Gull (26 page)

‘Here,’ he said, ‘and here...’ Randall wrote his name twice. ‘And that’s us.’ The manager smiled. ‘Can I offer you a drink, perhaps?’

‘I had better not.’

‘Of course, of course.’ The manager looked despondently at the ground before Randall’s feet. At his feet themselves, maybe, his shoes. He had made an error of judgement – an error perhaps of national judgement.

‘In other circumstances, mind you...’ said Randall.

‘Of course.’ The manager’s face brightened, but only a little. ‘Of course.’

Randall was offered a drink at the docks too, by the harbour master, ‘a small drop of something’, to show there were no hard feelings.

‘I understand entirely,’ Randall said, breaking off to blow on the cheque to make sure the ink was dry. ‘I think I would be happier if I knew the cars were safely through the gates first.’

A harbour-police car was already on its way to where the transporters were parked up to tell them to turn around again. The drivers sounded their horns as they passed Randall standing with the harbour master.

It was by now approaching a quarter to six and thoroughly dark. ‘OK,’ said Randall and clapped his hands under his arms – he had only now remembered that he had nothing heavier on than a sport coat, ‘I’ll have that drink now.’

He stopped in the town centre afterwards, emboldened by the generous measure of whiskey the harbour master had poured for him (the Lord only knew what a big drop would have looked like), and by the larger than usual number of people abroad on the streets.

It was the night, he quickly gathered, of the Christmas lights ‘switch-on’. The ceremony was over by the time he arrived, the tree before the City Hall – tall and rangy, teenager-ish – already illuminated. The stores were still open, which, he had been here long enough now to know, was something of a novelty, the practice of the last decade being for everyone, shop workers as well as shoppers, to get the hell out the moment the clocks struck five.

Some of the civilian searchers at the security gates straddling Donegall Place, the main shopping street, had attached sprigs of mistletoe to the metal grilles above their heads. Tonight at least the people who presented themselves before them, bags already open, arms half raised, did so without too much of a scowl. Randall had just emerged, level with the doors of Boots the Chemist, from the customary, perfunctory frisk – a couple of pats on the sides, a palm swept up the back of the jacket:
on you go
– when a firmer hand on his shoulder arrested his progress.

‘I had been hoping to bump into you some time soon, although I hadn’t quite pictured it like this.’

Jennings – for it was his voice, his hand – was dressed in his off-duty clothes, camel hair coat folded over the arm of a navy blazer. His shirt was the palest blue and open at the neck from which an actual cravat – silk, naturally – puffed out.

‘If it’s about the business at the docks,’ Randall said (was there anything in this city the man
didn’t
know about), ‘that has all been taken care of.’

For once, though, it was Jennings whose face betrayed his ignorance. ‘The docks?’ He shook his head and steered Randall a few feet to the left to the ornate entrance to a narrow, yellow-lit shopping arcade.

‘He has made enquiries about deferring the first interest payment.’ If there had been any doubt who the pronoun referred to, the mention of an interest payment dispelled it. ‘I don’t know what influence you have with him, but whatever you have I would urge you to use it to dissuade him. There is still time.’

At several points in the course of their exchange he had glanced over his shoulder, to ensure that they were not being overheard, Randall assumed, but now Jennings as he took his leave fell into step with a tall and equally well-groomed youth who had been standing all this time behind him. Son, could have been, or nephew, or... Randall realised that what he knew about the man would fit on the back of a postage stamp.

He realised as well that the pleasant effects of the harbour master’s whiskey had suddenly worn right off. Ho-ho-ho, to you too, Mr Jennings.

DeLorean when they spoke the next day made much of Randall’s initiative in the docks’ ‘mix-up’ – twice what he had paid out would be lodged in his personal account before the close of business there today – and made light of Jennings’s concerns over the interest payment. It was pretty much standard practice to miss the first one, although frankly – a little firmer now – it was not Jennings’s place to bandy about the details of a private conversation, in fact he had a good mind to take it up...

‘I wouldn’t if I was you.’ They both paused. He had never before said no to anything DeLorean had proposed. ‘At least, not just yet,’ he added quickly.

