Gull (16 page)

She turned off the tap, shook the excess water into the basin then turned, hands aloft, to the roller towel. Pull a yard, dry, dry, dry, pull a yard again for the person after you.

She watched her feet as they tiptoed towards the door. She saw them stop, as though the decision to speak came from them.

She faced about.

‘Don’t mind me asking, but he’s serious about this, isn’t he?’

Cristina Ferrare paused in the act of returning a brush to a bottle of lip gloss. Only her eyes moved, a slight frown forming above them as they sought out Liz’s a second time in the mirror.

‘Pardon me?’

‘Your husband, Mr DeLorean, well, I mean some people’ – she made the singular plural – ‘still can’t quite believe that he came here at all or that he is going to stay, you know, for the long haul.’

And now Cristina Ferrare turned so that they stood finally looking at each other, face to face, woman to woman.

She was more beautiful head on than seemed right or fair. Liz couldn’t tear her eyes away.

‘Of course he is going to stay, we bought a house here.’

‘I know,’ said Liz, hardly able to credit it was her talking at all. ‘So have a lot of the people I’m working with, the first house they have ever owned, most of them.’

‘Well, then.’ Cristina Ferrare smiled: a brilliant smile, and despite the reapplied lip gloss, entirely without artifice. ‘We are all in this together then, aren’t we?’

Liz saw her again a quarter of an hour later, holding tight to her husband’s arm as together they tried to make their way through the workers who were lining the corridor between the machinery, cheering and clapping and whistling through their fingers. DeLorean in the end climbed on to a workbench, raising himself still higher above the heads that surrounded him.

He held up his hands, but the cheering and clapping and whistling through fingers for a time only grew in volume. He spread his own fingers, made a tamping motion –
Please
– and now, at last, they let him speak.

‘I am so proud of each and every one of you today,’ he said, ‘so humble in your presence,’ and humble was exactly how he sounded to Liz: looked it too, more elbow and knee joints all of a sudden than he knew what to do with. ‘That car out front has my initials, sure, but make no mistake, it is your car. A few...’ he stroked the side of his nose, a sign that he was in on the secret, ‘...glitches today, but we can all work on those. We’ll write off today’s car and the next however many it takes as training exercises, but if you can get me three hundred top-notch cars by the start of April we will have a shipment leaving here bound for the US and the American market. What do you say, can you do it?’

‘Yes!’ Liz shouted, though she could barely hear herself, so loud and numerous were the yeses on all sides. They could, they would.

*

Randall held the door for them to pass through back outside. DeLorean paused before him and rested both hands on his shoulders. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to.

Don Lander, coming behind, did have something to say,
sotto voce
. ‘I don’t think you’ll have to worry any more about the Looking and Listening jibes.’

The secretary of state had not accompanied the DeLoreans on their tour of the factory. ‘Their moment,’ Randall had overheard him tell Jennings. (Perhaps it was time to revise that view of him as a man of constant sighing.) Randall could not imagine that he and Mrs Atkins had simply stood and waited, but wherever they had been in the interim they were here now, by their official car, to hear the last resounding cheer before the door to the assembly shop closed again.

‘You appear to have made quite an impression with the workers,’ Mrs Atkins said, that same smile on her face she had worn when she stepped from the car ninety minutes before.

‘I can tell you,’ said Cristina, ‘they have made quite an impression with me.’

‘Shame!’ another woman said – shouted – through a loudhailer, it sounded like. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’

Cristina’s head turned. Mrs Atkins’s head turned. Everyone’s head turned. The gates it was coming from, Twinbrook side. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’ The woman with the loudhailer was flanked by two more women, who seemed to Randall to be wearing nothing but blankets. There were other women, children too, holding up large photographs of bearded men – prisoners, of course – clad in the same coarse blankets. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’

‘Oh dear,’ said Atkins, at the end of a long sigh. ‘I think maybe it is time we were going.’

A detachment of cops was already at the gates, trying to keep the roadway clear. Others closed in around the official cars, hands variously clutching radios, baton handles, the stocks and the perforated barrels of the guns angled across their chests.

