Gull (15 page)

John Zachary DeLorean – for he seemed on this occasion to emerge in three distinct stages – finished unpacking himself from the car (however he
packed
himself his suits never creased) and was followed in one fluid movement by Cristina, towards whom every camera and microphone now pointed.

‘Mrs DeLorean, if you would... this way... please... Mrs DeLorean!’

‘How are you enjoying Belfast?’

‘Had you time for an Ulster fry on the way from the airport?’

Cristina merely smiled, which appeared from the absence of further questions to satisfy the journalists for now.

A few yards to the left Mrs Atkins maintained her smile too in case it was needed any time soon. Randall rather suspected it would not be.

DeLorean dipped his head towards him on his way to shake the secretary of state’s hand.

‘All set?’

‘All set.’

DeLorean squeezed his upper arm.

Don Lander, who had met up with the DeLoreans in London the night before, got out of the car last and least noticed. ‘Well I got to the bottom of the choice of launch date,’ he told Randall. ‘Seems Sonja thought this was the most auspicious day.’

Randall looked at him blankly.

‘Cristina’s palm-reader,’ Don said. ‘And there I was thinking it was the interior designer.’

*

All through the morning they had listened to the crowd gathering on the other side of the assembly shop doors. People returning from outside brought updates – ‘The sniffer dogs are here...’ ‘There’s fellas out there speaking German and all sorts’ – and questions – ‘Anybody know what CNN stands for...?’ ‘Who’s the woman with your wee man Chapman...?’

Liz had a distant memory of a Girl Guide Concert – dear God:
1959
– she and her fellow Guides taking it in turns to sneak a peek through the church hall’s dusty black curtains:
What can you see? What can you see?
Then, as now, when show time finally came it took them all a little by surprise, as though the reason for all that activity out front had temporarily slipped their minds. Then it was chords bashed out on the ancient piano; now it was a sound as of the whole factory being kick-started.

They turned their backs en masse on what was happening beyond the doors and strained to see the crane bring the first of the fettled bodies through from the pressing shop and set it, beyond the sightlines of those at Liz’s end of the chain, on to the trim line. There was an enormous cheer from that direction, modulating into a buzz – workers combining, talking one another through the tasks in hand – which after a time yielded to something more querulous, something indeed very like a grumble, punctuated finally by a single ringing cry, ‘What the
fuck
?’

Anto gave TC a boost and he clung to a pillar long enough to report that it looked as though there might be a ruck. A fella from the engine-dress line had already been despatched to find out more and returned breathless a few minutes later (the clamour had subsided a little) with word that the skins didn’t fit – ‘curling like the lids of sardine cans’, was what he had been told – and that the Tellus operators had been desperately trying to override the settings on the carrier, which kept wanting to move it on to the next stage. People were practically standing with their backs against it, others spreading themselves against the skins to keep them flat, and then some wee man from Rathcoole had produced a fistful of penny washers from his overall pocket (no one asked what he was doing with so many on his pocket to begin with) and started replacing the standard issue washers, or in some cases just firing the penny washers on over the top of them. They seemed to do the trick: the lids were back on the cans. Now fellas from all the sections were running to the stores looking for buckets of penny washers.

‘So,’ Anto said. ‘What are you waiting for, TC? Go and get us a bucket of washers.’

‘Me go? You go!’

‘Forget it, I’ll go,’ Liz said and would not hear then of them not letting her.

It was as she was making her way back, slowly (who knew there was so much weight in a bucket of washers?), that the word started going round that DeLorean and his wife had arrived – the secretary of state and his wife too – which would have accounted for the sudden competition again from noise without.

Liz set down the washers, with an inadvertent thump, between her and Anto. The Tellus carrier was moving again, past the doors section now, heading straight for them.

‘My palms are sweating,’ Liz said.

Said TC, ‘My cheeks are.’

‘What way’s that to talk?’ said Anto and seemed to shift uncomfortably inside his own overalls.

And then there it was in front of them and there they were at last, the three of them, hoisting the first of the black leather seats, their tools, the galvanised bucket of washers, and immersing themselves in the interior.

