‘Didn’t I tell you they would have to make me a supervisor?’ he said and smiled. ‘Your overalls clean?’
She couldn’t find the notepad that lived, or was supposed to live, in the door below the drainer. She turned over the bridal shop ad on the table and wrote in the margin. ‘Away back to work. Home at normal time.’
*
She had thought she understood it, sitting at home this last lot of weeks, but it was only walking into the assembly shop again now that she was hit by the full knowledge of how much of her was bound up in this factory. She felt in that moment as though she had returned from exile.
And like a returned exile all she could do for the first however many minutes was try to take it all in, looking, touching, adjusting the memory to the reality.
‘I honest to God never thought I would see the inside of this place again.’
‘Well take a good look,’ said Anto, ‘because after today it’s going to be another week before you see it again.’
He was a union man, Anto, he would not have thanked her for saying it, but it would have been all the same to her, to be honest, if they had her told she was only going to be working a one-day month.
18
The snow was long gone. The sales had not recovered. Barely two hundred coast to coast for the month of March, which, compared to the figures for April, was a veritable bonanza. A deal with Bank of America fell through, a deal with Budget-Rent-A-Car — or Blow-the-Budget-Rent-A-Car as it would have had to be rebranded — fell through. At the end of May, with DeLorean having got no closer than he was at the turn of the year to raising the money needed to restart production, Cork’s patience ran out. The gates of the factory were symbolically closed and three-quarters of the remaining employees were let go. To the couple of hundred who were kept on would fall the task of putting together — by hand if necessary — the various parts still about the factory, whose resale value in their unassembled state was virtually nil, and of keeping the larger tools maintained in the event that some rescue plan might, even now, be devised before the new final-final deadline of seven o’clock (it was persuasively precise) on the evening of 19 October.
They were kept company in the canteen by a couple of hundred of their former workmates who had decided to (symbolically) climb over the closed gates and stage a sit-in.
Cork had informed the management in advance, of course, about the need for a second round of redundancies, and the symbolism of the gates. ‘As of tomorrow DeLorean Motor Cars Limited is in a state of cryogenic suspension, a mere flick of a switch away from complete extinction. We cannot illustrate that graphically enough.’
Randall did not know when he had felt so low. His life the previous few weeks had been — to use a phrase he had picked up in the plant — completely up the left. He ate — when he remembered to eat — sitting at his desk. ‘Chips’ figured prominently, though half the time he could not have told you five minutes after he had finished what he had put in his mouth. That night, before the redundancies were announced, he made a supper for himself in Warren House of the only things he could find in the icebox: a jar of pickle, a pumpernickel loaf he had been astonished to discover in a store in Lisburn (how many weeks ago was that?) and a bottle of duty-free black-label vodka.
He addressed himself to them in unequal proportion.
Some time around ten he collapsed sideways on the sofa. He woke at three in the morning with — Oh, God — barely enough time to reach the kitchen sink before he threw up. He was sick then, off and on, for the next twenty-four hours. In between times he lay under the bedcovers and shivered. At some point he had a something-more-than-dream: he was in an elevator travelling up and up and up — the numbers above the door made no sense — and then suddenly he was out and he knew for certain this was the forty-third floor, knew it even though he all he could see was bare walls, bare floors, glass and empty sky beyond. He ran from room to room: nothing, nothing, nothing, was or ever had been…
His legs went from under him.
He was on the carpet in the sitting room of Warren House, the bed sheet he had tripped himself up with still tangled round his lower right leg. The vodka bottle was on its side under a low table next to his head. He straightened it up and was surprised to discover it was only a little less than two-thirds full. For the first time it occurred to him that whatever was ailing him did not emanate entirely from that source. Only then was he able to rise above his shame and phone a doctor whose first question — he was sorry to have to ask it — was had he been drinking — not that much and not for the best part of a day now — and whose second was had he been eating — a bit of stale bread, pickles…
The doctor came in person at first light, smelling heavily of pipe smoke, which was to say the least unhelpful. Randall could barely turn his face towards him. He nodded or shook his head weakly to a whole raft of new questions — about work, in the main, but home-life too, who, if anyone, was around to look after him — while the doctor conducted his examination, paying particular attention to the neck, the throat, the underarms and the abdomen.
He put away his stethoscope and took out his pipe, which he began idly to fill. ‘The vomiting needless to say will have drained you and the drinking on an empty stomach was, as any teenager could tell you, asking for trouble.’ (Randall was going to bring up the pickles and the bread then swallowed hard against the thought of bringing them up.) The doctor returned the pipe to his pocket unlit. ‘But I am satisfied there is something else there. Your system, frankly, is in a bit of a mess. You need time away from work.’
Randall found the strength to laugh.
‘I mean right away from everything connected to it. I would be happy to write you a line for a week, a fortnight, however long you think you need. You are no earthly use to anyone like this.’
He left time for his words to sink in.
‘A week, then,’ Randall said at last.
The doctor nodded: that was more like it. He put on a pair of half-moon glasses to write, head tilting back a little more the further he got down the page. ‘Here’ — tearing off the page — ‘I made it for two just in case. If you decide to go back before then they will all think you are a hero.’
In the doorway he turned and looked about the room. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, it’s a lovely house and everything, but if you had somewhere else you could be, other people around you, just till you’re on your feet again…’ His expression as he spoke gradually changed: this was as pointless, he had obviously concluded, as recommending a longer sick-line. He drew in breath. ‘I’ll see myself out.’
Randall fell asleep again almost at once, and almost at once was back on the empty forty-third floor, returning there at intervals throughout another fretful night. The following morning he felt well enough to make tea in a mug, which he drank, black of necessity, with three spoonfuls of sugar. By midday he was showered and dressed. Three hours later he was at the airport.
*
The first person he met as he came out of the elevator was Maur Dubin, fur-coated in defiance of the season, and immediately behind Maur a phalanx of uniformly young, uniformly six-foot-plus removal men, toting paintings, pieces of sculpture, sealed cardboard cartons. More cartons lay open on the secretaries’ desks, on the floor all around them; the lobby walls were stripped bare.
It was as though he walked into the movie of his life the scene before the one he had been dreaming. He took a step back, but already the elevator was closing behind him.
‘Hey, there!’ Maur clicked his fingers, to summon the name, it seemed, as much as attract attention. ‘Randall! Hold that door!’