by RL McKinney
He drank the first bottle quickly because he was thirsty, then opened another and worked on it more slowly, trying not to worry about what had happened on the rig but unable really to think about anything else. It had been like a kind of paralysis: a fear so intense that it froze him and stopped his breath in his throat. If it had lasted a few minutes it might have been described as a panic attack, but it had lasted three days: three days in which he had been unable to leave the accommodation block. He’d had a few episodes before, seconds of dizziness or moments in which he had felt himself pulled towards the edge by some external force, but this was different. He knew this changed things.
There had been a suicide on the platform. For reasons as yet unexplained, a roughneck had climbed the drilling tower and thrown himself off, hitting the Pacific below with sufficient force to shatter his bones and fatally compress his internal organs. The questions and repercussions affected everyone on the rig; Jose was a hard worker, he had a young family, he sent money back to his parents in Mexico. Calum hadn’t actually witnessed his fall, but when he closed his eyes, he could see it in vivid detail.
Then he dreamed of Finn falling, just falling down into space, falling but never disappearing from view, and he had to watch his brother fall forever: a death that couldn’t be averted but never actually came. He was jolted awake by his own voice and the freaked-out face of his room-mate, shaking him back to life. Now there would be questions to answer, an evaluation of his physical and mental fitness to continue his work, and he already knew the outcome.
Michelle got home after ten, her breath pungent with alcohol, and found him half asleep in front of the television only a week into his usual two-week stint. There was no point asking her where she’d been. He often wondered what she got up to while he was offshore, but probing for details provoked such an aggressive response that he had stopped asking. There was no evidence that she was sleeping with anyone else; she simply didn’t see any need to be answerable to him.
‘You’re late,’ he said, pushing himself upright.
‘You’re early.’ She didn’t kiss him or even try to pretend it was a pleasant surprise. They’d been skirmishing these last few months, for reasons he hadn’t yet tried to grapple with. Maybe all marriages went this way: the inevitable subsidence of familiarity into contempt. Her purse and keys clattered onto the counter and she pulled off her heels, unclasped her hair and let it fall down over her shoulders in a flaxen sheet. It was the only soft thing about her; the rest was sinew and attitude. ‘You look like shit. Are you sick?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘A guy killed himself, Shell. He jumped.’
‘Oh crap,’ she said, hearing but barely registering as she rifled through the stack of mail he’d left beside the telephone. ‘That sucks.’
‘I kind of … freaked out. I had … I don’t know … a flashback about my brother, and I couldn’t … ’ he paused, pressed his fingers into his eyes and focused on her again. She wasn’t looking at him. ‘Are you even listening?’
She sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘Every time I went outside I could see him falling.’
‘You’re seeing things that aren’t there? Oh my God, you are so fucked up.’
‘Thanks.’ His lungs felt like bagpipes squashed under somebody’s elbow.
‘You are. I keep telling you to go see someone.’
‘I think it’s past that now.’
‘Uh … like … no shit. They could fire you tomorrow.’
‘They’re not going to fire me, Shell, I’ve been with the company a long time.’
‘Then they’ll manage you out the door. They can’t have a psychotic chief engineer.’
‘I’m not psychotic. Jesus. I know it’s not real.’
‘Well, what do you call it, Cal? You’re seeing things.’ She sat down at the breakfast bar and visibly processed the implications. He knew she’d be thinking about the money before anything else, but then it felt like a cruel assumption and he had a quiet argument with himself because he was too weak to argue properly with her.
She’s a materialistic cow.
What’s wrong with that? She grew up in the age of Madonna.
Everything’s wrong with that.
Okay, Saint Francis, prove it. Turn out your pockets and walk away.
‘Maybe … ’ he had to suck in a deep breath to finish a sentence. ‘Maybe it’s time to do something else. Maybe I can get an onshore job. It’d be nice to be home more.’
‘You think so?’
‘Do you not?’
She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Two weeks on, two weeks off works pretty good for me.’
‘What are you saying, Michelle?’
They stared at each other from opposite sides of the room.
‘I think you know what I’m saying,’ she replied. Then she slid off the stool and picked up her shoes by their straps, staring at him for two or three long seconds. A look of pity crossed her face, but only for a moment. Then she sighed. ‘It’s been a day. Goodnight.’
Usually his first night off the rig was a mini-honeymoon, a celebratory reunion of bodies after a meal and a couple of bottles of wine, and it had always felt like what he thought love was supposed to feel like. Now he wondered how much of this had been a performance, however masterly, perfected and reserved for that single night per month when it most mattered. Was it her performance, or his, or both? Or maybe it was worse than that. Maybe it had never been what he thought it was. Maybe it was a semi-inebriated shag that she barely tolerated, and his misfiring brain had turned it into love. So much in California had proved to be illusory: imagined happiness made almost believable by sunshine and blue sky, a shimmering mirage over hot black asphalt.
He pulled off his trousers and slept on the couch.
