Glenn Patterson - Gull

*

DeLorean stepped up to the microphone, to the right of the grandstand, as though — Randall had observed it before — he moved through a different medium, or was being shot on a different speed, to everyone around him. He had never looked more impressive, his hair spun, you would almost have thought, from the same guaranteed rust-free stuff that sheathed the cars that bore his name. And as for his jaw… it was his conductor’s baton, his wand, wherever it pointed there was a reaction, a jumping to attention, a rush of colour to the cheeks, an instant abashed smile.

‘Mister Secretary of State’ — forget the syllables now: every letter nearly was drawn out to a sentence in its own right — ‘Missis Atkins, Distinguished Guests, Members of the Local and International Press, Friends and Well-wishers…’ From somewhere at his back there came a muffled thud. His eyes flicked towards Don, then Randall, but he carried on without noticeable hesitation and only a fraction louder than before, ‘…Ladies and Gentlemen. Thirty years ago, when I was a young man just beginning to make my way in the automobile industry…’

Don being too close to the dignitaries and the cameras that were trained on them, and too far from the source of the thud (for that was what the rapid movement of the eyes had signified: go, one of you), Randall backed slowly towards the assembly shop and, avoiding the main doors, ducked inside. It took him several moments to make sense of what he was seeing.

The car was wedged at an angle between the door pillar and the wall. The test driver stood, hands gripping fistfuls of his hair, at the centre of a crowd of horrified workers.

‘The brakes just weren’t responding,’ he said.

‘But we tested them,’ said the man at his left shoulder, practically in tears. Randall was not far off joining him.

The test driver’s hands tightened their grip, pulling his features into a dreadful grimace. ‘They weren’t responding. I was pressing and pressing, and nothing… nothing at all.’

‘We’re fucked,’ somebody said. Randall glanced round at him. One of the union leaders. Always had a book with him at meetings. He was looking straight at Randall, who was thinking in that moment Don , and how to get him away from those cameras out front without alerting everyone that there was a problem.

Oh, Christ was there a problem.

‘Wait,’ he said and turned to the driver. ‘There are still a couple of those mules around, aren’t there? Steering wheels and all already inside? Go and get one of them. And, here’ — this to the workers gathered round looking instantly a little less horrified — ‘get the skins off this.’ He leaned over the hood to have a look at the damage. The licence plate at least was salvageable: DMC1. ‘And the licence plate too. Time and a half for everyone if you can get a car out of here in the next quarter of an hour!’

Liz was the first to respond. Not a flicker as she rushed past him. Too focused.

He slipped out the side door again.

DeLorean was still on his feet, still talking (he had only just left the fifties behind for the thrill that was his first Car of the Year, the 1960 Tempest), his instinct and his experience telling him that if something was not going right there was every chance it was going very wrong indeed, but telling him too that the best people to deal with it were almost certainly already on the other side of the doors. What else was all the training for?

Randall, ignoring the frown Jennings turned his way, placed himself in DeLorean’s line of vision. He showed him the fingers of both hands then of the left hand alone. As before there was barely a pause, although maybe a careful observer would have seen his jaw jut out a fraction further. Fifteen minutes? He could do that. And how. From the Tempest to the GTO — a generous word for Bill Collins, in absentia, who had been part of the Pontiac too, a nod to Ronnie and the Daytonas, who had taken ‘this modified little Pon-Pon’ to the top of the Pop Charts as well as the auto sales charts — from the GTO to the GM kiss-off (here lightly done: this was not a day for recrimination), to the Vision that had guided him this past seven years and more… Randall could have flashed him a half dozen more handfuls of fingers and the store would not have been exhausted.

On fourteen and a half minutes, though, the mechanism controlling the assembly shop doors kicked in.

‘But now, ladies and gentlemen’ — you would have thought, so seamless was the transition, that the opening of the doors had been timed to fit his words and not the other way about — ‘this is the moment they told us we would never live to see, the moment they told us we were mad to dare dream we would live to see, and the moment that, but for the faith of my wonderful wife Cristina’ — she pressed a knuckle beneath each eye in turn — ‘I might even have got to thinking once or twice myself I was mad to dream I would live to see.’ Never more impressive, never more vindicated. ‘I present to you all…’ A final dramatic pause, or a catch in the throat, ‘the DMC-12 sports car.’

Randall uncrossed his fingers to join in the applause, which grew as the doors opened wider then, as the nose appeared (complete with licence plate), lost the run of itself completely. People were whooping and hollering, Irish people, British people. The press were whooping and hollering loudest of all. The secretary of state put his hand to his tie, patting the knot, when it seemed from his expression as though what he wanted to do was yank the thing loose or tear it off altogether.

The test driver was steering (hair again smoothed flat), but the engine was silent. The power instead was being provided by the six workers pushing from behind.

‘It’s basically held together with washers and duct tape,’ one of them told Randall out the corner of his mouth. ‘There’s bits of wood and all sorts in there.’ But that was not how it looked at all. The gull-wing doors lifted and every person present smiled.

‘You will excuse us if we don’t start the engine,’ DeLorean said, though it was doubtful that many heard, ‘but this is a high-performance car and with so many of us gathered this morning space is maybe a little tighter than is strictly advisable.’

Jennings materialised at Randall’s shoulder. ‘For a moment when he was spinning us those yarns about Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis Jr I thought he was going to hit us with another delay.’ But even as he was saying this DeLorean was inviting the secretary of state and his wife to come closer — to get inside — and Jennings was forced into an undignified shuffle to take Mrs Atkins’s bag, which he held as a man might a severed head that had been thrust into his hand, at arm’s length, by the hair, that is to say the straps.

*

Liz sat on the toilet with her head firmly between her knees. It was the only way she could think of to keep her legs from shaking.

Jesus, they had got away with it.

For the past half-hour, since the dressed-up mule had been pushed out the front, she had been waiting for the doors of the assembly shop to burst open again and every cop standing guard outside to come charging in and arrest the lot of them for fraud.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

She squeezed out an excuse for her occupation of the cubicle, hitched up her overall, and flushed. She opened the door and almost closed it again straight away.

Cristina Ferrare was standing at one of the sinks, a small make-up bag balanced, open, between the taps.

She looked up into the mirror, meeting Liz’s eyes next to the half-closed door, after which of course Liz had no option but to open the door fully and carry on out to the sinks. (If only she had been a man she could have headed straight for the exit. As Robert said to her once when she called him on it, ‘It’s not as if we hold the end of it or anything.’) She chose a sink two along on the exit side. Cristina Ferrare did not look round, or track her walk, but examined her own reflection for signs of imperfection and incredibly found one, high on her left cheekbone. She went at it with powder from a deep-red tub. Liz concentrated on the action of soaping her hands, folding them over one another, interlocking fingers and thumbs, thumbs and fingers, rinsing them then, thoroughly. Anything to avoid having to meet herself in the mirror, having to make the comparison.