Gull (22 page)

‘I’ve got to say I didn’t have you pegged as the sentimental type. It’s the product that has to be protected, the brand. That goes, it creates a void and there’s no telling what will get sucked in. I wouldn’t want to be standing too close to the edge.’

Randall nodded. For all kinds of reasons it was time for him to put as much distance as possible between him and DeLorean Motor Cars Limited. He nodded again, more firmly.

Dan Stevens smiled and went to take a drink. He didn’t like what he saw in his glass, or what he didn’t see. ‘What do you say we have another of those?’

Randall made a show of looking at his watch. ‘Sure,’ he said.

*

Stevens returned to Detroit with the promise to ‘start the ball rolling’, though discreetly for now, and Randall a couple of days later travelled down the I-495 to the Quality Assurance Centre in Wilmington. The cars in the compound on Ferry Road, right on the edge of the Delaware River, were the first DMC-12s he had seen since leaving Belfast. He told himself that pang he felt was only natural: he had no quarrel with the cars themselves.

The guy who met him wore shorts with socks pulled up to just below his knees, which flexed as he stood before Randall talking, like a pair of sensate potatoes (where did
that
come from?) struggling to escape the neck of a sack. Randall was relieved when they started walking to the workshop – ‘Lead the way,’ he said, and the knees did – and he was able to relax his face, strained from the effort of not looking.

‘I’m not going to lie, it was pretty hard going the first couple of days,’ the guy said over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know how many times I had to step in to stop a fight breaking out. Mostly your guys accusing our guys of going out of their way looking for problems, taking a wheel off just to check it had been screwed on right kind of thing... It’s settled down a bit since then.’ He turned with his hand poised to open the workshop door. ‘Don’t tell them I said this, but they are good workers.’

Good workers and, it appeared, genuinely pleased to see Randall walk in the workshop door, crowding round telling him this thing they had discovered about the alternator, this other thing about the door hydraulics. Even invited him out for a drink with them that night.

‘Probably not what you’re used to, like,’ said the one they called Washers, he of the winks of understanding at the airport. ‘You have been warned.’

‘I don’t know what you think I’m used to.’

A dive bar, a couple of blocks from Riverfront Market, beer by the pitcher, a stage at one end of the room on to which in due course a young woman in satin hot pants walked and without preamble pulled off her T-shirt to reveal shamrock nipple tassels. The law of supply and demand made barely covered flesh.

No one seemed to object to the failure to give a more rounded interpretation of
northern
Irishness (two of the women did pick up their purses and head for the door, but only, as they said, because there was a fella doing the same thing down the street, and no tassels) and when a tape recorder belatedly struck up ‘Danny Boy’, a group standing by the corner of the bar formed a circle and ignoring the now twirling shamrocks entirely sang along into one another’s faces, glasses raised and touching.

‘I needn’t ask if you have been enjoying yourself here,’ Randall said to the guy nearest him.

‘This? Sure it’s a bit of fun, isn’t it? But I have, aye, I’ve been enjoying it rightly. Be glad all the same to get back.’

‘Homesick?’

‘Not exactly. I’m not just saying this because you’re standing there, but I miss the work, you know, the cars constantly coming down the line at you – keeps you on your toes.’

There was a loud cheer from the front. The satin hot pants had come off now too. A pair of even smaller pants underneath,
Slainte!
across the behind, which was presented in a swift, toe-touching finale.

‘What about you?’ the worker said. ‘Will you not be sorry when you have to head back to Belfast again?’

Randall frowned. The man drew his head back. ‘Wait, you are coming back with us to Belfast, aren’t you?’

And the look in his eyes, it was as though he fully expected the answer to be no, because that was what life had taught him to expect, that just when things seemed as though they might actually be starting to go well something always happened to throw them into doubt.

Randall slipped out of that look by turning to the bar and ordering another pitcher. Pitchers all round, make that.

