Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  Randall let out a long, slow breath and hauled himself to his feet.

  So that was that, whatever it was.

  *

  She had said his name the night before. Robert had stopped dead, mid thrust, pushing her back off him, holding her at trembling arms’ length. ‘What?’ His chest was heaving, hers too: hers even more so. God, she had been so nearly there, so caught up she didn’t know she didn’t know what she was saying. But the echo of it reverberated now. She moved his palms from her shoulders on to her breasts, pressing down hard. ‘Hands all over me,’ she slurred the words. It wasn’t all put on. She raised her hips an inch, raised them another, took him by the right wrist, fitted his fingers into the gap she had made, as much on him as in her. ‘I want your hands’ – guiding the left one the length of her back, shoulder blades to tailbone, on down from there – ‘all over me.’

  He started again – couldn’t help himself – took back the inches she had temporarily denied him, strained then to find one... inch... more. It was over in seconds. Her before him.

  That’s how close she was.

  And that’s how close she was.

  She couldn’t risk anything like that happening again.

  The Frisbee, checking her stride, nearly broke her resolve, but she put her head down, held tight to the strap of her shoulder bag and ploughed on.

  *

  Randall awoke two nights later from a nightmare of scudding over jungle scrub taking fire on all sides to find that it was no dream at all – he was actually there or it was actually here – the clatter of the rotors, the sky’s untimely orange, the fizzes, the pops, the dreadful bangs. He rolled off the bed on to the floor, and kept rolling, looking for a place to hide.

  *

  What Liz heard first was bin lids. She swung her legs out of bed and crossed the floor barefoot to the window, opening it a fraction, as quietly as the latch would allow, which was not quite quietly enough.

  Robert sat up, knocking over the bedside lamp as he tried to switch it on... righting it again at the second attempt.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Listen.’

  ‘What?’

  Distant, distant.

  ‘Listen. Bin lids. He must be dead.’

  Robert reached for the lamp again, still squinting against its light. ‘If he is it’s nobody’s fault but his own.’

  ‘I know, but...’

  ‘But what?’ He rolled over. ‘You have your work in the morning. I have mine. Close that window and get back into bed.’

  She listened a few moments longer then did as he said.

  *

  When he had reoriented himself sufficiently to understand that he was not under direct attack Randall ventured to wriggle out of the corner into which he had rolled and raise the window blind an inch or two with the backs of his fingers. All was confusion: overlit, overloud confusion, much of it concentrated on a point about five hundred yards to his right, beyond the trees, corresponding to the Twinbrook entrance to the factory.

  Six feet to his left, at the other end of the window, the telephone sat on a glass table. He felt along the join of the baseboard and the carpet for the cable, yanked, bringing the handset crashing to the floor then reeled it in, dial tone buzzing angrily.

  It took ten minutes and four numbers – the last passed on to him by the housekeeper in Pauma Valley – to get through, to another house – ranch, Randall supposed – where a party was in full swing; a further ten while DeLorean was located, the phone so far as Randall could tell brought to him, elbowed through a dozen bellowed conversations and sudden bursts of laughter, rather than he to it.

  ‘Edmund?’ he said, and you just knew he had a finger in one ear.

  ‘I’m sorry to be phoning, it’s all gone crazy here.’ Randall pushed the receiver under the blind, held it to the window for half a minute. The glass throbbed. ‘Did you hear that?’

  ‘It’s hard for me to hear anything with this music,’ DeLorean said, or shouted. Randall was getting it too. Yvonne Elliman, if he was not mistaken, singing as though she was standing by DeLorean’s side.

  ‘Hold on, hold on, let me see,’ he said. A door slid open in California, slid shut, and Yvonne was gone, the backing track of voices, ice against glasses, pool water being efficiently displaced, was gone. ‘There.’

  Randall did not bother a second time with the phone to the window. ‘I’m guessing two, three hundred people, right in front of the gates. It’s to do with that hunger strike,’ he said. ‘Has to be.’

