Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
Rory
Iam in an exceptionally good mood.
This is not unusual. I am generally in a good mood.
I am, by nature, constitution, and years of careful practice, a person who is in a good mood.
But today I am in an exceptionally good mood, the kind that hums underneath everything and makes the gray beef thing seem almost acceptable and the cold North Sea wind feel almost refreshing and the rig feel almost cozy, and I am aware that this is noticeable and I am doing my absolute best to dial it back to normal levels and I am failing comprehensively.
I am humming.
I didn’t realize I was humming until Tam pointed it out approximately four minutes ago with the expression of a man witnessing something he cannot fully explain but intends to investigate thoroughly. I stopped immediately. Then I started again without noticing. This has happened three times.
The thing is, yesterday was…
I am not going to think about yesterday. Yesterday is in a box. A very warm, very private, very firmly lidded box that belongs to me and nobody else, and I am keeping it, and I am absolutely not going to stand here in the middle of a briefing room grinning like an idiot about it.
I am grinning like an idiot about it.
“Rory,” says Dazza, leaning over with the focused energy of a man who has been waiting for an opening. “You alright?”
“Grand,” I say.
“You seem.” He pauses. Considers. “Happy.”
“I’m always happy.”
Dazza’s eyes narrow. “True. But this is… happy, happy. Even for you.”
I open my mouth to deflect, and then Mac walks in and every single thought I am having evaporates completely.
Mac.
I have been calling him that in my head since yesterday afternoon, and every single time it lands somewhere warm and private and entirely mine.
Mac. Not MacLeod. Not the boss. Not the grumpy geographic feature who has been making everyone’s lives difficult since before I arrived.
Mac, who paused in the middle of everything yesterday and looked at me with those dark eyes and said, very quietly, My friends call me Mac, and I had opened my eyes and looked up at him and said, Am I your friend?
and the moment had stretched out like something precious and unhurried, and he had said, Aye, something like that, in a voice that was so different from his usual one, that I had felt it everywhere.
I am his friend. Something like that. I am something like his friend and I get to call him Mac, and I am keeping that information very close to my chest where nobody can reach it.
He is looking at his clipboard. The jaw is doing its thing in the morning light.
His shoulders fill the doorway in that way they always do and he moves through the room with the quiet authority of a man who has never once in his life doubted his authority or competence, and I am watching him the way I always watch him when he is not looking, which is to say with the focused appreciation of someone cataloguing something very much worth cataloguing.
He is extremely attractive. This is not a new observation, but it lands with slightly more weight than usual this morning, possibly because I have extremely recent and very detailed evidence to support it, which I am absolutely not thinking about.
I am thinking about it constantly.
Mac glances up from his clipboard. His eyes find mine across the room with that directness he always has.
I look back at him with the neutral, professional expression of a man who has absolutely nothing on his mind.
Mac holds my gaze for half a second. Something moves in his expression that nobody else would clock.
I clock it.
I look back at the table and pick up my mug and take a long drink of terrible coffee and feel, underneath everything, quietly and completely extraordinary.
The briefing passes. I pay attention, mostly, except for the parts where my brain wanders back to yesterday with the enthusiasm of someone returning to their favorite place in the world.
Mac runs the briefing exactly as he always does, precise and efficient, and his voice does the thing it always does where it cuts through everything else and I hear it clearly regardless of where I am in the room.
He assigns the morning tasks. When he gets to my name, I sit up straighter and say, Aye boss in a completely normal voice, and he moves on, and I am very proud of myself.
After the briefing, Tam falls into step beside me with the unhurried patience of a man who has all day.
“So,” says Tam.
“So,” I agree.
“Where were you yesterday?”
And there it is. I knew it was coming. I have been knowing it was coming since approximately six this morning when I woke up giddy and humming and completely unable to account for an entire rest day during which nobody saw me at all.
“Around,” I say.
Tam gives me a look. “Around.”
“Here and there.”
“Rory. It’s an oil rig. There is not that much around to be.”
