Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Rory
The mess hall is loud tonight in the best possible way.
Someone has connected a phone to the small speaker that lives on the shelf between the sauce bottles and the napkin holder, and it is playing something that Grigor has strong opinions about, which he is expressing at some volume while Tam argues back with the focused energy of a man who has been waiting for an excuse to argue about music all day.
Dazza has somehow acquired a second pudding and is eating it with the serenity of a man who has made his peace with all of his choices.
Whelan is doing something with a napkin that I think is supposed to be origami and is currently more of a small paper catastrophe.
Frasier is watching him and giving suggestions that don’t seem to be helping.
Brockie is at the end of the table, quiet as always, working his way through his dinner with the focused attention of someone who finds the act of eating genuinely requiring of concentration.
Spanner is next to him. Not crowding. Just there, the way he always is, calm and unhurried, occasionally adding something to the music argument that somehow settles it momentarily before Grigor and Tam find a new angle to disagree on.
I am in the middle of all of it and I am happy.
Genuinely, warmly, completely happy in the way that only happens when you are exactly where you are supposed to be with exactly the right people around you.
I have been on this rig for long enough now that it feels like somewhere I belong rather than somewhere I am visiting, and that feeling is one I want to hold onto with both hands.
I reach across Dazza for the salt. He angles his pudding away from me protectively. I wasn’t going to take his pudding. Probably.
Tam loses the music argument comprehensively and accepts defeat with enormous dignity, which means he changes the subject immediately and starts telling a story about something that happened on his last rotation that I have heard twice before and which is still very funny.
I laugh at the right parts. Dazza laughs at the wrong parts, which is also funny.
Grigor laughs at a completely different part with great enthusiasm and nobody knows why, but it doesn’t matter.
This is everything, I think. This right here is everything.
And then I look across the mess hall.
Mac is sitting alone at a table in the far corner.
He has a plate of food and a mug, and he is eating with the quiet, focused efficiency he applies to everything, and he is completely, utterly alone.
Not in the way that someone is alone when they have just sat down and are waiting for people to arrive.
In the way that someone is alone because that is simply the shape of their evening and has been for a long time.
The noise of the table continues around me. Tam’s story reaches its punchline. I laugh. The sound comes out right, and I don’t know how because something has happened in my chest that is making it difficult to feel the easy warmth of two seconds ago.
I look at Mac.
He is not looking at me. He is looking at his food, or past it, at something that isn’t really there, with an expression that is not the grim baseline and not the teaching voice and not the almost smile.
It is something quieter and more private than any of those.
The expression of a man who is used to his own company and has made peace with it, which is somehow worse than if he looked unhappy about it.
He has a grumpy face. I know this. I have catalogued this face extensively over the past few days.
The jaw set, the brow slightly furrowed, the default expression of a man who finds the world requiring and does not particularly feel the need to pretend otherwise.
Grumpy face, grumpy voice, grumpy eyes that miss nothing and give away less.
But he is lovely. That is the thing I cannot unknow now that I know it.
He is lovely in the way that things are lovely when they are true all the way through, not performed or constructed or maintained, just simply and straightforwardly real.
He is strict because he doesn’t want anyone to get hurt.
He gets quiet instead of loud because that is how he was made, not because he is cold.
He checked the weather forecast so I could see the Northern Lights.
He stood in a corridor and listened to me explain dogs wagging their tails and seemed to think I, Rory Gallacher, was imparting profound wisdom.
My mind abruptly conjures up other reasons Mac is wonderful, and suddenly I’m fighting a blush.
But my mind isn’t wrong. The words kind and generous lover were made for him.
He is patient with me and puts up with my chaos and nonsense, and when he kisses me, the world finally falls blessedly silent.
Basically, he is a teddy bear. An extremely grumpy, geographically imposing, professionally terrifying teddy bear, but a teddy bear nonetheless.
And he is sitting alone in the corner of the mess hall while Green Crew are loud and warm six tables away and I don’t know what to do with that.
I could invite him over. The thought arrives and immediately reveals itself as impossible in about seven different ways simultaneously.
