He replaced the phone on the cradle and swung his body round again, frowning slightly, as he searched for something on his desk... found it: a sheet of paper. ‘By the way, I want you to start proceedings for a compensation claim when you get back, for the riot damage.’
‘The Portakabin?’
‘“Additional Office Accommodation” – that is where the Hethel inventory was being relocated, isn’t that what you told me?’
‘Well there was very little actually in there yet. Most of it is still in transit.’
‘So we’ll have to pay for storage somewhere else. I’ve had finance here run the figures.’ He gave them a final check. ‘Ten million sound about right?’
Randall shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t know...’
‘I mean, I told them you were right there on the spot, but maybe, you know, in the hurly-burly of the moment’ – he had Randall’s eye now; held it – ‘you were nearly too close to form any sort of rational judgement.’
Randall took temporary refuge behind his coffee cup. Did he know? (Stylianides?) Was he guessing? Was this part of what he had seen in him the day they met in Kimmerly’s office – the man who had never shipped overseas looking into the eyes of the man who had shrunk from danger – that, never mind the bullshit detector (itself a piece of undetected bullshit), here was someone with something still to prove to himself? Or, worse, here was someone who at a crucial juncture could be relied on to capitulate again?
DeLorean selected a platinum ballpoint pen from the desk tidy, clicked the top, and made a bold blue tick on the page.
‘So, ten, then.’
*
First thing Randall did on arrival at his apartment was shower for half an hour trying to get the smell of the place out of his hair. He made a phone call, standing with the towel draped over his shoulder, then went to bed and slept until twenty after two the following afternoon. He got up and showered again, faster this time, and whistling. His appointment, subject of yesterday’s phone call, was for four o’clock. Nothing so formal as lunch or dinner, they had agreed. A civilised mid-afternoon cocktail. Crowne Plaza: Randall’s suggestion. Might as well lay more than one ghost.
With that in mind he stopped in too at the bar across the street for a shot of Polish vodka and might easily have persuaded himself of the wisdom of a second were it not for the television set in a corner of the room, across whose screen, at the precise moment he set down his empty glass, moved grim-faced people – thousands and thousands of them – following the coffin of a man who had starved himself to death to make the point that leaving a bomb in a furniture store was a political act.
He felt a secret shame. He was almost afraid that if he risked opening his mouth again his voice, inflected by his time there, would betray his complicity. And that was before he saw the banner off to one side. A DMC-12 smashing through a giant capital H: DeLorean Workers Against the H Blocks.
He entered the hotel lounge more assertively than he might otherwise have done. Seated at a table to the left of the door, Dan Stevens got to his feet hurriedly and a little more shakily perhaps than the first and last time Randall had met him at the Daily News. (Well, the man had been around since the days – a couple of thousand further away now than then – of Walter Chrysler.)
‘Randall.’ He indicated a seat on the other side of the table. ‘Please, sit.’
Randall did. The waiter was on him almost instantly. ‘Vodka martini,’ he answered before he was even asked, and Stevens nodded his approval – of the drink, the unhesitating way it was ordered, the combination of the two, who knew?
His own drink was something bourbon based. He centred it on the scalloped paper coaster. ‘It was good of you to make time to see me on your trip. Tell you the truth I wasn’t even sure you would call. I know we didn’t exactly get off on the right foot last time.’
‘I was probably a little hair-trigger that day.’
‘You had every right to be. You were taking a big step. I got to tell you, there are a lot of people in the industry who are surprised – a little upset some of them – that the factory has lasted this long.’ He lifted the glass, turned the coaster over, and went through the business of centring again. ‘John as ever is taking all the credit while saying he doesn’t want to take all the credit. So far as we can see, though, looking in, a lot of it is down to you.’
Randall tried to deflect the praise. ‘For the longest time I was used to people asking what it was I actually did,’ he said, to which Dan Stevens replied that sometimes the most important jobs were the hardest to explain.
Randall went to interject again. Dan Stevens held up his hand: hear me out here. ‘There has been a pretty high turnover at executive level, which is no more than was to be expected, working with John, but it can be destabilising. It could have – should have – been even more destabilising and because it wasn’t people start looking at who or what is keeping the ship steady, who has been there throughout... And we heard about what happened at the unveiling: quick thinking.’ He drank, ran his tongue over his teeth behind closed lips. ‘If that’s what you can do there in, let’s be honest, pretty hostile conditions, think what you could do here with all our expertise and experience behind you, and on twice the salary you are on at the moment.’
‘Twice?’
Stevens shrugged. ‘Three times. We will hook you up with our real estate people in Detroit, find a property out in Bloomfield Hills.’
The martini arrived, lemon rind bobbing like a kiss curl.
Stevens addressed his glass to it, but stopped short of drinking. ‘You have to remember, John is a gambler... Oh, not with his own money... His instinct is to keep raising the stakes – scares people off: he must have something. But sooner or later someone will call him on it, and then...’
‘A whole lot of people in Belfast will lose their jobs.’
‘Well, that’s true too, although John wouldn’t be alone in thinking of workers as chips.’
