by Paul Carter
To my surprise the two Russians helped Bobby to get up and walked over to me, showing the palms of their hands as if demonstrating there was no threat. Then the train stopped suddenly and the guard from earlier came storming in. It appeared everyone on the train was blind drunk, except us. The guard yelled at everyone in high-speed Russian, but after a few minutes he put on his big furry coat and went outside with two others to retrieve the legless man. The Russians told us that this happened every time there’s a crew change: Trolley Man makes a prick of himself . . . and they throw him out the window.
The train’s path through the flat landscape is on raised tracks, and it never goes faster than about twenty kilometres per hour. In winter the snow drifts on either side are deep enough to cushion Trolley Man’s plunge. He just sits in the snow drift freezing his stumps off while the boys stop the train and carry him back inside. He spends the next few days building a new trolley; he even steals the little wheels off the furniture from rigs in preparation for another window exit.
I thought it a bit much, treating Trolley Man like a crash-test dummy. But the Russians explained, ‘He was in war in Chechnya, many here from war . . . he likes go out window.’
Apparently, almost the whole crew had come from the Ministry of War. Trolley Man had stepped on a mine, and the government had rewarded him with a new job as a radio operator on the rig.
Bobby and I sat in the Russian crew’s carriage and drank vodka. They had to make the journey on wooden benches and we felt quite ashamed to have our own private cabin with heating and beds. But that’s the way it is, the Russians didn’t care, most of them lived in tiny one-bedroom flats without hot water or a phone. For them a rig is virtual luxury, with hot showers, good food, they don’t have to worry about getting their brains blown out for Russia and it’s all free. They are hard men, good workers, I even took a shine to Trolley Man—he may have been an abusive violent alcoholic, but any double amputee who enjoys taking a dive out of the window of a moving train is okay in my book.
By the time the train pulled into Nogliki Station, Bobby and I had sobered up but had massive hangovers. An army truck was our transport to the camp, which was basically just a series of port-a-cabins all joined up, with a high fence surrounding them and twenty-four-hour guards patrolling the perimeter. I think the security was more to keep us in than anything else.
My cabin was comfortable, I shared it with Peter: he had been with the company for a long time, and he has pissed more blood, drunk more beer and fucked more bimbos than anyone, and, oh yes, he’s never been sick at sea. (A week later we were on a six-hour crewboat ride to the rig and Peter spent the whole trip on all fours vomiting.) Peter’s a real character and always has a story that leaves you feeling like you just got all the enamel peeled off your teeth. But he’s good at the job and I never had a problem with him.
We were on board the rig for a month, the job went well and my crew change came around. After a month offshore you’re really looking forward to going home. I had done back-to-back jobs, so all I could think about was getting home to Sydney.
I spent a day back at the camp, waiting for the train. The sixteen-hour trip was a quiet one as there were no Russians this time. The camp had given me a packed lunch and a bottle of water, so after a few hours I decided to eat. The first bite was the last—as pain shot up my jaw. I spat out the contents of my mouth on the floor and jumped up to look at my teeth in the mirror. One of my back teeth had an abscess, I thought, it really hurt. By the time the train arrived in Yuzhno thirteen hours later, I looked like I’d jammed a cricket ball in my mouth and the pain was excruciating.
My agent was waiting there to drive me to the hotel because my flight to Korea didn’t depart until the following afternoon. Running up to him, I saw his expression change. He asked if I’d been fighting.
‘Get me to a dentist . . . dentist . . . dentista . . . tooth doctor, understand?’ But he looked confused. ‘It’s my fuckin’ teeth man.’
He nodded finally, pointing at his front teeth, ‘Da, da, dentist.’ He smiled, put a hand on my shoulder and announced,‘ Today is Russian public holiday.’
‘Oh fuck off . . . I need drugs then . . . pharmacy . . . pharmacy . . . chemist . . . drugs.’ I couldn’t see straight I was in so much pain.
‘Okay we go.’
He took me to the local hospital then he did some fast talking to the girl at the counter, who looked over her shoulder at me. I was sitting on the floor, twitching.
