Chapter 6
Chapter six
Rory
The alarm goes off like a personal attack. It’s not my first alarm or even my second. No, this particular shrill sound is my third alarm.
I surface from the deepest sleep I have ever had in my entire life, with all the grace and coordination of a man who has been hit by a bus.
Both of my eyes open approximately halfway and then stage a protest. Every muscle I own has filed a formal complaint.
I am warm and horizontal, and my body is making a very compelling case for staying exactly where I am for the next several years.
Then I become aware of two things simultaneously.
The first is that I am in my own bunk. I have absolutely no memory of getting here. The last thing I remember is. Well. The last thing I remember is not something I am going to think about right now because if I start thinking about it I might actually combust.
The second thing is Tam, who is already half dressed and looking at me with the expression of a man who has been waiting for this moment since approximately eleven fifteen last night and has prepared extensively.
“Morning,” says Tam.
“Morning,” I say.
There is a pause.
“So…” says Tam.
“We’re going to be late,” I say.
I’m going to be late because I needed my third alarm. Tam is going to be late because he wasted time lingering for an opportunity to thoroughly question me about every second of my life that has passed since I last saw him in the mess hall.
Tam looks at his watch. His expression does something complicated. Something that reflects his inner battle between his desire to be the first to hear everything, and his desire to not be late for Macleod’s briefing.
“Aye,” he says, after a moment. “We are.”
And that, for now, is that, because there is no time, there is genuinely no time, we are already late and the only thing standing between us and the full force of MacLeod’s professional disappointment is moving very fast and not stopping for anything.
We do the dance that we have somehow already perfected in less than a week, the two of us navigating the tiny cabin with the practiced efficiency of people who have learned exactly where the other person’s elbows are at all times.
Tam at the sink first because he was up first, me waiting the twelve seconds it takes him to splash water on his face and drag a razor across his jaw, then swapping so fast there is no gap.
The water from the stainless steel tap is cold and bracingly real and I hold it against my face for a second longer than necessary because I need something to anchor me to the present moment and cold water is doing a better job of it than my own brain is currently managing.
My brain is not managing particularly well, if I’m honest.
I catch my own reflection in the small rectangle of mirror above the sink.
I look exactly like a man who did not get enough sleep for reasons he is absolutely not thinking about.
My hair is doing something I don’t have time to fix.
There is a mark on my neck that I notice and then very deliberately do not look at again.
I busy myself with frantic teeth brushing followed by a lightning quick trip to the loo. Then I step back into the cabin, trying so hard to be fast that I stand still while my mind whirls.
“Rory,” says Tam from behind me, pulling his boots on. “We have to go.”
“Going,” I say, and I am. Somehow I’m dressed and I’m pulling my own boots on, I’m grabbing my jacket, I’m following Tam out the door and into the corridor, and we are moving.
If parts of me are sore, then, well, I’m not thinking about that. Because there is no time.
We don’t have time for breakfast. This is a genuine tragedy, and I register it distantly, somewhere behind the much larger and more pressing chaos currently occupying the majority of my brain.
Tam pulls out two cereal bars from his jacket pocket and hands me one without being asked, which is one of the nicest things anyone has done for me in recent memory, and I eat it in four bites while half-jogging down the corridor.
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Tam says, also half jogging, also eating a cereal bar, the picture of casual. “Obviously.”
“Good,” I say.
“I’m just saying. You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“The lads are going to ask though.”
“I know that too.”
Tam nods agreeably. We round the corner towards the briefing room. Through the door, I can already hear the low hum of the rest of Green Crew assembled and waiting, and my stomach does something complicated that has nothing to do with the missed breakfast.
“For what it’s worth,” says Tam, as I push the door open, “you came back in one piece. So I’m counting that as a win.”
I don’t have time to respond to this because we are through the door and into the briefing room, and every single face in the room turns to look at me with a unified and barely contained intensity that would be flattering under literally any other circumstances.
They are all here. Dazza has his arms folded and his eyebrows raised in a question that is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Frasier is wearing the expression of a man who feels personally responsible for a sequence of events and is not remotely sorry about it.
Whelan looks like he has been awake since the CCTV footage ended and has spent the intervening hours with questions.
Grigor is watching me with enormous, solemn eyes.
Even Brockie, who is very young and very quiet and usually gives the impression of someone trying to take up as little space as possible, is watching me with wide uncertain eyes from the end of the row, as if he is not entirely sure what has happened but can tell it was significant.
Spanner, sitting beside him, is not looking at me at all.
He is looking at Brockie, just for a moment, something quiet and unreadable in his expression, as if he has clocked that Brockie is unsettled by the room’s energy and is doing a quick assessment.
Then his gaze moves to me and he gives me one small, unhurried nod. That’s all. Nothing more is needed.
I find my seat between Tam and Dazza. Dazza immediately leans in.
“Well?” he breathes.
“Briefing in a minute,” I say.
“Rory.”
“Dazza.”
“You were in there for three hours.”
I become very interested in the table in front of me.
Three hours. I didn’t know it was three hours.
