Gull (6 page)

‘Double,’ he said, and when that was gone pointed a second time: same again.

Then he walked back out on to the street, through the traffic, up the steps and across the hotel lobby to the elevator, reached out his finger to press up. Missed.

*

He got on a flight that same evening and, the following morning, having slept off in the intervening hours the effects of the previous day’s vodkas (of which there had been several more after his extended dressing down by Romero-Barcelo), picked up another flight on a plane a quarter the size from a corner of Heathrow so remote and dismal it seemed to belong not just to a different airport but a different decade entirely.

An hour and a half later that plane came in to land on a runway bordered on one side by fields and on the other by a military base of a kind he had hoped never to see again when he flew out of Tan Son Nhat for the last time.

DeLorean had told him that a member of the secretary of state’s team would be in the arrivals hall to meet him and sure enough when he came through from the baggage claim a large sad-looking man, in an even larger, sadder-looking suit, stood holding a piece of paper with Randall’s name written on it in blue.

Randall stopped before him and held out his hand. ‘Jennings?’

‘McAuley, Mr Jennings is out in the car.’ The man bypassed Randall’s hand and reached down instead for his bag, affording Randall a glimpse of his gun, an old-fashioned pistol, holstered beneath his left arm.

‘I can manage that myself,’ Randall said, but McAuley had already hoisted the bag up behind his shoulder and started walking. Randall followed, a couple of steps off the bigger man’s pace, trying not to fall further behind, but trying too to take in his surroundings, which on first impressions appeared more closely aligned with that remote corner of Heathrow he had taken off from than the cosmopolitan airport he had had to walk through to get there.

A newspaper on the sole newsstand carried a photo on the front cover of a bearded man – haggard – draped in a blanket against the backdrop of a wall smeared with... well Randall had no idea what exactly, although the accompanying headline –
Cardinal: Prison ‘Unfit for Humans’
– made him fear the worst. He lifted a copy and set a note on the counter, which the young woman standing on the other side heaved a sigh at.

‘Is that the smallest you’ve got?’

McAuley and his bag were disappearing under the exit sign.

‘It’s all right,’ Randall said to the woman. ‘I don’t need the change.’

‘No!’ She scowled, not at the money now, he thought, but at the suggestion that she had been on the make. ‘Here...’ She dragged the coins – big ungainly things – one at a time from their compartments in her cash drawer and counted them into his hand. ‘There.’ She smiled, tightly, triumphantly:
you’ve nothing on me now
.

He stuffed the coins into his pants’ pocket and ran.

A cool breeze hit him as he reached the end of a corridor walled with yellowing Plexiglas, having made up all but a couple of yards on McAuley. Smell of new-mown grass cutting through the aircraft exhaust fumes.

The car, a large Ford (he recognised the emblem but not the model), was easy to spot: it was the only one parked within a hundred-yard radius of the terminal. Two cops stood by, sub-machine guns clutched to their bulletproof vests, the glossy peaks of their caps pulled so low they had to tilt their heads to see past them.

One of them said something out the corner of his mouth to McAuley as he passed, don’t ask Randall what, though McAuley smiled, a surprisingly pleasant smile, which Randall took to be a good sign.

With his free hand McAuley pulled open the rear nearside door. A man in his late fifties, at a guess, with the most precise side parting in his hair Randall had ever seen sat over against the other door, a stack of papers resting on a buff folder on his lap. He crossed a t or dotted an i and replaced the lid of his fountain pen before turning his attention to Randall, taking him in from the newspaper up.

‘Welcome to B
i
lfast.’ A softer accent than McAuley and the girl at the newsstand: Scots, Randall later learned. ‘East Berlin without the laughs.’

Randall responded with a laugh of his own as he sat into the car. Jennings raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. McAuley slammed the door and the least external sound at once disappeared. It was like being shut in an icebox.

‘Armoured,’ said Jennings and patted the armrest. ‘Means if they blow it up it comes down harder.’

Randall nodded, face straight.

‘That one was a joke,’ said Jennings.

‘Maybe if you were to give me a signal in advance.’