Then the dentist appeared in front of me. I couldn’t believe it. Russia’s supposed to have good dentists. His white coat had blood splattered all the way up his right lapel and there were Cyrillic tattoos on his knuckles. This is bullshit, I thought, as he walked me into a barren room. I took one look at the selection of tools decorating a small table and walked out.
My agent then took me to a chemist, and I immediately started munching on painkillers until I passed out. I woke up in the hotel the next day, and just for a second I thought I was okay, but it was a fleeting second—oh this is bullshit! The phone rang; the agent had managed to book me on the early morning flight to Korea.
I had a brief, painful layover in Seoul where I threw down more painkillers. I checked the bottle, the Russian chemist had written in English on the label ‘Only four a day’—fuck, I’d had double that already, but at least the pain was starting to ease off. I couldn’t stand the thought of an eight-hour flight to Singapore, but it was the fastest way to get to a dentist that would do an extraction without using a chisel.
The pills began to really kick in as I was boarding the plane. I was fast approaching a vegetative state, but I stayed just conscious enough to make it to my seat. The elderly Russian man sitting next to me thought I was handicapped and I discovered that I’d been drooling all over myself. He offered to help me get to the toilet; unable to talk I shot him a filthy look but it must have seemed more like a cry for help because he called the flight attendant and told her that I was a handicapped gentleman who needed some assistance. I was just trying to focus on my seatbelt, when the attendant came.
She was your typical Singapore Airlines girl, very pretty, very small, so off she went to get help. Two more small pretty girls showed up and they talked about how come they didn’t know there was a handicapped man on the flight who had special needs. All I could do was grunt; I was so trashed, my head was so swollen, everything just came out in one big syllable.
‘Iim-nut-handicapped-is-my-tooof.’
She smiled.‘Yes, okay, Mr Carter, this way.’
I could barely walk, and I practically fell into the toilet cubicle. I tried to smile, she smiled back and slammed the door shut. I looked at myself in the mirror. A long string of drool was making its way down my shirt, my head looked disfigured . . . freaky. ‘Wow you look really bad,’ I told myself. ‘I think you have an abscessed tooth, you can die from an abscessed tooth.’ And that was really funny, so I sat there and had a good laugh, then attempted to urinate.
Once I’d lined myself up with the bowl, I let fly, but the aircraft hit some turbulence and I pretty much just peed all over the place. That was really funny too, and I laughed out loud, because there wasn’t any turbulence at all, I was just fucked. I have never experimented with drugs, other than grass and that was ten years ago. Not because I didn’t want to but because we are randomly drug-tested at work. This was different from any drunken state I had ever been in, I was lucid but totally spazzed out when it came to hand–eye coordination or talking. At least there was no pain; I’ll take hallucinations and peeing on myself over that pain anytime.
As happy as I was to amuse myself in the toilet all day, the flight attendant came back.
‘Mr Carter, everything alright sir?’
I tried to open the door and talk, but it just wasn’t going to happen. This is when I discovered flight attendants can open the toilet door from the outside. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt.
‘I-doynt-evn-like-taaaking-aspeerin,’ I said.
She explained that I had been in there for more than an hour, and I should go with her now to a special seat. I wanted to tell her I was not handicapped, and that I reserve the right to pee on myself for special occasions only. But she was talking to me like I was a child.
‘Thish-is-sush-bullshit,’ I said.
She sat me down at the back, I had a whole row to myself. Then she appeared next to me with my painkillers in her hand; I must have dropped them. She asked if I needed to take one.
‘Nooooo-ooo,’ I said and so she gave me my mini-meal. Embarrassed enough, I shifted over to the window seat and tried to negotiate the mini-food onto the mini-fork and eventually into my mouth. I had not eaten since I left the camp, and that was two days ago. It’s okay, I thought, I’ll just chew on the left side, but getting the fork lined up with my mouth was more difficult than I had expected. I was dangerously close to taking out my eye. Finally, the angle looked right, and I jabbed the fork directly into my abscessed tooth.
‘AAAAAAAAH!’
