Liz had taken to ripping the letters up and burying the pieces in the bin, several bins even, the minute she was done reading them for fear that Robert would pick one up, (accidentally it would have to be, but still, accidents did sometimes happen), and read into it the same thing she did.
Because if he was to ask her to her face — ‘What does that sister of yours think she’s at? And what about Ivor? Do you not owe it to him to write and let him know?’ — I mean, seriously, how could she fail to give herself away?
The odd Sunday she went straight to her mother’s, skipped the Gardens altogether. Show him he wasn’t to depend on her coming. Show herself she wasn’t dependent on seeing him.
Monday to Friday and half of every other Saturday she built cars.
Eventually they would be turning out seventy or eighty a day, but for the first shipment they had a shade over eight weeks to manufacture three hundred they could swear by on the American market. The same car could come around two, three times, sometimes more, before the inspectors were content to let it out, or out as far as the Emissions and Vehicle Preparation shed at any rate. She knew what the shed was for now. EVP was their A&E. There weren’t many cars that didn’t come out of there better than they went in.
They were all still learning.
An assembly line is an exercise in rhythm, individual and collective. Like an orchestra, she was chuffed with herself for finally saying the day she tried to put it into words (tried to put it into words while simultaneously wrestling with a tension spring). Aye, said Anto, or like galley slaves.
The important thing was to distract all but that part of the brain required for the task in hand. Some people whistled — no: a lot of people whistled, a disproportionate number of them through their teeth — some people sang, or made noises approximate to singing in words only occasionally approximate to the ones committed to vinyl.
Anto had a game — ‘Where in the world?’ Where in the world would you be if you travelled five hundred miles west of such and such a place, then veered north for five hundred more?
Liz thought he must have invented it himself, for it was always him that won it. TC hated it — ‘Change the record, will you, for fuck sake’ — but he knew that the rhythm was better in the pit, or the galley, if they were all distracted by the same thing.
(Car arriving.)
‘You’ve come out of Stockholm, heading due south, you hit land… Where in the world would you be? Liz?’
‘Stockholm, you say?’
‘Stockholm.’
(Passenger seat in position.)
‘Stockholm, Stockholm, Stockholm…’
‘Due south.’
(Upper and lower shields aligned.)
‘It’s not Denmark?’
(Cap screws through the slide runners.)
‘Correct, it’s not.’
(Washers, nuts.)
‘I give up.’
‘After one guess? Come on! TC?’
(Tighten, tighten, tighten.)
‘Bangor?’
‘Ha-ha.’
‘Not our Bangor, the other one.’
‘Tell me’ (Driver seat in) ‘you’re not serious.’
‘If I wasn’t serious I wouldn’t have said it.’
‘Wait! Is it Poland?’
(Cap screw one, cap screw two.)
‘The land’s right, the Po’s wrong.’
‘What other land is there around there?’
(Washers, nuts again.)
‘Gotland.’
‘What land?’
‘Got. It’s an island, smack in the middle of the Baltic Sea.’
(Tightening.)
‘Why’s it not in the World Cup, then?’
‘Because it’s still part of Sweden.’
‘That’s cheating!’
‘Cheating how? I never said anything about countries: I wanted the name of the piece of land, simple as that.’
(Car gone.)
Deep into the second month she was still able to count the cars lined up in the car park as she walked towards the gate at night. When she could no longer do it without breaking stride — somewhere around the hundred mark — she quit bothering. It would be tight all right, but they were going to do it, they were going to get the shipment out on time.
*
Randall had already decided that he was going to press the issue of his returning to the US as soon as the first shipment was delivered. From there on in it was all production. He had by now, he hoped, something to offer elsewhere in the company. He had a daughter he needed in every sense to be closer to. In comparison to which the business with Liz was a small consideration indeed. But even there the conviction was growing that things could not go on indefinitely as they had been going on. Nor could they — whatever thoughts to the contrary he had once entertained — go any further.
Sundays now getting off the train at Botanic Station he found his feet occasionally dragging: what if this week he was the one who did not show up? OK, next week then…
Across the road from the station was a broad building out of keeping with the rest of the street: flat-roofed, red-brick, metal window frames; a sign at the end nearest the station proclaiming it the home of the Belfast Arts Theatre. Maybe upstairs it was. Downstairs for almost its entire length it comprised single-window businesses: a laundromat, a bric-a-brac store in the guise of a gift centre, and, between these two, a dingy-looking record store.
Randall had peered through the security mesh a couple of times — in those feet-dragging minutes after disembarking, or again on his return to the station with minutes still in hand before the next train — and had been intrigued to see among the album covers beginning to fade behind the glass a fair number of jazz artists.
On the one occasion that he had found himself, by chance, on the street during the hours of business, however, there had been a crowd of school kids — schoolboys — around the door, blazer lapels basically backdrops for their button badges and safety-pin collections, and he convinced himself he was in too much of a hurry anyway.
Then the sole on his right shoe started to go. ‘American?’ said the man in the Heel and Key Bar in Dunmurry to whom he showed it first. ‘We don’t get a big lot of these in here. Don’t get a big lot of shoes at all, tell you the truth. It’s mostly the keys. I don’t know what people do with them.’ He picked up the cigarette from the ashtray next to the cash register, squinted and blew a thin jet of smoke at the sole. Wisps of it came out through the eyelets. ‘Here.’ With the world’s smallest pen he wrote an address on the back of a docket. ‘You’d be better off taking them into Belfast, get them done right.’
It was a fortnight before Randall found the time. A Saturday afternoon. He could only imagine what it would be like trying to find a place to park. He took the train again, carrying on through Botanic this time to Central Station, although to what exactly the windowless bunker of a building he stepped out of was central he had for several disorienting moments not the first idea. Dereliction wherever his eyes lit.
A man approached him, red hair sprouting sideways from beneath a flat cap. ‘Taxi?’
Randall nodded, fist closing tighter round the Heel and Key Bar docket. The man trotted to a black London cab parked twenty yards away. He held the rear door for Randall then, as soon as he was inside, shut it again and disappeared in among the passengers emerging, scratching their heads, from the station. A minute passed. Two. The man in the cap returned with three other lost souls and admitted them to the rear of the cab with Randall. He went round then to the driver’s side and got in, turning in his seat once he had settled himself, and speaking through the sliding window between front and back.
‘City centre, all of you?’
The four strangers — two men, two women, two grey-heads, two in the prime, one with worn shoes wrapped in a bag on his lap — looked at one another and nodded.