Lexi
Lexi
“You don’t have to call me a culinary genius,” Zeke says from behind me, “but I have just conjured up an absolutely banging dinner from fossilized tins.”
I am standing in a pool of seawater and cracked old mussel shells, staring out at the waves between the metalwork on this side of the rig as he picks his way across to me. Seabirds swoop and caw above him—it’s clear they’ve colonized this place, and they’re not sure about the visitors. Zeke’s holding two plates on one arm, like a waiter, and two glass bottles of Coke between the fingers of the other hand. The steam rising from the food swirls away on the wind. He’s wearing someone else’s faded jeans with a leather belt; he’s shorn the jeans to finish just above his boots and found a moss-green knitted jumper that makes him look like he might distill whisky in the Scottish highlands. Only Zeke could try out oil-rig chic and make it happen.
He’s moving more gingerly—he thinks I’ve not noticed, but I know his wound is hurting. I try not to let the worry show on my face.
“You got the hob working?”
“Yep—whichever generator powers the kitchen seems to still have some juice. Not sure how long we’ll have it, but…let’s make the most.”
When he’s close enough, I peer at the contents of the plates, stomach tightening with hunger. It’s some sort of stew—it smells strongly of Bisto gravy, which makes me nostalgic for home, and it has those little round boiled potatoes in that my grandma used to eat for her dinner.
“This looks…”
“It tastes better than it looks, I promise you.”
“I was going to say it looks fantastic.”
Zeke smiles, already tucking in, Coke bottle now balanced on a giant concrete bollard to his left. There are so many giant things around here. After the smallness of the boat, this rig feels oversized and garish, with yellow and red lines painted on the concrete and blaring instructions laminated on walls. The machinery all around us is caked in sea salt, rust and bird poo; it’s like standing in a metalwork graveyard.
I look back out at the water, trying a forkful of the stew. It’s delicious—hot, laced with salt, and just the right sort of wholesome.
“So. What now?” Zeke asks.
“Now…”
I stir through my plate, noticing chopped green beans, wondering if they really can survive this long, even tinned. We can’t figure out when this place was abandoned, but it feels like a time warp. Even the fonts on the signs look dated, and the curtains in the bedrooms are all a shade of nineties mauve.
“Do we hit the radio room door again? Try to knock it down?” I suggest.
“It’s solid metal, Lexi,” Zeke says, his voice gentle. “I don’t know what more we can do.”
I clench my jaw. “Then we look for clues as to where we are. There might be a map somewhere with coordinates.”
Zeke looks pensive, still chewing. “Do you know what to do with coordinates?”
“No,” I admit, looking back out to the water. It’s so different from all the way up here on the rig platform—I’m used to the horizon sitting close to us, a warm blue line across the windows of the houseboat, but suddenly we can see so much more water. The sky blends into the sea in the distance, as if someone smoothed a thumb along it.
I glance up at the machinery that reaches into the sky. The rig has several cranes, painted a battered red and white. There’s a tower, too, a sort of crisscross metalwork structure to the right of us. Inside it there are thick, rusty cables leading down toward the water below. I squint, lifting a hand to block the glare of the low sun. It’s hard to see what’s at the top of the tower, but I think there’s a ladder running up its side.
“If we got higher…” I take a shaky breath. “If we got higher, we could see more.”
Zeke nods. “Maybe see boats, or even land…”
I keep my gaze fixed to that tower, stark and steely against the sky. When I close my eyes for a moment, I can still see its shape, inverted, white against darkness.
I hate heights. As a kid, I wouldn’t even go up on the monkey bars; if a building has more than three stories, I avoid the view from the windows.
“Only one of us should go,” I say. “It’ll be dangerous. I’ll…” The sentence sticks to my tongue.
I want to say I’ll go. I’m a woman who steps up when things are hard or a decision needs to be made—that’s who I want to be. And Zeke’s injury has clearly worsened since we got here. The last thing he needs is to climb a gigantic ladder. But I am starting to sweat at the very thought of going up that tower.
“It has to be me that goes,” he says. “Your body’s been through so much today. No way am I letting you do that.”
I drag my gaze away from the ladder and watch Zeke knock back his Coke, throat working, eyes closed against the bright sky.
