[...] “Don’t worry about your missus,” they’d say to each other. “She’s not worrying about you. She’s busy getting nailed by Leroy.”

Leroy is to oil workers as Jody is to marines. A folk figure; the indolent civilian who hangs about on dry land, taking advantage of their absence. An expression of generalized anxiety, a means of hardening the heart towards home. Notably (or not), Leroy, like Jody, appears to be black, though most North Sea workers come from postindustrial towns that are, for the most part, white. Leroy, one man said, was name-checked all over the world. He’d worked in Brazil, Greenland, the United States, the Falklands. Wherever he went, the men made jokes about Leroy. Why is he black? I asked the man. Why do you think? he replied.