Gull (18 page)

‘Volunteer Bobby Sands refused food yesterday morning in his cell in H2 of Long Kesh. We, the workers of the DeLorean Motor Company Limited, wish to express our solidarity with him and with all the brave men and women willing to sacrifice themselves for political status in the British concentration camps here.’

Randall had heard enough. It was only with an effort that he kept his whole body from shaking as he marched back to his office. He met Stylianides at the head of the stairs.

‘We need to get the name of every woman and man who walked out of that gate,’ he said, pointing back the way he had come.

Stylianides shrugged. ‘Sure, but maybe to save time we could collect the names of the ones who didn’t.’

*

It had to have been prearranged. Liz did not hear an actual command, but all at once, from all corners of the factory, there was a sound, beyond the simple downing of tools, of labour being definitively withdrawn.

Liz glanced over her shoulder, back up the line, and when she turned around again Anto and TC were walking too.

‘Here!’ she said, as in ‘Come back...
now
.’

Anto held up his hand – I hear you, but I’m not going to heed you – kept walking, on up past the Tellus terminal, left, out of sight.

She looked about her and registered it almost at once, the ones left standing – standing like her, like spare parts – they all came in through the Seymour Hill gate. She knew then right away. Robert had said to her this morning that there would be bother, just wait and see, but there had been a hunger strike at the tail end of last year and things had carried on in the factory as normal. To be honest Liz had hardly paid it any attention at all. There had been a couple of awful incidents in England a few years ago – they didn’t stand for any nonsense there, Robert said – hunger strikers choking while being force-fed – but in her experience these things usually petered out, as that last hunger strike did in... Do you know, she couldn’t even have told you when exactly.

The protests, right enough, had not let up – she had seen that first-hand – and the priests and what have you that were always in and out of the prison had been saying every opportunity they got that next time they worried it would be ‘for real’, but she had thought that was just the prisoners upping the ante, hunger-striking at one remove.

But now here it was again. For real.

The word soon filtered down through those that remained that Randall been ranting and raving out the front of the assembly shop. She blushed to hear it, for him, in part, for making a show of himself, but more than anything for her and this whole grotesque spectacle that passed for politics here.

The heat had not entirely left her face when half an hour after they walked out Anto, TC and all the rest walked back in, picked up their tools again and re-engaged their labour.

Liz leaned into the car that she had for the last thirty minutes been left to deal with on her own.

‘Do you want a hand there?’ Anto asked.

‘I’m fine.’

And wouldn’t you know, it was one of those: the bloody seat wouldn’t line up right. She hit the track a whack with the heel of her spanner.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I said’ – another whack – ‘I’m fine.’

TC was crouching down on the other side of the car, rattling around in his tool bag. ‘Anybody see my lug wrench?’ He tossed everything-but-the-lug-wrench about noisily. ‘Why is it always the lug wrench you can’t find?’

Anto interposed himself in the aperture between TC and Liz, resting his arm across the doorframe, sealing their conversation in.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘What could possibly be wrong?’ She didn’t trust herself to look at him, but it was impossible in such close confines not to see anyway his head drop forward an instant then snap back up again.

‘Wait till I tell you,’ he said, quieter. ‘It’s all very well these Yanks coming off with stuff about us being a country apart in here, but there are people in this factory who would take note if anyone who came in through our gate didn’t go out it in support of the prisoners. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

She shoved the seat with her shoulder: that would have to do. EVP could sort it out.

Only then did she meet his eye. ‘Nice speech,’ she said, ‘but maybe I am not the one you need to be trying to convince.’

*

Stylianides had obliged Randall with the personnel files and payroll lists and then had withdrawn, pleading a plane to catch for a meeting previously postponed – on two occasions – with Bennington in Coventry.

Randall, surrounded by pages with photographs clipped to the top corners, by folders containing more pages, boxes containing more folders, was coming to the realisation that he had not the faintest notion where to start, which was enough to cause his cooling anger to boil again.

