Sea State Read online

  Dedication

  For Mum, with love and gratitude

  Epigraph

  Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.

  —JANET MALCOLM,

  THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER

  Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

  Men were deceivers ever;

  One foot in sea, and one on shore,

  To one thing constant never.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  1: T Block

  2: Foum Assaka

  3: Tiffany

  4: T-211

  5: Tern

  6: Brent Field

  7: Piper Bravo

  8: Ninian Central

  9: Clyde

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE MEN OF THIS STORY, AND MY own motivations in writing it, you need look no further than the current political climate. On both sides of the Atlantic, we’ve seen populist uprisings divide countries, while polite political discourse has devolved into something more visceral and urgent. The book’s setting, the northeast coast of Scotland, and its characters, oil riggers from the northeast of England, may feel foreign. But on closer inspection, they’ll start to seem uncomfortably close to home. Now, more than ever, the experiences of ordinary working people in America and Britain resemble each other. It’s no coincidence that their political landscapes have come to look alike.

  In the summer of 2016, the liberal elite got a horrible shock: the British people voted to leave the European Union. It was a bipartisan issue, and it cut along class, rather than party, lines. It was proof, if proof were needed, that London was another country. The fraying ties that bound the capital to its provinces had finally been severed. The city was now a sovereign state, estranged from the people it governed.

  Human beings need narrative. We tell ourselves stories to make sense of things, to organize the world’s random vectors into a more pleasing shape. Of course, liberal elites are human too, and soon they were telling themselves a story about Brexit. The referendum was recast as an act of self-harm; the working-class “Leave” voters as cutters, sawing away at their arms in a fit of vengeful abnegation.

  As with many stories, this one contained an element of foreshadowing. Five months later, the US electorate put Donald Trump in office. Another dark night of the soul for the liberal media. Another round of anguished think pieces. What happened? Why were the American working classes aligning themselves with this person, a Manhattan real estate magnate born into money, whose one talent appeared to be ripping tradesmen off?

  The story the liberal media told itself was that Trump voters were racist, sexist, stupid. Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.” These two stories were alike (though the American version lacked the cloying, more-in-sorrow-than-anger tenor the British broadsheets favored), because our media classes are alike. Journalists in New York and London have far more in common with each other than they do with their working-class compatriots. Equally, our working classes have come to resemble each other far more than they do the opinion formers in their own countries.

  These populist movements were expressions of the same disquiet. They were powered by disaffected workers who sought a return to a gentler age, an era of full employment and economic sovereignty. They tapped into deeply felt convictions, held across the aisle. Yet the men at their vanguard, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, are curiously free of any ideology at all. They are gaffe-prone opportunists whose bumbling public personas conceal cores of ruthless self-interest. Neither Johnson nor Trump cares about the working class. But somehow, they were able to catch the cresting public mood and rebrand themselves as champions of the poor.

  I was the only journalist I knew who wasn’t shocked by the referendum result.

  I had recently returned from Aberdeen, the oil capital of Britain, where I’d spent six months interviewing offshore workers. The industry was contracting, and the men were worried: for their futures, for their families. They felt abandoned by the Labour Party (Britain’s answer to the Democratic Party), which had dropped class analysis in favor of identity politics and was too busy waging a culture war to advocate for the interests of ordinary working people.

  A great number of offshore workers come from Teesside, in the northeast of England. This area is best understood as a kind of British rust belt. It once had mines and manufacturing industries. Now it has zero-hour contracts and call centers. The men face a choice: to live on welfare, to take an unskilled job that pays so poorly they have to top up their wages with welfare, or to go offshore. Many will have worked in heavy industry for years, at the Teesside Steelworks or the defunct ICI chemical plant. Offshore, their skills are in demand.

  When I talked to these men, the issue of Europe kept coming up. Offshore, eastern European workers were prepared to do the same job for a third of the money. British workers complained about being undercut, but no one was listening. Neither of the two main parties cares about cheap labor. This is where the avid, free-market ethos of the Right and the benign, borderless ideals of the Left merge. The old Left, the socialist movement that once represented workers’ rights, no longer exists in any real way. Meanwhile, the new Left tells workers worried about the economic effect of unchecked migration that they’re racist.

  The relationship between the northeast of England and London is roughly analogous to the relationship between Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. No one cares about the area until there’s an election. Our last general election was an upset of sorts. It codified the working-class desire to leave Europe. Boris Johnson had promised Brexit, whether he could get a deal or no. The Red Wall—a block of Labour seats running from northeast Wales to northeast England—tumbled down, as the Labour heartlands pivoted right for the first time in living memory.

  For a long time, Labour had assumed ownership of the North. It took the northern vote for granted. Too often, people near the center of power treat northern England as one homogenous bloc. Southerners don’t bother to distinguish between the northeast and the northwest. To them, we’re all clueless rubes. There’s a phrase they trot out: “It’s grim up north.” To be fair, it can be. The North is poorer than the South; its economy has suffered at the hands of successive Conservative governments. A cultural rift remains between the two.

