The Waves Burn Bright

by Iain Maloney

  ‘You have no idea why you came here, why you agreed to that conference, do you?’

  ‘To deliver my paper.’

  ‘Why here? Why now?’

  ‘I didn’t decide the conference should be in Aberdeen this year. If it were up to me it would’ve been somewhere I actually wanted to go.’

  ‘What was in your paper that it had to be delivered in person? Why couldn’t it be published in one of the journals?’

  I hated arguing with her, I couldn’t think straight when we fought but she had this irritating ability to cut her emotion out of an argument. I felt like cattle being pushed through the channels she wanted me to go through until I got to the abattoir. ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘You chose to come here. Whether you admit it to yourself or not, it’s true. You chose to come here. To deliver a paper attacking the oil industry twenty-five years after Piper Alpha. You really expect me to believe that’s coincidence?’

  ‘I don’t care what you believe.’

  ‘I know that’s not true.’

  ‘Okay, say I did do all that, consciously or not, one thing I definitely didn’t do was get in touch with my dad and say, “Hey, let’s meet up. Last time was such a blast, let’s do it again.”’

  ‘You knew he was friends with Harry Boyle. You knew he’d find out.’

  ‘He’s known where I am for the last ten years. You think proximity was the problem?’

  ‘He came to the hotel. In Aberdeen. He came on Sunday when you were on campus. I spoke to him.’

  ‘And hatched this plan.’

  ‘Yes. I told him not to go to the conference, that it would be better for everyone to meet somewhere else.’

  ‘He didn’t listen to you. He came anyway.’

  ‘I know. I underestimated how much he wanted to see you.’

  ‘And how much I didn’t want to see him.’

  ‘No, I knew that. I just don’t want you to end up like me.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I never saw my father again.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry, but this is different.’

  ‘No, Carrie, it’s not. The only thing that’s different is that I didn’t try. And now I can’t.’

  ‘So you decided for me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She came over and sat on the edge of the bed, at a right angle to me, our knees touching.

  ‘Look, Ash, I know you had good reasons. But they were your reasons.’

  ‘What are your reasons? Tell me why you’ll never see your father again until it’s too late.’

  ‘Too much—’

  ‘Too much what? Anger? Bitterness? Shame?’

  ‘Time. Too much time. All of those things and more but too much time. I made my choice. My life. It was with you in Hawaii.’

  ‘Was? Oh no you don’t. You won’t run from me, Carrie.’

  But I was already out the door.

  I walked from the hotel into the forest. Something in the Speyside air, something that I recognised from my childhood. Pine, maybe, or resin. All the open space, the mountains, the sky, golden eagles, the osprey nest nearby. My memories were all green and brown, rushing water and rocky roads. When Dad and I walked the Lairig Ghru, the mountain pass that runs all the way to Braemar, we started from here, taking the Chalamain Pass. I’d been looking forward to showing this place to Ash. I’d wanted to camp at Loch Morlich but it would’ve been too much hassle to get all the equipment together and she got a discount at the Hilton.

  When I was a kid we’d come to the Colyumbridge for an evening. I’d swim in the pool, Hannah and Dad would sit in the bar. Last night Ash suggested a drink and for nostalgia’s sake we went down. I realised straight away it was a set-up. No coincidence involved in Dad and Isobel sitting at a table for four. I nearly walked out. I should have.

  He’d been drinking.

  I ordered an orange and lemonade, waited for an explanation.

  I’d never thought Ash would do that. Would take his side. Their side. She was supposed to be different.

  Why couldn’t people just leave me alone?

  One glass of orange and lemonade. The time it took to drink one glass of orange and lemonade. Must be some kind of record. Zero to sixty in whatever seconds. I wasn’t even listening. I was watching the ghosts. Graeme and I, his father and mine. That summer we’d bumped into each other at Loch Morlich, we’d gone to the hotel. Teenagers by then, we hung out in the games room, played Pac-man while our fathers drank. Graeme played Street Fighter and I wondered which of them would drive us home. Whether that would be the night we died in a car crash, startled by the machine gun chatter of the cattle grid, off the road by the clay pigeon lodge, upside down in the trees, tyres spinning, lights blinking.

  Those ghosts, the bar was full of them, the hotel. Dad said something. Isobel, something. And I was on my feet, shouting something, Ash holding my hand, trying to make me sit but I was off through the hotel, out into the car park and down through the trees to the river.

