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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.