Page 52 of Dirty Rotten Love

“Not really,” I say.

My mum makes a noise that means she doesn’t believe me but is not going to push, which is one of her other great gifts.

We talk for a little longer. She tells me about the boiler, which has developed a new sound on top of its existing sounds, a kind of percussive accompaniment that she has named Gerald. I tell her I will sort it when I get home, which is true, I have been putting money aside specifically for the boiler and for several other things that need sorting and it is one of the quiet satisfactions of this rotation, knowing that I can.

“I should go,” she says eventually. “Dinner won’t make itself.”

“Aye, go on.”

“I’m always thinking about you, you know,” she says, in that matter-of-fact way she has, the way she says things that are enormous as if they are simply true, which they are, which is exactly the point. “Every day. Because I love you.”

“Love you too, Mum,” I say. “Talk soon.”

“Talk soon.”

I hang up.

I stand in the alcove with the receiver back in its cradle and the noticeboard in front of me and the rig humming underneath everything the way it always does, and I think about what she said.

I’m always thinking about you.

The way I always think about Mac.

Not in the way I tell myself I think about him, which is the way you think about something present and relevant and currently occupying your life. A practical kind of thinking, a this is a thing that is happening kind of thinking. Not like that.

Like the way my mum thinks about me. Underneath everything. Constant. The first place my mind goes when it has a moment to go somewhere. The thing I wanted to share when I saw the Northern Lights. The name that surfaces when someone says something funny and I want to tell someone. The person I think about when I wake up and when I fall asleep and in the spaces between everything else.

Always.

I’m always thinking about Mac.

The realization arrives not like a thunderclap but like a light coming on in a room that has been dark for a while, quiet and complete, and making everything suddenly visible. All the boxes I have been closing and the lids that wouldn’t stay shut and the thing in my chest that has been getting less small and more warm since approximately day five and which I have been declining to name for weeks.

I love him.

I stand in the alcove and let the words exist in my head for a moment, plain and unqualified and enormous, and find that they are simply true. Not frightening. Not a crisis. Not something that needs a label or a category or any of the things I thought it would need if I ever looked at it directly.

Just true.

I am in love with Mac.

I am in love with Mac and he is on this rig and I need to tell him, right now, immediately, with the focused urgency of someone who has been waiting to say a thing without knowing they were waiting and cannot wait a single second longer.

I am out of the alcove and into the corridor before I have consciously decided to move. My feet know where they are going. They have known for weeks. I take the corridor and the stairs with the energy of a man who has somewhere to be and something very important waiting for him there, and I am grinning, I can feel it, wide and unstoppable and entirely real, my actual happy, the kind my mum can always tell.

My feet know where they are going. They have known for weeks. Mac’s corridor. Mac’s door. Same gray metal. Same handle.

But the room is empty. Nothing save for an incredibly neatly made bed. That’s fine. At this time of day, when he is off duty, there is only one other place he can be.

The mess hall.

I dash along the corridor in record time. Some small voice inside my head questions if I should slow down, think things through. But I’ve always ignored that voice, and I’m hardly going to start listening now when I’m in love and I need to tell the person I’m in love with.

I push the door of the mess hall open, and the warmth of it hits me, and I am already scanning for Mac, already have his name somewhere near my lips, but I see Dazza first.

Dazza is sitting at the nearest table with Whelan and Frasier, and there are cards on the table and beers and the remnants of a normal evening, and Dazza is looking at me with an expression that stops me in the doorway.

I know that expression. I have known Dazza for long enough now to know every version of his face and I have never seen this one before, this particular combination of stricken and guilty and sorry, the face of a man who has just watched something irreversible happen and knows it.