Someone had set fire to the post on which the timetable was mounted; vandal or amateur surrealist, the melted glass had a Dali-esque appearance, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Hope, perhaps. The instant I walk away a train will come, he told himself for the last thirty minutes of the fifty-five that dragged by before the train finally arrived: two carriages, the first of which was completely empty, for the very good reason — as he discovered before joining the other eight passengers in the second — that it stank of urine.
(No way was that a single person’s doing. There had to have been a gang of them: jump on, pee like fury, jump off again… Or sit in the adjoining carriage as though they had never met one another.)
It was one of those days that could turn up in any of the city’s seasons: warm for one, cool for another, about average for the other two. The train window offered him an overview of Belfast’s pastimes and preoccupations, garden sheds and vegetable patches, succeeded at length by yard walls — soccer goals here and there etched on the bricks, jerry-built pigeon lofts balanced on top or, more precarious still, kitchen chairs angled to catch the sun.
On the opposite side a goods yard piled high with metal beer kegs gave way to a stadium — as inviting in its concrete fastness as one of their neighbourhood police stations — hard by which was a wall entirely covered with a painting of a man in a scarlet coat and voluminous black wig, smiling blandly astride a white, rearing charger.
I think I might have seen a buddy of yours in London yesterday. Looking OK for his age, but maybe a little off-colour in comparison.
A voice came over the speaker at the head of the carriage: the next stop was Botanic Station, Botanic Station was the next stop (twice they said everything, everything, in a different order, they said twice). Eight pairs of eyes watched Randall alight. He had overheard a couple of the contractors building the factory talking once about Americans and their shoes. A dead giveaway, one of them said to the other, you don’t even have to wait for them to open their mouths. He looked down at his own. Florsheim Royal Imperial Oxfords. They might as well have been painted with Stars and Stripes.
They carried him, the Oxfords did, along the platform, at the bottom of a steep cutting, thick shrubs overhanging, and up a flight of steps to street level. Past a ticket booth they went then, through a turnstile, and out on to a shabby avenue of nineteenth-century townhouses — about one in two a shop or office, all, this Sunday morning, closed — with trees not so much lining the pavement as interrupting it, angled like arrows fired blind by a giant in one of their old tales.
(There was a thing that no one had explained to him, how a people that claimed such heroes in their lineage had come to be burying fathers of teenage girls face down in shallow graves.)
After a moment or two getting his bearings (away from the city centre: so, left), he strolled up the avenue, passing behind what he assumed was the university and into the Botanic Gardens by a narrow side gate, a sign beside it informing him that after five o’clock this evening there was no way out again. He passed a sunken garden, water trickling nearby, a down-at-heel glasshouse — two long wings with a dome at the centre — and a roofed-in man-made ravine, the doors to which, like the doors to the glasshouse, like the doors to the museum they shared the gardens with, were currently chained shut.
All the same, the woman, Liz, was right, it was — they were — lovely. He spent about an hour, until past noon, just sitting on a bench before the glasshouse, arms stretched out along the back, or forward, resting on his knees, watching the people come and go: the young, it seemed, and the very old, and not much in between.
He tried not to let it harden into conviction, but he felt about getting up from the bench what he had felt earlier about walking away from the railway platform with the melted timetable, that it would make happen — and therefore make him miss — the very thing he was waiting there for, though with even less reason for hope in this instance. (She had said it was a nice place to visit on a Sunday morning, that was all.)
As it was when he could wait no longer — could scarcely physically sit another minute — he looked back over his shoulder every third or fourth step until he had reached the little gate once more.
And it didn’t happen. And the train would have come when the train did come whether he had stayed on that platform or walked away.
*
In the middle of the following week DeLorean sent Chuck Bennington to Coventry. The official line was that he was to start work on the development of a right-hand drive model of the DMC-12 — why shut the gull-wing door on a third of the motoring world, after all? His work in Belfast was done. Randall couldn’t imagine, though, that Chuck would have chosen to go before the first cars had even come off the line.
Thinking back to the conversation in Soho Square, he was afraid that he might inadvertently have hastened his departure. It was a short step from taking a lot on to taking on too much, spreading yourself too thin. Chuck, however, on the one occasion that their paths crossed in the house after the announcement, appeared willing to shoulder the blame himself.
‘We’re more than six months behind. Someone has to take the rap.’
But the circumstances, Randall said, the complete overhaul of the design…
‘That’s what you say to your financiers, but they still expect to see you make changes. Anyway’ — he paused to crush one cigarette and light another — ‘John’s right, we need that right-hand model.’
A new managing director arrived — straightway: further proof, Randall consoled himself, that the decision had already been made before the conversation in London — a Canadian, Don Lander, who had done time with Chrysler in Africa and the Middle East. Less edgy than Bennington, more communicative. ‘I have been brought in to get the cars out, as simple as that,’ he told Randall and the other senior staff, gathered in the newly fitted out boardroom. ‘And you are here — thank you very much — to make sure I don’t fail in the attempt.’
He took Randall aside. ‘I understand from John that you have been here from the very start.’
‘Practically the only one left,’ Randall said, ‘now that Chuck has moved on.’
Lander nodded. ‘L & L, right? Logistics and Liaison.’
‘Right.’
‘Would it surprise you to know that some of your colleagues call it Looking and Listening?’ He pre-empted Randall’s response with a raised hand. ‘Whatever works in this business works and from what I can tell whatever isn’t working here just now has got precious little to do with you.’
*
With all this going on, Randall was not exactly in the best of spirits when the end of the week rolled round again. (Did they really think that was what he did? Looked and Listened?) The steady rain he awoke to on Sunday morning was just the soggy frosting on a rather unappetising cake.
A rabbit — little more than a kitten it looked like — came out of the warren and, ignoring the lure of the plastic bags and discarded cans, raised its twitching nose to the sky and went straight back down the hole again. Randall might have followed its lead and stayed put had he not while searching in an understairs cupboard for batteries for his shaver come across an umbrella, left behind by Chuck — Lotus F1… well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? — and feeling in that instant as though he had been deprived of that particular excuse; in the next was telling himself he ought at least to give the Gardens one more go.
He timed his setting forth this week so that he was on the platform of the local halt a quarter of an hour before the train had arrived last Sunday, in case it might have been running late then. It arrived at the exact same time, the exact same distribution of passengers, even though the urine stench had gone from the carriage in front: Randall checked then sat in the rear one anyway in case the other passengers knew something he did not.