‘Chips!’
Stevens tilted his head a little to one side. He seemed almost embarrassed by the reaction.
‘I’ve got to say I didn’t have you pegged as the sentimental type. It’s the product that has to be protected, the brand. That goes, it creates a void and there’s no telling what will get sucked in. I wouldn’t want to be standing too close to the edge.’
Randall nodded. For all kinds of reasons it was time for him to put as much distance as possible between him and DeLorean Motor Cars Limited. He nodded again, more firmly.
Dan Stevens smiled and went to take a drink. He didn’t like what he saw in his glass, or what he didn’t see. ‘What do you say we have another of those?’
Randall made a show of looking at his watch. ‘Sure,’ he said.
*
Stevens returned to Detroit with the promise to ‘start the ball rolling’, though discreetly for now, and Randall a couple of days later travelled down the I-495 to the Quality Assurance Centre in Wilmington. The cars in the compound on Ferry Road, right on the edge of the Delaware River, were the first DMC-12s he had seen since leaving Belfast. He told himself that pang he felt was only natural: he had no quarrel with the cars themselves.
The guy who met him wore shorts with socks pulled up to just below his knees, which flexed as he stood before Randall talking, like a pair of sensate potatoes (where did that come from?) struggling to escape the neck of a sack. Randall was relieved when they started walking to the workshop – ‘Lead the way,’ he said, and the knees did – and he was able to relax his face, strained from the effort of not looking.
‘I’m not going to lie, it was pretty hard going the first couple of days,’ the guy said over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know how many times I had to step in to stop a fight breaking out. Mostly your guys accusing our guys of going out of their way looking for problems, taking a wheel off just to check it had been screwed on right kind of thing... It’s settled down a bit since then.’ He turned with his hand poised to open the workshop door. ‘D
on’t tell them I said this, but they are good workers.’
Good workers and, it appeared, genuinely pleased to see Randall walk in the workshop door, crowding round telling him this thing they had discovered about the alternator, this other thing about the door hydraulics. Even invited him out for a drink with them that night.
‘Probably not what you’re used to, like,’ said the one they called Washers, he of the winks of understanding at the airport. ‘You have been warned.’
‘I don’t know what you think I’m used to.’
A dive bar, a couple of blocks from Riverfront Market, beer by the pitcher, a stage at one end of the room on to which in due course a young woman in satin hot pants walked and without preamble pulled off her T-shirt to reveal shamrock nipple tassels. The law of supply and demand made barely covered flesh.
No one seemed to object to the failure to give a more rounded interpretation of northern Irishness (two of the women did pick up their purses and head for the door, but only, as they said, because there was a fella doing the same thing down the street, and no tassels) and when a tape recorder belatedly struck up ‘Danny Boy’, a group standing by the corner of the bar formed a circle and ignoring the now twirling shamrocks entirely sang along into one another’s faces, glasses raised and touching.
‘I needn’t ask if you have been enjoying yourself here,’ Randall said to the guy nearest him.
‘This? Sure it’s a bit of fun, isn’t it? But I have, aye, I’ve been enjoying it rightly. Be glad all the same to get back.’
‘Homesick?’
‘Not exactly. I’m not just saying this because you’re standing there, but I miss the work, you know, the cars constantly coming down the line at you – keeps you on your toes.’
There was a loud cheer from the front. The satin hot pants had come off now too. A pair of even smaller pants underneath, Slainte! across the behind, which was presented in a swift, toe-touching finale.
‘What about you?’ the worker said. ‘Will you not be sorry when you have to head back to Belfast again?’
Randall frowned. The man drew his head back. ‘Wait, you are coming back with us to Belfast, aren’t you?’
And the look in his eyes, it was as though he fully expected the answer to be no, because that was what life had taught him to expect, that just when things seemed as though they might actually be starting to go well something always happened to throw them into doubt.
Randall slipped out of that look by turning to the bar and ordering another pitcher. Pitchers all round, make that.
*
It was quite possible that he was still drunk the following afternoon when he rang Dan Stevens. Certainly the woman whom he had rung a couple of minutes before thinking he was ringing Dan Stevens told him that he was, or at least she did the second time. ‘Read the goddamn number, or get someone sober to read it for you.’
(It was the third three, for some reason he kept seeing it as an eight.)
Stevens cautioned him not to be too rash. It would be understandable if he was feeling a little conflicted. Hell, if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be the man Dan took him to be. So by all means vent some spleen – let rip, in fact – but promise Dan this, that he would call back in a couple of hours when he was...
‘I am fine just as I am.’ He held up a random selection of fingers in front of his face. Three, not six, or eight. He thought maybe he let a laugh escape, much to Dan Stevens’ audible displeasure.
‘I am bound to tell you you are doing a very foolish thing. Some doors you will find do not open twice.’
‘I appreciate your concern, Dan, really, but what can I tell you? Turns out I am the sentimental type after all.’
He was betting his stash on the same square as DeLorean.
*
There were still army-issue hoses in the corridors of the administration building when he got back to Dunmurry, sand-filled fire buckets stationed outside the doors, one of which now bore the name Bill Haddad.
