Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  No more.

  ‘What time is it there?’ she asked thickly.

  ‘Half eleven.’

  ‘In the morning? I thought you would be in your work.’

  ‘I am, but it’s OK.’

  Ten thousand miles away a cigarette was lit. Liz took the full force of the smoke jet in her ear. ‘What kind of place is that?’

  ‘Truthfully? I think it might be the best place I have ever in my life worked.’

  ‘And you have so much to compare it to.’ Liz was nearly grateful for the dig, or the speed with which it was delivered. That was more like her big sister.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘But what about you?’ She rested her head against the wall, making sure the circuit was absolutely closed. ‘How are things in your place?’

  ‘My place?’

  ‘I just thought from some of your letters that maybe, I don’t know, maybe there was something you wanted to talk about.’

  Vivienne laughed sharply – the cheek of you! – then started to cry.

  Liz made up her mind the minute she hung up the phone that she was going out there to see her. Later, when the dinner things were all cleared away and the boys had taken their perpetual argument up the stairs, she set a cup of tea on the arm of Robert’s chair, a chocolate digestive balanced on the saucer.

  ‘Do you remember when the boys were in primary school and that wee P1 boy – Thompson – was knocked down and killed? Do you remember they became obsessed the two of them with dying?’

  Robert paused stirring his sugar. Flip, yeah, now that she mentioned it, he did. The father worked in the hardware shop, had a harelip...

  ‘And do you remember’ – she must not let him stray off the path she was laying – ‘what we said?’

  Robert resumed stirring thoughtfully. ‘Probably something like it was a one in a million chance.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘They had to make the most of every moment... we all had to.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said. (She did love him.)

  He smiled and took a bite from the biscuit where it had been softened by contact with the cup.

  ‘I’m signing up for nights one week in every two. I’m putting the money away to go out and see Vivienne next year, in case the opportunity doesn’t come around again.’

  He had practically fed her the line. Anyway, she thought later, that great sex thing worked both ways. He was hardly likely to go and change the locks, was he?

  It exhausted her, of course, the work, the switching between the two routines, the near impossibility of a full day’s sleep. A couple of weeks in she didn’t know which end of her was up. By half past ten on her second Tuesday back on days she was dead on her feet, or at least her knees.

  She gave the wrench a twist on the last nut of an uncooperative passenger seat and slumped forward in an attitude of prayer.

  ‘I’m never going to last till my tea break,’ she said into the soft leather.

  TC, working on the other side, spoke to her across his seat and hers. ‘Sure, why don’t you take ten minutes now?’ There were no hooters or whistles to work to, you took your break when you needed it, always supposing your workmates could spare you. ‘Me and Anto can manage. Can’t we, Anto?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Ah, no, I couldn’t do that on yous.’

  ‘It’s not a bit of bother. Tell her, Anto.’

  ‘It’s not a bit of bother.’

  ‘Well...’ She had pulled herself up on to her feet. ‘If you’re absolutely sure.’

  She walked away wiping her hands on a rag. God, it felt good to be able to turn your back. And to think Robert didn’t trust those fellas. The things they did for her, because actually, now she thought of it, it wasn’t just the comfort breaks, they were forever letting her take a couple of minutes here and there – You go on ahead, save us a seat in the canteen, we’ll just finish tidying up.

  She stopped in front of a vending machine full of sweets and chocolate bars. She felt in the pocket of her overalls and found two 10p pieces. It was fate.

  TC was standing with his back to the car, looking off in the other direction, when she returned barely two minutes after she had left, a Curly Wurly dangling from each hand.

  The seat that had caused her all the grief was on the ground next to Anto’s legs. The rest of him was inside the car, from where a scratching sound was coming – a sound she could not associate with any part of the assembly process that she had ever been involved in – a gouging sound was probably closer to the mark.

  ‘What’s that seat doing on the ground?’ she said.

