Sea state, p.10
Sea State, page 10
We walked to a casino at the west end of town. The building had a cinder block ceiling and a drab, municipal look. A place you’d go to address your need to gamble, not indulge it. We don’t do casinos well in this country; they run counter to the principles that made our nation great. Of course Aberdeen, a city that abhorred spending, a city grown fat on thrift, would make a particularly poor fist of it. Inside, the air was stale. The clockless walls were covered with flocked wallpaper.
Said went to the bar. The back-to-back drifted over to the roulette wheel, where he started a conversation with a man in a lightweight pink suit. The man had a prematurely reddened face, and wore the sleeves of his jacket pushed back, Miami Vice style. He suited being there, with his bookmaker’s clothes and his seedy aspect. They stopped talking as I walked up.
“What are you saying to my brother?” I said. “Anything you say to him, you have to run by me first.”
“This boy’s no your brother,” the man scoffed. “I was at college with him.”
Over the course of the night, I had become attached to my lie. I was used to being someone’s big sister, I suppose.
“He doesn’t like to talk about me, because I’m older. We’re not in the same peer group.”
“I was asking if he’d heard George FitzGerald’s album.”
“Who’s George FitzGerald?”
It sounded like a bandleader’s name.
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“You’ve just been to see him.”
I shrugged. Paying attention to specifics was what teenage boys did. I’d no sooner choose to go to a club because of the lineup than I would plaster my bedroom wall with flyers for old raves. Talk around us resumed. “That album’s about his burd,” said someone. “What time is it?” said someone else.
“It all sounds the same to me now,” I said. “Like nineties garage, which you’re probably too young to remember. Producers now are such . . . copies. Bicep. They’re copies. Their version of that Dominica song, it’s just the original song! I know, because I’ve got it, on a Stu Allan tape, from 1995. It’s no different.”
I spent the first decade of the new millennium complaining that music wasn’t as good as it used to be, the last few years alarmed by the rate at which my past was being pillaged. Hearing it, I felt a kind of vertigo, as if the twenty years between had been annulled. As if no time had passed at all. Garage mainlined everything good that had gone before (the frictionless gloss of house, the sadness and longing of early hardcore) and somehow made it more. It sounded like a hole in the heart, like the incommunicable ache that comes with a life spent looking backwards. It never gained traction in the northwest. Liverpool was too white, too wedded to the four/four signature.
“I love old garage.”
Said had materialized at the table, with drinks.
“I know you do, baby,” I said. “That’s because you have taste.”
I tucked an arm round his shoulder.
“That’s how I knew we’d be friends. I knew both of you would be my friends as soon as we met. I’ve got this thing with my best mate, we call it our friendship butterfly net, and when we meet someone we like . . .”
“Yes, yes,” said the back-to-back. “We’ve heard plenty about the butterfly net already.”
My face hurt. I suffered from bruxism, silent lament of the stressed. I’d not helped my case by grinding my teeth and talking rubbish all night. I flexed my jaw. The back-to-back patted his pockets down and handed me some gum.
“Your little friend looks unsavory,” I said, chewing.
“He is unsavory,” said the back-to-back. “That’s the word.”
“I don’t think you should talk to him anymore. I don’t think you should be squandering the family silver on a game of chance. Why not count some cards?”
“Away to fuck! I’m no in any state to card-count. I can barely see the table as it is.”
He pushed his chips onto the baize with a sweeping gesture. The croupier called to us, and as he did, everyone took a single step back and turned to watch the wheel. The ball shuttled around in its gulley. My pill had burned down, leaving in its place a ticking contentment, but as I stepped back it gave a vestigial kick, so that my vision skipped a few frames, and the table leered up at me, its white numbers arcane and coded like Ouija script, its cloth an unreal green. They say François Blanc cut a deal with the devil to obtain the secrets of the game. What secrets are there? Everyone knows which way the odds are stacked.