*

It was quite possible that he was still drunk the following afternoon when he rang Dan Stevens. Certainly the woman whom he had rung a couple of minutes before
thinking
he was ringing Dan Stevens told him that he was, or at least she did the second time. ‘Read the goddamn number, or get someone sober to read it for you.’

(It was the third three, for some reason he kept seeing it as an eight.)

Stevens cautioned him not to be too rash. It would be understandable if he was feeling a little conflicted. Hell, if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be the man Dan took him to be. So by all means vent some spleen – let rip, in fact – but promise Dan this, that he would call back in a couple of hours when he was...

‘I am fine just as I am.’ He held up a random selection of fingers in front of his face. Three, not six, or eight. He thought maybe he let a laugh escape, much to Dan Stevens’ audible displeasure.

‘I am bound to tell you you are doing a very foolish thing. Some doors you will find do not open twice.’

‘I appreciate your concern, Dan, really, but what can I tell you? Turns out I am the sentimental type after all.’

He was betting his stash on the same square as DeLorean.

*

There were still army-issue hoses in the corridors of the administration building when he got back to Dunmurry, sand-filled fire buckets stationed outside the doors, one of which now bore the name Bill Haddad.

Whatever had happened to change his mind in the days since Randall had spoken to him in his office (the funeral pictures might not have been incidental), DeLorean had decided that the image of the factory at least was under threat and accordingly had dispatched Haddad from New York to oversee PR. Randall had not seen him since the un-festive Christmas drinks in the Waldorf Astoria, in the course of which Haddad had repeatedly pulled rank, dropping names (mostly Kennedys) and boasting of his in-depth knowledge of the Northern Irish political scene. So obviously he reacted to actually being there as though it was some sort of punishment.

Or that at least was the impression he gave at the meeting that Don, at Randall’s suggestion, called between management and unions to try to minimise the impact on production of any future hunger strike deaths.

‘Let’s not beat about the bush here,’ said Randall, ‘how many more do we think are going to die?’

Haddad pushed his glasses up on to his forehead and with the same three fingertips massaged the bridge of his nose.
Has it come to this?

One of the union guys, taking his lead, threw his pen down on the table. ‘I object,’ he said.

‘And I am only trying to be rational. The worst thing we can do is to leave ourselves unprepared.’

‘Well...’ Anto broke the silence that ensued, ‘there’s the three boys who started in March... Hughes, McCreesh and O’Hara... And then there’s Joe McDonnell who went on’ – he cleared his throat of nothing – ‘who went on as soon as Bobby died, and presumably if any of the other three die there will be boys go on after them.’

Randall had been writing all this down. He stopped a second after Anto did. ‘Do you really think Thatcher will let it go that far?’

The guy who had thrown his pen down grunted; at least he was still in the room.

‘Nobody thought she would let it go this far,’ Anto said. ‘And I can’t see the hunger strikers backing down now. They’re inside. It’s like its own wee world, prison. Their loyalty is to each other before their families or even the IRA.’

The other men nodded.

Randall readied his pen again. ‘So, what are we saying... Four? Five?’

Anto shuddered. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘But we have to think about it.’

‘Maybe five, but after that... wiser heads would have to prevail, wouldn’t they?’

‘Let’s say six,’ Randall said. ‘Worst-case scenario. And if we were to allow half a day per funeral, all those who wanted to attend, that is...?’

The men looked at one another. Anto again spoke into their silence.

‘They’ll not all be in Belfast. Hughes and O’Hara are both Derry, McCreesh is South Armagh. The like of those I think we could keep down to a symbolic walkout – two minutes’ silence on the road in front of the gate sort of thing.’

Randall nodded. Finally they were getting somewhere. ‘I am sure we can work around that. Just one thing... You see that banner they’ve been carrying – the car smashing through the big H Block? Do you think they could lose that?’

For the first time since they had walked in the door the union men smiled. The guy who had thrown down his pen was slipping it now into his inside pocket. ‘What if they just kept it out of sight of the cameras?’

Haddad sat forward. ‘Point of order, that is a PR matter.’

‘Well what do you want them to do with the banner?’

He gathered up his things and headed for the boardroom door.

