Page 9 of Dirty Rotten Love

“Right,” I say. “Obviously.”

“Obviously,” agrees the table, with slightly too much sincerity.

I look around at all of them. Eight faces in the low, warm light, bright with barely contained delight, waiting. The prickle at the back of my mind gets a little stronger. Frasier, who in two hours of cards had been resolutely average, suddenly producing exactly what he needed at exactly the right moment. Dazza’s feet coming off the chair just before the cards went down, like a man bracing for something. The way the forfeit got suggested and agreed to so quickly, so cleanly, with such unanimous enthusiasm.

No. They wouldn’t.

Would they?

I look at Tam. Tam is the worst liar I have met in my life, and he is looking very intently at his beer.

Interesting.

I sit back in my chair and look at the ceiling for a moment. Engineered or not, it doesn’t matter. The result is the same. Rory Gallacher lost a bet, and Rory Gallacher does not back out and eight people plus whatever poor soul is unfortunate enough to be monitoring the CCTV tonight, are all about to witness what happens next.

I look back down at the table. At all of them, waiting, gleeful, magnificent idiots, every single one.

I am going to knock on MacLeod’s door at eleven o’clock at night and offer myself as a solution to his tension. Offer myself to my supervisor. Who has never once looked at me with anything other than professional disappointment. Who communicates primarily in silences and single devastating sentences. Who is tall and built like a geographic feature and has a jaw that could cut glass.

I am going to do this because I lost a card game that may or may not have been rigged, and because I do not back out and because somewhere in the last six days, these absolute idiots have become my people and I’m not going to let them down.

“He’s going to kill me,” I say.

Everyone nods. “Been nice knowing you, lad,” someone calls out.

Fuck my life.

“Right,” I say, and stand up. “I’m going.”

The cheer that goes up is genuinely the nicest thing that has ever happened to me and the worst thing that has ever happened to me at the exact same time.

I flip them all off with both hands on my way out the door.

The cheering gets louder.

At least I’m dying in a blaze of glory.

Chapter four

Rory

The corridor has grown.

I know this because I have walked it approximately forty times since I landed on the rig and it has never once felt long before. It is objectively not a long corridor. I have measured it in my head and it is maybe thirty metres from the mess hall to MacLeod’s cabin and thirty metres is nothing, thirty metres is the length of a swimming pool, I used to run thirty metres in under five seconds when I was seventeen and doing athletics at school, thirty metres is not a distance that should cause any problems whatsoever.

And yet here I am. Walking the longest corridor in human history.

My footsteps sound very loud. The rig hums underneath everything the way it always does, that constant low vibration that lives in your bones after the first couple of days, but right now it is doing nothing to cover the sound of my own feet on the floor and I am extremely aware of every single step I am taking towards what is almost certainly my own destruction.

Right. Okay. Let’s think about this rationally.

Option one. MacLeod opens the door and immediately kills me. This is probably the most likely outcome. He is going to look at me standing there at eleven o’clock at night and something in him is going to snap and that will be the end of Rory Gallacher. My mum will be very sad. The money will stop. They will have to find a new funniest man on the platform.

Option two. MacLeod opens the door, doesn’t kill me, but the humiliation is so complete and thorough that death would have been preferable. Because he looks at me with that expression, the one that goes so far beyond grim that it needs its own category, and he says something in that very quiet devastating voice and I have to walk back down this corridor past the camera and into the mess hall and face eight people who witnessed every second of it and I will never, not once, for the rest of my natural life, hear the end of it.

Option three.

I stop walking.