‘What’s that seat doing on the ground?’ she said.
TC nearly did himself an injury he spun round that fast. ‘Liz!’ It sounded more like a warning than a greeting.
‘Is that not the one I just finished putting in?’
The gouging sound stopped. TC had come round to place himself between her and the open car door.
‘I, ah, wasn’t happy, there was a wee problem with the, ah, what-you-me-call-it.’
Liz pushed past him. She could have knocked him right over without much difficulty. ‘Anto, what are you doing in there?’
As he was withdrawing his head from the seat well she was sticking hers in. There were metal shavings in a small heap below… she wasn’t sure at first what exactly: a candle it looked like, twists of something thorny — barbed wire? — around it.
‘What the hell is that?’
‘A hunger strike candle,’ Anto said matter-of-factly.
‘What’s it doing in our seat well?’ TC opened his mouth to say something, but the penny for Liz had already dropped. ‘Wait, are there other cars with “hunger strike candles” hidden in the seat wells too? Is that what all the “go on ahead, Liz, take ten minutes there” is about?’
‘No.’ TC finally got to speak. ‘Some of them have the candles behind the dashboard and some of them, you know, depending on the section have Celtic or Rangers or No Pope Here.’
‘Anto?’ She was conscious that she was talking to them the way she talked to her own boys, switching her gaze from one to the other in order to winkle out the truth; conscious but powerless to stop it. ‘Are you not the one who told me you had to walk out and take your place on those pickets because you never knew who was watching? And now here you are doing something that no one will ever even see?’
Anto was still sitting on the ground, hands dangling over his knees. They made a gesture, a half-hearted attempt at flight.
‘You can’t build a sports car in the middle of Belfast, in the middle of all this, and not expect it to carry some sort of a mark.’ His eyes slipped off her face. ‘I don’t think you can have any idea.’
‘About what? About anger? About people dying?’ She was slapping her thighs with those stupid fucking chocolate bars. ‘I lost a brother to one of your martyrs’ comrades. Dragged him out of his lemonade lorry just up the road here and put a bullet in his head. Put out an apology the next day saying they had mixed up his lemonade lorry with another one that delivered to army barracks.’
Anto’s eyes were locked on hers again. He had the grace to look stricken. ‘You never said.’
‘You’re right, I never did. I never did because I made a promise early on that I wasn’t going to go through life thinking of myself as a victim.’ Vivienne in contrast had resolved never to set foot in the country again. ‘Anyway,’ her anger was ebbing, turning back on her for breaking even for a moment her promise to herself, and her brother, ‘Pete wouldn’t have wanted me being bitter on his behalf. That wasn’t the type of him.’
‘But still…’ Anto was on his feet now, TC beside him.
‘Listen, Liz, we’ll not do any more of them,’ TC said and reinforced it with his thumb on his breastbone: down and across. ‘Swear to God.’
‘You can do what you like, TC, but the first car that comes through here after lunch is all mine. Now, get that seat bolted back in, and here’ — she shoved them into their hands — ‘enjoy your Curly Wurlys.’
She entertained all kinds of possibilities, trying a few of them out on paper napkins in the canteen — a lemonade bottle with her brother’s name on the label seemed particularly apt, but she doubted she would have the time or the skill under pressure to do it justice, and like she had told Anto it was a long time ago now. Six years, a thousand other deaths. She tore that napkin to shreds, and all the others she’d drawn on, and shoved them deep into the wastepaper bin.
It would have to be words. There was something to be said for No Pope Here. The form of it rather than the content. Short, to the point.
The boys (my God, she had even begun to think of them like that) had given her a wide berth while she deliberated. It was clear, on her return, that they had resolved to keep the mood light-hearted.
‘Are you ready for your first act of vandalism?’ Anto said.
‘I had a long life before I came to work here,’ she said and was surprised herself at how convincing she sounded. ‘Just keep watch.’
They stationed themselves at either end of the next car that came down the line, letting on to be searching for a spanner, inspecting the bodywork for a non-existent scratch (always the hardest to detect).
She knelt, took out the little metal file she always carried in the back of her purse, leaned in and got to work.
She had been dead right not to attempt the lemonade bottle. Christ, it was hard enough to manage a simple straight line. Aagh! Straightish.
‘Coat!’ Anto, under cover of a cough, barked the code they had agreed for manager and she nearly brained herself on the dashboard before he said in his normal voice, ‘False alarm, he’s away the other way.’
Back to work she went. Scratch, scratch, scratch.
‘Are you nearly done there?’ TC whispered.
‘Nearly.’ She was barely started, but so what, he could flipping well wait.
Another half a minute. The point of the nail file was bending with the effort of bringing a curved line back to the plane from which it had without her intending it deviated. Shit, shit, shit.
‘Would you for crying out loud come on!’ TC said and could not have sounded more strangulated if someone had indeed had their hands about his throat.
She dragged the file down the metal then started on another letter.
‘Seriously,’ Anto said from the other end, ‘you’re going to have to get out of there now.’
‘Right,’ she said, ‘right,’ and wrote four letters more. ‘OK, give me a hand getting this seat in.’
From the colour of his face as he trotted round to help, TC even looked as though he had been throttled.
‘So,’ said Anto, ‘are you going to tell us what you did?’
‘Do you really want to know? Do you really really want to know?’ Liz gave the rear nut a wrench. ‘It’ll cost you most of your year’s wages to find out.’
15
DeLorean that late summer and early autumn was consumed with the proposed stock-market flotation. Jennings had not been altogether wrong. Here was the opportunity to unburden the company almost overnight of government debt. ‘Set sail into open water,’ was a term DeLorean used more than once and Randall did actually picture the shares as so many tiny vessels corralled in a harbour, waiting for the wind to fill their sails, or the waves outside to subside a little.
DeLorean had recently completed the purchase of the Lamington Farm estate at Bedminster, New Jersey, preparatory, as Randall understood it, to selling the Pauma Valley ranch, bringing his work life and family life closer: a seventy-five minute drive at the week’s end (in so far, with a stock-market flotation imminent, the working weeks ever ended) instead of a six-hour flight.
Midway through September Humphrey Atkins was whisked away to become Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. (Centuries, it took, to perfect job titles like that.) A new secretary of state, Jim Prior, arrived and, looking, in the television reports, slightly puzzled that no one had thought of doing it before (although a look of puzzlement, Randall soon learned, ranging from slight to extreme, was habitual with him) made a point of going into the prison to talk to the prisoners refusing food. Within weeks the hunger strike was over. The six deaths that the management and the union leaders had, as an absolute maximum, been preparing for had been exceeded by four. Randall who went over it and over it in his head hundreds of times then and in the years that followed could not decide which of the parties to the dispute was the more fanatical.