Glenn Patterson - Gull

‘Her?’ You’re kidding me?’

‘Uh-uh. Standing at the sink in the toilets, like this, putting on her make-up.’ She set down the face cream and licked the tip of one finger and brushed her lips with it, glossing them. Purely for the purposes of illustration, of course.

‘Did you speak to her? What did she say?’

‘She said you had better get used to being a kept man.’

‘Did she now?’

He was round her side of the bed by this time. The reflection in the mirror now was all his chest in his white vest, rising and falling with the quickening of his breath.

‘Like a servant you mean?’ Hands on her hips beneath the nightdress, nudging it up, moving her a few inches to the left, getting the angle. (He knew that too of old.) ‘A gardener, maybe?’

And — dear God — he was in — as quick as that — right, right in. She could hardly breathe and yet she thrust back wanting even more. The face cream and all the other bottles and jars were scattered. The mirror tilted, toppled. She bit her forearm and the world went white.

*

The phone call came while Randall was still at dinner in the residents’ dining room. Most of the journalists had already checked out, but he went out to the lobby anyway to speak rather than have the phone brought to the table.

‘I didn’t get a chance to say before we drove off,’ DeLorean said, ‘but there has been a change of plan.’ In the background at that moment a flight was being announced, gate now closing. Randall saw again the expression on Cristina’s face as the car drove through those women in their blankets, put the two together. It must almost, in the pause that he left, have been audible — a more-than-mental click — because DeLorean at once began steering him towards a different conclusion. ‘There is a dealers’ convention, starts tomorrow, in Long Beach. I had been thinking on the flight across it would be too good an opportunity to miss with that first shipment coming due.’

‘No, you’re right. It makes perfect sense.’ And it did, of course. It really did.

There was a further and final call for passengers intending to travel.

‘I’ll talk to you from Long Beach,’ DeLorean said. ‘And, Randall… thank you.’

He moved back into Warren House that same evening, with — cold though it was — the familiar firefly-dance of cigarette tips across the valley to greet him. The red satin bows were still attached to the bay trees at the front door. Inside, not a grape had been dislodged from the pyramid of fruit in the crystal bowl on the sideboard, not a petal had dropped from the white peonies in the vase on the console of the bathtub beside which Randall undressed, letting his clothes fall to the floor where he stood. He reached into the bath and turned the dial to close the plug before opening the hot tap all the way. Steam billowed around him. He watched himself in the mirrored tiles disappear from the knees, the thighs, the waist up, knowing that all he had to do was pull the cord on the fan to begin to reverse the trick, but not yet (chest now, shoulders, neck, chin… bye-bye eyes), not just yet.

The Botanic Gardens rendezvous continued through what remained of the winter and into the spring. Liz told herself she was doing nothing whatever wrong. She would have been there on a Sunday morning anyway, or not a million miles away, and it wasn’t as if they did anything apart from talk, sometimes not even that, just sat, a careful distance apart, people-watching.

One February Sunday, caught in a sudden downpour, they fled to the relative shelter of the sunken garden, and straight away wished (his body language echoed hers) that they had taken their chances with the rain, and took them, in fact, the moment the rain stopped bouncing on the paths above their eye level.

Her sister Vivienne in Melbourne was having an affair, Liz was pretty sure, with a man at her work. She had not come right out with it in her letters — they had never been the type of family to come right out with anything — but it was there between the lines, even just in the frequency with which the letters had started to arrive: she needed to be talking, just as she had on those nights in her teens, coming home from dances, shaking Liz awake (Vivienne had five years on her little sister, was already bringing home a wage before Liz had finished primary school), spouting nonsense about everything under the sun — the moon , make that — when the thing she really wanted to tell her, the thing she could not come right out and say, was whose arms had wrapped themselves around her, whose hands when the lights had gone way down had found their way up — defying elastic and latex and metal underwiring — there .

Liz had taken to ripping the letters up and burying the pieces in the bin, several bins even, the minute she was done reading them for fear that Robert would pick one up, (accidentally it would have to be, but still, accidents did sometimes happen), and read into it the same thing she did.

Because if he was to ask her to her face — ‘What does that sister of yours think she’s at? And what about Ivor? Do you not owe it to him to write and let him know?’ — I mean, seriously, how could she fail to give herself away?

The odd Sunday she went straight to her mother’s, skipped the Gardens altogether. Show him he wasn’t to depend on her coming. Show herself she wasn’t dependent on seeing him.

Monday to Friday and half of every other Saturday she built cars.

Eventually they would be turning out seventy or eighty a day, but for the first shipment they had a shade over eight weeks to manufacture three hundred they could swear by on the American market. The same car could come around two, three times, sometimes more, before the inspectors were content to let it out, or out as far as the Emissions and Vehicle Preparation shed at any rate. She knew what the shed was for now. EVP was their A&E. There weren’t many cars that didn’t come out of there better than they went in.

They were all still learning.

An assembly line is an exercise in rhythm, individual and collective. Like an orchestra, she was chuffed with herself for finally saying the day she tried to put it into words (tried to put it into words while simultaneously wrestling with a tension spring). Aye, said Anto, or like galley slaves.

The important thing was to distract all but that part of the brain required for the task in hand. Some people whistled — no: a lot of people whistled, a disproportionate number of them through their teeth — some people sang, or made noises approximate to singing in words only occasionally approximate to the ones committed to vinyl.

Anto had a game — ‘Where in the world?’ Where in the world would you be if you travelled five hundred miles west of such and such a place, then veered north for five hundred more?

Liz thought he must have invented it himself, for it was always him that won it. TC hated it — ‘Change the record, will you, for fuck sake’ — but he knew that the rhythm was better in the pit, or the galley, if they were all distracted by the same thing.

(Car arriving.)

‘You’ve come out of Stockholm, heading due south, you hit land… Where in the world would you be? Liz?’

‘Stockholm, you say?’

‘Stockholm.’

(Passenger seat in position.)

‘Stockholm, Stockholm, Stockholm…’

‘Due south.’

(Upper and lower shields aligned.)

‘It’s not Denmark?’

(Cap screws through the slide runners.)

‘Correct, it’s not.’

(Washers, nuts.)

‘I give up.’

‘After one guess? Come on! TC?’

(Tighten, tighten, tighten.)

‘Bangor?’

‘Ha-ha.’