I still had my arm around Said’s shoulder, and I felt him brace beside me, as though it was his money on the table, not his friend’s. The ball clattered through its final revolution and settled into the bracket with a click. The back-to-back turned round and smiled so winningly, it took me a second to understand he had lost. He put a hand over his mouth, like a pinup girl pantomiming shock, then extended it towards us. A pill, split three ways, lay on his palm.
We place our bets and we gamble. We imagine we have what it takes to beat the house.
5
Tern
I was in the pub one night and this woman went to sit down next to me, so I moved my coat out of the way. She laughed at me, because the coat was pink. I said, “It’s not pink. It’s light plum.” Bit of banter, you see? Broke the ice. I fuck her the way I can’t fuck my wife. Throw her about the room. Bit of strangulation. It’s different, more animalistic. I’ve only seen her a couple of times, but when I’m offshore, I talk to her more than I talk to my missus. I don’t know if I miss her, but I miss the things she says to me. She tells me I look strong. My wife doesn’t say those things. And I don’t want to say “Look, I need to hear this” and then for her to go “Oh, you look nice” straight away, all robotic and that. But I do need to hear it. Massively. Turning thirty hurt me. My hair started falling out.
“HOW DID YOU GET THAT SCAR?”
“You don’t ask people that. You can’t just sit down and start asking questions like that. Do you not know anything? It’s a little bit personal, that.”
It wasn’t the Welsh boy who spoke, but the man sitting opposite me. He had the light, affectless stare of a serial killer, but his tone was chiding, schoolteacherly. Faced with him, I felt like I did when I was at school: sullen, resistant to correction.
“I’m interviewing him,” I said. “I have to ask questions.”
The scar was a deep, curving crevice that ran all the way down his face, from his eyelid to the corner of his mouth. The skin had an unhealthy purple tint to it, the yellowed lilac of a fading bruise. Unthinkingly, he passed a hand over his cheek. His eyes slipped past my shoulder as his focus settled somewhere else, somewhere interior.
“Warring,” he said.
“Don’t tell lies.”
He grinned.
“Fell off a log when I was six.”
“Onto what? A scythe?”
“We’re not that country. The log was at the edge of a quarry. I rolled right down.”
It was half past one on a Tuesday afternoon, and I was already on my way to being drunk. I’d been circulating around this room for a few hours now, buying drinks, inviting confidences, like the tipsy hostess of a dour, exclusively male cocktail party. These three men, I thought, could be ranked in order of hostility. The first found my presence an imposition, and wished I would go. His friend, who had just come back from the bar with four Southern Comforts and lemonade, apparently taking the Welsh boy at his word when he told him to “get anything,” didn’t care either way. And the Welsh boy, who was, as far as I could tell, the dominant force at the table, wanted me to stay.
The nature of this work was making me see what it must be like for them. Going up to groups, identifying the most receptive, inveigling your way in, uncaring of what the majority wants. Girls are taught to respond to the subtlest social cues, to beat a retreat at the first hint of furrowed brow or crossed arms; boys to develop a benign tone-deafness for the very same signals. They learn to brazen it out and keep talking, like a salesman on a doorstep sensing a soft no. In order to do work like this—to latch on to strangers and coax conversation from them—I had to become a hybrid of sorts. The unthreatening looks of a woman. The impervious core of a man.
“What’s your name, darling?” the Welsh boy said. He had a lilting Valleys accent, at the opposite end of the scale from the singing Teesside inflections around us.
“Dunyazad.”
“Shut the front door. Nobody’s called that!”
“I am.”
“Fuck me. I ain’t never met a Dunyazad before. I ain’t never heard a name like that my whole life.”
“Well. Now you have.”
“You got a pen? Write your name down for me. Your full name. I don’t want to miss this book when it comes out.”
“Put it in your phone.”
He looked at me as if I’d suggested inscribing it on his forehead.
“Can’t do that. My missus goes through my phone, doesn’t she?”
