Chapter 8
Chapter eight
Rory
Dinner on the rig starts serving at six, which means that today, by five fifty-eight Green Crew were assembled in the mess hall with the focused energy of people who have somewhere to be and something very important to discuss and have been waiting all day to discuss it.
I know this because I walk in at six on the dot and every single one of them is already there.
All eight. Tam and Dazza side by side with the coordinated air of men who have been comparing notes.
Frasier with his arms folded and his chin up, wearing the expression of a man expecting a full debrief.
Whelan and Grigor and Brockie clustered at one end of the table.
Spanner at the other end, unhurried as always, a plate of food in front of him that he is eating with perfect calm while the table hums with barely contained energy around him.
I get my food. I carry my tray to the table. I sit down.
“Right,” says Tam.
“Evening,” I say pleasantly, and start eating.
There is a pause of approximately two seconds.
“Rory,” says Dazza.
“Dazza.”
“We have been waiting all day.”
“Have you.” I reach for the salt. “How was your afternoon?”
The noise that Frasier makes is not a word but it communicates volumes. I look up at him with an expression of serene innocence that I have been practising since approximately three o’clock and feel reasonably confident about.
“I don’t kiss and tell,” I say.
The table erupts.
I sit in the middle of it and eat my dinner and feel, despite everything, despite the mark on my neck and the question I don’t have a label for and the invitation sitting warm and private somewhere in my chest, genuinely and comprehensively delighted with myself.
This is what I was built for. This exact thing.
Eight people losing their minds and me at the center of it, easy and unbothered, the picture of a man with absolutely nothing to hide.
I am hiding several things. But they can’t tell that.
“You don’t kiss and tell,” Whelan repeats, as if the sentence has broken something in him. “You went to MacLeod’s door on a dare. At eleven o’clock at night. And you don’t kiss and tell.”
“I’m a man of principle,” I say.
“He’s a man of principle,” says Tam, to the table at large, with an air of devastation..
“Did you actually?” Grigor stops. Starts again. His enormous, solemn eyes are very wide. “Did it actually… Did he actually…”
“Did he actually what, Grigor?”
Grigor waves a hand in a gesture that encompasses approximately everything.
“Well,” I grin mischievously. “I didn’t get sent away, did I?”
This produces more noise. Dazza actually puts his fork down. Frasier looks like a man receiving confirmation of a theory he has held for years and is experiencing the complicated emotions of being right.
“The whistling,” says Tam, pointing at me. “That really was you. You did that.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say serenely.
“He was almost nice,” says Whelan. “In the briefing. I mean, he was still MacLeod. But. Almost.”
“He didn’t tear chunks out of you when you drenched yourself in oil,” says Dazza. “In front of everyone. He just asked if you were hurt.” He shakes his head slowly. “I have been on this rig for years and I have never once seen MacLeod not tear chunks out of someone for something like that.”
That little nugget of information settles somewhere warm near my heart.
“To be fair, I handled it correctly after,” I say.
“You caused a spill. A pressure differential. You were covered in oil, Rory.”
“With great dignity,” I say. “I was covered in oil with great dignity.”
Tam snorts so hard he has to put his own fork down. I am very pleased with this.
“I need some of that,” says Dazza, with great feeling. “I genuinely need MacLeod to be nice to me. I am willing to make sacrifices.”
“Dazza,” says Frasier.
“I’m just saying. I would go to that door. Willingly. Tonight. Someone remind me what cabin.”
“You are a married man,” says Grigor.
“Separated,” says Dazza almost proudly. “And this would be for the good of the whole crew. A selfless act.”
“There can be only one,” says Frasier solemnly, which sets Tam and Grigor off immediately, the two of them dissolving into the wheezing helpless kind of laughter that means the Highlander joke has been deployed and I am once again the only person at the table who doesn’t fully understand it.
“There doesn’t have to be only one,” says Whelan. “What if we did a rota?”
Everyone looks at him.
He spreads his hands. “I’m serious. Once a week. One person from Green Crew volunteers. Keeps MacLeod in a good mood. We all benefit.” He looks around the table. “Democratically distributed. Fair for everyone.”
There is a beat of silence, and then the table considers this with the focused energy of men evaluating a genuine operational proposal. Every single person acting as if they aren’t pissing around.
“I’d put my name down,” says Dazza immediately.
“We know,” says everyone.
“A rota,” says Frasier slowly, as if tasting the word. “A MacLeod mood management rota.” He nods. “I’ve heard worse ideas.”
