Dirty Rotten Love

Chapter 1

Chapter one

Rory

“Rory,” says Tam, appearing at my elbow with the expression of a man bearing genuinely wonderful news. “You’re on drain inspection with MacLeod.”

I turn to look at him. He is delighted with himself. His round face is doing the thing where he is trying not to grin and failing completely.

“Brilliant,” I say. “Love that for me.”

“Just you and him. One on one. Quality time.”

“Tam, I swear to god.”

He loses the battle with the grin entirely. Several of the other lads look over, and Dazza makes a sound that is technically a cough and absolutely is not.

This is why I love it here. This. This exact thing.

The banter and the noise and being one of the lads in a way that feels real and earned rather than something I have to work for.

Back home I always had to work for it a bit.

Always had to be on, always had to land the joke or take the hit first before anyone would fully relax around me.

Here it took about forty-eight hours, and now I feel like I’ve known these idiots my entire life.

MacLeod appears from around the corner, and the atmosphere shifts in that way it always does when he arrives, like a pressure change before a storm. Conversations don’t stop exactly, but they recalibrate. Everyone becomes about sixty percent more focused on whatever they’re supposed to be doing.

I become about seventy percent more focused on whatever I’m supposed to be doing. Obviously. For the same reasons as everyone else.

He is looking at his clipboard. This is good.

When MacLeod is looking at his clipboard he is not looking at me, and when he is not looking at me, I get a free pass to just. Look at him.

In a completely normal way. The way you’d look at anyone who walked into a room.

The way you’d look at, I don’t know, a very large and imposing piece of industrial machinery.

You’d clock it. Take note of it. Acknowledge its presence in your vicinity. That’s all I’m doing.

He is tall. Genuinely impressively tall, and built in a way that suggests the North Sea has been trying to knock him down for twenty years and has not yet succeeded.

Dark hair, a bit longer than you’d expect, and a jaw that looks like it was assembled from spare parts left over from building a mountain.

He’s somewhere in his late thirties. He has the kind of face that has absolutely no time for your nonsense, which would be more intimidating if I had any nonsense to speak of, which I don’t, I am a consummate professional.

He looks up from the clipboard. His eyes go straight to me. They are very dark and extremely unimpressed.

I give him my best smile. Bright, easy, the full wattage. The smile that has been charming people since I was seven years old and worked out it was a more efficient strategy than crying.

MacLeod’s expression does not change in any way whatsoever.

Right. Fine. I drop the smile to a more moderate setting. Something relaxed and professional. One of the lads. Just a guy. Nothing to see here.

“Gallacher,” he says. “Drain inspection. Now.”

“On you go, boss,” I say, and fall into step behind him.

Tam gives me a thumbs-up behind MacLeod’s back.

I give Tam a look that communicates a wide range of feelings very efficiently.

He mouths something that I think is good luck, and for some reason it lands as the funniest thing he has said to me all week, but I absolutely cannot laugh, so I bite my bottom lip and hold my breath.

MacLeod sets a pace that requires me to move my legs at a rate I find personally offensive.

The man walks like he is permanently late for something, or possibly like he is trying to walk away from something and hasn’t quite accepted yet that it is following him.

I match his pace because I am fit and capable and I am not going to be the one huffing to keep up, absolutely not, I would rather die.

On the plus side, the exertion swallows up my need to laugh.

“You’ve done drain inspection before,” he says abruptly. It’s not a question. With MacLeod nothing is really a question.

“Aye, did the training,” I say. “All signed off.”

He makes a noise. It is not a positive noise. It is the noise of a man who considers training to be the absolute bare minimum and is deeply unimpressed that I am presenting it as a qualification.

“The training,” he says, in a tone that makes me feel several kinds of inadequate, “and doing it are two different things.”

“Aye, I know that.” I keep my voice easy. Unbothered. “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it. To learn the doing part.”

He glances sideways at me. It’s a quick look, sharp, like he’s checking something, and then he looks away again.

I don’t know what he’s checking. Whether I’m being cheeky, probably. I’m not being cheeky. I’m being genuine, which is rare for me, but here we are.

We reach the inspection point, and MacLeod crouches down to check the first drain with the focused efficiency of a man who has done this approximately ten thousand times.

I watch and then I do exactly what he does, checking the second one, and I do it correctly because I did actually pay attention in training and I am not, despite what certain supervisors might imply with their silences, an idiot.

