Chapter 22
Chapter twenty-two
Rory
My mum loves to chat on a Wednesday.
She always calls people on a Wednesday, she has done so my entire life.
Wednesday being the day she gets home from her shift at the supermarket early enough to have a proper conversation before she has to think about dinner.
I know this the way I know all the rhythms of her, the way I know which mug she uses in the morning and which side of the sofa is hers and the specific sound of her key in the door.
She is the most constant thing in my life, and I love her with a completeness that I have never quite managed to put into words, so I don’t try.
It hurts to be one of the people on the end of the phone, instead of at home, listening to her natter away to aunties and uncles and friends. But it is what it is, and I’ll be home soon.
I am in the small alcove off the main corridor, the one with the payphone that I can now operate without assistance, which feels like genuine personal growth, and the noticeboard that still hasn’t been updated, and I have been on the phone for twenty minutes and my face hurts from smiling.
She tells me about the neighbor’s cat, which has done something either terrible or magnificent, depending on whose account you believe.
She tells me about her friend at work who is getting married for the third time, delivering this information with the specific brand of affectionate scepticism that is one of her great gifts.
She asks about the food, I tell her about the gray beef thing, she makes a noise that suggests she would like to have words with whoever is responsible for it.
It is ordinary and warm and exactly what I needed without knowing I needed it.
“You sound different,” she says after a while.
“Do I?”
“Happy,” she says. “But a different kind of happy. Not your pretend happy. Your actual happy.”
I think about what to say to that. My mum has always been able to tell the difference between my performing happy and my actual happy, has been able to tell since I was seven years old, which is slightly alarming when I think about it too hard.
“I am happy,” I say. “I love it here.”
“I know you do.” A pause, the comfortable kind. “Are you eating enough?”
“I’m eating constantly. It’s one of the only things to do.”
“Good.” Another pause. “Is there anything else going on?”
I think about Mac. I think about the tender, sweet night that was different in ways I am still not looking at directly. I think about the way the world goes quiet when he kisses me and how that is, when I examine it, the most extraordinary thing anyone has ever done for me without trying.
“Not really,” I say.
My mum makes a noise that means she doesn’t believe me but is not going to push, which is one of her other great gifts.
We talk for a little longer. She tells me about the boiler, which has developed a new sound on top of its existing sounds, a kind of percussive accompaniment that she has named Gerald.
I tell her I will sort it when I get home, which is true, I have been putting money aside specifically for the boiler and for several other things that need sorting and it is one of the quiet satisfactions of this rotation, knowing that I can.
“I should go,” she says eventually. “Dinner won’t make itself.”
“Aye, go on.”
“I’m always thinking about you, you know,” she says, in that matter-of-fact way she has, the way she says things that are enormous as if they are simply true, which they are, which is exactly the point. “Every day. Because I love you.”
“Love you too, Mum,” I say. “Talk soon.”
“Talk soon.”
I hang up.
I stand in the alcove with the receiver back in its cradle and the noticeboard in front of me and the rig humming underneath everything the way it always does, and I think about what she said.
I’m always thinking about you.
The way I always think about Mac.
Not in the way I tell myself I think about him, which is the way you think about something present and relevant and currently occupying your life. A practical kind of thinking, a this is a thing that is happening kind of thinking. Not like that.
Like the way my mum thinks about me. Underneath everything.
Constant. The first place my mind goes when it has a moment to go somewhere.
The thing I wanted to share when I saw the Northern Lights.
The name that surfaces when someone says something funny and I want to tell someone.
The person I think about when I wake up and when I fall asleep and in the spaces between everything else.
Always.
I’m always thinking about Mac.
The realization arrives not like a thunderclap but like a light coming on in a room that has been dark for a while, quiet and complete, and making everything suddenly visible.
All the boxes I have been closing and the lids that wouldn’t stay shut and the thing in my chest that has been getting less small and more warm since approximately day five and which I have been declining to name for weeks.
I love him.
I stand in the alcove and let the words exist in my head for a moment, plain and unqualified and enormous, and find that they are simply true. Not frightening. Not a crisis. Not something that needs a label or a category or any of the things I thought it would need if I ever looked at it directly.
Just true.
I am in love with Mac.
