Page 27 of Dirty Rotten Love

I close my eyes.

What the hell am I doing?

It is a fair question. It is the question I have been not asking myself for ten days, with the focused determination of a man who knows that if he starts asking it, he will have to answer it, and the answer is not something I am ready to look at directly. The answer is too large and too complicated and too much of a disaster for a weekday night in the North Sea.

He is twenty-two years old.

I say this to myself the way you press on a bruise. Deliberately. Making sure I can still feel it. Twenty-two years old and on his first rotation, and the whole world still in front of him, still open, still possible in ways that it stops being possible after a certain number of years and a certain number of things going wrong.

Sixteen years between us. Sixteen years of distance that I cannot close no matter how many nights I allow myself this and no matter how natural it feels when Rory is actually in the room, which it does, which is the problem, which is the thing I cannot think about in the shower or anywhere else or it will undo me completely.

I should end it.

I should have ended it before it started. I should have looked at Rory Gallacher standing at my door at eleven o’clock at night with his best smile coming out slightly sideways, and I should have said no. Firmly. Professionally. The way any reasonable supervisor would have handled it.

I had fully intended to say no.

And then.

I tip my head back under the water and breathe out slowly through my nose, the way the doctor told me to years ago when the world got too loud, and think about the moment the intention collapsed. It hadn’t been the obvious thing. It hadn’t been how Rory looked in the corridor light or the way the smile went wonky, or any of the physical things that I have been carefully not cataloguing for ten days with extremely limited success.

It was a moment that preceded him knocking on my door, and in hindsight, was the very moment that sealed my fate.

It had been what Rory said.

I love it here. Said on a drain inspection on day five with such complete and unperformed sincerity that I had looked sideways at him involuntarily. Most people don’t love it on their first rotation, I’d said, and Rory had shrugged and said I’m not most people in a tone that wasn’t arrogance at all. It was just true. I had known it was true. I’d filed it away and told myself I was filing it away as a professional observation about a new crew member and not for any other reason.

I am a very poor liar. Even to myself.

Day five is what sealed my fate, but all in all, it was ten days of relentless attack upon my armor. Ten days of watching Rory Gallacher make this rig louder and warmer and stranger and better just by existing on it. Ten days of watching him land every joke and take every hit and bring people in rather than pushing them away, which is a thing I have never once known how to do and have largely stopped trying. Ten days of watching him work, actually work, with a focus and a care that he hides behind the performance of himself, the way I hide everything behind silence and procedure.

I noticed that. The hiding. I recognized it.

I understand performances. I have been giving one my entire life.

The hot water is starting to hurt. I should get out. I have an early start and I have already sacrificed more sleep than I can afford and I am standing in the shower thinking about a twenty-two-year-old deckhand like a man who has completely lost the thread of his own life, which is not something I can afford either.

But Rory came to my door.

That’s the thing. That is the thing that keeps short-circuiting every sensible thought I try to have about this. Rory came to my door. Not anyone else’s. Mine. MacLeod’s, who everyone on this rig spends a significant portion of their energy attempting to avoid, who has been told more than once by more than one person in his life that he is difficult to know and exhausting to be around and not worth the effort it takes to get past the exterior.

Rory knocked on my door.

I know how I come across. I have always known. It is not a lack of self-awareness. It is simply that the mechanisms other people seem to have for making themselves approachable and warm, for saying the right thing at the right time, for reading what someone needs and providing it smoothly and naturally, those mechanisms have never worked properly in me. I can learn the procedures. I have learned them, painstakingly, over decades, and I apply them with the discipline of a man who has had to work very hard for things that appear to come easily to others. But it never feels natural. It always feels like translation.

Rory makes it look effortless.

I have watched him translate himself instinctively into whatever the room needs, watched him find the joke that lands, the word that helps, the bit of warmth that costs him nothing because he has so much of it to spare, and I have thought, more than once and always in the privacy of my own head, that I have never met anyone quite like that. That kind of generosity is rare. The kind that comes from someone who grew up without enough and decided that was all the more reason to give.

I had looked him up. After that first shift together. A small thing, just the employment record, nothing improper, but enough to know that Rory Gallacher from Edinburgh had left school at sixteen and worked three jobs simultaneously before getting his offshore qualifications and that the emergency contact was his mother, and the address they shared was a road I know is all tiny two-bedroom terraces, and that he had listed the reason for applying as financial security for family.

I had put the file away and sat with that for a long time.

And then Rory had knocked on my door and stood there with the wonky smile and the wide eyes and talked about horizons and options in a voice that was trying very hard to be casual and not quite managing it, and I had looked at him and thought, with the helpless clarity of a man who has been refusing to think something for ten days and has finally run out of road, that I was completely and utterly done for.

I turn off the shower.

The silence after is the normal rig silence, the hum and the distant clank and the ever-present North Sea doing its thing against the hull. I stand in it and am honest with myself, which I have found is easier in the dark, easier when there is nobody watching, easier when the performance can come down for a few minutes.