Life After Joe (10 page)

“Westie,” Wycliffe began again, having one last go. “This is Barnes, isn’t it? The new medical assistant?”

Aaron’s gaze did not leave my face. If he didn’t acknowledge me, I wasn’t going to press the issue, I decided. They could throw me overboard, which I probably deserved, and Aaron could get on with his life. He said softly, voice carrying all the same over the wind and the dying thump of the rotors, “Who told you that, Dave?”

I saw Dave reviewing the last few hours of his life. Replaying, as I was, who had said what to whom. After a moment he took a step back, looking at me with new eyes. He blew his cheeks out and gave a tug at his souwester hood. “I…I suppose I told
him.
Well, I’ll be buggered! No offence, Westie.”

Aaron almost smiled. “None taken. How the hell did he get out here?”

It was an odd question. I didn’t think there was a bus. Wycliffe looked puzzled too. “Same way I did. On that thing.”

He gestured behind him. And it was as if, somehow, Aaron had not seen or taken in the massive rumbling machine on the helipad behind us, grunting and snarling like a beast forced too far and hard through the night. His pallor drained to grey. He looked at me and back to the chopper, and I thought for a second he was going to pass out. His mask had cracked to dust. He just looked terrified. “Aaron,” I whispered and took a step towards him.

A grip closed on my arm. Larsen’s this time—nothing like Wycliffe’s friendly grasp. Larsen did not look the type of man who would let a stranger blag his way onto an oil rig. “Dave, I’ll talk to you later,” he said. “Get out of here for now.” To my surprise, once Dave was out of earshot, Larsen extended his free hand and took hold of Aaron’s wrist, the gesture gentle. “All right, West. Everyone’s fine, okay? Now—do you have any idea who this guy is?”

“I…Yes. Jens, I’m so sorry. This is Rosie’s brother. I’ve been worried he would pull some sort of stunt. He’s been distraught.”

Larsen turned to me. He looked as bewildered as I felt, but whatever Aaron was playing, I had to go with it. “Rosie’s…Oh Christ. Look, West—I don’t know how he got past security shoreside, but you know he can’t stay—”

“I know. I know. Just…let me talk to him, okay?”

“I should have him placed under arrest…”

“No.” Aaron shifted, placed himself subtly but solidly in Larsen’s path. “I understand, but…give me a while alone with him. He’s not dangerous, I swear. I’ll make him my responsibility.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. I felt my arm carefully removed from Larsen’s grip and transferred into the larger, stronger one I had hopelessly tried to envisage clasping me safe in the jolting chopper’s cabin. Now I had it, I found myself differently afraid. It was like steel. He turned me away and began to march me off towards a low block of buildings that ran along the platform’s far edge. Whether Larsen made an effort to follow us or not, I didn’t care. All I could feel was wave after wave of delayed shock and the horrible chill of Aaron’s grasp on me without affection. He could have been dragging off a hostile stranger.

For as long as the wind continued to tear at us, I remained silent, concentrating on staying upright and making some of the effort of this forced march look like my own. I was blind with tears. When we passed into the lee of the low block, I swiped my palm across my eyes and ground to a halt, obliging Aaron to stop too or pull me off my feet. He swung round on me. Whatever pain or fright the sight of the helicopter had caused him was gone, subsumed back into that cold mask. “What?”

“Please stop. Let me talk to you.”

“Oh, we’ll talk. But not out here, you fucking nutcase.” He gestured to the double doors behind him. “Inside. Now.”

To be out of the wind was a shattering relief. The doors clapped shut behind us like the last notes of a violent symphony. A hush fell, in which I could suddenly hear everything: the thud of my own heart, a high whine in my reverberating eardrums. Aaron’s breathing, regular and deep, a sound I had come to love beside me in the night, but which at the moment seemed more the respiratory discipline of a man trying not to lash out and kill me. I said, more for the sake of speaking than out of real interest, “Where…where are we?”

“Accommodation block five. Of the Kittiwake deep-sea rig. Terrorists have tried to board her, Matthew. Paratroopers on exercise and Rainbow fucking Warriors. And you…just hopped on the shuttle flight and came.”

“I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. But I had to…” I didn’t get to finish. Aaron had stopped dead outside a door in a corridor not dissimilar to the one in his shore quarters. The floor was lined with rubber and steel, not mass-produced carpet, but it was just as anonymous. I wondered if that made it easier for him to go back and forth. Never accumulate anything, never leave anything or anyone behind…

The room I saw before me when he shoved open the door instantly killed that theory. It was only a cabin, about ten by ten, but I knew before he switched the light on.
My God, this is where you live.
There were pictures on the walls—mechanical sketches by da Vinci, huge geological maps. Designs for machines I didn’t recognise, beautifully executed in pencil and fine-line ink. As well as textbooks and classics, on these shelves were volumes I could imagine an ordinary man putting his feet up and reading to pass a rainy afternoon: blockbuster novels, Terry Pratchetts. I took it in almost with reluctance, grabbing at the edge of the desk to keep from falling. This was home.

