Diver
I’d never openly describe myself as a recluse, but I guess that’s what most people would call me. The bitter truth of it is that I’m only ever truly comfortable in isolated locations, like the windy stretches of Dartmoor, or Iceland, or the Gobi Desert. I don’t like human beings very much at all. I would have made a fantastic astronaut, except there wasn’t much training for that in the working-class Liverpudlian suburb where I grew up. Instead I was drawn to the docklands and the wild gray Irish Sea; more importantly, to what lies beneath it.
The first time I dived I immediately knew that I had found my element at last. Don’t get me wrong, it’s just as crowded underwater, but it’s a nonhuman, tremulous, shimmering busyness that defies time and place and the pettiness of our own primate species. There’s the well of darkness beneath you, the horizon of light above, and the orb—a cascading blue as you descend to nowhere and everywhere. I loved it from the very first: the way the suit wraps around you like an amniotic sac, the pressure demarcating your every move in syrupy-slow responsibility. But before I go any further, I’d better introduce myself.
My name is Seamus O’Connor and at the time of this whispered confession I am thirty-two years old, six foot two, and of not bad complexion. I have my father’s thick black bog-Irish hair, which I sometimes wear in a ponytail, and my ma’s brown eyes. And I’d been divorced six months by the time I found myself on oil rig 2564.
It was a colossal dinosaur of a thing, built back in the early 1970s during the time of the North Sea oil boom. The oil company that owned it had been making a tidy profit ever since. Oil rigs are manned twenty-four hours of the day, each man working six hours on, six hours off. As diving engineer my job was the underwater maintenance of the massive concrete pylons; two of them driven into the seabed at the shallower end, two of them floating, held by pins. I checked for fallen pipes, cracks in the coring, and any other potential problems. It was a dangerous job that involved spending three days in a decompression chamber after the dive and the heavy accountability for the souls of four other divers beneath me in rank.
The rest of the time was spent above water: playing cards, exercising, watching porn, helping with mechanical operations, and reading. A twenty-four-hour operation, come sun, rain, or tempest. One week the night shift, a howling gothic world where you battled the wind from cabin to cabin; the next week the day shift, a relentless stream of endless light, with no time between the two to adjust your body clock. Three months on the rig, three months off. But they paid you like a millionaire for putting up
with the isolation and a yawning tedium that would transform the sanest man. And I had fought hard to get my industrial diving rating.
I was there to forget. My wife had run off with my best and only friend, Hanif, back in Liverpool. I married Meredith when I was in my early twenties. It wasn’t a whirlwind romance but a calculated relationship. Even then I knew that if I didn’t marry I’d end up calcified in my own misanthropy and Meredith, not much more than a girl, mistook my cynicism for intellectual sophistication.
In those days I liked to delude myself that my attitude was poetic; now I see it as downright selfish. I wish I’d loved Meredith better, and I wish that Hanif had loved me more, but my wife was beautiful and in need and Hanif had a Middle Eastern pragmatism I had always lacked. He made sure he was there when I was not.
Strangely enough, my anger wasn’t directed toward them but at myself. I guess that’s why I signed on for the gig in the first place. A year to stew in my guilt and abandonment. How many evenings I wasted on that oil rig, lying on my bunk, listening to the rig creak, turning over the last days of my marriage, looking for a telltale fault line that I might have addressed—the only conclusion I ever reached was amazement that they hadn’t run off together sooner. I had not been an easy person to live with, just as I knew I was not an easy person to work with.
“Eh, Seamus! You coming with us on the dip-the-wick excursion?” Jimmy, the rig’s chief maintenance officer, a short cockney with an even shorter temper, stuck his head into the room. The men, all twenty of them, visited the nearest brothel on the last Thursday of every month. It was a ritual; those men attended the whorehouse like they were going to church, I’m telling you. I’d been with them once before, and once was enough.
The brothel, located in the windswept harbor town of Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, was above a fish and chip shop with a red light shining bravely over the door. The smell of cooking grease hung in the air and the five “ladies” who worked there were all fifteen stone or more, hefty Scottish lasses with the vernacular and the hair on their legs to prove it.
My coworkers tricked me into accompanying them by telling me they were going to see a great floor show. I’ve always liked those clubs because, under the colored lights and mirror balls, the strippers remind me of waving forests of seaweed. Those places were a fantasy underwater palace for me, and many was the time I’d escaped into some dive in old Liverpool town. I’m a watcher not a toucher and the lads knew it.
But after a hellish helicopter ride through whipping winds, we arrived at the tiny port and there was no show. Instead I found myself staring at the massive thighs of a fifty-year-old named Mary MacDougal who cooed over my thick black hair and the muscles in my arms, then offered to go down on me. I declined politely, saying I would be just as content with half an hour of female conversation, and, after rolling herself a cigarette, Mary was more than happy to oblige. I never found out if she was a fantastic lay but I’ll say this much: those whores of Lerwick have the trick of opening a man up and listening as he spills his heart. Then again, being the only available women for a hundred nautical miles in either direction means they’d get plenty of practice.
Before I knew it I was telling Mary about the divorce and the terrible loss of my wife and best friend. It was the first time I’d talked to anyone about it and it was comforting and easy for she was a stranger. Now that sex was out of the equation we both relaxed and Mary pulled a bottle of excellent Scotch malt from under the rickety foldout bed.
“Aye, there’s many a damaged man that ends up on the rig. It has a calling for the masochists among us. But the isolation can destroy a good brain,” she concluded, knocking back the whiskey, her massive breasts straining against her fluorescent pink nylon teddy.
“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.”
Seamus the puritan went to sea,
Not a muff-diver he would be,