Gull by Glenn Patterson Page A

Randall had been joined, now that the refurbishment was complete, by Chuck Bennington. ‘Think of me as the son that never moved out,’ Randall said, although Chuck was a largely absent parent, with a schedule that could not have been more punishing if it had been handed down by a court of law.
    Besides the private access road, the contractors were laying a new road to one of the two entrances they were building into the factory: the first to the south-east for workers who would be coming from the Seymour Hill direction; and the second – to be served by the new road – pretty much due west for those arriving from Twinbrook. Except no one was buying the convenience story (the gates were no more than a couple of hundred yards apart), although to be honest no one was trying very hard to sell it either. The Protestant and Catholic gates was what they were.
    ‘It is the only way you are going to get both tribes to buy in,’ was the way Dixon Hollinshead had justified it.
    Buy in, mind you, did not look to Randall as though it was going to be a problem. The applications had started coming in the morning after that first press conference – long before there was such a thing as an application form or even a list of job descriptions. By the time the forms were ready and the recruitment ads went into the newspapers midway through the first spring they already had three or four sackfuls sitting in a corridor in the carpet factory waiting to be read.
    Then the deluge began.
    Some of the envelopes didn’t have stamps, so hasty were the senders, or so unaccustomed to sending letters of any sort. A lot of them carried no address beyond DeLorean, Belfast – or Dunmurry, as some preferred, including one would-be worker who had underlined the place name three times to ensure the letter did not go to a different DeLorean. A sizeable number of the forms inside were lacking vital information, like the contact address, the name . But even after Stylianides and his staff had weeded out those they still had twenty applications for each of the first nine hundred positions that had to be filled.
    Stylianides reckoned that you could probably have learned more from those letters than you could from a whole library of history and sociology books, although for Chuck the only pertinent fact to draw from them was that there did not exist in the whole of that country more than a few score people with the training or the experience necessary to assemble stainless steel sports cars – any kind of cars.
    ‘So, think of all the bad habits they are not going to have to unlearn,’ DeLorean told him when the matter was raised on his next visit, and Chuck’s moustache and beard closed ranks with the perpetual cigarette to keep his mouth from saying anything else.
    The interviews took the better part of two months. If you made it that far you still had less than a one in three chance of landing a job. Randall took his turn on the interview panels same as everybody else. Whatever about no bad habits, it was a struggle at times not to give in to Chuck’s misgivings.
    He lay this side of sleep some nights, playing the interviews over in his head, got up more than once to write something down before it slipped away.
    *
    Woman, 45, according to her form (mistake, had to be: tens and units transposed?)
    Stylianides: You say in your application that you used to work in a pram factory?
    Woman: Well, we called it the Pram Factory, but mostly what it did was bikes.
    Stylianides: Bikes? Right.
    Woman: And cuddly toys.
    Stylianides: Bikes and cuddly toys. And what was your own area of expertise?
    Woman: The cuddly toys.
    Stylianides: So, like...?
    Woman: Stuffing, mainly.
    Stylianides (slowly): OK.
    Woman: It all had to be done by hand, you know. It’s a lot trickier than you think.
    Stylianides: You realise that most of our upholstering will be done offsite?
    Woman (ages another five years): I didn’t realise that, no.
    Stylianides: The seats and so forth, the