The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  That trance, thank goodness, quickly resolved itself into what Corran now knew it was: simple, desperate appreciation for the care and structure the woman was giving his daughter. Every weekday morning, when he fastened Lucy into her seat on the bicycle and rode down to Margaret’s house, Corran had one thought on his mind: Thank God we have Margaret. But as each weekend drew near and the inevitable void in the day care arrangement loomed, that thought was replaced by another: How are we going to make it to Monday without Margaret? So far, there’d been only one reliable answer: Sharon. Corran wasn’t proud of how abjectly he’d come to rely on his mother for her weekly three-hour drives up to Port Readie. But he didn’t know what else to do.

  One of his ferry mates, an older guy with a kind smile, asked Corran every now and then why he was living in Port Readie. “What are you doing all the way up here, anyway?” the man said. “And with no car? Ye daft? Why don’t you move back to the city, closer to your mum? Get some help with the baby?” Corran always shrugged, noncommittal. But the answer was simple enough, had he cared to share it: There was no skag in Port Readie. And no way to get any. The ferry salary was just enough to pay for food, for Margaret’s services, and for the rent on the tiny crofter’s cottage. No extra money. No extra means. No extra mobility. It all translated to one thing—no heroin.

  “Shush, Lucy,” he said now. It was growing colder outside the cottage. He opened his sweatshirt and held the baby closer to his chest, then wrapped the sweatshirt around her. “Go to sleep, Lucy. Baby. Baby. Shush, now.”

  She wailed.

  “Lucy,” he said. “I beg you from the depths of my tortured soul: Stop crying.”

  She took a breath and screamed. He was then seized with the ridiculous notion that Lucy could have stopped crying anytime she wanted, but that she was simply tormenting him out of boredom and vindictiveness. Never mind that she was nine months old. She was capable. He pulled out his phone and checked the screen, hoping for—for what? A text from his rigmate Jintzy, he admitted to himself. That’s what.

  When Anna was busted and Corran gave up the rigs to care for Lucy, he gave up a damn good job. Being a crewman on an offshore oil derrick was cold, hard, dangerous work, sure, and not something just anyone would want to do. But it paid well, and if you had the disposition for it, which Corran did, then the work was fine: solid and satisfying, with good benefits and a rugged wholesomeness (no alcohol, no drugs) that wasn’t a bad idea at all for a recovering addict. The positions were in high enough demand that getting back on once you’d stepped out of the rotation wasn’t easy. In two months Corran had yet to see any new openings posted on the company job site. His mate Jintzy, who just recently had been promoted from roughneck to motorman, had promised to see what he could do; he’d ask around, he said, feel out the supervisors, put in a good word at the HR office.

  But Corran didn’t know why he’d even asked Jintzy about it. It was pointless. What did he think he was going to do, tuck Lucy into a duffel bag, haul her out to a freezing oil rig, and leave her stashed on an activity quilt in the crew quarters while he pulled ten-, twelve-, sometimes fourteen-hour shifts on deck? Face it, he told himself, again and again. He wasn’t going to be able to work on the rigs and take care of his baby. It was one or the other. The screen on the phone was blank. Corran put it back into his pocket.

  Lucy leaned her head on his shoulder, momentarily stymied by exhaustion.

  “You want your dummy?” he said softly. She looked at him with damp, round eyes. “Come on, love,” he said. “Let’s find dummy.” He walked her back toward the house, a box-shaped cottage in the middle of a wide heath at the top of a steep hill. Inside, the rooms were arranged in perfect symmetry—a small bedroom and bathroom toward the back of the house, a living room and eat-in kitchen toward the front. The furnishings were spare: only a pressboard dinette set in the kitchen plus a frumpy pullout sofa and a rattan table in the living room.

  In one corner stood an electronic keyboard on a metal stand. Corran had been carting the old keyboard with him for nearly a decade now, even when he went out on the rigs, and the captains never seemed to mind the extra cargo since it meant a certain measure of entertainment in the form of Corran’s ability to play the rock and blues standards that kept the rig workers’ spirits up during the long nights at sea with no beer taps to ease the tedium. He was pretty good, too, if he’d say so himself, thanks to the years of piano lessons at the old music studio in Dunedin. God, those days seemed a million years ago.