Dazza has materialized on my other side because of course he has, Dazza has a sixth sense for conversations he wants to be part of. “We looked for you,” he says. “After lunch. Couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“I was…” I pause. My brain, which is usually extremely reliable in these situations, offers me absolutely nothing useful. “I was doing a thing.”
“A thing,” says Tam.
“A personal thing.”
“On an oil rig.”
“Yes.”
They both look at me. I look back at them with the serene confidence of a man who has this completely under control.
“I was reorganizing,” I say.
Dazza blinks. “Reorganizing what?”
Excellent question. “My bunk area,” I say. “Completely reorganized it. Top to bottom. Very time-consuming.”
Tam looks at me for a long moment. Then he looks at Dazza. Then he looks back at me.
“You reorganized your bunk area,” he says slowly. “For an entire day?”
“I’m very thorough.”
“Rory, your bunk area is the size of a napkin.”
“A disorganized napkin,” I say firmly. “You’d be amazed what you find when you really get into it. Very meditative. I lost track of time completely.”
Tam opens his mouth. Closes it again. Something crosses his face that suggests he is running through everything he knows about me and finding this explanation wanting in several significant ways.
“I looked in the cabin,” he says. “Around three o’clock. You weren’t there.”
I don’t miss a beat. “That’ll have been when I took a break and went for a walk.”
“A walk,” says Tam.
“Cleared my head. You know how it is.”
“And then you went back and carried on reorganizing.”
“For hours,” I confirm. “Really got into it.”
Dazza is watching this exchange with the bright, focused attention of a man at a tennis match. He looks at Tam. Tam looks at him. Some silent communication passes between them that I am choosing not to interpret.
“Right,” says Tam, very carefully. “So if I went back to the cabin now and had a look…”
“You’d see the results of a hard day’s work,” I say.
Tam nods slowly. “Because the thing is, Rory, I was in the cabin this morning when you got up, and.” He pauses. “It looked exactly the same.”
I meet his gaze with the steady, unblinking confidence of a man who has never told a lie in his life. “Aye,” I say. “You just can’t see the nuances.”
There is a silence.
It is a very specific kind of silence. The silence of two people confronted with a statement so magnificently committed and so thoroughly absurd that they cannot locate a reasonable response to it.
Dazza makes a sound that is not quite a word.
Tam looks at me with an expression that lives somewhere between baffled and perplexed, and is leaning heavily towards bemused.
“The nuances,” Tam repeats.
“Of bunk organization,” I clarify helpfully. “It’s quite a specialist area.”
“Is it?”
“Very much so. You wouldn’t necessarily notice from the outside. It’s more of an internal system.”
Dazza puts his hand over his mouth. His shoulders are doing something. I press on with the focused determination of a man who has started something and is going to finish it with his head held high.
“The key is the spatial logic,” I say. “Everything looks the same, but now it makes sense in a way it didn’t before. Fundamentally reorganised at a structural level. Very satisfying once you get there.”
Tam stares at me for a long moment.
Then he presses his lips together very firmly. Then he looks at the ceiling. Then he says, in a slightly strangled voice, “Right. Spatial logic. Got it.”
“Good,” I say pleasantly.
We walk on. Dazza is making a sound like a man trying very hard not to do something and not entirely succeeding.
The conversation drifts, the way it always does with Tam and Dazza, towards the football and the gray beef thing and whether Grigor’s mysterious tinned goods constitute a health hazard.
I contribute at the appropriate moments.
I am easy and present and completely normal.
Nobody asks any more questions about the bunk. Whether this is because they believe me, or because the explanation I provided was so bewildering that they cannot figure out how to follow it up, which is considerably more likely, the effect is the same. The subject is closed. I am safe.
Somewhere across the platform, Mac is doing his morning walkabout.
I cannot see him from here but I know the pattern of it, I have learned the rhythms of this rig the way you learn the rhythms of a place you love, and I know approximately where he will be and what he will be doing and I know that at some point this afternoon our paths will cross in a professional capacity and I will call him boss out loud and mean Mac in my head and nobody will know.
Nobody will know except me and Mac.
I tuck that away alongside everything else in the warm private box and walk on.
I am humming again.
This time I don’t stop.