  Liverpool, the northwestern city where my parents were born, suffered particular hardships. In the 1980s, southern football fans taunted Liverpool supporters by singing their own anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” back to them, with repurposed lyrics: “Sign on, sign on, with a pen in your hand, ’cause you’ll never work again.” Notably, Liverpool rejected Brexit. It also remained a Labour stronghold, even as the Red Wall crumbled. The rest of the country may be forgetful; this region remembers. Periodically, the Conservative Party will don a new guise and caper about, trying to fool the electorate. Scousers are immune to such blandishments. The Conservatives will never get into power here. They will never be forgiven, for what they did to this city.

  1

  T Block

  There was one girl who came out to our rig. She was only nineteen. One night, she was playing pool in the rec room. She was wearing hot pants. Word got round, and the rec room started filling up. And up. And up. Soon, it seemed like every lad on the rig was in that room, sitting there, watching her play pool. She didn’t get disciplined, she hadn’t done anything wrong, but her supervisor d
id. They said, “You should have told her, you should have let her know she can’t do that here. That was your job, to tell her that, and you didn’t do it.” As for the girl, she never came back. That was her first trip offshore. And her last.

  “WHERE’S HOME?”

  I was looking at his mouth as I said this. I’d never heard an accent like his before. It was a bit like mine (a guttural Liverpool k; some of the same distended vowels), but with a northeastern melisma that turned “module” into mod-joo-al, “sure” into shower.

  His lips were thin, yet gave the impression of fullness. They looked soft and malleable. His mouth was bracketed by two deep grooves that ran from either side of his nose to his chin and vanished when he smiled. I resisted the urge to insert a finger into one and push up, to see it disappear. As his lips parted and he prepared to speak, I saw the narrow gap between his teeth.

  “Stockton,” he said.

  ON THE ROAD WHERE MY MOTHER LIVES, THERE IS A BLACK SPOT where people sometimes die. They call it the Bends. The area is semirural. Modern tract housing bisected by expanses of green. Markers of real countryside. Passing places, farm tracks, concealed entrances. The Bends are wide, with a lazy camber that invites speeding. One night, we were driving down the Bends, on the way back from Club Kinetic, and we crashed. It was November and it was raining. My boyfriend’s car was a cheap little hatchback with slender tires, and as he took a corner too quickly, the wheels lost contact with the surface of the road. The car slid across the tarmac like a blade over ice, tumbling through a metal gate, a fence, a hedgerow seamed with barbed wire. I watched the hedge rushing up to meet us, illuminated in the headlights’ glare, and thought that this time I would die.

  We had crashed twice before, and I had a very clear sense, in those twirling, elastic seconds, that I was now out of chances. The boys in the back told me later that they thought I had died. They saw my head, in its blue Fila bucket hat, hit the roof three times and drop towards my sternum, the stem of my neck flopping ominously. But as the car came to rest in a ditch, and my boyfriend barked at his passengers to get out, get the fuck out, because beneath the bonnet the engine had started to smoke, I sat up and bit down. Between my molars, I could feel something like grit. Glass, smashed to a fine grain. I tried to open the door, but the barbed wire had wrapped itself around the car as we rolled, like twine around a spindle. I rattled at the handle, panic unfurling in my chest, and saw I was alone.

  By the time I’d scrambled out of the door on the driver’s side, my boyfriend was almost back at the Bends. The car no longer looked like a car, but a pumpkin. The roof was crushed, the chassis splayed around the middle. There was no glass left in the windows or windshield. On impact, the steel had simply crumpled. I stared at it, too shocked to cry. How was it all five of us had walked away unharmed? Divine intervention. There could be no other explanation.

  Except we weren’t unharmed. The substance of the crash clung to me. For a long time afterwards, whenever I closed my eyes, I would see it: the veering headlights and bright spot of hedgerow, approaching far too fast. It still lurked beneath the waterline, and sometimes, when I was driving, I’d see it unfold in front of me. The car slipping out from under my control. Futile screech of brakes. Spiraling gravel, grass, birds, sky, soil. Black. Things ending with a crunch. Bone on concrete, slowly pooling blood.

  Accidents happen when a few causal factors combine. An intersection of unlucky coordinates. Bad weather. Curving route. Young driver. Old car. The music didn’t help: loud and propulsive enough to make him put his foot down. It was an old house tune (old even then, and this was twenty years ago) but its couplets had the cadence of a nursery rhyme, or a child’s prayer.

  When I go to bed at night, I think of you with all my might.

  I love you. Fool.

  Remember? Relate.

  In some ways, he was the most instructive of all my boyfriends. He was two years older than me, at a time when that made a difference. He taught me things. His gospel relayed a frank and austere world I knew little of, but his lessons stayed with me forever. Some, I passed on to other people. He taught me how to lace trainers so the knots can’t be seen. How to tie an anorak in the middle so it still looked girly. He taught me—I still don’t know how he knew about this—to put the soles of my feet together when I came, to intensify the pleasure. He taught me about hardcore, house music’s bastard cousin, which came with a breakbeat and a looming sense of doom.

