One

by Conrad Williams

  'I hear you. But let's at least get some masks on. The suits too. You didn't see . . . their skin, Stop, their skin was sliding off them.'

  They shrugged on their wetsuits and masks, gloves and boots. They checked each other's oxygen tanks and gave each other the OK signal. At the hatch, Jane pulled out his regulator and said, 'Stop, try not to look at what's out there too much. Let's head for the OIM's office and see what's what. Quick as we can.'

  He didn't hang around to see if Stopper was following, but took off quickly and almost paid the price for his impatience. The wind on deck was gusting so violently that it swept his feet from under him and took him fully twenty feet towards the guard rails. Part of them had been sheared off either directly by the wind or some piece of hardware driven by it. The rubber suit bit at the deck and brought him to a stop six feet away from his death. He was almost too busy looking at the sky, at the chicanery of violet and green and orange, to notice. Northern Lights, he supposed. This far south? He thought it more likely that it was the breakdown of cells in his own brain as he lay dying. But he wasn't dying. Not yet.

  Stopper had tiptoed down to him, hand-over-hand on the guard rail, and helped him upright. Together they shouldered into the wind, angling towards the block that contained the Offshore Installation Manager's office. Bodies were piled up at the threshold of the door. He could feel the panic creeping through him like cold. He felt he must keep moving or it would consume him. Jane led the way inside, hoping that Stopper would give the dead as short shrift as he had. There were more bodies ranged across the corridors and internal stairs. In a canteen, one man sat hunched over a half-eaten sandwich, his cheeks ballooning, his stomach hanging like a Portuguese man-o'-war from his lips.

  Jane could hear his breathing quicken through the regulator. He tried to calm himself by thinking how ridiculous he must look in his diving gear. Some of the toolpushers and roustabouts would pull a muscle if they could see him and Stopper now. Gas leak, he was thinking. Cyanide? Hydrogen sulphide? Could that change the colour of the sky?

  He slowed as he neared the OIM's office. The control room next to it was utterly still and dark; the windows were packed black with debris. Ricky Melling, the Dynamic Positioning Operator, was slumped over a desk, a welter of his blood dried to glaze like a slab of treacle toffee waiting for the hammer. The swelling of his body had split his jacket up the back seam, the jacket he'd described once as a bit roomy since he'd come off the sauce and started grilling his chicken and chops.

  Though everything was dark, Jane tried the lights, the TV, the radios. No response. Wind was getting into this module somewhere; he could hear it howling and rattling around the prefabricated units. It was a wonder they all hadn't been torn off their housings. He was about to leave the control room and move further into the building, to the recreation room, when he saw Eamonn Tate, the OIM, sitting against the wall, his hands in his lap. He seemed to be staring down at them, or perhaps at the pale grey slack of his tongue as it lolled against his chest. Though Jane had been expecting this, to actually see the guy in charge, a guy who was as serene and quiet-talking as they come, broken and bent and capsized, was almost too much to take. Jane crouched down next to him and thought about taking his pulse, but shook his head. No survivors. Just Jane and Stopper. He was turning to tell Stopper this, but he realised he would have to take out the regulator to do so. Stopper wasn't ready for the news anyway, by the look on his face. To confirm what he was already seeing was to invite his utter dislocation.

  Jane clapped Stopper on the shoulder and gestured to the door. Stopper followed him. Jane lowered his head against the wind as he edged outside and led the way to the lower decks and the bright orange lifeboats. Jane checked behind him when he was shooting open the bolts on the entrance hatch. Stopper was standing loose, head back, watching the queasy swirl of the sky. He appeared deflated, a bottle of something unstoppered, flat. Now Jane wished he could say something. If Stopper didn't keep his mind on what was happening, a rogue gust was going to pick him up and toss him a couple of hundred feet into freezing water. Jane made a grunting noise around his mouthpiece, waved his arms: Stopper slowly levelled his gaze back on his buddy, but Jane doubted it had anything to do with his pleas for attention. Stopper's eyes were wide open but unseeing. Clouds had formed, despite the wind, pinguid and low, like something thick in a mixing bowl, streaked with the colours of decay. The secret colours he had only ever heard mentioned by his mother and her sisters: taupe, mauve, teal. The clouds sweated greasy rain.

