When the last of the lorries with the cars on them had gone she raced home and got the roast on — silverside — with onions cooked in the juices until they were practically caramelised. Robert’s mother and father came, along with his unmarried brother Hal-God-Love-Him (it was said so often it sounded like part of his name: there was something not quite right with Hal… God love him) and an aunt of Liz’s who had just lost her husband of forty-seven years. Everyone commented on the television. Robert showed them how you used the remote control, ran through a random Ceefax selection: TV listings, share prices, a recipe for hollandaise, the weather in Kuala Lumpur.
Didn’t say a word about how they had come by the set, which suited Liz fine: it had been fully incorporated into the household — it and the job that had put the money in her purse to give to Gilmore’s.
When the last guest had gone — the aunt, reluctantly… sure, what was there for her at home now? — and the boys had disappeared up to their room with what remained of their eggs (what age were you supposed to stop buying them?), Robert switched the TV on again to the big film: Murder on the Orient Express.
About twenty minutes in he turned to her.
‘Was it those onions?’
‘Was what those onions?’
‘You’re squirming in your seat there like I don’t know what. I thought maybe you had a touch of indigestion.’
She blushed. What it was, she realised, she had been miles away, down at the docks with Anto and the rest, washing cars. She tried to focus on the film. Richard Widmark was showing Albert Finney the small silver gun he slept with under his pillow. His life had been threatened, he said: his secretary could show Finney two letters he had on file.
‘It’s nothing,’ Liz said.
Robert looked at her looking at the film a moment longer. ‘Well I’d hate to see you if it was something.’
*
Randall stood in a canopy of sodium light watching, heart in mouth, as the crew gathered in the ropes and the ship gradually detached itself from the dockside. The cargo doors did not burst open as he had feared, in some grotesque Easter parody, they might. The cars remained, gleaming, in the hold.
The channel was broad and straight from the port into Belfast Lough and the open sea beyond. On the far side of the water from him was the shipyard. Those two enormous yellow cranes, stamped with H & W, Harland and Wolff — gateways they looked like, triumphal arches: Forget the City Hall, forget the factory chimneys and the parades of shops, this is where the real power resides.
Resided.
How many decades had it taken for shipbuilding to be established here, DeLorean had asked him, for Belfast to be able to claim this as the biggest, most productive yard in the world?
Exactly.
Little more than two and a half years it had taken to get these cars out. Not eighteen months, sure, but even so, two and a half years where no cars had ever been made before.
Don Lander came and joined him in the light, watched a while in silence. ‘Of course,’ he said at last, ‘the best thing that could happen is for that boat to sink halfway across, assuming the crew got picked up, of course. That way we’d get to say we got the cars out on time and no one would ever know at what cost.’
Randall glanced at him. Don was looking dead ahead, inscrutable.
*
The word Liz heard was ‘dogs’. Washers — as he had been known since he saved the day, with the world’s press waiting, by calling for a bucket of them — carried the word with him from the trim line where he had heard it spoken — spat — by his Big Mate, who had got it straight from a fella he knew on the boat. The only difference being, said the Yanks who had been tasked with unloading them on to the docks, actual dogs in that kind of shape would have been put down. Instead these dogs of cars were being sent straight to a Quality Assurance Centre to be taken apart and put back together at two thousand dollars a pop.
‘Cheeky gets,’ TC said.
‘Come on, you’re the one wants to be a supervisor,’ said Anto. ‘Don’t tell me it wasn’t obvious to you.’
‘Well, maybe the odd one was a bit iffy, but the whole lot…? Cheeky fucking gets.’
Washers’ Big Mate on the trim line also brought the word that the management was going to be looking for volunteers to go over to the States and find out how to do it the American way.
‘There you go, TC,’ Liz chipped in. ‘Stick your name down and tell them when you get there that the next lot of cars will be better, and the next lot after that. And see by next year, they’ll be sending people from there over to us to find out how we do it.’
TC sucked saliva through his teeth. ‘I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.’
‘Not even for a wee holiday?’ Washers said and anticipated his next sentence with an expansive hand gesture. ‘Broaden your horizons, sort of thing?’
‘I’ve been there once already,’ TC said, mainly to his toolbag: lug wrench again. ‘Got sent when I was at school with this kid from the other side, you know, see if we could stop fighting.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘Pittsburgh. What a hole. The only thing we had in common, him and me, was that we couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of it and back home.’
‘I nearly moved there once myself,’ Anto said.
Lord, thought Liz, they were coming like buses now, the revelations.
‘Pittsburgh?’
‘Schenectady, upstate New York. Had a job all lined up.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I don’t even remember now, cement factory or something. Tell you the truth I couldn’t have cared less about the job, even then, it was the name I loved.’ He got full value out of it: ‘Sche-nec-ta-dy.’
‘So why didn’t you go?’ Liz asked.
‘The usual reason, I met a girl…’
‘Don’t sound so miserable about it.’
‘…the girl met somebody else…’
‘Ah.’
‘…by which time things had kicked off here and the notion went off me.’
‘Some would say that things kicking off here was all the more reason for going.’
‘Yeah, but it would have looked like I was running away.’
‘And you wouldn’t want to look like you were running away, even if it killed you?’
‘What can I say?’ Anto shrugged. ‘If I had another brain it would be lonely.’
Washers cracked the knuckles of each hand in turn against the opposite palm: time he was getting back to work taming skins. He checked back. ‘What about that other fella, TC — the one you went to Pittsburgh with. You ever see him again after you got back?’
TC picked up a seat. ‘I saw him all right, a couple of years ago, in the paper. Got life for dropping a breezeblock on a fella’s head out the back of some club. Thought he was the “wrong sort”.’
He had the tact not to say what sort that was.
‘Jesus wept,’ said Washers under his breath.
‘Yeah.’ TC dumped the seat into the car, eyes averted from Liz’s. ‘Jesus wept.’
*
Johnny Carson got his car. Johnny. Carson. Got. His. Car. A week more and he had been going to tell them he would hold on now for the hearse modeclass="underline" at least he would be guaranteed one ride in it.
It broke down the very first time he took it out. Pressure regulator. The dealer had to rush a spare out to him and fix it at the side of the highway. Johnny seemed genuinely not to care, any more than the two hundred and ninety-nine people below him on the waiting list cared about, or even registered, the difference between the $12000 they had been quoted way back when and the $25000 they ended up paying. Most of them anyway would have been prepared to pay a premium for the kudos of driving one of the first three hundred to come off the boat. ‘Say, is that what I think it is…?’