Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  A few of the small upper windows were open in the canteen, to let out the fug of all those bodies in too-close proximity and with it the mingled sound of their voices, like a score of radios playing simultaneously: soaps, comedy, sports chat, songs from the shows and the hit parade, old and new. Randall carried on past, leaving all the factory buildings behind him, until at last he came to the smaller gate opening on to the road up to Warren House. The walk from one end to the other, twice a day, six and a half minutes there, seven minutes back (going against the slope), was what he liked to refer to as his exercise regime.

  Tonight he had just become dimly aware that there was no one on the warren when he stopped in his tracks. There were lit cigarettes, but not on the other side of the valley: right in front of him.

  ‘Fucking run!’ a voice – feet away only – called out.

  It was not directed at Randall, but at the other shadows behind the cigarette tips, who at once took to their heels, to the accompaniment of tins jostling, heavily, within the confines of plastic bags. Instinctively Randall shot out a hand and was amazed – horrified almost – to find himself holding a fistful of denim jacket. Palms went up protectively in front of the face.

  ‘Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!’

  The boy – despite the high pitch of the voice, it was a boy – was no more than fourteen. It occurred to Randall that if this boy and his friends were from the warren then he had been living here through one entire generation of underage drinkers.

  ‘They all said you’d gone.’ The boy was snivelling, and almost certainly drunk. ‘They were saying we should go in and see if we could get the gold taps off before anyone else did. I never wanted to do it, swear.’

  Randall loosened his grip and at once the boy wriggled free and ran off, laughing.

  ‘You fucking dick!’ he shouted and there was more laughter from the direction of the stream where his friends had stopped and regrouped.

  ‘I am, though, aren’t I?’ Randall said under his breath. He stooped to retrieve the bag the boy had dropped, a quart bottle of cider inside, two-thirds empty, and carried it, a finger through one twisted handle, up the drive to the house.

  Inside, he set the bag on the floor behind the double-locked door then switched on all the lights, upstairs and down, lest anyone should doubt he was home, and put a call through to the local police station to ask if they had a patrol in the area. ‘That,’ said the desk sergeant, ‘is not the kind of information we give out over the phone, for reasons which I am sure you will understand.’

  He had heard and read enough down his years here to understand perfectly.

  ‘But say there was, if you could ask them to check the perimeter of Warren House.’ He looked through the blind. The red glows were restored to their traditional position across the valley. It was on the tip of his tongue to add that the cops might want to do an age check on the crowd drinking up there – Who would be the fucking dick then? – but the answer, he suspected, would still be him, and he let the thought, and the blind slat, drop.

  He had already stripped to his shorts and T-shirt when he heard the engines on the road outside. At least two. The patrol that dared not leak its location. A moment later the intercom buzzed. It buzzed again, twice, before he reached it. The instant he flicked the switch the voice barked at him.

  ‘Randall? Open the gates.’

  It was Jennings. Randall had only just managed to get his second leg into his pants when the Scot was out of his car (had it even come to a halt?) and thumping on the front door.

  ‘Coming!’ Doing up his buttons; the thumping getting louder. Jesus. ‘Coming!’

  Jennings didn’t even bother with his normal potted version of the niceties, but marched past him into the vestibule. ‘Pack a bag,’ he said (a scowl as he saw the cider bottle, sticking out of its sack). ‘Quick.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Randall. ‘You can’t throw me out of here, and anyway there’s still...’ He couldn’t think where he had set his watch, ‘...hours yet.’

  Jennings had walked straight up the stairs. Randall in his astonishment could do nothing for the moment but stare so that by the time he did set off in pursuit Jennings was already on the landing headed for the bedrooms. He was coming out of Randall’s own room when Randall caught up, proclaiming violation of civil liberties, international protocols, threatening to phone the American Consul, the papers...

  Jennings shoved a shirt into his arms. ‘Get dressed.’

  ‘Not until you tell me what is going on.’

  Jennings drew a long envelope from his overcoat pocket and held it out towards him.

  Randall took a step back. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Bearer bonds.’ He held the envelope out further. ‘They aren’t going to blow up in your face, unless you were to try cashing them yourself, which I don’t recommend.’

  ‘But where are they from?’

  ‘People who would rather not see the factory close.’

  ‘Prior? Thatcher?’

  Jennings rolled his eyes. ‘I am surprised you could even ask.’

  ‘I thought you told me once you only served whoever was in power.’

  ‘Until whoever is in power starts to act in a way that is entirely contrary to logic and justice. There is a difference between neutrality and rank stupidity.’

  Randall was feeling suddenly light-headed. That they were standing here on his landing, him only half dressed, discussing matters of state and high finance.

  ‘Your Mr DeLorean is very hard man to defend sometimes,’ Jennings said, ‘but I am far from alone in thinking that factory down there is its own best argument.’

  Long afterwards it was the ‘far from alone’ that stuck in Randall’s mind, the threat beneath its surface reassurance. Jennings drew from his pocket a second envelope.

  ‘You will find a ticket in there for the six-thirty New York flight from Shannon Airport.’

  ‘But, that’s...’

