North Star Read Free

grey world, cloud and sea all one in colour and the whitecaps rolling in from dead astern. I glanced at the gyro and then at the skipper. ‘You’ve altered course.’
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘Aberdeen?’
    He nodded, his eyes on a small freighter headed for Norway and making heavy weather of it as she butted the tail end of the storm.
    ‘Did you talk to Watt?’
    He didn’t answer me and after a moment I ducked out of the bridge to the door of the radio room. The fug in that little cubbyhole was overpowering, the air thick with smoke. Sparks was thumbing the key, tapping out a message in his shirt sleeves, a cigarette burning beside him in a rusty tobacco tin full of stubs. I waited, sweating there, until he had finished. ‘Any news for me?’ I asked.
    He picked up his cigarette, turning in his chair and looking at me, his dark eyes large behind the steel-rimmed glasses. ‘You know we’re headed for Aberdeen?’ Morse crackled from the loudspeaker and he reached out tobacco-stained fingers for his message pad, listening with his pencil poised. Then he relaxed. ‘That rig again. So much traffic for Redco 2 I’ve hardly been able to send at all, and the old man desperate to jump the queue and get us slipped.’
    ‘He hasn’t notified the Aberdeen police?’
    ‘Not his job to do that. The office knows, of course, so maybe they have.’ He leaned back, his eyes fixed on me, buthalf his mind on the Morse. ‘They’re waiting to haul anchors so I suppose they got no joy on the Bressay Bank. Les is fit again, by the way.’ And he added, ‘Sorry about that. The old man’ll be sorry, too, in a way. Les isn’t the best mate in the fleet. What’ll you do when we get in?’
    I hesitated, wondering whether the police would be waiting for me at Aberdeen. ‘Go on the club again, I suppose.’ One trip in six months. I was hating myself for being so dependent on trawler owners for employment, conscious of a deep-seated urge to start something on my own.
    ‘Why don’t you switch to oil – supply ships, something like that? That’s where the future is. Trawling …’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Doesn’t matter to me. I go where Marconi send me. But a man like you, with a master’s certificate, you want to go where the future is.’ He jerked his head at the sound of the Morse. ‘He’s talking to the tug owners now, a big German job steaming north from Heligoland. The forecast’s good, so they’ll be under tow tomorrow night. Every trip it’s the same; down past Brent and Auk, all this area of the North Sea, nothing but rig talk – Bluewater , Staflo, North Star , Glomar. Take my advice – I listen and I know. There’ll be more rig supply ships than trawlers soon.’
    ‘Maybe.’ I stood there for a moment listening to the crackle of the Morse. Clydebank, Newcastle, Hull, all the political involvement of my life … My mind switched to Shetland, to the islands now far down below the horizon. Was it the island blood in my veins that had made me abandon capitalist America as a kid? Was that why I had started on my wanderings, seeking the values I could not find in the rich world my mother had embraced? Or was it the legendary figure of my father? Had I built him up as a hero in my mind simply because she had tried to bury him? I didn’t know. My mind was confused. All I knew for certain was that everything I had done, everything I had believed in, had suddenly turned sour.
    And then Sparks murmured, ‘The offshore capital of theworld.’ He coughed over his cigarette. ‘Aberdeen – you know it?’
    I shook my head. ‘Never been there.’
    He smiled. ‘Well, that’s what they call it.’ The Morse ceased and he glanced at the clock, his fingers reaching for the dials, tuning to the emergency waveband. ‘Take a walk round the harbour when you get there. Have a look at the pipe storage depots, the diving outfits, all the clutter of stuff the oil rigs need. You’ll get the message then all right. Aberdeen’s no