Gull (23 page)

He had carried on one very detailed set of negotiations with the Puerto Ricans while having his hair cut and his ears and nostrils trimmed.

‘When I am in New York I live in this office. How else am I going to find the time?’

‘I have been thinking, though,’ he said now, from over by the window maybe, eye to the lens of his telescope, ‘this is the moment we really need to push on.’

‘I don’t see how.’ Randall’s own view was of ranks of cars, serried rooftops, a renegade Irish flag among the television aerials, a rubble chute in the distant quarry. ‘Unless...’

‘We bring on a night shift? My thoughts exactly: double the workforce at a stroke and raise production to eighty cars a day.’

It had always been the intention, of course, but still the suddenness of the proposal caught Randall on the hop.

‘What does Don think?’

‘I’ll let you know when I’ve spoken to him.’

‘I told him we would need at least eight weeks to train up the new intake,’ Don said later. (DeLorean had not rung back. From the way he was talking it was pretty clear Don did not know that DeLorean had phoned Randall at all.) ‘He told me to “stop being so Canadian”. They could learn on the job. “Hell, Don,” he said,’ – the accent was borderline at best – ‘“you have built two thousand cars with the people you have there already – let them take care of the training. We have the orders, we just need the cars to fulfil them.”’

Early the following week Randall looked up from his desk to find Jennings standing in the doorway.

‘Don’t look so happy to see me,’ the older man said.

Randall opened his hands. ‘What can I say? You are just occasionally the bearer of some very bad tidings.’

‘Actually’ – sitting – ‘I was rather hoping that you might have some tidings for me.’

‘About the night shift?’

‘About the stock market flotation.’

There was no use pretending when his expression had so clearly declared that he knew nothing whatever about it. Jennings, though, did pretend that he had not noticed Randall’s surprise. He flicked at a speck of something on his lap. ‘I am assuming there is a connection between the two,’ he said. ‘Entirely logical: the higher the output the greater the share value the faster the loans are repaid.’

‘I can only speak to the production side,’ said Randall. ‘The dealers want more cars than we have been able to supply them with up to now.’

‘Of course, I forgot, you were over there not so long ago. I suppose’ – that speck on his lap again – ‘you must have seen quite a few on the roads.’

Randall pulled open a drawer and found a roll of Scotch tape. He pushed it across the desk. ‘For your trousers,’ he said in answer to Jennings’s quizzical look. ‘Wrap it around your hand sticky side out: it works like a clothes brush. And for your further information most of the dealers hadn’t even had their first deliveries when I was there. Not much chance me seeing too many cars. It’s a big place, the USA.’

Jennings frowned. Randall almost felt sorry for him. It couldn’t be fun having your lance blunted like that. Jennings picked at the ragged edge of the tape with his thumbnail.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the compensation claim... You will be pleased to know we are offering to buy a new Portakabin and to cover the cost of transportation and installation. We expect to have change out of four hundred thousand pounds.’

He bowled the tape across the desktop with the flat of his hand. Randall moved to his right to catch it, but the roll hit a pencil and flew instead past his left elbow.

‘Unlucky,’ Jennings said. ‘It looked like you had that covered.’

The moment he was gone Randall was up and doing. So they were floating on the stock market. That had always been a part of the plan too. The timing had changed, was all. As Jennings had just unwittingly proved, or proved in a way he had not intended, it was all about how you reacted to sudden changes in circumstances. Whatever was required of them at this end they must be prepared to carry out, and fast, starting with the doubling of the workforce.

It made no sense to put all the new starts on the nightshift, otherwise who would there be to provide the on-the-job training? Stylianides sent a letter round those veterans of the first two thousand cars offering them the chance to volunteer. Volunteers for permanent nights were offered the further inducement of dinner – date to be arranged – with Mr DeLorean himself.
Dates
to be arranged, it was going to have to be, so many at once signed up.