  Ash described me like one of those wind-up cars, the ones you pull back along the floor so the mechanism primes then when you let go it zooms off. A wind-up toy, permanently primed, ready to go.

  But the world wasn’t big enough, wasn’t flat enough. I’d run around the world and there I was, back in Scotland, back at the start. If I set off again would I ever be back? Would I die in Hawaii, be buried in the ground I’d spent so much time mapping? My ashes scattered over Pele’s domain. Would I move on, some of the projects I had in mind, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile?

  Ash in the room. ‘You won’t run from me.’

  She was right.

  Loch Morlich, June 2013

  Marcus kicked sand onto the fire, the flames smothered, the empty bottle in his hand. Sand turned into glass at temperatures above 1700 degrees Celsius. The charred wood, singed rocks, all of it buried, the last of the smoke drifting into the twilight air. The gentle lapping of the loch. When he died, he wanted to be scattered here.

  At rest.

  The pine resin, the peaks. He’d been happy here. Before Piper Alpha, before everything. He’d been happy. He no longer wished he’d died that day, was thankful for the days he’d been given, hard as they were.

  A figure stood in the shadows between two pines. He kept walking towards whoever it was. Maybe it was no one, just someone there to watch the sunset. She stepped out onto the beach, walked down to the shoreline, pine needles and twigs pushed up the sand. Carrie. He followed her to the edge, stood beside her looking out over the shimmering mirror of the loch, the last of the sun blazing on the hills, the ground beneath their feet.

  Acknowledgements

  I was born and raised in the Aberdeen area and vividly remember July 6th 1988 and the weeks and months that followed. There isn’t a family in Aberdeen from that time that does not have some connection with someone who was on Piper Alpha that night. It was a tragedy that scars the city to this day. The decision to write this book was not taken lightly.

  There were 226 souls on Piper Alpha that night, of whom 165 died. Two members of the Sandhaven crew also perished, sacrificing their lives to save others. 167 men. Richard Common, unable to cope with the guilt that he had survived while so many others hadn’t, took his own life in 1994. Out of respect for the memories of those who died and the privacy of those who survived, I chose to create a fictional 227th man, Marcus Fraser. He never existed and is not based on, or an amalgam of, any real people related to Piper Alpha. His presence on Piper Alpha within these pages is an anomaly to allow the story to be told.

  This book is a work of fiction. For those who wish to learn more about the tragedy, there are three non-fiction books on the Piper Alpha disaster from which I drew my research. Piper Alpha: A Survivor’s Story (Star, 1989) by Ed Punchard, Fire in the Night: The Piper Alpha Disaster (Pan Books, 2008) by Stephen McGinty, and Death and Oil (Pantheon, 2011) by Brad Matsen. The documentary Fire in the Night (2013) based on Stephen McGinty’s book was also inva
luable.

  While researching PTSD and alcoholism I learned much from the following two papers:

  “Use of an Integrated Therapy With Prolonged Exposure to Treat PTSD and Co-morbid Alcohol Dependence in an Iraq Veteran” by Sudie E. Back, Ph.D., Therese Killeen, Ph.D., A.P.R.N., Edna B. Foa, Ph.D., Elizabeth J. Santa Ana, Ph.D., Daniel F. Gros, Ph.D., Kathleen T. Brady, M.D., Ph.D.in The American Journal of Psychiatry, Volume 169 Issue 7, July 2012, pp. 688-691.

  “Survivors of the Piper Alpha Oil Platform Disaster: Long Term Follow-up Study” by Alastair M. Hull, MRCPsych, David A. Alexander, (Hon) FRCPsych, Susan Klein, PhD, Aberdeen Centre for Trauma Research, Royal Cornhill Hospital, Aberdeen, UK in British Journal of Psychiatry (2002), 181, pp. 433-438.

  Help, advice and corrections were kindly provided by Professor Susan Klein at the Aberdeen Centre for Trauma Research; Patricia Inglis, Advanced Nurse Practitioner, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary; Dr Liam McIlvanney; Professor Thor Thordarson; Carol Whitney Thordarson; Dr Jonathan Todman. Any lingering mistakes are entirely my own.

  Great Britain didn’t enter a snowboard team in the 1998 Olympics. The bronze medal in the Halfpipe went to Ross Powers of the USA.

  With thanks to Rodge Glass, Robbie Guillory, Patricia Inglis, Vicki Jarrett, Michael Maloney, Judy Moir, Adrian Searle.

  For Minori, with love always.