Gull (24 page)

At two-fifteen precisely a figure appeared, a man, moving at improbable speed. They all sat forward at once, heads almost meeting in an arc around the monitor. (Mingled breath of coffee and cigarettes and egg salad.)

‘How tall
is
that guy?’

‘Wait a second, is he...?’

‘What does he have on his feet?’

‘He is: he’s roller-skating.’

He was, and wearing a child’s Stan Laurel mask. He skated out of the picture and a few seconds later skated across it in the opposite direction, and out again. When next he appeared he was balancing on one leg, changing over then to the other on which he performed a passable pirouette before exiting a final time backwards, thumb to Stan Laurel’s nose and fingers wiggling.

Randall didn’t know about the rest of them, it was all he could do to stop himself applauding.

‘You don’t suppose, do you,’ he said instead, ‘he knew he was being watched?’

*

Liz never heard the words counter-surveillance used, but she did on several occasions overhear conversations to the effect that you had to keep an eye on the bosses to make sure that they never found out they weren’t the ones running the factory.

The bomb scares were a breach of that protocol as much as anything else and, worse still, they had drawn attention to the open phone line next to the storage area whose existence to that point close on two thousand people had managed to keep secret from a couple of score.

She had used it herself for the first time a few weeks earlier to phone her sister in Melbourne. It was tantamount to stealing, she knew, but she had been growing more and more concerned about the tone of Vivienne’s letters and couldn’t think when she would ever get the privacy at home to have the conversation they needed to have.

Mind you, half of the conversation they did have was taken up with her having to explain how she was able to phone at all. Vivienne sounded as though she had been drinking. Liz saw her framed in the doorway of the bedroom they had used to share, swaying, as though she had brought the night’s music home with her. Drink had added to her lightness in those days.

No more.

‘What time is it there?’ she asked thickly.

‘Half eleven.’

‘In the morning? I thought you would be in your work.’

‘I am, but it’s OK.’

Ten thousand miles away a cigarette was lit. Liz took the full force of the smoke jet in her ear. ‘What kind of place is that?’

‘Truthfully? I think it might be the best place I have ever in my life worked.’

‘And you have so much to compare it to.’ Liz was nearly grateful for the dig, or the speed with which it was delivered. That was more like her big sister.

‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘But what about you?’ She rested her head against the wall, making sure the circuit was absolutely closed. ‘How are things in your place?’

‘My place?’

‘I just thought from some of your letters that maybe, I don’t know, maybe there was something you wanted to talk about.’

Vivienne laughed sharply – the cheek of you! – then started to cry.

Liz made up her mind the minute she hung up the phone that she was going out there to see her. Later, when the dinner things were all cleared away and the boys had taken their perpetual argument up the stairs, she set a cup of tea on the arm of Robert’s chair, a chocolate digestive balanced on the saucer.

‘Do you remember when the boys were in primary school and that wee P1 boy – Thompson – was knocked down and killed? Do you remember they became obsessed the two of them with dying?’

Robert paused stirring his sugar. Flip, yeah, now that she mentioned it, he did. The father worked in the hardware shop, had a harelip...

‘And do you remember’ – she must not let him stray off the path she was laying – ‘what we said?’

Robert resumed stirring thoughtfully. ‘Probably something like it was a one in a million chance.’

‘Anything else?’

‘They had to make the most of every moment... we all had to.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. (She did love him.)

He smiled and took a bite from the biscuit where it had been softened by contact with the cup.

‘I’m signing up for nights one week in every two. I’m putting the money away to go out and see Vivienne next year, in case the opportunity doesn’t come around again.’

He had practically fed her the line. Anyway, she thought later, that great sex thing worked both ways. He was hardly likely to go and change the locks, was he?

It exhausted her, of course, the work, the switching between the two routines, the near impossibility of a full day’s sleep. A couple of weeks in she didn’t know which end of her was up. By half past ten on her second Tuesday back on days she was dead on her feet, or at least her knees.

She gave the wrench a twist on the last nut of an uncooperative passenger seat and slumped forward in an attitude of prayer.