  In the bedroom, Corran’s twin bed and Lucy’s crib stood side by side, as in barracks. He found the dummy in the crib and paced, rubbing the thick rubber bulb along Lucy’s lips and trying to get her to accept it. Well, no wonder the poor baby cried so much, he thought. She had no mum. All she had was a strung-out da with a dwindling bank account and a specter of smack always trailing at his heels. She took the dummy and Corran put her down on the activity quilt. He wanted to cry himself.

  No man is an island. So said John Donne. Well, Corran begged to differ. He’d been an island all his life, an unmoored archipelago adrift in the human brine. When he was a child Sharon used to nag him, “Go out and play with someone, Corry! Call up a mate!” And so he would, to appease her, but he always felt better alone. He was just wired that way. Better alone.

  The only time he had ever truly craved interaction with others was when he was on heroin. In that situation, the proximity of other people was a built-in safety net—an assurance that the next fix would be somewhere close at hand. That’s when he’d gotten involved with Anna, in fact. Involved. Was that what it was? On again, off again, hot, cold—years of that nonsense, and really, he was pretty sure now that the only reason they gravitated toward each other in the first place was to enable each other to use. Now, see that? He felt like calling up Sharon—all that rehab, and I did learn something! Enabling. He understood it now.

  When he looked at things today, from the sober side of the pipe, he realized that his love affair with Anna was really just a love affair with skag. They were one and the same—having one meant having the other. Not having one meant not having the other. Anna—God, poor dumb Anna. A year and a half ago he thought they were finally through, but she resurfaced last winter. She had a brutal web of tracks on one arm and a baby on the other that she said was Corran’s. She swore she’d been clean during the pregnancy. Lucy’s healthy, she told him, and indeed the baby was lovely—pink-faced and solid and the sweetest little bairn he’d ever seen. Corran felt crushed under a wave of sentiment.

  He married Anna. Sharon nearly had a conniption, of course, but in light of Anna’s arrest, Corran realized now it was good he had married her; it meant custody of Lucy. It was a terrible time, though, when Anna first came back. After they signed the marriage license they went out and picked up a hit. They spent a few wasted days together in Corran’s cold, dirty flat, and he cringed now to think of how heinously they must have been neglecting Lucy. On the third day Corran woke to find Anna in nothing but a tattered bra, shooting a needle directly into her groin in order to get a bigger rush. She’d been told it would be amazing. Lucy was wailing on the floor. Corran walked over and picked her up.

  “If we don’t stop, we’re going to die,” he told Anna. “And strangers will take Lucy away.” She looked at him stupidly, a thin line of blood and heroin residue snaking down her thigh. He walked out of the flat with his daughter that day and kept walking until he reached the addiction clinic. This time, Lucy made the difference. He’d tried and failed so many times before, but this time, he had to get clean. He begged Anna to clean up with him, actually got down on his knees and begged. Finally, she let him lead her. The weeks of withdrawal weren’t fun, but they made it through. A quarter of the people who use heroin even once never walk away from it. But they did. Well, Corran did.

  Not that he walked away completely. The skag was still with him—thoughts of it, memories of it, goddamned fantasies about it: every day, every hour, every minute, every sec
ond! He’d never felt such desire—before or since. Not for food, not for sleep, not for sex, not for love. Heroin eclipsed it all. Corran marveled, even today, at the perfect beauty of the rush. His father used to get so mad at him. Why do you do it, Corran? Johnny would demand over and over, genuinely bewildered. Because it feels wonderful, Corran wanted to tell him. It was the most lovely way to live. Or the most lovely way to die. One or the other.

  He got the placement on the rigs not long after the worst of the withdrawal symptoms started to subside. He tested clean and the company gave him a go. They got a little flat in Peterhead near St. Fergus for Anna and Lucy. Corran spent shore breaks in the flat and toughed out long shifts offshore with nothing but the battered keyboard and the pain of hard labor to think about. The rigs saved his life, in fact. Those long days and nights in the first months after withdrawal, when his skin itched and his breathing was ragged with longing for skag. Had he been on the mainland for any length of time he would have buckled. It was better to be offshore, with no way to get to smack other than to swim to it. The rigs kept him an island and kept him alive.

