Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  ‘I’d love to help,’ she said, ‘but we’re having people over later.’

  ‘I know: Easter.’

  ‘Have you no plans yourself?’

  ‘Me?’ His voice went up as though the very thought of it was absurd. ‘No.’

  It occurred to her that she didn’t know a single thing worth the knowing about his life outside the factory, other than that he was wearing out his library card. (The Jungle was his latest book. Something told her there were no talking animals in it.) Not that he could have known a big lot about her life, having never bothered his head to ask.

  When the last of the lorries with the cars on them had gone she raced home and got the roast on – silverside – with onions cooked in the juices until they were practically caramelised. Robert’s mother and father came, along with his unmarried brother Hal-God-Love-Him (it was said so often it sounded like part of his name: there was something not quite right with Hal... God love him) and an aunt of Liz’s who had just lost her husband of forty-seven years. Everyone commented on the television. Robert showed them how you used the remote control, ran through a random Ceefax selection: TV listings, share prices, a recipe for hollandaise, the weather in Kuala Lumpur.

  Didn’t say a word about how they had come by the set, which suited Liz fine: it had been fully incorporated into the household – it and the job that had put the money in her purse to give to Gilmore’s.

  When the last guest had gone – the aunt, reluctantly... sure, what was there for her at home now? – and the boys had disappeared up to their room with what remained of their eggs (what age were you supposed to stop buying them?), Robert switched the TV on again to the big film: Murder on the Orient Express.

  About twenty minutes in he turned to her.

  ‘Was it those onions?’

  ‘Was what those onions?’

  ‘You’re squirming in your seat there like I don’t know what. I thought maybe you had a touch of indigestion.’

  She blushed. What it was, she realised, she had been miles away, down at the docks with Anto and the rest, washing cars. She tried to focus on the film. Richard Widmark was showing Albert Finney the small silver gun he slept with under his pillow. His life had been threatened, he said: his secretary could show Finney two letters he had on file.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Liz said.

  Robert looked at her looking at the film a moment longer. ‘Well I’d hate to see you if it was something.’

  *

  Randall stood in a canopy of sodium light watching, heart in mouth, as the crew gathered in the ropes and the ship gradually detached itself from the dockside. The cargo doors did not burst open as he had feared, in some grotesque Easter parody, they might. The cars remained, gleaming, in the hold.

  The channel was broad and straight from the port into Belfast Lough and the open sea beyond. On the far side of the water from him was the shipyard. Those two enormous yellow cranes, stamped with H & W, Harland and Wolff – gateways they looked like, triumphal arches: Forget the City Hall, forget the factory chimneys and the parades of shops, this is where the real power resides.

  Resided.

  How many decades had it taken for shipbuilding to be established here, DeLorean had asked him, for Belfast to be able to claim this as the biggest, most productive yard in the world?

  Exactly.

  Little more than two and a half years it had taken to get these cars out. Not eighteen months, sure, but even so, two and a half years where no cars had ever been made before.

  Don Lander came and joined him in the light, watched a while in silence. ‘Of course,’ he said at last, ‘the best thing that could happen is for that boat to sink halfway across, assuming the crew got picked up, of course. That way we’d get to say we got the cars out on time and no one would ever know at what cost.’

  Randall glanced at him. Don was looking dead ahead, inscrutable.

  *

  The word Liz heard was ‘dogs’. Washers – as he had been known since he saved the day, with the world’s press waiting, by calling for a bucket of them – carried the word with him from the trim line where he had heard it spoken – spat – by his Big Mate, who had got it straight from a fella he knew on the boat. The only difference being, said the Yanks who had been tasked with unloading them on to the docks, actual dogs in that kind of shape would have been put down. Instead these dogs of cars were being sent straight to a Quality Assurance Centre to be taken apart and put back together at two thousand dollars a pop.

  ‘Cheeky gets,’ TC said.

  ‘Come on, you’re the one wants to be a supervisor,’ said Anto. ‘Don’t tell me it wasn’t obvious to you.’

  ‘Well, maybe the odd one was a bit iffy, but the whole lot...? Cheeky fucking gets.’

  Washers’ Big Mate on the trim line also brought the word that the management was going to be looking for volunteers to go over to the States and find out how to do it the American way.

  ‘There you go, TC,’ Liz chipped in. ‘Stick your name down and tell them when you get there that the next lot of cars will be better, and the next lot after that. And see by next year, they’ll be sending people from there over to us to find out how we do it.’

  TC sucked saliva through his teeth. ‘I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.’

  ‘Not even for a wee holiday?’ Washers said and anticipated his next sentence with an expansive hand gesture. ‘Broaden your horizons, sort of thing?’

  ‘I’ve been there once already,’ TC said, mainly to his toolbag: lug wrench again. ‘Got sent when I was at school with this kid from the other side, you know, see if we could stop fighting.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘Pittsburgh. What a hole. The only thing we had in common, him and me, was that we couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of it and back home.’

  ‘I nearly moved there once myself,’ Anto said.