  He tried to teach me, with limited success, how to fight, how to throw a punch. He told me every boy must resign himself to being beaten at least once in his life. He administered several of these beatings himself, but he also received one, when a troop of unknown boys picked him up and carried him shoulder high through the train station, as a triumphant football team bears their captain around the pitch. Once inside, they dropped him onto the platform, stamped on his ribs, and kicked him in the head. It was an unprovoked attack, an outpouring of tribal fury, and he accepted it without shame, without looking for reasons or seeking recompense. He knew the reasons. It was his cosmic bill come in. A tax on his maleness.

  I love you. Fool.

  He grew into one of those rare men who actually enjoy physical confrontation. To him, chancing on the opportunity to brawl was like finding a tenner in the gutter. A minor stroke of luck that would nevertheless alter the course of his day, setting it on a cheerful, upwards trajectory.

  One morning, about a month after the crash, I sent him to the shop for rolling papers and Fanta. He returned twenty minutes later, looking pink in the face and exhilarated, as if he’d just been for a run. His white Ellesse tracksuit was soaked in blood. “What have you been doing?” I said, as if I even needed to ask. The blood wasn’t his, he explained, it belonged to someone else. At any one time he’d have several separate grudges going, and he’d spotted a boy he was feuding with, standing near the Rotary Club’s yuletide float. My boyfriend took a bottle out of the trash, crept up behind him, and hit him over the head with it. “It was brilliant,” he said. “Everyone was watching. Father Christmas had ringside seats!” He ended up in Altcourse prison, where he flourished, like a green bay tree transplanted to its native soil.

  Remember? Relate.

  My sentence. My sentence was longer. I did remember, every day. I believed it was my own silent prayer (a wordless plea for benediction, uttered in a basal layer of my brain) that saved us. I refused to learn to drive for a long time. I hated getting in cars with anyone, even my mother, who drove everywhere at a ponderous twenty-eight miles an hour. That night, I found out fear is the strongest elixir. Whatever synthetics are coursing through your bloodstream, whatever chemicals have commandeered your limbic system, they will be neutralized. I was drugged when I got into that car, sober when I clambered out. And I’ve never forgotten that moment of gliding transition, the terrifying quickness with which conditions change. One minute, you have four wheels firmly on the tarmac. The next, you’re turning cartwheels through the air.

  I STILL THOUGHT OF THIS PLACE, ITS BLACK SPOTS AND BLIND corners, its narrow roads and ruinous collisions, as home, though I hadn’t lived there for years. I found myself picturing it before I went to sleep, its footpaths and fields, its cul-de-sacs of butter-bricked semis, and suburban alleyways of ficus and damp wood. These images came to me unprompted, like the old test card on television. I took comfort in them, their stasis, their bland, unchanging nature. I had lately lost my home. No. Not lost. That makes it sound unintentional, as if the bank snatched it back after I’d defaulted on a mortgage payment. I had lately walked out on my home, and divested myself of the contents therein.

  A few weeks after Christmas, a burglar broke into the apartment I shared with my boyfriend and stole my laptop. He (I’m assuming it was a man, going by the footprint left on the panel of the door; like me, he was an Air Max 1 wearer) also took my old laptop, which I had been using as a hard drive. I hadn’t backed up anywhere else, so all my work went with it, including a book about oil rigs,
which I’d been writing, off and on, for four years.

  I let myself into the flat, failing to notice that the door was missing a panel. Adam abhorred waste, of any kind. It was quite unlike him to leave every light on, yet very like him to leave the apartment looking—there really is no other way to put it—like it had been burgled. The drawers in my desk were upended, and the contents tipped out all over the floor. My first thought was that he had been running late and needed something from the desk. My second thought, barely formed before I realized what had actually happened, was that he’d gone rooting, looking for evidence of an affair. He was prone to occasional, highly specific fits of jealousy, and often went through my phone. I didn’t keep a diary, but I had notebooks, and though it was understood he shouldn’t read them, he did.

  I walked into the bedroom, and saw then what had happened. The mattress had been turned, the sheets worried, my underwear lay in a tangled knot on the bed. A purse my sister had given me, with a sausage dog embroidered on the front, was emptied, turned inside out and discarded. She’d asked a few times if I liked the purse, because she’d never seen me use it. I went to the wardrobe, to check if my most expensive shoes and my one good coat were still there. Air Max man though he was, the thief clearly didn’t know decent clothes when he saw them. Or maybe he just couldn’t envisage a use for them.

  I looked around, and thought how meager, how sad, our effects looked, strewn across the room. This was the sum of our life together, and it was all over the floor. The apartment was one of those opportunistic London conversions, a home that would not exist outside the capital. It had once been a janitor’s hut, tacked onto the back of a mansion block and still had a menial look, beneath the modern fittings. I walked outside, for some reason still stopping to lock the door behind me, though half of it now lay in the kitchen, and called Adam.