Conrad Williams - One

'Buckle up, Stop,' Jane said. In the end, he had to do it for him, pulling the straps tight over flesh that felt deboned, as yielding as a baby's.

Jane secured his own restraints and took a few fast shallow breaths. He hated fairground rides, and the times he'd rehearsed lifeboat drops had left him on the brink of vomiting. There was a lurch, but not his guts, not yet: the oil platform. Something had given way, most likely the leg they had been trying to reinforce. He peered through the hatch and saw the deck of the oil platform tilting towards the sea as the supports folded beneath it. Then a hard jolt and the tilt was halted. Jane reached out and hit the release button, but nothing happened. He punched it again and again. No reaction. It would need to be released manually, from the outside.

He unbuckled his harness and went to the porthole. 'Maybe the sea will wrench us clear,' he said, 'when the platform gives way.'

He looked back at Stopper, who had freed himself and was spinning the wheel of the hatch.

'What are you doing?'

Stopper stopped and slowly turned around as if addressing a fool. 'Uncoupling the boat,' he said.

'But it needs to be done on deck.'

Stopper gestured at the hatch. 'I know.'

'But . . .' Jane had been about to say you'll die and had to stop himself. Stopper was in shock. He wasn't thinking straight.

'I know ,' said Stopper. 'I'm not going with you. I'll set you free.'

'What do you fucking mean, you're not going? We're a team. I'm taking you off this platform. Now sit down and buckle up, or I swear' – he unsheathed the fire extinguisher from the wall – 'I'll deck you stone cold with this cunt.'

He turned back to the window. What bothered him most about Stopper's act of bravery wasn't that his friend would die but that Jane would be left alone. He wasn't sure he could face that, especially with the electrics on the boat shot, relying on the violence of the waves to take them to shore. They hadn't discussed the madness of this, but they had gravitated to the boats because that was what happened in an emergency. It was their only way off the platform, the only hope for survival. At some point there'd be a rescue attempt. Better to be warm and dry in an eye-catching orange capsule than a corpse pinned to the seabed by a thousand tons of steel. Better to . . .

He felt a spray of something hot against his cheek, and Stopper was saying, 'OK, so can I go now ?'

There was other stuff in the First Aid box. Chocolate, Kendal Mint Cake, a vacuum-sealed pack of raisins. Water. Jane eyed the bandages and plasters and dressings. None of them any use. He was sitting hunched in his seat, surrounded by a slurry of vomit. He had emptied his bowels too, unable to control himself through a fit of retching that he'd thought might turn him inside out. There was a lot of blood sprayed across the walls, a scary amount, given that Stopper had taken just a few seconds to turn the hatch wheel and duck out into the wind. Then the thunk of locking pins being hammered free and the drop into the ocean that he could not now recall, despite his fear of it. The scissors from the First Aid box were rattling around the floor, sticky with the blood that Stopper had cut out of his body. His severed artery had hung like the ragged end of a rubber hose in the exposed meat of his forearm.

Jane had been unable to say anything. Maybe this was all down to nitrogen in his blood. Maybe this was how your brain dealt with things when a million bubbles were expanding in its folds. If only.

Somehow he managed to sleep a little, although he supposed it was more a kind of unconsciousness, a turning away. He was able to sip some water and nibble a little mint cake during momentary lulls in the violence. The sugar fortified him, persuaded him that he wasn't dying, that the iridescent chips in the air were not going to cause his lungs to rupture.

He kept the restraints firmly fastened. The boat was tossed so violently that he doubted he'd survive should he free himself. He couldn't be sure if the boat had turned turtle at all; it didn't really matter. It was sealed. It wasn't sinking. The hull was the same colour no matter which way was up. Nobody had died – as far as he knew – from a surfeit of Big Dippers and Corkscrews. The storm must abate soon. Somebody must come to rescue him. If the oil platform did not topple, the helicopters would see that a boat had been launched. It couldn't be long. The thought of drifting far out into the North Sea and never being picked up he could not host. Nor consideration that a capitulation such as Stopper's was something that would become more attractive to him.

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.