Glenn Patterson - Gull

‘Not our Bangor, the other one.’

‘Tell me’ (Driver seat in) ‘you’re not serious.’

‘If I wasn’t serious I wouldn’t have said it.’

‘Wait! Is it Poland?’

(Cap screw one, cap screw two.)

‘The land ’s right, the Po ’s wrong.’

‘What other land is there around there?’

(Washers, nuts again.)

‘Gotland.’

‘ What land?’

‘Got. It’s an island, smack in the middle of the Baltic Sea.’

(Tightening.)

‘Why’s it not in the World Cup, then?’

‘Because it’s still part of Sweden.’

‘That’s cheating!’

‘Cheating how? I never said anything about countries: I wanted the name of the piece of land, simple as that.’

(Car gone.)

Deep into the second month she was still able to count the cars lined up in the car park as she walked towards the gate at night. When she could no longer do it without breaking stride — somewhere around the hundred mark — she quit bothering. It would be tight all right, but they were going to do it, they were going to get the shipment out on time.

*

Randall had already decided that he was going to press the issue of his returning to the US as soon as the first shipment was delivered. From there on in it was all production. He had by now, he hoped, something to offer elsewhere in the company. He had a daughter he needed in every sense to be closer to. In comparison to which the business with Liz was a small consideration indeed. But even there the conviction was growing that things could not go on indefinitely as they had been going on. Nor could they — whatever thoughts to the contrary he had once entertained — go any further.

Sundays now getting off the train at Botanic Station he found his feet occasionally dragging: what if this week he was the one who did not show up? OK, next week then…

Across the road from the station was a broad building out of keeping with the rest of the street: flat-roofed, red-brick, metal window frames; a sign at the end nearest the station proclaiming it the home of the Belfast Arts Theatre. Maybe upstairs it was. Downstairs for almost its entire length it comprised single-window businesses: a laundromat, a bric-a-brac store in the guise of a gift centre, and, between these two, a dingy-looking record store.

Randall had peered through the security mesh a couple of times — in those feet-dragging minutes after disembarking, or again on his return to the station with minutes still in hand before the next train — and had been intrigued to see among the album covers beginning to fade behind the glass a fair number of jazz artists.

On the one occasion that he had found himself, by chance, on the street during the hours of business, however, there had been a crowd of school kids — schoolboys — around the door, blazer lapels basically backdrops for their button badges and safety-pin collections, and he convinced himself he was in too much of a hurry anyway.

Then the sole on his right shoe started to go. ‘American?’ said the man in the Heel and Key Bar in Dunmurry to whom he showed it first. ‘We don’t get a big lot of these in here. Don’t get a big lot of shoes at all, tell you the truth. It’s mostly the keys. I don’t know what people do with them.’ He picked up the cigarette from the ashtray next to the cash register, squinted and blew a thin jet of smoke at the sole. Wisps of it came out through the eyelets. ‘Here.’ With the world’s smallest pen he wrote an address on the back of a docket. ‘You’d be better off taking them into Belfast, get them done right.’

It was a fortnight before Randall found the time. A Saturday afternoon. He could only imagine what it would be like trying to find a place to park. He took the train again, carrying on through Botanic this time to Central Station, although to what exactly the windowless bunker of a building he stepped out of was central he had for several disorienting moments not the first idea. Dereliction wherever his eyes lit.

A man approached him, red hair sprouting sideways from beneath a flat cap. ‘Taxi?’

Randall nodded, fist closing tighter round the Heel and Key Bar docket. The man trotted to a black London cab parked twenty yards away. He held the rear door for Randall then, as soon as he was inside, shut it again and disappeared in among the passengers emerging, scratching their heads, from the station. A minute passed. Two. The man in the cap returned with three other lost souls and admitted them to the rear of the cab with Randall. He went round then to the driver’s side and got in, turning in his seat once he had settled himself, and speaking through the sliding window between front and back.

‘City centre, all of you?’

The four strangers — two men, two women, two grey-heads, two in the prime, one with worn shoes wrapped in a bag on his lap — looked at one another and nodded.

‘Flat fare, two pound each,’ the driver said, and shut the window on the matter.

He set them down a quarter of a mile and a couple of turns in the road later (a couple of turns impossible to divine from the sidewalk before the station) at the back of the City Hall.

Randall and his temporary travel companions split without once having broken their silence, aware that they had been taken for a ride that could not be measured in distance alone.

Come the time to leave again, therefore, Randall opted to walk to the station he knew best and found himself at the entrance to Botanic two minutes late for one train, twenty-eight minutes early for the one after.

He looked over the road at the record store. No schoolkids today.

There was a crosswalk a little way up the street, but having by now had ample opportunity to observe the Belfast road-crossing etiquette — a hand raised in apology (or admonition) to the oncoming traffic — he decided on the more direct route and, hardly breaking stride, pushed open the shop door — halfway.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.

A kid was hunched over a box of records on the floor behind the door. In fact, looking about (it didn’t take long), he realised there were at least as many kids inside as he had previously seen outside, only out of uniform now and twice as rowdy.

Something or other, the one behind the door was saying emphatically (neither the bump or Randall’s apology having interrupted him) was a load of balls. Randall spotted a Yes album cover in the boy’s hand. He forgot now the name of the artist, but Stafford in his unit — the memory broke surface, blinking from long submergence — Stafford had been a huge fan, painstakingly stencilling his artwork for Gun on to the back of his flak vest: all hellfire and opened-maw ghouls.

Randall was about to take back the one step he had taken inside, pull the door quietly behind him, when the man — fifties maybe — working the counter called over the top of the heads between them.

‘Something you’re looking for there?’

Randall raised the hand with which he had moments before deflected the traffic. ‘I saw the LP covers in your window.’ He tried to make it sound as though it was his fault for imagining that there would be any connection between what was on display there and what was to be found on the shelves. ‘I was kind of wondering whether you maybe had anything by Artie Shaw.’

The man’s face lit up. ‘Arthur Jacob Arshawsky! Now you’re talking.’ He came out from behind the counter — a little more hesitantly than Randall would have expected: perhaps he had misjudged his age — and taking Randall by the arm guided him to the adjacent aisle. His fingertips skimmed the top edges of the sleeves, stopping now and then as though guided by touch alone to pull out an LP. That one? On second thoughts… That? No, wait: this one.