Zeke
Zeke
She rests for maybe two minutes before she begins trying to pull the boat in.
“Lexi,” I call across the distance between us. “You can’t do that. It’s just—it’s not going to be possible.”
My voice echoes under the rig. She’s wrenching on the rope one-handed because she needs to hold the ladder, arm muscles popping, an agonized grimace on her face.
“Lexi, stop!”
“How the hell else am I getting you here?” It’s half sentence, half sob.
“I can just swim over. We can leave the boat to…”
“Crash into one of those pillars and go under? No. No. She’s coming here and we’re going to get her secure.”
Lexi looks like a superhero right now, braced there on the ladder, drenched and bare, the rope in her hands.
“Just stop a second,” I say, gripping The Merry Dormouse ’s railing. “What if you use your body weight on it? One arm around the ladder, stand on the rung where you’ve tied it…and then do a sort of one-legged squat? Push down on the rope with your other leg? It should create some slack, and then you could tie it up again…”
It takes her a few more tries after the first one, but it works . The houseboat is about a foot or so closer to the ladder now, definitely.
“You,” she says, her voice hoarse. She says nothing else, but there’s a lot in that word, and all of it makes me glow.
The untying and retying is such hard work, I can see her legs shaking from here. I keep saying, “ Let me swim over and do it ,” but she shakes her head, teeth gritted, and I don’t want to say to her that she can’t do it herself, because look. She’s amazing. She can.
“Don’t you dare jump in and swim the last bit,” she says, when I’m just a couple of meters from her. “We did not come this far just to open up your wound again and get a load of seawater in it.”
The exhaustion’s rolling off her. She’s shaking so much, red-faced and sweaty and sea-soaked. I want to hold her so badly, want to wrap myself around her. I’m useless over here. I shove Lexi’s abandoned boots into her holdall, sling both our bags over my shoulders, and glance at Eugene in his box. We’ll have to come back for him. It’s stupid how much the thought of leaving him hurts.
When I finally leap across to the ladder, pain sears through my stitches so sharply that I can’t avoid crying out.
“Zeke!” Lexi shouts down. She’s climbed up to give me space to get on, but I can hear she’s paused on the ladder.
“I’m OK,” I call back, forehead to a rung, pain still lancing through me. “Keep going up. I’m OK.”
Every step to the first deck of the rig hurts. When I finally get there, we don’t say anything; she just turns in to me as I drop the bags at my feet. She presses her face to my chest. I hold her bare, trembling body. One minute, three minutes, five. We stay like this in the wind and the quietness, and I try not to notice how empty the rig feels around us.
Lexi steps away eventually, reaching for her bag and pulling out some dry clothes, along with her boots. I glance around as she yanks the jumper over her head. Everything looks so massive after the boat. I feel miniature, like an ant. And the bleakness, the echoing caws of seabirds…it’s freaky.
It looks a hell of a lot like this rig’s deserted.
Once she’s dressed, Lexi takes my arm, and we pick our way across the mussel shells covering the rusty grating beneath us. The shells pop and crack under our feet. Lexi’s shaking all over. I need to get her somewhere warm and dry. We head up a set of steps and reach a concrete level—firmer ground.
“You’re OK,” I tell her.
“Right. So are you,” she says, but her eyes keep flicking to my T-shirt, and I know she’s looking for blood. I’d like to do the same, but I don’t want to freak her out.
“There,” she says. “Try that door.”
It’s an emergency fire door. I try the handle—it’s unlocked, and there’s a gloomy corridor on the other side. Lexi’s hand tightens on my arm. It sends a warm feeling through me—even though she’s holding on to me for comfort, it’s working the other way around.
The corridor has that cheap, temporary vibe you get in institutional places. It’s all made with pale cream panels, and there are signs everywhere. Eyewash , it says on the wall, above some kind of contraption a bit like a handwash dispenser. Emergency Exit , says a big green sign, pointing back the way we came.
“Are you scared?” Lexi asks quietly.
“Nah. Not me.”
“Not even a little bit?”
“I’m mostly cold,” I say. And worried about you.
“ Bah! ” she says in my ear, and I jump about half a meter.
“Lexi! Jesus.”
She’s laughing. A thin, wobbly laugh, but a real one.
“I knew you were scared.”
“Fine, yes, this dark, derelict oil rig has given me the creeps a tiny bit, OK?” I say, pulling her closer to me with her arm on mine as we take in blank walls and dirty floors.
“Your toxic masculinity is showing,” she says, with a smirk in her voice.
I laugh, then my laugh trails off as a great creak rumbles through the structure around us.
“Umm,” Lexi says. “Did that sound…”
“Ominous?”
“Structural?”
I pull a face. It didn’t sound great .
“We’re going to be fine,” Lexi says, swallowing. “There’ll be a phone. A radio. Something. Then we’ll be home in no time.”
She tries a few handles and finds locked doors. We turn a corner, catching more laminated signs and wall panels in the dim light—and another door. This one opens.
“Oh, shitting hell.”
Lexi gets a look inside before me. I peek over her shoulder and pull right back out again. It’s some sort of sick bay—empty beds with lights over them, a bit like desk lamps but fixed to the ceiling.
“Are we in a disaster movie? Can you just tell me this is real, please? I feel like I’m in a bad dream.”
“It’s real. Sorry.” I swallow, forcing myself to take in the dark room again.
There’ll probably be useful supplies in here—bandages, creams. But it looks so creepy. I wrap an arm around Lexi’s shoulder, desperate to stop her shaking.
“Maybe another room will be better,” I say, steering her away. “Maybe there’s one filled with all our friends and family waiting to surprise us.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t joke about that.”
I wince. “Sorry. Stupid.”
