Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  Sure, some people who worked for him asked questions. That was their prerogative: more than their prerogative, it was their duty as DeLorean Motor Company employees. Frankly, the more of these sorts of memos there were in circulation the better. We all liked to think we were going to be around for ever – and he sure as heck wasn’t planning on going anywhere any time soon – but ‘All Things Must Pass’, wasn’t that what they said? At least he could be sure he would be leaving some pretty well informed people behind. If anybody was looking for some DeLorean gold, meanwhile, they could enter the raffle that American Express was planning on running for two specially commissioned DMC-12s: not painted, but 24-carat-electroplated.

  The interviewer, hands dangling between his knees now, cross-examination over, segued into a question about Cristina Ferrare. Actually, a volley of them: She was back on the small screen in the US, was that right? The Love Boat? Was he a fan of the series? How much influence did he have on her choice of roles?

  ‘With respect, you obviously don’t know Cristina if you think I could influence the parts she chooses. Of course’ – a smile as he said this – ‘I had a few ideas for improvements to the boat, although’ – the smile turned rueful – ‘I thought maybe I ought to confine my observations to the engine-room and the exterior...’

  Even the cameraman could be heard to chuckle.

  A week and a day after it broke Winterton’s story was officially a non-story. Police on both sides of the Irish Sea let it be known that they would not be making any further enquiries.

  All the same the announcement of the stock-market flotation was put on hold for a few weeks to allow the scandal that wasn’t (because despite the retractions there were always those who were slow to pick up on the ‘wasn’t’) time to fade from the share-buying public’s consciousness.

  You only got one chance with something like this. Even a dollar below the optimum could jeopardise the entire issue.

  Marion, meanwhile, to no one’s great surprise, did not return to New York. Haddad too was gone, though in the opposite direction, his name removed from the door in Dunmurry as quickly as it had gone up, and letting it be known that his departure at any rate would not be quiet. He had served the goddammed Kennedys, the UN, it would take a hell of a lot more than a moral pygmy like John DeLorean to shut him up.

  *

  June’s fiancé had been home from the rigs on an extended leave, in the course of which he had landed an interview at Lear Fan through a friend who worked there. He had the funniest story, she said to Randall in one rather snatched conversation, which she must remember to tell him next time they had ‘a proper chance to talk’. Although speaking of that, she had also, while he was home, spent a lot of time discussing the wedding, less than six months away now. It had put manners on her – she smiled – well a wee bit anyway. Maybe when the honeymoon and all was over and her husband was back on the rigs – somehow she couldn’t see him settling to a job in a factory – she and Randall could, you know, pick things up again, assuming he was still around himself. Randall suggested she might feel differently once the ring was actually on her finger (June: ‘I can’t think why’), but, for what it was worth, yes, he thought there was a fair chance he would still be here. He had caught himself a couple of times lately actually making plans predicated on that fact. Maybe come the summer he would have Tamsin over, fly out there and bring her back with him, or at least as far as Dublin if Pattie was nervous about her coming north. He could take her to the Ring of Kerry, Connemara, Blarney Castle. Her face when she saw that: an actual castle, Tamsin... or when she went into a café and asked for a soda... Thoughts to raise the spirits as the autumn days turned darker, danker.

  On one such day – the darkest and dankest yet – Thursday, towards the end of November, three transporters, each carrying twenty-four cars, left mid morning, on schedule, for the docks. Some time after two that afternoon Randall took a call from one of the drivers. All three of them were parked up in a lay-by about a mile from the harbour, pointing back towards the factory. ‘The fella at the gate said he had instructions not to let us in. Said there were dock fees outstanding. I saw the phone box here and thought maybe I would ring before we drove back through the town to the factory. I mean people are always waving when they see us and they’d be wondering, you know, was there something the matter.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Randall said. ‘Sit tight, we’ll get this sorted.’

