Gull (30 page)

He addressed himself to them in unequal proportion.

Some time around ten he collapsed sideways on the sofa. He woke at three in the morning with – Oh, God – barely enough time to reach the kitchen sink before he threw up. He was sick then, off and on, for the next twenty-four hours. In between times he lay under the bedcovers and shivered. At some point he had a something-more-than-dream: he was in an elevator travelling up and up and up – the numbers above the door made no sense – and then suddenly he was out and he knew for certain this was the forty-third floor, knew it even though he all he could see was bare walls, bare floors, glass and empty sky beyond. He ran from room to room: nothing, nothing, nothing, was or ever had been...

His legs went from under him.

He was on the carpet in the sitting room of Warren House, the bed sheet he had tripped himself up with still tangled round his lower right leg. The vodka bottle was on its side under a low table next to his head. He straightened it up and was surprised to discover it was only a little less than two-thirds full. For the first time it occurred to him that whatever was ailing him did not emanate entirely from that source. Only then was he able to rise above his shame and phone a doctor whose first question – he was sorry to have to ask it – was had he been drinking – not
that
much and not for the best part of a day now – and whose second was had he been eating – a bit of stale bread, pickles...

The doctor came in person at first light, smelling heavily of pipe smoke, which was to say the least unhelpful. Randall could barely turn his face towards him. He nodded or shook his head weakly to a whole raft of new questions – about work, in the main, but home-life too, who, if anyone, was around to look after him – while the doctor conducted his examination, paying particular attention to the neck, the throat, the underarms and the abdomen.

He put away his stethoscope and took out his pipe, which he began idly to fill. ‘The vomiting needless to say will have drained you and the drinking on an empty stomach was, as any teenager could tell you, asking for trouble.’ (Randall was going to bring up the pickles and the bread then swallowed hard against the thought of bringing them up.) The doctor returned the pipe to his pocket unlit. ‘But I am satisfied there is something else there. Your system, frankly, is in a bit of a mess. You need time away from work.’

Randall found the strength to laugh.

‘I mean right away from everything connected to it. I would be happy to write you a line for a week, a fortnight, however long you think you need. You are no earthly use to anyone like this.’

He left time for his words to sink in.

‘A week, then,’ Randall said at last.

The doctor nodded: that was more like it. He put on a pair of half-moon glasses to write, head tilting back a little more the further he got down the page. ‘Here’ – tearing off the page – ‘I made it for two just in case. If you decide to go back before then they will all think you are a hero.’

In the doorway he turned and looked about the room. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, it’s a lovely house and everything, but if you had somewhere else you could be, other people around you, just till you’re on your feet again...’ His expression as he spoke gradually changed: this was as pointless, he had obviously concluded, as recommending a longer sick-line. He drew in breath. ‘I’ll see myself out.’

Randall fell asleep again almost at once, and almost at once was back on the empty forty-third floor, returning there at intervals throughout another fretful night. The following morning he felt well enough to make tea in a mug, which he drank, black of necessity, with three spoonfuls of sugar. By midday he was showered and dressed. Three hours later he was at the airport.

*

The first person he met as he came out of the elevator was Maur Dubin, fur-coated in defiance of the season, and immediately behind Maur a phalanx of uniformly young, uniformly six-foot-plus removal men, toting paintings, pieces of sculpture, sealed cardboard cartons. More cartons lay open on the secretaries’ desks, on the floor all around them; the lobby walls were stripped bare.

It was as though he walked into the movie of his life the scene before the one he had been dreaming. He took a step back, but already the elevator was closing behind him.

‘Hey, there!’ Maur clicked his fingers, to summon the name, it seemed, as much as attract attention. ‘Randall! Hold that door!’

No sooner had he called out than DeLorean’s own voice roared from inside his office. ‘
Randall?
Is Edmund here?’

Randall presented himself in the doorway.

