Конрад Уильямс - One

‘What happens when all the oil dries up?’ she asked him once. ‘Where will the work take you then? Halfway around the world?’

‘I’ll be long finished before then, Cherry,’ he said.

‘We will be, you mean.’

And she was right about that. She’d missed out on one cliché but nailed another: the failed marriage to the man who was never around.

Bye Dad. I love you. With orl my hart. See you soon. Bring me sum Ben 10 stickers. And we can have a fight, just playing fight. And the chum-chiggle-iggle-umching-cha.

No. No. No.

‘No.’ The word flipped out of him, like a belch, involuntary. ‘No,’ he said again, louder. He yelled it so hard that spittle flew across the toughened glass of the window. Now he could see what it was that Rae was crying about. The hatch of the bell had been warped by one of the collisions with the platform. The flanges were rippled like the mantle of an oyster; they would not meet flush with their counterparts on the docking hatch. The bell was repositioned and the locking mechanism secured, but fingers of light poked in around the seal.

Jane shouted out again, shook his head, but either Rae couldn’t see him or chose not to. He heard the hiss as bell pressure was increased to ensure a seal that could not be made. He saw the wheel on the hatch begin to turn. Jane spun away, flinching at the sound of their bodies as they unravelled into the hyperbaric chamber. When he was able to look back through the porthole he could see how the hatch in Rae’s diving bell had been unable to open beyond three inches. Explosive decompression. Rae and Carver had been turned inside out. Tiny scraps of his friends slid through the red gruel on the window.

Jane staggered back to where he had left Stopper. He positioned a blanket over him, then sat on the bunk. He took up Stanley’s letter, folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. He realised he was wiping his hands, though it would have been impossible for any of Rae or Carver’s blood to have splashed him.

There was tapping at the hatch. Someone was scooping away the muck from the glass. He staggered over to look through the porthole and saw Gordon McLeish, one of the derrickmen. His face was as red as the coat he was wearing; blood was the filling in a sandwich formed by his lips. Where the bones made angles in his flesh, Jane could not see anything but tight shining skin. He might have been inflated. What looked like spoiling cottage cheese was foaming from his ears and nostrils. There were two bodies behind him, face down. One of them had fallen on his hands, as if he had dropped in the act of fastening his coat buttons. Or if that was what Jane thought it was, piled up bloodily next to him, then maybe he was trying to keep as much as he could from slithering out of whatever rents had appeared in his abdomen.

What was it? Jane mouthed at McLeish, but the other man was too intent on other tasks to be able to answer. He punched buttons on a back-up console that had been plugged into the mains; the central computer must have failed. He was beginning the decompression process. Jane stopped rapping on the glass and let him do his job; it didn’t look as though McLeish was likely to be around much longer. Blood was drizzling from the end of his coat sleeves, welling out of the eyelets of his boots.

Jane heard a wail, a gasp, and turned to check on Stopper, but he was still unconscious. It had been the wind chicaning through the struts of the oil platform, howling like something animal, something crazed. It had to be savage as hell for him to be able to hear it through two inches of steel.

McLeish was taking too long. Jane could see him slowing down. At one point he dropped the console and swayed as if he was about to faint, but he put out a hand to stop himself. The oil platform was shifting alarmingly. Jane could imagine the black grin in the leg of the platform that they had been trying to prevent from widening. What would happen if that leg buckled completely? It didn’t bear thinking about. He had to turn away. He went back to Stopper and tried to rouse him. He wiped his forehead, checked his vital signs again. Stopper was stable, but he’d wake up with a swine of a headache. Jane patted his pocket and felt the flat comfort of his son’s letter. He must not lose that, no matter what.

Yor not her to kiss at nighttim but I send you one out the window and I love you Daddy. I have nise drems abowt you, Dad.

A green light on the hatch door. Decompression was under way. Through the porthole – rapidly filling again with that gritty dense grain – he could see McLeish on his knees, vomiting blood and tissue onto the deck. McLeish who was comically cinematic whenever he played poker, wearing sunglasses to hide the signs his eyes might be giving, turning over his cards after a studied pause. McLeish who would fart in the middle of a tense scene during a film in the theatre and ask everyone if they wanted seconds. There was nothing Jane could do, but he whispered a thankyou anyway.

It was doubtful he’d see this thirty-six hours through. There was only one thing worth doing in this situation. Bolted to the wall between the bunks was a khaki-green metal box, fastened shut with eight screws. The words IN CASE OF EMERGENCY were stencilled in white on the face. Jane worked the screws free with a knife. The lid popped open, revealing a litre bottle of economy whisky bought from a corner shop for under ten pounds. It would have to be some emergency for you to get me to sup that shite , Stopper had once said. It would have to be a real soupy bowel moment.

Jane cracked the seal and started drinking.

He lay on the floor with Stopper. The ceaseless swaying of the chamber was bearable in that position. He could close his eyes and the freak weather’s battering of the oil platform became manageable squalls of sound, like remembered arguments or old plumbing, and he didn’t have to look at Stopper’s pale skin or congealing wounds. It was just him, his whisky and the incremental dispersal of nitrogen from his blood and tissue.

Jane wondered for a moment what effect alcohol had on the decompression process but as soon as the thought was in him it was gone, replaced by others, seeping through him like gas in the blood. Stanley remained a constant throughout. He was a watermark on pages, indelible; not that Jane wanted him out of his thoughts, but some of the others were inappropriate. He didn’t want his boy to share headspace when Saskia Sharkey from his sixth-form days – with her large breasts and talented tongue – flitted through his mind. Stanley oughtn’t to be there when Gormley, his first boss, was tearing into him about timekeeping and Jane told him to ram his job. And all those girls he had brought tears to over the years. All those regrets, all that sorry. Maybe this shitstorm of blood and wind was down to him: payback time for being a career bastard.

Trimming the fat from his thoughts, bringing them back to the here and now, served only to alert Jane to the headache thickening behind his eyes. Alcohol for a man under as many kinds of pressure as you cared to mention couldn’t be doing him any good. But what it did do, while he was decompressing, was compress his perception of time. That was one of the rare beauties of booze. It provided you with a beer Tardis to flip you forward to a point where you could have a coherent say in matters again.

He was slithering around in a puddle of vomit and couldn’t work out who it had come from. It reminded him of Stanley, when he’d been three, just before the end of things. He had been violently sick in his sleep, had woken himself up with it, and had cried out, distressed, panicky. Jane and Cherry had bulldozed into the room to find him sitting up in bed staring in dismay at Walter, his toy lion.