Tremble (60 page)

“I’m no masochist, but I suppose you could say I’m paying some kind of emotional penance. It was my own negligence that lost me my wife, after all,” I answered, joining Mary in a second glass.

Outside it had begun to snow and I was thankful for the gas fire’s dancing blue flames. Mary belched and smoothed down her greasy hair with the gesture of a coquette half her age.

“I had a client once, years ago,” she said, “maybe even twenty years. Of course I was a real looker in those days. You wouldn’t be sitting there drinking that whiskey if you’d seen me then. Anyways, he was from the rig too. Real sharp he was and regular with the cash. A wee lad, couldn’t have been more than five foot, but feisty.”

“And?”

“Well, one month he didn’t visit, or the next either, and then the next thing I know the insurance company is all over the town asking questions.”

“Questions?”

“They’d found him floating in a small raft. Dead he was, with his eyes scratched out. Turned out he’d gone stark raving mad. Tattle, that was his name—Jim Tattle. He had some marital problems, just like you. The sea’s got a voice, she’ll taunt you with your history at the best of times. You should be careful,” she finished, leaning forward dramatically. The sound of the howling wind and the soft patter of snow filled the room.

I realize now that she was trying to warn me, but at the time it was easy to dismiss the story as the starved imaginings of a town gossip. I should have known better.

Mary must have said something to the other lads because the next thing I knew they’d dubbed me Seamus the Puritan. Not that I cared. If anything it gave me an excuse to withdraw further into my own company. But that wasn’t good for the job. The men like to have a diving engineer they can trust, not only with their lives but with their personal problems as well.

I know I’m a cold man, but knowing something doesn’t mean you can change it, and I was painfully aware of how false I sounded when I tried to engage them in talk about their girlfriends or how awkward I looked playing soccer with them on the pitch marked out on the wooden deck. I’m just not a social animal by nature and I have always found it impossible not to be true to myself. Then they decided I was making a moral stand with my voluntary celibacy and they took every opportunity to remind me of it.

“Eh, Seamus! Are you training for the priesthood or is it that our fine Scottish women aren’t good enough for your bastard Irish loins?”

“Seamus, I was going to invite you to me cabin to watch the porn film with the other lads, then I remembered that you were dickless.”

One day they nailed a used condom on my cabin door. Another time I found a blow-up sex doll hanging in the shower unit. It got worse as the next visit to the brothel drew nearer. I suppose I could have stopped them but in a perverse way I think their ridicule fueled my own sense of martyrdom. I’m a self-righteous bastard at the best of times but give me something to be indignant about and I become impossible. It’s in the blood.

I became monosyllabic, spending my hours checking my apparatus over and over, as if somehow the decline of my marriage could be reversed by the maintenance of my equipment. I greased the lines, cleaned my masks, pored over my diving tables again and again, replaying all the arguments, all the heartbreak, trying to arrive at a point where I could forgive. Jesus, I missed them both.

Payday came and most of the crew left for Lerwick. As the clouds swallowed up the faint bee-speck of the helicopter I relaxed for the first time in weeks and began walking around the deck, pacing my territory like a dog.

It was a wonderful feeling, the purity of solitude swelling my soul like a benediction. It felt fucking great. All I could hear was the screaming sea and the seagulls. Salt drying on my skin.

Knowing that the skeleton crew were all below, I actually took all my clothes off and whirled around like a demented dervish. The huge gas flame of the rig roaring above me, the struggling sun catching in my hair, painting me with a rare northern heat. And for the first time in six months I felt the terrible grief of the divorce losing its grip.

That evening I decided to eat in the chief engineer’s private office. It was a formal room set high above the control room with a 360-degree view of the ocean. On a clear day, if you squinted, you could just see the tip of Peterhead on the Scottish mainland. It was like being on top of the world, as if you were steering the entire globe through time and space. I loved it up there.

I got myself a nice piece of local salmon from the massive freezer and some excellent hollandaise sauce the chef prepared regularly and froze. I cooked the fish, then washed it down with some vintage sauvignon
blanc I’d sneaked on board. I sat at the oak desk, crystal glass in hand. I felt like a king. Slowly my euphoria leaked away. A king of what? What was there for me back in Liverpool? A phone number I’d be frightened to ring and a house I was being forced to sell.

