Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Rory
The wind has picked up since morning.
It does that out here, decides mid afternoon that whatever it was doing before was not enough and escalates dramatically, and now it is doing the thing where it gets inside your collar no matter how high you pull it and finds the exact gap between your glove and your sleeve with the focused persistence of something with a personal grievance.
I have been on this rig long enough to know this is just Tuesday, and I pull my collar up anyway because at least it is something to do.
We are on the lower deck doing routine checks, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds, and Green Crew are doing what Green Crew always do when the work is routine and the wind is annoying, which is talking.
Constantly. About everything and nothing in the specific overlapping way of people who have spent enough time together that conversations don’t need beginnings or endings, they just continue from wherever they were last left.
Dazza is telling someone about his ex-wife’s cat, which he apparently has complicated feelings about.
Whelan is arguing with Frasier about something that started as a technical disagreement and has evolved into something more philosophical.
Tam is beside me, working through his section with quiet efficiency, occasionally contributing a word or a look to whatever conversation is nearest. Brockie is at the far end, focused and careful the way he always is.
Spanner is working near Brockie. He has been working near Brockie for days now, and I have started to notice the specific geography of it, the way the distance between them is always the same, close enough to be present, far enough to not crowd.
At one point Brockie reaches for something just out of his range, and Spanner passes it to him without being asked and without making anything of it, not even a look, just a hand extending with the thing in it and then returning to work.
Brockie says something quietly. Spanner nods once.
I watch this for approximately three seconds and then go back to my own section because it is not mine to watch and I have work to do.
I also have other things happening in my head that are taking up more space than is strictly convenient for routine checks.
Things from last night that I am not examining because I am at work and examination is for later, for the small cabin at the end of the day, except that the examination keeps starting anyway, keeps surfacing without permission, the way certain memories do when they have weight to them.
It was different last night. That’s all I will say about it, to myself, in my own head, where nobody can hear it. It was different, and I know it was different, and I am not thinking about why because why is a door I am not opening right now in the wind on the lower deck.
I focus on my work. My work is good. I am thorough and careful and I have come a long way from the valve incident and the oil, which I choose to remember as a moment of dignity rather than chaos, and my documentation is immaculate, and I belong here, and everything is fine.
The boots.
Everyone hears them before they see him, we always do, and the adjustment happens automatically, the way it always does, papers straightened, posture improved, faces arranged into the expressions of people who have been doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing because they have been doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing.
Mac comes around the corner.
He does his walkabout the way he always does, systematic and thorough, moving from station to station with the quiet authority of someone who knows this rig the way other people know their own homes.
He checks Whelan’s work first, says something brief, and moves on.
He checks Frasier’s documentation, nods, and moves on.
He works his way down the line with the focused efficiency of a man who has a procedure and follows it.
I watch him while pretending not to watch him, which I have become very good at.
He stops at Brockie’s station. Brockie is one of the newer crew members, and Mac always spends a little more time at the newer stations, not because he expects to find problems but because he is thorough, and thoroughness doesn’t discriminate.
He looks at Brockie’s work and asks something.
Brockie answers. Mac asks something else, a follow-up, the kind of question that is checking whether Brockie understood the principle rather than just the procedure.
Brockie answers correctly. I can tell by the fractional quality of Mac’s nod, the one that means satisfactory rather than merely acknowledged.
He moves on to my station.
I hand him my documentation without being asked. He takes it and reads it with the focused attention he gives everything, and I stand very straight and look at the middle distance and am extremely professional.
He hands it back. “Good,” he says.
Just good. One word. And I feel the small, warm thing in my chest that I have been feeling since approximately day five and which has, if I am being honest with myself, been getting less small and more warm with every passing day.
He finishes the walkabout. Reminds us of the afternoon schedule in that precise, quiet voice. Looks at us all in that way he has, taking attendance and inventory simultaneously, making sure everyone is where they should be and accounted for. Then he leaves.