  TC nearly did himself an injury he spun round that fast. ‘Liz!’ It sounded more like a warning than a greeting.

  ‘Is that not the one I just finished putting in?’

  The gouging sound stopped. TC had come round to place himself between her and the open car door.

  ‘I, ah, wasn’t happy, there was a wee problem with the, ah, what-you-me-call-it.’

  Liz pushed past him. She could have knocked him right over without much difficulty. ‘Anto, what are you doing in there?’

  As he was withdrawing his head from the seat well she was sticking hers in. There were metal shavings in a small heap below... she wasn’t sure at first what exactly: a candle it looked like, twists of something thorny – barbed wire? – around it.

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘A hunger strike candle,’ Anto said matter-of-factly.

  ‘What’s it doing in our seat well?’ TC opened his mouth to say something, but the penny for Liz had already dropped. ‘Wait, are there other cars with “hunger strike candles” hidden in the seat wells too? Is that what all the “go on ahead, Liz, take ten minutes there” is about?’

  ‘No.’ TC finally got to speak. ‘Some of them have the candles behind the dashboard and some of them, you know, depending on the section have Celtic or Rangers or No Pope Here.’

  ‘Anto?’ She was conscious that she was talking to them the way she talked to her own boys, switching her gaze from one to the other in order to winkle out the truth; conscious but powerless to stop it. ‘Are you not the one who told me you had to walk out and take your place on those pickets because you never knew who was watching? And now here you are doing something that no one will ever even see?’

  Anto was still sitting on the ground, hands dangling over his knees. They made a gesture, a half-hearted attempt at flight.

  ‘You can’t build a sports car in the middle of Belfast, in the middle of all this, and not expect it to carry some sort of a mark.’ His eyes slipped off her face. ‘I don’t think you can have any idea.’

  ‘About what? About anger? About people dying?’ She was slapping her thighs with those stupid fucking chocolate bars. ‘I lost a brother to one of your martyrs’ comrades. Dragged him out of his lemonade lorry just up the road here and put a bullet in his head. Put out an apology the next day saying they had mixed up his lemonade lorry with another one that delivered to army barracks.’

  Anto’s eyes were locked on hers again. He had the grace to look stricken. ‘You never said.’

  ‘You’re right, I never did. I never did because I made a promise early on that I wasn’t going to go through life thinking of myself as a victim.’ Vivienne in contrast had resolved never to set foot in the country again. ‘Anyway,’ her anger was ebbing, turning back on her for breaking even for a moment her promise to herself, and her brother, ‘Pete wouldn’t have wanted me being bitter on his behalf. That wasn’t the type of him.’

  ‘But still...’ Anto was on his feet now, TC beside him.

  ‘Listen, Liz, we’ll not do any more of them,’ TC said and reinforced it with his thumb on his breastbone: down and across. ‘Swear to God.’

  ‘You can do what you like, TC, but the first car that comes through here after lunch is all mine. Now, get that seat bolted back in, and here’ – she shoved them into their hands – ‘enjoy your Curly Wurlys.’

&n
bsp; She entertained all kinds of possibilities, trying a few of them out on paper napkins in the canteen – a lemonade bottle with her brother’s name on the label seemed particularly apt, but she doubted she would have the time or the skill under pressure to do it justice, and like she had told Anto it was a long time ago now. Six years, a thousand other deaths. She tore that napkin to shreds, and all the others she’d drawn on, and shoved them deep into the wastepaper bin.

  It would have to be words. There was something to be said for No Pope Here. The form of it rather than the content. Short, to the point.

  The boys (my God, she had even begun to think of them like that) had given her a wide berth while she deliberated. It was clear, on her return, that they had resolved to keep the mood light-hearted.

  ‘Are you ready for your first act of vandalism?’ Anto said.

  ‘I had a long life before I came to work here,’ she said and was surprised herself at how convincing she sounded. ‘Just keep watch.’

