Gull (20 page)

It had since his earliest DeLorean days been part of the package, but it had got to the point here where he half expected a Lotus man to be waiting to walk down the corridor with him when he stepped out of his room at night to go to the bathroom. He had heard of things like that happening to people on trips behind the Iron Curtain, only it wasn’t service they called it, it was surveillance. Not that he was complaining by the end of that day, quite the reverse: without the driver to call on for help he doubted he would have understood a word that the guy in the shipping office was saying. As accents went it was at the atonal end of the sing-song spectrum.

Still, when he had returned to Ketteringham Hall later that afternoon and packed his bag and nodded one last time to the driver holding the car door for him (no sign at all of Chapman), he was not exactly heartbroken to be leaving.

The following Sunday was as beautiful a spring day – as beautiful a day period – as Randall had seen in all his time in Belfast. When he arrived in the Botanic Gardens mid-morning, the grass between the paths was already colonised by students from the university next door, books open before them, some of which were even being read.

A quarter of an hour after he sat down, Liz dropped into the seat beside him, the briefest of smiles to acknowledge that she had seen him, hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she scanned the student faces, or perhaps, it only occurred to him afterwards, shielding her face from any return gaze.

Up to now they had met in public, but without much in the way of the public to witness it.

Randall had spent the evening before reading over lists of names. ‘I see no one from your section has put themselves forward for the retraining programme,’ he said in lieu of a hello of his own.

Her mouth side-on looked lipless. ‘It appears America holds bad memories for some of them.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Taking on the unspecified sins of an entire nation. ‘What about you?’

She turned to face him, her eyes as narrowed almost as her mouth, though the sun was at her back.

‘
I’m
not going, if that’s what is bothering you,’ he said, because something evidently was. ‘I just thought maybe if you were thinking in the future of advancement...’

Liz shook her head. ‘You still don’t get it, do you, the way things work in this country? Men earn more than their women, that’s the deal. It was enough for my husband to swallow me getting a job at all, never mind bringing home more than he was. I can just imagine how he would react to me “advancing”, and as for me waltzing in and telling him I was taking off to the States for a couple of weeks on my own...’

‘Hardly on your own.’

‘Do you seriously think that makes it
better
?’ She stood up suddenly. He was reminded of the very first time they met here, all those months of Sundays ago: same raincoat, despite the improvement in the weather, same belt, which she tugged on, hard, before offering him her hand. He didn’t know whether to laugh or not, but in the end followed her lead: not. He put his hand in hers (a vein in her wrist pulsed). She shook it once.

‘Goodbye,’ she said.

‘Wait a second, you’re not telling me...’

‘I’m telling you we’ll not do this again.’

He felt an odd sense of relief. He had thought at first she meant goodbye to the job and everything.

‘If you say so.’

‘I do say so.’

He went to get up.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Please.’

He sat back, spreading his arms as wide as they would go along the top of the bench: look at me not getting up. He watched her walk along the path in the direction of the river, take a quick step back to avoid an errant Frisbee travelling between students who had given up all pretence of study, then carry on, shoulders even from a distance set, round a bend and out of sight.

Randall let out a long, slow breath and hauled himself to his feet.

So that was that, whatever it was.

*

She had said his name the night before. Robert had stopped dead, mid thrust, pushing her back off him, holding her at trembling arms’ length. ‘
What?
’ His chest was heaving, hers too: hers even more so. God, she had been so nearly there, so caught up she didn’t know she didn’t know what she was saying. But the echo of it reverberated now. She moved his palms from her shoulders on to her breasts, pressing down hard. ‘Hands all over me,’ she slurred the words. It wasn’t all put on. She raised her hips an inch, raised them another, took him by the right wrist, fitted his fingers into the gap she had made, as much on him as in her. ‘I want your hands’ – guiding the left one the length of her back, shoulder blades to tailbone, on down from there – ‘all over me.’

He started again – couldn’t help himself – took back the inches she had temporarily denied him, strained then to find one... inch... more. It was over in seconds. Her before him.

