The fifteen hundredth car passed almost without comment. When it came through their section in fact Liz was on a comfort break. It was one of the Americanisms that she and Anto and TC had readily adopted, not to save them the embarrassment of admitting they sat on, or stood before, porcelain, voiding their bodies of waste, but because it better conveyed the amplitude of the ‘timeout’, incorporating as it often did a dander round the factory harvesting news and what passed in there for jokes (sample: what do you call a female chipmunk? A chipnun), a stop-off at the vending machines behind the chassis line, now and again a fag. (Liz’s official line — to herself — was that she didn’t smoke. Neither did the other two really. All the same every couple of weeks some one of the three of them would turn up with a box of ten, like they might with a box of Jaffa Cakes or a bag of Wine Gums: a wee change.) There were times when she didn’t even have to ask, when Anto and TC would look at her and seem to read the thought before it was fully formed in her mind.
‘Comfort break?’
‘Do you know, now that you mention it… But don’t one of you…?’
‘Nah, listen, go on ahead.’
‘Aye, do.’
‘All right then, I will.’
That was the sort they were. That was the sort the factory was: a happy worker was a productive worker, even if she wasn’t productive every last minute of the working day.
*
Randall wired the photo of the two-thousandth car off the line to New York. The workers had posed it themselves, out in the parking lot, cramming as many people as they could fit into the frame. Some of the ones higher up Randall had no idea what was supporting them unless it was sheer elation.
He received a call in the middle of that same afternoon.
‘Congratulations! I have the picture right here. Now there’s a sight to brighten a fellow’s morning.’
It sounded as though he was on speakerphone, at the limit almost of the device’s range. Randall had witnessed it many times, the way he conducted conversations, moving about the office, signing papers, reading unrelated files, communicating with Carole, Maur, Nesseth, Randall himself on occasion, by hand gesture or scribbled note or simply by holding down the secrecy button for tens of seconds at a time and talking over (or was that under?) whoever was talking to him.
He had carried on one very detailed set of negotiations with the Puerto Ricans while having his hair cut and his ears and nostrils trimmed.
‘When I am in New York I live in this office. How else am I going to find the time?’
‘I have been thinking, though,’ he said now, from over by the window maybe, eye to the lens of his telescope, ‘this is the moment we really need to push on.’
‘I don’t see how.’ Randall’s own view was of ranks of cars, serried rooftops, a renegade Irish flag among the television aerials, a rubble chute in the distant quarry. ‘Unless…’
‘We bring on a night shift? My thoughts exactly: double the workforce at a stroke and raise production to eighty cars a day.’
It had always been the intention, of course, but still the suddenness of the proposal caught Randall on the hop.
‘What does Don think?’
‘I’ll let you know when I’ve spoken to him.’
‘I told him we would need at least eight weeks to train up the new intake,’ Don said later. (DeLorean had not rung back. From the way he was talking it was pretty clear Don did not know that DeLorean had phoned Randall at all.) ‘He told me to “stop being so Canadian”. They could learn on the job. “Hell, Don,” he said,’ — the accent was borderline at best — ‘“you have built two thousand cars with the people you have there already — let them take care of the training. We have the orders, we just need the cars to fulfil them.”’
Early the following week Randall looked up from his desk to find Jennings standing in the doorway.
‘Don’t look so happy to see me,’ the older man said.
Randall opened his hands. ‘What can I say? You are just occasionally the bearer of some very bad tidings.’
‘Actually’ — sitting — ‘I was rather hoping that you might have some tidings for me.’
‘About the night shift?’
‘About the stock market flotation.’
There was no use pretending when his expression had so clearly declared that he knew nothing whatever about it. Jennings, though, did pretend that he had not noticed Randall’s surprise. He flicked at a speck of something on his lap. ‘I am assuming there is a connection between the two,’ he said. ‘Entirely logicaclass="underline" the higher the output the greater the share value the faster the loans are repaid.’
‘I can only speak to the production side,’ said Randall. ‘The dealers want more cars than we have been able to supply them with up to now.’
‘Of course, I forgot, you were over there not so long ago. I suppose’ — that speck on his lap again — ‘you must have seen quite a few on the roads.’
Randall pulled open a drawer and found a roll of Scotch tape. He pushed it across the desk. ‘For your trousers,’ he said in answer to Jennings’s quizzical look. ‘Wrap it around your hand sticky side out: it works like a clothes brush. And for your further information most of the dealers hadn’t even had their first deliveries when I was there. Not much chance me seeing too many cars. It’s a big place, the USA.’
Jennings frowned. Randall almost felt sorry for him. It couldn’t be fun having your lance blunted like that. Jennings picked at the ragged edge of the tape with his thumbnail.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the compensation claim… You will be pleased to know we are offering to buy a new Portakabin and to cover the cost of transportation and installation. We expect to have change out of four hundred thousand pounds.’
He bowled the tape across the desktop with the flat of his hand. Randall moved to his right to catch it, but the roll hit a pencil and flew instead past his left elbow.
‘Unlucky,’ Jennings said. ‘It looked like you had that covered.’
The moment he was gone Randall was up and doing. So they were floating on the stock market. That had always been a part of the plan too. The timing had changed, was all. As Jennings had just unwittingly proved, or proved in a way he had not intended, it was all about how you reacted to sudden changes in circumstances. Whatever was required of them at this end they must be prepared to carry out, and fast, starting with the doubling of the workforce.
It made no sense to put all the new starts on the nightshift, otherwise who would there be to provide the on-the-job training? Stylianides sent a letter round those veterans of the first two thousand cars offering them the chance to volunteer. Volunteers for permanent nights were offered the further inducement of dinner — date to be arranged — with Mr DeLorean himself. Dates to be arranged, it was going to have to be, so many at once signed up.
Randall ran into Liz the morning after the letters went out, the first time in going on two months he had seen her face to face. An empty passageway. (There were, even before the new starts were drafted in, a thousand people working in the place, no passageway was ever empty.) They both checked their stride then both realised they had no option but to carry on. She tucked her chin into her chest as they drew level.
‘Liz,’ he said.
‘Oh, hello.’ As if the act of tucking in her chin had wiped her memory of having seen him two seconds before.
‘I just wondered if you had got your letter.’