Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  ‘Welcome to Bilfast.’ A softer accent than McAuley and the girl at the newsstand: Scots, Randall later learned. ‘East Berlin without the laughs.’

  Randall responded with a laugh of his own as he sat into the car. Jennings raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. McAuley slammed the door and the least external sound at once disappeared. It was like being shut in an icebox.

  ‘Armoured,’ said Jennings and patted the armrest. ‘Means if they blow it up it comes down harder.’

  Randall nodded, face straight.

  ‘That one was a joke,’ said Jennings.

  ‘Maybe if you were to give me a signal in advance.’

  Jennings relaxed his lips a little. ‘Very good, very good.’

  McAuley was behind the wheel now. He steered the car with the heel of his right hand out through the fortified perimeter fence and on to a straight two-lane road, farmland on either side. They could not have travelled more than five hundred yards along it before they encountered an army check: soldiers with camouflaged faces in the middle of the road, others sharing a hedgerow with a couple of inquisitive-looking sheep. Randall averted his eyes.

  ‘The secretary of state is very invested in your Mr DeLorean, speaking figuratively as well as literally,’ Jennings said as though their journey had been interrupted by nothing more remarkable than a stoplight. He tapped a fingernail against the glass next to his cheek. ‘He told the prime minister that this deal could save the lives of soldiers like these.’

  McAuley was showing his papers to a soldier with corporal stripes. The soldier looked past the driver’s shoulder into the rear of the car, checked one face, checked two, then straightened up and made a circular motion with his hand: carry on. Jennings turned to face Randall. That parting had the permanent look of a scar.

  ‘You can imagine the prime minister was sceptical. He said, “That’s a rather extraordinary claim to make for a motor car,” to which the secretary of state said, “Yes, but it’s no ordinary motor car, and if it gives people jobs, hope, who knows what changes it might help set in motion.”’

  ‘I read the briefing papers on the plane,’ Randall said.

  ‘And what do you think yourself?’

  ‘I think you should never underestimate faith in the future.’

  Jennings pursed his lips again. He handed Randall another newspaper. The same photograph on the front page, but with a different headline: Outrage at Cardinal’s Prison Comments.

  ‘And I think you ought to remember there are two sides to every story here.’

  ‘As there are where I come from.’

  The other man made a noise through his nose, as much as to say have it your own way. Randall looked out the window but found nothing there to divert him save for hedges and fields and the occasional clump of trees. He closed his eyes and for a moment he was back in the lobby of the Sheraton Universal with Jim Hoffman in fatigues, looking down the barrel of an actual gun. He forced his eyes open again, shifted in his seat. Jennings was annotating a document, McAuley steering one-handed and humming quietly. The road stretched ahead straight between the hedges. The second time he did not feel his eyes close at all.

  The engine cut out.

  Randall’s cheek was pressed up against the glass. It made a sucking sound as he pulled away. The car had stopped next to a tubular steel gate leading into a field that was more mud than grass, the imprint, around the gate itself, of many cow hooves. Jennings was replacing the lid on his pen again. He clipped it into his inside pocket.

  ‘Well, here we are.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘DeLorean Motor Cars Limited... Dunmurry. You said you read the briefing papers.’

  ‘They didn’t mention cattle.’

  McAuley had come round to open his door. Randall stepped out unsteadily. The sun had broken through, but it still felt more like early spring than high summer.

  He leant against the gate.

  The field was actually two fields separated by a stream. On the far side of the second field was a housing project – two-storey houses and low-rise apartment blocks – with hills beyond eaten into by quarries. In the opposite direction – looking south-east, possibly, to judge by the position of the sun – over the roof of the car at any rate, lay a couple of hangar-like buildings, and a little further on another housing development, dominated by two tower blocks, but otherwise in layout and style, right down to the colour of its roof tiles, a virtual mirror-image of the first.

  (The names Twinbrook and Something Hill drifted across his jet-lagged mind. He would have to go back and read the papers again.)

