Sea State Read online

  “Go back in,” he snapped, when I finally got through to him. “Go back in and get my weed.”

  “I don’t want to,” I said. I was standing on the drive outside our block of flats, shivering rapidly. The items in the apartment, the apartment itself, felt soiled, which at the time I attributed to this soft-footed presence, moving through the rooms unseen. Adam spoke slowly, as if talking to someone with a poor command of English.

  “The police are coming, and I don’t want them to find my weed. So will you go back in and get it, please?”

  “They’re coming to investigate a burglary,” I said. “If they find it, they’ll just assume it’s his.”

  The police closed the investigation after a couple of days. It was a rough area; they had more pressing matters to attend to than a purloined laptop. I kept hoping a memory stick might be slipped through the door, but that’s what ethical thieves did, in places like Sweden. I went through my emails, and found twelve pages of my book. Other than that, it was gone.

  For a week, I came back to the flat, shut myself in the bathroom, and cried. In the evenings, Adam went out and patrolled the grounds, armed with his nine iron. Occasionally he would come into the bathroom, to wash his hands or brush his teeth, and step over me, a look of faint confusion on his face, as if trying to place this person who wept on his floor and ascertain why she was there.

  At the end of January, I booked some time off work. I was going to go north: home for my mother’s birthday, then on to Aberdeen for a week. I would start my book again. Only this time, I would do it properly. My editor looked uncertain when I told her my plans.

  “It’s cold in Aberdeen,” she said.

  “It’s also near the rigs.”

  “What do you want to write about oil rigs for?”

  “I want to see what men are like with no women around.”

  “But you’ll be around.”

  I had friends at home who worked on the rigs. When we went out together, they behaved as if they were famous, throwing their money about and circulating busily, so everyone got a chance to see them. Their reappearances were exciting, since they happened only rarely, like a red moon or a partial eclipse. Most of the time, they were away with work, or on expensive winter holidays.

  Oil is one of the last avenues of blue-collar opportunity in this country, one of the few sectors open to working-class men—outside of sport—that still pay well. The oil workers I knew were always trying to redress this imbalance by spending their wages as soon as they got them. They bought powerful cars on finance, expensive clothes, good shoes, strong cocaine. They went to the gym, bench-pressed weights, and covered themselves in tattoos (it seemed a cultural practice somehow related to the job, as miners in South Wales used to gather in chapel to sing). They stayed single longer than most men in the provinces, and even their marriages had a provisional feel, as if they might be dissolved at any moment. They were interesting. The sort of people you’d want at a house party, provided the house wasn’t yours.

  “The burglary was a sign,” I said. “The book wasn’t working. I need to rip it up and start again.”

  I was thinking here not of Adam, but of his best friend, who nursed a brief obsession with new wave, and played Orange Juice’s “Rip It Up” over and over again the summer we first met.

  “It might not be a sign,” my editor said. “It’s peak burglary season. And your apartment is easily accessible.”

  “I’m taking it as one.”

  She put a hand on mine.

  “I’ve often thought how hard it must be for you. Watching your little sister get married, when this relationship of yours is so on and off . . .”

  “Marriage isn’t important to me.”

  “She’s bought a house, you keep having to move.”

  “She doesn’t live in London.”

  “Now she’s having a baby . . .”

  “Could we maybe stop talking about how everything is really good for my sister?”

  I thought of my editor as motherly, though she couldn’t have been much older than me. Perhaps it was because she was the same physical type as my mother, a pale-eyed, brittle brunette, easily moved to tears. She was a bit like the magazine editors of romantic comedies—the ones people said were implausible—in that she was heavily invested in my personal life and didn’t care when my copy was late. She looked as though she was about to cry, probably because I was too. I really hated crying at work, though the casual observer might assume otherwise. She gave my hand a squeeze.

  “One day, you’ll meet a man who is so nice to you, you won’t be able to believe it. It happened to me, when I met my husband. And I know it’s going to happen to you.”

