‘Twenty-five years!’ came the cry. They were starting to enjoy themselves.
Your man nodded, satisfied. ‘One quarter of a century. So, skins there, then doors here, then all that remains is the seats and the wheels…’
‘Here, less of the “all that remains”,’ shouted Anto, a little to Liz’s left.
The guide acknowledged the justice of his complaint with a raised hand and a bowed head. ‘Correction, after that there follows the vitally important task of fitting the seats and wheels, then the car is placed on the rolling road, its brakes tested, its headlights aligned, and off on out the doors it goes — to what is no concern of yours. In fact, from the moment you walk through that factory gate in the morning, whichever gate it is you walk through, you don’t have to worry about anything…’
The chorus now became a sing-song. This was an old favourite: ‘No green, no white, no orange, no red, no white, no blue. We are the independent state of DeLorean, our wages are DeLorean wages, our conditions are DeLorean conditions.’
The guide held up a finger, straight as a baton. ‘As long as you keep getting fibreglass bodies in one end of this building and DeLorean motor cars out the other.’
They applauded, him for his performance, themselves for their contribution and for what they were about to do together.
‘OK,’ he said — he was Jimmy Cagney now, all twitching lip and jittery hands — ‘tomorrow we make cars.’
9
Randall left the Conway a couple of minutes short of half past six. The scaffolders were already onsite when he reached the factory, laying out the metal poles for the temporary bleachers — grandstand as they preferred here, if a structure with a mere twenty-four seats could be thought of as grand (as opposed to some of the people who would sit in it). Before it was quite eight o’clock half a dozen outside-broadcast units — ranging in size from VW van through three-axle fixed-body truck to giant semi-trailer — were parked in the loading bay at the side of the assembly shop, thick black cables running from them into a generator provided gratis along with the constant supply of tea and coffee and triangles of toast brought from the canteen by Peggy, who once upon a time had stuffed cuddly toys in the pram factory.
(Did the people in the vans and trucks thank her, or him? They did not.)
Jennings showed up an hour ahead of schedule, looking as ever as though he had dressed according to strict civil service guidelines, right down to the size of the bow on his shoelaces.
Behind him came an advance party of the RUC, bringing with them a pair of Labrador detection dogs, one golden, one black, who were let off their leashes to run around a while, ears up, tongues wagging, noses to the ground, before being called to heel again. In went the tongues, down went the ears.
‘I sometimes think I would like to leave something very small for them to find, they look so disappointed,’ said Jennings, as the handlers coaxed the dogs into their van.
They were no sooner away than the VIPs began to arrive, or the PIPs at any rate — the pretty important people: the industrial developers, the local political party leaders, doing their level best to be seen to be ignoring one another, a couple of lords lieutenant, Colin Chapman, accompanied by a woman half a head taller and a decade and a half younger, who did not answer to any of the descriptions Randall had heard of Chapman’s wife.
Another thirty minutes and a convoy of Land Rovers came through the gates with, at its centre, two long black cars. Jennings made straight for the first as it pulled up, Randall for the second, the two of them opening the doors almost simultaneously.
Humphrey Atkins stepped out of Jennings’s car then turned to offer his hand to a woman with the longest neck that Randall — from whose car no one had yet emerged — had ever seen. The press corps as good as ignored her, as they had ignored her husband before her, but as the first size sixteen black chain loafer was belatedly planted on the ground next to where Randall stood they made a sudden and determined charge.
John Zachary DeLorean — for he seemed on this occasion to emerge in three distinct stages — finished unpacking himself from the car (however he packed himself his suits never creased) and was followed in one fluid movement by Cristina, towards whom every camera and microphone now pointed.
‘Mrs DeLorean, if you would… this way… please… Mrs DeLorean!’
‘How are you enjoying Belfast?’
‘Had you time for an Ulster fry on the way from the airport?’
Cristina merely smiled, which appeared from the absence of further questions to satisfy the journalists for now.
A few yards to the left Mrs Atkins maintained her smile too in case it was needed any time soon. Randall rather suspected it would not be.
DeLorean dipped his head towards him on his way to shake the secretary of state’s hand.
‘All set?’
‘All set.’
DeLorean squeezed his upper arm.
Don Lander, who had met up with the DeLoreans in London the night before, got out of the car last and least noticed. ‘Well I got to the bottom of the choice of launch date,’ he told Randall. ‘Seems Sonja thought this was the most auspicious day.’
Randall looked at him blankly.
‘Cristina’s palm-reader,’ Don said. ‘And there I was thinking it was the interior designer.’
*
All through the morning they had listened to the crowd gathering on the other side of the assembly shop doors. People returning from outside brought updates — ‘The sniffer dogs are here…’ ‘There’s fellas out there speaking German and all sorts’ — and questions — ‘Anybody know what CNN stands for…?’ ‘Who’s the woman with your wee man Chapman…?’
Liz had a distant memory of a Girl Guide Concert — dear God: 1959 — she and her fellow Guides taking it in turns to sneak a peek through the church hall’s dusty black curtains: What can you see? What can you see? Then, as now, when show time finally came it took them all a little by surprise, as though the reason for all that activity out front had temporarily slipped their minds. Then it was chords bashed out on the ancient piano; now it was a sound as of the whole factory being kick-started.
They turned their backs en masse on what was happening beyond the doors and strained to see the crane bring the first of the fettled bodies through from the pressing shop and set it, beyond the sightlines of those at Liz’s end of the chain, on to the trim line. There was an enormous cheer from that direction, modulating into a buzz — workers combining, talking one another through the tasks in hand — which after a time yielded to something more querulous, something indeed very like a grumble, punctuated finally by a single ringing cry, ‘What the fuck?’
Anto gave TC a boost and he clung to a pillar long enough to report that it looked as though there might be a ruck. A fella from the engine-dress line had already been despatched to find out more and returned breathless a few minutes later (the clamour had subsided a little) with word that the skins didn’t fit — ‘curling like the lids of sardine cans’, was what he had been told — and that the Tellus operators had been desperately trying to override the settings on the carrier, which kept wanting to move it on to the next stage. People were practically standing with their backs against it, others spreading themselves against the skins to keep them flat, and then some wee man from Rathcoole had produced a fistful of penny washers from his overall pocket (no one asked what he was doing with so many on his pocket to begin with) and started replacing the standard issue washers, or in some cases just firing the penny washers on over the top of them. They seemed to do the trick: the lids were back on the cans. Now fellas from all the sections were running to the stores looking for buckets of penny washers.