“In London, it is considered unacceptable to go through your partner’s phone.”
“Well in Port Talbot, it’s fine. I’ve got to keep my Facebook secret even.”
“You have a secret Facebook account?”
“I like nosing at people’s photos. I hate the drama that goes with it.”
“I’ve noticed men who claim to ‘hate drama’ are often quite good at causing it.”
“So birds in London aren’t bothered about cheating?”
“It’s not that they’re not bothered. They are, but they cover it up, because they want to seem French. It’s a bit tacky, to monitor your partner’s movements. Like . . . having a party after a christening.”
I pulled a pen without a cap from the detritus at the bottom of my bag, tore a page from my notebook, and wrote Dunyazad Jones in a clear, round hand. He took the paper from me, held it up to the light, and squinted at it, like a cashier checking a fifty.
“Tell you what, Dunyazad. They’re some cracking boots you got on.”
The boots were lovely, in fact. They were dark blue, and finished at mid-calf with a soft suede leg that folded back over the heels, like gaiters. A relic from my old life, where beauty was obtainable, and everything, but everything, was up for barter.
“I call them my horse leg boots. Because they make me look like a shire horse.”
“Neigh, they don’t!” He glanced at them again. “They’re very nice, actually. Like fake UGGs.”
“They’re Chloé.”
“Kind of collapsed in on themselves, aren’t they? Cluggs!”
“I don’t know why I bother wearing anything nice up here.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be asking us about offshore?”
“So I am. Where do you work?”
“Not telling.”
“I bet I can guess. Let me see. You flew here direct, and you’ve not gone three and three yet. I reckon that puts you on . . .” I tapped my mouth with my pen and narrowed my eyes. “One of the Brents?”
The Welsh boy smirked.
“That’s classified.”
“I’m just going to say you work on the Tern. Same region, same weather.”
“Say Tern again.”
“Tern.”
“Turn. Quite posh, aren’t you?”
“Not especially.”
“It’s good, I like it. I like posh girls.”
“What’s it like?”
He looked at me evenly. His eyes were the color of honey. His hair and his eyes and his skin were all the same shade, which made it difficult to pick out his features, or form an organizing impression of his face.
“It’s all right,” he said.
“It’s shite,” muttered the first man.
“It’s what you make of it. See, I never bring my problems to work. Some people do. They’re the ones who end up counting the days down till they go home. If you don’t cut it off, it pickles your head. There was a man not long ago who filled his pockets with wrenches and threw himself off his rig.”
“I feel like I’ve heard that one before.”
“Maybe. The point remains. You cannot live one life, if you work offshore. You must live two.”
“You don’t mind being away?”
“I have to be honest with you, my love, I don’t. I’m a little bit coldhearted like that.”
“I don’t do Facebook, it drives me mad. You see people out there, doing their own heads in, thinking: ‘The missus is out again, doing this or doing that, and I’m stuck on here.’”
It was the second man speaking, the one who fetched the drinks. I was distracted by the incipient tension between the Welsh boy and his friend, and had almost forgotten he was there. I looked at him properly for the first time. He had a scaffolder’s build—tall, with huge, rounded shoulders—and an anxious, florid face. There was a large tattoo of a football crest on his arm, partially obscured by the sleeve of his T-shirt, but what was visible, just below, was the hooligan motto “Keep It Casual,” written in a jaunty, slanting font.
“A lot of the Boro lads are never off the phone, arguing with their birds. It’s constant drama. Always drama.”
“Someone told me about a boy on the Beatrice,” I said. “He headbutted his iPad because his girlfriend was going out and he couldn’t stop her.”
“It’s hard,” the second man said. “I’ve got a missus and sprogs at home. My youngest has just turned one. She had a bit of a cough and she’s been crying a lot in the night. The other night, my wife sent me three recordings of her screaming. I said, ‘Why the fuck have you sent me this?’ She said, ‘Because I’m putting up with it, every single night.’”
