Glenn Patterson - Gull

Randall had the car stop at the first pub on the road back to London, gave the landlord twenty pounds for ten pounds’ worth of silver from out of his cash register — ‘You’re cleaning me out here,’ the landlord said, struggling to keep his frown in place — and tucked himself into the very corner of the yellowed hood over the pay phone to dial.

Carole, answering, on the far side of the pips, was guarded. ‘You don’t sound like yourself,’ she said.

‘I’m in a pub in the middle of the English countryside.’ The pips went again. He pumped in another pound in ten pence pieces. ‘I have to speak to John.’

‘Mr DeLorean is not here.’

Mr DeLorean?

‘But he’s in New York?’

‘I’m not at liberty to say that.’

‘Carole…’ More damn pips. More coins. ‘It’s me : Randall.’

‘I know, and I’m sorry, but I Am Not At Liberty To Say.’ He caught her drift finally. It was not him, it was not her, it was the phones.

‘Hold on.’ He shoved in as many coins as the box would take, the ridged rim of the final one visible just beneath the slot. ‘Roy, then, can I speak to him?’

A silence. He thought for a moment he had lost the connection.

‘Roy’s in Wichita,’ she said finally, quietly.

‘Wichita? What’s he thinking of, going to Wichita now?’

She cleared her throat. ‘Court,’ she said.

So it had finally come to pass. The dispute over the blank lease form and the nine thousand dollar discrepancy in an elderly couple’s memory of what had been shaken on and Roy’s had gone to trial.

Whatever else he may have misrepresented, Bill Haddad was not wrong in his assessment of Nesseth. He was a bully and a boor and with millions of dollars at stake, the very future of the company, he had allowed himself to be dragged into court over less than ten grand. Very big, Roy, very bad.

While Randall was thinking what to say next his money ran out.

The landlord was still waving as the car pulled out on to the road again. ‘Come back any time!’

Arriving back at Heathrow, a sombre couple of hours later, it crossed his mind that he could trade up his return ticket for a flight to New York, to what end though, with nothing in his pockets but his hands?

He submitted himself instead — for the very last time? — to the invasive bag and body searches and police interrogation that Belfast people had been conditioned to accept were part and parcel of flying to that (only slightly offshore) region of the United Kingdom.

On the evening before it was all due to end, Liz was cutting through the parking lot when she saw him a little way off to her right, head tilted back against the wall blowing smoke into the frosting air. She thought for a moment of putting her own head down and hurrying on — he was so lost in thought she doubted he would even have noticed — but it seemed somehow churlish, the more so because of the word that had made its merry way out of the canteen a short time before: that he had ordered in fish suppers for all the occupiers and half a dozen cases of Harp to wash them down.

She checked her stride.

‘That was a nice thing you did,’ she said. He turned — re turned from wherever it was he had just been this October night to the lot at the back of the DeLorean factory. ‘The fish and chips and the beer.’

He shuffled his feet. ‘It was little enough,’ he said.

She wasn’t about to make more of it than it was. ‘I know, but all the same.’ She shrugged. ‘I just thought it was nice.’

They stood for an awkward moment looking at the cars parked about the lot. She couldn’t help herself, she sighed. ‘It’s all a bit heartbreaking, isn’t it?’

‘There’s still time,’ he said.

‘Don’t think bad of me, but I kind of wrote off the cavalry coming over the hill when I heard that your woman…’

‘Farnan.’

‘…her… when I heard she wasn’t stumping up the cash. I mean, I really thought, the day she walked around the factory…’ She threw up her hands. ‘Ah, well.’

It seemed as though there was nothing else to say. Except…

‘Do you know the only thing I regret?’ she said. ‘I never actually got to drive in one of them.’

He looked at her.

‘Don’t act so surprised,’ she said. ‘Not many of us did.’

‘No, no, I wasn’t… What are you doing now?’

‘Going for my bus.’

He gestured to the cars. ‘I’ll drive you.’

‘In one of these?’ She laughed. ‘You’ll not drive me far: eight minutes’ worth of petrol, remember, not a second more, not a second less.’

‘So I’ll drive it round to the service pump and fill it up.’

‘You’re mad,’ she said then gave up arguing. ‘Sure, go on ahead.’

He stepped away from the wall into the lot with her. ‘You get to choose.’

‘Hm.’ She walked along, eyeing them up. ‘So hard to decide.’ She stopped before one, angled her head to the left and the right, shook it finally, ‘No.’ She turned abruptly and pointed at more or less random. ‘This one.’

‘A very good choice.’ He raised her door before his own. She smiled. Of course she did.

For all the thousands of times she had clambered in and out of them, it was still a surprise on sitting down properly inside a finished car, buckling the seat belt, pulling the door closed behind her, how low the suspension was, and she was reminded, even before the engine started, of the dreams she sometimes had of flying — always close to the ground like this. Then the engine started — a sound of rocket boosters igniting (she was sure that was something that, given time, they would have had to work at) — and the car surged forward.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I haven’t driven them very often myself.’

He stopped again, a little untidily, fifty yards further on. The service pump was padlocked, but he had the key for it in his pocket, as it seemed he had a key for everything.

She pressed herself back against the seat, turning her head to one side, into shadow, as they passed the security man — a wave from Randall was all it took — at the gate; passed a banner saying, Don’t Let Our Factory Die .

‘You’ll have to direct me,’ he said once they were out.

‘No,’ she said. It was partly the car — she didn’t want to have to be getting out so soon after getting in — but there was more to it than that. ‘You take me the way you think we should go.’

‘You sure?’

She still had her head averted, looking out the window. ‘Positive.’

The way he thought they should go was on to the M1 at Dunmurry headed south. The speed — or the concentration of it in her solar plexus — was like nothing she had ever experienced. In every car they overtook, heads turned. Kids put their hands to the windows and frankly gawped. Lisburn passed, Moira, Lurgan, greater or lesser densities of light. They came off finally at the exit for Portadown, went round a roundabout and pulled into a lay-by where they switched over, him in the passenger seat her in the driver’s, and — oh! she didn’t even want to say what that felt like — drove back on to the motorway again headed in the opposite direction. It was deep dark now, the evening rush hour long since over, few vehicles of any kind driving into the city, so that for minutes at a time it was as though they had the entire road system to themselves.

They barely spoke. Even the switchover had been agreed with little more than glances and shrugs. Driver then driven, driven then driver. Two parts of the same thing.

They left the motorway again where they had first joined it then took to the back roads, some of them barely wide enough for the car to pass along, until they had climbed above the housing line in the foothills of Black Mountain or Divis — Liz could never tell the two apart, though as had been explained to her a long time ago there was no real distinction, Divis being the best fist the English could make of dubh , the Irish for black.