Gull (21 page)

Stylianides was there, shouting, ‘I am supposed to be head of security.’

The captain laid a hand on Randall’s shoulder. ‘Try not to worry, everyone freezes their first time.’

Randall, his first time, he could not find tongue to tell the captain, did not freeze, he fled, somewhere very far inside. His helicopter had made an unscheduled landing in a clearing in torrential rain. Aftermath of an ambush. The radio operator whose call had brought them was sitting splayed-legged on the ground bleeding through the dressing on his stomach, alternating between crying and laughing. A medic was dressing a head wound nearby, the body to which the head was attached already to Randall’s eyes inert. The definitively dead were under capes, seven of them. Randall’s commander was arguing with a lieutenant, pointing at the corpses – ‘We’re supplies, we can take the wounded, but we can’t take these guys’ – and then from the edge of the clearing as the lieutenant ducked back out of the range of the rotors there came a bright light – that was all Randall could remember of it – a bright light getting brighter, brighter... blinding.

Then it was one week later and he was under a bed in a hospital in Saigon. A nurse was looking in at him through a gap in the blanket draped over the frame to make a canopy. She smiled. ‘Are you ready to come out now?’

His commander had wanted to have him put on a charge, refusal to obey an order, specifically the order to get out of the chopper when the mortar hit the clearing and the lieutenant disappeared along with the wounded radio operator and the medic winding bandages round a dead or dying comrade, who disappeared too, his head at any rate.

Dissociative fugue, was the diagnosis of the doctor who had, all unknown to Randall, been monitoring him since he had been brought in and sought sanctuary on the floor. He literally had not been himself from that moment to this.

‘Fuck fugue,’ was the commander’s reaction relayed to Randall when he was transferred at length to another supplies unit. ‘I have been in this army long enough to know cowardice when I see it.’

*

Liz heard it on the shop floor a couple of days later that, contrary to what he had told her the last time they talked, Randall had in fact gone to the States with the volunteers for retraining. Washers had phoned his Big Mate before he had even left Aldergrove for the connecting flight. Your man Randall, he told him, had weighed in while they were queuing at the check-in desk taking the piss out of each other’s passport photos: Was that before you’d the operation...? Did the cops not ask you for their photo back...? Anything to take their minds off the fact that they were to be locked in a metal cylinder for seven hours six miles above the Atlantic Ocean.

‘First class, of course. Gave us some crap about it being the only seat he could get by the time he booked. I tell you, I said to him, if it was me and I could I would do it every time and wouldn’t give a monkey’s what anybody thought of me.’

‘Imagine going away and missing all the fun and games here,’ Big Mate said, winding up his report.

The fun and games had kept the factory closed the whole of the first day after Bobby Sands died. Practically the only buses moving in town were being pushed by the wee lads who had hijacked them, under instruction from the not so wee lads standing in the wings, to reinforce their barricades.

Even now on the second day only about one worker in three had been able to plot a way through the mayhem, or had attempted to.

Robert had astonished Liz this morning by proposing that he drive her right up to the gate. ‘It isn’t right, other people dictating to you when you can and can’t work,’ he said and she resisted the temptation to point out how rich that was coming from him, because she was genuinely grateful – touched – and then too maybe some of his reservations about her being here had not been entirely unjustified. Forget for the moment those Sunday mornings in Botanic Gardens (and what did they amount to really?): imagine she had told Robert that she did want to put her name down for the States; imagine she had insisted on it – as she had insisted, despite him, on applying for the job in the first place, on going for the interview and accepting the letter of offer; imagine she had wound up in a hotel somewhere over there with Edmund Randall?

‘Fun and games,’ Washers’ Big Mate said again as he walked off, slapping his
Sun
against his thigh. ‘Fun and games.’

