Now it was Anto who sat back, slowly, though, shaking his head. (Reviewing the moment later Randall thought of a grandmaster who had drawn his opponent into the trap he had for several moves past been laying.) ‘Oh, I don’t think you want to go down that road,’ he said.
‘What road?’
‘You know rightly what road. The Protestants didn’t walk out so the Protestants keep their jobs? I’m sure the headlines that made would be as welcome back home as a cargo ship without cars: DeLorean purges Catholic Workers.’
Randall’s phone rang. He snatched at it. ‘Yes?’
A somewhat sulky June. ‘I’ve got that line to Mr DeLorean for you.’
Anto was watching him closely from across the desk.
Randall cleared his throat, of anger more than anything. ‘Put him through,’ he said and the next moment there was DeLorean, Edmunding, asking if things were all right.
Randall turned his chair round to face the window. ‘Things are just fine,’ he said and a moment later heard the door close as Anto let himself out.
‘That’s what I was hoping you were going to say,’ DeLorean said. ‘Everything depends on us making that shipment. We are drawing up plans at this end for the launch schedule.’
And he went into detail then about how field operations were to be divided, four geographical areas, Eastern, Western, Southern and Centraclass="underline" Edison New Jersey, Irvine California, Atlanta Georgia and dear old Detroit. There were to be two Quality Assurance Centres besides, at Irvine again serving all dealerships west of the Mississippi and Wilmington Delaware serving everywhere to the east.
‘And these Quality Assurance Centres would be…?’ Randall had until mention of them been regaining a little of the confidence that had been haemorrhaging over the previous two or three hours.
‘To be sure, to be sure. Isn’t that what they say there? Besides, the cars will have been at sea for a few days. We’ll put them through their paces one more time before we deliver them to the dealers. Means all you have to do there is concentrate on the numbers.’
Randall did not really take in a lot of what came after that — the text of the letter that was to go into the owner’s pack along with the Scotch-Brite pads and the stainless-steel shampoo, praising the faith — make that the courage (maybe he wasn’t talking to Randall at all, maybe he was dictating) — the courage manifest in purchasing a revolutionary new product such as the DMC-12… It was the numbers he kept coming back to: all else for now was of secondary importance to getting the numbers out.
That did not sit well with Don — for you can believe that there were many calls to his line too in the days that followed — nor would Randall have expected it to. Still, there was a date, there would be a ship leaving with space in the hold for three hundred cars. What else was there to say?
Randall was scarcely in his office at all the rest of that month, but toured the shop floors, the stores, the holding tanks for the resin, chivvying, encouraging, asking questions, on the spot or on the phone: those pallets arriving at the dock levellers — stacking up at the dock levellers — was there any way of speeding up the inspection? Yes, this was Mr Randall, yes he was ringing — for the fourth time now — to enquire about the automated fettling tool… Where in God’s name was it?
He was not above donning coveralls and pitching in, starting in that fettling room where, in the continued absence of the damned tool, they needed all the help they could get. (And needed too more than just a set of coveralls: they needed hoods, a personal air supply.) God it was grim: every particle of excess fibreglass — ‘flash’ — to be removed by hand, and to hang, most of it, in the air, before the bodies were fit to leave the body-press shop. He helped cut the mats for the moulds (another process that had not yet been automated), he stripped the plastic coverings from the panels as they were being stacked on their racks (a process he doubted ever would be), he took a blowtorch to dents, sandpaper to scratches; once, while one of the men who usually did it was at the restroom, he had a go at centring the first — and crucial — roof panel to see if it could be done faster. It took the man on his return ten minutes to repair what he had done.
He did everything but switch out the lights at night.
At the end of each day he dragged himself back to Warren House and stretched out on a sofa positioned between a pair of tall, narrow speaker cabinets, listening, eyes closed in concentration, to whatever records he had that week borrowed from (or — as most often was the case — had not had time to return to) the record library. More than once it was the hum of the speakers that woke him — shivering, disoriented — hours after they had last emitted a pre-recorded note.
And so March passed. Two more prisoners — a soldier-killer and a guy caught on a street with a hand grenade — joined Sands on hunger strike. The lots continued to fill with cars.
11
April nineteenth, Easter Day, crept in through a damp mist that lingered into the morning and low to the ground with the curious effect that when the sun did at last appear the maisonettes looked like skyscrapers, breaking through the clouds, the hills beyond them virtual Himalayas.
The rigs had been travelling back and forth since nine o’clock the night before, but there were still, twelve hours on, scores of cars waiting to be transported to the docks.
Even though it was a Sunday — even though it was Easter — there were also, by nine a.m., scores, possibly hundreds of workers gathered. Unlike previous red-letter days theirs, today, were the only cameras in evidence. They snapped away as the cars were loaded, posing their workmates by the tailgates then passing the camera to someone else whose place in the group they took, arms folded, grinning. As each fully laden rig headed towards the exit some of them ran alongside, taking more pictures. Others stood and cried. Randall, once or twice, had to widen his own eyes to keep them from filling up. (It was, despite the sun, a watery kind of morning.) Refocusing after one such moment he saw Anto break away from a group of half a dozen women and men and walk towards him, eyebrows knitted.
His heart sank.
‘A word?’ Anto said.
‘What is it?’
‘A few of us have been talking.’ This with a jerk of the head back the way he had come. Randall couldn’t be doing with the theatrics.
‘And?’ he said shortly.
‘And we’re not happy.’
‘Well there’s a surprise.’
‘Some of the cars have been parked out here so long they’re filthy.’
Randall looked long and hard. The man was right. How many times had he stood at his window watching the clouds tumble over the brow of the hills, bringing the next weather front? Whatever soot and dirt they had picked up on their race across country to get there this lot took the full force of it.
‘We were thinking maybe we would go down to the docks later on before they were put on the ships, give them a bit of a wash.’
Randall turned to face him, struggling for words.
‘It’s all right,’ Anto said to him, ‘we’re not going to be looking for overtime for it… Just this once.’
*
Liz watched from a distance. Anto had told her what he and the others were planning on doing. ‘Can’t have those Americans thinking we’re all a load of dirt birds.’
‘I’d love to help,’ she said, ‘but we’re having people over later.’
‘I know: Easter.’
‘Have you no plans yourself?’
‘Me?’ His voice went up as though the very thought of it was absurd. ‘No.’
It occurred to her that she didn’t know a single thing worth the knowing about his life outside the factory, other than that he was wearing out his library card. (The Jungle was his latest book. Something told her there were no talking animals in it.) Not that he could have known a big lot about her life, having never bothered his head to ask.