I know she misses Mae in a way I can’t comprehend. I want to see my mum, Brady, even Jeremy and Lyra, but Lexi’s like a woman with a hole in her heart right now, and I just stuck a finger in it.
“Not stupid,” she says, glancing up at my face. “It’s hard to say exactly the right thing to someone who’s shit-scared and doesn’t even know what they want to hear. It’s not stupid to sometimes hit on the wrong thing, Zeke. We all do it.”
She remembers that conversation in the bathroom, then. I’d hoped she might not—mild concussion, or something. I look away, embarrassed. Not because of what she said, but because of how good it makes me feel to hear it.
The next door leads to a staircase with the same clinical feel as the corridor we just left behind. As we make our way up the steps, with Lexi leaning on my arm, I figure out why I feel so weird. I’m unsteady on my feet, like the steps are moving underneath me. No wonder Lexi’s dizziness has got worse—we’re both having to manage our sea legs.
Plus I’m still a bit light-headed from the blood loss, and my wound’s hurting like hell right now. Not that I’m going to mention that.
As we round a bend, it gets lighter. There are windows, showing cranes and sky. I never thought I’d be so relieved to see the sea again.
“Do you need to rest?” I say, glancing at Lexi.
She shakes her head. “I want to keep going.”
“I could keep exploring, while you…”
Her grip on my arm gets twice as tight.
“We stay together. Please. Don’t leave me.”
I give her hand a quick squeeze.
“Never.”
We check every door. We find bare bedrooms, mostly, like dorm rooms in a school. There’s even a games space with a snooker table and some of those chairs that you find in waiting rooms, the uncomfortable ones with curved wooden arms. Deeper down the maze of corridors is an inventory room filled with tall metal shelves, carrying endless boxes of screws and pipes and bits of metal.
“A treasure trove,” Lexi whispers, running her hand across a dusty shelf. “Or maybe…absolutely useless.”
I know what she means. If we were in a survival film, then all these pieces of equipment would probably be a lifeline. We’d cobble them together to start up our engine or something. But it turns out being lost out here hasn’t made me any less me . I’m still a man who has no clue what to do with any of this stuff.
The last—very last—room we find is our real treasure trove. A radio room.
Lexi lets out a sobbing gasp when she sees the sign on the solid metal door, and then she tries the handle. It’s locked.
She falls forward into the door, half collapsing. As if this barrier has sucked all the energy out of her at last.
“We can break in,” I say, reaching for her arm, trying the handle like she did, just in case. “We’re so close. We can just…Surely we can…”
We yank at the handle. Hammer at the door. Go back to the tall shelves and look for something—anything—that might help us. We bruise our hands and toes. And the door just…stays locked. A big, thick, gray metal obstacle between us and the rest of the world.
Lexi sways on her feet. I move to catch her.
“You need rest,” I say.
I wince. As I steady her, it tugs on my stitches, and the pain is fierce.
“You have to lie down,” I manage.
“Not on those beds,” she says, shuddering. “I want…”
She stares at the door, tears in her eyes. I gather her into my arms, and she melts against me, damp and sea-smelling, the most precious person. My mind’s going full tilt, trying to think of a place I can take her that won’t feel so much like somewhere that might feature in a first-person shooter game. It’s all so bleak here. I have this weird out-of-body moment and imagine a world where I could take Lexi to a café, or a shop, or my flat, and it’s almost painful.
“Did you see that helicopter pad through the window in the office?” I say. “That’s where our rescuers will be dropping in. We can write a message on it. Help us, we had a one-night stand on a houseboat and ended up here! ”
I get a laugh for that, and honestly, it’s better than a bath would be right now. Better than a hot piece of toast. Better than a pint of Coke.
“Or something shorter,” she says into my chest. “And less like a BuzzFeed article.”
“Right, yeah, we can edit it down, sure.”
She loops her arms around my waist, pressing in. Letting me take the weight of her body. I back up until I’m against one of the cream-paneled walls and we can both just lean there, her head on my chest.
“Do you think we could take a break from trying to cope with all this?” she says.
“You want to freak out for a while?”
“Yeah. This is just all completely fucking awful .”
I stay quiet. I totally get that she needs to say that out loud right now, but I really don’t, and I trust she knows that, too. The wind whistles through the gaps in the edge of the windows, and I wonder if there’s anyone else I would prefer to have with me in this nightmare than the woman with the gorgeous eyes who said I’m not but thanks when I told her she was beautiful. It doesn’t even take a second to realize that no, there isn’t. Not Brady, not my brother, not Bear Grylls. I just want her.
“Do you think chocolate goes off?” she says eventually.
“Hmm?”
She pulls back to meet my gaze.
“Chocolate. Do you think it actually goes off? Or do they just put sell-by dates on chocolate bars for insurance reasons or something, and actually you can eat it forever?”
“Like cheese?”
She does one of those hemmed-in smiles. The kind she wears when she’s trying to act like she doesn’t want to laugh.
“Since you’re the person in charge of all our meals, I sincerely hope you’re joking right now.”
I smile. “Is there a reason you’re asking about sell-by dates?”
“I saw chocolate bars in an open bedroom drawer. Snickers and TimeOuts. They were obviously someone’s secret stash.”
“TimeOuts,” I say, salivating.
“Aren’t you too young to—”
“Lexi.” I’m laughing.
“Sorry, sorry. I think eating them would probably be bad, though.”
“Bad, like, morally?” I ask, looking down at her.
“Bad, like, intestinally.”
She gives me a tiny smile when I laugh.
“We’re going to be OK,” she says.
“Absolutely,” I say. “We’re going to be fine.”
And right now, with my arms around Lexi, it doesn’t even feel like I’m pretending to mean it.