That is. That is information I am going to put in the same mental box as the mark on my neck and the fact that I have no memory of getting back to my bunk, and I am going to close the lid on that box very firmly and not open it again until I am somewhere private and have had significantly more sleep.
“The door just closed,” says Whelan from across the table, unable to help himself. “It just closed and then nothing. We watched for twenty minutes.”
“You watched for twenty minutes?” I repeat.
“For welfare purposes.”
“Of course.”
Frasier opens his mouth.
The boots start.
It is remarkable how quickly a room full of people can transform when they hear a specific sound.
One second Green Crew are a barely contained explosion of burning questions and significant eyebrow activity, and the next they are eight men sitting up straight with expressions of total professional neutrality, papers shuffled, eyes forward, the picture of a shift that has absolutely nothing on its mind except the safe and efficient operation of a North Sea oil platform.
I straighten up with everyone else. My cereal bar wrapper makes a noise in my pocket. I go very still.
MacLeod comes through the door.
He looks exactly like MacLeod always looks.
Same dark hair. Same jaw. Same presence that fills every available inch of whatever room he walks into.
He has his clipboard. His expression is its standard baseline of a man who has high expectations of the world and has largely accepted that they will not be met.
And he is whistling.
It is a low, quiet, almost-under-his-breath kind of whistling.
The sort of thing you might not even notice if you weren’t already listening for it.
If you didn’t know that in six days and some number of hours, MacLeod has never once made any sound that was not a word or a silence or that particular noise of concentrated professional disappointment.
He is whistling.
I watch, in my peripheral vision, as the information travels around the table.
It moves like a current, person to person, the microscopic widening of eyes, the almost imperceptible straightening of spines, the tiniest intake of breath from Frasier that he will absolutely deny later.
Dazza’s foot makes brief contact with mine under the table.
I do not look at him. I am looking straight ahead, at MacLeod, with an expression that I am working very hard to keep completely neutral and that I am fairly certain is failing in ways I cannot fully control.
I did that. That whistling is… I mean, objectively, I don’t know that for certain. It could be completely unrelated, MacLeod is a human being with an interior life that has nothing to do with me, obviously, but.
The whistling.
MacLeod sets his clipboard down on the table and looks at us.
His gaze travels the room in that way it always does, steady and thorough, taking attendance and inventory at the same time.
It reaches me. I look back at him with the focused calm of a man who is completely fine.
MacLeod holds my gaze for half a second, exactly as long as he holds everyone else’s, and moves on.
My heart is doing something I am choosing not to examine.
“Right,” says MacLeod. “Let’s go through it.”
He runs the briefing exactly as he always does.
Precise, efficient, no words wasted. The overnight readings.
The maintenance schedule. A valve on level two that needs monitoring.
He has notes on Grigor’s documentation from two days ago, delivered in that quiet voice that makes everyone want to disappear, though notably the quiet today has a fractionally different quality to it.
Still professional. Still focused. Still entirely MacLeod.
But somewhere in the baseline of it there is something that is almost, almost not grim.
Green Crew are exquisitely, painfully attuned to MacLeod’s moods in the way that people become attuned to things when their quality of life depends on reading them correctly.
And so while objectively nothing is different, while anyone walking in off the street would see a perfectly standard briefing conducted by a perfectly standard supervisor, Green Crew are sitting here experiencing something closer to witnessing a solar eclipse.
Technically the same sun. Technically the same moon.
But not the same sky.
Dazza’s foot presses against mine again, slightly more insistently this time. I press back briefly to acknowledge it without looking at him, because looking at him right now would end me.
MacLeod works through the schedule. He assigns the shift tasks with his usual decisive efficiency. When he gets to my name, I sit up a fraction straighter, which is automatic and involuntary, and I’m not examining it.
“Gallacher. Level three inspection with Whelan.”
“Aye, boss,” I say.
My voice comes out completely normal. I am extremely proud of this.
MacLeod moves on without missing a beat. Whelan glances at me sideways. I look at the table.
The briefing wraps up with the same words MacLeod always uses, clear and clipped, and then he picks up his clipboard and he is done, and Green Crew have approximately two seconds before he leaves.
He gets to the door.
And then, just before he steps through it, quiet enough that you would miss it if you weren’t listening, the whistling starts again.
The door closes behind him.
Nobody speaks for a full five seconds.
Then Dazza says, very quietly, “What did you do to him.”
It is not a question. It is the voice of a man standing in front of something he cannot explain and has accepted he will never be able to.
I open my mouth. I close it again. I think about the mark on my neck and the three hours and the gentle thing that happened that I am absolutely not thinking about.
“Level three inspection,” I say to Whelan. “Shall we go?”
Whelan stares at me.
The entire room stares at me.
I stand up, tuck my chair in, and walk out of the briefing room with the steady, purposeful stride of a man who has absolutely everything under control and whose world has not been rocked in ways he doesn’t yet have words for.
Behind me, I hear Tam say something to Frasier in a very low voice.
I don’t hear what it is.
I think that’s probably for the best.