That’s how close she was.

And that’s how close she was.

She couldn’t risk anything like that happening again.

The Frisbee, checking her stride, nearly broke her resolve, but she put her head down, held tight to the strap of her shoulder bag and ploughed on.

*

Randall awoke two nights later from a nightmare of scudding over jungle scrub taking fire on all sides to find that it was no dream at all – he was actually there or it was actually here – the clatter of the rotors, the sky’s untimely orange, the fizzes, the pops, the dreadful bangs. He rolled off the bed on to the floor, and kept rolling, looking for a place to hide.

*

What Liz heard first was bin lids. She swung her legs out of bed and crossed the floor barefoot to the window, opening it a fraction, as quietly as the latch would allow, which was not quite quietly enough.

Robert sat up, knocking over the bedside lamp as he tried to switch it on... righting it again at the second attempt.

‘What is it?’

‘Listen.’

‘What?’

Distant, distant.

‘
Listen
. Bin lids. He must be dead.’

Robert reached for the lamp again, still squinting against its light. ‘If he is it’s nobody’s fault but his own.’

‘I know, but...’

‘But what?’ He rolled over. ‘You have your work in the morning. I have mine. Close that window and get back into bed.’

She listened a few moments longer then did as he said.

*

When he had reoriented himself sufficiently to understand that he was not under direct attack Randall ventured to wriggle out of the corner into which he had rolled and raise the window blind an inch or two with the backs of his fingers. All was confusion: overlit, overloud confusion, much of it concentrated on a point about five hundred yards to his right, beyond the trees, corresponding to the Twinbrook entrance to the factory.

Six feet to his left, at the other end of the window, the telephone sat on a glass table. He felt along the join of the baseboard and the carpet for the cable, yanked, bringing the handset crashing to the floor then reeled it in, dial tone buzzing angrily.

It took ten minutes and four numbers – the last passed on to him by the housekeeper in Pauma Valley – to get through, to another house – ranch, Randall supposed – where a party was in full swing; a further ten while DeLorean was located, the phone so far as Randall could tell brought to him, elbowed through a dozen bellowed conversations and sudden bursts of laughter, rather than he to it.

‘
Edmund?
’ he said, and you just knew he had a finger in one ear.

‘I’m sorry to be phoning, it’s all gone crazy here.’ Randall pushed the receiver under the blind, held it to the window for half a minute. The glass throbbed. ‘Did you hear that?’

‘It’s hard for me to hear anything with this music,’ DeLorean said, or shouted. Randall was getting it too. Yvonne Elliman, if he was not mistaken, singing as though she was standing by DeLorean’s side.

‘Hold on, hold on, let me see,’ he said. A door slid open in California, slid shut, and Yvonne was gone, the backing track of voices, ice against glasses, pool water being efficiently displaced, was gone. ‘There.’

Randall did not bother a second time with the phone to the window. ‘I’m guessing two, three hundred people, right in front of the gates. It’s to do with that hunger strike,’ he said. ‘Has to be.’

He thought for a moment or two that DeLorean still hadn’t heard properly, so unhurried was his reply.

‘You know that’s why I have you there, right? I figured if anyone knew what to do in a situation like this it would be you. This is your moment, Edmund. You call it.’

These last words were barely out of his mouth when he spoke again, over his shoulder as it sounded, and as though taken entirely by surprise. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude.’ Then ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘is that...?’ The rest of the sentence was smothered by his hand on the mouthpiece. When he removed it again – a matter of seconds – the pitch of his voice had changed.

‘I’m back in New York tomorrow,’ he said, chords stretched tight, something more immediate he did not want to betray: whoever, or whatever, it was he had seen trumped for a moment the spectacle Randall was trying to describe. ‘We’ll talk then.’

Randall sat a full minute after DeLorean had (abruptly) hung up, the phone still in his hand, then he pressed a finger on one of the black buttons, summoning the dial tone back, and called the only Belfast number he knew by heart.

