Free Gull by Glenn Patterson Page B

House’? Surely not. Too neat, though she had loved it then: ‘Now everything is easy ’cause of you and our la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la...’
    He actually shook his head to wipe the picture.
    At a table at the top of the room a woman was sitting alone, wearing the same corsage as the bride’s father, but younger than him by a good twenty years, and beautiful. She caught Randall’s eye, held it a moment. His hand started up in a wave but before it had arrived she had set her mouth and looked away. Sorry, buster, no second chances.

6
    The warren from which the name derived faced his new home across a steep-sided valley, the shallow Derriaghy River making its unhurried way across the bottom. Randall quickly realised that this was the hill where he had seen the teenage boys passing the bottles between them on the day he arrived in Belfast. Most weekend mornings and a fair few mornings in between he awoke to the sight of their debris – theirs or their fellow enthusiasts – the green glass, the empty tins, bent in the middle – and once saw a rabbit, as though remotely conjured, appear out of a striped plastic bag into which it had apparently crawled in hopes of grass greener than that which lay all around it.
    On another side of the house work had already begun to clear the ground for a new private road giving direct access to the factory site, in contravention, no doubt, of all Brethren strictures about raising any one man above another, though not – Randall had sought reassurance from Jennings on the point – of the terms of the British government’s grants. ‘I suppose if it improves efficiency...’
    ‘And security,’ said Randall, who could not help but see the lane up from the main road through DeLorean’s eyes, although he had once or twice on his own account wished as he turned on to it that he had about him the lump hammer from the Conway’s security hut.
    He had been in the house little more than a fortnight when the Labour Prime Minister, Callaghan, lost a vote of confidence in the British Houses of Parliament and was forced to call an election for the start of May.
    Several times during the campaign Randall, remembering Jennings’s warning, voiced his concerns to DeLorean as poll after poll suggested the Conservatives were winning over voters with their ad campaign, a long serpentine line of the unemployed dwarfed by the slogan ‘Labour Isn’t Working.’
    ‘It is in Belfast,’ DeLorean said.
    Randall pointed out that, from what he had seen of it, Belfast, Northern Ireland generally, was incidental to the election campaign, aside from promises – stock-sounding even to a newcomer and varying little from party to party – to get tougher with the IRA. Neither Labour, nor the Tories, nor the smaller Liberal Party were fielding candidates in the Northern Irish constituencies.
    ‘Which kind of makes you wonder what they wanted with it in the first place,’ said DeLorean.
    Randall listened to the radio long into the election night as the results came in, first a trickle then a torrent, entranced by both the place names – the Wrekin, Sutton Coldfield, Epping Forest, Thanet East, Thanet West, Angus South, Clitheroe, Cirencester and Tewkesbury – and by the repetition of the commentary: Conservatives gain, Conservatives hold, Conservatives hold on an increased majority, swing of 9.9 per cent from Labour red to Tory blue. The outcome was beyond doubt long before sun-up. Jennings and the opinion polls were right. Callaghan – Mason – and Labour were out, the Conservatives, Thatcher and whoever she decided on as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland were in.
    *
    Robert did not much like Margaret Thatcher, but he liked that buffoon Jim Callaghan even less. To his mind anybody would have been an improvement.
    ‘Even a woman, you mean?’
    ‘Oh, come on, Liz, Margaret Thatcher’s never a woman, she’s a man in a dress.’
    Liz was not sure what to make of it all. She had long ago