  IT TAKES TWO REVELATIONS TO LEAVE A PERSON YOU’VE ONCE loved. There is the moment you realize you no longer love him. And there is the moment you realize you can no longer pretend. The length of time between the two varies, depending on your capacity for deceit, your tolerance for fraud. Adam called me at my mother’s house, the day before I left for Aberdeen. He’d received a tax return from the Inland Revenue, and was now four thousand pounds richer. I wondered if it was worth asking what he was going to do with the money, since I already knew the answer.

  Unhappy couples always know how certain conversations will go. He was going to tell me that he planned to spend the money—all of it, every last penny—on himself. I was going to remind him that it was not two weeks since I’d lost the most precious thing in my possession. I’d say that for a writer, losing every word of your writing feels roughly equivalent to a miscarriage. Then he’d snarl, “I’m aware of that, I’m a writer too.” I’d reply, “Not much of one” (it annoyed me that he always referred to himself as a writer, when he actually worked in PR, handling crisis management for an energy company). And he’d say something like “You’re fucking boring, do you know that?” For in the symphony of our discord, the gulf between his compromised ethics and my own, incorruptible art was a theme I liked to revisit.

  Adam was a shouter, a shover, not above using his size to win arguments. Often, he’d hold a hand over my mouth to tell me it was time to stop talking. If I tried to answer back, he’d say in a lilting voice, “Shhh. Shhh. Shut the fuck up now.”

  “What are you going to do with that money?” I asked.

  “I’m going to buy a new iPad and pay off my credit card. I’ll put the rest in savings.”

  I shifted my position. I was sitting on the floor, and the ridges of the radiator were beginning to burn through the fabric of my T-shirt. We had been together five years. During that time, I’d left him twice. Ours was a fairy-tale romance: I had to fail twice before I could succeed. I had to learn to survive in reduced circumstances.

  “Don’t call me again,” I said. “Just wipe my number from your phone. I’ll do the same with yours.”

  “What?”

  I heard the breath of gas, then a click. He wasn’t listening. I could hardly blame him. It wasn’t the first time, or even the tenth, that I’d said this.

  “Wipe my number from your phone. I don’t want to hear from you again.”

  “Is this about money?”

  His tone sounded wounded, incredulous. Once again, his girlfriend was asking for something. Once again, her hand was out. She was like a Victorian urchin, a needful dependent. A maw.

  “In part, yes. It’s about the money. But it’s about other things too. We’re miserable, Adam. Aren’t we? Please admit it.”

  I checked myself, even as I said the words. It was this need for consensus that kept me trapped in his basement flat. I was determined to prove myself right, and he would never admit it. Even if the levy he paid was a wintry half-life with a woman he held in contempt.

  “I was going to share it. If only you’d waited.”

  For months, I’d lain awake next to him, as my nerves shrilled and my mind performed frantic, scuttling maneuvers. Now I felt calm. The realization that you’re out of options brings with it its own brand of peace. I would leave him, I decided. I would leave him, his parents’ money, and the shockproof captivity of moderate means. I would do it today. Then, whatever privations waited for me on the other side, I wouldn’t have to do this again. I wouldn’t have to hear him tell lies. I wouldn’t have to watch him, wide-eyed as a manga girl, swear, swear, that what he’d just said, he hadn’t said, that what he’d just done, he hadn’t done, that it was all just a figment of my febrile, female brain.

  “No, Adam. You weren’t. And that’s fine. It’s your money, you can do what you want with it. But I don’t want you to call me again. So wipe my number.”

  I sat for a while on the floor, looking out at the garden, the trees denuded of their leaves. Then I went upstairs and started to pack.

  “WHAT’S THAT?”

  “Nothing.”

  I was looking at a list on my phone. I’d composed it on my way to Aberdeen: Adam’s gravest infractions. I had thought, seeing as it combined two of my favorite pastimes—making lists, and meditating on his many faults—I might enjoy writing it, but it made for bleak reading. I ran out of stamina at the halfway point:

  Family barbecue (his MOTHER!!!)

