He spied Stylianides at his office window and followed the direction of his gaze. Placards were being waved outside the gates — the same placards that were waved as the car carrying the DeLoreans sped through — Victory to the Prisoners, Support the 5 Demands — except there was something almost jaunty in the motion today, the workers as they exited being greeted with clapping and cheering. The loudhailer was there again too, although the voice that came from it on this occasion evidently belonged to someone (Randall from that distance, with that distortion, could not have said who) from within the workforce.
‘Volunteer Bobby Sands refused food yesterday morning in his cell in H2 of Long Kesh. We, the workers of the DeLorean Motor Company Limited, wish to express our solidarity with him and with all the brave men and women willing to sacrifice themselves for political status in the British concentration camps here.’
Randall had heard enough. It was only with an effort that he kept his whole body from shaking as he marched back to his office. He met Stylianides at the head of the stairs.
‘We need to get the name of every woman and man who walked out of that gate,’ he said, pointing back the way he had come.
Stylianides shrugged. ‘Sure, but maybe to save time we could collect the names of the ones who didn’t.’
*
It had to have been prearranged. Liz did not hear an actual command, but all at once, from all corners of the factory, there was a sound, beyond the simple downing of tools, of labour being definitively withdrawn.
Liz glanced over her shoulder, back up the line, and when she turned around again Anto and TC were walking too.
‘Here!’ she said, as in ‘Come back… now.’
Anto held up his hand — I hear you, but I’m not going to heed you — kept walking, on up past the Tellus terminal, left, out of sight.
She looked about her and registered it almost at once, the ones left standing — standing like her, like spare parts — they all came in through the Seymour Hill gate. She knew then right away. Robert had said to her this morning that there would be bother, just wait and see, but there had been a hunger strike at the tail end of last year and things had carried on in the factory as normal. To be honest Liz had hardly paid it any attention at all. There had been a couple of awful incidents in England a few years ago — they didn’t stand for any nonsense there, Robert said — hunger strikers choking while being force-fed — but in her experience these things usually petered out, as that last hunger strike did in… Do you know, she couldn’t even have told you when exactly.
The protests, right enough, had not let up — she had seen that first-hand — and the priests and what have you that were always in and out of the prison had been saying every opportunity they got that next time they worried it would be ‘for real’, but she had thought that was just the prisoners upping the ante, hunger-striking at one remove.
But now here it was again. For real.
The word soon filtered down through those that remained that Randall been ranting and raving out the front of the assembly shop. She blushed to hear it, for him, in part, for making a show of himself, but more than anything for her and this whole grotesque spectacle that passed for politics here.
The heat had not entirely left her face when half an hour after they walked out Anto, TC and all the rest walked back in, picked up their tools again and re-engaged their labour.
Liz leaned into the car that she had for the last thirty minutes been left to deal with on her own.
‘Do you want a hand there?’ Anto asked.
‘I’m fine.’
And wouldn’t you know, it was one of those: the bloody seat wouldn’t line up right. She hit the track a whack with the heel of her spanner.
‘Are you sure?’
‘I said’ — another whack — ‘I’m fine.’
TC was crouching down on the other side of the car, rattling around in his tool bag. ‘Anybody see my lug wrench?’ He tossed everything-but-the-lug-wrench about noisily. ‘Why is it always the lug wrench you can’t find?’
Anto interposed himself in the aperture between TC and Liz, resting his arm across the doorframe, sealing their conversation in.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘What could possibly be wrong?’ She didn’t trust herself to look at him, but it was impossible in such close confines not to see anyway his head drop forward an instant then snap back up again.
‘Wait till I tell you,’ he said, quieter. ‘It’s all very well these Yanks coming off with stuff about us being a country apart in here, but there are people in this factory who would take note if anyone who came in through our gate didn’t go out it in support of the prisoners. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
She shoved the seat with her shoulder: that would have to do. EVP could sort it out.
Only then did she meet his eye. ‘Nice speech,’ she said, ‘but maybe I am not the one you need to be trying to convince.’
*
Stylianides had obliged Randall with the personnel files and payroll lists and then had withdrawn, pleading a plane to catch for a meeting previously postponed — on two occasions — with Bennington in Coventry.
Randall, surrounded by pages with photographs clipped to the top corners, by folders containing more pages, boxes containing more folders, was coming to the realisation that he had not the faintest notion where to start, which was enough to cause his cooling anger to boil again.
He picked up the phone and at once set it back on the cradle and, standing up (his chair nearly toppled with the suddenness of it), walked down the hall. June was sitting side-on to her desk chatting to Sandra.
‘Haven’t you got that line for me yet?’
She faced front again. ‘I’m sorry: Monday, everything’s busy.’
‘Except in here obviously.’
He slapped the wall on his way out and swinging back into his own office nearly collided with the union guy, Hughes — Anthony, only it wasn’t Anthony he called himself, not Tony either…
‘This really isn’t a good time,’ Randall told him. (Anto, that was it.)
‘I know it isn’t, that was what I wanted to talk about.’
Randall gestured to a chair, trusting that that casual flick of his wrist set the tone for the proceedings: this was not a discussion, this was an audience granted under sufferance.
Anto considered a moment before sitting. ‘I just think it would be a grave error to overreact,’ he said then.
‘This would be to over fifty per cent of the workforce staging an unauthorised walkout in the middle of the day?’ Randall threw himself back theatrically, for the second time in a matter of minutes almost causing his seat to topple. It only added to the effect.
‘For half an hour,’ Anto said. ‘They’re all back now.’
Randall came forward again, elbows on the desk. ‘Yes, but for half an hour they were out, five hundred of them, that is at least two-hundred and fifty man-hours lost, that is cars lost, seven weeks before we are due to send out our first shipment to the US, and over what? The radio is saying this guy Sands is in prison for blowing up a furniture store, for Christ sakes — destroying jobs.
‘I know, but that “guy” Sands also happens to be from around this way. He’s a neighbour of a lot of the people building your cars. He’s not Sands to them, he’s Bobby. Bobby who persuaded the black taxis to put on a route out to Twinbrook because there was next to no public transport.’
‘Which wouldn’t have anything to do with the IRA’s habit of burning every bus its members can lay their hands on.’
‘Look, you have to understand what a hunger strike means to people here.’
‘Some people here: there were quite a few who didn’t follow you out the gates.’