Glenn Patterson - Gull

They crossed the river — the spine of the book — into a neighbourhood of cramped houses and single-window shop fronts, with here and there a derelict-looking factory to relieve the monotony. The Christmas decorations — green, red and gold — competed for space and attention with the year-round displays of the British flag and coordinating bunting. After the initial exchanges in the arrivals hall DeLorean had withdrawn into an almost meditative state, gathering his thoughts maybe for the conversation ahead. Randall had the Sounds of DeLoreland in his jacket pocket and once or twice reached inside to take it out, but, no, this wasn’t the moment.

They approached the Stormont grounds by the side gates. The driver wound down his window. ‘I have Mr John DeLorean here,’ he told the policeman on duty. (Mr John DeLorean dipped his head and smiled over the driver’s shoulder.)

‘Is that right?’ said the policeman and proceeded to sweep the outside of the car with a bomb detector, squatting to reach up into the wheel arches. He checked the trunk and under the hood, drumming his fingers on the latter when he had closed it again. Stopping suddenly. ‘OK.’

‘What was that about?’ DeLorean asked as the car pulled away.

The driver shrugged. ‘Some people, the wee bit of power goes to their head. Also’ — he changed from second gear to third — ‘it’s cold out there. He’s probably saying to himself why should I be the only one to suffer.’

They bypassed the parliament building entirely, following the road between the trees to the castle, which to Randall’s eyes more resembled the home of a Hollywood star of the Douglas Fairbanks era, and which for the ten years of what the British called Direct Rule was where the real power resided.

Randall turned as he got out of the car and slipped the cassette to the driver. ‘Maybe you could put this on when we come back.’ All the loose ends tied, the holidays about to begin.

More security awaited them at the top of the steps up to the front door — a chrome wand with a loop at the end, which traced the outline of their jackets and pants with profuse apologies from the policeman wielding it, who was obviously having a better, or at least warmer day than his friend at the gate.

‘Will you both be going in to see the secretary of state?’ asked the functionary who issued them with their passes.

‘Yes,’ said DeLorean before Randall could say no. DeLorean gripped him by the elbow and added out the corner of his mouth. ‘You don’t think I’d go in without my best man, do you? Besides, it always pays to have someone with you in these circumstances. You would be amazed how often a collective amnesia strikes them otherwise. “Did we really say that?”’

A door opened at the end of the corridor that the functionary directed them into and Jennings appeared, restored to his pinstriped suit and tie knotted just-so.

‘Jennings!’ DeLorean said. It sounded a lot like delight. Jennings merely nodded. Behind him the secretary of state emerged, broad face, hair swept back.

‘I believe you have already spoken,’ said Jennings.

‘A pleasure to meet you at last.’

Prior took the hand that DeLorean offered. ‘I was about to say the same thing.’

‘You know Edmund?’

Prior smiled blandly in Randall’s direction. ‘You are most welcome.’

They entered a room with tall windows at one end looking across a lawn to a rather fine-looking glasshouse and, at the room’s very centre, a table on which sat a telephone twice as large as any Randall had ever seen and around which they took their seats and waited. Five minutes. Ten.

Prior made a show of consulting his watch. ‘The cabinet meeting must have overrun.’

DeLorean held up both hands in a gesture of magnanimity. ‘Who are we to curtail the exercise of democracy?’

Jennings pursed his lips and went to the door, opening it and almost immediately closing it again. ‘I thought I heard the tea trolley,’ he said, a second before a light began to flash orange below the telephone’s dial and a voice — that voice — seemed to fill the entire room.

‘Gentlemen, I do apologise for keeping you waiting. I trust I haven’t missed anything.’

The gentlemen, one and all, jumped to, sitting up in their seats, squaring their shoulders in their suit jackets. (Randall could still not quite believe how quickly he had been admitted into this: the prime minister of the United Kingdom was virtually in the same room .)

DeLorean spoke before any of them. ‘I was just telling Jim, Prime Minister, that we have an order coming in from the United Arab Emirates.’

It was the first that anyone seated around the table had heard it, but it was said with such conviction that Prior actually looked to Jennings as though to make sure he had not suffered an actual bout of amnesia.

‘So’ — Mrs Thatcher’s voice did not waver — ‘we can expect to see you start to pay back… how much is it exactly we have advanced you?’

Prior — trying to get back on the front foot, or at least return the discomfiture — leaned in towards the phone. ‘Sixty-five million pounds, not counting the ten million compensation claim.’ (Which was never paid in full, Randall wanted to remind him, but missed his moment.) ‘About eleven thousand pounds for every car that has been built to date.’

He sat back, folding his arms. DeLorean carried on as though he had not spoken at all.

‘The thing is, Prime Minister, we are on the point here of a major — and I mean major — breakthrough. The market is primed.’

‘The market, I’ve heard, is stagnant,’ Prior said and could not have sounded more the sulky English public schoolboy.

‘Well if you don’t mind me saying, you maybe need to get your hearing checked. We are on course to post a profit for the first five quarters of operation.’ Randall had seen the projections just the day before: it was true. ‘If your own Member — is that the word you use? — had not put about those rumours in the fall we would have floated the company weeks ago and taken things on to the next stage.’ All this was directed at the suddenly not-so-very-Old Carthusian to his right. The next line, however, was delivered straight to the phone in a tone so intimate that Prior — and Jennings, and Randall come to that — might as well not have been in the room. ‘You have my word, Prime Minister, every penny owing will have been repaid by this time next year.’

‘Your word?’ Thatcher, from her tone, was somewhat disarmed.

‘Absolutely.’ His hand as he said this was pressed, hard, against his heart. ‘In the short term, though’ — the hand that had been on his heart was now flat on the table — ‘we are going to need one final cash injection.’

Prior’s eyebrows rose, his jaw dropped. Next to him Jennings’s face was a frozen mask of horror. Randall had angled himself towards DeLorean, poised to speak, but he was not about to be interrupted or deflected. It was him and the prime minister, to use the old telephone operator’s phrase, person to person.

‘ Another one?’

‘A final one.’

‘And you were thinking of…?’

‘What the flotation would have raised: forty-seven million pounds.’

Jennings’s eyes closed, Prior’s eyebrows practically disappeared into his high hairline. The phone on the table, despite its bulk, actually vibrated.

Randall, meanwhile, had pulled a notebook towards him and scribbled down what he had been trying a moment before to say. He tore off the page and pushed it in front of DeLorean who read what was written there verbatim and as though he had all along intended to say it.

‘If you could show the same flexibility that you showed to Lear Fan here last December thirty-second .’