Glenn Patterson - Gull

‘Thank you,’ Randall said. ‘Sit tight, we’ll get this sorted.’

Randall had no clear idea himself what the matter was, why the fees had not been paid. He knew only that spending time now trying to get to the bottom of it risked exposing more than just the driver and his colleagues to scrutiny.

Without a moment’s further thought he pulled out his contacts book and phoned the harbour master.

‘I understand we have a small problem here.’

‘There is a problem, certainly. As for the size of it, I suppose in the scheme of things it is not particularly large, no, but if you put yourself in my place…’

‘How much exactly?’ Randall asked. He listened. ‘It’ll be with you by the end of the afternoon.’

He sat for a second or two with the receiver in his hand — this was the right thing to do — then phoned the bank where he had his personal account.

‘Mr Randall!’ the manager said. He sounded as though he had food in his mouth and was trying desperately to swallow. Finally. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

‘I wanted to arrange a temporary overdraft facility.’

‘Of course, of course.’ Dabbing at his mouth now, with sandpaper, as the phone made it sound. ‘And what had you mind?’ Randall named the figure. The manager stopped dabbing, collected himself. ‘I would need to ring head office for approval.’

‘It would be very temporary indeed,’ Randall said, sorry that he hadn’t just come straight out with it when he had the man at a disadvantage.

‘I am sure it will just be a formality.’

While he was pacing the floor waiting for the call back, Randall overheard two guys passing beneath his window, talking.

‘Here’s what I’m wondering,’ said one. ‘All parts are guaranteed for twenty-five years, right? And we’re going to be building eighty cars a day for, what — two hundred and fifty days a year? So what’s that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ll tell you what it is: twenty thousand cars a year. Multiply that by twenty-five, that’s half a million cars before anyone has to buy a new one. Do you get what I’m saying?’

‘I think so.’

Randall looked out, but whoever they were they were gone.

The phone rang. The bank manager, preening himself. ‘That is all arranged,’ he said. ‘I will just need a signature from you, if you wanted to call first thing in the morning.’

‘No.’ Whether the cars shipped out today now or not they had to be got on to the portside of the harbour gates. ‘It has to be this afternoon.’

‘That might be cutting it a bit fine, getting in from Dunmurry. You know we close at half-past three.’

‘I have my coat on,’ Randall said, taking it down from the rack.

On his way out to the car he took a quick sideways step into the experimental workshop. It reminded him of that first visit to the Kimmerly offices in Detroit. The car disassembled, parts numbered and recombined. In one corner a hammock hung. The guys working there looked like they not shared a decent night’s sleep between the three of them, here or anywhere else, in weeks. They were grouped around a chassis with the steering column on the right-hand side. They barely glanced at him even when he coughed.

‘From Coventry?’ he asked. ‘How close are they with that, do you think?’

‘Could go into production spring of next year,’ said one.

‘No problem,’ said another.

Which was, Randall thought as he hurried on out, at least half a million more to keep them all going over the next two and a half decades.

The bank’s commissionaire already had the key in the lock when he arrived. He turned it behind Randall’s back. ‘We stop letting them in after about a quarter past,’ he said. There were about fifteen of ‘them’ in the line for the tellers, two-thirds clutching bags of coins for deposit. The commissionaire raised an eyebrow at Randall beneath the peak of his white-covered cap — ‘It all has to be counted,’ he said, ‘every last half pee of it’ — and led him, smartly, across to the manager’s office. The manager — rather unimpressive, rumpled even, in comparison — had the papers laid out on his desk. He uncapped his pen.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘and here…’ Randall wrote his name twice. ‘And that’s us.’ The manager smiled. ‘Can I offer you a drink, perhaps?’

‘I had better not.’

‘Of course, of course.’ The manager looked despondently at the ground before Randall’s feet. At his feet themselves, maybe, his shoes. He had made an error of judgement — an error perhaps of national judgement.

‘In other circumstances, mind you…’ said Randall.

‘Of course.’ The manager’s face brightened, but only a little. ‘Of course.’

Randall was offered a drink at the docks too, by the harbour master, ‘a small drop of something’, to show there were no hard feelings.

‘I understand entirely,’ Randall said, breaking off to blow on the cheque to make sure the ink was dry. ‘I think I would be happier if I knew the cars were safely through the gates first.’

A harbour-police car was already on its way to where the transporters were parked up to tell them to turn around again. The drivers sounded their horns as they passed Randall standing with the harbour master.

It was by now approaching a quarter to six and thoroughly dark. ‘OK,’ said Randall and clapped his hands under his arms — he had only now remembered that he had nothing heavier on than a sport coat, ‘I’ll have that drink now.’

He stopped in the town centre afterwards, emboldened by the generous measure of whiskey the harbour master had poured for him (the Lord only knew what a big drop would have looked like), and by the larger than usual number of people abroad on the streets.

It was the night, he quickly gathered, of the Christmas lights ‘switch-on’. The ceremony was over by the time he arrived, the tree before the City Hall — tall and rangy, teenager-ish — already illuminated. The stores were still open, which, he had been here long enough now to know, was something of a novelty, the practice of the last decade being for everyone, shop workers as well as shoppers, to get the hell out the moment the clocks struck five.

Some of the civilian searchers at the security gates straddling Donegall Place, the main shopping street, had attached sprigs of mistletoe to the metal grilles above their heads. Tonight at least the people who presented themselves before them, bags already open, arms half raised, did so without too much of a scowl. Randall had just emerged, level with the doors of Boots the Chemist, from the customary, perfunctory frisk — a couple of pats on the sides, a palm swept up the back of the jacket: on you go — when a firmer hand on his shoulder arrested his progress.

‘I had been hoping to bump into you some time soon, although I hadn’t quite pictured it like this.’

Jennings — for it was his voice, his hand — was dressed in his off-duty clothes, camel hair coat folded over the arm of a navy blazer. His shirt was the palest blue and open at the neck from which an actual cravat — silk, naturally — puffed out.

‘If it’s about the business at the docks,’ Randall said (was there anything in this city the man didn’t know about), ‘that has all been taken care of.’

For once, though, it was Jennings whose face betrayed his ignorance. ‘The docks?’ He shook his head and steered Randall a few feet to the left to the ornate entrance to a narrow, yellow-lit shopping arcade.

‘He has made enquiries about deferring the first interest payment.’ If there had been any doubt who the pronoun referred to, the mention of an interest payment dispelled it. ‘I don’t know what influence you have with him, but whatever you have I would urge you to use it to dissuade him. There is still time.’