I am in love with Mac and he is on this rig and I need to tell him, right now, immediately, with the focused urgency of someone who has been waiting to say a thing without knowing they were waiting and cannot wait a single second longer.
I am out of the alcove and into the corridor before I have consciously decided to move.
My feet know where they are going. They have known for weeks.
I take the corridor and the stairs with the energy of a man who has somewhere to be and something very important waiting for him there, and I am grinning, I can feel it, wide and unstoppable and entirely real, my actual happy, the kind my mum can always tell.
My feet know where they are going. They have known for weeks. Mac’s corridor. Mac’s door. Same gray metal. Same handle.
But the room is empty. Nothing save for an incredibly neatly made bed. That’s fine. At this time of day, when he is off duty, there is only one other place he can be.
The mess hall.
I dash along the corridor in record time. Some small voice inside my head questions if I should slow down, think things through. But I’ve always ignored that voice, and I’m hardly going to start listening now when I’m in love and I need to tell the person I’m in love with.
I push the door of the mess hall open, and the warmth of it hits me, and I am already scanning for Mac, already have his name somewhere near my lips, but I see Dazza first.
Dazza is sitting at the nearest table with Whelan and Frasier, and there are cards on the table and beers and the remnants of a normal evening, and Dazza is looking at me with an expression that stops me in the doorway.
I know that expression. I have known Dazza for long enough now to know every version of his face and I have never seen this one before, this particular combination of stricken and guilty and sorry, the face of a man who has just watched something irreversible happen and knows it.
I follow his gaze.
Mac is standing at the far end of the mess hall near the serving hatch with a tray in his hands.
He must have slipped in quietly the way he sometimes does, alone the way he always is, just coming in for food at the end of a long day, and he has clearly been there long enough to hear whatever Dazza said because he is standing very still and his tray is tilting very slightly in his grip, the angle of a man whose hands have forgotten what they are doing, and he was staring at Dazza and now he is staring at me.
I have never seen Mac’s face look like this.
All the armor is gone. Every layer of it, the professional distance and the careful silence and the gruffness that I now know is not coldness, all of it stripped away in a single moment, and what is underneath is something so raw and so unguarded that it physically hurts to look at it.
The table between us is frozen. Whelan is not moving. Frasier is not moving. Even the rig seems to have gone quiet, the constant hum of it receding somehow, as if the world has taken a breath and is holding it.
I understand, with the horrible clarity of someone who reads rooms incredibly well, that something has happened in this room.
Something that has to do with me. Something that Dazza, brilliant, oblivious, utterly well-meaning Dazza, has said without thinking, the way he always says things without thinking, and which cannot be unsaid.
With the relentless inevitability of an approaching tsunami, my mind puts the puzzle pieces together.
Dazza, Whelen and Frasier were drinking and playing cards. The conversation turned to a different card game, a very eventful card game. None of them noticed that Mac had slipped quietly in.
Mac stares at me across the mess hall, and the hurt in his eyes is greater than any tsunami. Far more devastating. Way more immense.
“It was a dare?”
Mac’s voice is very quiet. It is always quiet, but this is a different quiet, a stripped bare quiet, the quiet of someone asking a question they already know the answer to and are asking anyway because some part of them needs to hear it said.
There is so much pain in it.
I feel it go through me like something physical, like the cold North Sea wind finding the gap between my collar and my neck, except it goes all the way in, all the way down, and does not stop.
My mouth opens. All the words are there, I love you, it started as a dare but it became everything, it became you, it became the Northern Lights and breakfast porridge in bed and dogs wagging their tails and the world going quiet when you kiss me. All of it is right there and none of it will come.
I nod.
It is the smallest movement I have ever made, and it costs me more than anything I have ever done.
Mac looks at me for one more moment. One long, quiet, completely unguarded moment in which I can see everything he has never shown anyone, everything he keeps behind the silence and the procedure and the careful distance, and it is devastating and it is mine and I am losing it in real time and there is nothing I can do.
He sets his tray down on the nearest surface with a precise, careful movement that is somehow the most heartbreaking thing I have ever witnessed.
And then he walks out.
No words. No door slam. No scene. Just Mac, walking out of the mess hall with quiet dignity.
The mess hall door swings shut behind him.
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I have ever heard.