Chapter 2
Chapter two
Rory
The thing about MacLeod, and I say this as someone who has now spent six days in close professional proximity to the man, is that he doesn’t raise his voice. Ever. Not once. You might think this would make him easier to deal with. You would be wrong. You would be so catastrophically wrong.
Because what MacLeod does instead is get quieter.
And the quieter he gets, the worse it is.
The quieter he gets, the more every single person within a twenty-foot radius wants to spontaneously cease to exist. Right now he is extremely quiet, and there are eleven of us standing in a line next to the auxiliary pump housing, and I think at least three of them are actually considering jumping into the North Sea.
I am not considering jumping into the North Sea.
I am standing up straight and keeping my face neutral and professional, which is taking considerable effort because what I actually want to do is laugh, because that is my stress response, but I cannot laugh, I will not laugh, laughing right now would be the single worst decision I have ever made and I have made some genuinely impressive ones.
This disaster started forty minutes ago.
Grigor, who is one of the senior crew and should absolutely know better, signed off on a pressure check that he had not, as it turns out, actually done.
Not properly. He’d done the first stage and then got distracted by something and come back and signed it off from memory, which, as MacLeod has now explained to us in a voice so quiet we all had to lean in slightly to hear it, is not a procedure.
It is not even close to a procedure. It is the opposite of a procedure.
It is what happens when someone decides that their own judgement is more reliable than the entire safety framework of a North Sea oil platform, and how does that sit with everyone, does everyone feel comfortable with that?
No? Glad to see Green Crew has one brain cell between you and you can understand why we are going to be redoing every single check that Grigor signed off on this week.
Every single one.
Grigor looks like a man who has seen his own ghost. He is a big guy, Grigor, broad and weathered, the kind of man who looks like he was built for exactly this environment, and right now he looks approximately the size of a very guilty hamster.
“The documentation,” says MacLeod, still in that terrible quiet voice, “will be completed correctly. Every stage. Every sign off. If I find a single shortcut, we start again.” He pauses. “Are there any questions.”
There are no questions. There are never any questions when MacLeod uses that voice. Questions would require opening your mouth and drawing attention to yourself and nobody in their right mind is doing that right now.
MacLeod looks along the line of us. His gaze moves steadily from face to face with the energy of a man taking inventory of everything he finds disappointing about the world.
It reaches me. I give him nothing. Neutral.
Professional. A face that has never laughed in its life and doesn’t intend to start.
He looks away.
I quietly let out approximately forty percent of the air in my lungs.
“Right,” says MacLeod. “Get on with it.”
He walks away. The collective exhale of eleven men is almost loud enough to hear over the wind.
Nobody speaks for a good thirty seconds. It’s a kind of stunned silence, the silence of people who have survived something and are still taking stock of all their limbs.
Then Dazza says, very quietly, “Bloody hell.”
And that’s it, that’s the dam breaking, because suddenly everyone is talking at once, low and fervent, the kind of talking that happens just out of earshot of the person who caused it and not a single syllable further.
“Every check,” says Grigor, to nobody in particular. He still looks haunted. “Every single check.”
“Should’ve thought about that before you signed off on fresh air,” says Tam, but not unkindly, because Tam is constitutionally incapable of being actually cruel. He claps Grigor on the shoulder. “Come on. Sooner we start.”
“Do you know how long this is going to take?” says a guy called Frasier, who has been on rigs for fifteen years and has the permanently aggrieved expression of a man who expected things to get easier by now and is still waiting. “Do you have any idea? We are going to be here until midnight.”
“Might not be midnight,” I say.
Everyone looks at me.
“Could be one in the morning,” I explain cheerfully.
“Very helpful, Rory, thank you,” says Frasier.
I grin at him. He shakes his head but I catch the corner of his mouth doing something that isn’t quite a smile but is at least in the same postcode.
We get started. There is nothing else to do. The wind is doing its thing, the North Sea is being gray and aggressive in the middle distance, and eleven men are working their way through a stack of checks that should have been done properly the first time and very much were not.
It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot.
Two hours in and the mood has progressed through grumbling and out the other side into a kind of grim focused silence.
Frasier wasn’t wrong about the timings. We are absolutely going to be here until at least midnight.
My back is starting to have opinions about the positions I’ve been asking it to adopt and I am ignoring all of them because complaining about physical discomfort is also apparently one of the things you just don’t do on a rig, and I belong here, I love it here, my back can get absolutely lost.
MacLeod appears periodically. He doesn’t hover, which you might think would be a mercy, but actually the appearing and disappearing is somehow worse because you never know when the next one is coming.
He checks something, says nothing, or says one devastating sentence, and then he’s gone again, and nobody ever knows if it is safe to breathe.