  Randall had no clear idea himself what the matter was, why the fees had not been paid. He knew only that spending time now trying to get to the bottom of it risked exposing more than just the driver and his colleagues to scrutiny.

  Without a moment’s further thought he pulled out his contacts book and phoned the harbour master.

  ‘I understand we have a small problem here.’

  ‘There is a problem, certainly. As for the size of it, I suppose in the scheme of things it is not particularly large, no, but if you put yourself in my place...’

  ‘How much exactly?’ Randall asked. He listened. ‘It’ll be with you by the end of the afternoon.’

  He sat for a second or two with the receiver in his hand – this was the right thing to do – then phoned the bank where he had his personal account.

  ‘Mr Randall!’ the manager said. He sounded as though he had food in his mouth and was trying desperately to swallow. Finally. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  ‘I wanted to arrange a temporary overdraft facility.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Dabbing at his mouth now, with sandpaper, as the phone made it sound. ‘And what had you mind?’ Randall named the figure. The manager stopped dabbing, collected himself. ‘I would need to ring head office for approval.’

  ‘It would be very temporary indeed,’ Randall said, sorry that he hadn’t just come straight out with it when he had the man at a disadvantage.

  ‘I am sure it will just be a formality.’

  While he was pacing the floor waiting for the call back, Randall overheard two guys passing beneath his window, talking.

  ‘Here’s what I’m wondering,’ said one. ‘All parts are guaranteed for twenty-five years, right? And we’re going to be building eighty cars a day for, what – two hundred and fifty days a year? So what’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is: twenty thousand cars a year. Multiply that by twenty-five, that’s half a million cars before anyone has to buy a new one. Do you get what I’m saying?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Randall looked out, but whoever they were they were gone.

  The phone rang. The bank manager, preening himself. ‘That is all arranged,’ he said. ‘I will just need a signature from you, if you wanted to call first thing in the morning.’

  ‘No.’ Whether the cars shipped out today now or not they had to be got on to the portside of the harbour gates. ‘It has to be this afternoon.’

  ‘That might be cutting it a bit fine, getting in from Dunmurry. You know we close at half-past three.’

  ‘I have my coat on,’ Randall said, taking it down from the rack.

  On his way out to the car he took a quick sideways step into the experimental workshop. It reminded him of that first visit to the Kimmerly offices in Detroit. The car disassembled, parts numbered and recombined. In one corner a hammock hung. The guys working there looked like they not shared a decent night’s sleep between the three of them, here or anywhere else, in weeks. They were grouped around a chassis with the steering column on the right-hand side. They barely glanced at him even when he coughed.

  ‘From Coventry?’ he asked. ‘How close are they with that, do you think?’

  ‘Could go into production spring of next year,’ said one.

  ‘No problem,’ said another.

  Which was, Randall thought as he hurried on out, at least half a million more to keep them all going over the next two and a half decades.

  The bank’s commissionaire already had the key in the loc
k when he arrived. He turned it behind Randall’s back. ‘We stop letting them in after about a quarter past,’ he said. There were about fifteen of ‘them’ in the line for the tellers, two-thirds clutching bags of coins for deposit. The commissionaire raised an eyebrow at Randall beneath the peak of his white-covered cap – ‘It all has to be counted,’ he said, ‘every last half pee of it’ – and led him, smartly, across to the manager’s office. The manager – rather unimpressive, rumpled even, in comparison – had the papers laid out on his desk. He uncapped his pen.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘and here...’ Randall wrote his name twice. ‘And that’s us.’ The manager smiled. ‘Can I offer you a drink, perhaps?’

  ‘I had better not.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ The manager looked despondently at the ground before Randall’s feet. At his feet themselves, maybe, his shoes. He had made an error of judgement – an error perhaps of national judgement.

  ‘In other circumstances, mind you...’ said Randall.

  ‘Of course.’ The manager’s face brightened, but only a little. ‘Of course.’

  Randall was offered a drink at the docks too, by the harbour master, ‘a small drop of something’, to show there were no hard feelings.

