Page 3 of Dirty Rotten Love

I shrug nonchalantly. “Of course not, because I’m perfect. Can’t find fault with perfection.”

Tam snorts and slaps me on the back. “Yeah, right!”

“You have no idea.” I clap him on the shoulder. “Right. What’s for lunch? Please tell me it’s not the gray beef thing.”

“It’s the gray beef thing,” says Tam.

I close my eyes briefly.

I love it here. Not even the gray beef thing is ‌going to change that. Because I truly do love this rig. I know that sounds mental. It’s loud and it smells and the North Sea looks like it’s in a permanently bad mood and my bunk is roughly the size of a coffin, but I genuinely, honestly love it. Every single morning I wake up and I think, I’m on an oil rig. Me. Rory Gallacher from a two-bedroom terrace in Edinburgh where the boiler worked maybe sixty percent of the time and the other forty percent you just put another jumper on. I’m on an oil rig, earning more money in a single rotation than my mum used to earn in three years, and it is brilliant and I am brilliant for being here and nothing can touch me.

Except MacLeod, who can and does touch me, metaphorically speaking, approximately fifteen times a day.

Not like that. Obviously not like that. I just mean he gets to me. In a professional capacity. Because he is my supervisor and his entire personality is disappointment, and being on the receiving end of that much concentrated disappointment from one individual is a lot for anyone to deal with.

I am dealing with it magnificently.

I was entirely professional just now. And he said my work was fine. He actually said the word fine. So it’s fine. The crew like me, my boss thinks I’m fine. Everything is great.

This rotation is going to be the best time of my life.

Chapter two

Rory

The thing about MacLeod, and I say this as someone who has now spent six days in close professional proximity to the man, is that he doesn’t raise his voice. Ever. Not once. You might think this would make him easier to deal with. You would be wrong. You would be so catastrophically wrong.

Because what MacLeod does instead is get quieter. And the quieter he gets, the worse it is. The quieter he gets, the more every single person within a twenty-foot radius wants to spontaneously cease to exist. Right now he is extremely quiet, and there are eleven of us standing in a line next to the auxiliary pump housing, and I think at least three of them are actually considering jumping into the North Sea.

I am not considering jumping into the North Sea. I am standing up straight and keeping my face neutral and professional, which is taking considerable effort because what I actually want to do is laugh, because that is my stress response, but I cannot laugh, I will not laugh, laughing right now would be the single worst decision I have ever made and I have made some genuinely impressive ones.

This disaster started forty minutes ago. Grigor, who is one of the senior crew and should absolutely know better, signed off on a pressure check that he had not, as it turns out, actually done. Not properly. He’d done the first stage and then got distracted by something and come back and signed it off from memory, which, as MacLeod has now explained to us in a voice so quiet we all had to lean in slightly to hear it, is not a procedure. It is not even close to a procedure. It is the opposite of a procedure. It is what happens when someone decides that their own judgement is more reliable than the entire safety framework of a North Sea oil platform, and how does that sit with everyone, does everyone feel comfortable with that? No? Glad to see Green Crew has one brain cell between you and you can understand why we are going to be redoing every single check that Grigor signed off on this week.

Every single one.

Grigor looks like a man who has seen his own ghost. He is a big guy, Grigor, broad and weathered, the kind of man who looks like he was built for exactly this environment, and right now he looks approximately the size of a very guilty hamster.

“The documentation,” says MacLeod, still in that terrible quiet voice, “will be completed correctly. Every stage. Every sign off. If I find a single shortcut, we start again.” He pauses. “Are there any questions.”

There are no questions. There are never any questions when MacLeod uses that voice. Questions would require opening your mouth and drawing attention to yourself and nobody in their right mind is doing that right now.

MacLeod looks along the line of us. His gaze moves steadily from face to face with the energy of a man taking inventory of everything he finds disappointing about the world. It reaches me. I give him nothing. Neutral. Professional. A face that has never laughed in its life and doesn’t intend to start.

He looks away.

I quietly let out approximately forty percent of the air in my lungs.

“Right,” says MacLeod. “Get on with it.”

He walks away. The collective exhale of eleven men is almost loud enough to hear over the wind.

Nobody speaks for a good thirty seconds. It’s a kind of stunned silence, the silence of people who have survived something and are still taking stock of all their limbs.

Then Dazza says, very quietly, “Bloody hell.”

And that’s it, that’s the dam breaking, because suddenly everyone is talking at once, low and fervent, the kind of talking that happens just out of earshot of the person who caused it and not a single syllable further.

“Every check,” says Grigor, to nobody in particular. He still looks haunted. “Every single check.”