‘Wait a second... Wait a second.’

‘Watch! No, lift that... A bit higher... A bit higher... Whoa! Whoa!
Whoa!
’

‘Where’s this supposed to...?’

‘Look: down there. Remember?’

‘Do you want me to hold it for you?’

‘Quick, chuck us a couple more washers.’

‘The torque, the torque! Use the torque wrench!’

And, almost before they had time to think, they were out and the car had moved on. For the life of her she couldn’t remember the second seat even going in. A couple of minutes after that it was through the wheels section too and up on the ramp for fuelling. (One third of an imperial gallon those eight minutes amounted to. They would have been better off with a dropper than a pump.) There had been talk of Jackie Stewart or Stirling Moss coming to drive the first car out, or even – they should be so lucky – James Hunt. Instead that honour went to one of the test drivers, Barry, Liz thought it was you called him, who walked to the car like the astronauts at Cape Canaveral to their rockets, that same expression on his face of anticipation mixed with dread. As he got in, left side, to the driver’s seat, TC and Anto were running to help open the roller doors.

*

DeLorean stepped up to the microphone, to the right of the grandstand, as though – Randall had observed it before – he moved through a different medium, or was being shot on a different speed, to everyone around him. He had never looked more impressive, his hair spun, you would almost have thought, from the same guaranteed rust-free stuff that sheathed the cars that bore his name. And as for his jaw... it was his conductor’s baton, his wand, wherever it pointed there was a reaction, a jumping to attention, a rush of colour to the cheeks, an instant abashed smile.

‘Mister Secretary of State’ – forget the syllables now: every letter nearly was drawn out to a sentence in its own right – ‘Missis Atkins, Distinguished Guests, Members of the Local and International Press, Friends and Well-wishers...’ From somewhere at his back there came a muffled thud. His eyes flicked towards Don, then Randall, but he carried on without noticeable hesitation and only a fraction louder than before, ‘...Ladies and Gentlemen. Thirty years ago, when I was a young man just beginning to make my way in the automobile industry...’

Don being too close to the dignitaries and the cameras that were trained on them, and too far from the source of the thud (for that was what the rapid movement of the eyes had signified: go, one of you), Randall backed slowly towards the assembly shop and, avoiding the main doors, ducked inside. It took him several moments to make sense of what he was seeing.

The car was wedged at an angle between the door pillar and the wall. The test driver stood, hands gripping fistfuls of his hair, at the centre of a crowd of horrified workers.

‘The brakes just weren’t responding,’ he said.

‘But we tested them,’ said the man at his left shoulder, practically in tears. Randall was not far off joining him.

The test driver’s hands tightened their grip, pulling his features into a dreadful grimace. ‘They weren’t responding. I was pressing and pressing, and nothing... nothing at all.’

‘We’re fucked,’ somebody said. Randall glanced round at him. One of the union leaders. Always had a book with him at meetings. He was looking straight at Randall, who was thinking in that moment
Don
, and how to get him away from those cameras out front without alerting everyone that there was a problem.

Oh, Christ was there a problem.

‘Wait,’ he said and turned to the driver. ‘There are still a couple of those mules around, aren’t there? Steering wheels and all already inside? Go and get one of them. And, here’ – this to the workers gathered round looking instantly a little less horrified – ‘get the skins off this.’ He leaned over the hood to have a look at the damage. The licence plate at least was salvageable: DMC1. ‘And the licence plate too. Time and a half for everyone if you can get a car out of here in the next quarter of an hour!’

Liz was the first to respond. Not a flicker as she rushed past him. Too focused.

He slipped out the side door again.

DeLorean was still on his feet, still talking (he had only just left the fifties behind for the thrill that was his
first
Car of the Year, the 1960 Tempest), his instinct and his experience telling him that if something was not going right there was every chance it was going very wrong indeed, but telling him too that the best people to deal with it were almost certainly already on the other side of the doors. What else was all the training for?

