Page 6 of Dirty Rotten Love

“Cheeky shit!” exclaims Tam.

I go to my bunk. I am grinning the entire way there. My back has stopped complaining. My documentation was immaculate. MacLeod said good work.

Tomorrow there will be a card game.

Things, as it turns out, are looking up.

Chapter three

Rory

Here is a thing I know about myself. I am excellent at cards. This is not arrogance, this is simply a fact, the same way it is a fact that I am funny and that the North Sea is gray and that the gray beef thing is an abomination. I have been excellent at cards since I was fourteen years old, and my uncle Stevie taught me poker at a family barbecue while my mum was distracted by trying to stop my drunk grandpa from setting fire to the whole garden and not just the burgers.

Uncle Stevie is a man who has made some genuinely questionable life choices, and I have him to thank for one of my greatest skills.

So when I walk into the mess hall for the card game, I feel nothing but anticipation. Good, clean, predatory anticipation.

The mess hall is bigger than the rec room and far more suited for a night of cards. Red Crew are on shift, so it’s all ours. I was worried it would be a bit of a grim setting, but it looks different at night with the overhead strips turned down low and someone’s playlist coming out of Dazza’s Bluetooth speaker.

Someone has pushed three tables together, and there are beers lined up along the edge, and the whole thing has the warm, slightly chaotic energy of people who have survived something and are celebrating still being alive. Which is basically what we are. We survived MacLeod’s bollocking and eleven hours of checks, and we are still here and we deserve this.

There are eight of us around the tables. Me and Tam and Dazza and Grigor and Frasier, plus three other lads from Green Crew, Whelan and Brockie and a guy everyone calls Spanner for reasons that have not yet been explained to me but that I am absolutely going to find out. The beers are cold. The playlist is excellent. Frasier has produced a family-sized bag of crisps from somewhere, and nobody is asking questions.

This, I think, looking around at all of them in the low warm light, is exactly what I wanted when I came out here. Not just the money, though the money is life-changing and I think about it approximately every forty minutes. But this. This exact thing. A table full of idiots who feel like family after less than a week. Back home I had mates, of course I did, but it always felt like something I had to maintain, something that would fall away if I stopped being funny or stopped being useful or stopped showing up. This feels different. This feels like they’d still be here even if I had a bad day. The thought is so unfamiliar it’s almost uncomfortable, so I take a long drink of beer and pick up my cards.

I win the first two hands with the focused ease of a man who was born to do this. Frasier looks personally offended. This is very funny and I tell him so, which makes it worse.

The third hand I lose on purpose, just a little, just enough to keep things interesting, because cleaning everyone out in the first twenty minutes would be poor form. I am excellent at cards and I am also excellent at reading a room, and the room wants a contest.

By the fourth hand, we are all a bit warmer and a bit louder, and Dazza has his feet up on a spare chair and Tam has abandoned any pretense of a poker face and is basically announcing his hand through the medium of facial expressions. Someone has started a second bag of crisps. The playlist has reached a song that Grigor apparently is fond of, and he is now quietly singing along to, which is both unexpected and magnificent.

This is the best evening I have had since I got here. Possibly the best evening I have had in months.

“For fuck’s sake,” says Whelan, who has just lost his third consecutive hand and has the look of a man ‌dismayed with his own terrible decisions. “This is worse than getting bollocked by MacLeod.”

There is a ripple around the table. Not discomfort exactly, more the collective loosening of something that has been held tight all day.

“Are you sure about that?” says Tam, studying his cards.

“He’s been absolutely foul this week. Even by his standards.” Grigor reaches for his beer. “What’s his problem?”

“His problem,” says Frasier, with the authority of a man who has been on this rig longer than anyone, “is that he is MacLeod. That is the problem. That has always been the problem.”

“He wasn’t always this bad,” says Dazza. “I’ve said this before.”

“You have,” says Tam. “Every time someone brings him up.”

“Because it’s true.” Dazza puts his cards face down on the table, which is a crime against card playing etiquette but nobody says anything because it’s Dazza. “Nine years ago, he was alright.”

Tam waves his hand dismissively. “Ancient history.”

“Maybe he’s just miserable,” says Brockie, who is very young and very quiet, and this might be the most I have heard him say all week.

“He’s not miserable,” says Spanner. “He’s frustrated.”

Everyone looks at Spanner.

Spanner shrugs with the serenity of a man delivering an obvious truth. “He needs to get laid. It’s been coming off him in waves for months. You can practically see it. The man is wound so tight he’s about to snap, and it’s everyone else’s problem.” He picks up his cards. “Just saying.”