Page 4 of Dirty Rotten Love

“Should’ve thought about that before you signed off on fresh air,” says Tam, but not unkindly, because Tam is constitutionally incapable of being actually cruel. He claps Grigor on the shoulder. “Come on. Sooner we start.”

“Do you know how long this is going to take?” says a guy called Frasier, who has been on rigs for fifteen years and has the permanently aggrieved expression of a man who expected things to get easier by now and is still waiting. “Do you have any idea? We are going to be here until midnight.”

“Might not be midnight,” I say.

Everyone looks at me.

“Could be one in the morning,” I explain cheerfully.

“Very helpful, Rory, thank you,” says Frasier.

I grin at him. He shakes his head but I catch the corner of his mouth doing something that isn’t quite a smile but is at least in the same postcode.

We get started. There is nothing else to do. The wind is doing its thing, the North Sea is being gray and aggressive in the middle distance, and eleven men are working their way through a stack of checks that should have been done properly the first time and very much were not.

It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot.

Two hours in and the mood has progressed through grumbling and out the other side into a kind of grim focused silence. Frasier wasn’t wrong about the timings. We are absolutely going to be here until at least midnight. My back is starting to have opinions about the positions I’ve been asking it to adopt and I am ignoring all of them because complaining about physical discomfort is also apparently one of the things you just don’t do on a rig, and I belong here, I love it here, my back can get absolutely lost.

MacLeod appears periodically. He doesn’t hover, which you might think would be a mercy, but actually the appearing and disappearing is somehow worse because you never know when the next one is coming. He checks something, says nothing, or says one devastating sentence, and then he’s gone again, and nobody ever knows if it is safe to breathe.

On his third pass, he stops near me. I am on my knees doing a valve check and my documentation is immaculate, every stage, every box, because I have been completing it with the focused energy of a man who has something to prove, which I don’t, I have nothing to prove, I am simply thorough.

I feel him stop. I keep working.

He picks up my completed sheet from the stack. I keep working. I do not look up. I am very busy and very professional and I am absolutely not holding my breath.

He puts it back down and walks away.

I look at Tam. Tam gives me a thumbs-up. I look back at my valve.

The small warm thing in my chest from yesterday is back. It is bigger this time. I am ignoring it comprehensively.

By the time we get to the last section, the light has gone completely and we are working under the rig’s floodlights, which turn everything a slightly unreal yellow and make everyone look mildly unwell. Frasier looks more than mildly unwell. Grigor has the hollow eyes of a man atoning for his sins. Even Tam, who is relentlessly good-natured, has gone quiet in a way that suggests his good nature has a limit and we are approaching it.

“I was looking forward to tonight,” says Dazza mournfully, from somewhere to my left. “Had a proper plan. Cards, a couple of beers, early enough to actually sleep like a human being for once.”

“Cards,” says Frasier, with the reverence of a man describing something he can no longer have. “I’d have taken every penny off the lot of you.”

“You say that every time,” says Tam. “You’ve never once taken every penny.”

“Tonight was going to be different.”

“It really wasn’t.”

I sit back on my heels and look at them. There is an idea forming. It is an excellent idea. It is the kind of idea that a naturally optimistic person, a person who loves it here and finds the positive in every situation, would have.

“Tomorrow,” I say.

Dazza looks at me. “What?”

“Card game. Tomorrow evening. In the mess hall, all of Green Crew. We’ll all be done by six, it’s a lighter shift. We do our shift, we eat, we get the beers in, put some sounds on, sorted.”

There is a pause. The kind of pause where people are too tired to immediately agree with something but can feel themselves wanting to.

“Rory,” says Frasier slowly, “do you know that you’re the most aggressively cheerful person any of us have ever met?”

“Thank you.”