He’s a beautiful man. Thoughtful and kind, with just a dash of darkness to him. When I’m with him, I feel different: like I’m worth what I used to think I was worth. Like I’m someone . That’s the gift he’s given me out here, and despite every horror we’ve been through, I feel genuinely lucky to have had this time with him. That’s how special he is.
I don’t want Zeke going up that tower. Getting onto the rig was hard enough for him. I know his wound is hurting, and I live in constant terror of it opening up again, or worse, getting infected.
“I’ll go,” I manage.
“Lexi, that’s crazy, you can’t—”
And then I say the one thing that I know will make him back off.
“Don’t tell me I can’t. I want to do it.”
To begin with, the ladder is nice and sturdy, with wide rungs covered in chipped yellow paint. It’s not too badly rusted—I feel safe. In a deeply unsafe sort of way, of course.
I’m out of breath by the time I reach the platform that leads to the next ladder. It’s broad, with thick metal railings. This is OK , I think, gripping the rail tightly as I pick my way across to the body of the tower, the birds cawing their protest around me. I’m doing OK .
“All right, Lexi?”
Zeke’s voice is distant now. I glance downward, then let out a quiet, terrified oh as I realize how high above the main platform I am already. Zeke looks minuscule down there, his upturned face no bigger than a thumbnail.
“Oh, God,” I say, gripping the railing with both hands as my vision starts to swim and the ground morphs below me.
This next ladder is not as sturdy. It’s thinner, with a sparing curved framework around it, a pretty cursory nod to safety. I wonder if the people who’d normally climb this tower would be in harnesses, secured with ropes. I’ve got nothing, just my bare palms on the metal, my black boots on the rungs.
“You OK?” Zeke calls.
I almost wish he knew how afraid I am of heights. I wish I weren’t doing this. For a traitorous second, I decide I don’t care about Zeke at all, and I’d rather he were going up this ladder than me.
“I’m OK,” I shout down. “I can do this.”
I keep saying it as I get set on the first rung. It feels so flimsy, and the wind can reach every part of me as I climb now, with only the caging around the ladder and the sparse structure of the tower to shelter me. It tugs at my clothes, making my jumper buffet my body.
“I can do this,” I say.
Up another few rungs, and another. The sea unfurls beneath me; I can hear it, but all I can see is metal and sky. My thigh muscles are beginning to burn, my palms getting sore.
“Five more,” I say to myself. “You can do five more rungs, can’t you?”
My foot slips. It’s the tiniest movement, a miscalculation by no more than a centimeter, and I find my footing within seconds, but my stomach clenches and my heart hammers and suddenly I am too aware of it all: the open sky at my back, the smallness of Zeke’s voice, the gap between living and dying.
I lean my forehead on the ladder. It burns cold against my skin, an icy brand running from my eyebrow to my cheekbone. As my heart rate slowly steadies, I tilt my head so I can glance out at the horizon. I am so high. Then I look up at the triangle of the tower above me, and it’s clear there’s still so, so much further to go.
I don’t know whether I can see Zeke—I’m too afraid to look down. There is a constant butterfly-lightness in my stomach, and my breath doesn’t seem to make it to my lungs. It just flutters in and out of my mouth.
I go higher. Higher. For a while I sing to myself to pass the time, “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana , and I think about dancing drunk on the deck with Zeke. We knew we were in danger then, but it was different—with hindsight, it was a less pressing sort of danger. We might die, but not imminently . Whereas right now…
It gets windier the higher I go, the breeze buffeting my ears with the sound you hear if you crack a window in the car on the motorway. I look up: I don’t think I’m even close to halfway.
My foot slips again. Properly this time, the result of tired legs and endless repetitive motion. I jolt forward and whack my nose on a rung of the ladder. Pain blooms. I cry out, clinging on, and suddenly my breath isn’t just fluttering in my mouth, it’s catching helplessly on the wind, too fast, out of control. I’m going to die , I think, and the moment I’ve let the thought in, it floods through me. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.
The pain in my nose has made my eyes water, and the tears on my cheeks seem to set something off—I’m crying in earnest now.
“Oh my God. I’m going to die.” I say it out loud and it gets truer, and I’m staring down now; I couldn’t resist, because the fear said, Go on, just check, just once .