  Lord, thought Liz, they were coming like buses now, the revelations.

  ‘Pittsburgh?’

  ‘Schenectady, upstate New York. Had a job all lined up.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I don’t even remember now, cement factory or something. Tell you the truth I couldn’t have cared less about the job, even then, it was the name I loved.’ He got full value out of it: ‘Sche-nec-ta-dy.’

  ‘So why didn’t you go?’ Liz asked.

  ‘The usual reason, I met a girl...’

  ‘Don’t sound so miserable about it.’

  ‘...the girl met somebody else...’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘...by which time things had kicked off here and the notion went off me.’

  ‘Some would say that things kicking off here was all the more reason for going.’

  ‘Yeah, but it would have looked like I was running away.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t want to look like you were running away, even if it killed you?’

  ‘What can I say?’ Anto shrugged. ‘If I had another brain it would be lonely.’

  Washers cracked the knuckles of each hand in turn against the opposite palm: time he was getting back to work taming skins. He checked back. ‘What about that other fella, TC – the one you went to Pittsburgh with. You ever see him again after you got back?’

  TC picked up a seat. ‘I saw him all right, a couple of years ago, in the paper. Got life for dropping a breezeblock on a fella’s head out the back of some club. Thought he was the “wrong sort”.’

  He had the tact not to say what sort that was.

  ‘Jesus wept,’ said Washers under his breath.

  ‘Yeah.’ TC dumped the seat into the car, eyes averted from Liz’s. ‘Jesus wept.’

  *

  Johnny Carson got his car. Johnny. Carson. Got. His. Car. A week more and he had been going to tell them he would hold on now for the hearse model: at least he would be guaranteed one ride in it.

  It broke down the very first time he took it out. Pressure regulator. The dealer had to rush a spare out to him and fix it at the side of the highway. Johnny seemed genuine
ly not to care, any more than the two hundred and ninety-nine people below him on the waiting list cared about, or even registered, the difference between the $12000 they had been quoted way back when and the $25000 they ended up paying. Most of them anyway would have been prepared to pay a premium for the kudos of driving one of the first three hundred to come off the boat. ‘Say, is that what I think it is...?’

  As Johnny said, after sitting out there on the highway waiting for the repairman, the damn thing was getting more looks than he was.

  It was not only more expensive than originally intended but, thanks to the Lotus makeover, heavier too, slower off the mark (they had had to down tune the engine to 130 horsepower to meet emissions standards), and when it did get going it was able to deliver just nineteen miles a gallon, ten short of projections and not far above federal minimum standards. The doors now and then, and despite the offices of the Quality Assurance Centres, had an alarming habit of jamming open, or (more alarming still) shut. Randall’s erstwhile colleagues in the auto pages and the specialist trade press – the same people who had fallen over themselves to praise the ’73 Vega – reported all this with an amount of malicious glee, adding for good measure that the bodywork showed up the pawprints of every one of those ‘slack-jawed gawpers’.

  Yet withal it was thing of beauty. (A thing of beauty – critics note – with anti-pawprint shampoo in the glove box.) No one but no one could fault it on that.

  DeLorean telephoned at four in the morning, forgetting for once in his urgency the hours between them. For the first half a minute, during which DeLorean could get no further than ‘Edmund’ – ten, maybe fifteen times – Randall thought he might be high, but that wasn’t what it was at all. He had driven – he got the words out at last – driven his own DMC-12 out from the ranch that afternoon, deep into the desert beyond Palm Springs. He must have sat for two hours with just the driver-side door open watching the sun’s declension, from ragged white hole to blood red disc, played out on the hood.

  ‘I’m not a man for hearing voices, Edmund, but I swear something spoke to me out there: “Don’t rest on this. Keep going... Keep going.” Does that sound crazy?’

  Randall told him he had had enough testimony from good and perfectly sane army buddies – one who had turned to answer a question (there was no one behind him who could have asked it) a split second before a bullet passed by right where his head would have been – not to discount anything.

  Later there would be stories – most of them put about by DeLorean himself – that he was in fact no stranger to supernatural interventions of this kind, that the palm-reader who had conjured up 21 January as the day when the first car would come off the line had been guiding his every decision since he turned his back on Puerto Rico, that much of what he was still to do – doubling production, floating on the stock market – was at her prompting too, or at the prompting of whoever spoke through her, palms being the least of her psychic talents.

  Randall never bought it, any more than he bought the conversion to Christianity that caused DeLorean to confess it. Every time the subject came up he thought back to that early-morning call, DeLorean’s embarrassment almost at what he thought he had heard out there in the Californian desert.

  Anyone who had been receiving messages from a 55th Street medium for the previous however many years could have taken something like that, you would have thought, in his long-legged stride.

  12

  Up to now the money had all been flowing in one direction: out. From here on, though, it would start to flow back in again. The overheads too, now that they were in full production, would come down dramatically. The Hethel presence, for a start, could be scaled back. No need, with the initial research and development phase over, for a separate DMCL office onsite. Randall travelled across to Norfolk to oversee the winding-up of operations. Chapman apologised that the helicopter was otherwise engaged, and sent a car instead to meet him off the train up from London at Wymondham, a place that took half as long again to spell as it did to pronounce, lodging him in a wing of the hall (my God, the hall) with a view from his lead-paned window of a nine-hundred-year-old church.