  ‘One hundred and seventy-five miles, although you might as well add on another hundred for the state of the roads on the other side of the border... If you are lucky you will do it in six hours, although the flight, once you are on it, is at least direct.’

  Still something in Randall resisted. ‘Why like this? Why not just wire it?’

  ‘Because wires inevitably have points of departure as well as arrival that can be traced.’

  He looked Randall straight in the eye a moment longer then made to withdraw his hand. ‘Or maybe you would rather I just ripped the tickets up.’

  Randall reached out and grabbed them and the envelope with the bonds.

  ‘I will put a call through to the police on both sides of the border.’ The tail end of the sentence disappeared with Jennings into Randall’s room. He returned with two ties, the least worst of which, a tweed-knit (that tweed-knit, bought a DeLorean-Motor-Company lifetime ago en route to Detroit), he handed to Randall. ‘I’ll pass on the registration number and ask them to speed you through the checkpoints.’

  Randall was turning round, turning round, scouring the floor.

  ‘Shoes, is it?’ asked Jennings. ‘You left them on the bathroom floor.’

  He got his shirt on, his tweed-knit tie, his jacket, his shoes, finally. He found his watch, his passport and a carry-on into which he threw a couple of things at random. The second envelope, with the tickets, went in there, the first went, uncomfortably to begin with, into his breast pocket.

  He had worked his way in the course of this down into the vestibule again. Jennings went ahead of him and opened the front door. He stood aside, holding the handle.

  Randall was not quite sure what to. He went to hug Jennings, who stayed him with a raised hand.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Just go.’

  So Randall did.

  At the last moment he detoured into the factory again, lights still on in the canteen from which quarter singing came, not raucous, or confused, a single voice, too far off for him to catch the burden. He wanted
to go and tell them not to worry, but there wasn’t time for that and for what he had come here to do.

  Five minutes, that took. He would make it up between here and Shannon, between here and Portadown. Out the gates he went for the third time that night and that really was him away.

  21

  Liz heard the rumour as soon as she walked into the assembly shop in the morning that Randall done a runner during the night.

  TC said he wasn’t the least bit surprised.

  Anto cupped a hand to his ear. ‘Listen, you can hear the other rats leaving too.’

  Liz said nothing at all, not even (an effort of will) to herself, but walked to her locker, where the first thing she saw was a ragged edge of paper protruding from the bottom of the door. She turned the lock and the page – torn from a notebook – floated to the ground, blank side up. She hesitated before crouching and turning it over. This can all still work out, it said. Believe with me. He had signed it. E.R.

  Like the Queen, was all she could think. She stayed there a few moments, sitting back on her heels, the page a ball in her fist clasped to her forehead, then she pushed herself forward and up with her toes, locked the metal door and carried on out to the assembly shop again.

  They went about their tasks in silence, each keeping to her, or his, own part of the factory floor, choosing not to meet one another’s eyes. Liz didn’t know about the others but she was torn the whole time between finishing the car (she had been working on the same one for the past eleven days) and putting her spanner through its windscreen.

  She made it as far as lunchtime. ‘I can’t wait around like this,’ she said, and started there and then taking off her overalls.

  Anto and TC laid down their tools too.

  ‘What’ll you do now?’ she asked them.

  Anto shrugged. ‘Go to the canteen, join the sit-in.’

  ‘While there’s life...’ said TC.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Liz, while there’s life.

  She put her arms around them both.

  Back at the house she picked up the first of the day’s notes, left by Robert this morning on the dressing table. ‘I am still waiting for a proper explanation.’

  As to why she had not called last night to say she would be late, as to where she had been all that time.

  He had driven up to the factory looking for her an hour before she finally arrived home and of course she was nowhere to be seen.

  He came into the kitchen when he heard her at the back door, closing the living room door behind him, letting her trap herself in a lie about a tricky carburettor and no change for the payphone.

  ‘Is it that fella Anto?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, for God sake, Robert.’

  ‘Don’t you for God sake me. There’s someone, there’s something.’

  She had allowed herself to be turned around by him, her back to the sink. His face was in the space where hers should have been, her own drawn back so far she thought her neck would snap. His eyes were wild, but it was fear she saw in them, not anger. When it got to the point there was no violence. He reminded her, heartbreakingly, of the boys, all mouth and trousers.

  And he was half right. There was something, but though she had kissed another man not half an hour before there was no one. She wasn’t even sure she could explain it to herself, not last night, not now.

  One day, maybe.

  *

  She looked at the figures on the clock radio: 14:59. She slid the button from auto to on as all but the first digit changed and the pips sounded for three o’clock.

  She heard the news out then reached under the bed for the suitcase.

  It was now or never.

  *

  Randall didn’t know what set him off – exhaustion, maybe – but all of a sudden, sitting on the lip of that enormous desk on the thirty-fifth floor, he began to shake with silent laughter.

