Page 57 of Dirty Rotten Love

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.

Chapter twenty-five

Mac

The barometer has been dropping since yesterday.

I know this the way I know everything about this rig, precisely and without having to check. Because knowledge lives in my body after twenty years rather than just in my head. I felt it in the quality of the wind this morning, in the particular restlessness of the water, in the way the sky sat low and gray and purposeful in a way that is different from its usual low, gray indifference. Something is coming. Something significant.

I am glad of it.

This is not something I would say out loud. It would alarm people, and alarming people unnecessarily is counterproductive, and there is nothing unnecessary about the amount of work that a significant weather event requires. The preparations alone will consume the next several hours completely and thoroughly, every system checked and double-checked, every loose thing secured, every procedure reviewed and confirmed. There will be no gaps. No spaces between one task and the next where things can get in.

This is what I need. I have needed it since Wednesday.

I have been MacLeod since Wednesday. This is not a small thing. Being MacLeod requires effort in the way that most people do not understand because most people have never had to consciously construct the version of themselves that functions. I have been doing it for nine years and I am very good at it and it costs me something every day and this week it has cost me considerably more than usual because the raw material underneath MacLeod is in worse shape than it has been in a long time.

But the barometer is dropping, and there is work to do and work is the thing that has always saved me when nothing else could.

I start with the upper deck inspection. Wind speed is increasing and the forecasts are confirming what the rig already knows, that we are looking at something serious by tomorrow evening at the latest, possibly sooner. I move through the checks with the focused efficiency of a man who has done this many times and knows exactly what he is looking for and exactly what needs to be done when he finds it.

This is the thing about procedure. It does not care how you are. It does not ask questions or require explanations, or make assessments about the state of your interior life. It simply requires to be followed, correctly and completely, and in return it gives you something to do with your hands and your mind and the hours of the day that would otherwise be very long indeed.

I have been grateful for procedure before. I am more grateful for it this week than I can remember being for anything in a long time.

The crew are good. They read the weather the way all experienced offshore workers do, with a pragmatic respect that has nothing romantic about it, and they are already moving with the slightly heightened awareness that comes before a serious storm, conversations more focused, movements more deliberate. I do my walkabout and issue the preliminary instructions, and everything moves the way it is supposed to move, and I am in the middle of it and functioning and this is enough.

It has to be enough.

I am on the mid deck checking the secondary securing when I see him.

Rory is on the far side of the platform with Whelan, working through the equipment checks, and I see him before I mean to, the way I always see him before I mean to, some peripheral awareness that has been calibrated to him since approximately day five, and that I have not been able to recalibrate no matter how much I would like to.

I look away immediately.

Not immediately enough.

In the half second before I look away, I see that he is working carefully and correctly, the way he always works, the competence that he cannot see in himself evident in every movement, even from this distance. I see that he has not slept. I can tell from here, from the set of his shoulders and the particular quality of stillness he has when he is not performing, which he is not performing right now, not even slightly.