Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Mac
Iam almost past the group when I hear it.
Laughter. Easy and warm, the specific laughter of people relaxing after a period of attention, the way Green Crew always loosens once I have moved on.
I know this laugh. I have been hearing this laugh, or versions of it, my entire life.
The laugh that starts up the moment you are far enough away that they think you cannot hear it.
I keep walking.
I should be used to it by now. I am thirty-eight years old, and I know what I am and how I come across, and I have made my peace with it, or I have made something that functions like peace with it, which is usually sufficient.
The precise way I do things. The silence.
The difficulty with small talk and the way it reads as coldness, even when it isn’t.
I know all of this about myself and I have accepted it the way you accept a weather pattern, not happily exactly, but practically, because there is nothing to be done about it and complaining takes energy you need for other things.
It still stings.
I hate that it still stings. I have been telling myself for at least twenty years that it shouldn’t, that I am past caring what people think and most of the time this is true, most of the time I am past it, but then today, I heard the laugh and something caught, somewhere small and old, and now I am eighteen again and twenty-nine again and every age in between, walking away from the sound of people being easier with each other than they ever quite manage to be with me.
Daniel used to do it. The thought arrives the way it always does, without warning, unwelcome, carrying the particular weight that nine years has not fully diminished.
Daniel and Fraser, my husband and my best friend, who used to sit at the kitchen table and laugh at the way I organized the spice rack and the way I needed the television volume on an even number and the way I prepared for social events like they were operational procedures.
They’d laugh and call it harmless banter, it’s just a joke, you’re so serious, can’t you take a joke?
I took the jokes. I always took the jokes. I am very good at taking things quietly.
I keep walking.
I am on the upper observation deck before I fully register that I have come here, drawn by the light and the habit of twenty years and the need to stand somewhere high and look at something vast and be reminded that the things that sting are small against the scale of the water.
The North Sea obliges, as it always does. Gray and immense and entirely indifferent.
There is a particular quality to the light on the North Sea in the late afternoon.
I have been watching it for twenty years, and I have never fully gotten used to it.
The way it goes low and flat and turns everything silver at the edges, the way the water holds it differently than any other water I have seen, the way the rig itself looks almost beautiful in it if you catch it at the right angle.
I am not a sentimental man. I know this about myself the way I know most things about myself, clearly and without fuss.
But this light, at this hour, on this particular stretch of the North Sea, does something to me that I have never been able to prevent.
It’s beautiful, but today it’s not holding my full attention. I am standing in the late afternoon light, not watching the sea, but watching Green Crew work on the mid deck below.
Watching Rory work, if I am being precise about it. Which I am, always, even when I would prefer not to be.
He is on the mid deck with Tam and Whelan doing the secondary valve checks, and he moves through the work with an ease that he did not have on day one and has been building steadily ever since, the ease of someone who has learned a thing properly rather than just learned to perform it.
His documentation will be immaculate. I know this not because I just inspected his work, but because I have checked enough times to know the pattern of him, the way his hands work, the way he reads a gauge, the particular focused expression he gets when he is doing something that requires care.
He has no idea that he is good at this.
That is the thing that gets me, if I am being honest with myself, which I try to be in the late afternoon light when there is nobody watching.
He performs confidence the way other people perform modesty, loudly and constantly, and underneath it he has no idea that he is actually capable.
That the thing he came out here terrified of being found out as, being not enough, being not clever enough or not skilled enough or not worthy of the money and the opportunity, is not a thing that exists.
He is good at this job. He has been good at this job since approximately day eight and he will be better at it by the end of this rotation and better still by the end of the next one, and he will never quite believe it no matter how many times someone tells him.
I told him he wasn’t stupid, and he said, I’m really not clever though, in that matter of fact way, just a fact, no self-pity, and I had to look away and find something to do with my hands.
Below me Rory says something to Tam and Tam laughs, the full one, the wheezing helpless kind, and even from up here I can see the quality of it, the genuine delighted surprise of a man who has been made to laugh rather than simply finding something amusing.
Rory does that. He makes people laugh in a way that is a gift rather than a performance, or rather it starts as a performance and somewhere in the giving of it becomes real, becomes actually and genuinely funny in a way that lands in the body rather than just the mind.