  And then from a distant corner of the further field, in front of a red-brick building he had not until that moment noticed, movement: a man striding out in the direction of the gate – by his height and his stride Randall recognised him at once as DeLorean – a dozen others stumbling in his wake, photographers as proximity proved them to be, cameras thumping against their chests, film-roll canisters hopping from their bags, their jacket pockets, as they tried, between shaking the muck off their shoes, to keep up.

  DeLorean seemed to have found the only route that was not potholed or mined with cow pies.

  Randall pulled himself up over the gate and walked out to meet him part way, sidestepping the hazards as best he could. They were to be producing upwards of ten thousand cars a year on this ground within the next two or three years.

  ‘Edmund! Am I glad to see you.’

  The moment DeLorean stood still the camera shutters started clicking. He paid them no regard. Jennings was out of the car now too, although he and his high-polished shoes remained firmly on the other side of the gate.

  ‘Has the secretary of state arrived yet?’ he asked.

  DeLorean pointed back the way he had come to a smaller grouping before the red-brick building out of whose midst rose a couple of sound-boom poles. ‘He was just getting set for an interview when I left him.’

  More cars and vans were arriving as they walked back, photographers in tow, disgorging more men with cameras and boom poles. This was really happening. Here in Belfast. Any minute now the whole world would know. From that point on there could be no going back.

  *

  Liz had the four nearly matching plates lined up on the kitchen countertop ready to serve dinner when the news came on the TV. She stretched out her right foot and with the toe of her slipper pulled the door open another six inches so that she could see the screen in the corner of the living room. As ever it took her eyes a moment or two to adjust. The contrast was gone, or stuck, she wasn’t sure which, and there was something wrong too with the vertical hold. Every couple of minutes a swelling would appear right down at the bottom of the picture, like a tear forming on an eyelid, only instead of brimming over it would begin slowly to move up the screen, pulling everything it passed through an inch to the right, turning landscapes into abstracts, people into question marks, twisting their words besides, for there was an aural counterpart to this visual distortion. And the worst about it was while it was only every couple of minutes they could not justify the cost of leaving the set in to be repaired again. Fifteen pounds it had cost them the last time (the pincushion correction circuit apparently): fifteen pounds and their marriage almost. Robert had nearly been as inconsolable as the boys without it.

  She wrapped a tea towel round the handle of the potato pot and lifted it over from the stove: four pieces for Robert, three each for the boys, two for her.

  Roy Mason was on, standing in a field by the looks of it. She couldn’t hear a word he was saying. The boys, out of sight (at either end of the settee, most likely), were arguing.

  ‘Ah, she never.’

  ‘She did so.’

  ‘She never.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Did.’

  ‘Give over, the pair of you,’ Robert said, closer to hand. (The armchair, always the armchair, to the left of the doorframe.) ‘I’m trying to listen to this.’

 
; ‘Have you your hands washed?’ she called to all three a second before Roy Mason’s voice finally rose above her sons’ bickering, if rose was a word you could ever use of something so flat and nasally.

  ‘This is a great day for British industry, a great day for the people of Northern Ireland, and most of all a great day for the city of Belfast.’

  Liz took the pork chop pan from under the grill where it had been keeping warm and when she turned back there was the man from the newspaper that time, the car-maker, not in Limerick now, but in Belfast, standing before the microphone that Roy Mason had just stepped away from.

  It had to be raised a good foot before he could speak.

  ‘Thank you, Secretary of State...’ He sounded a bit like Gary Cooper. ‘I can’t tell you how good it feels to be somewhere people understand you at last, what it is you are trying to achieve...’ Not Gary Cooper: George Peppard. ‘I am delighted to be able to announce that following my meetings with Mr Mason and his team over the past few days the agreements have all been signed.’ A younger man behind him frowned, looking off to his right. ‘You know, they told us in the US we couldn’t do this, go right back to the blank page and build a brand new type of car in a brand new type of factory. They told us there were good reasons why no one had successfully launched an auto company since Chrysler in 1923. They are probably still telling us that, but we can do it and we will do it, on this very spot: from cow pasture to car production in just eighteen months.’