Randall had left the DeLorean workers at the airport, one group waiting for an onward flight to California, and the Santa Ana QAC, the rest for the buses that would take them to the centre in Wilmington, and carried on by himself to Manhattan. (One of the Wilmington-bound workers told him with many accompanying winks he didn’t blame him not taking the bus with them. ‘But I’m going in a different direction,’ Randall said and the man winked again. ‘You don’t have to explain to me.’) Rain was falling when he got out of the car in front of 280 Park Avenue. A doorman ran down the steps to the sidewalk opening an umbrella. ‘Came right out of nowhere,’ he said and sure enough in the time it took Randall to cross the lobby to the elevators and the express car to deposit him on the forty-third floor the skies had cleared so much you could have been forgiven for thinking it had never rained at all.

Carole had been taking instruction from Marion Gibson when he entered, head bowed over her desk, and was barely able to get out from behind it in time to announce him.

‘Edmund!’ DeLorean looked up, took off the spectacles perched on the end of his nose and gave Randall his broadest smile. ‘The way the news was reporting it I’m surprised there were flights leaving there at all. Luckily I have been in the news often enough myself to know not to believe everything I see or hear.’

‘We had to get the army in.’ (He could hardly get the sentence out.)

‘Isn’t it good to know we have support?’ DeLorean was round in front of his desk now, buttocks and feet firmly planted.

Randall was pacing, right to left, left to right. ‘And there’s still the funeral to come. There could be more trouble at that. A whole lot more.’

DeLorean spread his hands. He was a giant bird against the window of sky at his back, riding the currents.

‘Think back to the very beginning of all this, Edmund – think of the hurdles we had to overcome. And look where we are now.’

He did not, Randall knew, mean the office per se, but that inevitably was what he found himself focusing on, the apricot carpet, the bust of Lincoln, the life-size photo study of father and son, the telescope through which in rare idle moments, DeLorean liked to look down on to the street below.

‘Whatever the next few days throw up we will get through that too. I feel it in here.’ He gripped his shirt front, held it till his knuckles whitened. Then let go and pushed himself up off the desk. ‘Now, Carole, can we get some coffee for this man?’

The coffee arrived a few minutes later in a pot with an exaggeratedly belled base. DeLorean insisted that Randall take the first cup. ‘They are lovely people, the Brits, but they don’t know the first thing about making coffee.’

And Randall thought as he sipped (thought
through
the recognition that it was true about the coffee) how far indeed he had travelled since he last heard that particular B word used.

DeLorean toasted with this cup: ‘The Brits’ – smiling – ‘and the Irish.’

The phone rang in the outer office. Carole was already halfway there. She answered it on the third ring. A few seconds later the phone on the desk at DeLorean’s back rang too.

‘Excuse me,’ he said and leaned across to answer, one long leg rising in counterweight. ‘Hey... Yes, it was swell running into you.’ Randall was struck by the contrast between the ‘swell’ and the strain in the voice. Maybe he had reached back further than he had anticipated to pick up the phone. ‘Of course, next time I’m at the ranch... Well, that’s good of Hetrick to offer, but it’s really no bother... No, no, I will, I’ll keep it in mind.’

He replaced the phone on the cradle and swung his body round again, frowning slightly, as he searched for something on his desk... found it: a sheet of paper. ‘By the way, I want you to start proceedings for a compensation claim when you get back, for the riot damage.’

‘The Portakabin?’

‘“Additional Office Accommodation” – that is where the Hethel inventory was being relocated, isn’t that what you told me?’

‘Well there was very little actually in there yet. Most of it is still in transit.’

‘So we’ll have to pay for storage somewhere else. I’ve had finance here run the figures.’ He gave them a final check. ‘Ten million sound about right?’

Randall shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t know...’

‘I mean, I told them you were right there on the spot, but maybe, you know, in the hurly-burly of the moment’ – he had Randall’s eye now; held it – ‘you were nearly too close to form any sort of rational judgement.’

Randall took temporary refuge behind his coffee cup. Did he know? (Stylianides?) Was he guessing? Was this part of what he had seen in him the day they met in Kimmerly’s office – the man who had never shipped overseas looking into the eyes of the man who had shrunk from danger – that, never mind the bullshit detector (itself a piece of undetected bullshit), here was someone with something still to prove to himself? Or, worse, here was someone who at a crucial juncture could be relied on to capitulate again?

