by Paul Carter
First published in 2005
Copyright © Paul Carter 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1. Achtung spitfire, 1969–87
2. Pool balls, 1987–94
3. Pack-a-day monkey, 1994–95
4. Saturation, 1995–96
5. Killer mouse, 1996–97
6. The devil’s business, 1997–98
7. The Hobbit House, 1998–99
8. Where you from?, 1999–2000
9. Barrel fever, 2000–01
10. The darkest continent, 2001
11. Gobbing, 2002
12. Rig up, rig down, 2002
13. Legless in Russia, 2003
14. The ghost of a flea, 2004
15. Ah Meng, 2004
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I’d like to thank Erwin Herczeg, for watching my back on more occasions than I care to mention and proving to be the perfect role model. Thanks also to Drew Gardenier for getting me started in the first place, and letting me get away with a damn sight more than I deserved to. Special thanks to Sally and Simon Dominguez and Lou and Doug Frost, and Susan Coghill, without whom this book would never have happened. My thanks to all the boys who backed me up, covered my arse and listened to my bullshit over the years; you know who you are. To the team at Allen & Unwin, especially Jo Paul, Lou Johnson, Alexandra Nahlous and Catherine Milne—thank you and sorry I can’t spell. Last, but certainly not least, all my love to Clare, Elinor, Johannes, Allan and France. God bless.
CALENTURE
A name formerly given to a tropical fever or delirium suffered by sailors after long periods at sea, who imagine the ocean to be green fields and desire to leap into them.
THE MAN SITTING NEXT to me looked panicked; I tried to hold on, beads of nervous sweat forming on my forehead. My knuckles went from white to blue, I bit into my upper lip. About halfway through the take-off climb, the inevitable happened: my backside let go. I yelped in complete horror as two piping-hot spurts of poo shot down my trouser legs . . . I’d just lost my arse on a commercial airliner . . . oh my God.
I fumbled at the seatbelt, my IV bag dangling from my mouth. The man next to me ran away as I hobbled down the fuselage towards the nirvana of a business-class toilet. Kicking off a metabolic chain reaction, within minutes I had the rest of my crew frantically scurrying towards toilets in immediate and imminent danger of crapping all over the place. And all because some guy in logistics didn’t check the bottled water on the rig. What were we thinking, that eight grown men with dysentery could clench all the way from Port Moresby to Singapore? But it was either that or we take the ‘death by local hospital’ option.
I locked the toilet door, catching my reflection in the mirror as I pulled down my pants and surveyed the horror. I looked so bad for a second I thought I was in there with a pale sweaty stranger. It was one of those unbelievably embarrassing moments in life when you just wish you could go back in time and be ten years old and life was just an endless romp in the park. How did this happen? How in hell did I let this happen?
It was a long flight . . . There’s some kid out there in the front row who’s going to be disturbed for a while, and that’s just because of the smell. I wasn’t coming out of that toilet. It gave me time to ponder just how I got to this auspicious point in my ridiculous career path to rapid bowel movement oblivion.
In point of fact it all started when I was about ten but there was no park to romp in . . .
I WAS BORN IN THE UK to a German mother, an English father, an older sister and a cat called Brim. Brim was an overt snob who would only drink his milk after I had popped any bubbles that floated on the surface. My father would inevitably end up walking by these goings-on and step on the edge of Brim’s saucer, sending milk directly up his trouser leg.
My early life was not happy; I don’t recall any memories of Dad that make me smile, just overwhelming fear. Brim and I would regularly jostle over the best hiding places, while my father, with his milk-stained trousers, would look for us.
My father was in the Royal Air Force, a navigator. He was a ‘children are seen and not heard’ kind of dad, and so my sister and I lived a disciplined life. In all our family photos we look like we are having our picture taken for a police line-up.
These should have been the times when life was just an endless romp in the sun and tomorrow didn’t matter, when parents were neither a fear nor a worry but something so dependable you would look for that peace of mind in adult life and marry it.
For the Christmas holidays, I was sent to visit my respective grandparents, one year with the Germans, the next with the English. Every year the standard holiday war movie would play on or around Boxing Day, and every year it was something like The Great Escape or The Dirty Dozen. Throughout the movie, my English grandfather would cheer and clap and when it was over he would pull out his medals and tell me war stories. My German grandfather, on the other hand, would curse and cringe at every standard scene of a single American soldier gunning down countless Germans without once reloading his weapon. When the movie was over, he would crack open a bottle of Schnapps and get blind drunk.
Needless to say we never got together to have nice family dinners with my grandparents.
I think I was around six when I saw The Magnificent Seven, the first movie I remember seeing. It had a profound effect on me. My father was away a lot so I took all my male cues from TV. After that movie I wanted to be a cowboy. Just like Steve McQueen. Then one day, after I had been a cowboy for some months, my father returned from service in Canada with a real Western gun holster. The belt went from just under my nipples to the top of my bellybutton and the holster itself was almost as long as my right leg. All my cap guns just dropped straight through it so I replaced them with my drink cup. It was one of those kiddies’ plastic cups with a screw-down lid, it had Charlie Brown on it, but when it was wedged down into the holster all you could see was gun leather and a blue cup handle.
