Page 47 of Dirty Rotten Love

We work through the afternoon. The wind keeps its personal grievance going. The North Sea stays gray.

At the end of the shift, when everyone else has headed in, Tam falls into step beside me the way he always does, and we walk for a moment in silence.

“You alright?” he says, eventually.

For some reason, I’m not surprised he wasn’t fooled by my performance. I think about all the things I could say. All the deflections available to me, the jokes, the shrugs, the I’m fines that have served me reliably for twenty-two years. I line them up and look at them and find, for the first time in recent memory, that none of them quite fit.

“I don’t know,” I say.

Tam nods. Slowly, carefully, the nod of a man receiving information he was already expecting and is treating with appropriate care.

“Okay,” he says. Just that. Okay.

We walk the rest of the way in silence, and it is the loudest silence I have had in weeks.

Chapter twenty

Mac

Iam almost past the group when I hear it.

Laughter. Easy and warm, the specific laughter of people relaxing after a period of attention, the way Green Crew always loosens once I have moved on. I know this laugh. I have been hearing this laugh, or versions of it, my entire life. The laugh that starts up the moment you are far enough away that they think you cannot hear it.

I keep walking.

I should be used to it by now. I am thirty-eight years old, and I know what I am and how I come across, and I have made my peace with it, or I have made something that functions like peace with it, which is usually sufficient. The precise way I do things. The silence. The difficulty with small talk and the way it reads as coldness, even when it isn’t. I know all of this about myself and I have accepted it the way you accept a weather pattern, not happily exactly, but practically, because there is nothing to be done about it and complaining takes energy you need for other things.

It still stings.

I hate that it still stings. I have been telling myself for at least twenty years that it shouldn’t, that I am past caring what people think and most of the time this is true, most of the time I am past it, but then today, I heard the laugh and something caught, somewhere small and old, and now I am eighteen again and twenty-nine again and every age in between, walking away from the sound of people being easier with each other than they ever quite manage to be with me.

Daniel used to do it. The thought arrives the way it always does, without warning, unwelcome, carrying the particular weight that nine years has not fully diminished. Daniel and Fraser, my husband and my best friend, who used to sit at the kitchen table and laugh at the way I organized the spice rack and the way I needed the television volume on an even number and the way I prepared for social events like they were operational procedures. They’d laugh and call it harmless banter, it’s just a joke, you’re so serious, can’t you take a joke?

I took the jokes. I always took the jokes. I am very good at taking things quietly.

I keep walking.

I am on the upper observation deck before I fully register that I have come here, drawn by the light and the habit of twenty years and the need to stand somewhere high and look at something vast and be reminded that the things that sting are small against the scale of the water.

The North Sea obliges, as it always does. Gray and immense and entirely indifferent.

There is a particular quality to the light on the North Sea in the late afternoon.

I have been watching it for twenty years, and I have never fully gotten used to it. The way it goes low and flat and turns everything silver at the edges, the way the water holds it differently than any other water I have seen, the way the rig itself looks almost beautiful in it if you catch it at the right angle. I am not a sentimental man. I know this about myself the way I know most things about myself, clearly and without fuss. But this light, at this hour, on this particular stretch of the North Sea, does something to me that I have never been able to prevent.

It’s beautiful, but today it’s not holding my full attention. I am standing in the late afternoon light, not watching the sea, but watching Green Crew work on the mid deck below.

Watching Rory work, if I am being precise about it. Which I am, always, even when I would prefer not to be.

He is on the mid deck with Tam and Whelan doing the secondary valve checks, and he moves through the work with an ease that he did not have on day one and has been building steadily ever since, the ease of someone who has learned a thing properly rather than just learned to perform it. His documentation will be immaculate. I know this not because I just inspected his work, but because I have checked enough times to know the pattern of him, the way his hands work, the way he reads a gauge, the particular focused expression he gets when he is doing something that requires care.

He has no idea that he is good at this.

That is the thing that gets me, if I am being honest with myself, which I try to be in the late afternoon light when there is nobody watching. He performs confidence the way other people perform modesty, loudly and constantly, and underneath it he has no idea that he is actually capable. That the thing he came out here terrified of being found out as, being not enough, being not clever enough or not skilled enough or not worthy of the money and the opportunity, is not a thing that exists. He is good at this job. He has been good at this job since approximately day eight and he will be better at it by the end of this rotation and better still by the end of the next one, and he will never quite believe it no matter how many times someone tells him.

I told him he wasn’t stupid, and he said, I’m really not clever though, in that matter of fact way, just a fact, no self-pity, and I had to look away and find something to do with my hands.

Below me Rory says something to Tam and Tam laughs, the full one, the wheezing helpless kind, and even from up here I can see the quality of it, the genuine delighted surprise of a man who has been made to laugh rather than simply finding something amusing. Rory does that. He makes people laugh in a way that is a gift rather than a performance, or rather it starts as a performance and somewhere in the giving of it becomes real, becomes actually and genuinely funny in a way that lands in the body rather than just the mind.