  Jane bundled Stopper into the lifeboat and swung the hatch shut. He pressed his fingers against Stopper's regulator to prevent him from spitting it clear, waiting to see if any of the granularity of the sky had followed them inside. What there was settled quickly without the wind to propel it. It settled like a weird matte glitter on their clothes, twinkling dully. Scintillas of quartz, Jane thought. Obsidian. Asbestos. He plucked the regulator out and drew a breath.

  'Normal service has been resumed,' he said, trying a smile. Stopper blinked at him. Jane gently tugged free Stopper's mouthpiece; a glut of drool followed it out. The other man didn't protest but regarded him slackly, as if every muscle in his face had been injected with relaxant.

  'Buckle up, Stop,' Jane said. In the end, he had to do it for him, pulling the straps tight over flesh that felt deboned, as yielding as a baby's.

  Jane secured his own restraints and took a few fast shallow breaths. He hated fairground rides, and the times he'd rehearsed lifeboat drops had left him on the brink of vomiting. There was a lurch, but not his guts, not yet: the oil platform. Something had given way, most likely the leg they had been trying to reinforce. He peered through the hatch and saw the deck of the oil platform tilting towards the sea as the supports folded beneath it. Then a hard jolt and the tilt was halted. Jane reached out and hit the release button, but nothing happened. He punched it again and again. No reaction. It would need to be released manually, from the outside.

  He unbuckled his harness and went to the porthole. 'Maybe the sea will wrench us clear,' he said, 'when the platform gives way.'

  He looked back at Stopper, who had freed himself and was spinning the wheel of the hatch.

  'What are you doing?'

  Stopper stopped and slowly turned around as if addressing a fool. 'Uncoupling the boat,' he said.

  'But it needs to be done on deck.'

  Stopper gestured at the hatch. 'I know.'

  'But . . .' Jane had been about to say you'll die and had to stop himself. Stopper was in shock. He wasn't thinking straight.

  'I know,' said Stopper. 'I'm not going with you. I'll set you free.'

  'What do you fucking mean, you're not going? We're a team. I'm taking you off this platform. Now sit down and buckle up, or I swear' – he unsheathed the fire extinguisher from the wall – 'I'll deck you stone cold with this cunt.'

  He turned back to the window. What bothered him most about Stopper's act of bravery wasn't that his friend would die but that Jane would be left alone. He wasn't sure he could face that, especially with the electrics on the boat shot, relying on the violence of the waves to take them to shore. They hadn't discussed the madness of this, but they had gravitated to the boats because that was what happened in an emergency. It was their only way off the platform, the only hope for survival. At some point there'd be a rescue attempt. Better to be warm and dry in an eye-catching orange capsule than a corpse pinned to the seabed by a thousand tons of steel. Better to . . .

  He felt a spray of something hot against his cheek, and Stopper was saying, 'OK, so can I go now?'

  There was other stuff in the First Aid box. Chocolate, Kendal Mint Cake, a vacuum-sealed pack of raisins. Water. Jane eyed the bandages and plasters and dressings. None of them any use. He was sitting hunched in his seat, surrounded by a slurry of vomit. He had emptied his bowels too, unable to control himself through a fit of retching that he'd thought might turn him inside out. There was a lot of blood sprayed across the walls, a s
cary amount, given that Stopper had taken just a few seconds to turn the hatch wheel and duck out into the wind. Then the thunk of locking pins being hammered free and the drop into the ocean that he could not now recall, despite his fear of it. The scissors from the First Aid box were rattling around the floor, sticky with the blood that Stopper had cut out of his body. His severed artery had hung like the ragged end of a rubber hose in the exposed meat of his forearm.

  Jane had been unable to say anything. Maybe this was all down to nitrogen in his blood. Maybe this was how your brain dealt with things when a million bubbles were expanding in its folds. If only.

  Somehow he managed to sleep a little, although he supposed it was more a kind of unconsciousness, a turning away. He was able to sip some water and nibble a little mint cake during momentary lulls in the violence. The sugar fortified him, persuaded him that he wasn't dying, that the iridescent chips in the air were not going to cause his lungs to rupture.

