‘Flat fare, two pound each,’ the driver said, and shut the window on the matter.
He set them down a quarter of a mile and a couple of turns in the road later (a couple of turns impossible to divine from the sidewalk before the station) at the back of the City Hall.
Randall and his temporary travel companions split without once having broken their silence, aware that they had been taken for a ride that could not be measured in distance alone.
Come the time to leave again, therefore, Randall opted to walk to the station he knew best and found himself at the entrance to Botanic two minutes late for one train, twenty-eight minutes early for the one after.
He looked over the road at the record store. No schoolkids today.
There was a crosswalk a little way up the street, but having by now had ample opportunity to observe the Belfast road-crossing etiquette — a hand raised in apology (or admonition) to the oncoming traffic — he decided on the more direct route and, hardly breaking stride, pushed open the shop door — halfway.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said.
A kid was hunched over a box of records on the floor behind the door. In fact, looking about (it didn’t take long), he realised there were at least as many kids inside as he had previously seen outside, only out of uniform now and twice as rowdy.
Something or other, the one behind the door was saying emphatically (neither the bump or Randall’s apology having interrupted him) was a load of balls. Randall spotted a Yes album cover in the boy’s hand. He forgot now the name of the artist, but Stafford in his unit — the memory broke surface, blinking from long submergence — Stafford had been a huge fan, painstakingly stencilling his artwork for Gun on to the back of his flak vest: all hellfire and opened-maw ghouls.
Randall was about to take back the one step he had taken inside, pull the door quietly behind him, when the man — fifties maybe — working the counter called over the top of the heads between them.
‘Something you’re looking for there?’
Randall raised the hand with which he had moments before deflected the traffic. ‘I saw the LP covers in your window.’ He tried to make it sound as though it was his fault for imagining that there would be any connection between what was on display there and what was to be found on the shelves. ‘I was kind of wondering whether you maybe had anything by Artie Shaw.’
The man’s face lit up. ‘Arthur Jacob Arshawsky! Now you’re talking.’ He came out from behind the counter — a little more hesitantly than Randall would have expected: perhaps he had misjudged his age — and taking Randall by the arm guided him to the adjacent aisle. His fingertips skimmed the top edges of the sleeves, stopping now and then as though guided by touch alone to pull out an LP. That one? On second thoughts… That? No, wait: this one.
‘Let me show you,’ he said, and turned back to the counter where he slipped the vinyl from the third sleeve, displaying it front and back beneath a lamp. ‘First pressing. See? Not a mark.’
Randall laughed awkwardly. ‘All I need to know is does it have “Nightmare”.’
‘They nearly all have “Nightmare”. Do you want to have a listen?’
He still had better than twenty minutes before his train was due. ‘All right.’
The man had already raised the lid of the turntable behind the cash register. He positioned the record on the rubber mat then bent over to place the stylus on the groove — an operation as precise as cutting the diamond the stylus had come from. He took an untipped cigarette from the box in his shirt pocket — this too appeared be part of the operation — and with a nod of his head — for that was not mere hiss they were hearing, that was the sound of the forces gathering and could not be talked over — invited Randall to join him. Randall nodded back — he would, sure — and lit up with him, two sides of the same flame.
The kids looked over their shoulders curiously at the first funereal notes from some enormous horn. A whole shipful of bad news. Trumpets came in, harsh as sirens, then a clarinet — Artie himself: the sound of one man trying to steer a course through the confusion.
Randall remembered the night sitting in the grillroom in — where was it? — Manhattan Beach — DeLorean’s hands making the shape of the clarinet, though perhaps it was something far more intangible he was trying to conjure… those stories of his childhood on Six Mile Road — parents striving to live decently, clarinet lessons and a piano in the parlour, despite the goons and the summer lay-offs — his first days at Packard and the awe he felt in the presence of the actual makers — not the machine-operators — the craftsmen, who knew, and knew that everyone from the goddamned president down knew, their proper worth.
The track ended at the same time as the cigarette. Randall’s head was whirling with the strength of the tobacco, the intensity of the music, the combination of the two. The man lifted the stylus with even more care than he had set it down.
‘Imagine someone with that much talent just walking away.’
‘Who walked away?’
‘Artie Shaw. Hasn’t played in twenty-five years. Story is he couldn’t bear the prospect of hearing his powers diminish night after night.’ He eased the vinyl back into its inner sleeve. The barest whisper of a contact. It would still have been pristine in 2001 if he never let it out of his hands.
He laid the LP flat on the counter. ‘What do you think?’
‘I’ll take it,’ said Randall.
‘Buy or borrow?’
‘Oh, listen, I couldn’t borrow it, thanks all the same.’
‘Read the sign,’ the man said and pointed, and sure enough, there it was, black on fluorescent yellow: Record Library. ‘Ten bob to join and ten bob up to three LPs a week.’
Randall already had his pocketbook out. ‘Ten bob is…?’
‘Fifty new pence.’
So Randall gave the man a hundred of them in the shape of a Bank of Ireland pound note, took the first pressing just demonstrated, another slightly more dog-eared Artie Shaw, plus a Stan Getz potluck (Groovin’ High) and crossed the road again — by the lights this time: never mind it had only cost him a pound, he had a valuable cargo under his arm — to the station.
A couple of days later, just before noon, with Don in Hethel for a meeting, he was passing his office window on his way to the filing cabinet when he noticed a large number of workers weaving between the cars in the parking lot, headed in the direction of the Twinbrook gates. His first instinct was to pick up the phone to June in the office down the hall. ‘Did I miss something? Has there been a fire drill?’
She hesitated before replying. ‘A fire drill…? No.’ There was a lot of background noise, chair legs scraping across the floor, footfalls in the corridor. He checked the window again — still men and women leaving in their scores — then put down the phone and made his way across to the assembly shop. For a moment he thought it was completely deserted, but then his eyes lit on a worker here and a worker there and somewhere else again two or three where he would have expected to see six or more, tinkering, all of them, rather than working.
Two men came round the corner from the chassis line intent on the door.
‘Can one of you tell me what is going on here?’ Randall asked, but the men only put their heads down and carried on around him. He turned. ‘I am talking to you!’
They didn’t stop, if anything speeded up. He began to jog. And then the next thing he was running, back through the shop, out the door, calling out to people who continued to ignore him. ‘You do not have permission to leave this factory in working hours… I insist that you return to your work station immediately!’