I would parade around the street quick-drawing and slurping cordial. My mother called me ‘The Milkshake Sheriff ’ and wherever she took me the holster came along, Church, Sunday School, the local pool.
The Milkshake Sheriff made only one real enemy in town, a huge Old English sheepdog named ‘Benny’. He would spot the Sheriff strutting across the park, bound up, and with one paw knock him down and start shagging him. I hated that dog.
A few years later on a visit to my German grandparents I sat down
to watch the post-Christmas movie and this time it was The Great Escape. There was Steve McQueen again. I loved it. By the end of the movie my grandfather was hammered on Schnapps as the Germans lost again and I was ready to trade the holster for a motorbike.
I tooled around the neighbourhood on my pushbike, trying to jump it over people’s back fences. I would try to appear surly and indifferent. Looking through one of my mother’s magazines one day, I found an article on Steve McQueen. It said he was a man who liked fast bikes and fast women. So I tried to find fast women, but at the age of ten I misunderstood what that meant. I started with the babysitter . . . ‘So, you like Fisher Price music baby?’ She sent me straight to bed with a firm ‘There’ll be no Starsky & Hutch for you Mister’.
My mother was a saint; she made up for my father’s insanely strict parenting routine with boundless love and affection. One day she got the strength to leave. My sister and I were bundled into the back of the Mini and that was that. Dad ended up leaving the Service and spent the rest of his working life as a directional driller on the rigs; coincidentally my mother ended up working for a major oil company and that led to our eventual emigration to Australia. One of the strange things about the drilling industry is that it is global but very small, and every now and again I run into some old drilling hand who knew my father.
Mum moved to Aberdeen, Scotland, and my sister and I went to a new school; home life, although devoid of the luxuries of my father’s house, improved a great deal. We didn’t have any money for the kinds of things a ten-year-old boy wants, but we loved each other and Mum made me the man of the house, or rather man of the tiny rundown council flat. I could get away with murder.
When I was fourteen I suddenly started getting bullied at school. His name was Athel, he was thick and had been held back a year because of it. Athel didn’t like my glasses. Mum could not afford to take me to an optometrist so I had National-Health-black-one-size-fits-all nasty grownup glasses; I looked like a midget Michael Caine.
After Athel was finished I had to tape them together.
My mother’s solution to Athel was that I should get a big stick. Instead I talked her into getting me an air rifle. (I had been mildly obsessed with guns since I was five, when I was given a pair of Star Trek pyjamas that came with a phazer gun water pistol.)
The idea was simple. Athel had a gang of boys who kept jumping me and beating me up. He cut the tyres on my bike with a flick knife, and told me he was going to cut my pecker off. So I was going to kill him with my new rifle. It had worked in the war movies . . .
I stole wooden pallets from the loading bay of a nearby supermarket and constructed a hide-out overlooking Athel’s backyard. I lay there for hours with my BSA .22 air rifle in hand. I knew Athel stole his father’s cigarettes and hid near the shed to smoke them. All I had to do was wait. And sure enough out he came, so I let him have it. The pellet hit him square in the forehead, sending him backwards into the shed door. His screams soon had his father over him, but Athel’s sniper-in-the-tree-line story and bleeding head quickly became unimportant as his father realised he had been smoking. Then it was Athel’s father who was screaming. I looked on in mute fascination. Athel was not dead, and that’s a good thing; he never bothered me again.
Life, as they say, comes down to a few moments. That was one of them. My glasses were never a problem again. A few years after shooting Athel I joined the Gordon Highlanders 2nd Battalion ACF. Thanks to my father I was already totally indoctrinated into the military system—he would check that my toys and clothes were always stowed where they should be, and my room was freakishly tidy—so the military was no surprise. The drill sergeant was scary to the other lads, but compared to my dad he was just a man who yelled a lot. I knew he couldn’t hit me. The Highlanders was a great experience, and I managed to fulfil all my childhood firearms needs.
Not long after the Athel incident my mother came home and said she had met a really nice man through her new job with the oil company. His name was John and she wanted to bring him home so my sister and I could meet him. I was happy if she was happy, and my sister was about to move in with her boyfriend so she was happy. John turned out to be great. He was totally relaxed and also treated me like a grown-up, so I didn’t give him any shit and he was happy too.
With home life steady at last, I started spending more time hanging around Mum’s office or at the workshop talking to the offshore guys when they came in on a crew change. Mostly Americans at that time, they would congratulate me on my polite manners and shove everything from Buck knives to Zippo lighters in my pocket. John would get back from a rig and tell me stories about the strange places he worked in, and always brought me back something cool.