  DeLorean was not wrong about the Brits.

  Chapman himself could only spare a few minutes the afternoon of Randall’s arrival. It was the Grand Prix season, he had just got back from Buenos Aires, where Elio de Angelis had – to Chapman’s evident disgust – finished ‘only’ sixth, and had another three races coming up in quick succession (three opportunities for de Angelis to make amends): San Marino, Belgium and Monaco.

  Randall had got the feeling on the previous occasions he had met him that Chapman always had at least one eye out for someone more important approaching. Meeting him here, however, on his home ground, with no one else around, Randall realised that importance was not relative to situation: even for a few minutes he was never going to command Chapman’s full attention. Even as he was saying hello, shaking hands, Chapman was already looking beyond.

  Indeed, though he thought at first it was just another facet of that famous English reserve, the longer Randall was there, the more polite hands that were extended, the greater was his sense that there was a distinct coolness towards him, or rather the car that he represented, as though it and he were eating up time that could be better spent handcrafting Esprits and Elans.

  As for the office equipment whose repatriation he was here to effect, Randall had no idea where it was all going to go. The Dunmurry offices were full to overflowing as it was: Portakabin for now was all he could think. There were still a couple behind the body shop, left over from plant’s construction.

  He had toyed with the notion of driving across to Norwich by himself to finalise the arrangements with the shipping company, take a detour through a few of those villages in which the countryside abounded. At least in this part of English-speaking Europe he was unlikely to encounter soldiers in hedges or discover on arrival at his destination that one entire sector (the one, wouldn’t you know, where he had been intending to park) had been evacuated because of a telephoned coded warning. When the time came, though, he found a car waiting for him at the door, a driver already at the wheel.

  It had since his earliest DeLorean days been part of the package, but it had got to the point here where he half expected a Lotus man to be waiting to walk down the corridor with him when he stepped out of his room at night to go to the bathroom. He had heard of things like that happening to people on trips behind the Iron Curtain, only it wasn’t service they called it, it was surveillance. Not that he was complaining by the end of that day, quite the reverse: without the driver to call on for help he doubted he would have understood a word that the guy in the shipping office was saying. As accents went it was at the atonal end of the sing-song spectrum.

  Still, when he had returned to Ketteringham Hall later that afternoon and packed his bag and nodded one last time to the driver holding the car door for him (no sign at all of Chapman), he was not exactly heartbroken to be leaving.

  The following Sunday was as beautiful a spring day – as beautiful a day period – as Randall had seen in all his time in Belfast. When he arrived in the Botanic Gardens mid-morning, the grass between the paths was already colonised by students from the university next door, books open before them, some of which were even being read.

  A quarter of an hour after he sat down, Liz dropped into the seat beside him, the briefest of smiles to acknowledge that she had seen him, hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she scanned the student faces, or perhaps, it only occurred to him afterwards, shielding her face from any return gaze.

  Up to now they had met in public, but without much in the way of the public to witness it.

  Randall had spent the evening before reading over lists of names. ‘I see no one from your section has put themselves forward for the retraining programme,’ he said in lieu of a hello of his own.

  Her mouth side-on looked lipless. ‘It appears America holds bad memories for some of them.’
>
  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Taking on the unspecified sins of an entire nation. ‘What about you?’

  She turned to face him, her eyes as narrowed almost as her mouth, though the sun was at her back.

  ‘I’m not going, if that’s what is bothering you,’ he said, because something evidently was. ‘I just thought maybe if you were thinking in the future of advancement...’

  Liz shook her head. ‘You still don’t get it, do you, the way things work in this country? Men earn more than their women, that’s the deal. It was enough for my husband to swallow me getting a job at all, never mind bringing home more than he was. I can just imagine how he would react to me “advancing”, and as for me waltzing in and telling him I was taking off to the States for a couple of weeks on my own...’

  ‘Hardly on your own.’

  ‘Do you seriously think that makes it better?’ She stood up suddenly. He was reminded of the very first time they met here, all those months of Sundays ago: same raincoat, despite the improvement in the weather, same belt, which she tugged on, hard, before offering him her hand. He didn’t know whether to laugh or not, but in the end followed her lead: not. He put his hand in hers (a vein in her wrist pulsed). She shook it once.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  ‘Wait a second, you’re not telling me...’

  ‘I’m telling you we’ll not do this again.’

  He felt an odd sense of relief. He had thought at first she meant goodbye to the job and everything.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do say so.’

  He went to get up.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  He sat back, spreading his arms as wide as they would go along the top of the bench: look at me not getting up. He watched her walk along the path in the direction of the river, take a quick step back to avoid an errant Frisbee travelling between students who had given up all pretence of study, then carry on, shoulders even from a distance set, round a bend and out of sight.