Cristina’s expression curdled. She seemed to stumble as she took a step towards the car and had to grab hold of her husband’s sleeve to keep from falling.

‘I don’t imagine those shouts are directed at you,’ Atkins said, although from the look on her face this was scant comfort to Cristina. She had reached the car now and at once slid across the back seat, almost for the moment disappearing from view. DeLorean got in after her and leaned forward, speaking animatedly to the driver.

There was jostling now at the gates, which the cops were trying to force fully open against the wishes and the weight of the protestors. The jostling became scuffling. A cop had his cap knocked off and he reacted by shoving the woman closest to him on the shoulder.

‘Brutality!’ yelled the woman with the loudhailer. ‘RUC brutality!’

The cars and their police escorts meantime were heading in convoy towards the exit, press photographers trying to keep pace, Randall trying to keep pace with them. As the lead Land Rover went through the gates it took a hit on the left side of the security grille from a bag of flour, which exploded in a white cloud that the secretary of state’s car drove through, windshield wipers going at maximum speed. An egg hit the roof, and another, and another.

It was as though someone in the throng was systematically emptying a bag of groceries.

The fourth egg overshot and broke, spreading its mess against a window of the car carrying DeLorean and his wife. Randall, who had drawn almost alongside – close enough that he had managed to get his hand in the way of the lens of the photographer dropping to a crouch to fire a shot off – saw Cristina’s head pop up, as though propelled by shock, or outrage. He was not inside the car so had no way of knowing for sure, but he saw the look on her face, he saw her mouth moving, ‘Away,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘Away!’

*

The news bulletin that evening mentioned the protests only in passing, thank the Lord, preferring to focus on the car, which looked, through the filter of the camera and the television screen, even more convincing than it had when it was pushed out of the assembly shop to meet its public. Robert sat through it, as he had sat through dinner, in complete silence. Actually he barely said a word all night. Liz waited until they were getting ready for bed.

‘You never asked me how it went today,’ she said when he came into the bedroom from the bathroom. She was already in her nightdress, a jar of face cream uncapped in her hand.

‘Sure I know how it went. Didn’t I see it on the TV?’

‘You didn’t see everything,’ she said. She was leaning over looking in the mirror on top of the chest of drawers. She saw him glance up. He knew that tone of voice. After all these years he ought to. ‘I met the model wife.’

He had his trousers in his hand. He folded them the way he did, using his chin to hold the waistband flat, but there was a greater than usual deliberateness about his movements. And though the mirror didn’t let her see far enough down to be certain, well – after all these years – it didn’t need to.

‘Her?’ You’re kidding me?’

‘Uh-uh. Standing at the sink in the toilets, like this, putting on her make-up.’ She set down the face cream and licked the tip of one finger and brushed her lips with it, glossing them. Purely for the purposes of illustration, of course.

‘Did you speak to her? What did she say?’

‘She said you had better get used to being a kept man.’

‘Did she now?’

He was round her side of the bed by this time. The reflection in the mirror now was all his chest in his white vest, rising and falling with the quickening of his breath.

‘Like a servant you mean?’ Hands on her hips beneath the nightdress, nudging it up, moving her a few inches to the left, getting the angle. (He knew that too of old.) ‘A gardener, maybe?’

And – dear God – he was in – as quick as that – right, right in. She could hardly breathe and yet she thrust back wanting even more. The face cream and all the other bottles and jars were scattered. The mirror tilted, toppled. She bit her forearm and the world went white.

*

The phone call came while Randall was still at dinner in the residents’ dining room. Most of the journalists had already checked out, but he went out to the lobby anyway to speak rather than have the phone brought to the table.

‘I didn’t get a chance to say before we drove off,’ DeLorean said, ‘but there has been a change of plan.’ In the background at that moment a flight was being announced, gate now closing. Randall saw again the expression on Cristina’s face as the car drove through those women in their blankets, put the two together. It must almost, in the pause that he left, have been audible – a more-than-mental
click
– because DeLorean at once began steering him towards a different conclusion. ‘There is a dealers’ convention, starts tomorrow, in Long Beach. I had been thinking on the flight across it would be too good an opportunity to miss with that first shipment coming due.’