  They stationed themselves at either end of the next car that came down the line, letting on to be searching for a spanner, inspecting the bodywork for a non-existent scratch (always the hardest to detect).

  She knelt, took out the little metal file she always carried in the back of her purse, leaned in and got to work.

  She had been dead right not to attempt the lemonade bottle. Christ, it was hard enough to manage a simple straight line. Aagh! Straightish.

  ‘Coat!’ Anto, under cover of a cough, barked the code they had agreed for manager and she nearly brained herself on the dashboard before he said in his normal voice, ‘False alarm, he’s away the other way.’

  Back to work she went. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

  ‘Are you nearly done there?’ TC whispered.

  ‘Nearly.’ She was barely started, but so what, he could flipping well wait.

  Another half a minute. The point of the nail file was bending with the effort of bringing a curved line back to the plane from which it had without her intending it deviated. Shit, shit, shit.

  ‘Would you for crying out loud come on!’ TC said and could not have sounded more strangulated if someone had indeed had their hands about his throat.

  She dragged the file down the metal then started on another letter.

  ‘Seriously,’ Anto said from the other end, ‘you’re going to have to get out of there now.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘right,’ and wrote four letters more. ‘OK, give me a hand getting this seat in.’

  From the colour of his face as he trotted round to help, TC even looked as though he had been throttled.

  ‘So,’ said Anto, ‘are you going to tell us what you did?’

  ‘Do you really want to know? Do you really really want to know?’ Liz gave the rear nut a wrench. ‘It’ll cost you most of your year’s wages to find out.’

  15

  DeLorean that late summer and early autumn was consumed with the proposed stock-market flotation. Jennings had not been altogether wrong. Here was the opportunity to unburden the company almost overnight of government debt. ‘Set sail into open water,’ was a term DeLorean used more than once and Randall did actually picture the shares as so many tiny vessels corralled in a harbour, waiting for the wind to fill their sails, or the waves outside to subside a little.

  DeLorean had recently completed the purchase of the Lamington Farm estate at Bedminster, New Jersey, preparatory, as Randall understood it, to selling the Pauma Valley ranch, bringing his work life and family life closer: a seventy-five minute drive at the week’s end (in so far, with a stock-market flotation imminent, the working weeks ever ended) instead of a six-hour flight.

  Midway through September Humphrey Atkins was whisked away to become Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. (Centuries, it took, to perfect job titles like that.) A new secretary of state, Jim Prior, arrived and, looking, in the television reports, slightly puzzled that no one had thought of doing it before (although a look of puzzlement, Randall soon learned, ranging from slight to extreme, was habitual with him) made a point of going into the prison to talk to the prisoners refusing food. Within weeks the hunger strike was over. The six deaths that the management and the union leaders had, as an absolute maximum, been preparing for had been exceeded by four. Randall who went over it and over it in his head hundreds of times then and in the years that followed could not decide which of the parties to the dispute was the more fanatical.

  The mood in the factory the morning after it ended was subdued, sombre even. Only the announcement of the five-thousandth car off the assembly line lifted spirits. Actually, such was the release, it nearly lifted the roof off.

  Randall stopped by Don’s office shortly after the announcement was made.

  ‘I didn’t see that coming.’

  ‘That’s because it’s the four thousand eight hundred and ninetieth... I thought today might be a day for rounding up,’ said Don and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘I don’t understand it. I thought they would have been glad, all of them, that madness in the prisons was over. Unless of course they’re thinking the same thing I’ve been thinking.’ His gaze had drifted off towards the window, but returned now. ‘This government seems to like a fight. Who is it going to pick one with next?’

  Two days later a member of Thatcher’s party accused DeLorean in the press of misuse of public funds, citing the example of Warren House, whose bathroom taps he claimed were made of solid gold.

  DeLorean was en route to Daytona Beach when Randall rang him.