‘I’m never going to last till my tea break,’ she said into the soft leather.

TC, working on the other side, spoke to her across his seat and hers. ‘Sure, why don’t you take ten minutes now?’ There were no hooters or whistles to work to, you took your break when you needed it, always supposing your workmates could spare you. ‘Me and Anto can manage. Can’t we, Anto?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Ah, no, I couldn’t do that on yous.’

‘It’s not a bit of bother. Tell her, Anto.’

‘It’s not a bit of bother.’

‘Well...’ She had pulled herself up on to her feet. ‘If you’re absolutely sure.’

She walked away wiping her hands on a rag. God, it felt good to be able to turn your back. And to think Robert didn’t trust those fellas. The things they did for her, because actually, now she thought of it, it wasn’t just the comfort breaks, they were forever letting her take a couple of minutes here and there – You go on ahead, save us a seat in the canteen, we’ll just finish tidying up.

She stopped in front of a vending machine full of sweets and chocolate bars. She felt in the pocket of her overalls and found two 10p pieces. It was fate.

TC was standing with his back to the car, looking off in the other direction, when she returned barely two minutes after she had left, a Curly Wurly dangling from each hand.

The seat that had caused her all the grief was on the ground next to Anto’s legs. The rest of him was inside the car, from where a scratching sound was coming – a sound she could not associate with any part of the assembly process that she had ever been involved in – a
gouging
sound was probably closer to the mark.

‘What’s that seat doing on the ground?’ she said.

TC nearly did himself an injury he spun round that fast. ‘Liz!’ It sounded more like a warning than a greeting.

‘Is that not the one I just finished putting in?’

The gouging sound stopped. TC had come round to place himself between her and the open car door.

‘I, ah, wasn’t happy, there was a wee problem with the, ah, what-you-me-call-it.’

Liz pushed past him. She could have knocked him right over without much difficulty. ‘Anto, what are you doing in there?’

As he was withdrawing his head from the seat well she was sticking hers in. There were metal shavings in a small heap below... she wasn’t sure at first
what
exactly: a candle it looked like, twists of something thorny – barbed wire? – around it.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘A hunger strike candle,’ Anto said matter-of-factly.

‘What’s it doing in our seat well?’ TC opened his mouth to say something, but the penny for Liz had already dropped. ‘Wait, are there other cars with “hunger strike candles” hidden in the seat wells too? Is that what all the “go on ahead, Liz, take ten minutes there” is about?’

‘No.’ TC finally got to speak. ‘Some of them have the candles behind the dashboard and some of them, you know, depending on the section have Celtic or Rangers or No Pope Here.’

‘Anto?’ She was conscious that she was talking to them the way she talked to her own boys, switching her gaze from one to the other in order to winkle out the truth; conscious but powerless to stop it. ‘Are you not the one who told me you had to walk out and take your place on those pickets because you never knew who was watching? And now here you are doing something that no one will ever even see?’

Anto was still sitting on the ground, hands dangling over his knees. They made a gesture, a half-hearted attempt at flight.

‘You can’t build a sports car in the middle of Belfast, in the middle of all this, and not expect it to carry some sort of a mark.’ His eyes slipped off her face. ‘I don’t think you can have any idea.’

‘About what? About anger? About people dying?’ She was slapping her thighs with those stupid fucking chocolate bars. ‘I lost a brother to one of your martyrs’ comrades. Dragged him out of his lemonade lorry just up the road here and put a bullet in his head. Put out an apology the next day saying they had mixed up his lemonade lorry with another one that delivered to army barracks.’

Anto’s eyes were locked on hers again. He had the grace to look stricken. ‘You never said.’

‘You’re right, I never did. I never did because I made a promise early on that I wasn’t going to go through life thinking of myself as a victim.’ Vivienne in contrast had resolved never to set foot in the country again. ‘Anyway,’ her anger was ebbing, turning back on her for breaking even for a moment her promise to herself, and her brother, ‘Pete wouldn’t have wanted me being bitter on his behalf. That wasn’t the type of him.’

‘But still...’ Anto was on his feet now, TC beside him.

