Chapter 26
Chapter twenty-six
Rory
The storm prep starts at six in the morning and does not stop.
I know this because I am part of it, have been part of it since the briefing where Mac stood at the front of the room and talked through the protocols in that precise, quiet voice and I sat in the second row and looked at the table in front of me and listened to every word and retained approximately none of it because my brain has not been retaining things properly since Wednesday.
I know the protocols. That is the saving grace.
I learned them early and I learned them properly the way Mac taught me to learn things, understanding the why rather than just the what, and so my hands and my body know what to do even when my head is somewhere else entirely, which it is, which it has been, which I cannot seem to fix no matter how many times I tell myself to be here, be present, be Rory.
The problem is that being Rory requires a certain amount of energy that I do not currently have.
Being Rory is a full-time occupation, and it runs on something that has been running very low since Wednesday night and has not been replenished because the thing that replenishes it, the warmth and the belonging and the specific feeling of being exactly where I am supposed to be, is not available to me right now.
I keep going anyway. The rig needs me to keep going and so I keep going. It is the most MacLeod thing I have ever done, and the thought of that sits in my chest like something sharp and small.
The wind is serious by mid-morning. Not the worst yet, not by a long way according to Frasier who has been through three of these and is treating the current conditions with the measured respect of someone who knows what is still coming, but serious enough that every movement on the open deck requires more effort and more attention and every loose thing that hasn’t been secured is making itself known.
We work in pairs. We work methodically. We work the way Mac taught us to work, thoroughly and without shortcuts, and I am grateful for that, I am genuinely grateful for it, because thoroughness requires attention and attention is something that requires all of my focus, every inch of my effort.
Attention requires me to try so hard that there isn’t any room left for pain.
At least, there shouldn’t be. Right now it doesn’t seem to be working that way.
I catch Tam watching me twice. The second time our eyes meet and he gives me the look, the quiet one, the one that means I see you and I am here, and I nod back and look away because if he is too kind to me right now I am going to fall apart and I cannot fall apart on a deck in a storm.
I cannot fall apart at all. There is no time for it and no space for it and Rory Gallacher does not fall apart, that is not a thing that Rory Gallacher does, except that he did, he did in Spanner’s cabin three nights ago with a cup of tea in his hands.
And the memory of that sits alongside all the other things I am not examining right now.
By early afternoon the rain has started.
It comes in sideways, which is apparently how it always comes here, not falling so much as being thrown, driven horizontally by the wind with the focused energy of something that means it.
I have been cold before on this rig, the North Sea has made its feelings about my presence known on many occasions, but this is a different category of cold, the kind that gets inside everything and stays there and makes you understand in a physical rather than theoretical way why this water has the reputation it has.
I keep working.
I am aware that I am not performing at my best. This is an unfamiliar sensation.
I have always been able to pull it together when it mattered, have always found the thing inside me that rises to the occasion, and right now the occasion is rising and the thing inside me is somewhere else, sitting outside a locked cabin door in a cold corridor saying please to someone who cannot hear it or will not.
Dazza covers for me twice without being asked.
I notice this and file it away and am grateful in a distant way, and I know it is not just because he is a good person.
It is because he is wracked with guilt and does not know how to say so and covering for me in a storm is the closest thing available to an apology, and I do not have the energy to tell him that it was not his fault, that Dazza being Dazza is not something anyone can help, least of all Dazza.
The communication tower alarm goes off at three forty-seven.
I hear it before I understand what it is, a different kind of alarm from the standard ones, and then Whelan is talking fast into his radio and the information arrives in pieces.
The satellite array on the communication tower.
Something has come loose in the wind, a bracket or a mounting, and it is compromising the primary communications system and if it is not secured before the full storm hits we lose external contact entirely, which in a storm of this severity is not a problem anyone wants to have.
The communication tower is accessible via a service ladder on the exterior of the rig.
It is a long ladder. It is, by any reasonable assessment, a very long ladder, rising high above the main deck and completely exposed to the wind and rain that are currently doing their considerable best to make the entire rig feel like a bad idea.
Everyone looks at the tower. Everyone looks at the ladder. Nobody says anything for a moment.
I look at Whelan.
Whelan is looking at the ladder with an expression that he is trying to keep neutral and not quite managing.
He is the communications technician. This is his job.
His specific, trained, designated job, the one he has been doing for two years on this rig, and he is looking at that ladder in the driving rain with the expression of a man who is about to do something that terrifies him because it is his job and he is going to do his job.
But he is terrified.
I turn to look at Dazza because he is Whelan’s second, and I find Dazza has turned a rather alarming shade of green. One I didn’t even know was humanly possible.
I look at the ladder.
And then I look at the gray churning water far below and the wind throwing the rain sideways and the height of the tower above us, and I think about Mac somewhere on this rig not looking at me, and the locked door, and the cold corridor, and Spanner’s cabin and the tea going cold in my hands, and I think about the numbness that has been sitting in me since Wednesday like something that used to be feeling and has run out.
I conclude, distantly and without very much engagement, that I should probably be more frightened than I am.
“I’ll go,” I say.
Whelan looks at me. Frasier looks at me. Tam, standing a little apart, looks at me with an expression that is several things at once.
“It’s not your job,” says Frasier.
“I’m a fast climber,” I say, which is true, I have always been fast at anything physical. It is one of the things my body does reliably regardless of what my brain is doing. “And Whelan knows the system. He can talk me through what needs doing from down here.”
Whelan opens his mouth. Closes it. He nods once, the nod of a man who is relieved and ashamed of being relieved in equal measure.
I look at Dazza. Dazza is already looking at me. The guilt on his face is enormous and quiet and has been there since Wednesday.
“The harness,” says Dazza. His voice is not quite steady. “Let me help you with the harness.”
Procedure. Like everything on this rig. Important things need to be checked twice. By two different people.
“Aye,” I say. “Obviously.”
It is not obvious. I am aware, in the part of my brain that is still functioning correctly, that I said obviously in a tone that suggested the harness was a formality rather than the thing standing between me and a very long fall into very cold water, and that this is not the correct attitude to bring to climbing an exterior ladder in a storm.
I am aware of this and I cannot seem to make it matter the way it should.
Dazza fits the harness with hands that are not quite steady. He checks every clip and every connection with the thoroughness of a man who is doing this because he needs it to be right, who needs very much for this to be right, and I stand still and let him do it and watch his face while he works.
“Rory,” he says, very quietly, not looking up from the clip he is checking for the third time.
“It’s fine, Dazza,” I say. “It was always going to be fine.”
I don’t entirely mean the harness.
He looks up. His eyes are doing something that I am not going to look at directly because I do not have the reserves for it right now, and he nods, once, and claps me twice on the shoulder in the way that means something he cannot say out loud.
I turn to the ladder.
The wind hits me immediately, properly and personally, the way the North Sea always makes things personal, and the rain is in my eyes and my collar and everywhere else and the ladder stretches up above me into the gray churning nothing and far below the water is doing things I choose not to look at.
I put my hands on the first rung.
How hard can this be?