Glenn Patterson - Gull

Randall never bought it, any more than he bought the conversion to Christianity that caused DeLorean to confess it. Every time the subject came up he thought back to that early-morning call, DeLorean’s embarrassment almost at what he thought he had heard out there in the Californian desert.

Anyone who had been receiving messages from a 55th Street medium for the previous however many years could have taken something like that, you would have thought, in his long-legged stride.

Up to now the money had all been flowing in one direction: out. From here on, though, it would start to flow back in again. The overheads too, now that they were in full production, would come down dramatically. The Hethel presence, for a start, could be scaled back. No need, with the initial research and development phase over, for a separate DMCL office onsite. Randall travelled across to Norfolk to oversee the winding-up of operations. Chapman apologised that the helicopter was otherwise engaged, and sent a car instead to meet him off the train up from London at Wymondham, a place that took half as long again to spell as it did to pronounce, lodging him in a wing of the hall (my God, the hall) with a view from his lead-paned window of a nine-hundred-year-old church.

DeLorean was not wrong about the Brits.

Chapman himself could only spare a few minutes the afternoon of Randall’s arrival. It was the Grand Prix season, he had just got back from Buenos Aires, where Elio de Angelis had — to Chapman’s evident disgust — finished ‘only’ sixth, and had another three races coming up in quick succession (three opportunities for de Angelis to make amends): San Marino, Belgium and Monaco.

Randall had got the feeling on the previous occasions he had met him that Chapman always had at least one eye out for someone more important approaching. Meeting him here, however, on his home ground, with no one else around, Randall realised that importance was not relative to situation: even for a few minutes he was never going to command Chapman’s full attention. Even as he was saying hello, shaking hands, Chapman was already looking beyond .

Indeed, though he thought at first it was just another facet of that famous English reserve, the longer Randall was there, the more polite hands that were extended, the greater was his sense that there was a distinct coolness towards him, or rather the car that he represented, as though it and he were eating up time that could be better spent handcrafting Esprits and Elans.

As for the office equipment whose repatriation he was here to effect, Randall had no idea where it was all going to go. The Dunmurry offices were full to overflowing as it was: Portakabin for now was all he could think. There were still a couple behind the body shop, left over from plant’s construction.

He had toyed with the notion of driving across to Norwich by himself to finalise the arrangements with the shipping company, take a detour through a few of those villages in which the countryside abounded. At least in this part of English-speaking Europe he was unlikely to encounter soldiers in hedges or discover on arrival at his destination that one entire sector (the one, wouldn’t you know, where he had been intending to park) had been evacuated because of a telephoned coded warning. When the time came, though, he found a car waiting for him at the door, a driver already at the wheel.

It had since his earliest DeLorean days been part of the package, but it had got to the point here where he half expected a Lotus man to be waiting to walk down the corridor with him when he stepped out of his room at night to go to the bathroom. He had heard of things like that happening to people on trips behind the Iron Curtain, only it wasn’t service they called it, it was surveillance. Not that he was complaining by the end of that day, quite the reverse: without the driver to call on for help he doubted he would have understood a word that the guy in the shipping office was saying. As accents went it was at the atonal end of the sing-song spectrum.

Still, when he had returned to Ketteringham Hall later that afternoon and packed his bag and nodded one last time to the driver holding the car door for him (no sign at all of Chapman), he was not exactly heartbroken to be leaving.

The following Sunday was as beautiful a spring day — as beautiful a day period — as Randall had seen in all his time in Belfast. When he arrived in the Botanic Gardens mid-morning, the grass between the paths was already colonised by students from the university next door, books open before them, some of which were even being read.

A quarter of an hour after he sat down, Liz dropped into the seat beside him, the briefest of smiles to acknowledge that she had seen him, hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she scanned the student faces, or perhaps, it only occurred to him afterwards, shielding her face from any return gaze.

Up to now they had met in public, but without much in the way of the public to witness it.

Randall had spent the evening before reading over lists of names. ‘I see no one from your section has put themselves forward for the retraining programme,’ he said in lieu of a hello of his own.

Her mouth side-on looked lipless. ‘It appears America holds bad memories for some of them.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Taking on the unspecified sins of an entire nation. ‘What about you?’

She turned to face him, her eyes as narrowed almost as her mouth, though the sun was at her back.

‘ I’m not going, if that’s what is bothering you,’ he said, because something evidently was. ‘I just thought maybe if you were thinking in the future of advancement…’

Liz shook her head. ‘You still don’t get it, do you, the way things work in this country? Men earn more than their women, that’s the deal. It was enough for my husband to swallow me getting a job at all, never mind bringing home more than he was. I can just imagine how he would react to me “advancing”, and as for me waltzing in and telling him I was taking off to the States for a couple of weeks on my own…’

‘Hardly on your own.’

‘Do you seriously think that makes it better ?’ She stood up suddenly. He was reminded of the very first time they met here, all those months of Sundays ago: same raincoat, despite the improvement in the weather, same belt, which she tugged on, hard, before offering him her hand. He didn’t know whether to laugh or not, but in the end followed her lead: not. He put his hand in hers (a vein in her wrist pulsed). She shook it once.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

‘Wait a second, you’re not telling me…’

‘I’m telling you we’ll not do this again.’

He felt an odd sense of relief. He had thought at first she meant goodbye to the job and everything.

‘If you say so.’

‘I do say so.’

He went to get up.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please.’

He sat back, spreading his arms as wide as they would go along the top of the bench: look at me not getting up. He watched her walk along the path in the direction of the river, take a quick step back to avoid an errant Frisbee travelling between students who had given up all pretence of study, then carry on, shoulders even from a distance set, round a bend and out of sight.

Randall let out a long, slow breath and hauled himself to his feet.

So that was that, whatever it was.

*

She had said his name the night before. Robert had stopped dead, mid thrust, pushing her back off him, holding her at trembling arms’ length. ‘ What? ’ His chest was heaving, hers too: hers even more so. God, she had been so nearly there, so caught up she didn’t know she didn’t know what she was saying. But the echo of it reverberated now. She moved his palms from her shoulders on to her breasts, pressing down hard. ‘Hands all over me,’ she slurred the words. It wasn’t all put on. She raised her hips an inch, raised them another, took him by the right wrist, fitted his fingers into the gap she had made, as much on him as in her. ‘I want your hands’ — guiding the left one the length of her back, shoulder blades to tailbone, on down from there — ‘all over me.’