He picked up the phone and at once set it back on the cradle and, standing up (his chair nearly toppled with the suddenness of it), walked down the hall. June was sitting side-on to her desk chatting to Sandra.

‘Haven’t you got that line for me yet?’

She faced front again. ‘I’m sorry: Monday, everything’s busy.’

‘Except in here obviously.’

He slapped the wall on his way out and swinging back into his own office nearly collided with the union guy, Hughes – Anthony, only it wasn’t Anthony he called himself, not Tony either...

‘This really isn’t a good time,’ Randall told him. (
Anto
, that was it.)

‘I know it isn’t, that was what I wanted to talk about.’

Randall gestured to a chair, trusting that that casual flick of his wrist set the tone for the proceedings: this was not a discussion, this was an audience granted under sufferance.

Anto considered a moment before sitting. ‘I just think it would be a grave error to overreact,’ he said then.

‘This would be to over fifty per cent of the workforce staging an unauthorised walkout in the middle of the day?’ Randall threw himself back theatrically, for the second time in a matter of minutes almost causing his seat to topple. It only added to the effect.

‘For half an hour,’ Anto said. ‘They’re all back now.’

Randall came forward again, elbows on the desk. ‘Yes, but for half an hour they were out, five hundred of them, that is at least two-hundred and fifty man-hours lost, that is
cars
lost, seven weeks before we are due to send out our first shipment to the US, and over what? The radio is saying this guy Sands is in prison for blowing up a furniture store, for Christ sakes – destroying jobs.

‘I know, but that “guy” Sands also happens to be from around this way. He’s a neighbour of a lot of the people building your cars. He’s not Sands to them, he’s Bobby. Bobby who persuaded the black taxis to put on a route out to Twinbrook because there was next to no public transport.’

‘Which wouldn’t have anything to do with the IRA’s habit of burning every bus its members can lay their hands on.’

‘Look, you have to understand what a hunger strike means to people here.’

‘Some people here: there were quite a few who didn’t follow you out the gates.’

Now it was Anto who sat back, slowly, though, shaking his head. (Reviewing the moment later Randall thought of a grandmaster who had drawn his opponent into the trap he had for several moves past been laying.) ‘Oh, I don’t think you want to go down that road,’ he said.

‘What road?’

‘You know rightly what road. The Protestants didn’t walk out so the Protestants keep their jobs? I’m sure the headlines that made would be as welcome back home as a cargo ship without cars:
DeLorean purges Catholic Workers
.’

Randall’s phone rang. He snatched at it. ‘Yes?’

A somewhat sulky June. ‘I’ve got that line to Mr DeLorean for you.’

Anto was watching him closely from across the desk.

Randall cleared his throat, of anger more than anything. ‘Put him through,’ he said and the next moment there was DeLorean, Edmunding, asking if things were all right.

Randall turned his chair round to face the window. ‘Things are just fine,’ he said and a moment later heard the door close as Anto let himself out.

‘That’s what I was hoping you were going to say,’ DeLorean said. ‘Everything depends on us making that shipment. We are drawing up plans at this end for the launch schedule.’

And he went into detail then about how field operations were to be divided, four geographical areas, Eastern, Western, Southern and Central: Edison New Jersey, Irvine California, Atlanta Georgia and dear old Detroit. There were to be two Quality Assurance Centres besides, at Irvine again serving all dealerships west of the Mississippi and Wilmington Delaware serving everywhere to the east.

‘And these Quality Assurance Centres would be...?’ Randall had until mention of them been regaining a little of the confidence that had been haemorrhaging over the previous two or three hours.

‘To be sure, to be sure. Isn’t that what they say there? Besides, the cars will have been at sea for a few days. We’ll put them through their paces one more time before we deliver them to the dealers. Means all you have to do there is concentrate on the numbers.’

