Glenn Patterson - Gull

She cut the engine, letting her head fall back against the headrest.

‘That was just unbelievable,’ she said.

He peered into the darkness, unrelieved by streetlights, shop signs, the glow even of a screen between badly pulled curtains. ‘So is this where you live?’

‘Don’t be funny. I just needed a bit of time after that before I went back.’

For the moment there was no sound in the car but their breathing.

‘Have you lost something?’ he asked.

She had, she realised, been feeling around beneath her seat.

‘What? No. It’s just…’ She folded her hands in her lap then thought what difference did it make, really? ‘Do you know what it is? They all have messages scratched in them, under the seats sometimes, sometimes behind the dashboard.’

‘You’re kidding me?’ He sounded, as she had hoped he would be, more amused than aghast. ‘Don’t you know that’s a sacking offence?’

She held out her hand. ‘Look at me, I’m shaking.’

‘So did you…?’

‘Once.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s any point me asking…’

‘No.’ She put a finger on his lips. His lips. On an impulse she took hold of his face with both hands and pulling him to her kissed him long and hard. Drew back eventually. ‘Would you mind taking me home now?’

Before he could reply she had pushed up the door, letting the air in, and had stepped out on to the mountain road.

‘I am doing the right thing,’ she was telling herself. ‘I am doing the right thing.’

*

Randall dropped her, at her request, a couple of hundred yards (she said) from her house on a pleasant-enough-looking housing estate, marked out nevertheless — it was, apparently, inescapable — by flags and painted kerbstones. ‘This is probably close enough,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if you’re driving a Ford Escort. I usually walk the last bit anyway from the bus stop there.’

The bus stop too had been painted, in three segments, as though to deter the wrong sort of bus from stopping.

She let herself out, but when she had the door halfway down again she stopped and ducked her head underneath.

‘Do you really want to know what I wrote in that car? “I made this.”’

‘I don’t think anybody could argue with that,’ he said before her head slipped from view again and the door came down the rest of the way.

His last sight of her was illuminated in the sweep of his headlights as he turned the car about. She squinted against the glare, but kept on walking.

He drove back through the quiet suburban streets: gas stations, Chinese carry-out restaurants and bars the only businesses showing signs of life, these last, with their security fences, razor wire, and cameras, having the air of prisons rather than places of public resort.

He drove, without a second glance, past the entrance to the Conway Hotel, before turning right off the main road and a little later right again, and — another wave to security as he passed — through the factory gates. He crawled through the lot, up and down the aisles, until he found the empty bay and reversed the car into it. When he had walked a couple of dozen paces he turned and looked back and already he had trouble picking out the car he had taken. If it hadn’t been for the extra miles on the clock and the ache still in his jaw, he could almost have convinced himself the past couple of hours had never happened.

A few of the small upper windows were open in the canteen, to let out the fug of all those bodies in too-close proximity and with it the mingled sound of their voices, like a score of radios playing simultaneously: soaps, comedy, sports chat, songs from the shows and the hit parade, old and new. Randall carried on past, leaving all the factory buildings behind him, until at last he came to the smaller gate opening on to the road up to Warren House. The walk from one end to the other, twice a day, six and a half minutes there, seven minutes back (going against the slope), was what he liked to refer to as his exercise regime.

Tonight he had just become dimly aware that there was no one on the warren when he stopped in his tracks. There were lit cigarettes, but not on the other side of the valley: right in front of him.

‘Fucking run!’ a voice — feet away only — called out.

It was not directed at Randall, but at the other shadows behind the cigarette tips, who at once took to their heels, to the accompaniment of tins jostling, heavily, within the confines of plastic bags. Instinctively Randall shot out a hand and was amazed — horrified almost — to find himself holding a fistful of denim jacket. Palms went up protectively in front of the face.

‘Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!’

The boy — despite the high pitch of the voice, it was a boy — was no more than fourteen. It occurred to Randall that if this boy and his friends were from the warren then he had been living here through one entire generation of underage drinkers.

‘They all said you’d gone.’ The boy was snivelling, and almost certainly drunk. ‘They were saying we should go in and see if we could get the gold taps off before anyone else did. I never wanted to do it, swear.’

Randall loosened his grip and at once the boy wriggled free and ran off, laughing.

‘You fucking dick!’ he shouted and there was more laughter from the direction of the stream where his friends had stopped and regrouped.

‘I am, though, aren’t I?’ Randall said under his breath. He stooped to retrieve the bag the boy had dropped, a quart bottle of cider inside, two-thirds empty, and carried it, a finger through one twisted handle, up the drive to the house.

Inside, he set the bag on the floor behind the double-locked door then switched on all the lights, upstairs and down, lest anyone should doubt he was home, and put a call through to the local police station to ask if they had a patrol in the area. ‘That,’ said the desk sergeant, ‘is not the kind of information we give out over the phone, for reasons which I am sure you will understand.’

He had heard and read enough down his years here to understand perfectly.

‘But say there was, if you could ask them to check the perimeter of Warren House.’ He looked through the blind. The red glows were restored to their traditional position across the valley. It was on the tip of his tongue to add that the cops might want to do an age check on the crowd drinking up there — Who would be the fucking dick then? — but the answer, he suspected, would still be him, and he let the thought, and the blind slat, drop.

He had already stripped to his shorts and T-shirt when he heard the engines on the road outside. At least two. The patrol that dared not leak its location. A moment later the intercom buzzed. It buzzed again, twice, before he reached it. The instant he flicked the switch the voice barked at him.

‘Randall? Open the gates.’

It was Jennings. Randall had only just managed to get his second leg into his pants when the Scot was out of his car (had it even come to a halt?) and thumping on the front door.

‘Coming!’ Doing up his buttons; the thumping getting louder. Jesus. ‘Coming!’

Jennings didn’t even bother with his normal potted version of the niceties, but marched past him into the vestibule. ‘Pack a bag,’ he said (a scowl as he saw the cider bottle, sticking out of its sack). ‘Quick.’

‘Hold on,’ said Randall. ‘You can’t throw me out of here, and anyway there’s still…’ He couldn’t think where he had set his watch, ‘… hours yet.’

Jennings had walked straight up the stairs. Randall in his astonishment could do nothing for the moment but stare so that by the time he did set off in pursuit Jennings was already on the landing headed for the bedrooms. He was coming out of Randall’s own room when Randall caught up, proclaiming violation of civil liberties, international protocols, threatening to phone the American Consul, the papers…