Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Rory
The thing about having your entire worldview quietly dismantled at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, is that the rig does not care.
The rig does not pause to allow you to sit somewhere quiet and take stock of your life.
The rig hums and clanks and demands your full attention, and your full attention is currently split approximately forty ways between the job in front of you and the absolute chaos happening inside your own skull.
I am on level three with Whelan and I am working and I am fine. I am completely fine. I am a professional.
I am also, somewhere underneath the professional, experiencing something that I don’t have a category for yet.
Here is what I know. Last night was. It was good.
It was genuinely, undeniably, remarkably good, and not just in the obvious way, though obviously it was good in the obvious way too, because MacLeod is.
Well. MacLeod. But there was also a moment, or possibly several moments, where he was. Where it felt like he was actually…
I tighten a bolt with slightly more force than necessary.
The point is, it happened and it was good and now I need to figure out what to do with that information and I have approximately zero time in which to do it because Whelan is right there and the level three inspection is not going to complete itself.
So. Fine. I’ll do it in my head. Quietly. While working. Like a normal person.
Am I gay?
That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the thing that keeps floating to the surface every time I try to push it down.
Am I gay? And the honest answer, if I’m being honest, which I apparently am because there’s nobody in here inside my skull except me, is that I don’t know.
I have looked at men before. I have always told myself that this is fine, that it doesn’t mean anything, that being secure enough in yourself to notice that another person is attractive regardless of their gender is just. Confidence. Evolved thinking. Not a big deal.
Which is still true, actually. I stand by that.
But last night was somewhat more than noticing.
Okay, so maybe I’m not completely straight.
Maybe I’m. Something else. Something with more range.
And the thing is, when I turn that thought over and look at it properly, it doesn’t feel like a crisis.
It feels like. Information. Useful, if slightly startling, information about myself that I am now in possession of and can file accordingly.
I don’t need a label for it. Labels are for other people. I am Rory Gallacher, and I contain multitudes and that is absolutely fine and I’m not going to make a big thing of it.
I’m not making a big thing of it.
I’m genuinely not.
The fact that I have now been thinking about nothing else for four hours is simply because my brain is thorough. It’s a feature, not a flaw.
What I keep coming back to, if I’m being completely truthful with the inside of my own head, is not the question of labels at all.
It’s MacLeod. Specifically, it’s the thing MacLeod did, around about the second hour, where he.
Where there was a moment of. It was gentle, and that’s the thing.
I was not expecting gentle. I had braced myself for a lot of things when that door opened last night and gentle was not anywhere on the list and the fact that it was there, quietly and matter-of-factly, like it was the most natural thing in the world, has lodged itself somewhere in my chest and is refusing to move.
I am twenty-two years old and I have had a reasonable amount of experience and nobody has ever been quite that…
I tighten the next bolt.
Or I try to.
What actually happens is that my brain serves up another vivid flash of last night at exactly the wrong moment, my hands do something slightly wrong, and the valve I am supposed to be tightening does something it is absolutely not supposed to do.
There is a sound. A pressurized, enthusiastic, extremely final kind of sound.
And then there is oil. Everywhere. All at once. A spectacular, thorough, total drenching that hits me directly in the face and chest and keeps going with what I can only describe as personal investment. It is cold. It is extremely comprehensive. It covers everything.
My hand remembers my training, and it acts. It moves independently of my brain, and the disaster is diverted, and the spray of crude oil stops.
There is a moment of complete silence on level three.
I stand there. I am wearing oil. I am wearing a very great deal of oil. My goggles, which I am at least wearing correctly and which MacLeod will be relieved about, are the only part of my face that is not entirely coated. I look, I imagine, absolutely extraordinary.
Whelan makes a sound that is not quite a word.
“Right,” I say, to nobody in particular. My voice comes out remarkably steady given the circumstances.
Boots on the floor. Fast, purposeful, familiar. My stomach does something involuntary that has nothing to do with being covered in oil. MacLeod arrives at my shoulder with the efficiency of a man who has seen this happen before and has a procedure for it and the procedure does not involve panic.
He looks at me. I look at him. There is a lot of oil between us, metaphorically speaking, as well as literally. Actually, I don’t think there is such a thing as a metaphor about oil, so I guess the oil is only between us literally.
I brace myself for the bollocking of a lifetime. He is going to flay me alive with words, and that’s fine, I deserve it. However, the knowledge that I thoroughly deserve this, does nothing to stop something inside me curling up and withering.
“Are you hurt?” he says.
“No,” I say, while blinking in shock. That’s a strange way to start verbally tearing chunks out of someone.
He looks me over anyway, quick and thorough, checking for anything I might have missed. Then he looks at the valve.
“Talk me through what happened,” he says, in the voice he uses for teaching rather than bollocking. They are different voices. I have learned to tell them apart.
I talk him through it. Accurately and completely, including the part where my concentration slipped, though I leave out the reason why because some information is not relevant to a safety debrief. MacLeod listens without interrupting.
“So you understand what you should have done differently?” he says, when I’ve finished.
“Aye.”
He looks at me for a moment longer. There is something in his expression that I cannot read and am absolutely not going to try to read, while I am standing here covered in oil in front of Whelan and whoever else has gathered at a respectful distance to witness this.
He nods once. Then he walks away.
Nobody moves for a second.
