‘No,’ Rory replied stiffly, trying to drown out this train of thought. ‘I just needed to get an early night.’
‘Oh, right.’ Graham’s eyes creased, troubled by something. ‘Just thought, y’know. We haven’t been out together in ages. Thought you’d want to let off some steam, right?’
‘I did. Now I need to sleep. Just tired from work, you know?’
Graham’s expression lifted in an instant, replaced by a coarse grin. ‘You work too hard. Stay on that boat too much an’ you’ll be looking at lobsters for company.’
‘Only if they’re as good looking as your mum,’ Rory replied weakly, which got a resounding laugh from Graham.
‘You enjoy your kip, then, like an old man.’ Graham made a mocking gesture of touching his forelock. ‘The rest of us will be out here living, if you choose to join us.’
Rory watched his swaying departure down the street. Graham soaked up alcohol like he was made of the same brick as the outhouse he resembled.
Nowtherewas a jacked-up manly man, if ever there was one. Graham shared some traits with the blue guy—the height, the muscles, the tatts. And did Rory feel anything attractive about him? Nada. Zero. Resoundingly nope.
Thank fuck for that.
He locked the door and went to bury his head under his duvet.
That fact that Graham was checking on him bothered Rory. They’d grown up together; been probably the closest thing either of them could call a best friend to each other. Though in reality that friendship amounted to inventing newyour mumjokes,trading industry info, and occasionally sharing a drink in the other’s company.
Throughout it all, Graham had looked out for Rory. Rory had been the scrawnier of the two of them when they were teenagers and Graham had stood in the way when bigger kids tried to shake him down for a laugh. And then he taught Rory how to punch back.
Machismo was something Rory had to learn to fit in, whereas for Graham it seemed to come naturally.
In the early days, it was Graham who helped Rory take the reigns of his dad’s boat. Back when Hamish Douglas had finally given up on the outside world and retreated to the cave of his house and the memory of his wife. The memory that Rory couldn’t live up to, no matter how fucking hard he tried.
Graham and Rory had spent days, months, working in all weathers, in both banter and silence, to keep the dying business afloat. And even now, it was Graham trying to offer Rory a lifeline, a way out of his dismal situation with the dangling prospect of a new job. Maybe a new life. Catching tourists instead of lobsters.
Same boat, different fish, Rory reflected. Graham didn’t realise it wasn’t the escape to Rory he thought it was.
And the fact he thought Rory needed rescuing at all was a boot to his pride. After all these years, did he still look pathetic? Did he still look like a failure? All Rory had ever done was work hard, and Graham seemed to see it as a kind of weakness.
I suppose if you’re already strong then you don’t need to work hard for it,Rory thought dully.
He rolled over to stare at the ceiling. His skin had begun itching again. A sort of crawling sensation all over his body, like tiny crabs were scuttling from his toes to his head.
He put it down to stress and went to take a bath.
* * *
Rory spent the whole of the weekend hiding at home, save for a single trip to check on his dad. He dreaded going back to work on Monday. How could he set foot on theStarknowing that an army of blue musclemen might be lurking beneath the waves?
He checked the weather forecast obsessively, hoping there would be storms and other good reasons to not take theStarout. As if to spite him, the weather turned positively balmy with slower winds and a temperature hovering around fifteen degrees. Even the sun could occasionally be spotted peeking through the clouds.
What’s worse, his bank balance provided an even greater argument for not shirking work. Months of poor yields had left him in a precarious financial situation.
So it was with great trepidation that Rory piloted theWandering Starout of Ullapool’s harbour, following the tidal flow of Loch Broom west until it spilled out into the Minch. He was on his own today: a small blessing to not have Ol’ Doaty grousing in his ear.
Rory maneuvered the boat into position to drop his first line of creels and set to work. He checked each mesh pot was baited before throwing the first over the side. Then it was a painstaking process of paying out the rope via an antiquated pulley system while Rory nudged theStarforward a few metres, and then coming back to manually drop the next trap in.
Years ago, he’d tried to convince his father to buy equipment to mechanise the process like they did on larger creelers. But Hamish Douglas was a man firmly set in his ways and wouldn’t hear a word against the ‘traditional’ way of running his boat and his business. Change was like poison to the old man.
Still, gruelling though it was, Rory enjoyed the solitude. And simple labour made it easy to forget what he was hiding from.
Having found the rhythm of his work, Rory began to relax. It was just as he was about to drop the sixth and final creel that a head popped out of the water.
‘You do know you’re littering my territory, yes?’ said the blue merman.
