Glenn Patterson - Gull

Stylianides: Bikes? Right.

Woman: And cuddly toys.

Stylianides: Bikes and cuddly toys. And what was your own area of expertise?

Woman: The cuddly toys.

Stylianides: So, like…?

Woman: Stuffing, mainly.

Stylianides (slowly): OK.

Woman: It all had to be done by hand, you know. It’s a lot trickier than you think.

Stylianides: You realise that most of our upholstering will be done offsite?

Woman (ages another five years): I didn’t realise that, no.

Stylianides: The seats and so forth, the ‘stuffing’.

Silence… long silence.

Woman (smiling, a girl again): What about the canteen?

*

Heavy-set Man, buzz-cut.

Hollinshead: You left your last job, let me see…

Heavy-set Man: In 1975. Third of March. A Monday.

Hollinshead: Is it not more usual to work through to the end of the week?

Heavy-set Man: I had a spot of bother.

Hollinshead: Do you mind me asking what sort of bother exactly?

Heavy-set Man: The foreman was always on my case. Didn’t matter what it was went wrong, it was me he gave the blame to. In the end I just threw the head up.

Hollinshead: You quit?

Heavy-set Man (absentmindedly flexing right hand): I lamped him.

Self: Just so we’re clear, when you say ‘lamped’…?

Heavy-set Man: I flattened him. One punch.

Hollinshead (clears his throat): And you don’t think maybe you should have mentioned that in your application?

Heavy-set Man: I told myself I wasn’t going to let that… so-and-so ruin my life.

*

Teenage Girl (first interview!!): My boyfriend dared me to apply. Here he was, Sure why not, I am, and here’s me, Me… ? Aye, dead on, and now here’s me has the big interview and there’s him sitting in the house moping. He’d probably chuck me if I was to get a start.

Bennington (removing cigarette from his mouth): That’s what you say here for ‘dump’, ‘break it off’? ‘Chuck’?

Teenage Girl: Aye.

Bennington (raises his eyebrows): Well we wouldn’t want that to happen.

Teenage Girl (a sigh, like here is a man who understands): I know. Six weeks we’ve been going.

*

Slouching Man… he slouches, that’s it.

Stylianides: Are you comfortable there?

Slouching Man: Fine, fine. Tell you the truth, but, I had plenty to keep me busy on the brew*. You know yourselves, you can always find something to do. I only wrote off for the form to keep Her quiet.

*A drinker?

*

Twitchy Man (nicotine to the knuckles): I was on the sick there for a lot of years with my nerves.

Hollinshead: I’m sorry to hear that.

Twitchy Man (nods): Some fella in the place where I used to be foreman went buck mad one day and attacked me for no reason at all.

*

And that was all in the first week.

Somewhere in the middle of the second Randall looked up, a heartbeat after the door opened, from the notes he had been making, to find a woman already installed in the chair across the table. He half expected her to glance away, or even get up and leave. It was her : the woman from the wedding reception in the Conway, the sister-in-law. The rest of the panel were looking at him expectantly. He was supposed to lead on this one.

‘So.’ He found her form. ‘Elizabeth, is that correct?’

‘Liz is fine.’

It wasn’t her at all, he saw that now. He frowned.

‘I’m looking at your application here and I see you haven’t really worked…’

‘Since my sons were born, no.’

‘And they are…?’

‘Fourteen and fifteen now. I can hardly believe it myself.’

‘So what, after all that time, made you decide to apply to DMCL?’

‘Funny,’ she said, without the expression, facial or vocal, to support it, ‘that’s exactly what my husband asked me.’

*

She had been upstairs changing the boys’ beds (the joys of Saturday morning!) when she heard him calling from the hall.

‘Liz?’

‘Coming!’ She bundled up the dirty sheets along with the socks and underwear lying about the floor and stuffed them into the pillowcases.

‘ Liz! ’ Not just louder, but higher , from a point closer to her. He did that sometimes, foot on the first stair for extra projection.

‘I said I’m coming.’ She came. Along the landing to the head of the stairs. Stopped. He was actually on the third step. Straight away she saw what it was that had raised him to such a pitch. The application form was trembling with the force of his rage in his right hand. If she had leaned forward far enough she could have grabbed it off him, or at least have had the satisfaction of taking him with her if she fell in the attempt.

‘You left this on the table,’ he said.

‘I left it in my bag.’

‘You left your bag on the table.’

‘You have no right to go looking in there.’

‘I have every right. Whatever’s under this roof is ours together.’ He closed his fist tighter around the application. ‘So are you going to tell me what you think you’re playing at?’

‘I’m not “playing” at anything.’ She pushed past him, forcing him back against the banister. Forget that form, she’d send away for another one. She would send away for as many as it took.

He followed her through the living room and into the kitchen reading aloud. ‘“I would consider myself suitable for any position although I would prefer something on the assembly side of things…” You’re not serious?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Do you know where that factory is?’

‘Dunmurry.’

‘It’s Twinbrook: West Belfast. Remember the last factory to open around there? Remember Grundig? It’s not safe.’ He paused, big sorrowful lip on him. She knew what was coming. Pete. ‘You above all people shouldn’t need telling.’

‘Oh, Robert, don’t.’ She hated him using her brother’s memory against her like that. Pete would have hated it too.

‘Anyway’ — he wasn’t prepared to let this go yet — ‘what are you going to tell them at the interview? That the nearest you’ve come to the assembly side of things is pushing two chairs together for the boys to “drive” when they were wee?’ He jabbed the heel of his hand in the air in front of her face. ‘Beep-beep, Noddy!’

‘Stop it, will you. It’s not funny.’

The boys came in the back door at that moment from their football, grown men nearly the two of them, to look at, wrapped up in a smell of sweat and mud and Wintergreen rub.

‘What’s not funny?’

‘Remember the wee cars your mum used to make you?’

‘In the dinette, you mean? With the chairs?’

‘Flip, yeah!’

‘Where was it we were always driving to?’

‘The McGillycuddy Reeks!’

Robert howled at this forgotten detail. ‘Don’t forget to tell them that at the interview as well: your car made it all the way to the McGillycuddy Reeks.’ In her face again. ‘Beep-beep!’

She went to knock his hand out of the way but she was still holding the damned pillowcases. She threw them on the ground at the boys’ feet — ‘You’re big enough now you can pick up your own dirty laundry’ — then turned on the tap over the sink, hard, spraying water in all directions.

‘Flip sake!’

‘Watch what you’re doing!’

She turned the water off again, swung round to face Robert.

‘You know what I’ll tell them if they give me an interview? That it’s the first thing that’s made me smile in this bloody country for years.’

*

One of the Americans on the other side of the table was frowning, the older one: hadn’t spoken a word yet. ‘Smile?’ he said now.

‘A sports car made in Belfast?’ she said. ‘Whoever heard of that? And those doors, the way they lift up… The very first time I saw them on TV, I don’t know, I couldn’t help myself.’