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I stepped into my cabin and reluctantly tore open the cheap pink paper.
Dear Mr. Seamus, after you left I remembered something about Tattle. Something strange I have not told anyone else. The last time he visited me there were funny marks on his body. I see a lot in my industry but I ain’t seen nothing like this before. Like a sucking or a beating perhaps. I remembered my first thought was whether he had been hurt by the other men. Bored men can get cruel. But to my eyes it looked like animal tracks of some kind. I didn’t ask Tattle because he was quite distressed by this time and not entirely in his right mind.
Hope this helps. Yours, Mary MacDougal.
Helps what, I thought. Why should I care about Tattle? A man’s problems can hang around a rig like a ghost for years, even after the man himself is long gone. Every offshore worker knows that. The secret is to walk through that haunting as if you haven’t a care in the world. Otherwise the negative energy will stick to you like metal filings to a magnet.
The weather was changing; warmth floated in on the breezes that came from the land. It made the men restless and set the cook humming. It usually made me dream, but for the last week I’d found myself plunging into a deep imageless slumber each time I laid down my head. Perhaps it was the switch over to night shift; whatever it was it disturbed me.
This particular evening I woke up with a pounding at my temples. The air was stuffy with a rich animal smell I couldn’t identify. For a moment I wondered if a mouse had died behind one of the walls. With my head still pulsing I yawned and reached under my pillow. My hand touched something unfamiliar. A blue-black pearl, left there like some sort of message.
It was large and misshapen, not perfectly spherical like a cultured pearl. There was something alien about the way it shone in the light, as if it had come from an entirely different terrain.
I ran it across my skin; it was sticky, as if it had only just been removed from the oyster. Then I sniffed it. A familiar salty musk. I’m telling you, as a good Catholic I blushed when I remembered where I had smelled the scent before. I lay there struggling with my erection, before my alarm went off indicating my shift had begun. It had to be a prank the lads were playing on me.
I waited until the last meal of the shift then confronted the crew.
“Which one of you jokers thought this would be funny?” I held up the pearl.
They looked at me blankly. Then Nick the navigator, a bit of a showman, held out his hand. I dropped the gem into the center of his palm. He studied it as if he were a jeweler examining the Queen’s crown; the others watching, fascinated. Finally he looked up with a mock-serious expression plastered across his long face.
“What the fuck are you on about, Seamus? This is a fucking pearl. A valuable one at that. What’s this got to do with us?”
“Someone left it under my pillow.”
There was an awkward silence. Then Nick spoke up again.
“Okay, fess up, you mob, which of you lads is in love with this here Irishman?” At that they all cracked up.
“Come on, who left the love note?” Nick yelled over the laughter, which only sent them into louder peals of hysterics. I sat there, face burning, not moving an inch.
“Mate, you’re losing it. You should get over to the knocking shop before your balls ferment the rest of your brain,” Nick added.
I spent the rest of the night alone in the library. I couldn’t find a reference to anything as big or the same color as my pearl. It really was exotic. I’d placed it on the flat top of a desk ba
rometer and it stared back at me, almost as if daring me to give it definition.
By the time dawn started to creep in under my blinds I’d decided it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. I settled under the eiderdown and switched off the lamp, hoping that this time I might actually dream. Of what I don’t know—giant oysters?
I started to doze off but was suddenly flooded with the sensation that I was slipping underwater without my diving mask. I sat up, struggling to draw breath; coughed, almost expecting my lungs to bring up water. But nothing came. “It’s an anxiety attack, that’s all,” I said to myself. “Breathe deeply and it will go away.” I relaxed, then lay down. Again I felt as if I were drowning. Finally, dosed up with sleeping pills, I fell asleep only to wake an hour later. This went on throughout my rest time.
I moved through my next shift with limbs as heavy as lead, a slow dread growing in my guts—the terror of falling asleep. At dawn I approached my bunk like it was an electric chair. This time I had drunk the best part of a whiskey bottle and taken two Valium on top of that, but the fear was still upon me. I lay there, eyelids wide, my heart rattling like a stone in a tin despite the drink and the drugs. Each time my eyes started to droop and exhaustion eased its way through my muscle tissue it felt as if my lungs were filling with water and I was being pulled down into liquid suffocation.
The next day I propped myself up with caffeine and some NoDoz pills the cook gave me. I had no choice: I had a job to do. The new cable had arrived that morning and, as chief diver, I knew it was I who had to go down and weld the new section to the old. I was inspecting the cable when one of the crew put his head around the door to tell me there was a phone call for me.
There was only one phone on the rig and usage was restricted to one call per man per week, incoming or outgoing. I’d never had reason to use it and I couldn’t think who’d be ringing me now. The extraordinary notion that it could be Jim Tattle himself calling from the underworld occurred to me as I walked swiftly to the communications cabin.
“Seamus?”
Her voice brought an avalanche of memories, a past I had tried to smother with rationality; but now, hearing that familiar soft tentative tone of hers echoing down the line, I realized I loved her yet. My heart lurched as I wondered whether maybe, just maybe, she was coming back.
“Meredith? Are you okay?”
“Of course.”
A yawning silence; I free-fell through it, limbs twitching in anticipation.
“And you?” she said eventually.