Aaron shrugged out of his oilskins, stepped round behind me and helped me out of mine with about as much ceremony as if he were skinning a rabbit. He tossed them to one side and pulled out the chair from under the desk. He didn’t invite me to sit down, but the push he gave my shoulders was enough to make my knees buckle, as they’d been wanting to since the helicopter touched down. Turning away, he crouched beside a metal filing drawer and pulled out an unlabelled bottle. He broke the seal—it looked homemade—and sat down heavily on his bunk. The contents of the bottle were lucently clear, and the smell of it reached across to me like a clenched fist. Tipping it up—I saw with a twisting pain at my heart that his hand shook—he drank deeply, straight from the neck. Then he corked it back up again and returned it to its place in the drawer. “None for you, Amelia Earhart,” he said. “You’re on the wagon.” He pressed the backs of his fingers to his mouth for a second. Transfixed me with such a look that I almost wished myself back in the chopper again. “Right. Explain.”

I swallowed. I did not want to be afraid of him, and I didn’t understand quite why he was so bleakly furious. I’d done something stupid, but he must have worked out that I’d done it for him…“It was Joe,” I began, more or less at random. “He…bowled me over. I didn’t mean to let you leave like that. I had to see you. I wanted to tell you…” But before I told him that, I needed to know one thing myself. It shouldn’t have mattered. If I loved him, I loved him. Aaron had been right a while back, though: I was in pieces; more pieces at least than could bear the weight of unassisted trust.

He was watching me in silence. “Aaron, please. Who’s Rosie?”

He drew a breath. Finally gave me a break from his gaze—looked out into the dark that lay beyond his cabin window. Eventually, he said, without inflection, “You know who Rosie is. You read my fucking e-mails, Matt.”

“I didn’t. I mean—Christ, yes, I did, and it was despicable. But I didn’t
go through
them. I only opened one. I thought…I thought she was your girlfriend, or even your wife. I thought—”

“My wife.” It was a flat echo. For a moment he looked at me again, and then he sank his face into his hands. “My…my wife. Okay. Did you see the date on your one e-mail?”

The date? No, I hadn’t. Beyond a few flaring, unforgettable phrases which had drifted through my mind ever since, I’d taken in very little. I shook my head. “No. Why?”

He pushed himself suddenly upright. I braced myself not to flinch as he strode over to the desk. He crouched by the chair where I sat, and pulled out a drawer. The desk itself was utilitarian, plastic and steel. Incongruously, this one drawer seemed to be lined in dark wool, as if he had folded a thick fisherman’s sweater into it. On top of the wool, carefully stacked, were a few photo frames. Aaron withdrew the largest of them and put it into my hands. “Andrew Rose,” he said, tapping the image smiling up at me. “Rosie. Like Westie, only…funnier, for a hard-arsed drill operator. He was also a brilliant draughtsman. Those are his mechanical drawings on the wall.” Aaron paused. His voice was calm, conversational, hardly suited to a revelation of this order. He pointed to the bookshelf. “That’s his crappy taste in literature over there. He brewed up rigger’s moonshine in a crate under his bed, which didn’t matter because he was hardly ever in it. He more or less lived in here.”

I looked at the photograph. An ordinary face—for about a second, until you saw the eyes. The uncertain, lopsided smile. He was poised on one of the gantry arms, oblivious to the hundred-foot drop below him into the North Sea, gazing up at his photographer with pure love.

Pretty, dark-haired Rosie, with her house and her garden and everything else in the bubble I’d created to contain her, popped and disappeared. The room seemed to recede from all around me. I felt crass, naïve, and about six years old. I asked, through cold lips, knowing the answer, “Did he leave?”

“No. He was coming back from an off duty last February, and his shuttle helicopter went down. The sister ship, actually, to the one you rode out here tonight. He died. They all did. When I had to go out the other day, it was to hear the findings of the inquest. They couldn’t prove pilot error. It was mechanical failure. So if you don’t mind…” He took hold of the edge of the desk and levered himself upright. “If you don’t mind, I’m sending you back on the supply boat. You’ll have to wait around here for a couple of days, but…I’ll go and talk to Larsen about it now.”

I watched him make his way to the door. I had never seen him other than graceful, but now he moved as if his joints were hurting him. His head was down. He took hold of the heavy steel handle. “Aaron,” I rasped, and wondered if he had heard. My mouth felt numb and sandy. “Aaron, please. Wait.”

