Sea state, p.16
Sea State, page 16
These men talked about home with an exile’s longing, a perspective skewed by distance. The houses they missed were dolls’ houses, the women and children inside arranged in tableaux. I was shocked, as I shouldn’t have been, by the number who confessed to affairs, by the varied shades of connection that existed in the minds of married men. The many species that jostled for space, under the genus of “extra.” Girlfriends. Side things. Shags. Sluts. Mistresses, of marriage-spoiling grade and potency. Ego-strokers. Attention donors. Other Women, in all their stripes.
At work, they spoke to them on disposable phones, or apps that left no trace. When they landed, they snapped the SIM cards, stashed the burners, wiped the apps. In a very real sense, these women existed only when they were offshore. At home, the portal slammed shut, and the girlfriends disappeared. Increasingly, I had to fight the compulsion to empathize, to jump in with the chummy anecdote, the time when I did this, and I did that, and not just because it was bad practice.
What I wanted, I realized, was my day in court, a chance to explain myself to a partial audience. It wasn’t enough to tell my friends what Caden had done. I wanted to tell his friends, his colleagues, to shame him in front of his peers. My dream was of a chance meeting with people who knew him well, people on whose good opinion he relied. Then I could give my version of events, lure them over to my side with the clarity of my arguments. My favorite scenario—unlikely, but not impossible, given that the North Sea is a small place, and the weather was beginning to turn again—was that the cast of my first interview was somehow reassembled around the same table, minus him. I could fill them in on what had happened since that night, and together we would denounce him. Everybody would tell competing stories about his awfulness, and also comment on how well I looked, information they could pass on to him at a later date.
The temptation to say too much was always there. And there were times when, four bottles of beer to the good, my capacity for voir dire impaired, I did. Then the man I was talking to might snap, “Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson now.”
More often, he tried to impress upon me a different kind of lesson. Sleeping with him would be a curative. I should ignore the signs and signifiers of his home life—wedding ring; trilling phone; rubicund toddlers and clouds of bridal white on his WhatsApp profile; once, memorably, a creased photo of a five-month scan, produced with shy pride only minutes before—and submit to his care. It only has to be once, he’d say. Just once. If we don’t now, we won’t be able to ever. And everyone’s allowed one slip. I do everything for her, but she doesn’t appreciate me. She hates it when I do anything for myself. She’s jealous, she’s controlling. She has no idea how hard I work.
By then, I’d picked up a smattering of the language, as an expat picks up a few phrases after six months in the new country. My ex is crazy: I treat women poorly. My ex is controlling: I am a cheat. My ex is bitter: I am incapable of linking cause and effect. My ex took me for everything I had: she received an amount commensurate with her contribution to our marriage. My ex won’t let me see the kids, though I pay through the nose: I think maintenance payments ought to work like a VIP concert ticket, where you buy access to the performer, irrespective of my failings as a parent. You’re different to other birds: I believe women are more or less interchangeable. I’d sit there, thinking that mothers who tell their girls they’re special send them out into the world with a flank exposed. Occasionally, I asked these men why they got married in the first place. I got the same answer every time: No man ever wants to get married. It’s always for they girlfriends.
“Who’s going to talk more?” I said now, pushing my phone towards the dark man. For some reason, I was directing my questions to him. He had a sullen magnetism about him, the authority that comes with not trying. “You, or him?”
“He’ll have more to say than me,” the dark man said. “He always does.”
I turned to the blond man. He began to talk, as if eager to live up to his friend’s estimate. His rig, the Ninian Central, was notoriously hard to get off. (Whenever I said I wanted to talk to men who worked there, people made the same joke: “You won’t find anyone, love. They’re all stuck on.”) It was in the northern North Sea, and poorly designed. If the wind blew in a certain direction, hot air from the turbines’ exhaust stacks flowed down across the helideck and into the engines of the S-92s, making them stall. But southerly winds were the least of their worries. Flights home could be canceled for the stupidest of reasons: geese on the runway at Scatsta, ice on the runway at Scatsta (ice an apparently unforeseeable condition, in the Shetlands, in November), a pilot who couldn’t fly in the dark, a missing bulb in the survival suit shed. Workers were sometimes still stuck there seven or eight days after their shifts finished, turning an enervating three and three into a dangerous four and two. Though most of the time, the man said, he got stranded going the other way. His life had always been like that. He was born lucky.
“I’ve got a mole on your rig,” I said, when he finished. “He emails me his complaints. I heard there was a fight on there the other week.”
The men looked at each other. The dark man gave a startled bark of laughter.
“There was no fight,” he said, shaking his head.
“That’s not what I heard. I heard someone got punched.”
“Did your mole tell you this?”
“I’ve heard it twice.”
This appeared to delight them. The blond man wriggled in his seat. He had a lovely, gurgling laugh, like a tickled baby.
“Were you in the fight?” I said. “You were, weren’t you?”
“Was I hell! Do I look like I could throw a punch?”
I had to concede, he did not. He was gawky as a Lowry drawing, all angles and elbows.
“Did you hear about it?”
