Glenn Patterson - Gull

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.

Robert shook his head. ‘If somebody was giving me thirty grand for every job I think I could see my way to rustling up two thousand of them as well,’ he said and went and sat down at the table. Liz strained the peas between the angled lid and the side of the pot and spooned them on to the plates.

‘And this,’ the industrial correspondent went on, ‘is the car that is creating all the excitement, described by its creator John DeLorean’ (so that was how you said it) ‘as the world’s most ethical mass-production motor car and the first car of the twenty-first century.’

Liz tilted her head trying to make sense of the image on the screen. Something odd was happening to the sides of the car — for a moment she thought it must be a trick of the vertical hold, but, no, those were the doors opening, rising up, and up, and up.

She set down the slotted spoon she had been using for the peas and covered her mouth with her hand. Honest to God, it was the only thing she could think to do to keep herself from laughing out loud.

*

The news crews were packing up. Randall rested a shoulder against one of the vans. UTV it said on the side. He was still dazed from the announcement, the flight, the whole crazy whirl of the past twenty-four hours.

For the final few minutes of the press conference his attention had snagged on a group of kids — mid-teens was his guess — watching from a slight muddy rise a couple of hundred yards away. He fancied for a time that they were trying to signal to him (he really was pretty dazed) then that they were involved in some kind of pat-a-cake or hand jive. Finally he twigged that what they were doing was passing something between them — some things : bottles, flashing green as heads were thrown back, tilting them towards their mouths.

He felt a hand on his back between his shoulder blades. He turned. DeLorean. His eyes were shining.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘It’s going to be something to see when it’s done.’

DeLorean nodded. ‘About that, I’ve been thinking, it might be an idea if you were to stay on here, just until we get the place up and running.’

Randall opened his mouth. DeLorean got there before him.

‘Oh, don’t worry, you’ll not be on your own, there’ll be plenty of faces you recognise, but with so many people sometimes it’s good to have someone taking care of L & L.’

Randall returned the initials as a question.

‘Call it Logistics and Liaison,’ DeLorean said. It was a new one on Randall, but then, his prerogative he supposed: his company, his job descriptions.

A cop walked by, part of the secretary of state’s team, toting the same model of machine gun as the cops at the airport. (RUC they were called here: Royal Ulster Constabulary.) DeLorean brought his voice down a notch. ‘Besides, with that overseas experience of yours you’re not likely to be freaked out by the presence of all these guns.’

This time, before Randall could muster a reply, Jennings stepped across their path. He dipped his head with practised deference towards DeLorean. ‘The secretary of state would like a word before he leaves.’

‘Of course.’ DeLorean took Randall’s hand in both of his. ‘I have to get on to London later: a few more papers to sign before they will start releasing the money. We’ll book you into a hotel until we can fix you up with somewhere more permanent. Ring me the day after tomorrow, let me know what you need.’