Page 39 of Dirty Rotten Love

“A walk,” says Tam.

“Cleared my head. You know how it is.”

“And then you went back and carried on reorganizing.”

“For hours,” I confirm. “Really got into it.”

Dazza is watching this exchange with the bright, focused attention of a man at a tennis match. He looks at Tam. Tam looks at him. Some silent communication passes between them that I am choosing not to interpret.

“Right,” says Tam, very carefully. “So if I went back to the cabin now and had a look…”

“You’d see the results of a hard day’s work,” I say.

Tam nods slowly. “Because the thing is, Rory, I was in the cabin this morning when you got up, and.” He pauses. “It looked exactly the same.”

I meet his gaze with the steady, unblinking confidence of a man who has never told a lie in his life. “Aye,” I say. “You just can’t see the nuances.”

There is a silence.

It is a very specific kind of silence. The silence of two people confronted with a statement so magnificently committed and so thoroughly absurd that they cannot locate a reasonable response to it. Dazza makes a sound that is not quite a word. Tam looks at me with an expression that lives somewhere between baffled and perplexed, and is leaning heavily towards bemused.

“The nuances,” Tam repeats.

“Of bunk organization,” I clarify helpfully. “It’s quite a specialist area.”

“Is it?”

“Very much so. You wouldn’t necessarily notice from the outside. It’s more of an internal system.”

Dazza puts his hand over his mouth. His shoulders are doing something. I press on with the focused determination of a man who has started something and is going to finish it with his head held high.

“The key is the spatial logic,” I say. “Everything looks the same, but now it makes sense in a way it didn’t before. Fundamentally reorganised at a structural level. Very satisfying once you get there.”

Tam stares at me for a long moment.

Then he presses his lips together very firmly. Then he looks at the ceiling. Then he says, in a slightly strangled voice, “Right. Spatial logic. Got it.”

“Good,” I say pleasantly.

We walk on. Dazza is making a sound like a man trying very hard not to do something and not entirely succeeding. The conversation drifts, the way it always does with Tam and Dazza, towards the football and the gray beef thing and whether Grigor’s mysterious tinned goods constitute a health hazard. I contribute at the appropriate moments. I am easy and present and completely normal.

Nobody asks any more questions about the bunk. Whether this is because they believe me, or because the explanation I provided was so bewildering that they cannot figure out how to follow it up, which is considerably more likely, the effect is the same. The subject is closed. I am safe.

Somewhere across the platform, Mac is doing his morning walkabout. I cannot see him from here but I know the pattern of it, I have learned the rhythms of this rig the way you learn the rhythms of a place you love, and I know approximately where he will be and what he will be doing and I know that at some point this afternoon our paths will cross in a professional capacity and I will call him boss out loud and mean Mac in my head and nobody will know.

Nobody will know except me and Mac.

I tuck that away alongside everything else in the warm private box and walk on.

I am humming again.

This time I don’t stop.

Chapter sixteen

Mac

The payphone is in a narrow alcove off the main corridor on level two, wedged between a fire extinguisher and a noticeboard that nobody updates. It is not a comfortable space. It is the kind of space that exists because something has to go somewhere and nobody could think of a better option. The phone itself is institutional gray, heavy-handled, the kind of telephone that has been making offshore workers homesick since approximately 1987.