Конрад Уильямс - One

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.’

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 blanket 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 .’