DeLorean was standing in the middle of the floor where his desk had used to be, phone in hand. Shirts were strewn about the carpet, some still in their packaging, others unwrapped, arms outstretched, blues and lilacs, plain and striped, white collars and toning. ‘But this is crazy,’ he said, taking the words out of Randall’s mouth. He held the phone at arm’s length, earpiece tilted towards Randall. Far, far, away a ring tone sounded. ‘I was just this minute trying to call you in Belfast. They told me you were sick.’

‘And they told me you weren’t giving up yet.’

DeLorean drew back his head, puzzled, then looked about him. Now he got it. ‘You mean this?’ He laughed. ‘Didn’t you see the memo? We’re not giving up, we’re
moving down
, to the thirty-fifth floor.’ The thirty-fifth floor – the ‘basement’ in the DeLorean company parlance – had up to now been home to several of the company’s non-executive offices. ‘Doing our bit to help the economy drive.’

‘Excuse me.’ An elderly man slipped into the room through the door behind Randall, suit jacket off to reveal, beneath his vest, a lilac-striped shirt to match one of those spread out on the floor. ‘Anything?’ he asked DeLorean, and Randall at the second time of asking placed the accent, a variant on Jennings’s Scots.

DeLorean glanced apologetically at Randall. ‘I wonder if you could give us a couple of minutes. Mr Simpson here has come all the way from Edinburgh, Scotland... not just for me, you understand, but this is his only afternoon in New York.’

Randall felt his brow furrow. At a time like this he was buying shirts? Imported tailor-made shirts?

Of course he was. No matter how parlous the situation he was still the public face of the company, a face, moreover, whose appearance on the cover of a magazine could generate millions of dollars of desperately needed publicity.

What was he to do, go about in a
hair
shirt?

‘You don’t have to explain anything,’ Randall said.

DeLorean walked across the floor and embraced him, fists tightening between Randall’s shoulder blades. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said and Randall could not deny that to be seen by him – to be so warmly welcomed – was good too.

‘I’m not going to pretend that I thought it would ever come to this,’ DeLorean told Randall when he returned next day, rested, back to his old self, as good as, ‘and I am certainly not going to pretend that it is character-forming or any such crap, but we will take what benefit we can from the changes being forced upon us and we will come back stronger than before.’

Later that day, sitting in the new office (Randall thought he looked a little hunched as though the unaccustomed eight floors above him was an actual physical weight), DeLorean told him he had decided, some weeks ago, when it had become inevitable that operations here in Park Lane would have to shrink, to take the opportunity to clear up some of the other...
clutter
that had accumulated over the years. ‘I believe I may have given the wrong impression about my father in the past, not just to you, to almost anyone I spoke to about him. I may have suggested that he was from Alsace-Lorraine.’ (
I believe I may... I may...
Even decluttering had to be approached with circumspection.) ‘He wasn’t, he was from a place called Alba, in Romania, Transylvania, to be precise, which, you can imagine, was part of the problem when I was a kid.’ He raised his hands, making claws of the fingers. ‘Son of Dracula...’ His lips settled again over the teeth he had momentarily bared. ‘You know how other kids are. It was a problem for the old man too, or he got it into his head that it was. He had ambitions as an inventor, you see, making improvements to the tools they used then on the line – I saw them myself, carved out of wood – but he couldn’t get anyone at GM to look at them: no pedigree. I think that’s where Alsace-Lorraine came from.’

‘Bugatti,’ said Randall.

DeLorean nodded, smiled wryly. ‘Not that they wanted to know even then, but once he’d made that journey in his head there was no going back. Or maybe I’m not even remembering it correctly, maybe’ – circumspect again, testing the hypothesis – ‘it was just something he talked about doing, inventing a new back-story, and then later I just ran with it: insecurity.’ He stopped. ‘Does that seem strange to you?’

‘That you were insecure? After what you described? No.’

Another nod, another not-altogether smile. DeLorean opened a drawer and passed across the desk a sheet of heavy writing paper embossed with an eagle that Randall mistook at first for America’s own until he noticed the cross held in the beak, the downward sweep of the wings. He looked at the address: Bucures¸ti.

