Glenn Patterson - Gull

‘You’re right, I never did. I never did because I made a promise early on that I wasn’t going to go through life thinking of myself as a victim.’ Vivienne in contrast had resolved never to set foot in the country again. ‘Anyway,’ her anger was ebbing, turning back on her for breaking even for a moment her promise to herself, and her brother, ‘Pete wouldn’t have wanted me being bitter on his behalf. That wasn’t the type of him.’

‘But still…’ Anto was on his feet now, TC beside him.

‘Listen, Liz, we’ll not do any more of them,’ TC said and reinforced it with his thumb on his breastbone: down and across. ‘Swear to God.’

‘You can do what you like, TC, but the first car that comes through here after lunch is all mine. Now, get that seat bolted back in, and here’ — she shoved them into their hands — ‘enjoy your Curly Wurlys.’

She entertained all kinds of possibilities, trying a few of them out on paper napkins in the canteen — a lemonade bottle with her brother’s name on the label seemed particularly apt, but she doubted she would have the time or the skill under pressure to do it justice, and like she had told Anto it was a long time ago now. Six years, a thousand other deaths. She tore that napkin to shreds, and all the others she’d drawn on, and shoved them deep into the wastepaper bin.

It would have to be words. There was something to be said for No Pope Here. The form of it rather than the content. Short, to the point.

The boys (my God, she had even begun to think of them like that) had given her a wide berth while she deliberated. It was clear, on her return, that they had resolved to keep the mood light-hearted.

‘Are you ready for your first act of vandalism?’ Anto said.

‘I had a long life before I came to work here,’ she said and was surprised herself at how convincing she sounded. ‘Just keep watch.’

They stationed themselves at either end of the next car that came down the line, letting on to be searching for a spanner, inspecting the bodywork for a non-existent scratch (always the hardest to detect).

She knelt, took out the little metal file she always carried in the back of her purse, leaned in and got to work.

She had been dead right not to attempt the lemonade bottle. Christ, it was hard enough to manage a simple straight line. Aagh! Straightish.

‘Coat!’ Anto, under cover of a cough, barked the code they had agreed for manager and she nearly brained herself on the dashboard before he said in his normal voice, ‘False alarm, he’s away the other way.’

Back to work she went. Scratch, scratch, scratch.

‘Are you nearly done there?’ TC whispered.

‘Nearly.’ She was barely started, but so what, he could flipping well wait.

Another half a minute. The point of the nail file was bending with the effort of bringing a curved line back to the plane from which it had without her intending it deviated. Shit, shit, shit.

‘Would you for crying out loud come on!’ TC said and could not have sounded more strangulated if someone had indeed had their hands about his throat.

She dragged the file down the metal then started on another letter.

‘Seriously,’ Anto said from the other end, ‘you’re going to have to get out of there now.’

‘Right,’ she said, ‘right,’ and wrote four letters more. ‘OK, give me a hand getting this seat in.’

From the colour of his face as he trotted round to help, TC even looked as though he had been throttled.

‘So,’ said Anto, ‘are you going to tell us what you did?’

‘Do you really want to know? Do you really really want to know?’ Liz gave the rear nut a wrench. ‘It’ll cost you most of your year’s wages to find out.’

DeLorean that late summer and early autumn was consumed with the proposed stock-market flotation. Jennings had not been altogether wrong. Here was the opportunity to unburden the company almost overnight of government debt. ‘Set sail into open water,’ was a term DeLorean used more than once and Randall did actually picture the shares as so many tiny vessels corralled in a harbour, waiting for the wind to fill their sails, or the waves outside to subside a little.

DeLorean had recently completed the purchase of the Lamington Farm estate at Bedminster, New Jersey, preparatory, as Randall understood it, to selling the Pauma Valley ranch, bringing his work life and family life closer: a seventy-five minute drive at the week’s end (in so far, with a stock-market flotation imminent, the working weeks ever ended) instead of a six-hour flight.

Midway through September Humphrey Atkins was whisked away to become Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. (Centuries, it took, to perfect job titles like that.) A new secretary of state, Jim Prior, arrived and, looking, in the television reports, slightly puzzled that no one had thought of doing it before (although a look of puzzlement, Randall soon learned, ranging from slight to extreme, was habitual with him) made a point of going into the prison to talk to the prisoners refusing food. Within weeks the hunger strike was over. The six deaths that the management and the union leaders had, as an absolute maximum, been preparing for had been exceeded by four. Randall who went over it and over it in his head hundreds of times then and in the years that followed could not decide which of the parties to the dispute was the more fanatical.

The mood in the factory the morning after it ended was subdued, sombre even. Only the announcement of the five-thousandth car off the assembly line lifted spirits. Actually, such was the release, it nearly lifted the roof off.

Randall stopped by Don’s office shortly after the announcement was made.

‘I didn’t see that coming.’

‘That’s because it’s the four thousand eight hundred and ninetieth… I thought today might be a day for rounding up,’ said Don and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘I don’t understand it. I thought they would have been glad, all of them, that madness in the prisons was over. Unless of course they’re thinking the same thing I’ve been thinking.’ His gaze had drifted off towards the window, but returned now. ‘This government seems to like a fight. Who is it going to pick one with next?’

Two days later a member of Thatcher’s party accused DeLorean in the press of misuse of public funds, citing the example of Warren House, whose bathroom taps he claimed were made of solid gold.

DeLorean was en route to Daytona Beach when Randall rang him.

‘Who is this fucking guy?’ DeLorean wanted to know. Nicholas Winterton was the answer and Randall by now had enough experience of the British political classes to further identify him as one of the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em brigade’. Hang ’em, flog ’em, anything at all but subsidise ’em.

DeLorean’s first instinct was to hire someone to investigate Winterton’s own expenses. He didn’t care what country you were talking about, nobody walked very far in public life without getting some shit on his shoes.

‘And what’s Haddad doing? Why isn’t he on the phone to me?’

‘Well, you see, that’s the thing, Winterton’s taken all this stuff from a memo Bill sent you last Christmas.’

‘Bill sent me a memo about faucets? The hell he did. If Bill Haddad had sent me a memo it would be sitting in my office not that asshole’s.’

‘It was in your office,’ Randall said. ‘Marion leaked it.’

‘Marion?’

‘Seems she landed in England the day before yesterday and went straight to Winterton’s constituency.’

He could nearly hear the blood pulsing in DeLorean’s temples. ‘No,’ he said at long last. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘It’s in the newspapers, the London Times , the Daily Express… ’