Glenn Patterson - Gull

He started again — couldn’t help himself — took back the inches she had temporarily denied him, strained then to find one… inch… more. It was over in seconds. Her before him.

That’s how close she was.

And that’s how close she was.

She couldn’t risk anything like that happening again.

The Frisbee, checking her stride, nearly broke her resolve, but she put her head down, held tight to the strap of her shoulder bag and ploughed on.

*

Randall awoke two nights later from a nightmare of scudding over jungle scrub taking fire on all sides to find that it was no dream at all — he was actually there or it was actually here — the clatter of the rotors, the sky’s untimely orange, the fizzes, the pops, the dreadful bangs. He rolled off the bed on to the floor, and kept rolling, looking for a place to hide.

*

What Liz heard first was bin lids. She swung her legs out of bed and crossed the floor barefoot to the window, opening it a fraction, as quietly as the latch would allow, which was not quite quietly enough.

Robert sat up, knocking over the bedside lamp as he tried to switch it on… righting it again at the second attempt.

‘What is it?’

‘Listen.’

‘What?’

Distant, distant.

‘ Listen . Bin lids. He must be dead.’

Robert reached for the lamp again, still squinting against its light. ‘If he is it’s nobody’s fault but his own.’

‘I know, but…’

‘But what?’ He rolled over. ‘You have your work in the morning. I have mine. Close that window and get back into bed.’

She listened a few moments longer then did as he said.

*

When he had reoriented himself sufficiently to understand that he was not under direct attack Randall ventured to wriggle out of the corner into which he had rolled and raise the window blind an inch or two with the backs of his fingers. All was confusion: overlit, overloud confusion, much of it concentrated on a point about five hundred yards to his right, beyond the trees, corresponding to the Twinbrook entrance to the factory.

Six feet to his left, at the other end of the window, the telephone sat on a glass table. He felt along the join of the baseboard and the carpet for the cable, yanked, bringing the handset crashing to the floor then reeled it in, dial tone buzzing angrily.

It took ten minutes and four numbers — the last passed on to him by the housekeeper in Pauma Valley — to get through, to another house — ranch, Randall supposed — where a party was in full swing; a further ten while DeLorean was located, the phone so far as Randall could tell brought to him, elbowed through a dozen bellowed conversations and sudden bursts of laughter, rather than he to it.

‘ Edmund? ’ he said, and you just knew he had a finger in one ear.

‘I’m sorry to be phoning, it’s all gone crazy here.’ Randall pushed the receiver under the blind, held it to the window for half a minute. The glass throbbed. ‘Did you hear that?’

‘It’s hard for me to hear anything with this music,’ DeLorean said, or shouted. Randall was getting it too. Yvonne Elliman, if he was not mistaken, singing as though she was standing by DeLorean’s side.

‘Hold on, hold on, let me see,’ he said. A door slid open in California, slid shut, and Yvonne was gone, the backing track of voices, ice against glasses, pool water being efficiently displaced, was gone. ‘There.’

Randall did not bother a second time with the phone to the window. ‘I’m guessing two, three hundred people, right in front of the gates. It’s to do with that hunger strike,’ he said. ‘Has to be.’

He thought for a moment or two that DeLorean still hadn’t heard properly, so unhurried was his reply.

‘You know that’s why I have you there, right? I figured if anyone knew what to do in a situation like this it would be you. This is your moment, Edmund. You call it.’

These last words were barely out of his mouth when he spoke again, over his shoulder as it sounded, and as though taken entirely by surprise. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’ Then ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘is that…?’ The rest of the sentence was smothered by his hand on the mouthpiece. When he removed it again — a matter of seconds — the pitch of his voice had changed.

‘I’m back in New York tomorrow,’ he said, chords stretched tight, something more immediate he did not want to betray: whoever, or whatever, it was he had seen trumped for a moment the spectacle Randall was trying to describe. ‘We’ll talk then.’

Randall sat a full minute after DeLorean had (abruptly) hung up, the phone still in his hand, then he pressed a finger on one of the black buttons, summoning the dial tone back, and called the only Belfast number he knew by heart.

‘I was wondering when I might hear from you,’ Jennings said, as though it had been an overdue social call he was taking.

‘We need help,’ Randall said.

‘I have a feeling you are not the only ones,’ said Jennings. The help, however, arrived at the factory within the quarter hour, a mere minute or two after Randall himself, which, given, as Jennings implied, how much else was under threat that night in Belfast, was beyond better than might have been expected, though there again few places under threat that night in Belfast had quite as many millions of government money tied up in them.

The captain to whom Randall opened the Seymour Hill gate could not have been more than twenty-one, a voice as clipped as the prince whose soon-to-be bride was hogging the headlines everywhere in Britain but here. Randall had met his West Point cousins, young men passing through the military on their way to high office. He shook Randall’s hand, more gentleman than officer, then waved through four armoured cars, from the rear of which a platoon of soldiers dismounted. These were the men whose lives the DMC-12 was supposed to be going to save. They walked beside their vehicles in the lee of the body-press shop, trying to come at the Twinbrook gate unseen.

Randall went a few feet ahead of them, rounding the corner of the building nearest the gate on his own. The drive was a mess of rocks and broken glass though it was not quite the catastrophic vision Randall had imagined when he inched up the blind in his room. He quickly realised that there was not a group of people gathered outside, but two groups: the one closest to the gate itself, with their backs to him, trying to hold the other, much larger group at bay.

Seeing Randall come round the corner — or sensing somehow what was coming round the corner behind him — this group found new and more aggressive voice. They surged forward, pressing the small group back, causing the gate and the fence flanking it to shake. A man looked over his shoulder — red-faced even at that distance and in that light — lips stretched tight with the strain of trying to hold the line.

‘Are there Brits in there?’ he called to Randall.

‘Brits?’

‘Don’t fucking give me that Dumb Yank crack. These ones are shouting they seen soldiers. Did they?’

Randall glanced behind him, which was all the proof the man needed. ‘They did see them! They’re fucking in there.’

‘They’re protecting the factory.’

The red-faced man’s face got redder, closer to the fence between them. Randall recognised him now. One of the storemen. An index finger poked through. ‘ We’re protecting the factory, telling these young bucks it’s supposed to be neutral. Do you not understand? It’s in more fucking danger with the Brits in there.’

Then suddenly from somewhere further back there was a shout — a cheer almost — and Randall looked up to see a black object arc overhead, trailing flame.