He is the warmest person I have ever met.
I say this to myself the way I say most things in the privacy of my own head, plainly and without qualification, because it is simply true.
I have met friendly people and gregarious people and people who are good at making others comfortable.
Rory is something different. Rory has warmth the way the sun has light, not as a quality he deploys but as a thing he simply is, and it lands on everyone around him whether they asked for it or not.
It landed on me.
I was not asking for it. I was specifically and deliberately not asking for it, I had not been asking for anything from anyone for nine years.
I had built something functional and sustainable and self-contained that did not require warmth from outside sources and was not vulnerable to the absence of it.
And then Rory Gallacher arrived on my rig, with his wonky smile and his three alarms and his implacable cheerful determination to belong here, and the warmth landed anyway.
I watch him move across the mid deck. He stops at a valve and crouches down and checks it with the careful thoroughness I taught him, and even from this distance I can see him doing it correctly, properly, the way it is supposed to be done, and something in my chest does what it always does when I watch him work, which is something warm and quiet and deeply inconvenient.
Below me, Whelan says something, and Rory stands up and the late afternoon light catches him from the side and he is laughing at something, head tipped back slightly, and the gray North Sea behind him.
The North Sea behind him.
I have stood on this rig for twenty years and watched this water in every mood it has, every season, every light.
It is the constant of my adult life, the thing that has been here through everything that changed and kept being here after, gray and vast and entirely indifferent to whatever was happening to me on top of it.
I chose it deliberately and I have never regretted it, and I love it in the uncomplicated way that you love something that has never let you down.
And Rory is standing in front of it in the late afternoon light, looking like he belongs there. The light is catching him from the side, and he is, against all reason and all sense, the most beautiful thing I have seen in twenty years of watching this water.
I let myself look. Just for a moment. Just the length of the light.
He belongs here. Not just on this rig but here, in the shape of things, in the space the North Sea makes when it is gray and the light goes silver and something that has been alone for a long time suddenly has company.
He fits in a way I cannot explain and have stopped trying to.
He is warm where I am not, and loud where I am quiet, and he explains things in terms of dogs wagging their tails and somehow it is exactly right and I have thought about it every day since he said it.
He belongs in the shape of the life I have built out of this water and this work and these long rotations.
Here, in the small cabin that has been just mine for longer than I can remember and that smells different now when I walk into it, warmer, more inhabited, as if the walls have noticed something I am still pretending not to.
The laughter has faded. The crew are working. Rory moves on from the valve and says something to Tam and claps him on the shoulder in that easy way he has, and moves on.
He does not know I am watching him.
He does not know that I heard the laughter and that it landed the way it always lands, in the same small old place, and that somehow knowing he was part of it hurts differently than it would have a month ago, carries a particular kind of weight that I was not expecting and am not equipped for.
He does not know any of it. He is twenty-two and warm and bright and he has half a rotation still to run and a whole life after it, and I am a chapter in that life and I know it, and knowing it has not stopped me from standing here on the upper deck watching him in the silver light and feeling the thing in my chest that I have completely run out of ways to talk myself out of.
I am not going to end it.
The admission sits in me the way the cold sits in the North Sea, all the way down, pervasive and complete. Not a decision. A discovery. The thing was already true, and I have simply stopped pretending otherwise because pretending has become more effort than I have to spare.
I will not end it. I will have whatever this is for however long it lasts, and when the rotation ends and Rory goes home to his mum’s house in Edinburgh, I will stand here in this light and watch this water and it will be enough because it will have to be enough because I am MacLeod and this is what I do, I make things be enough.
I have been making things be enough for a very long time and I am very good at it.
Rory will finish his rotation and go home, but he will come back for the next one, and I will be here, and that will be enough, I have decided that it will be enough, and if there is a voice somewhere underneath that decision that says it won’t be, that more has already happened here than enough can contain, I am not listening to it.
Not today.
Today I watch Rory work against the backdrop of the North Sea in the late afternoon light, and I let myself have it, all of it, the warmth and the want and the quiet devastating hope of it, for exactly as long as the light lasts.
The light holds for a little longer.
I let myself have it.