DeLorean selected a platinum ballpoint pen from the desk tidy, clicked the top, and made a bold blue tick on the page.

‘So, ten, then.’

*

First thing Randall did on arrival at his apartment was shower for half an hour trying to get the smell of the place out of his hair. He made a phone call, standing with the towel draped over his shoulder, then went to bed and slept until twenty after two the following afternoon. He got up and showered again, faster this time, and whistling. His appointment, subject of yesterday’s phone call, was for four o’clock. Nothing so formal as lunch or dinner, they had agreed. A civilised mid-afternoon cocktail. Crowne Plaza: Randall’s suggestion. Might as well lay more than one ghost.

With that in mind he stopped in too at the bar across the street for a shot of Polish vodka and might easily have persuaded himself of the wisdom of a second were it not for the television set in a corner of the room, across whose screen, at the precise moment he set down his empty glass, moved grim-faced people – thousands and thousands of them – following the coffin of a man who had starved himself to death to make the point that leaving a bomb in a furniture store was a political act.

He felt a secret shame. He was almost afraid that if he risked opening his mouth again his voice, inflected by his time there, would betray his complicity. And that was before he saw the banner off to one side. A DMC-12 smashing through a giant capital H:
DeLorean Workers Against the H Blocks
.

He entered the hotel lounge more assertively than he might otherwise have done. Seated at a table to the left of the door, Dan Stevens got to his feet hurriedly and a little more shakily perhaps than the first and last time Randall had met him at the
Daily News
. (Well, the man
had
been around since the days – a couple of thousand further away now than then – of Walter Chrysler.)

‘Randall.’ He indicated a seat on the other side of the table. ‘Please, sit.’

Randall did. The waiter was on him almost instantly. ‘Vodka martini,’ he answered before he was even asked, and Stevens nodded his approval – of the drink, the unhesitating way it was ordered, the combination of the two, who knew?

His own drink was something bourbon based. He centred it on the scalloped paper coaster. ‘It was good of you to make time to see me on your trip. Tell you the truth I wasn’t even sure you would call. I know we didn’t exactly get off on the right foot last time.’

‘I was probably a little hair-trigger that day.’

‘You had every right to be. You were taking a big step. I got to tell you, there are a lot of people in the industry who are surprised – a little upset some of them – that the factory has lasted this long.’ He lifted the glass, turned the coaster over, and went through the business of centring again. ‘John as ever is taking all the credit while saying he doesn’t want to take all the credit. So far as we can see, though, looking in, a lot of it is down to you.’

Randall tried to deflect the praise. ‘For the longest time I was used to people asking what it was I actually did,’ he said, to which Dan Stevens replied that sometimes the most important jobs were the hardest to explain.

Randall went to interject again. Dan Stevens held up his hand: hear me out here. ‘There has been a pretty high turnover at executive level, which is no more than was to be expected, working with John, but it can be destabilising. It could have – should have – been even more destabilising and because it wasn’t people start looking at who or what is keeping the ship steady, who has been there throughout... And we heard about what happened at the unveiling: quick thinking.’ He drank, ran his tongue over his teeth behind closed lips. ‘If that’s what you can do there in, let’s be honest, pretty hostile conditions, think what you could do here with all our expertise and experience behind you, and on twice the salary you are on at the moment.’

‘
Twice?
’

Stevens shrugged. ‘Three times. We will hook you up with our real estate people in Detroit, find a property out in Bloomfield Hills.’

The martini arrived, lemon rind bobbing like a kiss curl.

Stevens addressed his glass to it, but stopped short of drinking. ‘You have to remember, John is a gambler... Oh, not with his own money... His instinct is to keep raising the stakes – scares people off:
he must have something
. But sooner or later someone will call him on it, and then...’

‘A whole lot of people in Belfast will lose their jobs.’

‘Well, that’s true too, although John wouldn’t be alone in thinking of workers as chips.’

‘Chips!’

Stevens tilted his head a little to one side. He seemed almost embarrassed by the reaction.