“I heard the rumors. That’s all they were. Vicious rumors.”
“I heard the rumors,” said the dark man. “I heard it was more than a punch. A hell of a lot more than a punch.”
“What did you hear?”
“That’s it. I’ve said too much already.”
“You two are no fun. You’re rubbish interviewees, the pair of you.”
They looked at each other again and laughed. The blond man turned towards me, cupping his face in his palm, like a ditzy chat show host.
“I want to know who your mole is, me.”
I smiled complacently and pulled my sleeves over my wrists.
“Journalists can’t be compelled to reveal their sources.”
“Haway.” He dismissed my scruples with a wave of his hand. “Tell us who it is. If I don’t go offshore tomorrow, I’ll forget all about this conversation.”
“A mole is an anonymous source.”
“Who does he work for? You must be able to tell us that.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know much about him, other than that he works on your rig and he’s unhappy.”
“It’s bound to be scaff,” muttered the dark man.
The conviction that scaffolders were lazy, stupid, dishonest, addled by steroid addiction, incompetent to the point of criminality, and given to telling pointless lies was shared by almost every offshore worker I’d spoken to.
“He says your OIM treats the rig like a fiefdom. And that his chopper always gets off on time. Whatever the weather.”
“I’ll tell you something that happened last trip. I was lying in bed and heard two choppers come in—one was the OIM’s flight—and they both managed to land, smack bang in the middle of the sector.”
“I heard he built himself a lovely new production suite that no one else wanted, even as he was laying people off.”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly comment on that.”
“What happened to the boy who inhaled H2S the other day?”
The blond man’s elbow lost contact with the tabletop and his arm slipped off the edge. He righted himself and turned back to me.
“Now, how do you know about that?”
“My mole told me.”
“They’re not even sure it was H2S.”
“What was it then?”
“Proper nosy, aren’t you?”
“You have to be, in my line of work.”
“Aye. I suppose you do. Shy bairns get nae sweets, as they say.”
We gossiped idly as the light failed. They told me asset holders were trawling social media, looking for the aberrant comment, the errant opinion, that might turn a redundancy into a dismissal, a payoff into a freebie. Men were suspended and stripped of their positions for being tagged in the wrong Facebook status. Some were moved onto the Murchison, which was little more than a slow-motion sacking, since the rig was due to be decommissioned in March. The blond man smiled when he talked about the Murchison. He’d spent seven years on there.
It was the happiest rig of all, because it had been designed with people in mind.
They spoke about the conditions they worked in during winter, the horizontal snow and ninety-mile-per-hour gales that rocked the moorings and rattled the superstructure on its struts. (“The rig is square, so when the wind hits seventy miles an hour, they er . . . well, they just tell us to avoid certain sides,” said the blond man, rubbing the bridge of his nose with a bony index finger.) In December, it started getting dark at half two. The wind chill could drop to minus twenty. The platforms were so old, water swilled all over the decks. Yet still they were hustled out of the tea shacks in all weathers. What they were witnessing was a systematic stripping of their rights, a kind of reverse Maslow, an inverted triangle of provision.
The blond man had been offshore more than a decade, and this was the lowest he’d ever seen morale. How could you feel happy when your pals were being paid off? He’d watched as friends missed holidays and funerals. He’d seen sick men stuck on the rig, when they should have been flown off.
Getting home on time was treated as a minor miracle, but any talk of transfers was swiftly squashed. Lucky to have a job, they were told. There were men contacting their companies, offering to do their first trip for free. Offshore was overrun with a new breed of worker: the six-week wonder. Self-employed, armed with a quick enhancement course, they were taking jobs off real tradesmen, and charging more besides. Domestic plumbers turned pipe fitters. Welding inspectors who’d never held a set of welding tongs in their life. They were mercenaries, kitted out for the new era: high day rates, no rights. This was raw capitalism, free enterprise distilled down to its essence.
“I met someone who worked for your company last night,” I said. “An ex-marine. He was a sniper in Iraq. He told me he’d killed a lot of people.”
“He’ll be a scaffolder, craic like that,” said the dark man. He kept crossing his arms high over his chest when he spoke. He was doing it now, tucking his hands into his armpits and frowning, like a disgruntled teddy bear. “They’re full of shit. Honestly.”
The blond man giggled. “He’ll be lying to you, you know.”
“He wasn’t,” I persisted.
I was treating the story as a comic interlude, though at the time, I was nervous. As he sank treble whiskies, the man’s lucid, funny answers had descended into paranoid rambling about government conspiracies and contract killings. Leaning against the slatted wooden walls of the pub, bearded and wild-eyed, he had reminded me of a shipwrecked sailor, driven mad by dehydration. This is what men always fail to grasp about women. We are scared of them, especially when they drink.
“He did seem a bit tapped. He tried to grab my head and kiss me in the middle of the pub. I ducked out of the way and he said: ‘This will be addressed later.’ It sounded vaguely rapey.”
“Vaguely rapey?” said the dark man.
“You didn’t let him go to the bar for you, did you?” sighed the blond man.