Whatever had happened to change his mind in the days since Randall had spoken to him in his office (the funeral pictures might not have been incidental), DeLorean had decided that the image of the factory at least was under threat and accordingly had dispatched Haddad from New York to oversee PR. Randall had not seen him since the un-festive Christmas drinks in the Waldorf Astoria, in the course of which Haddad had repeatedly pulled rank, dropping names (mostly Kennedys) and boasting of his in-depth knowledge of the Northern Irish political scene. So obviously he reacted to actually being there as though it was some sort of punishment.
Or that at least was the impression he gave at the meeting that Don, at Randall’s suggestion, called between management and unions to try to minimise the impact on production of any future hunger strike deaths.
‘Let’s not beat about the bush here,’ said Randall, ‘how many more do we think are going to die?’
Haddad pushed his glasses up on to his forehead and with the same three fingertips massaged the bridge of his nose. Has it come to this?
One of the union guys, taking his lead, threw his pen down on the table. ‘I object,’ he said.
‘And I am only trying to be rational. The worst thing we can do is to leave ourselves unprepared.’
‘Well...’ Anto broke the silence that ensued, ‘there’s the three boys who started in March... Hughes, McCreesh and O’Hara... And then there’s Joe McDonnell who went on’ – he cleared his throat of nothing – ‘who went on as soon as Bobby died, and presumably if any of the other three die there will be boys go on after them.’
Randall had been writing all this down. He stopped a second after Anto did. ‘Do you really think Thatcher will let it go that far?’
The guy who had thrown his pen down grunted; at least he was still in the room.
‘Nobody thought she would let it go this far,’ Anto said. ‘And I can’t see the hunger strikers backing down now. They’re inside. It’s like its own wee world, prison. Their loyalty is to each other before their families or even the IRA.’
The other men nodded.
Randall readied his pen again. ‘So, what are we saying... Four? Five?’
Anto shuddered. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’
‘But we have to think about it.’
‘Maybe five, but after that... wiser heads would have to prevail, wouldn’t they?’
‘Let’s say six,’ Randall said. ‘Worst-case scenario. And if we were to allow half a day per funeral, all those who wanted to attend, that is...?’
The men looked at one another. Anto again spoke into their silence.
‘They’ll not all be in Belfast. Hughes and O’Hara are both Derry, McCreesh is South Armagh. The like of those I think we could keep down to a symbolic walkout – two minutes’ silence on the road in front of the gate sort of thing.’
Randall nodded. Finally they were getting somewhere. ‘I am sure we can work around that. Just one thing... You see that banner they’ve been carrying – the car smashing through the big H Block? Do you think they could lose that?’
For the first time since they had walked in the door the union men smiled. The guy who had thrown down his pen was slipping it now into his inside pocket. ‘What if they just kept it out of sight of the cameras?’
Haddad sat forward. ‘Point of order, that is a PR matter.’
‘Well what do you want them to do with the banner?’
He gathered up his things and headed for the boardroom door.
‘Bill,’ Randall called after him. ‘They’re waiting for an answer here.’
‘Keep them out of sight of the cameras, of course,’ he said angrily.
*
One of those who joined the strike after the first few deaths had been a member of the IRA gang (they would have preferred ‘unit’) that bombed the Conway Hotel. The car they were making their escape in had broken down before it was even out of the driveway. That was when, as the security guards at the Conway had told it to Randall, they burst into the off-d
uty police officer’s house, demanding the keys of his car. (What were the chances of that, indeed?) This particular guy had managed to get away when the shooting started, but only a few months later he was out again, right in the heart of downtown, on his way to plant a bomb, again, when who should appear but the cops – again – and give chase to the van he was driving. He ditched that and tried to hijack another car, but the engine at the crucial moment cut out on him.
It could happen to anyone with any car. Ask Johnny Carson.
On such small mechanical details did fortunes sometimes turn.
He died after seventy-three days without food. Twenty-five, he was.
A waste, whatever way you cut it.
14
The one thousandth car came down the assembly line in the second week of June. Men and women were kissing it before they passed it on to the next section. By the time it got to their end of the shop there were balloons attached to the wing mirrors, streamers hanging off the rear bumpers.
‘Didn’t we do well?’ said TC, an unconvincing Bruce Forsyth, barely even in the same language group, said Anto.
Like the nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine that had come down the line before it, the car, its streamers and balloons catching in the wind, was driven straight out of the assembly shop doors and into EVP. ‘Fine-tuning’ was the term used now, to minimise the work required when the cars were taken off the ships at the other end, because, despite the weeks of retraining, work ‘Stateside’ was still needed, although listening to some of the stories the men brought back from over there Liz didn’t wonder at it. The ones the women brought back were even more lurid. (They all of them, women and men, sported badges on their overalls, given to them by their American co-workers: Honorary POG. Look like a Pig Work like a Dog, it stood for. There were no letters for Party like a Wild Animal.) If you were to believe even the half of it they must only have gone into the workshop in the mornings for respite from the nights.
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