Conrad Williams - One

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.

2. PRESSURE

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.

'Walter sicked all over me,' he said. 'Walter sicked all over me.'

It must have been Jane, not Stopper, that had vomited. Both of them were wearing it; it didn't matter. Jane pulled himself upright. The stubble on his chin told him what the clock could not. Was he still drunk, or was the platform still lurching? Had the storm not blown itself out by now? The windows were packed with filth. He tried the radio again out of habit, but already he was ignoring its silence, thinking ahead, wondering when, wondering if. Already he was thinking what might happen if there was nobody left to come and let them out. There was water in a five-pint container. There was no food; the food was always served to them through the airlock at mealtimes. He felt a bite of claustrophobia, a fear he had never, until now, experienced or understood. If the weather should persist, if the platform should fail, back to the seabed he and Stopper would go, with little hope of rescue before they suffocated. Maybe it would be for the best if Stopper did not regain consciousness. He was taking up air that Jane could use. Jane could . . . Jane could . . .

Could what?

He rubbed his lips and called out. Hello? His voice, no longer etiolated by heliox, was scratchy and tired. Scared. Keep your mind away from that. Do not touch. Turn away. The clock wasn't working, so why should the mechanism release? Did fail-safe mean that, if everything broke down?

'Stopper?' he said. The bristles on Stopper's face seemed too dark for his alabaster skin; he wished his buddy were blond. 'Stopper?'

Let him sleep. Let him just fade away.

No. Not a great option. ' Stopper! ' Jane knelt beside him and lifted an eyelid. The pupil contracted. OK. Good. He pinched the skin on Stopper's clavicle; Stopper flinched. Better. Jane leaned close. 'Wake up. You lazy fucker.'

Movement. A grey edge of tongue. Jane poured water onto a discarded shirt, pressed it against his friend's forehead. He pressed it against his lips and his mouth worked at it.

'Come on,' Jane said. 'Sit up. Have a drink.'

He managed to get Stopper to lift himself up from the floor. He wore an expression of someone angry without understanding why. Confusion, hunger, muddied things. He was trying to speak but only a fudge of sound fell from his lips.

'Something in the water,' Jane heard eventually. 'My God. Something in the water.'

Over the next few hours Jane coaxed his friend back. Stopper was shaking quite badly – they both were – but Stopper's mouth was shuddering like that of a baby plucked too swiftly into the air. 'I need a drink,' Stopper said, but waved away the water that Jane offered him. 'I need a fucking drink,' he growled. There were a couple of fingers of the economy gut-rot left and, even though Stopper eyed it suspiciously, he necked the lot.

'Can you stand up?' Jane asked. 'We have to try to get out.'

'What about Carver? Rae?' Stopper was smacking his lips as though he'd just been quaffing Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

Jane shook his head. 'Let's concentrate on us for a while. Give or take, we should be clean. If we go fizzy after this long, it'll only be like taking a swig from a bottle of piss-warm Coke. But take it from me, there's nobody left. Nobody came to check on us.'

He could see Stopper beginning to get twitchy, as he had done in the bell before his fall, and he laid a hand on the bigger man's shoulder. 'We have to get out of here. I'm not sure how long the platform is going to remain upright. There's a wind been blowing for the last day and a half that'd tear your face off if you looked at it the wrong way. It doesn't sound as though it's going to let up.'