Is he crazy?
‘Don’t worry, the petrol tank is at the back.’
I cough loudly, twice. He touches a button. Some kind of vacuum sucks his smoke straight up. Mr Rawlins starts the engines and coasts gently out of the range of bad golfers and their hard, white balls abducted by the wind.
There is the sound of air escaping under terrible pressure. As we lift up, my body dives for the earth, yearning. The pilot takes off with a stream of smoke pulling from his head. Nine little pigs smile through the Perspex.
This must be what they call adventure.
As we rise I let my eyes drop through the glass, see the crowns of houses and upended skirts of trees. The Dragonfly erupts through the clouds with barely a sound, more like a hum, as if the thin vacuum that removes the man’s smoke is keeping this craft in the sky.
* * *
After two hours, I am part of the Dragonfly. The machine breathes its mechanical breath through the soles of my sneakers as it takes me up to rub shoulders with the sun, fly within earshot of heaven, get the first whisper in. My fear is gone. The Dragonfly is taking me gracefully to a miracle of science. I will soon become a Raizier quality product.
Joy is fecund, but it rots easily. A dusting of old yellow appears on the rims of the pilot’s white sleeves. Fluff forms, a gathering audience to our exhaustion. Several times I check my GPS on my timepiece but it says, Aircraft Tracker Block On. Mr Rawlins doesn’t bother to speak to me, as if his words would be wasted on a mute.
The earth turns to heaving, sucking blue, but I would not call it a colour. It is a state, a plane, almost astronomical. I have seen the sea three times at Ladebi beach but this sea is as wilful as a seizure, as crushing as the unconscious mind. I would not call it blue.
* * *
After five more hours, the Dragonfly starts to slide from the sky. From a distance, the oil rig is a greedy creature crouched over its prey, covering it for consumption or mating. Closer, it’s a piece of industry broken off, a floating block of factory, with cement beams and steel cylinders sinking into the water, rooting it, I can only hope, in the earth’s core. Towers of criss-cross struts climb towards the sky as if someone was trying to build scaffolding to heaven. On the highest deck, a tall, round tower glitters near a landing ring. At the edge of the deck, an orange torpedo tilts down at forty-five degrees. A hi-tech lifeboat, ready to freefall into the sea.
As we fly closer, the sea smashes at the rig’s metal legs, turns them into twigs to be snapped off with a careless slap before the water demolishes the rig, devours it without tasting. The Dragonfly descends.
I can swim. I can swim, I tell myself desperately.
The pilot does something astonishing. He works the controls with one hand and pulls his shirt over his head with the other. Mr Rawlins has unexpectedly big breasts. He covers them up with a perfectly pressed shirt, identical to the one in which he’s spent nine hours sloughing skin. He clips down his mirror, combs his silver hair so it shines like the rotor blades through the window. He starts to brush his teeth, switching hands on the levers. He spits foam into his cup, speaks into the stiff wire on his cheek.
‘Nadras tower, Dragonfly 554FP, seventy feet and descending. Landing estimated at thirty-five seconds.’
I grip my seat as the rig heaves to meet me. As the deep sea separates into green, grey, black, I see black fins like plastic, pricking curiously in the water beneath the rig.
Am I dreaming?
A pillow of wind tries to stop us from touching down. We find a second of surrender, dive the last ten metres.
We land more heavily than one would expect from a man with excellent hygiene and a silver side flick, a man who is too important to communicate with a mute.
* * *
A Chinese woman stands like a sculpture cut from pearly white rock. After hours of flying, all the pilot gets is a slight bow. Her eyes are so black the midday sun tints them magenta.
‘Malachi Dakwaa.’ She smiles out of custom rather than kindness. ‘I am Meirong. The logistics controller on this project.’ She is wearing a black dress, square at her neck. There are black radio devices clipped to her waist, which is impossibly slim. Nipped. Her shoes are low and black.
I brace against the faint rocking of the rig, keep my eyes off the pale, polished bump rising above her ankle strap. The hair on her head is simply black water. She nods. ‘Come with me.’
Her flesh is shinier, more solid than I have ever seen. She is made of the same stuff as the life-size Buddha I saw in a garden shop once, but this woman is not the offspring of a gurgling teacher of joy without cause. She is the marble tree under which the fat man sat.
A black man steps from a huge old lifeboat with a torn-off roof. I want to duck away from his AK97, but I’ve taught myself to plant my feet, breathe before security personnel. The man’s muscles are laid in thin, strong strips, I can tell by his easy flex on the slightly shifting surface. Metal jangles with each tread, as if his pockets are heavy with loose change. His eyes are as bleak as the surface of this rig.
Oh, God. His epaulettes.
My fists form into bone.
They bear the same sign as the ANIM. I suck air through my teeth, force my eyes to the devil-thorn insignia on his chest. Nadras Oil, it says. A barbed star with a right angle hooked to each tip. A drilling emblem with a clockwise momentum, not the insignia of the devil who