Jennings relaxed his lips a little. ‘Very good, very good.’

McAuley was behind the wheel now. He steered the car with the heel of his right hand out through the fortified perimeter fence and on to a straight two-lane road, farmland on either side. They could not have travelled more than five hundred yards along it before they encountered an army check: soldiers with camouflaged faces in the middle of the road, others sharing a hedgerow with a couple of inquisitive-looking sheep. Randall averted his eyes.

‘The secretary of state is very invested in your Mr DeLorean, speaking figuratively as well as literally,’ Jennings said as though their journey had been interrupted by nothing more remarkable than a stoplight. He tapped a fingernail against the glass next to his cheek. ‘He told the prime minister that this deal could save the lives of soldiers like these.’

McAuley was showing his papers to a soldier with corporal stripes. The soldier looked past the driver’s shoulder into the rear of the car, checked one face, checked two, then straightened up and made a circular motion with his hand: carry on. Jennings turned to face Randall. That parting had the permanent look of a scar.

‘You can imagine the prime minister was sceptical. He said, “That’s a rather extraordinary claim to make for a motor car,” to which the secretary of state said, “Yes, but it’s no ordinary motor car, and if it gives people jobs,
hope
, who knows what changes it might help set in motion.”’

‘I read the briefing papers on the plane,’ Randall said.

‘And what do you think yourself?’

‘I think you should never underestimate faith in the future.’

Jennings pursed his lips again. He handed Randall another newspaper. The same photograph on the front page, but with a different headline:
Outrage at Cardinal’s Prison Comments
.

‘And I think you ought to remember there are two sides to every story here.’

‘As there are where I come from.’

The other man made a noise through his nose, as much as to say have it your own way. Randall looked out the window but found nothing there to divert him save for hedges and fields and the occasional clump of trees. He closed his eyes and for a moment he was back in the lobby of the Sheraton Universal with Jim Hoffman in fatigues, looking down the barrel of an actual gun. He forced his eyes open again, shifted in his seat. Jennings was annotating a document, McAuley steering one-handed and humming quietly. The road stretched ahead straight between the hedges. The second time he did not feel his eyes close at all.

The engine cut out.

Randall’s cheek was pressed up against the glass. It made a sucking sound as he pulled away. The car had stopped next to a tubular steel gate leading into a field that was more mud than grass, the imprint, around the gate itself, of many cow hooves. Jennings was replacing the lid on his pen again. He clipped it into his inside pocket.

‘Well, here we are.’

‘Where?’

‘DeLorean Motor Cars Limited... Dunmurry. You said you read the briefing papers.’

‘They didn’t mention cattle.’

McAuley had come round to open his door. Randall stepped out unsteadily. The sun had broken through, but it still felt more like early spring than high summer.

He leant against the gate.

The field was actually two fields separated by a stream. On the far side of the second field was a housing project – two-storey houses and low-rise apartment blocks – with hills beyond eaten into by quarries. In the opposite direction – looking south-east, possibly, to judge by the position of the sun – over the roof of the car at any rate, lay a couple of hangar-like buildings, and a little further on another housing development, dominated by two tower blocks, but otherwise in layout and style, right down to the colour of its roof tiles, a virtual mirror-image of the first.

(The names Twinbrook and Something Hill drifted across his jet-lagged mind. He would have to go back and read the papers again.)

And then from a distant corner of the further field, in front of a red-brick building he had not until that moment noticed, movement: a man striding out in the direction of the gate – by his height and his stride Randall recognised him at once as DeLorean – a dozen others stumbling in his wake, photographers as proximity proved them to be, cameras thumping against their chests, film-roll canisters hopping from their bags, their jacket pockets, as they tried, between shaking the muck off their shoes, to keep up.

DeLorean seemed to have found the only route that was not potholed or mined with cow pies.

Randall pulled himself up over the gate and walked out to meet him part way, sidestepping the hazards as best he could. They were to be producing upwards of ten thousand cars a year on this ground within the next two or three years.

‘Edmund! Am I glad to see you.’