Nothing from the other end of the line for several seconds more, then a long breath out. ‘All right, in December then, face to face.’

‘You’re coming over again?’

‘For the Christmas party. We have come through a hell of a year. I want us all to celebrate together.’

*

The way Liz heard it (she was on nights that week) the choice of hotel was decided by the toss of a coin, the workers who used the Twinbrook gate not being best keen on the Conway, nor the Seymour-Hill-gate users on the Greenan Lodge – aka the (Oh, the wit of it!) Fenian Lodge – on Black’s Road.

A large crowd had gathered in the canteen to watch. Randall it was who stepped forward with the coin, which was taken in turn by a representative of each gate – this one biting down on it after checking it wasn’t double-sided, that one pretending to slip it into his pocket – before being returned to him for tossing, best of three. No prizes for guessing who called (crowned) heads. It came down tails the first two: Greenan Lodge. A groan for every whoop, but then, as the whoopers all said as they walked back to work, side by side with the groaners, sure it was Christmas, one place was as good, or as bad, as another.

The Born Again set said there was no good about any of them, ever, and let it be known that they would not be attending.

Like they would be fucking missed, said Steve, who was telling all this to Liz. Steve’s wife, Niamh (‘we’re the perfect couplet’), was working days. They had one hour a day in which to swap news ‘and other stuff’, which Liz assured him she would rather not hear about. What she was interested in hearing that particular night was that DeLorean was coming over for the party too, that he might even have an important announcement to make, which was reassuring because a rumour had run round the factory one afternoon the week before that three of the transporter lorries had been refused entry to the docks – a huge wodge of cash owing.

Even the fact that no lorries arrived back at the factory didn’t put paid to the rumour entirely. There were still one or two who maintained they knew what they knew and that was that, but maybe there would always be one or two, just like there would always be a Born Again set getting their knickers in a twist about people having a few drinks and singing sentimental songs every December.

Randall had noticed the last time he had seen him that DeLorean was carrying a Sony Walkman, not playing music on it,
carrying
, turning it over in his hands at idle moments in the back seat of the car, examining the internal spindles, the mechanism that opened the cassette-tape drawer.
Why didn’t I think of this?

He thought it might be a nice gesture to make up a tape of the records he had been taking out of the library on Botanic Avenue, evidence of how his education was proceeding: Lester Young and Mezz Mezzrow, Barney Bigard’s ‘Nine O’Clock Beer’ and ‘C-Jam Blues’.

He spent hours over the selection and sequence (open with the drum fill in ‘Concerto for Clarinet’ – Artie had to be in there somewhere), hours more over the recording itself, lying on his stomach in front of the hi-fi waiting for the right moment to press pause and minimise the hiss between tracks. (The only other tape he could remember having made was for Pattie, her first birthday after they met. Sitting with a small cassette recorder on his lap, microphone pointed at the record player. ‘Laughing’, by The Guess Who. ‘You took away everything I had you put the hurt on me.’ In retrospect maybe the writing had been on the wall there from the very start.)

He even had June help him print up a custom-made liner, track-listing on the inside and on the outside a DMC-12 flanked by a clarinet and a tenor sax, the title arcing in a banner overhead.
Sounds of DeLoreland
, he called it, in imitation of Birdland.

Kept it in the top left-hand drawer of his desk, sneaking looks now and then, half the time not even aware he was doing it.

All in all, he was pretty proud of it.

*

Tinsel hung all about the assembly shop. There were shoe-whitener snowflakes on the bathroom mirrors and cartoons pinned up of sleighs with gull-wing doors. Anto told Liz there had been an agreement between all the union reps: they were to inform their members that only Christmas trees and Santas were permitted behind the dashboards and in the seat wells from now to Epiphany.

He and Liz were sharing the dayshift with another woman, Amanda, TC having booked a week’s leave for his latest City and Guilds exams.

