Chapter 24
Chapter twenty-four
Rory
The mess hall door swings shut.
I stand where I am. The table with the cards and the beers and Dazza’s stricken face is behind me and the door is in front of me and Mac is on the other side of it, walking away, walking away the way he always walks, with that quiet, purposeful dignity, taking things quietly, and I cannot move.
Dazza says my name. I don’t hear it properly. It arrives muffled and distant, like something coming through water.
I walk out.
I don’t decide to walk out. My feet do it the same way they ran to find Mac a few minutes ago, before the world ended, when I was a different person with a different future and a different everything.
They just move and I follow them and the corridor closes around me and I am walking and I don’t know where I am going and it doesn’t matter because the one place I want to be is with Mac and he just walked away from me.
So nowhere is going to be better than anywhere else right now, and at least moving feels like doing something.
I walk the rig.
I know this rig. I have learned its rhythms and its geography over weeks of being here and loving it and I know every corridor and every staircase and every deck, and I walk all of it, or as much of it as I can without ending up somewhere I need to explain my presence.
I walk and I breathe and I try to find the thing inside me that always knows what to do, the thing that has never once in twenty-two years let me down, the performing happy, the grin, the joke, the next thing, and it is not there.
It is not there.
The rig looks different. That is the thing I cannot get over.
The same corridors, the same gray metal, the same hum underneath everything, and it looks completely different, like a place I don’t know, like somewhere I arrived today and have never been before.
I loved it here. I have been saying that since day one and meaning it completely, and now I am walking through it and it feels cold and enormous and hostile in a way it has never felt before.
Mac did that. Not on purpose. Just by being the thing that made it warm and then leaving.
I don’t know what to do.
I have always known what to do. This is the fundamental truth of Rory Gallacher, the thing underneath all the chaos and the performance, the thing that keeps me moving when everything else is uncertain.
I always know what to do next. Not the right thing necessarily, not the sensible thing, but something, always something, the next joke or the next dare or the next door to knock on.
I don’t know what to do.
I take a staircase without deciding to, and I am on the upper deck and then I am through the door, and the cold hits me like a wall, and I am on the helipad, and I stop.
The Northern Lights are out.
The same lights. The same sky. The same impossible green shifting across the darkness like someone is moving something vast and slow behind the world.
They were here the first time and they are here now and the coincidence of it is so cruel and so complete that I make a sound I didn’t know I was going to make, something that is not quite a word, and have to stand very still for a moment until I can breathe properly.
I remember his hand on my face.
I remember the jumper, the ancient soft jumper, and holding onto it while the lights moved overhead and the world went quiet in a way it never goes quiet for me, and the kiss that started as an accident and became the least accidental thing I have ever done.
I remember saying I could kiss you for this and meaning the lights and also not meaning the lights at all, not really, not if I am being honest in the way I have been too slow to be honest with myself.
I meant him. I meant Mac standing in the cold with his face tipped up to the sky, checking the forecast so I wouldn’t miss it, remembering something I said on day one because he was already paying attention to me before I was paying attention to myself.
The lights move. Green and slow and completely indifferent.
I don’t know what to do, and then I do know, suddenly and completely, the way I always know things when they finally come, and I am moving before the thought has fully finished.
I have to try.
That’s all. I don’t know if it will work and I don’t know what I will say and I don’t have a plan, I never have a plan, but I have to try because not trying is not who I am and has never been who I am and whatever else is true tonight that is still true.
I take the stairs fast, one hand on the railing. Mac’s corridor. Mac’s door.
I try the handle. It’s locked.
I knock.
The sound of it echoes and then disappears into silence.
The corridor is very cold. It’s little more than a few sheets of metal between the rig and the endless North Sea and the night.
I didn’t bring a jacket when I left the mess hall and I am in just my long-sleeved teeshirt, and the cold is finding all the same gaps it always finds, the collar and the sleeve and the thin places, and I don’t move.
“Mac.” My voice comes out strange. Smaller than usual. “It’s me.”
Silence.
I knock again. Harder this time, not angry, just desperate, the knock of someone who needs the door to open the way you need air, completely and urgently and without any ability to consider alternatives.
“Mac, please.” The please costs me something. I am not a person who pleads. I have never in my life stood in a corridor and pleaded with a closed door, and the word comes out unvarnished and raw and entirely true. “Please. Just. Let me in.”
Silence.
He is in there. I know he is in there the way I know things I have no logical basis for knowing, the way I know when Tam is awake in the bunk below me even when he is completely still, some sense that has nothing to do with sound or sight.
He is in there and he is not going to open the door and I knew this before I knocked, and I knocked anyway because what else was I going to do.
“I’m sorry,” I say to the door, to the silence, to Mac sitting in the dark on the other side of it if that is where he is.
My voice is doing something I cannot control.
“I’m really sorry.” I stop. The corridor is very cold and very quiet, and the words that were so clear and so ready when I was running here have gone somewhere I cannot reach them. “I never meant to hurt you, Mac.”
Silence.
I lean my forehead against the door. The metal is cold. I press my forehead against it anyway because it is there, and it is solid and I need something to be solid right now.
I knock one more time. Quiet. Almost gentle.
“Please,” I say again, very softly.
Nothing.
I stand in the corridor with my forehead against the cold door, and I do not know how long I stand there. Long enough that the cold has worked its way properly in, through the shirt and through everything else, finding all the places that were already cold and making them colder.
“Rory.”
I turn around.
Spanner is at the end of the corridor. He is in his off duty clothes, a mug in each hand, and he is looking at me with that expression of his, the one that is almost impossible to read until suddenly it isn’t, and right now it is not impossible to read at all.
It is very simple and very clear and it is the expression of a man who has seen something and come anyway, no questions, no fuss, just come.
He holds up one of the mugs.
I look at it. I look at him. The corridor is very cold and the door behind me is very silent and I have nothing left, not a single performing happy in reserve, not one grin or deflection or spatial logic of bunk organization, nothing.
I walk to Spanner and he turns and I follow him, and he doesn’t say a word.
His cabin, that he shares with Brockie, is small and warm, the same size as every other cabin on this rig, and it is incredibly neat in a way that somehow does not surprise me at all.
He sits me down on the chair by the desk and puts the mug in my hands and stands nearby, not crowding, just there, the way he is always just there.
The tea is hot. I wrap both hands around the mug and stare at it.
Spanner says nothing. He doesn’t ask what happened or offer an opinion or suggest a course of action.
He is simply present in the way that some people know how to be present, completely and without agenda, and the silence he makes is a different quality of silence from the one in the corridor, warm rather than cold, held rather than empty.
I don’t know how it happens. One moment I am staring at the tea and the next something in my chest breaks open, quietly and completely, and I am crying.
Not normal crying. Not the kind you do when something is sad and tears seem appropriate. The other kind, the kind that comes from somewhere much further down, the kind I have not done since I was small.
Spanner does not move. He does not pat my shoulder or tell me it will be alright or do any of the things people do when someone cries in front of them.
He stays where he is, calm and unhurried, his presence filling the small warm cabin like something steady and unmovable, and it is exactly right, it is the only thing that could possibly be right, and I cry until there is nothing left to cry and then I sit with the cold tea in my hands and breathe.
Spanner nudges a box of tissues towards me. I yank out a couple and scrub at my face. Then I sit listlessly.
Eventually, Spanner takes my mug and puts it in the small sink and refills it from the kettle without asking.
He hands it back.
I take it.
I don’t know what else to do.