He arrived back in Glendarach around two, just as a keen breeze from the sea blew the rain off to the east. The sun emerged and a swell billowed in with the tide. A stranger emerged from the pub as he drove past. It was a girl, well-built but not particularly tall, with short hair dyed cherry red. Enormous rucksack. She walked slowly, head down, thumbs working on the screen of a mobile phone. That would be fairly pointless. He wondered whether he should stop and offer her a lift somewhere, or if that would automatically be taken as creepy. She looked up as he drove by her. She was very like Catriona. His breath caught in his throat and he looked back. Then he hit the brakes, swerved onto the gravel verge and got out. He felt like he’d just draped himself over an electric fence.
‘Cat?’
She approached hesitantly, lifted a hand in a shy greeting. ‘Um … hi.’
‘Hi,’ he managed to stay, rooted to the spot and rubbing his hands on his jeans. He hoped his sunglasses hid the fact that his inner workings were going into meltdown. Panicky questions came in quick succession, followed by inadequate answers:
This is my daughter.
Five years of nothing and here she is.
She’s got so much gear she’s obviously fixing to stay a while.
What do I do? What do I do, what do I do?
Don’t fuck it up like you did last time.
How?
She’d been a child last time, small, late in developing. Her shape was presently obscured by an oversized lumberjack shirt, but she was quite visibly not a child anymore. Black eyeliner extended beyond the corners of her eyes, and her full lower lip was punctured by a silver hoop. She had prominent cheekbones in a broad, heart-shaped face, clear pale skin, very like her mother had been when he’d met her. So much like Jenny. Even from afar, he’d never been able to see himself in her. But even so, she was his daughter.
It was shameful that he had to remind himself of this. There had been so many times he’d almost forgotten her existence. This is your daughter, he bellowed at himself. You haven’t seen her in five years, you useless prick.
He’d been ill then, needy and drugged and hurting, embarrassing to a fourteen-year-old w
ho hadn’t seen more than photographs of him for longer than he cared to quantify.
Don’t fuck this up, don’t fuck this up, don’t fuck this … ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Perfect. Good start. Idiot. Close your mouth. Breathe.
She looked him in the eye for the first time. ‘I’ve come to see you, stupid.’
‘Okay.’
‘Is it?’
‘What?’
‘Okay that I’ve come to see you.’
Another rapid-fire volley of thoughts. For how long? You might have called first. And now I’ve got two of them to look after. What’s Mary going to say? Will Mary even remember who you are? It was a minor victory that he managed to think all of these things without saying them.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ he said instead, and reached towards her hand.
She swallowed, looked like she was trying to hide her relief and allowed her fingers to twine with his. ‘Thanks.’
He held onto her hand for a moment. ‘You got a hug for your old dad?’
She nodded and stepped toward him. They embraced and she burst into tears.
SEVENTY-SIX PER CENT
‘All right now?’
Catriona nodded, mortified by her display. He would think she was a pathetic snivelling child. ‘I don’t know what that was about. I’m not usually a crier. Sorry.’
‘It’s okay.’
She’d been afraid that he might look even worse than last time she’d seen him, if that was possible. Now, as she dared to focus on him, she saw a man she recognised. It was as if the person who had appeared at the door five years ago had been some kind of imposter. His hair was shorter and greyer, and he looked older but seemed a million years younger. He was fit again, robust in dirty work clothes, with arms most of the boys her age would envy. She couldn’t remember what age he was. Forty-six or forty-seven, a fair bit older than Mum, anyway. Mum had only just turned forty, but he’d recovered and she’d withered, forever complaining about her sore back and her headaches. Calum was handsome for someone his age, she supposed, like Anna said. So did her mum. It was the only nice thing she ever said about him. Be careful around the good-looking ones, she would say. Catriona understood that now.
They sat in the pub again and he ordered them burgers and pints from the bar, and she mopped her smudged eyeliner with the tissue he’d given her, feeling babyish and embarrassed. He didn’t seem angry that she’d turned up, but he could be saving it. Mum would have hit her with a million questions already, but he held back, drank his pint slowly and offered a few relevant pieces of information.
‘Your Granny Mary’s staying with me just now. You remember her, don’t you?’
Cat felt a weight of disappointment form in her gut. She didn’t want to share him with some old lady she barely knew. ‘I remember her singing. She used to sing all the time. She tried to teach me Gaelic.’
‘Oh aye, she’s still at it.’
‘She must be so old now.’
‘Not so old, but she’s not that well. She’s got Alzheimer’s disease.’
‘So she can’t remember anything?’
‘She remembers a lot of things. And she forgets a lot of things. I don’t know if she’ll remember you. Some days I think she barely remembers me, and then other days she’s fine. She can be argumentative. Sometimes she’s paranoid. She thinks people are stealing from her, that sort of thing.’
Cat considered the implications of this. She should have called him first. It was selfish to assume he could automatically make space in his life for her. ‘So you’re saying it’s not a good time for me to be here.’
‘No, it’s fine. You just need to know.’
‘I can leave. I could stay a day or two and then … ’ And then what? Home again, like the four-year-old runaway. ‘Just, you know … tell me straight.’
‘Aye, straight up. I’m just … surprised, Cat. After all this time you’ve refused to speak to me and now here you are.’