  Liz looked down. She had put all the chops on the one plate. She used her fingertips to redistribute them. Hot, hot. The boys came in, pushing and shoving, like some strange two-headed beast trying to tear itself apart.

  ‘Not chops,’ said one of them.

  ‘Sure, you love chops,’ said the other.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Aye, you do.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Do.’

  Robert appeared in the doorway, looking behind him still at the TV. Back in the evening-news studio the industrial correspondent was throwing out figures: three hundred jobs in the initial building phase, twelve hundred jobs when production began, rising eventually to two thousand, in one of the most economically depressed parts of Belfast, a city whose only notable contribution to the auto industry was the invention of the pneumatic tyre a hundred years ago.

  Robert shook his head. ‘If somebody was giving me thirty grand for every job I think I could see my way to rustling up two thousand of them as well,’ he said and went and sat down at the table. Liz strained the peas between the angled lid and the side of the pot and spooned them on to the plates.

  ‘And this,’ the industrial correspondent went on, ‘is the car that is creating all the excitement, described by its creator John DeLorean’ (so that was how you said it) ‘as the world’s most ethical mass-production motor car and the first car of the twenty-first century.’

  Liz tilted her head trying to make sense of the image on the screen. Something odd was happening to the sides of the car – for a moment she thought it must be a trick of the vertical hold, but, no, those were the doors opening, rising up, and up, and up.

  She set down the slotted spoon she had been using for the peas and covered her mouth with her hand. Honest to God, it was the only thing she could think to do to keep herself from laughing out loud.

  *

  The news crews were packing up. Randall rested a shoulder against one of the vans. UTV it said on the side. He was still dazed from the announcement, the flight, the whole crazy whirl of the past twenty-four hours.

  For the final few minutes of the press conference his attention had snagged on a group of kids – mid-teens was his guess – watching from a slight muddy rise a couple of hundred yards away. He fancied for a time that they were trying to signal to him (he really was pretty dazed) then that they were involved in some kind of pat-a-cake or hand jive. Finally he twigged that what they were doing was passing something between them – some things: bottles, flashing green as heads were thrown back, tilting them towards their mouths.

  He felt a hand on his back between his shoulder blades. He turned. DeLorean. His eyes were shining.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘It’s going to be something to see when it’s done.’

  DeLorean nodded. ‘About that, I’ve been thinking, it might be an idea if you were to stay on here, just until we get the place up and running.’

  Randall opened his mouth. DeLorean got there before him.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, you’ll not be on your own, there’ll be plenty of faces you recognise, but with so many people sometimes it’s good to have someone taking care of L & L.’

  Randall returned the initials as a question.

  ‘Call it Logistics and Liaison,’ DeLorean said. It was a new one on Randall, but then, his prerogative he supposed: his company, his job descriptions.

  A cop walked by, part of the secretary of state’s team, toting the same model of machine gun as the cops at the airport. (RUC they were called here: Royal Ulster Constabulary.) DeLorean brought his voice down a notch. ‘Besides, with that overseas experience of yours you’re not likely to be freaked out by the presence of all these guns.’

  This time, before Randall could muster a reply, Jennings stepped across their path. He dipped his head with practised deference towards DeLorean. ‘The secretary of state would like a word before he leaves.’

  ‘Of course.’ DeLorean took Randall’s hand in both of his. ‘I have to get on to London later: a few more papers to sign before they will start releasing the money. We’ll book you into a hotel until we can fix you up with somewhere more permanent. Ring me the day after tomorrow, let me know what you need.’

  Randall and Jennings together watched him go to Roy Mason’s side.

  ‘I couldn’t help overhearing,’ Jennings said without turning his head, ‘and if you don’t mind me saying, it’s not the guns you have to worry about, it’s the government.’

