Glenn Patterson - Gull

*

Robert did not much like Margaret Thatcher, but he liked that buffoon Jim Callaghan even less. To his mind anybody would have been an improvement.

‘Even a woman, you mean?’

‘Oh, come on, Liz, Margaret Thatcher’s never a woman, she’s a man in a dress.’

Liz was not sure what to make of it all. She had long ago given up on politicians in this part of the world — take your pick from old men, angry men, or angry old men — and the ones across the water always seemed, and not just by virtue of the water, remote. Part of her responded to the sound of a woman (whatever Robert called her) commanding attention, shouting down the hecklers — encouraging them in order to shout them down was how it sometimes came across — but another, larger part feared Thatcher’s certainty. Liz’s granny had a saying (her granny had a store of sayings; it was, besides her children, the principal achievement of her life): the higher you build your tower the harder it is to climb down.

Margaret Thatcher by the sound of her was still building and had no intention of stopping any time soon.

*

Turned out what had DeLorean in Utah earlier in the year was Imps and Sprytes — Thokiol Imps and Sprytes, to be precise: specialist snow vehicles built in Logan by a company that had got a lucky break in the Space Shuttle programme and were looking to offload their terrestrial holdings at a price that was too good to pass up, even for a man with a new high-concept sports car on his hands.

It was in Utah again, on Mountain Time — a couple of hours closer to the start of his day, in consequence, than had been intended — that Randall tracked him down the morning after the election. Despite the time disadvantage he sounded more alert than Randall felt: already had a full workout under his belt, in fact.

‘We should have staked some of that money the last government gave us on the result,’ DeLorean said. (He sounded as though he was on speakerphone, quite possibly still on an exercise bike.) ‘We could have paid the new one back and still have had change to finish off the factory with.’

‘About that,’ said Randall.

‘You are going to tell me that we are nine months into the eighteen. As I have already said to Dixon and Chuck, our glass is half full.’

‘Jennings—’

‘—inclines to the half-empty point of view, that’s why he is a civil servant, a checker of things. We are makers of things.’ Randall was ambushed by a tingling up his spine at these words, their conviction and their inclusiveness: we . ‘At Chevrolet at one point the parts manual was nineteen inches thick: there were a thousand options just for the dashboard. We’re giving our owners four options and half a dozen accessories for the whole car. Do you understand what I am saying? We are not just trying to build a factory, we are rethinking an entire way of doing things and, barring something totally unforeseen, we’ll hit our target.’

*

Viewed through the full half of the glass, the foundations of the factory had now been laid. The stream dividing the fields — a tributary of the river that bordered Warren House — had been diverted and culverted and thousands of tons of stone had been brought down from the quarry at White Mountain, which formed — and daily deformed — part of the skyline to the west.

In places the stone was four feet deep. On top of this the skeleton of the factory itself had begun to take shape. There were to be two main sections, the body-pressing building — the word they used here was ‘shop’ — and, sitting at right angles to it, the assembly or ‘build’ shop, the two connected by a system of mobile cranes. The bodies aside, no actual manufacturing would be done on site. Instead, as many of the components as possible would be sourced locally, further boosting employment. The stainless steel panels had been sub-contracted to a factory near Limerick, which as Jennings ruefully observed, meant the southern Irish had contrived to get a slice of the pie without having to buy any of the ingredients.

For the moment, all of this was being coordinated and administered from the ‘carpet factory’ — the red-brick building before which the press conference had taken place the day Randall arrived — or from Warren House itself, where Randall had been joined, now that the refurbishment was complete, by Chuck Bennington. ‘Think of me as the son that never moved out,’ Randall said, although Chuck was a largely absent parent, with a schedule that could not have been more punishing if it had been handed down by a court of law.

Besides the private access road, the contractors were laying a new road to one of the two entrances they were building into the factory: the first to the south-east for workers who would be coming from the Seymour Hill direction; and the second — to be served by the new road — pretty much due west for those arriving from Twinbrook. Except no one was buying the convenience story (the gates were no more than a couple of hundred yards apart), although to be honest no one was trying very hard to sell it either. The Protestant and Catholic gates was what they were.

‘It is the only way you are going to get both tribes to buy in,’ was the way Dixon Hollinshead had justified it.

Buy in, mind you, did not look to Randall as though it was going to be a problem. The applications had started coming in the morning after that first press conference — long before there was such a thing as an application form or even a list of job descriptions. By the time the forms were ready and the recruitment ads went into the newspapers midway through the first spring they already had three or four sackfuls sitting in a corridor in the carpet factory waiting to be read.

Then the deluge began.

Some of the envelopes didn’t have stamps, so hasty were the senders, or so unaccustomed to sending letters of any sort. A lot of them carried no address beyond DeLorean, Belfast — or Dunmurry, as some preferred, including one would-be worker who had underlined the place name three times to ensure the letter did not go to a different DeLorean. A sizeable number of the forms inside were lacking vital information, like the contact address, the name . But even after Stylianides and his staff had weeded out those they still had twenty applications for each of the first nine hundred positions that had to be filled.

Stylianides reckoned that you could probably have learned more from those letters than you could from a whole library of history and sociology books, although for Chuck the only pertinent fact to draw from them was that there did not exist in the whole of that country more than a few score people with the training or the experience necessary to assemble stainless steel sports cars — any kind of cars.

‘So, think of all the bad habits they are not going to have to unlearn,’ DeLorean told him when the matter was raised on his next visit, and Chuck’s moustache and beard closed ranks with the perpetual cigarette to keep his mouth from saying anything else.

The interviews took the better part of two months. If you made it that far you still had less than a one in three chance of landing a job. Randall took his turn on the interview panels same as everybody else. Whatever about no bad habits, it was a struggle at times not to give in to Chuck’s misgivings.

He lay this side of sleep some nights, playing the interviews over in his head, got up more than once to write something down before it slipped away.

*

Woman, 45, according to her form (mistake, had to be: tens and units transposed?)

Stylianides: You say in your application that you used to work in a pram factory?

Woman: Well, we called it the Pram Factory, but mostly what it did was bikes.