  Making me walk up Scafell Pike in mist!!!

  Mortgage fight

  Dating site

  Carla’s wedding!!!

  Soraya’s bachelorette!!!!!!!

  “Do you want another drink?”

  “I’ll get these. What do you want?”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re a lass. Can’t let you buy us a drink.”

  He craned his neck to catch the attention of his friend, who was getting up to go to the bar. “She’ll have a Peroni.”

  Peer-own-ee. There were six men around the table. They all spoke with th
e same singing modulations. Sweeter, more musical than accents from my corner of the country.

  “Are we going to do this thing, then?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’ll have to tape you, because my shorthand isn’t all it should be. Also, I have to tell you I’m taping you. Otherwise it’s illegal. Is that right? Maybe it’s just not admissible in court, if you don’t know you’re being taped. Anyway.”

  “What should I say?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  I put my phone on the table. He eyed it warily, as though it were an undetonated bomb.

  “See, now I won’t want to swear.”

  “It’s fine. You can swear. It’s only my phone that will hear you.”

  I watched him as he talked. He had a few pale freckles, scattered across the bridge of his nose. I had a weakness for freckles. I painted my own on with an eyebrow pencil: two stippled wings along the top of my cheekbones that usually merged into brown smears by the end of the day, making me look as if I cleaned chimneys for a living. He was complaining about a man he used to work with on the Brae Bravo. That he’d been given free rein to choose a topic, any topic, and had decided to talk about a colleague he hated, made me like him more. I would have done the same.

  “He was up on mod fourteen, fifteen, got the clamps, and started dropping them from the roof to the floor, just throwing them down! He was a nightmare. He was the worst Frenchman in the world. I didn’t like him, he didn’t like me. Said I was too cocky. Can’t think why. He was in charge of us for a week. One day it was pissing down with rain, and he goes to me and this lad, ‘Youse are out there.’ I said, ‘I’m not going out there. It’s too wet.’ Just joking. Anyway, he went in and phoned the office, and . . .”

  On and on he ran, cataloging the Frenchman’s iniquities, which ranged from sticking a sign that said DO NOT TOUCH on the thermostat in his room to taking a manway off a crane without a permit. The significance of most of these incidents escaped me, but I liked listening to his voice, its fractional echoes of home. Whenever I looked at him, he’d smile. There was a small delay as he looked back at me. And then he’d smile, with a quick, guilty motion, as though I were the foreman, and smiling at me was his job.

  I had found him at the airport. He was standing near arrivals, listing under the weight of his kit bag. He was small, no taller than me. His body was compact and carefully proportioned, like a jockey’s. He had a jockey’s face too. Pliable and very pale.

  “I’m looking for men like you,” I told him. “I’m writing a book about offshore.”

  “You going to slag it off?”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  He looked as though he might refuse to tell me. Then he said, “Caden.”

  “Well Caden, why don’t you give me your number?”

  “I wouldn’t dare do that,” he said. “I’m married.”

  He got his friend Tyler to call me. Tyler told me to meet them at their hotel, where they were drinking with some other men. Offshore workers pass through Aberdeen with tidal regularity. Sometimes, they get stranded. In the summer, mist descends on the east coast and hangs there for a week, like gray gauze. In autumn, the weather takes a brutal turn. Super Pumas—the long-range passenger helicopters used to ferry the men to and from the rig—have a nasty habit of falling from the sky, and if the sea is too rough for rescue craft to sail, the choppers don’t fly. The city is rich and dull. The winters are punitively cold. There is little to do but drink, and that’s what stranded offshore workers do. They drink like it’s their profession: starting as soon as they get bumped, and committing to it for the next eight hours. They’re driven partly by boredom (the dearth of daytime activities for squads of grown men), partly by the knowledge that once they’re offshore, they won’t be able to drink at all.

