Glenn Patterson: Gull

He picked up his fork and moved a small segment of artichoke from the rim of his plate to the centre. Left it there. He laid the fork lengthways across the plate.

‘I remember reading that his mother was Austrian.’ Artie Shaw’s, he meant, or so Randall guessed. ‘Same as mine. I kept thinking there had to be a connection, the way my own mother pushed me to take music lessons. I mean those were tough times to be trying to find five bucks a week, there weren’t too many people working on the assembly lines with her who were willing to make the sacrifices.’

Randall had spent enough time in his presence over the past couple of years to have become familiar with his parents’ assembly-line experiences, although DeLorean had never until now talked to him about them directly like this, facing him across a table, no eager journalist standing by turning the anecdote to screeds of shorthand.

‘Back then they could lay you off right across the summer while they got the lines ready for the next year’s model. You can’t imagine the strains that put on a family.’

His parents had separated, Randall had already picked that up. There were spells as a child living with relatives of his mother here in California. Or was it his father who had come west? A difficult man, he had gathered that by now too. It wasn’t Austria he was from, somewhere else beginning with A… Alsace, that was it: home of Bugatti. That was the first time he had heard DeLorean suggest a regional affinity passed down the family line: the artistry in the manufacturing, the conviction that weight was the arch-enemy of innovative design.

DeLorean was tapping lightly with all eight fingertips on the grillroom tablecloth. ‘I remember this one time a piano turning up in the house. Don’t ask me where from, some kind of shelter it looked like. There were keys missing, dampers, but we were going to fix it up. My father was good at that sort of thing, as long as he didn’t have to talk too much. Anyway, I woke up one night to a lot of crashing and thumping from downstairs — I was eight, nine, something like that — crashing and thumping at any time is unnerving, but in your own home, in the middle of the night… And what it was, Ford was having a crackdown, stolen tools, or tools suspected of being stolen. There were men in our house, to this day I couldn’t tell you how they got there, if they knocked the door, or kicked it in, but they were in there, crashing and thumping, when my brothers and I crept down the stairs to see what was going on… And, well, I guess a battered piano looked to them a likely hiding place.’

The band had stopped playing. DeLorean raised his hands to applaud over his shoulder.

‘I hope I need hardly add that there were no tools, not there, not anywhere in the house.’

‘I can’t believe they could get away with something like that,’ Randall said.

‘It was Detroit. They knew they had the people.’ He closed his fist: this tight. ‘Where else were they going to go for work?’

*

They reached the magical one hundred and fifty midway through the third morning and by the end of the day had added another eight dealers to the list. That evening they were driven out to Burbank as special guests at the recording of The Tonight Show. Randall had fielded two calls in the course of the afternoon from the Puerto Ricans, but DeLorean spent the entire journey on the car phone to Cristina, head turned to the window, and from the moment they arrived at the studios they had production assistants and hospitality staff in close attendance and then the show was starting and they were standing — such was their access — out of shot at the side of the stage, with its mess of cables and monitors, its young men and women with stopwatches and clipboards, watching Johnny Carson coax a beauty of a performance out of Peter O’Toole.

‘The last time you were on here people thought you were bombed out of your gourd…’

‘ I thought I was bombed out of my gourd.’

‘But you were just exhausted, weren’t you?’

‘Well, it’s half your truth and half mine. I had been flying back from Japan and we left there on a Monday and arrived in the States on a Sunday, which alarmed me, and everywhere we stopped along the way it was cocktail hour and one doesn’t want to be discourteous…’

Under cover of the applause that greeted its conclusion Randall finally had an opportunity.

‘Romero-Barcelo’s people have been on the phone again. I really think you should talk to them.’

DeLorean nodded. ‘Did Roy Clark call? I’d hoped I might see him here. I know he’s been filming a guest slot with the Muppets.’

‘No,’ said Randall as the studio manager tried to wind up the applause and get Peter O’Toole to vacate his seat, ‘he didn’t.’

Afterwards, while the set was struck and Johnny was in make-up for his make-down, they went across to the Sheraton Universal Hotel, where, as Randall had observed him do many times before, DeLorean opted to stand in the lobby rather than sit, as though reluctant to commit himself too soon: Say Johnny doesn’t come at all…?

He attracted plenty of looks of his own, even in that lobby where whichever way you turned you saw someone who looked like someone you had seen on TV. That chestnut-haired woman holding up the shoe with the broken heel? Pure Mary Tyler Moore. The four men at the table over to the right, all open-neck shirts and heavy gold bracelets and furtive glances over the shoulders as they talked? Straight off the set of The Rockford Files .

DeLorean had checked his watch two or three times already, had muttered two or three times more about another invitation he had had, which perhaps it would have been polite not to have declined, when the hotel doors revolved and out at quarter-turn intervals stepped Johnny Carson’s entourage, the young men and women from the wings, minus stopwatches and clipboards, with, at their centre, Johnny himself. He spotted DeLorean at once. The entourage parted as he did a little shuffle, feinting left and right before throwing his arms wide.

‘Hey!’

‘Hey!’

They hugged. Johnny and John. Brothers. Back-clapping.

Johnny was first out of the clinch.

‘So, when can I expect my car?’ He turned to the entourage as to a studio audience. ‘You know I’m going to do ads for this man? I must be the only schmuck in television history to pay half a million bucks to appear in an ad.’

DeLorean took it, as it was given, in good part. Every comedy act needed a stooge and he for the minute was it. ‘We just signed up our one-hundred-and-fifty- eighth dealer, that’s enough to take the first two years’ output and then some.’

‘You’ve settled then on where the plant will be?’

‘We’re’ — not a flicker of hesitation — ‘very nearly there with that.’

Johnny leaned closer, but his head was angled to ensure that the entourage-cum-audience was privy to his stage whisper. ‘Did I hear Ireland ?’

‘Well, I had talks with some people from the government there, but then the governor of Puerto Rico called…’

‘Several times,’ Randall said. (DeLorean cast him a quick sidelong look.)

Johnny straightened, slapping DeLorean’s back again. ‘Begorrah, I know the Irish need the jobs even more than the Puerto Ricans do, but I thought that had to be a lot of blarney.’

The Rockford Files guys were doing more than glancing over now, they were turned in their seats openly staring. Randall watched over DeLorean’s shoulder as one of them stood and made his way across the lobby, buttoning his sport jacket, with some difficulty, over his stomach. Randall’s instinct was to head him off, but as he took a step forward DeLorean himself seemed to sense the presence at his back.