She had moved from the north-west of England specially, had Amanda (a typical Amanda sentence structure was that), her and her husband and their three wee girls. Lasses, she called them. Gracie Fields, Anto called her, until she started calling him Bert Lynch, after the James Ellis character in
Z Cars
. ‘I don’t sound anything like him,’ Anto said. ‘And did you actually listen to Gracie Fields ever?’ asked Amanda.

There was no work to be had anywhere over there, at least no work to compare with this.

‘You may hope that the word doesn’t spread too far or there’ll be a whole lot more like me come the New Year.’

‘The more the merrier,’ said Liz.

Anto on that occasion said nothing.

*

DeLorean flew in via Prestwick in Scotland late on the afternoon of the day of the Christmas party, looking as he always did at the end of those transatlantic flights as though he had ridden a couple of blocks in a cab.

‘We have to go to Stormont Castle,’ was the first thing he said at arrivals. First thing to Randall: he had already stopped to pose for a photograph with a woman and her baby daughter and had answered good-naturedly the inevitable shout of ‘Here, give us one of your cars’, from a man egged on by his friends, with the line that his particular car was getting the extra-special treatment and would be another few weeks yet.

‘Secretary of state?’ asked Randall.

‘Actually, I was hoping to speak to his boss: conference call.’ DeLorean had already in the time it took him to say this over his shoulder (Randall as ever was half a pace behind) strode two-thirds of the way down the Plexiglas corridor to the exit. He paused at the end to allow Randall to catch up. ‘A few loose ends I’d like to get tied up before the holidays.’

There was a point on the journey in from the airport where the motorway bent to the right and the city opened up like a child’s pop-up book, the commercial core on the right-hand page and on the left the docks and the shipyard, with low green hills on the far margin, the underused parliament building standing out against them, elephant white.

They crossed the river – the spine of the book – into a neighbourhood of cramped houses and single-window shop fronts, with here and there a derelict-looking factory to relieve the monotony. The Christmas decorations – green, red and gold – competed for space and attention with the year-round displays of the British flag and coordinating bunting. After the initial exchanges in the arrivals hall DeLorean had withdrawn into an almost meditative state, gathering his thoughts maybe for the conversation ahead. Randall had the
Sounds of DeLoreland
in his jacket pocket and once or twice reached inside to take it out, but, no, this wasn’t the moment.

They approached the Stormont grounds by the side gates. The driver wound down his window. ‘I have Mr John DeLorean here,’ he told the policeman on duty. (Mr John DeLorean dipped his head and smiled over the driver’s shoulder.)

‘Is that right?’ said the policeman and proceeded to sweep the outside of the car with a bomb detector, squatting to reach up into the wheel arches. He checked the trunk and under the hood, drumming his fingers on the latter when he had closed it again. Stopping suddenly. ‘OK.’

‘What was that about?’ DeLorean asked as the car pulled away.

The driver shrugged. ‘Some people, the wee bit of power goes to their head. Also’ – he changed from second gear to third – ‘it’s cold out there. He’s probably saying to himself why should I be the only one to suffer.’

They bypassed the parliament building entirely, following the road between the trees to the castle, which to Randall’s eyes more resembled the home of a Hollywood star of the Douglas Fairbanks era, and which for the ten years of what the British called Direct Rule was where the real power resided.

Randall turned as he got out of the car and slipped the cassette to the driver. ‘Maybe you could put this on when we come back.’ All the loose ends tied, the holidays about to begin.

More security awaited them at the top of the steps up to the front door – a chrome wand with a loop at the end, which traced the outline of their jackets and pants with profuse apologies from the policeman wielding it, who was obviously having a better, or at least warmer day than his friend at the gate.

‘Will you both be going in to see the secretary of state?’ asked the functionary who issued them with their passes.

‘Yes,’ said DeLorean before Randall could say no. DeLorean gripped him by the elbow and added out the corner of his mouth. ‘You don’t think I’d go in without my best man, do you? Besides, it always pays to have someone with you in these circumstances. You would be amazed how often a collective amnesia strikes them otherwise. “Did we
really
say that?”’

A door opened at the end of the corridor that the functionary directed them into and Jennings appeared, restored to his pinstriped suit and tie knotted just-so.