Randall ran into Liz the morning after the letters went out, the first time in going on two months he had seen her face to face. An empty passageway. (There were, even before the new starts were drafted in, a thousand people working in the place, no passageway was
ever
empty.) They both checked their stride then both realised they had no option but to carry on. She tucked her chin into her chest as they drew level.

‘Liz,’ he said.

‘Oh, hello.’ As if the act of tucking in her chin had wiped her memory of having seen him two seconds before.

‘I just wondered if you had got your letter.’

‘I did thanks. I left it in the bin back there.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No, you don’t, do you? And I explained it to you so carefully the last time.’

‘Oh, yes, that’s right.’ He couldn’t understand where this hostility was coming from, hers or his. ‘The man owns the wife in this country.’

‘Who owns you? At least I am somewhere that I want to be.’ She dipped her head in towards his as a door opened at the far end of the passageway. ‘And at least I am still getting great sex.’

From her smile it must have looked to the people coming their way like a brief pleasantry. Randall had no time to come back, to tell her that she was wrong on both counts: this was where he wanted to be, for now, and in fact...

In fact.

Since coming back from the States – choosing to come back – he had been dating June from the office down the hall. Not dating so much as sleeping with. Not sleeping with so much as fucking. It was the worst kind of cliché (worse by far than chaste talks in public parks), but with the hours he worked where else was he going to meet someone? Her fiancé was working on the North Sea oil rigs. She told him the first time they fucked that she had wondered how many times she was going to have to drop that into the conversation before he twigged. She showed Randall one of the videotapes she had found in her fiancé’s luggage the last time he was home: unbelievable stuff, unwatchable, nearly. ‘That’s all they do out there when they’re not working, it’s a wonder there isn’t a giant geyser of come...’
Please
, he had said:
enough
, which thrilled her almost as much as the film to judge by what she did next with his hand. ‘People look at me and think butter wouldn’t melt, but we all do it and we all do it to get to the same place’ – she provided the sound effects. ‘The only thing that’s different is what we do to get there.’

He was sure she was right. He just didn’t think he had ever met anyone as dedicated to getting there as she was.

And when she made it...

*

Pandemonium. Absolute pande-fucking-monium. Anto said, no kidding, it reminded him of August ’69, the streets full of people running here there and everywhere, not a clue any of them whether they were running into trouble or away from it. He said he had heard one fella asking another fella if he knew where the experimental workshop was and the fella said sorry, mate, I’m only new, you’d need to ask a supervisor that, and the first fella said to him I
am
a supervisor.

‘Are you telling me there are people coming straight in as supervisors?’ asked TC, whose own ambitions in that direction remained unfulfilled. ‘How can that be right?’

‘Maybe they have more City and Guilds than you.’

‘Cunny funt.’

‘Cleaner mouths,’ said Liz.

The Honorary POGs walked around shaking their heads. ‘Wait till they see over there the state of the cars this lot are going to turn out.’

*

At the end of the first week of the expanded workforce one person in every three received an empty pay packet: system overload. One person in every three on the dayshift dropped what he or she was doing and marched on the administration block. Word of their coming and the reason for it had gone ahead of them – actually one in three of the people in the administration block were marching out to join them (You too, June? You too?) – and Randall responded by setting up a table in their path and installing Gardiner from wages behind it, pen in one hand, chequebook in the other.

You could nearly hear the brakes being applied as the crowd wheeled round the corner and saw him.

‘The bad news is the computer’s brain wasn’t big enough to cope with all the extra names,’ Randall said into the temporary silence. ‘The good news is Mr Gardiner here has a bigger brain than any computer outside the Space Programme, not to mention a good old-fashioned ballpoint pen.’ Gardiner showed them it. ‘So, if you could bear with us and form an orderly line...’

Which was the signal for a renewed free-for-all.

‘It’s OK! It’s OK! He has a spare pen in his jacket pocket, he’s not going to run out of ink – or money.’

