Glenn Patterson - Gull

Instinctively he went into a deep crouch, which only delighted the shouters and cheerers and missile-throwers more. The man at the gate turned back to face them. ‘Which one of you wee fuckers threw that?’

Randall, stumbling as he tried to get to his feet again could only watch, prone, as the missile — the petrol bomb — struck the flat top of a Portakabin and spread its flames all over the tarred surface.

A voice that must have been the captain’s, though it sounded shriller, issued an order and a soldier broke cover, dragging a hose, which pulsed a couple of times, convulsed, and finally shot out water in a silvery crescent that seemed only incidentally to take in the Portakabin and its flaming roof.

Even the men who had been holding the young bucks back bellowed at this. More rocks came over the fence, more bottles. Here now was the cataclysm. Another three soldiers emerged from the shadows, short wide-barrelled guns already braced against their shoulders.

Someone had a hold of Randall by the collar and was trailing him back towards the armoured cars.

The captain had a megaphone now. ‘Move away from the gates.’ Royal command. ‘My men are under orders to fire baton rounds at identified targets only. Please, move away from the gates.’

He handed the megaphone to a soldier twenty years his senior and several ranks his junior.

‘You did the right thing requesting assistance,’ he told Randall. ‘Those men would not have been able to hold back that crowd another ten minutes on their own.’

The rocks and bottles continued to come over. The trio of soldiers continued to move their guns across the face of the crowd, trigger fingers twitching. The Portakabin roof, despite the water that was now, with two more soldiers helping hold the hose, being properly trained on it, continued to burn.

Stylianides was there, shouting, ‘I am supposed to be head of security.’

The captain laid a hand on Randall’s shoulder. ‘Try not to worry, everyone freezes their first time.’

Randall, his first time, he could not find tongue to tell the captain, did not freeze, he fled, somewhere very far inside. His helicopter had made an unscheduled landing in a clearing in torrential rain. Aftermath of an ambush. The radio operator whose call had brought them was sitting splayed-legged on the ground bleeding through the dressing on his stomach, alternating between crying and laughing. A medic was dressing a head wound nearby, the body to which the head was attached already to Randall’s eyes inert. The definitively dead were under capes, seven of them. Randall’s commander was arguing with a lieutenant, pointing at the corpses — ‘We’re supplies, we can take the wounded, but we can’t take these guys’ — and then from the edge of the clearing as the lieutenant ducked back out of the range of the rotors there came a bright light — that was all Randall could remember of it — a bright light getting brighter, brighter… blinding.

Then it was one week later and he was under a bed in a hospital in Saigon. A nurse was looking in at him through a gap in the blanket draped over the frame to make a canopy. She smiled. ‘Are you ready to come out now?’

His commander had wanted to have him put on a charge, refusal to obey an order, specifically the order to get out of the chopper when the mortar hit the clearing and the lieutenant disappeared along with the wounded radio operator and the medic winding bandages round a dead or dying comrade, who disappeared too, his head at any rate.

Dissociative fugue, was the diagnosis of the doctor who had, all unknown to Randall, been monitoring him since he had been brought in and sought sanctuary on the floor. He literally had not been himself from that moment to this.

‘Fuck fugue,’ was the commander’s reaction relayed to Randall when he was transferred at length to another supplies unit. ‘I have been in this army long enough to know cowardice when I see it.’

*

Liz heard it on the shop floor a couple of days later that, contrary to what he had told her the last time they talked, Randall had in fact gone to the States with the volunteers for retraining. Washers had phoned his Big Mate before he had even left Aldergrove for the connecting flight. Your man Randall, he told him, had weighed in while they were queuing at the check-in desk taking the piss out of each other’s passport photos: Was that before you’d the operation…? Did the cops not ask you for their photo back…? Anything to take their minds off the fact that they were to be locked in a metal cylinder for seven hours six miles above the Atlantic Ocean.

‘First class, of course. Gave us some crap about it being the only seat he could get by the time he booked. I tell you, I said to him, if it was me and I could I would do it every time and wouldn’t give a monkey’s what anybody thought of me.’

‘Imagine going away and missing all the fun and games here,’ Big Mate said, winding up his report.

The fun and games had kept the factory closed the whole of the first day after Bobby Sands died. Practically the only buses moving in town were being pushed by the wee lads who had hijacked them, under instruction from the not so wee lads standing in the wings, to reinforce their barricades.

Even now on the second day only about one worker in three had been able to plot a way through the mayhem, or had attempted to.

Robert had astonished Liz this morning by proposing that he drive her right up to the gate. ‘It isn’t right, other people dictating to you when you can and can’t work,’ he said and she resisted the temptation to point out how rich that was coming from him, because she was genuinely grateful — touched — and then too maybe some of his reservations about her being here had not been entirely unjustified. Forget for the moment those Sunday mornings in Botanic Gardens (and what did they amount to really?): imagine she had told Robert that she did want to put her name down for the States; imagine she had insisted on it — as she had insisted, despite him, on applying for the job in the first place, on going for the interview and accepting the letter of offer; imagine she had wound up in a hotel somewhere over there with Edmund Randall?

‘Fun and games,’ Washers’ Big Mate said again as he walked off, slapping his Sun against his thigh. ‘Fun and games.’

Randall had left the DeLorean workers at the airport, one group waiting for an onward flight to California, and the Santa Ana QAC, the rest for the buses that would take them to the centre in Wilmington, and carried on by himself to Manhattan. (One of the Wilmington-bound workers told him with many accompanying winks he didn’t blame him not taking the bus with them. ‘But I’m going in a different direction,’ Randall said and the man winked again. ‘You don’t have to explain to me.’) Rain was falling when he got out of the car in front of 280 Park Avenue. A doorman ran down the steps to the sidewalk opening an umbrella. ‘Came right out of nowhere,’ he said and sure enough in the time it took Randall to cross the lobby to the elevators and the express car to deposit him on the forty-third floor the skies had cleared so much you could have been forgiven for thinking it had never rained at all.

Carole had been taking instruction from Marion Gibson when he entered, head bowed over her desk, and was barely able to get out from behind it in time to announce him.

‘Edmund!’ DeLorean looked up, took off the spectacles perched on the end of his nose and gave Randall his broadest smile. ‘The way the news was reporting it I’m surprised there were flights leaving there at all. Luckily I have been in the news often enough myself to know not to believe everything I see or hear.’