The rig platform looks like a child’s toy down below me. I can’t see Zeke, just a lacework of machinery and swathes of color below it: rusty red, gray concrete, the speckling blackness of all those mussel shells. Bird poo forms vivid green tie-dyed patches on the rig floor, spread and reshaped by the glinting puddles.
It swims, shifts, like a reflection in water. I can see the edges of the rig—that’s how high I am. The full width of it lies below me, and then sea. Vomit rises in my throat. I tilt my chin up and force myself to look at the top of the tower, its apex black against the sky.
I can’t go up any more. I just can’t. I shift one trembling foot, planning to climb down, but I don’t know that motion; I don’t know the distance to the rung below—I only know up, up, up.
I can’t go down. I can’t go up. I’m stuck here. The panic is all-engulfing; it takes me under. I cling and I sob, useless, in an absolute frenzy of terror. Sweat runs down my back and tears drip from my chin, spiraling downward into the tiny bird’s-eye landscape below me.
“Lexi, you’re OK.”
I inhale sharply at the sound of Zeke’s voice.
“Lexi? Listen to me. I’m right below you. OK?”
“ Why? ” I choke out. I’m angry, because why have I done all this if he was just going to come up anyway and risk himself? But I’m relieved, too, because thank God, thank God, I’m not alone.
“You telling me you’d let me enjoy the view up here all on my own, if the roles were reversed?”
“Zeke,” I say, shoulders shaking as I sob, “I can’t do this.”
“Course you can.” He sounds so calm. “You’re the person who threw herself into the ocean half-concussed to get us here. The person who carried an injured seagull in a shoebox from the boat to the rig because you didn’t want him to get lonely.”
“ You didn’t want him to get lonely,” I manage, my words catching on a sob halfway. “I said leave him in the fucking boat.”
“You said that, but then there he was in the mess room when I came back out with dinner,” Zeke says, with a smile in his voice.
“I was just keeping busy while you cooked,” I say, voice thick.
“Uh-huh. Of course.”
He sounds as though he’s just below me, but I can’t possibly look down—my gaze is fixed on a patch of white sky. While I’m looking into nothing, then I can almost imagine I’m not here.
“Zeke…”
“Lexi.”
“I can’t.”
“Of course you can.”
“I can’t.”
“Take a breath. You’ve done amazingly. We’re almost at the top.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” I sob. “It’s all for nothing if you rip open your stitches or fall off and die, you selfless moron.”
“Can you look at me?”
“You want me to look down?”
“Only at me. Not all the way down. I’m right below you. Look, here, I’m going to touch your leg.”
“Oh my God, don’t.”
He already has, just a gentle, firm hand on the back of my left calf, where my boot meets my jeans. I shudder with sobs, but that hand, it helps.
“You should…You need to put both your hands on the ladder!”
“Apparently not, actually,” Zeke says, as he rubs soft, reassuring circles on my calf with his thumb.
I focus on the place where our skin touches. My sobs are ebbing a little. Maybe I’m just running out of tears.
“What can I do?” he says.
“Just stay,” I whisper. “For a moment. Just don’t…don’t leave.”
He keeps touching me. He stays. I’m calming slightly with each assured swipe of his thumb.
“We can head down now,” Zeke says after a while, as my breath slowly steadies. “There’s a pretty sensational view from where we are, and I don’t know about you, but I’m just seeing a lot of sea.”
With a deep breath, I move my gaze away from that patch of sky. My eyes are aching, dry from the wind and sore from the tears, and it takes a second to focus on the horizon. My view is bisected by a cable, thick as a tree branch and edged with the silver of the ladder. Zeke’s right. It’s just endless, breathtaking ocean.
Zeke’s thumb is still resting on the skin of my calf, beneath my jeans. I feel an acute, almost painful desire to be held, and I make a vow that if I get off this tower alive, I am going to kiss the man who climbed up here to tell me I’m amazing, rules be damned.
“Lexi?” he says. “What do you want to do?”
I grip the ladder tightly. Zeke’s right: I have done so much today, and all things that I never thought were possible for someone like me. I’m a tiny speck in a giant ocean right now, but I don’t feel small.
“Let’s keep going,” I find myself saying. “We’ll see more from the top.”