‘Listen, Liz, we’ll not do any more of them,’ TC said and reinforced it with his thumb on his breastbone: down and across. ‘Swear to God.’

‘You can do what you like, TC, but the first car that comes through here after lunch is all mine. Now, get that seat bolted back in, and here’ – she shoved them into their hands – ‘enjoy your Curly Wurlys.’

She entertained all kinds of possibilities, trying a few of them out on paper napkins in the canteen – a lemonade bottle with her brother’s name on the label seemed particularly apt, but she doubted she would have the time or the skill under pressure to do it justice, and like she had told Anto it was a long time ago now. Six years, a thousand other deaths. She tore that napkin to shreds, and all the others she’d drawn on, and shoved them deep into the wastepaper bin.

It would have to be words. There was something to be said for No Pope Here. The form of it rather than the content. Short, to the point.

The boys (my God, she had even begun to think of them like that) had given her a wide berth while she deliberated. It was clear, on her return, that they had resolved to keep the mood light-hearted.

‘Are you ready for your first act of vandalism?’ Anto said.

‘I had a long life before I came to work here,’ she said and was surprised herself at how convincing she sounded. ‘Just keep watch.’

They stationed themselves at either end of the next car that came down the line, letting on to be searching for a spanner, inspecting the bodywork for a non-existent scratch (always the hardest to detect).

She knelt, took out the little metal file she always carried in the back of her purse, leaned in and got to work.

She had been dead right not to attempt the lemonade bottle. Christ, it was hard enough to manage a simple straight line. Aagh! Straightish.

‘Coat!’ Anto, under cover of a cough, barked the code they had agreed for manager and she nearly brained herself on the dashboard before he said in his normal voice, ‘False alarm, he’s away the other way.’

Back to work she went. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

‘Are you nearly done there?’ TC whispered.

‘Nearly.’ She was barely started, but so what, he could flipping well wait.

Another half a minute. The point of the nail file was bending with the effort of bringing a curved line back to the plane from which it had without her intending it deviated. Shit, shit, shit.

‘Would you for crying out loud come on!’ TC said and could not have sounded more strangulated if someone had indeed had their hands about his throat.

She dragged the file down the metal then started on another letter.

‘Seriously,’ Anto said from the other end, ‘you’re going to have to get out of there now.’

‘Right,’ she said, ‘right,’ and wrote four letters more. ‘OK, give me a hand getting this seat in.’

From the colour of his face as he trotted round to help, TC even looked as though he had been throttled.

‘So,’ said Anto, ‘are you going to tell us what you did?’

‘Do you really want to know? Do you really
really
want to know?’ Liz gave the rear nut a wrench. ‘It’ll cost you most of your year’s wages to find out.’

DeLorean that late summer and early autumn was consumed with the proposed stock-market flotation. Jennings had not been altogether wrong. Here was the opportunity to unburden the company almost overnight of government debt. ‘Set sail into open water,’ was a term DeLorean used more than once and Randall did actually picture the shares as so many tiny vessels corralled in a harbour, waiting for the wind to fill their sails, or the waves outside to subside a little.

DeLorean had recently completed the purchase of the Lamington Farm estate at Bedminster, New Jersey, preparatory, as Randall understood it, to selling the Pauma Valley ranch, bringing his work life and family life closer: a seventy-five minute drive at the week’s end (in so far, with a stock-market flotation imminent, the working weeks ever ended) instead of a six-hour flight.

Midway through September Humphrey Atkins was whisked away to become Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. (Centuries, it took, to perfect job titles like that.) A new secretary of state, Jim Prior, arrived and, looking, in the television reports, slightly puzzled that no one had thought of doing it before (although a look of puzzlement, Randall soon learned, ranging from slight to extreme, was habitual with him) made a point of going into the prison to talk to the prisoners refusing food. Within weeks the hunger strike was over. The six deaths that the management and the union leaders had, as an absolute maximum, been preparing for had been exceeded by four. Randall who went over it and over it in his head hundreds of times then and in the years that followed could not decide which of the parties to the dispute was the more fanatical.