  He kept the restraints firmly fastened. The boat was tossed so violently that he doubted he'd survive should he free himself. He couldn't be sure if the boat had turned turtle at all; it didn't really matter. It was sealed. It wasn't sinking. The hull was the same colour no matter which way was up. Nobody had died – as far as he knew – from a surfeit of Big Dippers and Corkscrews. The storm must abate soon. Somebody must come to rescue him. If the oil platform did not topple, the helicopters would see that a boat had been launched. It couldn't be long. The thought of drifting far out into the North Sea and never being picked up he could not host. Nor consideration that a capitulation such as Stopper's was something that would become more attractive to him.

  He pulled the letter from his pocket. He struggled to read it in the endless vibration and shuddering of the boat but studied it four or five times anyway. Stanley stayed with him. There could be no letting go while his boy waited at home for him. He would not see his letter lacking a response. The smell of his scalp; the shape of his slim shoulders under his father's hands. Machine-gun laughter whenever he was tickled.

  dad, can we tak the tent to the bech soon and hav a picnik lik befor but not get sand in the food. remember we plad futbal and I scord ten gols. can we have a baby soon. a boy I dont lik gerls.

  Cherry, flat-line mouth, lifting the boy's pudgy hand to wave goodbye. Cherry, unable to lift a hand of her own. 'You're pulling us down,' she told him. 'I don't want to be a part of a family that has a corner of its triangle missing.'

  'I'm not missing. I'm working,' he reasoned. 'Who paid for that leather jacket you love so much? Who bought us the extension to our house? Who bought the Audi you've christened Mungo?'

  'It's my house. Dad bought it for me.'

  'It became ours when we married, Cherry. We share everything. That's what marriage is all about. Read the small print.'

  'Marriage.' She spat the word as if it were something spoiled she had put in her mouth. 'This is no marriage. This is me skivvying at home while you swan off for a piss-up with your Aberdeen cronies.'

  He'd been unable to counter that. She must break down and start laughing soon, he had thought. She must just be kidding. 'We can afford to get help in,' he had managed at last. 'You don't have to lift a finger.'

  'I'm lifting this finger,' she said, and showed him her wedding ring. She slipped it off and tossed it to him.

  'Think of Stanley,' he told her. 'What this will do to him.'

  'I am thinking of Stanley,' she said. 'He wants a dad, not some lodger who brings him an expensive toy every couple of months. He's growing up and you're missing it.'

  'I'm providing for my family,' he said, but the anger had been punched from him. She was right. He was missing it, but it wasn't his fault. It was called sacrifice. You put up with the cold and shitty work and bad food and loss of hearing in order to give your loved ones a better path in life. Why was she unable to see this?

  And then Stanley stumbling in, all smiles. 'Hello, Daddy, Daddy, you're a green paste.' And laughter and wrestling and Cherry looking down on them both, lachrymose, statue-cold.

  He had talked her round a little. She agreed to a trial separation, that sad old cliché. So he'd ended up moving out, which was what she was criticising him for in the first place, and he took off to Aberdeen and put his name down for as many shifts as he was medically fit to work.

  He'd always believed it would be different for him, whenever he had listened to the bitching and the bitterness among the oil platform's divorced club. But he supposed there were always going to be trends, likelihoods, destinies. You work away from home for long enough, then you might as well be a stranger. You were the shadow on the wall, the flicker in the mirror. You were the empty place at the table and the awkward question at bedtime. He could see what it was she didn't like. It was a male world, working the rigs. There was a lot of industrial language. A lot of bawdy talk and banter. Off the helicopter, after a shift, back on the Aberdeen soil, men unwound quickly. You could see them, refracted through glasses of amber, unspooling as if their bodies, if not their minds, were celebrating coming back from the brink. It was as if, at any moment, they might float away into the sky. They needed all those atmospheres of water on their backs just to stay in one place. And there were women, in Aberdeen, all too willing to provide a lap for a weary diver's head.

