Glenn Patterson - Gull

She turned off the tap, shook the excess water into the basin then turned, hands aloft, to the roller towel. Pull a yard, dry, dry, dry, pull a yard again for the person after you.

She watched her feet as they tiptoed towards the door. She saw them stop, as though the decision to speak came from them.

She faced about.

‘Don’t mind me asking, but he’s serious about this, isn’t he?’

Cristina Ferrare paused in the act of returning a brush to a bottle of lip gloss. Only her eyes moved, a slight frown forming above them as they sought out Liz’s a second time in the mirror.

‘Pardon me?’

‘Your husband, Mr DeLorean, well, I mean some people’ — she made the singular plural — ‘still can’t quite believe that he came here at all or that he is going to stay, you know, for the long haul.’

And now Cristina Ferrare turned so that they stood finally looking at each other, face to face, woman to woman.

She was more beautiful head on than seemed right or fair. Liz couldn’t tear her eyes away.

‘Of course he is going to stay, we bought a house here.’

‘I know,’ said Liz, hardly able to credit it was her talking at all. ‘So have a lot of the people I’m working with, the first house they have ever owned, most of them.’

‘Well, then.’ Cristina Ferrare smiled: a brilliant smile, and despite the reapplied lip gloss, entirely without artifice. ‘We are all in this together then, aren’t we?’

Liz saw her again a quarter of an hour later, holding tight to her husband’s arm as together they tried to make their way through the workers who were lining the corridor between the machinery, cheering and clapping and whistling through their fingers. DeLorean in the end climbed on to a workbench, raising himself still higher above the heads that surrounded him.

He held up his hands, but the cheering and clapping and whistling through fingers for a time only grew in volume. He spread his own fingers, made a tamping motion — Please — and now, at last, they let him speak.

‘I am so proud of each and every one of you today,’ he said, ‘so humble in your presence,’ and humble was exactly how he sounded to Liz: looked it too, more elbow and knee joints all of a sudden than he knew what to do with. ‘That car out front has my initials, sure, but make no mistake, it is your car. A few…’ he stroked the side of his nose, a sign that he was in on the secret, ‘…glitches today, but we can all work on those. We’ll write off today’s car and the next however many it takes as training exercises, but if you can get me three hundred top-notch cars by the start of April we will have a shipment leaving here bound for the US and the American market. What do you say, can you do it?’

‘Yes!’ Liz shouted, though she could barely hear herself, so loud and numerous were the yeses on all sides. They could, they would.

*

Randall held the door for them to pass through back outside. DeLorean paused before him and rested both hands on his shoulders. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to.

Don Lander, coming behind, did have something to say, sotto voce . ‘I don’t think you’ll have to worry any more about the Looking and Listening jibes.’

The secretary of state had not accompanied the DeLoreans on their tour of the factory. ‘Their moment,’ Randall had overheard him tell Jennings. (Perhaps it was time to revise that view of him as a man of constant sighing.) Randall could not imagine that he and Mrs Atkins had simply stood and waited, but wherever they had been in the interim they were here now, by their official car, to hear the last resounding cheer before the door to the assembly shop closed again.

‘You appear to have made quite an impression with the workers,’ Mrs Atkins said, that same smile on her face she had worn when she stepped from the car ninety minutes before.

‘I can tell you,’ said Cristina, ‘they have made quite an impression with me.’

‘Shame!’ another woman said — shouted — through a loudhailer, it sounded like. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’

Cristina’s head turned. Mrs Atkins’s head turned. Everyone’s head turned. The gates it was coming from, Twinbrook side. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’ The woman with the loudhailer was flanked by two more women, who seemed to Randall to be wearing nothing but blankets. There were other women, children too, holding up large photographs of bearded men — prisoners, of course — clad in the same coarse blankets. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’

‘Oh dear,’ said Atkins, at the end of a long sigh. ‘I think maybe it is time we were going.’

A detachment of cops was already at the gates, trying to keep the roadway clear. Others closed in around the official cars, hands variously clutching radios, baton handles, the stocks and the perforated barrels of the guns angled across their chests.

Cristina’s expression curdled. She seemed to stumble as she took a step towards the car and had to grab hold of her husband’s sleeve to keep from falling.

‘I don’t imagine those shouts are directed at you,’ Atkins said, although from the look on her face this was scant comfort to Cristina. She had reached the car now and at once slid across the back seat, almost for the moment disappearing from view. DeLorean got in after her and leaned forward, speaking animatedly to the driver.

There was jostling now at the gates, which the cops were trying to force fully open against the wishes and the weight of the protestors. The jostling became scuffling. A cop had his cap knocked off and he reacted by shoving the woman closest to him on the shoulder.

‘Brutality!’ yelled the woman with the loudhailer. ‘RUC brutality!’

The cars and their police escorts meantime were heading in convoy towards the exit, press photographers trying to keep pace, Randall trying to keep pace with them. As the lead Land Rover went through the gates it took a hit on the left side of the security grille from a bag of flour, which exploded in a white cloud that the secretary of state’s car drove through, windshield wipers going at maximum speed. An egg hit the roof, and another, and another.

It was as though someone in the throng was systematically emptying a bag of groceries.

The fourth egg overshot and broke, spreading its mess against a window of the car carrying DeLorean and his wife. Randall, who had drawn almost alongside — close enough that he had managed to get his hand in the way of the lens of the photographer dropping to a crouch to fire a shot off — saw Cristina’s head pop up, as though propelled by shock, or outrage. He was not inside the car so had no way of knowing for sure, but he saw the look on her face, he saw her mouth moving, ‘Away,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘Away!’

*

The news bulletin that evening mentioned the protests only in passing, thank the Lord, preferring to focus on the car, which looked, through the filter of the camera and the television screen, even more convincing than it had when it was pushed out of the assembly shop to meet its public. Robert sat through it, as he had sat through dinner, in complete silence. Actually he barely said a word all night. Liz waited until they were getting ready for bed.

‘You never asked me how it went today,’ she said when he came into the bedroom from the bathroom. She was already in her nightdress, a jar of face cream uncapped in her hand.

‘Sure I know how it went. Didn’t I see it on the TV?’

‘You didn’t see everything,’ she said. She was leaning over looking in the mirror on top of the chest of drawers. She saw him glance up. He knew that tone of voice. After all these years he ought to. ‘I met the model wife.’

He had his trousers in his hand. He folded them the way he did, using his chin to hold the waistband flat, but there was a greater than usual deliberateness about his movements. And though the mirror didn’t let her see far enough down to be certain, well — after all these years — it didn’t need to.