Glenn Patterson - Gull

(Did the people in the vans and trucks thank her, or him? They did not.)

Jennings showed up an hour ahead of schedule, looking as ever as though he had dressed according to strict civil service guidelines, right down to the size of the bow on his shoelaces.

Behind him came an advance party of the RUC, bringing with them a pair of Labrador detection dogs, one golden, one black, who were let off their leashes to run around a while, ears up, tongues wagging, noses to the ground, before being called to heel again. In went the tongues, down went the ears.

‘I sometimes think I would like to leave something very small for them to find, they look so disappointed,’ said Jennings, as the handlers coaxed the dogs into their van.

They were no sooner away than the VIPs began to arrive, or the PIPs at any rate — the pretty important people: the industrial developers, the local political party leaders, doing their level best to be seen to be ignoring one another, a couple of lords lieutenant, Colin Chapman, accompanied by a woman half a head taller and a decade and a half younger, who did not answer to any of the descriptions Randall had heard of Chapman’s wife.

Another thirty minutes and a convoy of Land Rovers came through the gates with, at its centre, two long black cars. Jennings made straight for the first as it pulled up, Randall for the second, the two of them opening the doors almost simultaneously.

Humphrey Atkins stepped out of Jennings’s car then turned to offer his hand to a woman with the longest neck that Randall — from whose car no one had yet emerged — had ever seen. The press corps as good as ignored her, as they had ignored her husband before her, but as the first size sixteen black chain loafer was belatedly planted on the ground next to where Randall stood they made a sudden and determined charge.

John Zachary DeLorean — for he seemed on this occasion to emerge in three distinct stages — finished unpacking himself from the car (however he packed himself his suits never creased) and was followed in one fluid movement by Cristina, towards whom every camera and microphone now pointed.

‘Mrs DeLorean, if you would… this way… please… Mrs DeLorean!’

‘How are you enjoying Belfast?’

‘Had you time for an Ulster fry on the way from the airport?’

Cristina merely smiled, which appeared from the absence of further questions to satisfy the journalists for now.

A few yards to the left Mrs Atkins maintained her smile too in case it was needed any time soon. Randall rather suspected it would not be.

DeLorean dipped his head towards him on his way to shake the secretary of state’s hand.

‘All set?’

‘All set.’

DeLorean squeezed his upper arm.

Don Lander, who had met up with the DeLoreans in London the night before, got out of the car last and least noticed. ‘Well I got to the bottom of the choice of launch date,’ he told Randall. ‘Seems Sonja thought this was the most auspicious day.’

Randall looked at him blankly.

‘Cristina’s palm-reader,’ Don said. ‘And there I was thinking it was the interior designer.’

*

All through the morning they had listened to the crowd gathering on the other side of the assembly shop doors. People returning from outside brought updates — ‘The sniffer dogs are here…’ ‘There’s fellas out there speaking German and all sorts’ — and questions — ‘Anybody know what CNN stands for…?’ ‘Who’s the woman with your wee man Chapman…?’

Liz had a distant memory of a Girl Guide Concert — dear God: 1959 — she and her fellow Guides taking it in turns to sneak a peek through the church hall’s dusty black curtains: What can you see? What can you see? Then, as now, when show time finally came it took them all a little by surprise, as though the reason for all that activity out front had temporarily slipped their minds. Then it was chords bashed out on the ancient piano; now it was a sound as of the whole factory being kick-started.

They turned their backs en masse on what was happening beyond the doors and strained to see the crane bring the first of the fettled bodies through from the pressing shop and set it, beyond the sightlines of those at Liz’s end of the chain, on to the trim line. There was an enormous cheer from that direction, modulating into a buzz — workers combining, talking one another through the tasks in hand — which after a time yielded to something more querulous, something indeed very like a grumble, punctuated finally by a single ringing cry, ‘What the fuck ?’

Anto gave TC a boost and he clung to a pillar long enough to report that it looked as though there might be a ruck. A fella from the engine-dress line had already been despatched to find out more and returned breathless a few minutes later (the clamour had subsided a little) with word that the skins didn’t fit — ‘curling like the lids of sardine cans’, was what he had been told — and that the Tellus operators had been desperately trying to override the settings on the carrier, which kept wanting to move it on to the next stage. People were practically standing with their backs against it, others spreading themselves against the skins to keep them flat, and then some wee man from Rathcoole had produced a fistful of penny washers from his overall pocket (no one asked what he was doing with so many on his pocket to begin with) and started replacing the standard issue washers, or in some cases just firing the penny washers on over the top of them. They seemed to do the trick: the lids were back on the cans. Now fellas from all the sections were running to the stores looking for buckets of penny washers.

‘So,’ Anto said. ‘What are you waiting for, TC? Go and get us a bucket of washers.’

‘Me go? You go!’

‘Forget it, I’ll go,’ Liz said and would not hear then of them not letting her.

It was as she was making her way back, slowly (who knew there was so much weight in a bucket of washers?), that the word started going round that DeLorean and his wife had arrived — the secretary of state and his wife too — which would have accounted for the sudden competition again from noise without.

Liz set down the washers, with an inadvertent thump, between her and Anto. The Tellus carrier was moving again, past the doors section now, heading straight for them.

‘My palms are sweating,’ Liz said.

Said TC, ‘My cheeks are.’

‘What way’s that to talk?’ said Anto and seemed to shift uncomfortably inside his own overalls.

And then there it was in front of them and there they were at last, the three of them, hoisting the first of the black leather seats, their tools, the galvanised bucket of washers, and immersing themselves in the interior.

‘Wait a second… Wait a second.’

‘Watch! No, lift that… A bit higher… A bit higher… Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! ’

‘Where’s this supposed to…?’

‘Look: down there. Remember?’

‘Do you want me to hold it for you?’

‘Quick, chuck us a couple more washers.’

‘The torque, the torque! Use the torque wrench!’

And, almost before they had time to think, they were out and the car had moved on. For the life of her she couldn’t remember the second seat even going in. A couple of minutes after that it was through the wheels section too and up on the ramp for fuelling. (One third of an imperial gallon those eight minutes amounted to. They would have been better off with a dropper than a pump.) There had been talk of Jackie Stewart or Stirling Moss coming to drive the first car out, or even — they should be so lucky — James Hunt. Instead that honour went to one of the test drivers, Barry, Liz thought it was you called him, who walked to the car like the astronauts at Cape Canaveral to their rockets, that same expression on his face of anticipation mixed with dread. As he got in, left side, to the driver’s seat, TC and Anto were running to help open the roller doors.