Page 80 of You Float My Boat

I stepped back just in case. Kate and Oz in his bedroom was not something I could unhear.

Instead, I knocked. Loudly. ‘Oz?’

Nothing.

I tried again.Rap rap rap.Reminiscent of the way our old school housemaster used to.

‘Oz …’

‘I don’t hear anything.’ This time, Brooks pressed his ear to the door. ‘If they’re both in there then they’re both asleep. I’m going in.’

Twisting the handle with surprising delicacy, he eased the door open enough so the pair of us could peer around.

It only took a second for it to hit us.

‘Jesus, it smells like a distillery in here.’ I wafted my hand through the air and opened the door wide.

It was still early enough that the sun hadn’t yet emerged, and we stood in the entranceway waiting for our eyes to adjust to the darkness in Oz’s room, and the lump underneath the navy duvet in the middle of his huge bed. Brooks cracked open the window, and immediately the cold outside air flowed in.

Flicking on the study lamp on Oz’s desk, I turned to spot one arm hanging listlessly down the side of the mattress, though his fingers still gripped the neck of an almost empty whisky bottle.

One that had been full yesterday.

‘Holy shit.’ I picked it up, my socks immediately soaking into a dark, wet patch I hadn’t noticed and breathed a sigh of relief we probably wouldn’t have to make a trip to accident and emergency. ‘Doesn’t look like he’s drunk it all.’

Brooks pulled back the cover to find Oz appropriately snoring like a drunken sailor, and eased out the phone stuck under his cheek.

‘What time is it?’ whispered Brooks, though whispering was pointless. Based on Oz’s current position it would probably be easier to wake the dead.

Flicking my wrist around to check my watch, I replied, ‘Five forty-five.’

‘Shit. We can’t leave him here, but we also don’t have enough time to get him ready for training.’

‘Mate … he’s not going anywhere. Even if he only had half that bottle, he’s still going to be drunk. Do you think he needs to go to hospital?’

Brooks’ eyes flicked to Oz and back to me. ‘What for?’

‘Getting his stomach pumped?’

‘Nah,’ he scoffed, with all the ambivalence of someone weighing in at 100 kilos, and whose food and drink intake had very little effect on his day-to-day. Though I don’t think I’d ever seen Brooks drink quite this much in one go. ‘We have bigger issues, namely what are we going to tell Coach? He’s already worried about Oz given everything happening with Kate – he might drop him from the crew.’

Glancing down at a snoring Oz, I attempted to ease away the tension building in my temples. Brooks was right. In the past few weeks, the tabloid media had discovered Oz and Kate’s relationship, and as Oz was deemed a person of interest – whether he wanted to be or not (he didnot) they’d unwittingly been pulled into the spotlight. While Oz was used to it, Kate wasn’t, and after an incident involving a speedboat and theCambridge rowing crew training on the Tideway, Oz had been understandably upset.

Actually, upset was an understatement. Apoplectic was more like it. On the warpath was better, and after he’d smashed up most of the lockers in the locker room, Coach had asked if he wanted to step down as president.

I had a feeling Coach wouldn’t be quite so lenient the second time around, and Oz wouldn’t be given the choice. He’d simply be removed.

We needed a plan.

The snap of Brooks’ fingers pulled my attention, ‘What if we all call in sick? A twenty-four-hour stomach bug or something. We can say we’ve all got food poisoning from that pie last night.’

‘From my cooking?’

‘Have you got a better idea?’ he hissed.

I didn’t.

We were still staring at each other when a low rumbling noise sounding more animal than human croaked from the lump on the bed. ‘I can hear you, you know?’

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