“You’ve suggested worse ideas,” says Tam.
“I suggested the thing with the valve coupling,” says Frasier. “That worked.”
“It absolutely did not work.”
“Well, the Macleod rota definitely will work.”
The pretense cracks suddenly and abruptly as these things do, and everyone starts laughing. The proper, belly-hurting and eyes-watering kind of laughter.
I am laughing too. Real and unforced, the warm chaos of these people who have been my people for less than two weeks and already feel like something permanent.
The rota idea is very funny and completely absurd, and I am absolutely going to laugh about it, and I am also, somewhere underneath the laughing, experiencing something I don’t have a name for yet.
Something that feels a lot like not wanting anyone else on the rota, even if it is only a joke.
Something that feels a lot like the idea of Dazza knocking on that door being considerably less funny than it should be.
Something that’s almost a need to declare that Macleod gave me an invitation at lunch. Me. Rory, no one else.
But strangely, even though I know this information would be received with immense glee and utter delight by my crew, I don’t want to share it. I don’t want the attention, the laughter, the respect. Instead, I want it for myself. It’s for me and Macleod and no one else.
I pick up my fork and keep eating and do not examine this at all.
“Can I say something?” says Brockie.
The table goes slightly quieter in the way it always does when Brockie speaks, because Brockie speaks so rarely that when he does it tends to carry a certain weight simply by virtue of being surprising.
He is looking at his plate, and his ears have gone a bit pink, and he has the look of someone who has been building up to something for several hours and has finally decided to say it.
“Obviously none of this is my business,” he says. “And I know it was a bet and everything. But.” He stops. Looks up briefly and then back at his plate. “You’re alright, aren’t you, Rory? I mean. You wanted to, didn’t you?”
The table goes very still.
I look at Brockie. He is very young and very sincere, and the tips of his ears are extremely pink, and he is clearly absolutely mortified to have said anything at all but said it anyway because he genuinely felt it should be checked.
Something in my chest does something unexpectedly warm.
“Aye,” I say, and I mean it completely. “I wanted to. Totally fine. Better than fine.”
Brockie nods, visibly relieved, and goes back to his dinner with the focused intensity of a man who has used up his entire social reserves for the week.
I happen to glance at Spanner. Just for a moment.
He is looking at Brockie with an expression that is very quiet and very contained and almost impossible to read, except that it isn’t quite, not entirely, because there is something in it that is unmistakably soft.
He catches me looking, and the expression is gone in an instant, replaced with his usual unhurried calm.
He gives me a small nod. I give it back.
“For what it’s worth,” says Spanner, to the table, in the measured way he says everything, “MacLeod is many things. But he would never do anything that wasn’t wanted.” A pause. “He’s not that kind of man.”
Nobody argues with this. When Spanner says something with that particular quality of certainty it tends to settle the matter, and this settles it. There is a collective nodding, the nodding of people who know something to be true and are glad to hear it confirmed.
Tam refills his water glass. Frasier reaches for the last of the bread. The moment moves on the way moments do, naturally and without ceremony, and the table noise builds back up around us.
“So,” says Dazza, leaning forward with renewed energy. “You really won’t tell us anything?”
“I really won’t,” I say.
“Not one detail?”
“Not one.”
“Not even.” He pauses. “I mean. Is he? You know?” He holds his hands up, a fair distance apart. An obscene, anatomically impossible distance apart.
Everyone cracks up. Snorts, wheezes, bangs cups on the table, the whole thing.
I look at Dazza with the serene, unreadable expression of a man who is taking every single thing he knows to his grave.
Dazza groans. “Rory.”
“I don’t kiss and tell,” I say again, with great satisfaction.
Everyone groans. There is some swearing. Someone throws a napkin at me. A general air of great exasperation fills the mess hall.
It’s wonderful. I grin and lap it up, every delicious ounce of it.
Spanner decisively turns the conversation to the footy, and Green Crew happily follow his lead. The attention drifts from me and I don’t mind, I’ve had enough to last a fair while. So I grin, eat my food and listen to my mates argue about football.
Things are rattling around my head, but they are not all bad things. For instance, Macleod’s invitation is sitting warm in my chest where nobody can see it and nobody can touch it and it is mine and I am keeping it.
I reach for my water.
I am not thinking about the rota.
I’m not.
But that Highlander joke I don’t get is echoing in my skull. There can be only one. And for some reason, I like the sound of it.