Mum’s boss was a larger-than-life character, Jessie Thomas Jackson—JT.A big man in his fifties, impeccably dressed, he, unlike many adults, always shook my hand and despite my mother’s protests let me hang out in his giant office. He was remarkably good to me. He would let me drink Coke from his little fridge. I would sit on his massive leather couch, awe-inspired, gazing at the array of rig memorabilia on the shelves.
Sometimes he would look at me over his glasses the way grown-ups do and say,‘C’mon over here Pauli.’
I would run up to his big wooden desk.
‘How’d you like to do some work for me?’
‘Yessir.’
‘Okay whad’ya say you wash ma car for me ’n clean up the inside too, how’d that be?’
Off I’d go and an hour later JT would wander down the front steps of the office, his hands buried in his pockets rattling the change about. He’d take a minute to survey the silver Mercedes. ‘Damn good job son.’ In his big hand was a twenty-pound note. That was way more than any other neighbourhood kid got for washing a car.
On one occasion he let me drive his Mercedes to the shops and back. ‘Don’t tell your mom you drove okay buddy.’
In the years Mum worked for JT he always took time to chat to me or walk around the workshop with me and ‘bullshit to the boys’. Both JT and his wife June looked after their people in a way I have never seen again. They had us over for dinner many times. He had changed the course of our family’s future for the best by employing my mother.
JT was still going offshore well into his seventies. I would have liked to thank him as an adult but I never took the time and sadly he died in 2002, the last of his generation. The oilfield is run by the corporate machine more than ever now, lawyers backed by engineers who have never seen a rig. The human side is gone, the bottom line rules, and it’s every man for himself. Outside my crew I don’t trust anyone. Not in the office, and especially not the client.
These days it leaves the older guys who remember the rigs when they were still wild, seething. They speak up on occasion, usually at a critical moment during the meeting before the main meeting which proceeds the really big meeting where we talk about what we’re going to say when we have the really really big meeting with the people in Houston joining us via satellite speaker phone (that’s the meeting where no-one makes a firm decision because of the consequences of getting sued for making a decision). ‘Aw fuck all this horse shit’ the old guys say, when the bureaucracy gets ridiculous and the legal implications of opening your mouth has you more concerned about losing your job than actually solving the problem. And for the tiniest of moments everyone in the room is reminded of the qualities that made these men pioneers when the drilling game was in its infancy.
A year after Mum and John got together, JT offered John a job. Then when the company decided to open an office and machine shop in Australia, he asked John if he would like to transfer there, with permanent residency sponsored by the company. John and my mother jumped at the opportunity. I was fifteen and again life changed dramatically for the better.
Perth was a great place to discover Australia. I loved going to the beach, I started surfing, everyone was so nice . . . so many girls wearing so much less than they do in Scotland.
The next three years
were a total blur: I didn’t do well at school, I was far too busy discovering my first girlfriend, first beer, first motorcycle, and the fact that everyone had a pool in the backyard. Unlike rainy Scotland, barbecues didn’t start and end in the garage. Fruits and vegetables were big, days were long and hot, and neighbourhoods were large and well planned with wide streets and clean footpaths. We had a house with a huge backyard; Mum installed a spa in the middle of the back patio. She planted endless flowers and ferns that flourished around the steamy pool. Within a year our house and especially the back patio looked like a tropical oasis. John got a big 4WD and the two of them went exploring on weekends, and often flew off to Asia on long weekends. For some reason they trusted me to ‘look after things’ while they were away. I was in teenage heaven. Just after my eighteenth birthday Mum and John got married. John asked me to be his best man; it was a special day, in a great new country.
I left school early, I wanted money, I wanted rigs, I wanted to fly in a helicopter, and say Gawd-damn a lot. I wanted to wear one of those gold company cigar rings. (What can I say, it was the 1980s.) But most of all I wanted an adventure. It’s hard to get a rig job if you don’t know someone, harder still if you’re eighteen and green. I didn’t want to ask John, I had to do it myself, but all I could get was a porter’s position in a swanky hotel downtown. I’d answered an ad in the paper and they hired me. I was punctual and polite, but lost the job because I was caught having sex with a guest by a room service attendant.
A brief stint as a waiter followed but that too was doomed. The head chef was young; we would regularly hide in the back alley smoking joints and drinking wine. One night during the pre-Christmas rush of corporate dinners, we took things too far. Fran, one of the waitresses, was a law student who looked down her nose at having to wait tables. To rattle her cage, I hatched a plan involving the chef, the biggest tomato he could find in the cool room, some raw steak and a meat cleaver. Fran could not stand the sight of blood, and whenever one of the chefs nicked a finger she would run, covering her mouth and honking about hygiene and food. So I cut the tomato in half, pushed my white shirt cuff over my hand and dropped the tomato down inside the hole where my hand should have been. With some strips of steak hanging over the edges and lots of tomato sauce, it looked gruesomely real. Fran came through the double doors into the kitchen doing her balancing act, both arms full of dirty dishes. I spun around, waving my gory stump at her. She froze, turned white and made the long fall, straight down, face first into a banquet trolley of half-eaten food scraps.