Glenn Patterson - Gull

She had used it herself for the first time a few weeks earlier to phone her sister in Melbourne. It was tantamount to stealing, she knew, but she had been growing more and more concerned about the tone of Vivienne’s letters and couldn’t think when she would ever get the privacy at home to have the conversation they needed to have.

Mind you, half of the conversation they did have was taken up with her having to explain how she was able to phone at all. Vivienne sounded as though she had been drinking. Liz saw her framed in the doorway of the bedroom they had used to share, swaying, as though she had brought the night’s music home with her. Drink had added to her lightness in those days.

No more.

‘What time is it there?’ she asked thickly.

‘Half eleven.’

‘In the morning? I thought you would be in your work.’

‘I am, but it’s OK.’

Ten thousand miles away a cigarette was lit. Liz took the full force of the smoke jet in her ear. ‘What kind of place is that?’

‘Truthfully? I think it might be the best place I have ever in my life worked.’

‘And you have so much to compare it to.’ Liz was nearly grateful for the dig, or the speed with which it was delivered. That was more like her big sister.

‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘But what about you?’ She rested her head against the wall, making sure the circuit was absolutely closed. ‘How are things in your place?’

‘My place?’

‘I just thought from some of your letters that maybe, I don’t know, maybe there was something you wanted to talk about.’

Vivienne laughed sharply — the cheek of you! — then started to cry.

Liz made up her mind the minute she hung up the phone that she was going out there to see her. Later, when the dinner things were all cleared away and the boys had taken their perpetual argument up the stairs, she set a cup of tea on the arm of Robert’s chair, a chocolate digestive balanced on the saucer.

‘Do you remember when the boys were in primary school and that wee P1 boy — Thompson — was knocked down and killed? Do you remember they became obsessed the two of them with dying?’

Robert paused stirring his sugar. Flip, yeah, now that she mentioned it, he did. The father worked in the hardware shop, had a harelip…

‘And do you remember’ — she must not let him stray off the path she was laying — ‘what we said?’

Robert resumed stirring thoughtfully. ‘Probably something like it was a one in a million chance.’

‘Anything else?’

‘They had to make the most of every moment… we all had to.’

‘Exactly,’ she said. (She did love him.)

He smiled and took a bite from the biscuit where it had been softened by contact with the cup.

‘I’m signing up for nights one week in every two. I’m putting the money away to go out and see Vivienne next year, in case the opportunity doesn’t come around again.’

He had practically fed her the line. Anyway, she thought later, that great sex thing worked both ways. He was hardly likely to go and change the locks, was he?

It exhausted her, of course, the work, the switching between the two routines, the near impossibility of a full day’s sleep. A couple of weeks in she didn’t know which end of her was up. By half past ten on her second Tuesday back on days she was dead on her feet, or at least her knees.

She gave the wrench a twist on the last nut of an uncooperative passenger seat and slumped forward in an attitude of prayer.

‘I’m never going to last till my tea break,’ she said into the soft leather.

TC, working on the other side, spoke to her across his seat and hers. ‘Sure, why don’t you take ten minutes now?’ There were no hooters or whistles to work to, you took your break when you needed it, always supposing your workmates could spare you. ‘Me and Anto can manage. Can’t we, Anto?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Ah, no, I couldn’t do that on yous.’

‘It’s not a bit of bother. Tell her, Anto.’

‘It’s not a bit of bother.’

‘Well…’ She had pulled herself up on to her feet. ‘If you’re absolutely sure.’

She walked away wiping her hands on a rag. God, it felt good to be able to turn your back. And to think Robert didn’t trust those fellas. The things they did for her, because actually, now she thought of it, it wasn’t just the comfort breaks, they were forever letting her take a couple of minutes here and there — You go on ahead, save us a seat in the canteen, we’ll just finish tidying up.

She stopped in front of a vending machine full of sweets and chocolate bars. She felt in the pocket of her overalls and found two 10p pieces. It was fate.

TC was standing with his back to the car, looking off in the other direction, when she returned barely two minutes after she had left, a Curly Wurly dangling from each hand.

The seat that had caused her all the grief was on the ground next to Anto’s legs. The rest of him was inside the car, from where a scratching sound was coming — a sound she could not associate with any part of the assembly process that she had ever been involved in — a gouging sound was probably closer to the mark.

‘What’s that seat doing on the ground?’ she said.

TC nearly did himself an injury he spun round that fast. ‘Liz!’ It sounded more like a warning than a greeting.

‘Is that not the one I just finished putting in?’

The gouging sound stopped. TC had come round to place himself between her and the open car door.

‘I, ah, wasn’t happy, there was a wee problem with the, ah, what-you-me-call-it.’

Liz pushed past him. She could have knocked him right over without much difficulty. ‘Anto, what are you doing in there?’

As he was withdrawing his head from the seat well she was sticking hers in. There were metal shavings in a small heap below… she wasn’t sure at first what exactly: a candle it looked like, twists of something thorny — barbed wire? — around it.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘A hunger strike candle,’ Anto said matter-of-factly.

‘What’s it doing in our seat well?’ TC opened his mouth to say something, but the penny for Liz had already dropped. ‘Wait, are there other cars with “hunger strike candles” hidden in the seat wells too? Is that what all the “go on ahead, Liz, take ten minutes there” is about?’

‘No.’ TC finally got to speak. ‘Some of them have the candles behind the dashboard and some of them, you know, depending on the section have Celtic or Rangers or No Pope Here.’

‘Anto?’ She was conscious that she was talking to them the way she talked to her own boys, switching her gaze from one to the other in order to winkle out the truth; conscious but powerless to stop it. ‘Are you not the one who told me you had to walk out and take your place on those pickets because you never knew who was watching? And now here you are doing something that no one will ever even see?’

Anto was still sitting on the ground, hands dangling over his knees. They made a gesture, a half-hearted attempt at flight.

‘You can’t build a sports car in the middle of Belfast, in the middle of all this, and not expect it to carry some sort of a mark.’ His eyes slipped off her face. ‘I don’t think you can have any idea.’

‘About what? About anger? About people dying?’ She was slapping her thighs with those stupid fucking chocolate bars. ‘I lost a brother to one of your martyrs’ comrades. Dragged him out of his lemonade lorry just up the road here and put a bullet in his head. Put out an apology the next day saying they had mixed up his lemonade lorry with another one that delivered to army barracks.’

Anto’s eyes were locked on hers again. He had the grace to look stricken. ‘You never said.’