Glenn Patterson - Gull

‘Bugatti,’ said Randall.

DeLorean nodded, smiled wryly. ‘Not that they wanted to know even then, but once he’d made that journey in his head there was no going back. Or maybe I’m not even remembering it correctly, maybe’ — circumspect again, testing the hypothesis — ‘it was just something he talked about doing, inventing a new back-story, and then later I just ran with it: insecurity.’ He stopped. ‘Does that seem strange to you?’

‘That you were insecure? After what you described? No.’

Another nod, another not-altogether smile. DeLorean opened a drawer and passed across the desk a sheet of heavy writing paper embossed with an eagle that Randall mistook at first for America’s own until he noticed the cross held in the beak, the downward sweep of the wings. He looked at the address: Bucures¸ti.

‘I made contact with their Industry and Economic and Financial Activity Commission, who passed me on to the Foreign Policy and International Economic Cooperation Commission, who sent me this.’

Randall read down, do not anticipate a need for your product… our own excellent Dacia Brasovia… however, on the matter of buses…

Randall looked up. ‘Buses?’

DeLorean shrugged. ‘I figured lower individual car ownership, greater need for public transport: we pilot them there then target the whole of the Eastern Bloc.’ He had his hand out to take the letter back. ‘You’ll see it doesn’t close the door entirely. I guess it does no harm that I am second-generation Romanian-American…’

Yes, thought Randall, you are now, aren’t you, and might in time be Alsatian again, or Austrian, if that was what it took to protect the brand, stop the void that Dan Stevens had talked of from opening and swallowing all of them, the factory at Dunmurry first.

*

Liz was on her back contemplating a rotor, the precision of it, as irrefutable in its composition as its own name — and the lustre… like a platinum disc, near, something valuable anyway, awarded then kept out of sight under the stairs. The things you never knew you never knew about. She unhooked the bungee rope holding the calliper clear of the rotor and began to assemble. She greased the guide pins and slid them into place, turning them just enough to hold them for now, then rubbed lubricant on to the faces of the brake pads. Copper. She tried to remember from her schooldays if there had been an actual Copper Age, tried to imagine the circumstances of its first being smelted — wasn’t that what you called it? — I mean, for someone to look at a lump of this greeny-browny rock and think, I know, I’ll heat it up and chuck in some… What was it you did chuck in? Nah, gone. She slotted the pads into their allotted calliper cradles — the pad with the wear indicator to the inside — before returning to the pins, tightening each one in turn. Wheel on, hubcap on and that would be it, locked away under the stairs until the fifteen-thousand-mile service.

She worked her way out from underneath the car, using the heels of her hands and the balls of her feet to propel the dolly. There was not a living soul within thirty yards of her. Somebody far distant was whistling ‘Tonight’ from West Side Story , jauntily, with flute-band trills and flourishes.

She had completely lost track of time. Yet if she could have captured one moment and held it out of all the hours she had spent there since her miraculous return — the many hundreds of hours since she first walked through the door — this would be it.

Every bit as miraculous as the return was the fact that she, along with Anto and TC, had survived the end of May cull. They had no way of explaining it to themselves, had been, in truth, more embarrassed than elated the day the announcement was made and had stood at the locked gates with the thirteen hundred of their workmates who would not now be going back in, or who were not expected to be going back in until a portion of them took matters into their own hands and climbed over again to set up camp in the canteen.

The occupiers were cordial and philosophical when, the next morning, they came face to face with Liz and the others in their overalls. Every calamity had its survivors, after all, and it was simply wrongheaded to blame your fate on them. They even — those without work — shared the tea they brought in with them — for they were occupying the canteen, not looting it — with those who still had work to take a break from.

The ‘two hundred’, meanwhile, were doing what those endless tours around the factory before ever production began had been preparing them for, though it had sounded like just a bit of crack then, the nuclear outcome, in which the very few had to fill in for the great many, carrying out the tasks of the departed as well as their own, hanging doors as well as fitting seats, wiring dashboards and putting on wheels, and before the wheels the brakes.

She replaced the tools in the pouches of her roll then picked up the dolly and moved round to the other side of the car where she worked her way underneath, head and shoulders first, to start work on that rotor.

*

On his return from the States Randall had made straight for the canteen — past the banners that read We Want Work and DeLorean Workers Demand Their Rights — to talk to the men and women staging the occupation. It was not what you would call a warm reception.

Where had he been when they were getting their cards? Not a manager to be seen the whole day.

He couldn’t speak for the any of the rest, he said, but for his own part — truthfully? — he had been at home with his head down the toilet bowl.

‘Oh, good,’ said a guy at the front (Randall recognised him from the dive bar in Wilmington), ‘wishes sometimes do come true.’

‘Well, you must have been wishing pretty damned fervently,’ Randall said, ‘because I never in my life felt anything to compare with it. If you were able to work the same trick wishing for new finance…’ He told them, as truthfully as the head down the toilet bowl, how he saw things, which was hopeless… if it had been up to anyone other than John DeLorean to try to pull it round. There were no lengths he would not go to (in his mind’s eye Randall saw that Romanian eagle): literally no lengths. And as he looked around their faces, saw the anger, the anxiety, lose their grip a little, he realised that DeLorean was the one person in all of this they still trusted, because in coming here in the first place he had trusted them.

He repeated this speech half an hour later in the assembly shop, only just managing to keep a rein on his confusion at seeing Liz, looking as though she had never been away, although he had checked the list after the confrontation back in February (the fury in her eyes that day…) and had seen her name plain as day among the laid-off. Some of the workers applauded when he had got to the end of his last line — ‘Keep the faith, in the management here, in John Z. DeLorean, and together we will ensure there is life in this plant after October nineteenth.’ Liz merely nodded, to herself as it might have been: all right, faith pledged.

DeLorean’s calls in the weeks that followed were, more often than not, from international airports: Dubai, Singapore, Frankfurt on a layover, Zurich, though not in the end Bucharest. There was always a deal just starting to take shape, taking the place of the last deal, which had broken down over some stupid bureaucratic detail or outrageous demand. (‘The Romanians basically wanted me to kiss Ceausescu’s ass.’) He was in the truest sense of the word indefatigable. And as June turned to July, July to August, August to September, Randall thought he detected a note of anxiety creeping in that for all the tens of thousands of miles he was covering — the lengths he was going to — he was getting nowhere.