The test driver was steering (hair again smoothed flat), but the engine was silent. The power instead was being provided by the six workers pushing from behind.
‘It’s basically held together with washers and duct tape,’ one of them told Randall out the corner of his mouth. ‘There’s bits of wood and all sorts in there.’ But that was not how it looked at all. The gull-wing doors lifted and every person present smiled.
‘You will excuse us if we don’t start the engine,’ DeLorean said, though it was doubtful that many heard, ‘but this is a high-performance car and with so many of us gathered this morning space is maybe a little tighter than is strictly advisable.’
Jennings materialised at Randall’s shoulder. ‘For a moment when he was spinning us those yarns about Johnny Carson and Sammy Davis Jr I thought he was going to hit us with another delay.’ But even as he was saying this DeLorean was inviting the secretary of state and his wife to come closer — to get inside — and Jennings was forced into an undignified shuffle to take Mrs Atkins’s bag, which he held as a man might a severed head that had been thrust into his hand, at arm’s length, by the hair, that is to say the straps.
*
Liz sat on the toilet with her head firmly between her knees. It was the only way she could think of to keep her legs from shaking.
Jesus, they had got away with it.
For the past half-hour, since the dressed-up mule had been pushed out the front, she had been waiting for the doors of the assembly shop to burst open again and every cop standing guard outside to come charging in and arrest the lot of them for fraud.
Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
She squeezed out an excuse for her occupation of the cubicle, hitched up her overall, and flushed. She opened the door and almost closed it again straight away.
Cristina Ferrare was standing at one of the sinks, a small make-up bag balanced, open, between the taps.
She looked up into the mirror, meeting Liz’s eyes next to the half-closed door, after which of course Liz had no option but to open the door fully and carry on out to the sinks. (If only she had been a man she could have headed straight for the exit. As Robert said to her once when she called him on it, ‘It’s not as if we hold the end of it or anything.’) She chose a sink two along on the exit side. Cristina Ferrare did not look round, or track her walk, but examined her own reflection for signs of imperfection and incredibly found one, high on her left cheekbone. She went at it with powder from a deep-red tub. Liz concentrated on the action of soaping her hands, folding them over one another, interlocking fingers and thumbs, thumbs and fingers, rinsing them then, thoroughly. Anything to avoid having to meet herself in the mirror, having to make the comparison.
She turned off the tap, shook the excess water into the basin then turned, hands aloft, to the roller towel. Pull a yard, dry, dry, dry, pull a yard again for the person after you.
She watched her feet as they tiptoed towards the door. She saw them stop, as though the decision to speak came from them.
She faced about.
‘Don’t mind me asking, but he’s serious about this, isn’t he?’
Cristina Ferrare paused in the act of returning a brush to a bottle of lip gloss. Only her eyes moved, a slight frown forming above them as they sought out Liz’s a second time in the mirror.
‘Pardon me?’
‘Your husband, Mr DeLorean, well, I mean some people’ — she made the singular plural — ‘still can’t quite believe that he came here at all or that he is going to stay, you know, for the long haul.’
And now Cristina Ferrare turned so that they stood finally looking at each other, face to face, woman to woman.
She was more beautiful head on than seemed right or fair. Liz couldn’t tear her eyes away.
‘Of course he is going to stay, we bought a house here.’
‘I know,’ said Liz, hardly able to credit it was her talking at all. ‘So have a lot of the people I’m working with, the first house they have ever owned, most of them.’
‘Well, then.’ Cristina Ferrare smiled: a brilliant smile, and despite the reapplied lip gloss, entirely without artifice. ‘We are all in this together then, aren’t we?’
Liz saw her again a quarter of an hour later, holding tight to her husband’s arm as together they tried to make their way through the workers who were lining the corridor between the machinery, cheering and clapping and whistling through their fingers. DeLorean in the end climbed on to a workbench, raising himself still higher above the heads that surrounded him.
He held up his hands, but the cheering and clapping and whistling through fingers for a time only grew in volume. He spread his own fingers, made a tamping motion — Please — and now, at last, they let him speak.
‘I am so proud of each and every one of you today,’ he said, ‘so humble in your presence,’ and humble was exactly how he sounded to Liz: looked it too, more elbow and knee joints all of a sudden than he knew what to do with. ‘That car out front has my initials, sure, but make no mistake, it is your car. A few…’ he stroked the side of his nose, a sign that he was in on the secret, ‘…glitches today, but we can all work on those. We’ll write off today’s car and the next however many it takes as training exercises, but if you can get me three hundred top-notch cars by the start of April we will have a shipment leaving here bound for the US and the American market. What do you say, can you do it?’
‘Yes!’ Liz shouted, though she could barely hear herself, so loud and numerous were the yeses on all sides. They could, they would.
*
Randall held the door for them to pass through back outside. DeLorean paused before him and rested both hands on his shoulders. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to.
Don Lander, coming behind, did have something to say, sotto voce. ‘I don’t think you’ll have to worry any more about the Looking and Listening jibes.’
The secretary of state had not accompanied the DeLoreans on their tour of the factory. ‘Their moment,’ Randall had overheard him tell Jennings. (Perhaps it was time to revise that view of him as a man of constant sighing.) Randall could not imagine that he and Mrs Atkins had simply stood and waited, but wherever they had been in the interim they were here now, by their official car, to hear the last resounding cheer before the door to the assembly shop closed again.
‘You appear to have made quite an impression with the workers,’ Mrs Atkins said, that same smile on her face she had worn when she stepped from the car ninety minutes before.
‘I can tell you,’ said Cristina, ‘they have made quite an impression with me.’
‘Shame!’ another woman said — shouted — through a loudhailer, it sounded like. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’
Cristina’s head turned. Mrs Atkins’s head turned. Everyone’s head turned. The gates it was coming from, Twinbrook side. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’ The woman with the loudhailer was flanked by two more women, who seemed to Randall to be wearing nothing but blankets. There were other women, children too, holding up large photographs of bearded men — prisoners, of course — clad in the same coarse blankets. ‘Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!’
‘Oh dear,’ said Atkins, at the end of a long sigh. ‘I think maybe it is time we were going.’
A detachment of cops was already at the gates, trying to keep the roadway clear. Others closed in around the official cars, hands variously clutching radios, baton handles, the stocks and the perforated barrels of the guns angled across their chests.