  ‘I understand entirely,’ Randall said, breaking off to blow on the cheque to make sure the ink was dry. ‘I think I would be happier if I knew the cars were safely through the gates first.’

  A harbour-police car was already on its way to where the transporters were parked up to tell them to turn around again. The drivers sounded their horns as they passed Randall standing with the harbour master.

  It was by now approaching a quarter to six and thoroughly dark. ‘OK,’ said Randall and clapped his hands under his arms – he had only now remembered that he had nothing heavier on than a sport coat, ‘I’ll have that drink now.’

  He stopped in the town centre afterwards, emboldened by the generous measure of whiskey the harbour master had poured for him (the Lord only knew what a big drop would have looked like), and by the larger than usual number of people abroad on the streets.

  It was the night, he quickly gathered, of the Christmas lights ‘switch-on’. The ceremony was over by the time he arrived, the tree before the City Hall – tall and rangy, teenager-ish – already illuminated. The stores were still open, which, he had been here long enough now to know, was something of a novelty, the practice of the last decade being for everyone, shop workers as well as shoppers, to get the hell out the moment the clocks struck five.

  Some of the civilian searchers at the security gates straddling Donegall Place, the main shopping street, had attached sprigs of mistletoe to the metal grilles above their heads. Tonight at least the people who presented themselves before them, bags already open, arms half raised, did so without too much of a scowl. Randall had just emerged, level with the doors of Boots the Chemist, from the customary, perfunctory frisk – a couple of pats on the sides, a palm swept up the back of the jacket: on you go – when a firmer hand on his shoulder arrested his progress.

  ‘I had been hoping to bump into you some time soon, although I hadn’t quite pictured it like this.’

  Jennings – for it was his voice, his hand – was dressed in his off-duty clothes, camel hair coat folded over the arm of a navy blazer. His shirt was the palest blue and open at the neck from which an actual cravat – silk, naturally – puffed out.

  ‘If it’s about the business at the docks,’ Randall said (was there anything in this city the man didn’t know about), ‘that has all been taken care of.’

  For once, though, it was Jennings whose face betrayed his ignorance. ‘The docks?’ He shook his head and steered Randall a few feet to the left to the ornate entrance to a narrow, yellow-lit shopping arcade.

  ‘He has made enquiries about deferring the first interest payment.’ If there had been any doubt who the pronoun referred to, the mention of an interest payment dispelled it. ‘I don’t know what influence you have with him, but whatever you have I would urge you to use it to dissuade him. There is still time.’

  At several points in the course of their exchange he had glanced over his shoulder, to ensure that they were not being overheard, Randall assumed, but now Jennings as he took his leave fell into step with a tall and equally well-groomed youth who had been standing all this time behind him. Son, could have been, or nephew, or... Randall realised that what he knew about the man would fit on the back of a postage stamp.

  He realised as well that the pleasant effects of the harbour master’s whiskey had suddenly worn right off. Ho-ho-ho, to you too, Mr Jennings.

  DeLorean when they spoke the next day made much of Randall’s initiative in the docks’ ‘mix-up’ – twice what he had paid out would be lodged in his personal account before the close of business there today – and made light of Jennings’s concerns over the interest payment. It was pretty much standard practice to miss the first one, although frankly – a little firmer now – it was not Jennings’s place to bandy about the details of a private conversation, in fact he had a good mind to take it up...

  ‘I wouldn’t if I was you.’ They both paused. He had never before said no to anything DeLorean had proposed. ‘At least, not just yet,’ he added quickly.

  Nothing from the other end of the line for several seconds more, then a long breath out. ‘All right, in December then, face to face.’

  ‘You’re coming over again?’

  ‘For the Christmas party. We have come through a hell of a year. I want us all to celebrate together.’