On his third pass, he stops near me. I am on my knees doing a valve check and my documentation is immaculate, every stage, every box, because I have been completing it with the focused energy of a man who has something to prove, which I don’t, I have nothing to prove, I am simply thorough.
I feel him stop. I keep working.
He picks up my completed sheet from the stack. I keep working. I do not look up. I am very busy and very professional and I am absolutely not holding my breath.
He puts it back down and walks away.
I look at Tam. Tam gives me a thumbs-up. I look back at my valve.
The small warm thing in my chest from yesterday is back. It is bigger this time. I am ignoring it comprehensively.
By the time we get to the last section, the light has gone completely and we are working under the rig’s floodlights, which turn everything a slightly unreal yellow and make everyone look mildly unwell.
Frasier looks more than mildly unwell. Grigor has the hollow eyes of a man atoning for his sins.
Even Tam, who is relentlessly good-natured, has gone quiet in a way that suggests his good nature has a limit and we are approaching it.
“I was looking forward to tonight,” says Dazza mournfully, from somewhere to my left. “Had a proper plan. Cards, a couple of beers, early enough to actually sleep like a human being for once.”
“Cards,” says Frasier, with the reverence of a man describing something he can no longer have. “I’d have taken every penny off the lot of you.”
“You say that every time,” says Tam. “You’ve never once taken every penny.”
“Tonight was going to be different.”
“It really wasn’t.”
I sit back on my heels and look at them. There is an idea forming. It is an excellent idea. It is the kind of idea that a naturally optimistic person, a person who loves it here and finds the positive in every situation, would have.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
Dazza looks at me. “What?”
“Card game. Tomorrow evening. In the mess hall, all of Green Crew. We’ll all be done by six, it’s a lighter shift. We do our shift, we eat, we get the beers in, put some sounds on, sorted.”
There is a pause. The kind of pause where people are too tired to immediately agree with something but can feel themselves wanting to.
“Rory,” says Frasier slowly, “do you know that you’re the most aggressively cheerful person any of us have ever met?”
“Thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment.”
“I’m choosing to take it as one.”
Tam snorts. Dazza is smiling despite himself. Even Grigor, who has spent the last four hours wearing the expression of a man doing penance, looks fractionally more human.
“Tomorrow,” says Tam. “Aye, alright. Cards tomorrow.”
“And we fleece the new boy,” says Frasier, pointing at me with his pen.
“You are welcome to try,” I say generously.
There’s a warning whistle from the far end. MacLeod, appearing out of the dark, into the floodlight area, because of course he is, because he has an absolute gift for timing.
Everyone straightens up. Papers are checked. Faces go neutral. The transformation is instantaneous and slightly impressive.
MacLeod walks the line. He checks three things. He signs off the final sheet. He looks at all of us with an expression that gives nothing away and tells us the full force of his withering contempt at the same time.
“There are no shortcuts on my rig,” he says, quietly. “There are no exceptions. There is no check too small to do properly.” Another pause. “Good work tonight.”
And then he’s gone.
We all stand there for a moment in the yellow floodlight.
“Did he just…” says Dazza.
“Aye,” says Tam.
“Was that?”
“I think so.”
I am grinning. I can feel it and I cannot stop it and I don’t particularly want to. Good work tonight. From MacLeod. To all of us, obviously, collectively, not to me specifically, but still. Good work tonight.
“Right,” says Frasier, gathering his paperwork with the energy of a man who needs to lie down immediately. “I’m away to my bunk. At least there is only one of him.”
There’s a beat.
“He cannot be serious,” says Dazza.
“There can be only one,” says Frasier, pointing his pen at the darkness where MacLeod disappeared, doing a voice that I don’t recognize at all but that makes Tam and Dazza and Grigor all lose their minds simultaneously. Even the other lads are laughing, the proper kind, tired and helpless and good.
I look around at all of them. I have absolutely no idea what is happening.
“What’s the joke?” I say.
This makes it significantly worse. Frasier is actually wheezing.
“MacLeod,” says Tam, wiping his eyes. “Highlander. The film. There can be only one.” He looks at my face. “You’ve not seen Highlander?”
“I’ve not seen Highlander.”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
Tam shakes his head slowly, like I’ve said something genuinely sad. “Away to your bunk, son. Your Ma will be along to tuck you in and sing you a lullaby.”
“Alright, grandad,” I grin.
“Cheeky shit!” exclaims Tam.
I go to my bunk. I am grinning the entire way there. My back has stopped complaining. My documentation was immaculate. MacLeod said good work.
Tomorrow there will be a card game.
Things, as it turns out, are looking up.