‘Bill,’ Randall called after him. ‘They’re waiting for an answer here.’

‘Keep them out of sight of the cameras, of course,’ he said angrily.

*

One of those who joined the strike after the first few deaths had been a member of the IRA gang (they would have preferred ‘unit’) that bombed the Conway Hotel. The car they were making their escape in had broken down before it was even out of the driveway. That was when, as the security guards at the Conway had told it to Randall, they burst into the off-duty police officer’s house, demanding the keys of his car. (What were the chances of that, indeed?) This particular guy had managed to get away when the shooting started, but only a few months later he was out again, right in the heart of downtown, on his way to plant a bomb, again, when who should appear but the cops – again – and give chase to the van he was driving. He ditched that and tried to hijack another car, but the engine at the crucial moment cut out on him.

It could happen to anyone with any car. Ask Johnny Carson.

On such small mechanical details did fortunes sometimes turn.

He died after seventy-three days without food. Twenty-five, he was.

A waste, whatever way you cut it.

The one thousandth car came down the assembly line in the second week of June. Men and women were kissing it before they passed it on to the next section. By the time it got to their end of the shop there were balloons attached to the wing mirrors, streamers hanging off the rear bumpers.

‘Didn’t we do well?’ said TC, an unconvincing Bruce Forsyth, barely even in the same language group, said Anto.

Like the nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine that had come down the line before it, the car, its streamers and balloons catching in the wind, was driven straight out of the assembly shop doors and into EVP. ‘Fine-tuning’ was the term used now, to minimise the work required when the cars were taken off the ships at the other end, because, despite the weeks of retraining, work ‘Stateside’ was still needed, although listening to some of the stories the men brought back from over there Liz didn’t wonder at it. The ones the women brought back were even more lurid. (They all of them, women and men, sported badges on their overalls, given to them by their American co-workers: Honorary POG. Look like a Pig Work like a Dog, it stood for. There were no letters for Party like a Wild Animal.) If you were to believe even the half of it they must only have gone into the workshop in the mornings for respite from the nights.

The fifteen hundredth car passed almost without comment. When it came through their section in fact Liz was on a comfort break. It was one of the Americanisms that she and Anto and TC had readily adopted, not to save them the embarrassment of admitting they sat on, or stood before, porcelain, voiding their bodies of waste, but because it better conveyed the amplitude of the ‘timeout’, incorporating as it often did a dander round the factory harvesting news and what passed in there for jokes (sample: what do you call a female chipmunk? A chipnun), a stop-off at the vending machines behind the chassis line, now and again a fag. (Liz’s official line – to herself – was that she didn’t smoke. Neither did the other two really. All the same every couple of weeks some one of the three of them would turn up with a box of ten, like they might with a box of Jaffa Cakes or a bag of Wine Gums: a wee change.) There were times when she didn’t even have to ask, when Anto and TC would look at her and seem to read the thought before it was fully formed in her mind.

‘Comfort break?’

‘Do you know, now that you mention it... But don’t one of you...?’

‘Nah, listen, go on ahead.’

‘Aye, do.’

‘All right then, I will.’

That was the sort they were. That was the sort the factory was: a happy worker was a productive worker, even if she wasn’t productive every last minute of the working day.

*

Randall wired the photo of the two-thousandth car off the line to New York. The workers had posed it themselves, out in the parking lot, cramming as many people as they could fit into the frame. Some of the ones higher up Randall had no idea what was supporting them unless it was sheer elation.

He received a call in the middle of that same afternoon.

‘Congratulations! I have the picture right here. Now there’s a sight to brighten a fellow’s morning.’

It sounded as though he was on speakerphone, at the limit almost of the device’s range. Randall had witnessed it many times, the way he conducted conversations, moving about the office, signing papers, reading unrelated files, communicating with Carole, Maur, Nesseth, Randall himself on occasion, by hand gesture or scribbled note or simply by holding down the secrecy button for tens of seconds at a time and talking over (or was that under?) whoever was talking to him.