  Randall glanced at him sidelong. ‘I thought you were the government.’

  ‘Me? Oh, no: civil service. I simply do the bidding of whoever is in power.’ This with a small wave to the secretary of state, just getting into his car. ‘And, whisper it, Mr Mason and his party are not going to be in power for very much longer.’

  Mr Mason’s party, Randall knew, was Labour, which stood in relation to its main rivals, the ‘Tories’ of the Conservative Party, rather as the Democrats did to the Republicans. The Tories had a woman in charge, Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan was a fan.

  ‘The next incumbents, I am afraid, are not renowned for their love of public subsidy, certainly not under the new regime... And certainly not in the tens of millions that it appears Mr DeLorean has managed to extract. If I had any influence I would make sure he stuck to that timetable of his, although between you and me “eighteen months” was a bit of unnecessary bravado.’ He shook his head. ‘What I would call handing the opposition a goal start.’

  The car with DeLorean in it followed the secretary of state’s away from the site. He turned a final time in his seat and saluted Randall with a forefinger off the eyebrow.

  Randall raised a forefinger halfway to his own.

  Jennings shook his head again.

  The kids on the rise overlooking the cow fields passed their bottles round.

  5

  To begin with Randall stayed in a hotel – the Conway – a scant half a mile from the future plant, hidden away in woods on the edge of one of the housing projects that he had glimpsed that first day. Housing estates, I beg your pardon. The Conway, way back when, had been the home of some linen magnate, a brother of the owner of the former Seymour (the name that had escaped him) Hill, whose entire house and lands – hence ‘estate’ – the Northern Ireland government had requisitioned after World War II for public housing.

  And ‘Northern Ireland’. Not ‘North’ or ‘North of’. They were very particular about that.

  As DeLorean had assured him, he was not on
his own. As the weeks went by and the transformation of the Dunmurry cow pasture began, the Conway started to fill up with DeLorean Motor Company Limited guests. (DeLorean himself returned to break ground at the start of October but had already checked in his souvenir spade for the flight back to London before the fourteen earth movers that entered the fields as he exited had between them turned over a single one of the seventy-two acres.) One of the first to arrive was Myron Stylianides, the perpetually upbeat director of personnel, who was responsible for finding a managing director in Chuck Bennington. Bennington was as lugubrious as Stylianides was sunny, a trait that Randall attributed in part to his beard and moustache, which looked to be modelled on an Olde English seafarer’s – a Raleigh or a Drake – and which seriously limited his scope for smiling, and in part to his Raleighan devotion to tobacco, which in its permanently lit cigarette form similarly limited his scope for speech. On Dick Brown’s recommendation Stylianides and Bennington brought in Dixon Hollinshead to oversee the construction of the factory itself and to help swell the numbers in the Conway’s residents’ dining room.

  There were still nights though, particularly towards the end of the working week, when those who could get out did and when Randall had the dining room pretty much to himself.

  Dunmurry was not strictly speaking in Belfast at all, but in the borough of Lisburn, whose town centre lay about three miles south along the main road that ran past the end of the Conway’s long driveway. The centre of Belfast lay maybe a mile and a half further than that in the opposite direction, although Randall did not often make that particular journey for reasons other than work and scarcely at all at night, the news that he awoke to each morning being a daily renewed disincentive.

  (He was particularly alarmed by the recurrence of the term ‘coffee-jar bomb’. How could you trust anything if you could not trust a jar of coffee?)

  Instead he would have a couple of beers most nights in the lounge bar – two sometimes, rarely more than three – and afterwards take a walk around the grounds or if, as was often the case, the grass was too wet, follow that long, curving driveway down to the main gates. There were a couple of whitewashed cottages opposite, vegetable gardens just visible in daylight at the rear, the whole lot dwarfed by a pair of twenty-storey apartment blocks that might have sprouted from a handful of magic stones tossed out of a cottage window one night in a fit of temper.