So then I used my fingers instead . . .
The flight attendant appeared next to me again. She tried not to frown at the grown man who just pissed all over the plane and was now playing with his food. She asked again if I needed a pill.
Our descent into Singapore airspace was like having my toenails pulled out with a pair of pliers, and I was in tears by the time we got to the gate. The pills had worn off in lieu of being handicapped; I had regained the power of speech and explained what had happened to the cabin crew, who kindly let me get off first and arranged for my bags to go first as well.
Every step from the airport to the dentist hurt. Our workshop manager, Joe, is an ex-offshore man and thoroughly reliable and he had arranged everything for me. A car was waiting and I went straight to an excellent dentist.
The dentist looked excited to see me. He took X-rays, rubbed his chin a lot while he studied them, then looked at the pills I had taken.‘How many did you take?’
‘Eight, I think.’
‘Eight! Mr Carter that was extremely dangerous.’
The dentist then explained that I had two options: I could book in for surgery, which he recommended or he could do the extraction now, however, there was a chance I would lose the sense of touch in my lower lip permanently.
‘Just fuckin’ take it out now.’
Twenty minutes later the tooth was out, I had a mouth full of stitches, more pills, and a quiet hotel room waiting for me where I could sit and drool in peace. The dentist said that when I woke up the next day I should hopefully have regained my sense of touch in my lower lip, and thankfully, I did.
I spent the next five months in Sydney, with one trip to France to visit Mum and John for two weeks. While I was there I rented a car to go exploring. Mum and John lived in the Dordogne region, which is predominantly rural and full of picture-postcard villages that made me want to wear collarless shirts and baggy pants with braces.
One day I was driving through the rolling hills going nowhere in particular when I saw a well-dressed man strolling through a grassy field with a big bird on his arm. I stopped the car and hopped over the fence; he saw me coming and smiled, motioning for me to come over. We had a polite greeting, almost formal. He had a beautiful hawk perched on his gloved hand, a basket over his shoulder and a white ferret in the pocket of his tweed jacket. He was hunting rabbits.
‘Please have a seat,’ he pointed at a blanket near the fence.
I watched him pull out the ferret, whose name was Claude, from his pocket. As soon as Claude hit the deck he was off down a rabbit burrow. A few moments passed and then panicked bunnies took off across the field, their bums streaking a white fluffy blur in three different directions.
The hood was pulled from the hawk’s head; it lined up the nearest target and was airborne in seconds. The bunny didn’t stand a chance. I had no idea that rabbits scream when they die; it sounded like a child. The hawk held the rabbit in its talons until the Frenchman strolled up, then it returned to its perch atop the gloved hand. Claude came lolloping up and sat next to the man’s leg, patiently waiting to be picked up and returned to the tweed pocket.
I can’t remember the hawk’s name, but going from its ability it should have been ‘Death from Above’.What is it about birds of prey? They know they look cool. Anyway, at least it was more civilised than blowing the bunny’s head off with a shotgun.
I HAVE A FRIEND in Sydney who has a pet ferret named Freddy. We go out riding our motorcycles together, and Freddy comes along too. He’s an experienced passenger and just curls up inside Andy’s backpack and falls asleep. Andy could strap Freddy to the handlebars if he wanted, and he wouldn’t wake up. When I first discovered Andy was riding about with a ferret in his bag, or sometimes stuffed in his jacket, I was worried the ferret might jump out or bite Andy. But over time I learned that ferrets have a defined lifestyle. They sleep for an hour, then go nuts for half an hour, back to sleep for an hour and so on all day. So if you go for a ride with a ferret in your pocket, make sure it’s after they’ve had the half-hour of going nuts.
Naturally curious and interested in anything they can climb into, a ferret in a new room is very entertaining. We would pull up outside a pub, go in, order a few beers and rack up the pool table. Andy would pull a totally limp Freddy out of his jacket. Freddy would wake up just in time for the cue ball’s crack into the pack. Andy calls it Freddy Pool: the balls spin across the table, and soon Freddy is into it. He loves pool, and quicker than you can say ‘No ferrets on the pool table’ he is off down the nearest pocket.