‘Sorry. I should have called. I was going to call you, I just … ’ She was on the verge of panic. ‘I needed to get away from Aberdeen.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
Not yet, she thought. Not here, in a pub, in this tiny place where everybody would know him. ‘It’s a long story.’ He was looking at her strangely, like he could see the strain on her. She needed a quick diversion. ‘What about Granny Mary? Will she be okay with me?’
He shrugged. ‘I hope so. We’re on new ground every single day. She’s completely freaked out by this whole referendum thing, so it’s probably best not to mention it around her. She thinks there’s going to be a war.’
‘Why?’
‘God knows.’ He drank some beer and gave her that look again. He could see straight through her. Or maybe he was just shocked by her style but was politely keeping quiet about it. Probably he was having a hard time matching her with his memory of her.
‘Don’t say it,’ she muttered.
‘What?’
‘You hate the way I look.’
‘No, it suits you.’
‘So why are you staring at me?’
‘I was trying to work out what side you’re on. Are you an Aye or a Naw?’
‘Aye. Obviously.’
He sat back. ‘Well thank God for that. The lip ring I can live with.’
A giggle rose like a gas bubble in her chest. At least they had that in common. ‘So ehm … are you like … remarried or anything?’
‘No. You think I’d get married without telling you?’
She shrugged. ‘You could be doing all kinds of things without telling me.’
‘My life is pretty quiet, Cat. Boring, probably, compared to whatever you’ve been up to at uni.’
She sipped her lager and looked out the window, watching the sheep grazing on the seaweed-strewn peat at the edge of the bay. They were the only people sitting in this end of the pub and she was grateful for the relative privacy. ‘Uni’s not that good. It’s completely shite, actually.’
‘How’s that?’
‘It just is.’ She felt the tears gathering again. ‘So’s home. I just … don’t want to be there right now.’
‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’
‘I … ’ She couldn’t look at him. ‘No. I don’t.’
He accepted this, but narrowed his eyes and chewed his lip. ‘Does Jenny know you’re here?’
‘Yeah, I told her. I lied and said I’d spoken to you. She’s not happy about it. She thinks you’re … ’ she paused, wished she could call her words back.
Calum sighed. ‘Jenny thinks I’m a lot of things, some of which are true. You don’t have to drop her in it.’
‘She thinks you’re a bit … you know … unstable.’
He cleared his throat and looked away, his mouth forming some kind of silent response. It looked like a curse. ‘I had a bad time for a couple of years. You know that, right? Well, you remember. Call it what you want, a breakdown or something. I’m better now. Your mother can say what she likes but I hope you’ll take me as you find me now.’
I have his eyes, Catriona thought as she looked at him. It was hard to see any more similarity than that. He’d blown in and out of her life, felt more like a distant uncle than a father. Their little holidays without Michelle had been good: three or four days each, to London or Rome or Copenhagen. Sometimes all they would do was walk and talk, pausing here or there to look at an old bridge or church, and he would point out tiny features of the engineering and describe the ingenuity of the design in a way that made her forget she’d rather be at a theme park. They would stop to listen to a street musician or sit in a cafe and eat some delicious thing. And then long periods, months running into years, when he was away. She never knew why his promises to bring her to America came to nothing, but there were always Christmas and birthday parcels: cuddly toys and trendy American clothes, books, CDs of bands he wanted her to like. Phone calls and emails came regularly, postcards, photos, grinning pictures from the back
of his motorbike or on oil rigs, in bright orange waterproofs with crazy big waves crashing behind him.
Mum would go all sour-faced, stare over her shoulder at the pictures and vent: ‘If he thinks that’s being a father, he’s completely delusional. He was never here when you were screaming in the middle of the night, or to stay home with you when you were ill. Remember when you had appendicitis? I had to take two weeks off work, unpaid. He wants to be your pal, but he’s not interested in the hard part. I don’t think he’s capable. He’s completely detached from reality.’
He seemed as well anchored to reality as anyone, but she decided to test him. ‘How did you get better?’
A girl brought out their plates of food. Calum thanked her and waited until she’d gone away again before replying. ‘Medicine. Counselling. Lots of exercise. A career change … a divorce. Moving back here.’
‘Are you completely okay now?’
He raised his eyebrows as he bit into his burger. He chewed deliberately slowly and wiped the paper napkin over his mouth. Maybe he thought she wouldn’t like the answer.
‘Is this why you haven’t wanted to see me up till now?’
‘No. Well … not really. I just want to know.’
‘All right … ehm … I guess I would say that I don’t know if that’s possible. We all have our hard days, right? I’m … seventy-six per cent okay.’
She laughed softly. ‘Seventy-six?’
‘Aye. I did the sums in my head just now. It’s a complicated equation with a lot of variables. What about you?’
‘Less than that.’
‘Right.’ He paused for a drink, eyes not leaving her.
She stared at her nails. Bitten. Dark blue varnish, flaking, showing white beneath. Ask me about music, she wanted to say. Or telly, or my favourite book. Anything that doesn’t mean anything. Give me some chat about the weather. That’s the stuff most people talk about. You know, pointless blethers? Don’t you do that, Calum? Let’s talk about the referendum. That’s important, right?