  He thought for a moment or two that DeLorean still hadn’t heard properly, so unhurried was his reply.

  ‘You know that’s why I have you there, right? I figured if anyone knew what to do in a situation like this it would be you. This is your moment, Edmund. You call it.’

  These last words were barely out of his mouth when he spoke again, over his shoulder as it sounded, and as though taken entirely by surprise. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’ Then ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘is that...?’ The rest of the sentence was smothered by his hand on the mouthpiece. When he removed it again – a matter of seconds – the pitch of his voice had changed.

  ‘I’m back in New York tomorrow,’ he said, chords stretched tight, something more immediate he did not want to betray: whoever, or whatever, it was he had seen trumped for a moment the spectacle Randall was trying to describe. ‘We’ll talk then.’

  Randall sat a full minute after DeLorean had (abruptly) hung up, the phone still in his hand, then he pressed a finger on one of the black buttons, summoning the dial tone back, and called the only Belfast number he knew by heart.

  ‘I was wondering when I might hear from you,’ Jennings said, as though it had been an overdue social call he was taking.

  ‘We need help,’ Randall said.

  ‘I have a feeling you are not the only ones,’ said Jennings. The help, however, arrived at the factory within the quarter hour, a mere minute or two after Randall himself, which, given, as Jennings implied, how much else was under threat that night in Belfast, was beyond better than might have been expected, though there again few places under threat that night in Belfast had quite as many millions of government money tied up in them.

  The captain to whom Randall opened the Seymour Hill gate could not have been more than twenty-one, a voice as clipped as the prince whose soon-to-be bride was hogging the headlines everywhere in Britain but here. Randall had met his West Point cousins, young men passing through the military on their way to high office. He shook Randall’s hand, more gentleman than officer, then waved through four armoured cars, from the rear of which a platoon of soldiers dismounted. These were the men whose lives the DMC-12 was supposed to be going to save. They walked beside their vehicles in the lee of the body-press shop, trying to come at the Twinbrook gate unseen.

  Randall went a few feet ahead of them, rounding the corner of the building nearest the gate on his own. The drive was a mess of rocks and broken glass though it was not quite the catastrophic vision Randall had imagined when he inched up the blind in his room. He quickly realised that there was not a group of people gathered outside, but two groups: the one closest to the gate itself, with their backs to him, trying to hold the other, much larger group at bay.

  Seeing Randall come round the corner – or sensing somehow what was coming round the corner behind him – this group found new and more aggressive voice. They surged forward, pressing the small group back, causing the gate and the fence flanking it to shake. A man looked over his shoulder – red-faced even at that distance and in that light – lips stretched tight with the strain of trying to hold the line.

  ‘Are there Brits in there?’ he called to Randall.

  ‘Brits?’

  ‘Don’t fucking give me that Dumb Yank crack. These ones are shouting they seen soldiers. Did they?’

  Randall glanced behind him, which was all the proof the man needed. ‘They did see them! They’re fucking in there.’

  ‘They�
�re protecting the factory.’

  The red-faced man’s face got redder, closer to the fence between them. Randall recognised him now. One of the storemen. An index finger poked through. ‘We’re protecting the factory, telling these young bucks it’s supposed to be neutral. Do you not understand? It’s in more fucking danger with the Brits in there.’

  Then suddenly from somewhere further back there was a shout – a cheer almost – and Randall looked up to see a black object arc overhead, trailing flame.

  Instinctively he went into a deep crouch, which only delighted the shouters and cheerers and missile-throwers more. The man at the gate turned back to face them. ‘Which one of you wee fuckers threw that?’

  Randall, stumbling as he tried to get to his feet again could only watch, prone, as the missile – the petrol bomb – struck the flat top of a Portakabin and spread its flames all over the tarred surface.

  A voice that must have been the captain’s, though it sounded shriller, issued an order and a soldier broke cover, dragging a hose, which pulsed a couple of times, convulsed, and finally shot out water in a silvery crescent that seemed only incidentally to take in the Portakabin and its flaming roof.