  He felt guilty that Anna hadn’t had the same chance. Maybe if she, too, had become an island, things could have been different for her. As it was, she stayed in Peterhead, worked at Asda, looked after Lucy, and made friends with some of the local girls: not junkies, no—they’d left those behind in Glesga—just lushy rig birds, crude and wind-battered, but with a brassy, hearty resilience Corran hoped would infect Anna. It was strength she needed, strength she lacked. Those friendships didn’t help. Having Lucy didn’t help. By summer, the tracks were back on Anna’s arms.

  Corran didn’t love her. Given that at least one of them was almost always high as a kite when they were together, he didn’t even know her, really, and he was ashamed to say he didn’t want to. There seemed little to know. When he heard of the smuggling arrest he got a chopper flight off the rig. He took Lucy and went straight to Sharon’s house, where it gradually began to sink in that Anna would not be a part of her daughter’s life until Lucy was well into adulthood. If ever. And when the drums started beating in Corran’s ears and the sounds of Glasgow turned into the seductive siren calls of skag, he came up here to Port Readie and created a new island where he and Lucy would live. He wangled cheap rent from the uncle of one of his rig-mates on a crofter’s cottage three hours away from his heroin supply. He sold his car. From the cottage, he could see only sheep and nettles and a curl of chimney smoke rising from the old couple’s house at the bottom of the hill. He made porridge for breakfast and cheese pies for dinner, and he cajoled Sharon into coming up on weekends to help. He tried to divine a plan for getting back on the rigs. He shook himself out of fitful dreams and got up in the night to stand at Lucy’s crib and watch the soft rise and fall of her chest.

  In this way, hour by hour, he kept himself from dying.

  Corran bundled Lucy into the stroller. He pushed the pram out to the edge of the croft and started down the lane in the dark for the long walk to the village below. Two miles each way, but Corran was used to it. The walk down to Port Readie was easy enough. It was the walk back up to the croft that could get him sometimes, but Lucy always seemed appeased by the movement and the gentle bumping of the carriage along the stone-grouted lane. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” she said now, appreciating, evidently, the bumping percussion of her voice. “Uh. Uh. Uh.” Corran kept one hand on the pram’s handle, and with the other he checked his phone, where there was a text from Jintzy.

  HUET on Tuesday, it said. Can you make it?

  Shit! Another training session that Corran would have to miss. HUET—Helicopter Underwater Egress Training—was an annual requirement for anyone working on offshore rigs. Once you took leave or were furloughed, you had to be recertified before you could get back in the rotation for a rig assignment. Tuesday’s would be the second HUET session Corran would be missing in as many months, and there was no getting back on the rigs until he took a recertification class. He was sober; he could pass it. If only he could get there to do it. He looked at Lucy in the stroller. Now, think about this, pal, he told himself. He was Mr. Mom these days. It wasn’t as if missing HUET training was the only thing standing in the way of rig work.

  Still, he imagined the scene on Tuesday—a row of men lining up on the side of a huge, deep training pool, dressed in full work coveralls and flotation vests. Sometimes there’d be a woman or two, but this was rare, and when Corran told Sharon about the dearth of women in the training sessions she always said it was because women had far more sense than to do what these men were about to do. The trainees would board the test helicopter, which was suspended by a winch above the water. They’d clip on safety harnesses and swallow back the rising waves of fear. Then the helicopter would be released from the winch, plunged into the water, and rotated upside down to simulate an offshore crash. The game was to unclip, bash out a window, shimmy out of the chopper’s fuselage, inflate your flotation vest, and drift to the surface before panic and lack of oxygen made you gasp in a lungful of pool water.