The moment DeLorean stood still the camera shutters started clicking. He paid them no regard. Jennings was out of the car now too, although he and his high-polished shoes remained firmly on the other side of the gate.

‘Has the secretary of state arrived yet?’ he asked.

DeLorean pointed back the way he had come to a smaller grouping before the red-brick building out of whose midst rose a couple of sound-boom poles. ‘He was just getting set for an interview when I left him.’

More cars and vans were arriving as they walked back, photographers in tow, disgorging more men with cameras and boom poles. This was really happening. Here in Belfast. Any minute now the whole world would know. From that point on there could be no going back.

*

Liz had the four nearly matching plates lined up on the kitchen countertop ready to serve dinner when the news came on the TV. She stretched out her right foot and with the toe of her slipper pulled the door open another six inches so that she could see the screen in the corner of the living room. As ever it took her eyes a moment or two to adjust. The contrast was gone, or stuck, she wasn’t sure which, and there was something wrong too with the vertical hold. Every couple of minutes a swelling would appear right down at the bottom of the picture, like a tear forming on an eyelid, only instead of brimming over it would begin slowly to move up the screen, pulling everything it passed through an inch to the right, turning landscapes into abstracts, people into question marks, twisting their words besides, for there was an aural counterpart to this visual distortion. And the worst about it was while it
was
only every couple of minutes they could not justify the cost of leaving the set in to be repaired again. Fifteen pounds it had cost them the last time (the pincushion correction circuit apparently): fifteen pounds and their marriage almost. Robert had nearly been as inconsolable as the boys without it.

She wrapped a tea towel round the handle of the potato pot and lifted it over from the stove: four pieces for Robert, three each for the boys, two for her.

Roy Mason was on, standing in a field by the looks of it. She couldn’t hear a word he was saying. The boys, out of sight (at either end of the settee, most likely), were arguing.

‘Ah, she never.’

‘She did so.’

‘She never.’

‘She did.’

‘Never.’

‘Did.’

‘Give over, the pair of you,’ Robert said, closer to hand. (The armchair, always the armchair, to the left of the doorframe.) ‘I’m trying to listen to this.’

‘Have you your hands washed?’ she called to all three a second before Roy Mason’s voice finally rose above her sons’ bickering, if rose was a word you could ever use of something so flat and nasally.

‘This is a great day for British industry, a great day for the people of Northern Ireland, and most of all a great day for the city of Belfast.’

Liz took the pork chop pan from under the grill where it had been keeping warm and when she turned back there was the man from the newspaper that time, the car-maker, not in Limerick now, but in Belfast, standing before the microphone that Roy Mason had just stepped away from.

It had to be raised a good foot before he could speak.

‘Thank you, Secretary of State...’ He sounded a bit like Gary Cooper. ‘I can’t tell you how good it feels to be somewhere people understand you at last, what it is you are trying to achieve...’ Not Gary Cooper: George Peppard. ‘I am delighted to be able to announce that following my meetings with Mr Mason and his team over the past few days the agreements have all been signed.’ A younger man behind him frowned, looking off to his right. ‘You know, they told us in the US we couldn’t do this, go right back to the blank page and build a brand new type of car in a brand new type of factory. They told us there were good reasons why no one had successfully launched an auto company since Chrysler in 1923. They are probably still telling us that, but we can do it and we will do it, on this very spot: from cow pasture to car production in just eighteen months.’

Liz looked down. She had put all the chops on the one plate. She used her fingertips to redistribute them. Hot, hot. The boys came in, pushing and shoving, like some strange two-headed beast trying to tear itself apart.

‘Not chops,’ said one of them.

‘Sure, you love chops,’ said the other.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Aye, you do.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Do.’

Robert appeared in the doorway, looking behind him still at the TV. Back in the evening-news studio the industrial correspondent was throwing out figures: three hundred jobs in the initial building phase, twelve hundred jobs when production began, rising eventually to two thousand, in one of the most economically depressed parts of Belfast, a city whose only notable contribution to the auto industry was the invention of the pneumatic tyre a hundred years ago.