Page 46 of Dirty Rotten Love

Brockie answers correctly. I can tell by the fractional quality of Mac’s nod, the one that means satisfactory rather than merely acknowledged.

He moves on to my station.

I hand him my documentation without being asked. He takes it and reads it with the focused attention he gives everything, and I stand very straight and look at the middle distance and am extremely professional.

He hands it back. “Good,” he says.

Just good. One word. And I feel the small, warm thing in my chest that I have been feeling since approximately day five and which has, if I am being honest with myself, been getting less small and more warm with every passing day.

He finishes the walkabout. Reminds us of the afternoon schedule in that precise, quiet voice. Looks at us all in that way he has, taking attendance and inventory simultaneously, making sure everyone is where they should be and accounted for. Then he leaves.

The collective exhale is quieter than it used to be. We have all recalibrated to Mac over the rotation, learned the rhythms of him, stopped flinching at the silence. He is still Mac. He still takes the air out of a room and replaces it with something more demanding. But it is a familiar demanding now, almost comfortable, the way weather is comfortable when you know how to dress for it.

“Right,” says Dazza, rolling his shoulders like a man emerging from something. “Back to it.”

“He seemed almost human today,” says Whelan.

“He’s always almost human,” says Frasier. “It’s just that the almost does a lot of heavy lifting.”

There is a ripple of laughter. Easy and warm, the laughter of people who have made their peace with something.

“But Rory’s special treatment is clearly starting to wear off,” says Dazza cheerfully, to nobody in particular. “Gonna need someone else to take one for the team soon. Keep Macleod bearable.”

The laughter continues. I hear it the way you hear something from underwater, slightly delayed, slightly muffled, arriving a beat after it should.

Dazza. Brilliant, oblivious, utterly well-meaning Dazza, who just said that with the easy carelessness of someone making a joke they have made several times before and expect it to land the same way it always has.

I open my mouth.

“He’s not like that,” I say.

My voice comes out wrong. Not loud exactly, but with an edge to it that has no business being in a routine banter exchange, and everybody hears it. I know everybody hears it because the laughter stops with a completeness that is almost physical, like a sound being switched off.

I can feel the words already out there and cannot get them back.

“He checks that you’ve understood,” I say, and my voice has leveled out a bit, but not enough, not nearly enough. “Not just that you’ve done it. He wants you to actually know why. He comes back and asks follow-up questions because he cares whether you’ve learned it, not just whether the box got ticked. He’s trying to keep everyone safe and none of you…” I stop.

The lower deck is very quiet. The wind is doing its thing. The North Sea is gray and vast and completely indifferent.

I look at the documentation in my hands.

Nobody says anything.

I can feel Tam beside me very specifically, the quality of his silence, which is different from everyone else’s silence. Everyone else’s silence is shocked. Tam’s silence is something else entirely.

“Rory,” says Dazza, and his voice is genuinely gentle, not taking the mick at all, just Dazza being Dazza, which is fundamentally a decent person who has stumbled into something he didn’t see coming. “Mate.”

“Sorry,” I say. “That came out.” I stop again. “Sorry.”

I go back to my work with the focused energy of a man who needs something to do with his hands urgently. My documentation is already immaculate, but I check it again anyway because it is there and it is something to look at that is not the faces of my crew.

Nobody makes another joke. The conversation resumes after a moment, carefully and around a new shape, the way water moves around something that has appeared in its path. Dazza starts a different story about a completely different topic with the natural grace of a man who knows when a subject needs to be left alone.

I am grateful for this. I am grateful for Dazza in a way I could not have predicted three minutes ago.

Tam says nothing. He doesn’t need to. He is just there, working beside me, steady and present, and at one point his shoulder makes brief contact with mine in a way that could be accidental and is not.

I take a deep breath and become Rory again. The funny one. The joker. The class clown. The one who everyone likes because he makes them laugh and is easy to be around.