  It wasn’t easy. Lots of the newer boys got beaten by HUET. The first time Corran had attempted it, he was thrown off when the bloke next to him panicked on the chopper’s impact and inflated his life jacket too early. Then the guy was too big to fit through the exit window and he panicked underwater, blocking Corran’s path as well. Corran had to wiggle to the back door of the fuselage, and in the process he’d snagged his foot on his own harness and got stuck, had to be fished out by one of the trainers. He got better at it after that, though, and before he won his certification he actually got to a point where he enjoyed it—the rush of water, the tactical challenges, the heart-stopping scramble for egress. He’d miss it on Tuesday.

  He texted Jintzy: I can’t make it, mate. I wish I could.

  It struck Corran as vaguely shameful that he would rather be thrashing about in the fuselage of an upside-down, sinking aircraft than pushing his baby daughter down a moonlit pathway in the Highlands. Ah, but bollocks. It was what it was.

  There was a tiny pub in Port Readie, barely larger than a garden shed, and Corran parked the pram at the door and carried Lucy in. He one-armed a wooden high chair over to a table and set her up with a digestive biscuit. Her spirits seemed to have improved with the change of scene.

  “Pah,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Biscuit.”

  He ordered a Belhaven. Though the counselors at the rehab disapproved, he allowed himself one a night, and so far, he’d been staying the course. He sat down opposite Lucy and regarded the pub, which was empty save for him and Lucy and a pair of middle-aged men at a table near the bar. He nodded to them; he knew they were regulars, both workers at the aluminium plant near Inverlochy. He’d caught a pint with them a couple of times, and now he drummed his fingers on the table, waiting for their names to come back to him. Nick. That’s one. And the other … Angus. There. Got it.

  They waved him over, and he waited until his beer arrived, then gathered up Lucy’s things and dragged the high chair across the floor to position it at the other table, where Lucy stared at the men suspiciously.

  “Corran,” Nick said. “Save me from this sot. He’s gone ‘round the bend.”

  “What’s on?” Corran said.

  “He’s sexually perverted,” Nick said.

  “I’m not,” Angus said. “It’s just good fun, see? My wife and I. We’re trying to spice up the bedroom business, see?”

  “He’s batty,” Nick said. “Tell him what you’re doing.”

  Angus sighed. He gestured toward the table, where a gadget the size of a lighter sat next to a cell phone. “I’ve got a button here, see?” he said. He picked up the gadget and pressed a button on it. “And it’s connected to a little vibrator. Tiny size, like a peanut, see? And when I press the button, it makes the vibrator wiggle. It’s got amazing range. Great long distances.”

  “Ask him where the vibrator is,” Nick said. Before Corran could assure th
em that he had no particular curiosity about where the vibrator was, Nick spared him the trouble.

  “It’s in his wife’s thingy, that’s where,” he said. He took a long swallow of his beer and looked at Corran wide-eyed, waiting for a response.

  “Well,” Corran said. He looked at the gadget in Angus’s hand. Angus pushed the button, then pushed it again. Corran looked away, embarrassed.

  “Can you beat that?” Nick said. He slapped the table. “My wife would never agree to it, I tell you. I can hear her right now. ‘Stick it up your own arse,’ she’d say. ‘Nae mine.’”

  Angus frowned. “Well, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” he said. He put the buzzer down on the table and picked up the cell phone. “She’s supposed to text me when she gets a zap, aye? And she’s supposed to tell me something randy. Only she’s not been texting me like we planned.” He looked at the cell phone sadly.

  “Maybe it’s out of range,” Nick said kindly.

  “Supposed to be capable of miles,” Angus said. “She’s only doing the shopping, isn’t she? Across the loch at the co-op.”

  “Well, then maybe it’s out of battery,” Nick said. He looked at Corran and raised his eyebrows.

  Angus sighed. “I don’t understand it,” he said.

  “D’ye want me to try it?” Nick said. He reached for the buzzer.

  “Get yer filthy hands off,” Angus said. He picked up the buzzer and put it in his pocket. “Talk about perverted. You’re the one.” He glared at Nick and then turned his attention to Lucy, who was still staring from one man to the next.

  “Looka that bairn,” Angus said. “At’s a good one.” He smiled at Lucy and waggled his fingers on the tabletop in front of her. “How’d you get such a good one, mate?”