  The men looked up as I walked into the bar, mild expectation on their faces. Caden was sitting in the corner, staring at a list of racehorses on his phone.

  “Help me pick,” he said, barely glancing up. I didn’t gamble enough to be guided by anything other than the name. “That one,” I said, pointing to Anonymous John. “Go for that one there.”

  They were on their way to the T Block, but were unwilling—or unable—to supply more details than that. It was possible they didn’t know where they were in relation to other rigs. Maps don’t tell you much, since oil companies, like pay-per-view channels, only acknowledge their own assets. Everyone was talking about the price of Brent Crude, and the tumble it had taken. Oil is a volatile commodity, its price linked to geopolitics and economic growth, as well as supply (which is inelastic) and demand (which tends to be cyclical). Ever since the first North Sea crude oil came onshore, in the seventies, it’s been locked in a boom–bust cycle, though this downturn appeared more serious than the last. Put simply, the market was saturated. The machines designed to do our bidding had spun out of control, like the sorcerer’s enchanted broom. They kept churning out cheap product—Iran Heavy, Arab Light, Dubai Crude, Qatar Marine—even as the price was falling fast.

  On the way to the hotel, my taxi driver had spoken at length about Aberdeen’s profligacy, its reckless reliance on one revenue stream. People put their eggs in one basket and lived beyond their means. You saw them driving around, in their Range Rovers on finance, with their big houses on Morningfield Road. As if they could afford it! It was a myth that oil workers earned huge salaries, a piece of propaganda left over from the eighties, mostly put out by the workers themselves, but only when it suited them. The money used to be good, but the industry had been neglected. They were out of sight and out of mind. Of course they’d had recessions before—they were down to nine dollars a barrel in 1999—but this was different. This was the industry preparing for the future. There was a sermonizing tone to his talk; he sounded quite pleased. Like every taxi driver in Aberdeen, he had once worked offshore.

  I pushed my phone towards the man sitting opposite me.

  He unloaded various grievances: the cost of the flight back to Teesside; the way oil companies expected contractors to drop everything and travel three hundred miles with a few hours’ notice; the class divide offshore.

  He was the oldest man at the table, and the best looking, by some margin. His eyes were black, his cheekbones high and slanted. He appeared to be mixed race, though it took me a while to register this. What’s obvious and unremarkable in London becomes shifting and indeterminate somewhere like Aberdeen.

  “There’s over a thousand men out of work now. Lads are applying for jobs and getting their CVs sent back, or replies saying ‘Sorry, but there’s six hundred looking at the same job.’”

  “When will the price go back up?”

  “They reckon it’ll get better by next month. End of March, everything will be back to normal.”

  Tyler’s voice sailed over the collective burr. He was complaining about women, their assumptions about offshore workers. It was all very unfair.

  A man from the Tern had gone on a dating show, Take Me Out. Before he’d even stepped onto the stage, every girl had switched her light off. I thought how nice it was, being around men who watched Take Me Out. Adam didn’t like me watching ITV. He called it the “northern channel.” By northern he meant “working class.” For Adam, the two states were interchangeable.

  The afternoon wore on, the sky grew dark. We swapped stories. I offered a brief précis of the past month. The men shook their heads and commiserated.

  “What was your book about?” said the one sitting to my right. He had a long, lugubrious face under a wedge of gray hair.

  “This, really,” I said, looking at Tyler. “What it does to your relationship, having someone gone half the time. How the women at home cope.”

  “It’s hard,” he said. “You shouldn’t plan things for your first week back. The weather gets so bad, you never know when you’ll be home. There was a lad who got stuck on the Central, missed his own wedding.”

  “That sounds like a punch line to a joke.”

  “Don’t think his lass found it funny.”

  The gray-haired man was getting married that summer. He showed me a picture: a delicate blond, younger than him, dandling a baby on her knee. It was passed around the table to generalized congratulation. Next to me, Caden murmured something.