  Randall and his temporary travel companions split without once having broken their silence, aware that they had been taken for a ride that could not be measured in distance alone.

  Come the time to leave again, therefore, Randall opted to walk to the station he knew best and found himself at the entrance to Botanic two minutes late for one train, twenty-eight minutes early for the one after.

  He looked over the road at the record store. No schoolkids today.

  There was a crosswalk a little way up the street, but having by now had ample opportunity to observe the Belfast road-crossing etiquette – a hand raised in apology (or admonition) to the oncoming traffic – he decided on the more direct route and, hardly breaking stride, pushed open the shop door – halfway.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.

  A kid was hunched over a box of records on the floor behind the door. In fact, looking about (it didn’t take long), he realised there were at least as many kids inside as he had previously seen outside, only out of uniform now and twice as rowdy.

  Something or other, the one behind the door was saying emphatically (neither the bump or Randall’s apology having interrupted him) was a load of balls. Randall spotted a Yes album cover in the boy’s hand. He forgot now the name of the artist, but Stafford in his unit – the memory broke surface, blinking from long submergence – Stafford had been a huge fan, painstakingly stencilling his artwork for Gun on to the back of his flak vest: all hellfire and opened-maw ghouls.

  Randall was about to take back the one step he had taken inside, pull the door quietly behind him, when the man – fifties maybe – working the counter called over the top of the heads between them.

  ‘Something you’re looking for there?’

  Randall raised the hand with which he had moments before deflected the traffic. ‘I saw the LP covers in your window.’ He tried to make it sound as though it was his fault for imagining that there would be any connection between what was on display there and what was to be found on the shelves. ‘I was kind of wondering whether you maybe had anything by Artie Shaw.’

  The
man’s face lit up. ‘Arthur Jacob Arshawsky! Now you’re talking.’ He came out from behind the counter – a little more hesitantly than Randall would have expected: perhaps he had misjudged his age – and taking Randall by the arm guided him to the adjacent aisle. His fingertips skimmed the top edges of the sleeves, stopping now and then as though guided by touch alone to pull out an LP. That one? On second thoughts... That? No, wait: this one.

  ‘Let me show you,’ he said, and turned back to the counter where he slipped the vinyl from the third sleeve, displaying it front and back beneath a lamp. ‘First pressing. See? Not a mark.’

  Randall laughed awkwardly. ‘All I need to know is does it have “Nightmare”.’

  ‘They nearly all have “Nightmare”. Do you want to have a listen?’

  He still had better than twenty minutes before his train was due. ‘All right.’

  The man had already raised the lid of the turntable behind the cash register. He positioned the record on the rubber mat then bent over to place the stylus on the groove – an operation as precise as cutting the diamond the stylus had come from. He took an untipped cigarette from the box in his shirt pocket – this too appeared be part of the operation – and with a nod of his head – for that was not mere hiss they were hearing, that was the sound of the forces gathering and could not be talked over – invited Randall to join him. Randall nodded back – he would, sure – and lit up with him, two sides of the same flame.

  The kids looked over their shoulders curiously at the first funereal notes from some enormous horn. A whole shipful of bad news. Trumpets came in, harsh as sirens, then a clarinet – Artie himself: the sound of one man trying to steer a course through the confusion.

  Randall remembered the night sitting in the grillroom in – where was it? – Manhattan Beach – DeLorean’s hands making the shape of the clarinet, though perhaps it was something far more intangible he was trying to conjure... those stories of his childhood on Six Mile Road – parents striving to live decently, clarinet lessons and a piano in the parlour, despite the goons and the summer lay-offs – his first days at Packard and the awe he felt in the presence of the actual makers – not the machine-operators – the craftsmen, who knew, and knew that everyone from the goddamned president down knew, their proper worth.