It was like a scene from
It’s a Wonderful Life
– order was miraculously restored, and the ink didn’t run out, neither did the money, and – five, four, three, two,
one
– they reached the end of the working day, the first shift of it anyway, with everyone more or less content.

One of the other consequences of the doubling of the workforce was, it stood to reason (one nine-hundred-strong cross-section of the population – any population – being, morally speaking, the same as another), a doubling of the instances of petty larceny.

Bill Haddad showed up in Randall’s office one morning fit to be tied. He had taken a cab the night before – black, of course, it being next to impossible to find anything more regulated – and the radio in the dash – he recognised it straight away – it was one of theirs.

Randall suggested it might just have been
very like
one of theirs.

Not very like, Haddad insisted: the exact radio, a Craig. Who else used Craigs here? Anyway, he had just been down to the stores to double-check: absolutely no doubt. He jabbed Randall’s desk with his middle finger. ‘We are going to have to put extra people on the gates, introduce random searches.’

‘Slow down, slow down,’ Randall said. ‘I share your concern, obviously, but this isn’t a prison, it’s a factory. Things go missing now and again.’

He was thinking of the tale he had heard – one cigarette in length – down at the Conway’s security hut, about the man who left the shipyard every evening with a jacket draped suspiciously over his wheelbarrow, and every evening this one foreman would pull him over and look under the jacket and find nothing. Only when the pair had retired and met on the street did the labourer put the foreman out of his misery by telling him what he had been pilfering all those years: wheelbarrows.

Haddad’s finger was still pressing down on his desk. He didn’t look as though he was in the mood for stories.

‘John doesn’t hold with searches,’ Randall said simply.

‘Why does that not surprise me?’ said Haddad, then changing tack, ‘Have you any idea what those radios are worth?’

‘I know what every single thing in this factory is worth, and I know what our workers are worth too, and it’s more than a toolkit or a couple of pairs of coveralls, or even a Craig radio.’

‘That’s a very fine sentiment, I’m sure,’ said Haddad and leaning all his weight on that single finger pushed himself upright, ‘but you forget that until we start to turn an actual profit the money that paid for those things isn’t John’s and it sure as hell isn’t yours.’

It was bad enough having to take one lecture from Haddad, but to have to take another, just a few days later and this time have to admit that he had a point...

There had been a spate of bomb scares, middle of the night: middle of the night
shift
.

Three times in as many weeks Randall had been woken by a phone call telling him to get down to the plant double-quick. (On the second of these occasions he had been surprised to see Liz among the workers standing at the assembly point, though with the threat of an explosive device in the building this surprise was –
un
surprisingly – short-lived.) It was the police who pointed out after the third alert had been declared a hoax that all three calls had been made not just on the same day of the week – Wednesday – but at the same time of night, exactly a quarter after two. A couple of days later they confirmed what had begun to seem obvious: that all three calls had been made from inside the assembly shop, from one particular phone, near the Engine and Gearbox Storage area, whose calls – and the list of them was staggering: Australia and everywhere – for some reason did not appear to be going through the plant’s own operator system. With the cops to back him Haddad was not about to be dissuaded. Never mind the bad press if the story was to get out, this was effectively sabotage, this hurt everybody: they would have to mount a stakeout.

Under cover of running repairs to the ceiling a tiny camera was installed high on the wall facing the phone. Randall did not even bother going to bed the following Wednesday, but killed the time until half past midnight (Erroll Garner
Concert by the Sea
: not one he would be sorry to return) then took himself down to the factory.

They had set up the monitor in a corner of Stylianides’ office, its bluish greys the only artificial light in the room. There were plates of sandwiches under Saran wrap on the desk, two large thermos flasks of coffee and half a dozen mugs: one each for Stylianides, Haddad, Randall (Don had been more than happy to delegate) and the three cops who had arrived a little ahead of Randall wearing boiler suits with the name of a pest control company on the back.

‘You’d be amazed the places these will get you into,’ the cop in charge said. ‘I’ve had people shake my hand and then seconds later they’re on the floor with the cuffs on them.’