‘No, you’re right. It makes perfect sense.’ And it did, of course. It really did.

There was a further and final call for passengers intending to travel.

‘I’ll talk to you from Long Beach,’ DeLorean said. ‘And, Randall... thank you.’

He moved back into Warren House that same evening, with – cold though it was – the familiar firefly-dance of cigarette tips across the valley to greet him. The red satin bows were still attached to the bay trees at the front door. Inside, not a grape had been dislodged from the pyramid of fruit in the crystal bowl on the sideboard, not a petal had dropped from the white peonies in the vase on the console of the bathtub beside which Randall undressed, letting his clothes fall to the floor where he stood. He reached into the bath and turned the dial to close the plug before opening the hot tap all the way. Steam billowed around him. He watched himself in the mirrored tiles disappear from the knees, the thighs, the waist up, knowing that all he had to do was pull the cord on the fan to begin to reverse the trick, but not yet (chest now, shoulders, neck, chin... bye-bye eyes), not just yet.

The Botanic Gardens rendezvous continued through what remained of the winter and into the spring. Liz told herself she was doing nothing whatever wrong. She would have been there on a Sunday morning anyway, or not a million miles away, and it wasn’t as if they did anything apart from talk, sometimes not even that, just sat, a careful distance apart, people-watching.

One February Sunday, caught in a sudden downpour, they fled to the relative shelter of the sunken garden, and straight away wished (his body language echoed hers) that they had taken their chances with the rain, and took them, in fact, the moment the rain stopped bouncing on the paths above their eye level.

Her sister Vivienne in Melbourne was having an affair, Liz was pretty sure, with a man at her work. She had not come right out with it in her letters – they had never been the type of family to come right out with anything – but it was there between the lines, even just in the frequency with which the letters had started to arrive: she needed to be talking, just as she had on those nights in her teens, coming home from dances, shaking Liz awake (Vivienne had five years on her little sister, was already bringing home a wage before Liz had finished primary school), spouting nonsense about everything under the sun – the
moon
, make that – when the thing she really wanted to tell her, the thing she could not come right out and say, was whose arms had wrapped themselves around her, whose hands when the lights had gone way down had found their way
up
– defying elastic and latex and metal underwiring –
there
.

Liz had taken to ripping the letters up and burying the pieces in the bin, several bins even, the minute she was done reading them for fear that Robert would pick one up, (accidentally it would have to be, but still, accidents did sometimes happen), and read into it the same thing she did.

Because if he was to ask her to her face – ‘What does that sister of yours think she’s at? And what about Ivor? Do you not owe it to him to write and let him know?’ – I mean, seriously, how could she fail to give herself away?

The odd Sunday she went straight to her mother’s, skipped the Gardens altogether. Show him he wasn’t to depend on her coming. Show herself she wasn’t dependent on seeing him.

Monday to Friday and half of every other Saturday she built cars.

Eventually they would be turning out seventy or eighty a day, but for the first shipment they had a shade over eight weeks to manufacture three hundred they could swear by on the American market. The same car could come around two, three times, sometimes more, before the inspectors were content to let it out, or out as far as the Emissions and Vehicle Preparation shed at any rate. She knew what the shed was for now. EVP was their A&E. There weren’t many cars that didn’t come out of there better than they went in.

They were all still learning.

An assembly line is an exercise in rhythm, individual and collective. Like an orchestra, she was chuffed with herself for finally saying the day she tried to put it into words (tried to put it into words while simultaneously wrestling with a tension spring). Aye, said Anto, or like galley slaves.

The important thing was to distract all but that part of the brain required for the task in hand. Some people whistled – no: a lot of people whistled, a disproportionate number of them through their teeth – some people sang, or made noises approximate to singing in words only occasionally approximate to the ones committed to vinyl.