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.’
‘You don’t just slip the lock in these bastards, Rich,’ Stopper said. ‘You don’t just kick the fucking door off its hinges.’
‘The windows, then,’ Jane said. ‘There’s got to be something we can do.’
Stopper was shaking his head, but he stood up and tested the bunk bolted to the wall. ‘Fetch me one of them spanners,’ he said.
Between them they managed to unscrew the bolts and wrench the bunk clear. Jane tossed the bedding to one side.
‘Here,’ Stopper said, ‘turn that round so we can use that nasty-looking corner. See if we can’t ram that into the glass.’
They spent ten minutes trying to crack the porthole, but the glass wasn’t even scratching. There was no swearing; they had both known what the result would be. Stopper tossed the bed into the corner of the chamber; the echo of its collision rang dully. Panic unstitched itself once more in Jane’s gut. He wanted to breathe fresh air. He didn’t want the stink of cheap whisky fumes and stomach acid to be the last odours to sit in his lungs. And though Stopper was suddenly the only thing between him and being alone, he wished him a thousand miles away. He didn’t know what was going to happen once the goodwill and the fire from the whisky were all gone and it became just the two of them and the panic stripping them away, layer by layer, to a point where violence was waiting.
They were painstakingly checking the seals at the hatch on the far side of the chamber, in the hope that the explosive decompression Carver and Rae had suffered might have somehow weakened it, when there was a deep sound they both recognised: the chunk of the hatch tumblers sliding free. They stumbled over each other in their desire to be first out of the door, and Stopper’s fist was balled, ready to fight Jane for it, when Jane put out a hand to hold him back.
‘Wait,’ he said, and held up his other hand in a placatory gesture. ‘Stopper, let’s just take it slow. We don’t know what it was did for the guys out there. If it was a gas leak, maybe.’
‘There’s nothing on the platform that could take out a whole shift.’
‘But something did, right? Something did.’
Stopper sighed and let the tension fall out of him; he seemed to dwindle. ‘OK. I just… if that’s the fail-safe, I just don’t want it to unfail-safe itself. You hear me?’
‘I hear you. But let’s at least get some masks on. The suits too. You didn’t see… their skin, Stop, their skin was sliding off them.’
They shrugged on their wetsuits and masks, gloves and boots. They checked each other’s oxygen tanks and gave each other the OK signal. At the hatch, Jane pulled out his regulator and said, ‘Stop, try not to look at what’s out there too much. Let’s head for the OIM’s office and see what’s what. Quick as we can.’
He didn’t hang around to see if Stopper was following, but took off quickly and almost paid the price for his impatience. The wind on deck was gusting so violently that it swept his feet from under him and took him fully twenty feet towards the guard rails. Part of them had been sheared off either directly by the wind or some piece of hardware driven by it. The rubber suit bit at the deck and brought him to a stop six feet away from his death. He was almost too busy looking at the sky, at the chicanery of violet and green and orange, to notice. Northern Lights, he supposed. This far south? He thought it more likely that it was the breakdown of cells in his own brain as he lay dying. But he wasn’t dying. Not yet.