  Jane slept a little, he ate a little, he drank a little. He cried a lot. He screamed when he wasn't vomiting; it helped. He kept one bloodshot eye on the porthole, craving the weathered bow of a rescue vessel, or the beat of a helicopter rotor turning the surface to shivering skin. But instead it was swell after swell of convulsing ocean. He could be anywhere. He could be drifting north towards the Arctic. A pure childish fear had reawakened in him, gripped him to the point of numbness. But at some point he seemed to switch off and everything that had been conspiring to make him feel alive – the fear and hunger, the panic, the hope – shrivelled like a pupil in bright light.

  Stanley stood in his red pyjamas at the end of some horribly long corridor, Walter the lion hanging from his tiny fist. His eyes were like the portholes in the Ceto, unstable, crawling. The filth shifted upon them like iron filings on a bed of magnets. He was speaking, but the words were spoiled by the misery in his voice. Sometimes Jane had to sit and soothe him for five or ten minutes when he was like this, until Stanley's chest stopped hitching and he was able to make out what was wrong. It was usually thirst, or dreams of being left behind, of not being able to catch up during a walk to the shop or the park. Sometimes it was that uncomplicated need for human closeness. A hug, reassurance. Stay with me all night, Daddy. Don't go.

  He felt himself clench inside that he had not always done as his son asked. Little things, really. But important to Stanley, which should have mattered more at the time. He could have stroked his hair, slept with him until morning, but there was always a perceived crisis elsewhere.

  He had always believed he carried childishness in him, that he had never truly grown up, but the opposite was the case. He was all too quick to finish the game, pack away the toys, curtail the rough and tumble. There was always something else that needed doing. And now he was near death and his boy was 500 miles away. It pierced him to think there would be no more hide-and-seek or piggyback rides.

  Perhaps there had been footage of the storm on the TV and Cherry was either shielding him from it or gleefully pointing out that had Jane found a job on a building site in London Daddy wouldn't be in trouble.

  Stanley in the corridor, putting out a hand to the wall to steady himself. His voice shattered by fear. 'Dad? Dad? I'm scared.'

  'It's all right, Stan,' Jane said. 'I'm with you.'

  3. DEAD CLADE WALKING

  He was thinking about beaches on the west coast of France. Long and white and narrow like ivory letter-openers. Stanley no more than six months old, sitting in the sand with a large floppy cricket hat casting a broad shadow. Cherry snoozing on her back in a black bikini, skin shining with sun cream. The heat pressing people into the ground. A bl
anket and some baguettes, some cheese. A jar of anchovies. Christ, he had been mad for anchovies that summer. A bottle of Muscadet in a cool bag. The air thin and baked, stripping the throat dry. Sweat dried as soon as it escaped the pores. He had watched the sea for a long time, that strange illusion of the horizon seeming to rear up higher than the leading edge of the tide, as if it was a wall of water. He had been wishing he could go diving in water like that, instead of the cloudy, frigid swill of the North Sea.

  He remembered the Gulf of Mexico and the fish that came to ogle him while he trained in the clear warm sea. When was that . . . '93? '94? He had worked with a guy called Erubiel, a Mexican from Lagos de Moreno who had not wanted to take over his father's dairy. The smell of milk made him sick. He just wanted to dive and then watch girls on the beaches of Pensacola during his time off. Erubiel was a good diving buddy, if a little hot-headed. He was methodical when it came to checking Jane's gear, but when it came to his own, he trusted to God. 'I drive carefully when I carry a passenger,' he said. 'When I'm on my own? Safety? Chupame la verga.'

  Erubiel used to tap Jane on the head whenever he wanted his attention. He did it all the time. Tap, tap, tap. He was doing it now. And that was funny, because Erubiel had ended up in a wheelchair. Jane had received a postcard from his father a couple of years later when Jane had been building a reputation with his burning gear on drilling rigs near the Shetlands. There had been an accident on a rig in Campeche Sound. A gas leak. A dozen men had died. Erubiel leapt from the rig and the drop crushed his spine. Now he could sit and watch girls all day, but that was pretty much all he could do.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  Pack it in, Ruby. Give it a rest.

  Jane opened his eyes. His head was slapping against the edge of the chair. But it was more rhythmical now, less violent. Gone was the arbitrary shearing of deep-sea currents, a sickening, jolting pitch and yaw. This was a shallow-water beat. This was land ahoy.