“What for?” He turned to me, his eyes hollow with desperation. “So I can tell you I hung about in gay bars for nine months hoping for someone to look enough like him that I could close my eyes and pretend? That I…keep his e-mails and read them and pretend that way? I’ve never told anyone, Matt. I never even meant for you to know his name.”

“I didn’t find out his name from the e-mails. You say it in your sleep.”

He flinched. “What?”

“The first night I was with you, and…often since.”

“I…I do?”

I had to lip-read it. His brow was furrowed. I saw that his cheeks were wet. Carefully I laid the photograph down on the desk and came to stand in front of him. He flung out a hand at me, a gesture of warding off, and I accepted it. “Yes. Often.”

“Good, because when I met you—and you look nothing like him—and I started to feel the way I do about you, I thought I was beginning to forget…”

The way I do.
My mind set that aside, though it felt like being thrown a handful of diamonds. “You’re not. You never will.”

“Good,” he repeated. Then, again, “You’re nothing like him. I thought at first…I was afraid it was just the state of you. Rosie never needed much looking after, God knows, and…”

“And you thought I did?”

“Yes, I…It felt good. But even that couldn’t last. I found out what had happened to you, and I saw how hard you were fighting—just to stay sane, to stay alive. Winning too.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Was I? Maybe after I met you…”

“No. You’d have been okay. You’re strong, Matt. Not in the same way Rosie was, but—you were open,
loving
, somehow, even after what Joe had done to you. I saw that soon enough. It wasn’t just—compassion, needing someone to care for. Then every time we touched one another, it felt better and better, until…” He shuddered to a halt. I waited, watching his fading colour in concern. Hearing this was life’s blood to me, but he didn’t sound steady. The hand he was holding out to me opened and closed in a sudden spasm. “You know, by the time I knew you’d read my fucking e-mails, I was almost pleased. Because…because you were guilty and miserable, and that meant I wasn’t the only one starting to fall in—Oh God—to fall in love. I realised that, and I thought—I think about Rosie, and it feels like only yesterday he died…” He watched for a moment unseeingly, his eyes dark and bewildered. Then he whispered, barely audible, “Fuck. I can’t breathe.”

“What?” I slipped past his outstretched hand and stood close to him. “What is it?”

“Don’t know. Just can’t…can’t get air in.”

For a second, panic seized me. Then, just as quickly, it died. I might be a fake doctor here, but back on land I was a real one. I put a hand on his shoulder and listened to him. He was struggling—drawing short inhalations too high in his chest to do him much good—but I couldn’t hear wheezing or fluid. People dropped into respiratory distress for dozens of reasons. Trauma, disease; sometimes just overwhelming, inexpressible pain. The sense of knowing what to do came back to me like the memory of a long-gone dream. “Okay,” I said, reaching for the pulse in his wrist. It pounded hard beneath my fingertips, racing with his fear, but it was strong. “All right. This will pass. Can you come with me?”

He moved obediently when I took hold of his arm and guided him over to the bunk. I could feel him spiralling, the panic feeding on itself, and I ran a hand up and down his back. “Sit down for me.” His lips were going blue. In a moment I would run and hit whatever alarm it took to get the rig’s medical team down here, but I had one trick. “Okay. Now rest your elbows on your knees and put your head down.”

“And what the fuck…is this meant to do?”

That was good: still talking, and irritation coming through the fright. “Opens your chest out,” I told him. “Relaxes the bits that are trying to clog up. I get asthmatics to do it.”

“Not an…asthmatic,” he growled, but he suddenly drew a huge, half-drowned lungful of air. “Oh God.”

“That’s it. Again.” I waited for the next inhalation and the next, and the third one became a grating sob. “Aaron, love…”

I reached for him, and he stiffened. “Nn-nn. Don’t.” His hand came out once more in that hopeless sign of rejection, pushing me away. I had thought he was trying to sidestep the breakdown beginning to overwhelm him, but finally I saw his problem. I had come out here, reenacting the trip which had killed his last lover, and taken a hammer to the shell in which he had been rebuilding his life. Coping. Surviving. Oh, and I’d begun my work long before that—needing him, making him be more to me than just the simple lay that would have done him good and left him with intact memories. Making him, never expecting any such development, begin to fall in love—long before he was ready for it. Getting between him and his memories. I was the fucking problem. “Aaron, I’m sorry,” I whispered, hating the inadequacy of the words. “I am. I’ll clear out, okay? I’m so sorry—for all the stupid things I thought. For coming out here tonight especially. God, if I’d known what had happened…what had happened to Rosie, I’d never have…” I watched, paralysed, while another sob wrenched his frame, and he pulled back the hand and wrapped it round his nape, clenching, trying to curl up on himself. “I’ll leave you alone, okay?”