‘I was wondering when I might hear from you,’ Jennings said, as though it had been an overdue social call he was taking.

‘We need help,’ Randall said.

‘I have a feeling you are not the only ones,’ said Jennings. The help, however, arrived at the factory within the quarter hour, a mere minute or two after Randall himself, which, given, as Jennings implied, how much else was under threat that night in Belfast, was beyond better than might have been expected, though there again few places under threat that night in Belfast had quite as many millions of government money tied up in them.

The captain to whom Randall opened the Seymour Hill gate could not have been more than twenty-one, a voice as clipped as the prince whose soon-to-be bride was hogging the headlines everywhere in Britain but here. Randall had met his West Point cousins, young men passing through the military on their way to high office. He shook Randall’s hand, more gentleman than officer, then waved through four armoured cars, from the rear of which a platoon of soldiers dismounted. These were the men whose lives the DMC-12 was supposed to be going to save. They walked beside their vehicles in the lee of the body-press shop, trying to come at the Twinbrook gate unseen.

Randall went a few feet ahead of them, rounding the corner of the building nearest the gate on his own. The drive was a mess of rocks and broken glass though it was not quite the catastrophic vision Randall had imagined when he inched up the blind in his room. He quickly realised that there was not
a
group of people gathered outside, but two groups: the one closest to the gate itself, with their backs to him, trying to hold the other, much larger group at bay.

Seeing Randall come round the corner – or sensing somehow what was coming round the corner behind him – this group found new and more aggressive voice. They surged forward, pressing the small group back, causing the gate and the fence flanking it to shake. A man looked over his shoulder – red-faced even at that distance and in that light – lips stretched tight with the strain of trying to hold the line.

‘Are there Brits in there?’ he called to Randall.

‘Brits?’

‘Don’t fucking give me that Dumb Yank crack. These ones are shouting they seen soldiers. Did they?’

Randall glanced behind him, which was all the proof the man needed. ‘They did see them! They’re fucking in there.’

‘They’re protecting the factory.’

The red-faced man’s face got redder, closer to the fence between them. Randall recognised him now. One of the storemen. An index finger poked through. ‘
We’re
protecting the factory, telling these young bucks it’s supposed to be neutral. Do you not understand? It’s in more fucking danger with the Brits in there.’

Then suddenly from somewhere further back there was a shout – a cheer almost – and Randall looked up to see a black object arc overhead, trailing flame.

Instinctively he went into a deep crouch, which only delighted the shouters and cheerers and missile-throwers more. The man at the gate turned back to face them. ‘Which one of you wee fuckers threw that?’

Randall, stumbling as he tried to get to his feet again could only watch, prone, as the missile – the petrol bomb – struck the flat top of a Portakabin and spread its flames all over the tarred surface.

A voice that must have been the captain’s, though it sounded shriller, issued an order and a soldier broke cover, dragging a hose, which pulsed a couple of times, convulsed, and finally shot out water in a silvery crescent that seemed only incidentally to take in the Portakabin and its flaming roof.

Even the men who had been holding the young bucks back bellowed at this. More rocks came over the fence, more bottles. Here now was the cataclysm. Another three soldiers emerged from the shadows, short wide-barrelled guns already braced against their shoulders.

Someone had a hold of Randall by the collar and was trailing him back towards the armoured cars.

The captain had a megaphone now. ‘Move away from the gates.’ Royal command. ‘My men are under orders to fire baton rounds at identified targets only. Please, move away from the gates.’

He handed the megaphone to a soldier twenty years his senior and several ranks his junior.

‘You did the right thing requesting assistance,’ he told Randall. ‘Those men would not have been able to hold back that crowd another ten minutes on their own.’

The rocks and bottles continued to come over. The trio of soldiers continued to move their guns across the face of the crowd, trigger fingers twitching. The Portakabin roof, despite the water that was now, with two more soldiers helping hold the hose, being properly trained on it, continued to burn.