  Even the men who had been holding the young bucks back bellowed at this. More rocks came over the fence, more bottles. Here now was the cataclysm. Another three soldiers emerged from the shadows, short wide-barrelled guns already braced against their shoulders.

  Someone had a hold of Randall by the collar and was trailing him back towards the armoured cars.

  The captain had a megaphone now. ‘Move away from the gates.’ Royal command. ‘My men are under orders to fire baton rounds at identified targets only. Please, move away from the gates.’

  He handed the megaphone to a soldier twenty years his senior and several ranks his junior.

  ‘You did the right thing requesting assistance,’ he told Randall. ‘Those men would not have been able to hold back that crowd another ten minutes on their own.’

  The rocks and bottles continued to come over. The trio of soldiers continued to move their guns across the face of the crowd, trigger fingers twitching. The Portakabin roof, despite the water that was now, with two more soldiers helping hold the hose, being properly trained on it, continued to burn.

  Stylianides was there, shouting, ‘I am supposed to be head of security.’

  The captain laid a hand on Randall’s shoulder. ‘Try not to worry, everyone freezes their first time.’

  Randall, his first time, he could not find tongue to tell the captain, did not freeze, he fled, somewhere very far inside. His helicopter had made an unscheduled landing in a clearing in torrential rain. Aftermath of an ambush. The radio operator whose call had brought them was sitting splayed-legged on the ground bleeding through the dressing on his stomach, alternating between crying and laughing. A medic was dressing a head wound nearby, the body to which the head was attached already to Randall’s eyes inert. The definitively dead were under capes, seven of them. Randall’s commander was arguing with a lieutenant, pointing at the corpses – ‘We’re supplies, we can take the wounded, but we can’t take these guys’ – and then from the edge of the clearing as the lieutenant ducked back out of the range of the rotors there came a bright light – that was all Randall could remember of it – a bright light getting brighter, brighter... blinding.

  Then it was one week later and he was under a bed in a hospital in Saigon. A nurse was looking in at him through a gap in the blanket draped over the frame to make a canopy. She smiled. ‘Are you ready to come out now?’

  His commander had wanted to have him put on a charge, refusal to obey an order, specifically the order to get out of the chopper when the mortar hit the clearing and the lieutenant disappeared along with the wounded radio operator and the medic winding bandages round a dead or dying comrade, who disappeared too, his head at any rate.

  Dissociative fugue, was the diagnosis of the doctor who had, all unknown to Randall, been monitoring him since he had been brought in and sought sanctuary on the floor. He literally had not been himself from that moment to this.

  ‘Fuck fugue,’ was the commander’s reaction relayed to Randall when he was transferred at length to another supplies unit. ‘I have been in this army long enough to know cowardice when I see it.’

  *

  Liz heard it on the shop floor a couple of days later that, contrary to what he had told her the last time they talked, Randall had in fact gone to the States with the volunteers for retraining. Washers had phoned his Big Mate before he had even left Aldergrove for the connecting flight. Your man Randall, he told him, had weighed in while they were queuing at the check-in desk taking the piss out of each other’s passport photos: Was that before you’d the operation...? Did the cops not ask you for their photo back...? Anything to take their minds off the fact that they were to be locked in a metal cylinder for seven hours six miles above the Atlantic Ocean.

  ‘First class, of course. Gave us some crap about it being the only seat he could get by the time he booked. I tell you, I said to him, if it was me and I could I would do it every time and wouldn’t give a monkey’s what anybody thought of me.’

  ‘Imagine going away and missing all the fun and games here,’ Big Mate said, winding up his report.

  The fun and games had kept the factory closed the whole of the first day after Bobby Sands died. Practically the only buses moving in town were being pushed by the wee lads who had hijacked them, under instruction from the not so wee lads standing in the wings, to reinforce their barricades.

  Even now on the second day only about one worker in three had been able to plot a way through the mayhem, or had attempted to.