  He picked up the envelope with its pink-tinged edge and for a moment he thought he should put it back in his pocket, leave here and go find Tamsin – Pattie too, if that was what it took, and whoever Pattie was sharing her life with now – and just disappear together. How great could the reach of Jennings’s associates be, after all? But even as he was asking the question he knew he could not risk his daughter’s happiness or safety to find out and knew too that without her he was not disappearing anywhere. He searched in the little dish at the base of the bust of Abraham Lincoln for a thumbtack, turned with it in his hand, looking for a suitable spot.

  Carole watched apprehensively from the door. ‘I don’t think you should do that,’ she said, too late, as he made a sudden move across the floor to the photograph of DeLorean and his son in the surf and pushed the tack into it so that the envelope covered the I recall that followed life’s illusions.

  ‘I think thumbtacks in pictures might be the least of his worries now,’ he said.

  *

  DeLorean was looking down on the clouds from his airplane window, trying to get a sum right in his head. He wrote the answer down on his drinks napkin, next to the other seven- and eight-figure calculations. He had run the numbers dozens – hundreds – of times before, as indeed he had been running them all his working life, but he needed to be absolutely sure. This deal had been months in the making and bar one moment of folly, compounded by noises – to be specific quacks – off, kept from even his closest confidants. (Cristina, much to his regret, was completely in the dark.) There had been other offers on the table at various stages, more or less plausible, more or less attractive, but this was the one he kept coming back to, or rather that had kept coming back to him (for its proposers were the ones who made the running, seeming at times to anticipate events), trustworthy almost in inverse proportion to those involved in it. Morgan Hetrick and Jim Hoffman were not men who you could have brought into a room with Sir Kenneth Cork. They made Roy, frankly, look like a kid stealing apples from his neighbour’s yard.

  Edmund thought he couldn’t see it, but his eyes had been wide open from the start. These men did not have scruples or much in the way of morals. They did though have money to invest and he had a scheme – the trust agreement prospectuses were in his briefcase – to enable them to invest it: a brand new company, DeLorean Motor Cars Inc., which would only come into existence – this was the genius of the thing – at the moment of their investing and which would straight away invest in DeLorean Motor Cars Ltd, or, for the time being at any rate, Cork Gully Receivers.

  And, yes, he was aware that they wanted more from him, some reciprocal investment in their own business, but he had concocted a story that he was confident would keep them at arm’s length on that. (What was business but telling – and selling – the best story?) He was in hock to the IRA in Belfast was what he had told them, he had zero room for manoeuvre, unless Hoffman and Hetrick wanted to get them involved too, which he was pretty sure – if they knew anything of that organisation’s methods – they did not.

  Still.

  Earlier in the week he had written a letter to Tom Kimmerly, sealed inside another envelope, Only to be opened in the event of my death, in which he laid out, step by step, the path he had tried to tread in his dealings with these people, from his first casual conversations with Hoffman – in so far as anything Jim Hoffman ever said could be classed as casual – to the legal nicety that was DMC Inc. Emphasis on the legal. He hoped Tom would not mind this once, but he had, as much for Tom’s own sake as his own, taken other advice: Hoffman and Hetrick would not be buying John DeLorean, they would be making a donation to the British government.

  The trick was to make sure they did not work that out too soon.

  The British government’s deadline would already have passed by the time the plane touched down, but surely faced with the prospect of all those lay-offs becoming permanent job losses, that factory standing empty, a warning to anyone else tempted to try to set up business there, they would be bound, as soon as he got this deal over the line, to suspend the liquidation proceedings.

  Hoffm
an himself was waiting outside the terminal at the wheel of a white Cadillac, alongside another of the consortium, Benedict, who ran the Eureka Savings and Loan in San Carlos, up beyond San Jose. Vicenza the final member, was joining them at the hotel.

  Hoffman shrugged his shoulders inside his jacket, DeLorean assumed for comic effect. ‘You ready to do this?’

  DeLorean gave it his best drawl. ‘Ready if you are.’

  It was not much more than five minutes in the car down West Century Boulevard to the Sheraton Plaza. Mainly they talked about the car. He had always had a fondness for Caddies, he told them, though they weren’t to whisper that to anyone at General Motors. (Said as though he actually imagined that was a possibility.) In the elevator they did not speak at all. The imminent outlay of double-digit millions he guessed was a sobering prospect for even the most risk-addicted.

  Hoffman had forgotten to bring his room key, but explained in the act of knocking at the door of suite 501 that it was nothing to worry about, Vicenza ought to be there by now waiting for them, and, hey presto, there Vicenza was (it had crossed DeLorean’s mind in the instant before the door opened that he could not have picked the man out in a line-up), smiling, shaking hands, come on in, come on in, good to see you, good to see you. They were conscious that they were all standing so they all sat on the two sofas at the centre of the room, but that was wrong too so instantly Hoffman and Hetrick stood. DeLorean stayed put, took off his jacket, signalling he was ready to get down to business. He was going to need ten or twelve million straight away (the ‘twelve’ appeared just like that: long habit, always push for a little more); ten or twelve ought to keep everything together for now.

  Hoffman though started to talk about four and a half million, which was ludicrous, and tomorrow, not today, which was even more ludicrous, but no, no, he was saying as DeLorean tried to interject, that would just be the beginning.