After a couple of minutes, Freddy would spring from a random pocket, scarper across the table and down an opposite pocket. This went on throughout the game, but you had to be careful not to play for more than half an hour, as the little shit would just fall asleep somewhere inside the pool table and then you had to wait for an hour until he woke up. This happened on one occasion.
We were in Wollongong playing ‘Freddy Pool’ when he fell asleep in the table. No problem, it was early afternoon, in the middle of the week . . . then four bikers came in and started playing doubles for money.
Andy and I sat there, waiting, middle of the fifth game, when suddenly Freddy took off over the tabletop.
‘Fuck . . . hey, did you see that fuckin’ thing?’ said one of the bikers.
‘See one what?’ said his mate.
‘There’s a fuckin’ rat in the table.’
‘Don’t be fuckin’ stupid Macca.’
‘I’m fuckin’ telling ya, there’s a fuckin’ huge fuckin’ rat, inside that fuckin’ table.’
‘You cunt . . . anything to cop out of twenty fuckin’ bucks a game.’
‘You sayin’ I’m a fuckin’ liar Davo?’
‘Next it’ll be . . . Sorry boys, can’t finish the game cause a fuckin’ emu flew in and stole the fuckin’ cue ball.’
The two men began to shape up to one another when Freddy stuck his head out of the corner pocket, wondering what the hold up was.
‘There’s the fucker, get it Davo!’
Davo was amazed, he just stood there, his mouth slightly ajar, while the other three bikers started laughing. Macca was intent on bloody murder; he hovered over the corner pocket brandishing the cue over his head.
Freddy popped out of the opposite corner pocket, ran into the middle of the table, did a nice little figure of eight and disappeared back down the same pocket. The cue came down hard, completely missing Freddy and splintering on the table’s edge, sending fractured wood in all directions. Now all three of Macca’s mates were folded up laughing. The bar manager came over with a security guard to calm him down. Macca threw twenty dollars on the table for the broken cue and stormed off, followed by his mates who were still laughing.
‘There really was a rat in the table mate,’ they said to us as they picked up their helmets and gloves. A few moments later we heard the big ‘V’ twins fire up and roar away.
‘Can we go now, I don’t want to
get my head kicked in over your ferret,’ I said.
‘Oh shit,’ Andy said, looking at his watch. ‘He’s gone to sleep again.’
‘Jesus, Andy, is the fuckin’ thing narcoleptic? Wake him up!’
Andy got the keys to the table from the bar man who told us that it was the best laugh he’d had in ages. We opened the table, retrieved the sleeping Freddy and made for home.
During that trip home I decided to change laundromats. The previous couple I had been going to changed the colour of one too many shirts, so I wandered into a slick-looking new one down the street. All I could see behind the counter were legs and the best-looking bum in history. Her back was turned, giving me a chance to take in her figure. She turned, and I was caught. Dazzling smile . . . stunning. I felt like a twat, she was so sexy, her cheeky enthusiasm toyed with my embarrassment, boggling my loins to a point that left me instantly unable to talk.
I went back the following Wednesday, at the same time, and there she was.
I found myself feeling butterflies every time I went to get my laundry done. I tried to look cool; I’d park my bike in front of the door, toe out the kick-stand and walk in grinning like a lottery winner.‘Hi, how are you today Paul?’ Wow she remembered my name. But I mostly fumbled with my backpack and came out with hopelessly inane conversation. But she always flashed me that smile and said,‘Have a good day.’
That went on for months. Her name was Clare. I would look forward to laundry day and another chance to fuck up my thirty-second window to ask her out. Then one Wednesday she said she would rather be with her family as it was her birthday.
‘Oh, many happy returns.’
I would have been better off saying ‘Sucked in’! Many happy returns! Jesus Pauli, that’s hip and youthful. So I walked down the road and bought a big bunch of flowers. She was happy to get them, and as no-one was in the shop we chatted for a while.
‘What is it that you do for a living?’ she asked. ‘I’m curious because you can tell a lot about a person from doing their laundry.’