The collective exhale is quieter than it used to be.
We have all recalibrated to Mac over the rotation, learned the rhythms of him, stopped flinching at the silence.
He is still Mac. He still takes the air out of a room and replaces it with something more demanding.
But it is a familiar demanding now, almost comfortable, the way weather is comfortable when you know how to dress for it.
“Right,” says Dazza, rolling his shoulders like a man emerging from something. “Back to it.”
“He seemed almost human today,” says Whelan.
“He’s always almost human,” says Frasier. “It’s just that the almost does a lot of heavy lifting.”
There is a ripple of laughter. Easy and warm, the laughter of people who have made their peace with something.
“But Rory’s special treatment is clearly starting to wear off,” says Dazza cheerfully, to nobody in particular. “Gonna need someone else to take one for the team soon. Keep Macleod bearable.”
The laughter continues. I hear it the way you hear something from underwater, slightly delayed, slightly muffled, arriving a beat after it should.
Dazza. Brilliant, oblivious, utterly well-meaning Dazza, who just said that with the easy carelessness of someone making a joke they have made several times before and expect it to land the same way it always has.
I open my mouth.
“He’s not like that,” I say.
My voice comes out wrong. Not loud exactly, but with an edge to it that has no business being in a routine banter exchange, and everybody hears it. I know everybody hears it because the laughter stops with a completeness that is almost physical, like a sound being switched off.
I can feel the words already out there and cannot get them back.
“He checks that you’ve understood,” I say, and my voice has leveled out a bit, but not enough, not nearly enough.
“Not just that you’ve done it. He wants you to actually know why.
He comes back and asks follow-up questions because he cares whether you’ve learned it, not just whether the box got ticked.
He’s trying to keep everyone safe and none of you… ” I stop.
The lower deck is very quiet. The wind is doing its thing. The North Sea is gray and vast and completely indifferent.
I look at the documentation in my hands.
Nobody says anything.
I can feel Tam beside me very specifically, the quality of his silence, which is different from everyone else’s silence. Everyone else’s silence is shocked. Tam’s silence is something else entirely.
“Rory,” says Dazza, and his voice is genuinely gentle, not taking the mick at all, just Dazza being Dazza, which is fundamentally a decent person who has stumbled into something he didn’t see coming. “Mate.”
“Sorry,” I say. “That came out.” I stop again. “Sorry.”
I go back to my work with the focused energy of a man who needs something to do with his hands urgently. My documentation is already immaculate, but I check it again anyway because it is there and it is something to look at that is not the faces of my crew.
Nobody makes another joke. The conversation resumes after a moment, carefully and around a new shape, the way water moves around something that has appeared in its path.
Dazza starts a different story about a completely different topic with the natural grace of a man who knows when a subject needs to be left alone.
I am grateful for this. I am grateful for Dazza in a way I could not have predicted three minutes ago.
Tam says nothing. He doesn’t need to. He is just there, working beside me, steady and present, and at one point his shoulder makes brief contact with mine in a way that could be accidental and is not.
I take a deep breath and become Rory again. The funny one. The joker. The class clown. The one who everyone likes because he makes them laugh and is easy to be around.
We work through the afternoon. The wind keeps its personal grievance going. The North Sea stays gray.
At the end of the shift, when everyone else has headed in, Tam falls into step beside me the way he always does, and we walk for a moment in silence.
“You alright?” he says, eventually.
For some reason, I’m not surprised he wasn’t fooled by my performance.
I think about all the things I could say.
All the deflections available to me, the jokes, the shrugs, the I’m fines that have served me reliably for twenty-two years.
I line them up and look at them and find, for the first time in recent memory, that none of them quite fit.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Tam nods. Slowly, carefully, the nod of a man receiving information he was already expecting and is treating with appropriate care.
“Okay,” he says. Just that. Okay.
We walk the rest of the way in silence, and it is the loudest silence I have had in weeks.