As night wrapped itself around the windows I stared out at the blooming stars and tried to think of nothing. Absentmindedly my fingers crept across the desk surface and began to stroke some marks that had been carved into the wood. I peered down at them.
Tattle
had been scratched out in thick clumsy lettering.

Suddenly a faint cry made me jerk up my head. I froze; realized it was just the seagulls and the roar of the flame. I relaxed but then there was another shout, this time louder. A man was screaming somewhere out there on the ocean.

I rushed to one of the windows. Outside, wavering bands of captured light rolled across the sea like a drowning sunset but it was an empty shimmering. There was no one to be seen. Then the distant but unmistakable sound of a voice crying, “Help me! Help me!” floated across the water.

This time I ran to the deck. I steadied myself against one of the metal struts and stared into the strip of illuminated water. Again I heard the plea but saw nothing. I reached for one of the flare guns strapped to the side of the life rafts. Holding it high I fired it into the night sky.

It burned brightly, a comet scattering crimson fog. For a split second, I saw the ghostly outline of a life raft, the silhouette of a man standing up in it, arms held to the sky as if he were commanding the heavens. His words were clear above the wind: “I see! I see!”

Then he vanished, just like that; the man, the boat, his shadow against the horizon. It was then that the story of Jim Tattle, the eyeless madman, came flooding back.

Needless to say I had trouble sleeping, but after pushing my travel trunk up against the door of my cabin I forced fear out of my head and drifted into oblivion.

The next morning I woke early. I got up to douse my face with my customary wake-up call of freezing water. One side of my neck felt peculiarly bruised. I pulled my shaving mirror from the wall. A blue-black
track of lovebites ran from just under my chin to my collarbone. I gazed at them blankly. It was so bizarre I didn’t realize what they were at first. Confused, I touched them carefully. My neck was definitely bruised as if whoever or whatever had sucked and bitten me deeply. I sat back on the bunk. I couldn’t remember anything about the night except that I had slept far more soundly than usual. I was pretty sure I hadn’t dreamed. I smelled my fingers; they had a curiously sweet fishy scent. And it wasn’t just on my hands. Sniffing the air I followed the scent; it led to my pillow.

I buried my nose in the rough cotton; the whole bed stank. Suddenly I noticed something glinting and I peered down. Nestled on my pillow was a small pile of translucent fish scales. I scooped them up and carried them to the desk in the corner. Under the lamp I examined them with a magnifying lens I keep for looking at shells and sea specimens.

The fish scales were pearly and larger than I’d ever seen. There were over ten of them and each was around half a centimeter across. They had a bronze hue and looked a little like crystal snowflakes. I placed them under a stronger lens and was shocked to see that each scale had distinctly individual patterns, very similar to the swirls of fingerprints. I’d never seen that before in any known species.

I sat back, trying to assimilate the facts. Was it possible that some bizarre fish species had crawled into the cabin and attacked me while I was sleeping? I knew that sometimes the wind will pick up a flying fish and throw the writhing creature onto the deck of a ship or oil rig. But flying fish belong in tropical waters, and besides, what kind of flying fish would crawl across the floor of a cabin and leave lovebites on its human occupant?

The curious and sometimes obscene relationships fishermen have with sea creatures floated through my mind: tales about dugongs being courted as sea-maidens because of their breast-like teats and near-human proportions; the more graphic stories I’d heard of men fucking skates because their vertical mouths were vagina-like. I cursed my Irish imagination and resolved to ignore the mystery and focus on prosaic matters. I tossed my bed sheets into the laundry. But somehow, later that day, I found myself outside the administration office determined to find out more about Tattle.

I switched the light on and the fluorescent tubes sputtered into life, creating a bluish underworld. There was a computer on the desk, a shortwave radio, and several metal filing cabinets pushed up against the back wall. Feeling horribly furtive I walked over to them. Harris, the administration officer, a fastidious man in his late sixties, had been working for the oil company for the past thirty years. He was overweight and had trouble squeezing his flesh into the undersized suits he insisted on wearing. I’d often wondered whether his preoccupation with detail and tidiness was a reaction to the war he obviously fought with his body. Whatever the cause, Harris was meticulous and obsessive—if Tattle had actually existed Harris would have filed all the details of his case for sure.

The first cabinet was marked
Personnel Files: 1975–85
, the second cabinet contained 1985–95. I knew the rig had been in operation since 1974, although it had gone through several overhauls since then. Mary the prostitute said the Tattle incident happened about twenty years before. I reached for the first drawer.