I could walk over to that table and say come and sit with us and Mac would look at me with that expression, and Green Crew would go quiet in that way they always do when Mac arrives somewhere, and the whole warm, easy evening would recalibrate into something careful and managed.
Mac would sit at the end of the table being Mac, which means being quiet and precise and not laughing at the wrong moments because Mac doesn’t laugh at moments at all, and everyone would be on their best behavior and it would be awful for everyone including Mac, who would know it was awful and would leave, and then it would just be me sitting there having made everything worse for no reason.
So that’s not an option.
I could go over there. Sit with him. Just me and Mac in the corner of the mess hall with our mugs while Green Crew are loud and warm across the room.
That is technically possible. We eat lunch together sometimes.
That has happened. But dinner is different somehow, dinner feels more deliberate, and if I got up and crossed the mess hall and sat down at Mac’s table then the whole crew would see and notice and wonder.
And Tam would watch me with that expression of his, the one that means he is filing things away carefully, and I would have to explain myself later in the small cabin before lights out and I don’t have an explanation that would satisfy either of us.
So that’s not an option either.
I could do nothing. I could sit here with my pudding and my people and be warm and easy and normal and let Mac sit in his corner the way he always sits in his corner and accept that some things are just how they are and cannot be fixed by Rory Gallacher showing up with good intentions and no plan.
That is absolutely the sensible option, but it sits in my chest like a stone.
I know how he is. I know he knows how he is and how other people see him, and I’m pretty sure he has made his peace with it.
I know that the rig is the shape of his life and that he has chosen it deliberately and carefully and that this is fine and sustainable and completely his business and not mine. I know all of this.
The stone doesn’t move.
Dazza says something that makes Whelan inhale his drink. The resulting chaos takes up approximately forty-five seconds and involves a lot of napkins and some swearing. I contribute to the chaos at the appropriate level. I am present and easy and completely normal.
I glance back across the mess hall.
Mac is still there. Still alone. He has finished eating and is nursing his mug with both hands and looking at the middle distance and there is something about the stillness of him that makes my chest do a thing I cannot name and do not want to examine too closely right now in the middle of a table full of people.
At the end of the table, Brockie puts his fork down and says something quietly to Spanner that I don’t catch over the noise.
Spanner turns and looks at him properly, the way Spanner looks at things, with complete and unhurried attention, and says something back.
Brockie looks at his empty plate for a moment.
Then he looks up at Spanner and something in his face is fractionally less uncertain than it usually is, just a degree, just enough to notice if you are paying attention.
I am only half paying attention because Mac is across the room and I am trying not to look at him again and failing.
I look at him again.
And Mac looks up.
I don’t know why. There is no reason for it, no sound I made, nothing to draw his attention across a busy mess hall to one specific table.
He just looks up, the way you sometimes do when someone is looking at you even when you can’t see them, and his eyes find mine across the noise and the distance and the six tables between us.
I don’t look away. I should look away. I should pick up my fork or turn to Dazza or do any of the seventeen things available to me that would constitute looking away, but I don’t do any of them.
I just look back at Mac across the mess hall and feel the thing in my chest get bigger and more complicated and less possible to put in a box.
Mac doesn’t look away either.
It lasts maybe three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough that it is no longer accidental and not quite long enough that anyone at my table would notice. Just the two of us looking at each other across a loud, warm room, and something passing between us that I don’t have a name for yet.
Then Tam says my name, and I turn and the moment is gone.
I tell the next joke. I laugh at Dazza’s thing.
I respond to Frasier with something that makes Whelan snort.
I do all of this with the practiced ease of someone who has been performing warmth since he was seven years old and knows exactly how it is supposed to look, and it works, it always works, and tonight it costs me something it doesn’t usually cost me.
“You alright?” says Tam, eventually. Not the casual version. The other version, the one with the slightly different quality that means he is actually asking.
“Grand,” I say, and pick up my fork, and am completely normal for the rest of dinner.
I don’t look across the mess hall again.
I don’t need to. The image of Mac sitting alone in the corner with his mug and his middle distance is already somewhere it is not going to leave in a hurry, filed somewhere complicated and right next to everything else I am not examining.
I eat my pudding.
It doesn’t taste as sweet as it normally does.