‘I did thanks. I left it in the bin back there.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, you don’t, do you? And I explained it to you so carefully the last time.’
‘Oh, yes, that’s right.’ He couldn’t understand where this hostility was coming from, hers or his. ‘The man owns the wife in this country.’
‘Who owns you? At least I am somewhere that I want to be.’ She dipped her head in towards his as a door opened at the far end of the passageway. ‘And at least I am still getting great sex.’
From her smile it must have looked to the people coming their way like a brief pleasantry. Randall had no time to come back, to tell her that she was wrong on both counts: this was where he wanted to be, for now, and in fact…
In fact.
Since coming back from the States — choosing to come back — he had been dating June from the office down the hall. Not dating so much as sleeping with. Not sleeping with so much as fucking. It was the worst kind of cliché (worse by far than chaste talks in public parks), but with the hours he worked where else was he going to meet someone? Her fiancé was working on the North Sea oil rigs. She told him the first time they fucked that she had wondered how many times she was going to have to drop that into the conversation before he twigged. She showed Randall one of the videotapes she had found in her fiancé’s luggage the last time he was home: unbelievable stuff, unwatchable, nearly. ‘That’s all they do out there when they’re not working, it’s a wonder there isn’t a giant geyser of come…’ Please, he had said: enough, which thrilled her almost as much as the film to judge by what she did next with his hand. ‘People look at me and think butter wouldn’t melt, but we all do it and we all do it to get to the same place’ — she provided the sound effects. ‘The only thing that’s different is what we do to get there.’
He was sure she was right. He just didn’t think he had ever met anyone as dedicated to getting there as she was.
And when she made it…
*
Pandemonium. Absolute pande-fucking-monium. Anto said, no kidding, it reminded him of August ’69, the streets full of people running here there and everywhere, not a clue any of them whether they were running into trouble or away from it. He said he had heard one fella asking another fella if he knew where the experimental workshop was and the fella said sorry, mate, I’m only new, you’d need to ask a supervisor that, and the first fella said to him I am a supervisor.
‘Are you telling me there are people coming straight in as supervisors?’ asked TC, whose own ambitions in that direction remained unfulfilled. ‘How can that be right?’
‘Maybe they have more City and Guilds than you.’
‘Cunny funt.’
‘Cleaner mouths,’ said Liz.
The Honorary POGs walked around shaking their heads. ‘Wait till they see over there the state of the cars this lot are going to turn out.’
*
At the end of the first week of the expanded workforce one person in every three received an empty pay packet: system overload. One person in every three on the dayshift dropped what he or she was doing and marched on the administration block. Word of their coming and the reason for it had gone ahead of them — actually one in three of the people in the administration block were marching out to join them (You too, June? You too?) — and Randall responded by setting up a table in their path and installing Gardiner from wages behind it, pen in one hand, chequebook in the other.
You could nearly hear the brakes being applied as the crowd wheeled round the corner and saw him.
‘The bad news is the computer’s brain wasn’t big enough to cope with all the extra names,’ Randall said into the temporary silence. ‘The good news is Mr Gardiner here has a bigger brain than any computer outside the Space Programme, not to mention a good old-fashioned ballpoint pen.’ Gardiner showed them it. ‘So, if you could bear with us and form an orderly line…’
Which was the signal for a renewed free-for-all.
‘It’s OK! It’s OK! He has a spare pen in his jacket pocket, he’s not going to run out of ink — or money.’
It was like a scene from It’s a Wonderful Life — order was miraculously restored, and the ink didn’t run out, neither did the money, and — five, four, three, two, one — they reached the end of the working day, the first shift of it anyway, with everyone more or less content.
One of the other consequences of the doubling of the workforce was, it stood to reason (one nine-hundred-strong cross-section of the population — any population — being, morally speaking, the same as another), a doubling of the instances of petty larceny.
Bill Haddad showed up in Randall’s office one morning fit to be tied. He had taken a cab the night before — black, of course, it being next to impossible to find anything more regulated — and the radio in the dash — he recognised it straight away — it was one of theirs.
Randall suggested it might just have been very like one of theirs.
Not very like, Haddad insisted: the exact radio, a Craig. Who else used Craigs here? Anyway, he had just been down to the stores to double-check: absolutely no doubt. He jabbed Randall’s desk with his middle finger. ‘We are going to have to put extra people on the gates, introduce random searches.’
‘Slow down, slow down,’ Randall said. ‘I share your concern, obviously, but this isn’t a prison, it’s a factory. Things go missing now and again.’
He was thinking of the tale he had heard — one cigarette in length — down at the Conway’s security hut, about the man who left the shipyard every evening with a jacket draped suspiciously over his wheelbarrow, and every evening this one foreman would pull him over and look under the jacket and find nothing. Only when the pair had retired and met on the street did the labourer put the foreman out of his misery by telling him what he had been pilfering all those years: wheelbarrows.
Haddad’s finger was still pressing down on his desk. He didn’t look as though he was in the mood for stories.
‘John doesn’t hold with searches,’ Randall said simply.
‘Why does that not surprise me?’ said Haddad, then changing tack, ‘Have you any idea what those radios are worth?’
‘I know what every single thing in this factory is worth, and I know what our workers are worth too, and it’s more than a toolkit or a couple of pairs of coveralls, or even a Craig radio.’
‘That’s a very fine sentiment, I’m sure,’ said Haddad and leaning all his weight on that single finger pushed himself upright, ‘but you forget that until we start to turn an actual profit the money that paid for those things isn’t John’s and it sure as hell isn’t yours.’
It was bad enough having to take one lecture from Haddad, but to have to take another, just a few days later and this time have to admit that he had a point…
There had been a spate of bomb scares, middle of the night: middle of the night shift.
Three times in as many weeks Randall had been woken by a phone call telling him to get down to the plant double-quick. (On the second of these occasions he had been surprised to see Liz among the workers standing at the assembly point, though with the threat of an explosive device in the building this surprise was — unsurprisingly — short-lived.) It was the police who pointed out after the third alert had been declared a hoax that all three calls had been made not just on the same day of the week — Wednesday — but at the same time of night, exactly a quarter after two. A couple of days later they confirmed what had begun to seem obvious: that all three calls had been made from inside the assembly shop, from one particular phone, near the Engine and Gearbox Storage area, whose calls — and the list of them was staggering: Australia and everywhere — for some reason did not appear to be going through the plant’s own operator system. With the cops to back him Haddad was not about to be dissuaded. Never mind the bad press if the story was to get out, this was effectively sabotage, this hurt everybody: they would have to mount a stakeout.