Then Dazza, who has appeared from somewhere and absolutely should not be on level three right now, lets out a low whistle.
“Right,” he says, with great feeling. “Someone find out MacLeod’s schedule. I need to let him pound my ass.”
The laughter that goes up is the helpless kind, the kind that happens when a group of people have been holding something in for too long and it finally finds a way out.
Even Whelan, who is generally quite serious, loses it entirely.
I can hear it echoing off the metal walls of level three, and I am grinning too, I can feel it, wide and uncontrollable and very much present on my oil-covered face.
I am also blushing. Comprehensively and extensively blushing, the kind that starts at the neck and goes everywhere. I am deeply, profoundly grateful that I am covered in oil and nobody can tell.
Nobody can tell.
I cling to this.
By the time lunch comes around I am showered and changed and approximately human again, and I am also absolutely ravenous in the way that only happens when you’ve missed breakfast and spent the morning doing physical work and also had, by any objective measure, quite an eventful night.
I pile my tray with everything available, including the gray beef thing, which tells you everything you need to know about how hungry I am, and I find a corner table and I sit down and I start eating with the focused dedication of a man with a mission.
I am three bites in when a tray clanks down on my table.
I look up.
MacLeod sits down with the unhurried ease of a man who has decided to do something and is not interested in making a production of it. He has a plate of food and a mug of something, and he looks, as always, completely unreadable.
I stop chewing. I remember to start again. I swallow.
MacLeod is eating lunch. At the same table as me. In the mess hall. Which is currently empty of everyone except us because Green Crew take their lunch in rotation and I am apparently on the same rotation as my supervisor and I did not know this until this exact moment.
He eats for a moment in silence. I eat for a moment in silence. This is normal. We are two colleagues having lunch. This is completely normal.
“Are you alright?” says MacLeod.
“It was just a dousing in oil,” I say, and my voice comes out admirably casual. “Nothing a shower couldn’t fix.”
MacLeod looks at me steadily. “I meant about last night.”
I open my mouth. Several things attempt to come out at once, and the resulting traffic jam produces something that is not quite any of them.
“I mean. Aye. Fine. Just a bit, you know. Sore. Here and there. Nothing major. Bit of. Aye.” I reach for my water. “Fine.”
Something happens at the corner of MacLeod’s mouth. It is very brief and very small, and it is absolutely, unmistakably, the beginning of a smile. On MacLeod’s face. I have never seen anything like it. I’m not entirely sure it’s real. I might be hallucinating from hunger.
“Good to know,” he says. “But I meant emotionally.”
The tips of my ears go nuclear. This is devastating and unprecedented.
I am Rory Gallacher, I was crowned funniest man on the platform, I revel in being the butt of the joke, any joke, and I have spent my entire life performing my way through uncomfortable situations with a grin and a punchline, and right now I cannot locate a single one.
“I’m fine,” I manage. “Emotionally. All good. No issues.” I pause. “No need to. I’m fine.”
MacLeod watches me for a moment with the patience of a very large and very calm geographical feature. Then he nods.
“No regrets?” he says.
I open my mouth to say something breezy and deflective, and what comes out instead is the truth, which ambushes me completely.
“No,” I say. “No regrets.”
And I sit with that for half a second and find that it is simply, straightforwardly true. Whatever is happening in my head, whatever questions I don’t have answers to yet, last night was something I chose and something I don’t regret, and that is actually quite a solid place to stand.
MacLeod nods again, as if this is the answer he expected. He takes a drink from his mug.
“You should rest tonight,” he says, in the same tone he uses to tell people about valve maintenance schedules and documentation procedures. Utterly matter of fact. “But you could come back to my cabin tomorrow night.”
I stare at him.
He is looking at his food.
I continue to stare at him.
“Is that an order?” I say, because my mouth has decided to operate independently of my brain again, and apparently this is just who I am now.
MacLeod looks up. The scowl that crosses his face is so deeply, perfectly, fundamentally MacLeod that something in my chest loosens with relief. There he is. That’s him. Whatever else is happening, that scowl is completely real and completely familiar, and I find it enormously reassuring.
“Of course not,” he snaps.
A beat.
“It’s an invitation,” he says. And then, as if the word cost him something, he looks back at his food.
I inhale a piece of gray beef and spend several seconds in genuine physical peril, coughing into my elbow while MacLeod sits across from me with the expression of a man who is waiting for something to run its course.
“Okay,” I splutter, when I am able. “Aye. Yes. Okay.”
MacLeod nods once. He picks up his fork.
The conversation is, apparently, concluded.
We eat in silence for a few minutes, the kind of silence that has a different quality to every other silence I have ever shared with this man, and I cannot fully name what the difference is yet, but I know that it’s there.
I look down at my tray. At the gray beef thing, which I am inexplicably still eating. At the table where MacLeod’s tray is sitting across from mine like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
I have no idea what is happening to my life.
But tomorrow night I am going to accept that invitation, I already know I am. I didn’t just say yes to be polite. I’m actually going to go. The decision was made somewhere around the word invitation and has not wavered since.
I go back to my food.
MacLeod goes back to his.
Outside the mess hall window, the North Sea is gray and choppy and completely indifferent to the fact that Rory Gallacher’s entire universe has quietly rearranged itself over a plate of gray beef and a mug of tea.