  ‘Who is this fucking guy?’ DeLorean wanted to know. Nicholas Winterton was the answer and Randall by now had enough experience of the British political classes to further identify him as one of the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em brigade’. Hang ’em, flog ’em, anything at all but subsidise ’em.

  DeLorean’s first instinct was to hire someone to investigate Winterton’s own expenses. He didn’t care what country you were talking about, nobody walked very far in public life without getting some shit on his shoes.

  ‘And what’s Haddad doing? Why isn’t he on the phone to me?’

  ‘Well, you see, that’s the thing, Winterton’s taken all this stuff from a memo Bill sent you last Christmas.’

  ‘Bill sent me a memo about faucets? The hell he did. If Bill Haddad had sent me a memo it would be sitting in my office not that asshole’s.’

  ‘It was in your office,’ Randall said. ‘Marion leaked it.’

  ‘Marion?’

  ‘Seems she landed in England the day before yesterday and went straight to Winterton’s constituency.’

  He could nearly hear the blood pulsing in DeLorean’s temples. ‘No,’ he said at long last. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘It’s in the newspapers, the London Times, the Daily Express...’

  But DeLorean had decided. He said it again, ‘It’s not possible.’

  Randall awoke next morning to photographers camped outside the gates of Warren House. They were still there – if anything had swelled in numbers – when he returned from the factory that evening, there when he picked up the phone at gone eleven o’clock to call DeLorean again.

  ‘I think we should let these guys in,’ Randall said.

  ‘Why in the world would we do that?’

  ‘To let them see we have nothing to hide.’

  ‘Edmund, you ought to know better than that. We don’t capitulate to asinine gossip in this country.’ By ‘this’, Randall assumed, he meant ‘that’, which is to say not the country from where he was speaking but the one where Randall stood listening while looking out at the spark-spark-flare of the press photographers’ lighters. ‘And we don’t let people bully their way into our homes either. If anyone does think we have something to hide let them get a warrant.’

  So then early the following evening the police arrived, two armoured Land Rovers of them, very apologetic. Doubly apologetic: ‘We need two Land Rovers these days just to check a dog licence,’ said the inspector who dismounted from the back of the se
cond, warrant in hand. They had been asked, he went on, as part of the investigation into the allegations made by Mr Nicholas Winterton to examine certain fixtures and fittings...

  ‘You mean faucets?’

  ‘Gold painted,’ the inspector said to Randall when his examination of the f-words in question (it had lasted for several silent minutes) was complete. ‘Gold painted,’ he said to his men, distributed about the sitting-room sofas as comfortably as their holsters and body armour would allow. He turned again to Randall. ‘That’s not really the same thing at all, is it?’

  ‘No,’ said Randall, ‘it isn’t,’ and he heard all around him the sound of heavily armed men struggling to lever themselves up from soft furnishings.

  Nicholas Winterton was not so easily satisfied, or as eager to quit his cushion on the sofa of a Breakfast TV set, which he had been inhabiting, it seemed, non-stop since he had set the misuse-of-public-funds hare running. Well, parliament was, for all that it was October, still in summer recess. Where else did he have to be?

  There had been further ‘revelations’ in the papers about DeLorean’s track record with expenses at General Motors: the highest claims in the entire company – highest in the entire history of the company.

  Which finally brought the man himself into the fray, in an Italian-suited, Breakfast-TV-sofa, thank-you-for-giving-me-the-right-of-reply kind of way. ‘I am proud of my expense claims at GM,’ he told the interviewer, with a corroborating tilt of his chin. ‘Do you know why? Because I never once disguised them the way executives did who were spending three times as much as me, and I never – ever – freeloaded on dealers out in the field who were already getting a hard time over their expenses. I settled all my bills and brought the receipts back to head office where everyone could see them.’ As for the memo that had started all of this the police had already investigated some of its more outlandish accusations, but the fact that such a memo existed proved how open and transparent the DeLorean Motor Company was. He did not think there was a single shredder in the whole organisation.