  *

  The way Liz heard it (she was on nights that week) the choice of hotel was decided by the toss of a coin, the workers who used the Twinbrook gate not being best keen on the Conway, nor the Seymour-Hill-gate users on the Greenan Lodge – aka the (Oh, the wit of it!) Fenian Lodge – on Black’s Road.

  A large crowd had gathered in the canteen to watch. Randall it was who stepped forward with the coin, which was taken in turn by a representative of each gate – this one biting down on it after checking it wasn’t double-sided, that one pretending to slip it into his pocket – before being returned to him for tossing, best of three. No prizes for guessing who called (crowned) heads. It came down tails the first two: Greenan Lodge. A groan for every whoop, but then, as the whoopers all said as they walked back to work, side by side with the groaners, sure it was Christmas, one place was as good, or as bad, as another.

  The Born Again set said there was no good about any of them, ever, and let it be known that they would not be attending.

  Like they would be fucking missed, said Steve, who was telling all this to Liz. Steve’s wife, Niamh (‘we’re the perfect couplet’), was working days. They had one hour a day in which to swap news ‘and other stuff’, which Liz assured him she would rather not hear about. What she was interested in hearing that particular night was that DeLorean was coming over for the party too, that he might even have an important announcement to make, which was reassuring because a rumour had run round the factory one afternoon the week before that three of the transporter lorries had been refused entry to the docks – a huge wodge of cash owing.

  Even the fact that no lorries arrived back at the factory didn’t put paid to the rumour entirely. There were still one or two who maintained they knew what they knew and that was that, but maybe there would always be one or two, just like there would always be a Born Again set getting their knickers in a twist about people having a few drinks and singing sentimental songs every December.

  16

  Randall had noticed the last time he had seen him that DeLorean was carrying a Sony Walkman, not playing music on it, carrying, turning it over in his hands at idle moments in the back seat of the car, examining the internal spindles, the mechanism that opened the cassette-tape drawer. Why didn’t I think of this?

  He thought it might be a nice gesture to make up a tape of the records he had been taking out of the library on Botanic Avenue, evidence of how his education was proceeding
: Lester Young and Mezz Mezzrow, Barney Bigard’s ‘Nine O’Clock Beer’ and ‘C-Jam Blues’.

  He spent hours over the selection and sequence (open with the drum fill in ‘Concerto for Clarinet’ – Artie had to be in there somewhere), hours more over the recording itself, lying on his stomach in front of the hi-fi waiting for the right moment to press pause and minimise the hiss between tracks. (The only other tape he could remember having made was for Pattie, her first birthday after they met. Sitting with a small cassette recorder on his lap, microphone pointed at the record player. ‘Laughing’, by The Guess Who. ‘You took away everything I had you put the hurt on me.’ In retrospect maybe the writing had been on the wall there from the very start.)

  He even had June help him print up a custom-made liner, track-listing on the inside and on the outside a DMC-12 flanked by a clarinet and a tenor sax, the title arcing in a banner overhead. Sounds of DeLoreland, he called it, in imitation of Birdland.

  Kept it in the top left-hand drawer of his desk, sneaking looks now and then, half the time not even aware he was doing it.

  All in all, he was pretty proud of it.

  *

  Tinsel hung all about the assembly shop. There were shoe-whitener snowflakes on the bathroom mirrors and cartoons pinned up of sleighs with gull-wing doors. Anto told Liz there had been an agreement between all the union reps: they were to inform their members that only Christmas trees and Santas were permitted behind the dashboards and in the seat wells from now to Epiphany.

  He and Liz were sharing the dayshift with another woman, Amanda, TC having booked a week’s leave for his latest City and Guilds exams.

  She had moved from the north-west of England specially, had Amanda (a typical Amanda sentence structure was that), her and her husband and their three wee girls. Lasses, she called them. Gracie Fields, Anto called her, until she started calling him Bert Lynch, after the James Ellis character in Z Cars. ‘I don’t sound anything like him,’ Anto said. ‘And did you actually listen to Gracie Fields ever?’ asked Amanda.