“You didn’t wake up with him, did you?” said the dark man.
“No. I didn’t. And by the way, he was a plumber.”
“House mouse!” they yelled in unison.
A group of men burst through the doors, as if buffeted in by a gust of wind, and dumped their kit bags on the floor. The blond man went to the bar. I asked his friend where he worked. The Tiffany, he replied. My palms prickled.
“Don’t think I know anyone on there,” I said.
Yeah you do. Caden appeared at the man’s shoulder. I blinked to dispel the vision (it came in through the door with the wind; I could feel it). Go away, I said. Stop interrupting. You’re a nuisance.
“Aye, well it’s quite little,” the man said, with a modest tilt of his head. “Only about seventy of us, all told.”
“That sounds . . . nice,” I said weakly. Caden was still hovering at his side, showing no inclination to move. I averted my eyes. “Cozy.”
“It’s a fucking shithole.”
“What do you do on there?”
A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. He had dimples, two indentations so deep and perfectly round, they looked like they’d been depressed with a pencil.
“I’m a scaffolder,” he said.
The sky, just visible through the vaulted glass ceiling, was growing dark. The quality of light inside had changed, taking on a cool, grayish cast. A couple of corseted witches and an imp with a curling tail ran past the window and up the main staircase, their shrieks echoing across the empty concourse. The dark man levered himself off his stool. He had a train to catch. I fluttered four fingers in his direction. “Watch what you’re doing there,” called the blond man, to his back. I glanced at the clock on the wall. I was always rushing now, always aware of how much time I’d squandered, how little I had left.
“I should go,” I said. “I’ve got my friend’s leaving drinks.”
“Need a new friend?”
We looked at one another, the what-shall-we-do-now indecision of unsupervised children playing over our faces.
“I can’t really be bothered.”
“Don’t bother, then. Come to the betting shop with me.”
“Will you be around later?”
“Might be,” he said.
SAID WAS LEAVING. HIS COMPANY HAD LAID OFF ALL ITS GRADUATES. They weren’t being seconded to Brunei. They weren’t being seconded anywhere. He was moving home, to train as an accountant. The world, he said, would always need accountants. The back-to-back was off to France, to do a ski season. And after that, who knew?
I felt put out by their defection. It struck me as a waste of all that education to abandon oil completely. That was the difference between us. They were young and unsentimental. They knew about the sunk-cost fallacy.
I should have tried harder with Said, I thought, as I walked across town. Except he belonged to those weeks in early summer, a time designated, with the binary process that attends a broken heart, as “before.” Said was inextricably linked with “before.” I saw him most days, and when we didn’t see each other, our phones chirruped all day, with the chatter of new friends who can’t stop finding things in common. I thought it might hurt, and pitch me backwards, to see him. Then again, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone out for a drink and not pushed my phone under the nose of the person opposite.
I saw the back-to-back first. He was leaning gracefully against a balustrade at the edge of the annex, talking to a blond girl, with a bored look on his face. He held out his arms and greeted me as one of his own. I had crossed a physical frontier and was physically like him now. Narrow, contained. A questing little switch of a person.
I was surprised again by the heat he gave off. He always looked to me as if his touch should be cold. I suppose I’d based this assumption on his white skin, his slippery, catlike style of attachment.
“Where the fuck have you been?”
“Mmm,” I said. “You’re all warm.”
He placed his hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length. The blond girl gave me a look that suggested she didn’t much care where I’d been, she only wished I’d go back.
“I’m serious. Where have you been? I thought we were going to see loads of you.”
I bit down the impulse to apologize. I felt genuine regret, but as usual, my pity was self-directed. Things might have been better if we’d stayed friends.
“I don’t know. I had my friendship butterfly net ready and everything. It’s just . . . nothing here worked out the way I planned.”
“Aye.” He looked around the room ruminatively. “I know what you mean.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Said told me. I meant to say.”
“Don’t be. I hated my job.”
“You’ll get something else.”
“Aye. I expect so.”
“No.” I put my hand on his arm. “That came out like a platitude. I meant you will get something else. You’re so bright. You could do anything. If I ran a company, I’d give you a job. In fact I’d create a role, just for you.”
“See, this is why I love it when you come out. My life is one long series of disappointments. And you manage to make me feel better about myself.”
“You should feel good about yourself,” I said. “You’re a gorgeous person.”
Said was watching us, an unreadable expression on his face. Whenever we talked, I got the feeling, difficult to rationalize but harder still to shake, that I’d upset him. We were cordial, but the air between us hummed with notes of grievance and concession. My invitation that night had the feel of a pardon, as when an errant duchess is restored to fashionable society after an internment on the fens. It’s possible I was being paranoid, but that summer’s events had transformed me. I ascribed to the creed of instinct now, and was sure, in the space behind my solar plexus, that I’d made him angry.
“How have you been?” he asked. His kiss felt cool against my cheek.
“I’m all right.” I realized with a shock that this was almost true. If not quite all right, then better than I’d been for some time. “Busy.”
“Yeah? You look good tonight.”
