Page 19 of Dirty Rotten Love

Or I try to.

What actually happens is that my brain serves up another vivid flash of last night at exactly the wrong moment, my hands do something slightly wrong, and the valve I am supposed to be tightening does something it is absolutely not supposed to do.

There is a sound. A pressurized, enthusiastic, extremely final kind of sound.

And then there is oil. Everywhere. All at once. A spectacular, thorough, total drenching that hits me directly in the face and chest and keeps going with what I can only describe as personal investment. It is cold. It is extremely comprehensive. It covers everything.

My hand remembers my training, and it acts. It moves independently of my brain, and the disaster is diverted, and the spray of crude oil stops.

There is a moment of complete silence on level three.

I stand there. I am wearing oil. I am wearing a very great deal of oil. My goggles, which I am at least wearing correctly and which MacLeod will be relieved about, are the only part of my face that is not entirely coated. I look, I imagine, absolutely extraordinary.

Whelan makes a sound that is not quite a word.

“Right,” I say, to nobody in particular. My voice comes out remarkably steady given the circumstances.

Boots on the floor. Fast, purposeful, familiar. My stomach does something involuntary that has nothing to do with being covered in oil. MacLeod arrives at my shoulder with the efficiency of a man who has seen this happen before and has a procedure for it and the procedure does not involve panic.

He looks at me. I look at him. There is a lot of oil between us, metaphorically speaking, as well as literally. Actually, I don’t think there is such a thing as a metaphor about oil, so I guess the oil is only between us literally.

I brace myself for the bollocking of a lifetime. He is going to flay me alive with words, and that’s fine, I deserve it. However, the knowledge that I thoroughly deserve this, does nothing to stop something inside me curling up and withering.

“Are you hurt?” he says.

“No,” I say, while blinking in shock. That’s a strange way to start verbally tearing chunks out of someone.

He looks me over anyway, quick and thorough, checking for anything I might have missed. Then he looks at the valve.

“Talk me through what happened,” he says, in the voice he uses for teaching rather than bollocking. They are different voices. I have learned to tell them apart.

I talk him through it. Accurately and completely, including the part where my concentration slipped, though I leave out the reason why because some information is not relevant to a safety debrief. MacLeod listens without interrupting.

“So you understand what you should have done differently?” he says, when I’ve finished.

“Aye.”

He looks at me for a moment longer. There is something in his expression that I cannot read and am absolutely not going to try to read, while I am standing here covered in oil in front of Whelan and whoever else has gathered at a respectful distance to witness this.

He nods once. Then he walks away.

Nobody moves for a second.

Then Dazza, who has appeared from somewhere and absolutely should not be on level three right now, lets out a low whistle.

“Right,” he says, with great feeling. “Someone find out MacLeod’s schedule. I need to let him pound my ass.”

The laughter that goes up is the helpless kind, the kind that happens when a group of people have been holding something in for too long and it finally finds a way out. Even Whelan, who is generally quite serious, loses it entirely. I can hear it echoing off the metal walls of level three, and I am grinning too, I can feel it, wide and uncontrollable and very much present on my oil-covered face.

I am also blushing. Comprehensively and extensively blushing, the kind that starts at the neck and goes everywhere. I am deeply, profoundly grateful that I am covered in oil and nobody can tell.

Nobody can tell.

I cling to this.

By the time lunch comes around I am showered and changed and approximately human again, and I am also absolutely ravenous in the way that only happens when you’ve missed breakfast and spent the morning doing physical work and also had, by any objective measure, quite an eventful night. I pile my tray with everything available, including the gray beef thing, which tells you everything you need to know about how hungry I am, and I find a corner table and I sit down and I start eating with the focused dedication of a man with a mission.

I am three bites in when a tray clanks down on my table.