  Robert had astonished Liz this morning by proposing that he drive her right up to the gate. ‘It isn’t right, other people dictating to you when you can and can’t work,’ he said and she resisted the temptation to point out how rich that was coming from him, because she was genuinely grateful – touched – and then too maybe some of his reservations about her being here had not been entirely unjustified. Forget for the moment those Sunday mornings in Botanic Gardens (and what did they amount to really?): imagine she had told Robert that she did want to put her name down for the States; imagine she had insisted on it – as she had insisted, despite him, on applying for the job in the first place, on going for the interview and accepting the letter of offer; imagine she had wound up in a hotel somewhere over there with Edmund Randall?

  ‘Fun and games,’ Washers’ Big Mate said again as he walked off, slapping his Sun against his thigh. ‘Fun and games.’

  13

  Randall had left the DeLorean workers at the airport, one group waiting for an onward flight to California, and the Santa Ana QAC, the rest for the buses that would take them to the centre in Wilmington, and carried on by himself to Manhattan. (One of the Wilmington-bound workers told him with many accompanying winks he didn’t blame him not taking the bus with them. ‘But I’m going in a different direction,’ Randall said and the man winked again. ‘You don’t have to explain to me.’) Rain was falling when he got out of the car in front of 280 Park Avenue. A doorman ran down the steps to the sidewalk opening an umbrella. ‘Came right out of nowhere,’ he said and sure enough in the time it took Randall to cross the lobby to the elevators and the express car to deposit him on the forty-third floor the skies had cleared so much you could have been forgiven for thinking it had never rained at all.

  Carole had been taking instruction from Marion Gibson when he entered, head bowed over her desk, and was barely able to get out from behind it in time to announce him.

  ‘Edmund!’ DeLorean looked up, took off the spectacles perched on the end of his nose and gave Randall his broadest smile. ‘The way the news was reporting it I’m surprised there were flights leaving there at all. Luckily I have been in the news often enough myself to know not to believe everything I see or hear.’

  ‘We had to get the army in.’ (He could hardly get the sentence out.)
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  ‘Isn’t it good to know we have support?’ DeLorean was round in front of his desk now, buttocks and feet firmly planted.

  Randall was pacing, right to left, left to right. ‘And there’s still the funeral to come. There could be more trouble at that. A whole lot more.’

  DeLorean spread his hands. He was a giant bird against the window of sky at his back, riding the currents.

  ‘Think back to the very beginning of all this, Edmund – think of the hurdles we had to overcome. And look where we are now.’

  He did not, Randall knew, mean the office per se, but that inevitably was what he found himself focusing on, the apricot carpet, the bust of Lincoln, the life-size photo study of father and son, the telescope through which in rare idle moments, DeLorean liked to look down on to the street below.

  ‘Whatever the next few days throw up we will get through that too. I feel it in here.’ He gripped his shirt front, held it till his knuckles whitened. Then let go and pushed himself up off the desk. ‘Now, Carole, can we get some coffee for this man?’

  The coffee arrived a few minutes later in a pot with an exaggeratedly belled base. DeLorean insisted that Randall take the first cup. ‘They are lovely people, the Brits, but they don’t know the first thing about making coffee.’

  And Randall thought as he sipped (thought through the recognition that it was true about the coffee) how far indeed he had travelled since he last heard that particular B word used.

  DeLorean toasted with this cup: ‘The Brits’ – smiling – ‘and the Irish.’

  The phone rang in the outer office. Carole was already halfway there. She answered it on the third ring. A few seconds later the phone on the desk at DeLorean’s back rang too.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said and leaned across to answer, one long leg rising in counterweight. ‘Hey... Yes, it was swell running into you.’ Randall was struck by the contrast between the ‘swell’ and the strain in the voice. Maybe he had reached back further than he had anticipated to pick up the phone. ‘Of course, next time I’m at the ranch... Well, that’s good of Hetrick to offer, but it’s really no bother... No, no, I will, I’ll keep it in mind.’