Glenn Patterson - Gull

Resided.

How many decades had it taken for shipbuilding to be established here, DeLorean had asked him, for Belfast to be able to claim this as the biggest, most productive yard in the world?

Exactly.

Little more than two and a half years it had taken to get these cars out. Not eighteen months, sure, but even so, two and a half years where no cars had ever been made before.

Don Lander came and joined him in the light, watched a while in silence. ‘Of course,’ he said at last, ‘the best thing that could happen is for that boat to sink halfway across, assuming the crew got picked up, of course. That way we’d get to say we got the cars out on time and no one would ever know at what cost.’

Randall glanced at him. Don was looking dead ahead, inscrutable.

*

The word Liz heard was ‘dogs’. Washers — as he had been known since he saved the day, with the world’s press waiting, by calling for a bucket of them — carried the word with him from the trim line where he had heard it spoken — spat — by his Big Mate, who had got it straight from a fella he knew on the boat. The only difference being, said the Yanks who had been tasked with unloading them on to the docks, actual dogs in that kind of shape would have been put down. Instead these dogs of cars were being sent straight to a Quality Assurance Centre to be taken apart and put back together at two thousand dollars a pop.

‘Cheeky gets,’ TC said.

‘Come on, you’re the one wants to be a supervisor,’ said Anto. ‘Don’t tell me it wasn’t obvious to you.’

‘Well, maybe the odd one was a bit iffy, but the whole lot…? Cheeky fucking gets.’

Washers’ Big Mate on the trim line also brought the word that the management was going to be looking for volunteers to go over to the States and find out how to do it the American way.

‘There you go, TC,’ Liz chipped in. ‘Stick your name down and tell them when you get there that the next lot of cars will be better, and the next lot after that. And see by next year , they’ll be sending people from there over to us to find out how we do it.’

TC sucked saliva through his teeth. ‘I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.’

‘Not even for a wee holiday?’ Washers said and anticipated his next sentence with an expansive hand gesture. ‘Broaden your horizons, sort of thing?’

‘I’ve been there once already,’ TC said, mainly to his toolbag: lug wrench again. ‘Got sent when I was at school with this kid from the other side, you know, see if we could stop fighting.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘Pittsburgh. What a hole. The only thing we had in common, him and me, was that we couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of it and back home.’

‘I nearly moved there once myself,’ Anto said.

Lord, thought Liz, they were coming like buses now, the revelations.

‘Pittsburgh?’

‘Schenectady, upstate New York. Had a job all lined up.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I don’t even remember now, cement factory or something. Tell you the truth I couldn’t have cared less about the job, even then, it was the name I loved.’ He got full value out of it: ‘Sche-nec-ta-dy.’

‘So why didn’t you go?’ Liz asked.

‘The usual reason, I met a girl…’

‘Don’t sound so miserable about it.’

‘…the girl met somebody else…’

‘Ah.’

‘…by which time things had kicked off here and the notion went off me.’

‘Some would say that things kicking off here was all the more reason for going.’

‘Yeah, but it would have looked like I was running away.’

‘And you wouldn’t want to look like you were running away, even if it killed you?’

‘What can I say?’ Anto shrugged. ‘If I had another brain it would be lonely.’

Washers cracked the knuckles of each hand in turn against the opposite palm: time he was getting back to work taming skins. He checked back. ‘What about that other fella, TC — the one you went to Pittsburgh with. You ever see him again after you got back?’

TC picked up a seat. ‘I saw him all right, a couple of years ago, in the paper. Got life for dropping a breezeblock on a fella’s head out the back of some club. Thought he was the “wrong sort”.’

He had the tact not to say what sort that was.

‘Jesus wept,’ said Washers under his breath.

‘Yeah.’ TC dumped the seat into the car, eyes averted from Liz’s. ‘Jesus wept.’

*

Johnny Carson got his car. Johnny. Carson. Got. His. Car. A week more and he had been going to tell them he would hold on now for the hearse model: at least he would be guaranteed one ride in it.

It broke down the very first time he took it out. Pressure regulator. The dealer had to rush a spare out to him and fix it at the side of the highway. Johnny seemed genuinely not to care, any more than the two hundred and ninety-nine people below him on the waiting list cared about, or even registered, the difference between the $12000 they had been quoted way back when and the $25000 they ended up paying. Most of them anyway would have been prepared to pay a premium for the kudos of driving one of the first three hundred to come off the boat. ‘Say, is that what I think it is…?’

As Johnny said, after sitting out there on the highway waiting for the repairman, the damn thing was getting more looks than he was.

It was not only more expensive than originally intended but, thanks to the Lotus makeover, heavier too, slower off the mark (they had had to down tune the engine to 130 horsepower to meet emissions standards), and when it did get going it was able to deliver just nineteen miles a gallon, ten short of projections and not far above federal minimum standards. The doors now and then, and despite the offices of the Quality Assurance Centres, had an alarming habit of jamming open, or (more alarming still) shut. Randall’s erstwhile colleagues in the auto pages and the specialist trade press — the same people who had fallen over themselves to praise the ’73 Vega — reported all this with an amount of malicious glee, adding for good measure that the bodywork showed up the pawprints of every one of those ‘slack-jawed gawpers’.

Yet withal it was thing of beauty. (A thing of beauty — critics note — with anti-pawprint shampoo in the glove box.) No one but no one could fault it on that.

DeLorean telephoned at four in the morning, forgetting for once in his urgency the hours between them. For the first half a minute, during which DeLorean could get no further than ‘Edmund’ — ten, maybe fifteen times — Randall thought he might be high, but that wasn’t what it was at all. He had driven — he got the words out at last — driven his own DMC-12 out from the ranch that afternoon, deep into the desert beyond Palm Springs. He must have sat for two hours with just the driver-side door open watching the sun’s declension, from ragged white hole to blood red disc, played out on the hood.

‘I’m not a man for hearing voices, Edmund, but I swear something spoke to me out there: “Don’t rest on this. Keep going… Keep going.” Does that sound crazy?’

Randall told him he had had enough testimony from good and perfectly sane army buddies — one who had turned to answer a question (there was no one behind him who could have asked it) a split second before a bullet passed by right where his head would have been — not to discount anything.

Later there would be stories — most of them put about by DeLorean himself — that he was in fact no stranger to supernatural interventions of this kind, that the palm-reader who had conjured up 21 January as the day when the first car would come off the line had been guiding his every decision since he turned his back on Puerto Rico, that much of what he was still to do — doubling production, floating on the stock market — was at her prompting too, or at the prompting of whoever spoke through her, palms being the least of her psychic talents.