MacLeod checks my work. I try not to hold my breath.

“Fine,” he says.

I feel a small burst of something warm in my chest that I am absolutely not going to examine.

We move on to the next point. The wind has picked up and it is cold in the specific miserable way that the North Sea does cold, which is less of a temperature and more of a personal attack.

I pull my collar up and say nothing because complaining about the weather on an oil rig is apparently one of the things you just don’t do, Dazza explained this on day one, it marks you out as someone who doesn’t belong here, and I belong here absolutely, I love it here, and I’m not going to mess it up.

“How are you finding it,” says MacLeod.

I look at him. He is looking at the next drain and his face gives nothing away, which is standard, but the fact that he has asked me anything at all that is not a direct instruction is genuinely unprecedented in our five-day acquaintance.

“Love it,” I say, and I mean it so completely that it probably comes out more earnest than intended.

He does look at me then. Briefly.

“It’s your first rotation,” he says.

“Aye.”

“Most people don’t love it on their first rotation.”

I shrug. “I’m not most people.”

It comes out confident because I am confident. Obviously. And also because there is something about the way MacLeod talks to me that makes me want to stand up straighter, which I’m not examining either, I’m just noting it and moving on.

He makes the noise again. The unimpressed one. But there is something fractionally different about it this time and I can’t tell what, and it is going to bother me later, I already know it is.

We finish the inspection in silence that is less uncomfortable than our silences usually are, which might be the nicest thing I can say about MacLeod.

In the last five days I have learned that his silences have different qualities, the way the sea has different qualities, and this one is almost, almost neutral.

I’ll take it.

When we get back to the main floor, Tam is there and he raises his eyebrows at me in a question. I give him a tiny nod that means everything is okay, it was fine, stand down. He looks almost disappointed.

MacLeod hands me his clipboard. “Sign off the inspection log.”

I sign it. My handwriting is terrible. It has always been terrible and I have made my peace with this.

MacLeod takes the clipboard back and looks at my signature with an expression I cannot read.

“Gallacher,” he says.

“Boss?”

“Don’t be late for the briefing.”

“I’m never late,” I say, which is a complete lie, I am almost always late, but I have not been late once on this rig because I set three alarms and I will take that secret to my grave.

I also learned, on day one, that Macleod’s version of not late, is being at least five minutes early, and I won’t make that mistake again. Ever. There is absolutely no need for him to bring it up.

MacLeod gives me one last look. Long, dark, unreadable. Then he walks away.

I watch him go for approximately two seconds before I become extremely interested in the middle distance instead, which is a perfectly normal thing to look at.

Tam materializes at my shoulder. “Well?”

“It was a drain inspection,” I say. “We inspected drains.”

“And you survived? He didn’t tear chunks out of you?” Tam’s eyes are wide.

I shrug nonchalantly. “Of course not, because I’m perfect. Can’t find fault with perfection.”

Tam snorts and slaps me on the back. “Yeah, right!”

“You have no idea.” I clap him on the shoulder. “Right. What’s for lunch? Please tell me it’s not the gray beef thing.”

“It’s the gray beef thing,” says Tam.

I close my eyes briefly.

I love it here. Not even the gray beef thing is going to change that.

Because I truly do love this rig. I know that sounds mental.

It’s loud and it smells and the North Sea looks like it’s in a permanently bad mood and my bunk is roughly the size of a coffin, but I genuinely, honestly love it.

Every single morning I wake up and I think, I’m on an oil rig.

Me. Rory Gallacher from a two-bedroom terrace in Edinburgh where the boiler worked maybe sixty percent of the time and the other forty percent you just put another jumper on.

I’m on an oil rig, earning more money in a single rotation than my mum used to earn in three years, and it is brilliant and I am brilliant for being here and nothing can touch me.

Except MacLeod, who can and does touch me, metaphorically speaking, approximately fifteen times a day.

Not like that. Obviously not like that. I just mean he gets to me. In a professional capacity. Because he is my supervisor and his entire personality is disappointment, and being on the receiving end of that much concentrated disappointment from one individual is a lot for anyone to deal with.

I am dealing with it magnificently.

I was entirely professional just now. And he said my work was fine. He actually said the word fine. So it’s fine. The crew like me, my boss thinks I’m fine. Everything is great.

This rotation is going to be the best time of my life.