“What can you do about that, while you’re away?”
“It’s a bit of a cycle. She’s at home, doing everything on her own. If she’s in a foul mood when I ring, then we’ll have a few days where we don’t speak or we’re arguing. Then you’re bickering with everyone at work, because your head’s up your arse. Then you make up, say you’re sorry. We normally do two or three rounds each trip.”
He looked so downcast, I felt I ought to change the subject, but could think of nothing to say in that moment that didn’t relate to marriage.
“You know, it’s very common to fight with your wife when you work away. It’s so common they have a name for it: intermittent husband syndrome.”
“Is that a real thing?”
“It is. Soldiers get it too.”
These men were like soldiers, I thought. They had to cultivate a capacity to detach. They were in the business of maintaining civilization, and this work had a paradoxically coarsening effect on their behavior. It sent them out into the world’s roughest wildernesses. They liked to talk about hardship posts, to one-up each other with awful conditions. In Angola, they were hustled into a fleet of blacked-out SUVs and made to lie on the floor, out of sight of local militia. In Nigeria, rigs came with bunkers shaped like upright coffins. If pirates seized control of the platform they were supposed to lock themselves in the bunkers and face Mecca. You could earn good money in Africa, but it was danger money.
So maybe they were more like mercenaries. Certainly, rigs were like barracks: all-male domains where antifemale paranoia flourished. Offshore, they swapped stories of grasping wives and scheming girlfriends, of women who “trapped” them with pregnancies, spirited children away over borders, who pauperized them in divorce settlements, cheated on them with their friends. “Don’t worry about your missus,” they’d say to each other. “She’s not worrying about you. She’s busy getting nailed by Leroy.”
Leroy is to oil workers as Jody is to marines. A folk figure; the indolent civilian who hangs about on dry land, taking advantage of their absence. An expression of generalized anxiety, a means of hardening the heart towards home. Notably (or not), Leroy, like Jody, appears to be black, though most North Sea workers come from postindustrial towns that are, for the most part, white. Leroy, one man said, was name-checked all over the world. He’d worked in Brazil, Greenland, the United States, the Falklands. Wherever he went, the men made jokes about Leroy. Why is he black? I asked the man. Why do you think? he replied.
“You’ve got your rig head and your home head,” the Welsh boy said. “You have to communicate in different ways. Offshore, you speak abruptly. You can’t leave any room for error. You can’t skirt round issues. When you get off, you need a decompression period. People at home don’t understand. Their reality goes on day to day. We’re taken out of it for a while.”
The sun threw a pale quadrant across the parking lot. Something about this room, the angle at which the light hit the window, made it seem smoky, though smokers were corralled in the concrete yard outside. The air looked tinted, as if seen through tobacco-colored glass. On the table in front of me, my phone lit up.
I’m here. Where are u???
“Going so soon?” the Welsh boy said, as I got up from my seat.
“I’ve got to go and get my boyfriend.”
“Let him wait.”
The first man shook his head, as if alive to me and my suite of sneaky tricks.
“‘Boyfriend.’ You must think we’re soft. I’ve seen you going up to lads all day. I think you’re a whore.”
“Shut up,” I said, picking up my bag. “Nobody cares what you think.”
Caden was standing in roughly the same spot I’d first found him. Now, as then, he was listing under the weight of his kit bag. I loitered by the ATM for a minute, watching him. I had rehearsed this scene in my mind many times. I had seen myself standing at arrivals, grave and erect in spaghetti-strapped black (my outfit planned to evoke Kim Kardashian, courtside with Kanye, in the salad days of their romance; taupe lip liner, loose bun, look of candid love). I would put my arms around his neck and hold him, in silent recognition of his sacrifice. My mood should be muted, to match his. It would be unseemly to act too pleased. I assumed he’d feel a degree of ambivalence, so I was prepared for a range of reactions: guilt, sadness, some light sulking. But I was not prepared for this.