‘I made contact with their Industry and Economic and Financial Activity Commission, who passed me on to the Foreign Policy and International Economic Cooperation Commission, who sent me this.’

Randall read down,
do not anticipate a need for your product... our own excellent Dacia Brasovia... however, on the matter of buses...

Randall looked up. ‘Buses?’

DeLorean shrugged. ‘I figured lower individual car ownership, greater need for public transport: we pilot them there then target the whole of the Eastern Bloc.’ He had his hand out to take the letter back. ‘You’ll see it doesn’t close the door entirely. I guess it does no harm that I am second-generation Romanian-American...’

Yes, thought Randall, you are now, aren’t you, and might in time be Alsatian again, or Austrian, if that was what it took to protect the brand, stop the void that Dan Stevens had talked of from opening and swallowing all of them, the factory at Dunmurry first.

*

Liz was on her back contemplating a rotor, the precision of it, as irrefutable in its composition as its own name – and the lustre... like a platinum disc, near, something valuable anyway, awarded then kept out of sight under the stairs. The things you never knew you never knew about. She unhooked the bungee rope holding the calliper clear of the rotor and began to assemble. She greased the guide pins and slid them into place, turning them just enough to hold them for now, then rubbed lubricant on to the faces of the brake pads. Copper. She tried to remember from her schooldays if there had been an actual Copper Age, tried to imagine the circumstances of its first being smelted – wasn’t that what you called it? – I mean, for someone to look at a lump of this greeny-browny rock and think, I know, I’ll heat it up and chuck in some... What was it you did chuck in? Nah, gone. She slotted the pads into their allotted calliper cradles – the pad with the wear indicator to the inside – before returning to the pins, tightening each one in turn. Wheel on, hubcap on and that would be it, locked away under the stairs until the fifteen-thousand-mile service.

She worked her way out from underneath the car, using the heels of her hands and the balls of her feet to propel the dolly. There was not a living soul within thirty yards of her. Somebody far distant was whistling ‘Tonight’ from
West Side Story
, jauntily, with flute-band trills and flourishes.

She had completely lost track of time. Yet if she could have captured one moment and held it out of all the hours she had spent there since her miraculous return – the many hundreds of hours since she first walked through the door – this would be it.

Every bit as miraculous as the return was the fact that she, along with Anto and TC, had survived the end of May cull. They had no way of explaining it to themselves, had been, in truth, more embarrassed than elated the day the announcement was made and had stood at the locked gates with the thirteen hundred of their workmates who would not now be going back in, or who were not expected to be going back in until a portion of them took matters into their own hands and climbed over again to set up camp in the canteen.

The occupiers were cordial and philosophical when, the next morning, they came face to face with Liz and the others in their overalls. Every calamity had its survivors, after all, and it was simply wrongheaded to blame your fate on them. They even – those without work – shared the tea they brought in with them – for they were occupying the canteen, not looting it – with those who still had work to take a break from.

The ‘two hundred’, meanwhile, were doing what those endless tours around the factory before ever production began had been preparing them for, though it had sounded like just a bit of crack then, the nuclear outcome, in which the very few had to fill in for the great many, carrying out the tasks of the departed as well as their own, hanging doors as well as fitting seats, wiring dashboards and putting on wheels, and before the wheels the brakes.

She replaced the tools in the pouches of her roll then picked up the dolly and moved round to the other side of the car where she worked her way underneath, head and shoulders first, to start work on that rotor.

*

On his return from the States Randall had made straight for the canteen – past the banners that read
We Want Work
and
DeLorean Workers Demand Their Rights
– to talk to the men and women staging the occupation. It was not what you would call a warm reception.

Where had he been when they were getting their cards? Not a manager to be seen the whole day.

He couldn’t speak for the any of the rest, he said, but for his own part – truthfully? – he had been at home with his head down the toilet bowl.

‘Oh, good,’ said a guy at the front (Randall recognised him from the dive bar in Wilmington), ‘wishes sometimes do come true.’