Randall, ignoring the frown Jennings turned his way, placed himself in DeLorean’s line of vision. He showed him the fingers of both hands then of the left hand alone. As before there was barely a pause, although maybe a careful observer would have seen his jaw jut out a fraction further. Fifteen minutes? He could do that. And how. From the Tempest to the GTO – a generous word for Bill Collins, in absentia, who had been part of the Pontiac too, a nod to Ronnie and the Daytonas, who had taken ‘this modified little Pon-Pon’ to the top of the Pop Charts as well as the auto sales charts – from the GTO to the GM kiss-off (here lightly done: this was not a day for recrimination), to the Vision that had guided him this past seven years and more... Randall could have flashed him a half dozen more handfuls of fingers and the store would not have been exhausted.

On fourteen and a half minutes, though, the mechanism controlling the assembly shop doors kicked in.

‘But now, ladies and gentlemen’ – you would have thought, so seamless was the transition, that the opening of the doors had been timed to fit his words and not the other way about – ‘this is the moment they told us we would never live to see, the moment they told us we were mad to dare
dream
we would live to see, and the moment that, but for the faith of my wonderful wife Cristina’ – she pressed a knuckle beneath each eye in turn – ‘I might even have got to thinking once or twice myself I was mad to dream I would live to see.’ Never more impressive, never more vindicated. ‘I present to you all...’ A final dramatic pause, or a catch in the throat, ‘the DMC-12 sports car.’

Randall uncrossed his fingers to join in the applause, which grew as the doors opened wider then, as the nose appeared (complete with licence plate), lost the run of itself completely. People were whooping and hollering, Irish people,
British
people. The press were whooping and hollering loudest of all. The secretary of state put his hand to his tie, patting the knot, when it seemed from his expression as though what he wanted to do was yank the thing loose or tear it off altogether.

The test driver was steering (hair again smoothed flat), but the engine was silent. The power instead was being provided by the six workers pushing from behind.

‘It’s basically held together with washers and duct tape,’ one of them told Randall out the corner of his mouth. ‘There’s bits of wood and all sorts in there.’ But that was not how it looked at all. The gull-wing doors lifted and every person present smiled.

‘You will excuse us if we don’t start the engine,’ DeLorean said, though it was doubtful that many heard, ‘but this is a high-performance car and with so many of us gathered this morning space is maybe a little tighter than is strictly advisable.’

Jennings materialised at Randall’s shoulder. ‘For a moment when he was spinning us those yarns about Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis Jr I thought he was going to hit us with another delay.’ But even as he was saying this DeLorean was inviting the secretary of state and his wife to come closer – to get inside – and Jennings was forced into an undignified shuffle to take Mrs Atkins’s bag, which he held as a man might a severed head that had been thrust into his hand, at arm’s length, by the hair, that is to say the straps.

*

Liz sat on the toilet with her head firmly between her knees. It was the only way she could think of to keep her legs from shaking.

Jesus, they had got away with it.

For the past half-hour, since the dressed-up mule had been pushed out the front, she had been waiting for the doors of the assembly shop to burst open again and every cop standing guard outside to come charging in and arrest the lot of them for fraud.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

She squeezed out an excuse for her occupation of the cubicle, hitched up her overall, and flushed. She opened the door and almost closed it again straight away.

Cristina Ferrare was standing at one of the sinks, a small make-up bag balanced, open, between the taps.

She looked up into the mirror, meeting Liz’s eyes next to the half-closed door, after which of course Liz had no option but to open the door fully and carry on out to the sinks. (If only she had been a man she could have headed straight for the exit. As Robert said to her once when she called him on it, ‘It’s not as if we hold the end of it or anything.’) She chose a sink two along on the exit side. Cristina Ferrare did not look round, or track her walk, but examined her own reflection for signs of imperfection and incredibly found one, high on her left cheekbone. She went at it with powder from a deep-red tub. Liz concentrated on the action of soaping her hands, folding them over one another, interlocking fingers and thumbs, thumbs and fingers, rinsing them then, thoroughly. Anything to avoid having to meet herself in the mirror, having to make the comparison.