Page 55 of Dirty Rotten Love

I do not cry.

I want to be clear about this in my own head, in the dark, where nobody is watching and nobody will ever know. I do not cry. I sit on the edge of the bunk and I hold the full weight of it without flinching, the dare and the kitchen and the note and the nine years and the particular cruelty of having the armor taken apart by someone who didn’t even know they were doing it. And I do not cry because I am MacLeod, and I take things quietly and I always have, and I will keep taking them quietly because it is the only way I know.

But I sit in the dark for a long time.

The rig hums. The North Sea does its thing. The world continues its comprehensive indifference.

At some point, I put my headphones on and I lie down. The volume is set to its highest level. The music is loud. It should be loud enough to drown out everything. The rig, the world, the sharp biting pain clawing at my heart.

It’s not enough.

I don’t sleep.

In the morning I will get up and I will run the rig and I will be MacLeod, which is what I have always been when everything else fell away. I am reliable and constant and sufficient.

Tonight I lie in the dark and I let myself know, just once, just tonight, that sufficient is not the same as enough, and has never been, and never will be, and I have known this for nine years and kept going anyway because what else is there. Knowing you are unlovable is far too heavy a truth to sit with.

But just tonight, I will sit with the truth.

Tomorrow I will be fine. Tomorrow I will pack the truth away. Tomorrow I will put the armor back on.

I will make it be fine. I always do.

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.