Randall did not really take in a lot of what came after that – the text of the letter that was to go into the owner’s pack along with the Scotch-Brite pads and the stainless-steel shampoo, praising the faith – make that the courage (maybe he wasn’t talking to Randall at all, maybe he was dictating) – the
courage
manifest in purchasing a revolutionary new product such as the DMC-12... It was the numbers he kept coming back to: all else for now was of secondary importance to getting the numbers out.

That did not sit well with Don – for you can believe that there were many calls to his line too in the days that followed – nor would Randall have expected it to. Still, there was a date, there would be a ship leaving with space in the hold for three hundred cars. What else was there to say?

Randall was scarcely in his office at all the rest of that month, but toured the shop floors, the stores, the holding tanks for the resin, chivvying, encouraging, asking questions, on the spot or on the phone: those pallets arriving at the dock levellers –
stacking up
at the dock levellers – was there any way of speeding up the inspection? Yes, this was Mr Randall, yes he was ringing – for the fourth time now – to enquire about the automated fettling tool...
Where in God’s name was it?

He was not above donning coveralls and pitching in, starting in that fettling room where, in the continued absence of the damned tool, they needed all the help they could get. (And needed too more than just a set of coveralls: they needed hoods, a personal air supply.) God it was grim: every particle of excess fibreglass – ‘flash’ – to be removed by hand, and to hang, most of it, in the air, before the bodies were fit to leave the body-press shop. He helped cut the mats for the moulds (another process that had not yet been automated), he stripped the plastic coverings from the panels as they were being stacked on their racks (a process he doubted ever would be), he took a blowtorch to dents, sandpaper to scratches; once, while one of the men who usually did it was at the restroom, he had a go at centring the first – and crucial – roof panel to see if it could be done faster. It took the man on his return ten minutes to repair what he had done.

He did everything but switch out the lights at night.

At the end of each day he dragged himself back to Warren House and stretched out on a sofa positioned between a pair of tall, narrow speaker cabinets, listening, eyes closed in concentration, to whatever records he had that week borrowed from (or – as most often was the case – had not had time to return to) the record library. More than once it was the hum of the speakers that woke him – shivering, disoriented – hours after they had last emitted a pre-recorded note.

And so March passed. Two more prisoners – a soldier-killer and a guy caught on a street with a hand grenade – joined Sands on hunger strike. The lots continued to fill with cars.

April nineteenth, Easter Day, crept in through a damp mist that lingered into the morning and low to the ground with the curious effect that when the sun did at last appear the maisonettes looked like skyscrapers, breaking through the clouds, the hills beyond them virtual Himalayas.

The rigs had been travelling back and forth since nine o’clock the night before, but there were still, twelve hours on, scores of cars waiting to be transported to the docks.

Even though it was a Sunday – even though it was Easter – there were also, by nine a.m., scores, possibly hundreds of workers gathered. Unlike previous red-letter days theirs, today, were the only cameras in evidence. They snapped away as the cars were loaded, posing their workmates by the tailgates then passing the camera to someone else whose place in the group they took, arms folded, grinning. As each fully laden rig headed towards the exit some of them ran alongside, taking more pictures. Others stood and cried. Randall, once or twice, had to widen his own eyes to keep them from filling up. (It was, despite the sun, a watery kind of morning.) Refocusing after one such moment he saw Anto break away from a group of half a dozen women and men and walk towards him, eyebrows knitted.

His heart sank.

‘A word?’ Anto said.

‘What is it?’

‘A few of us have been talking.’ This with a jerk of the head back the way he had come. Randall couldn’t be doing with the theatrics.

‘And?’ he said shortly.

‘And we’re not happy.’

‘Well there’s a surprise.’

‘Some of the cars have been parked out here so long they’re filthy.’

Randall looked long and hard. The man was right. How many times had he stood at his window watching the clouds tumble over the brow of the hills, bringing the next weather front? Whatever soot and dirt they had picked up on their race across country to get there this lot took the full force of it.

‘We were thinking maybe we would go down to the docks later on before they were put on the ships, give them a bit of a wash.’

Randall turned to face him, struggling for words.