Sea State by Tabitha Lasley review – sex, drugs and oil rigs
Extracting oil offshore is a treacherous business, requiring grit and stamina from its workers, along with a willingness to be cut off from civilisation for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. When men come home from the platforms they are like returning soldiers, struggling to acclimatise and communicate with their wives and girlfriends. Many will turn their phones off and spend the first few days in the pub. Gain the confidence of an offshore worker and he will probably tell you about the friend of a friend who filled his pockets with tools and threw himself off the rig.
The journalist Tabitha Lasley hears this suicide story over and over. She wonders if it’s an urban myth, but is assured by different men that it really happens. One, who worked on a Brent field platform in the North Sea, says: “I saw him half an hour before. I passed him in the corridor and said ‘Alright Jimmy, how you doing?’ He never took me on, just walked right past.”
Sea State was planned as a portrait of riggers, but soon turned into something else. It is customary for journalists to avoid inserting themselves into the story of other people’s lives, but Lasley plonks herself, without apology, right in the middle. After leaving her boyfriend of five years, she begins an affair with one of her early interviewees, a taciturn, tattooed rigger called Caden who is married with children, and whose attitudes to women and immigrants leave much to be desired. After weeks of to-ing and fro-ing, she moves from London into a flat in Aberdeen to be nearer him.
Lasley changes her name and her backstory on a whim, accosts fierce-looking strangers and gets drunk with them
Sea State is part reportage, part memoir, and the collision of the two is initially discombobulating – one moment the author is reflecting on the grotesque failures that led to the 1988 Piper Alpha disaster, which killed 167, and the next she is trying to take a photo of her breasts to send Caden on his third week offshore. It nonetheless builds a grey-hued portrait of a ruthless industry, a dour city and a breed of man who thinks nothing of calling a woman a whore for putting her hand on a man’s arm in a pub, and is shocked when she tries to buy a round of drinks. These men, many of whom have girlfriends as well as wives, are not big on self-reflection, yet they talk of home “with an exile’s longing, their perspective skewed by distance”.
Lasley’s methods for meeting her subjects are unorthodox, and her capacity for recklessness quite breathtaking. She changes her name and her backstory on a whim, accosts fierce-looking strangers and gets drunk with them, and takes drugs when they’re offered. She inveigles her way into exclusively male social settings, shrugging off suspicion and shouting back at the men who try to intimidate or insult her. She meets Said, a driller who is the youngest of four brothers and who worked on an Algerian rig before moving to Aberdeen. They go to a festival at a fairground where he tells stories of Caspian rigs with no choppers to ferry the workers; instead they are taken on boats that drop them at the foot of the platform where they must scramble up netting to reach the deck.
On a train she meets a boxer-turned-rigger who worked on platforms in Saudi Arabia and the Falklands before moving to Piper Bravo in the North Sea. He says he gets scared lying in his bunk bed. “When they bring the [oil] containers on board at night, and you hear them: boom! You’re working on a floating bomb. A floating bomb that’s just waiting for an ignition source.” Later, after a few drinks, he tells her he once killed a man. She’s not sure whether to believe him but still lets him walk her home.
Sea State is a hybrid of sorts: an investigation that is also a confession but reads a lot like a novel
Insecurity and isolation do strange things to people, as Lasley herself learns. She finds herself cast adrift from her family and her procreating friends who call from London and ask: “What are you doing all day?” Her initial compassion towards her boyfriend’s wife hardens into irritation and dismissal. She is exasperating, but you still worry about her throwing her lot in with a man who appears to be without conscience about the family he has abandoned. When he leaves Lasley too, she sees it coming but is still filled with loathing and despair.
Her research into offshore life continues, however, uncovering tales of cabin brawls, catastrophic safety lapses and 90mph gales that shake the rigs to their bones. The cold facts of this rarefied job hit hard, but so do the social observations gleaned in a fog of drunken chatter. Lasley notes how girls “are taught to respond to the subtlest social cues, to beat a retreat at the first sign of a furrowed brow or crossed arms; boys to develop a benign tone-deafness to the very same signals. They learn to brazen it out and keep talking, like a salesman on a doorstep, sensing a soft no.” In order to fit in and do her job, she says, she must become “a hybrid of sorts. The unthreatening looks of a woman. The impervious core of a man.”
Sea State is, itself, a hybrid of sorts: an investigation that is also a confession but reads a lot like a novel. It is a startlingly original study of love, masculinity and the cost of a profession that few outside of it can truly understand. The cost to Lasley herself is yet to be revealed.
• Sea State is published by Fourth Estate (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
