by This Is Not a Drill- Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield (retail) (epub)
Another member of my Russian crew, Avas, staggered in singing, fell into a chair and slammed a bottle of Absolut onto the table. He ordered a nose bag of borsch from a Russian waitress who looked like a drag queen who had stapled a dead tarantula to each eyelid. The vodka was finished off like an aperitif upon which Avas belched ‘AAABSOLUT’, banging down the empty bottle and laughing. If only the New York advertising punters could have seen that.
Kamran walloped around the corner, barking something in Russian and pointing a hairy finger at the even hairier waitress. She came over, he sat down and ordered, then looked at me and said ‘Ugly girl’ loud enough for everyone to hear. I looked around but no-one was listening. Kamran’s ability to simply state the obvious was bizarre. He would wander up to me on the rig while I was writing, sit down opposite me and say, ‘So you like writing then,’ like he had been hypnotised by someone waving a turd to and fro in his face. The waitress was in fact truly horrendous. She looked about as female as Mike Tyson would if he went through his girlfriend’s handbag and ate her lipstick.
Avas was trying to negotiate a meatball into his mouth but ended up chasing it across the floor and under a table occupied by two rough, salty-looking Russians. Meanwhile, I was also having some difficulty with a meatball that had landed in my crotch. The two men next to us were not happy with Avas under their table and Russian eyeballs were turning red. Avas banged his head and let fly with a high-speed abusive torrent, and the two Russians stood up, gold teeth gleaming, veins bulging in their leathery necks.
‘Oh fuck,’ I said and jumped up, sending my meatball flying across the floor. I faked a smile, showing them the palms of my hands. Why didn’t I learn all thirty-three letters of the Russian alphabet when I had the chance? One of the boys on the rig had the sort of phrase book you get at school and had tried to teach me some basic sentences. But I never really thought I’d need them so could never be bothered trying.
My brain frantically searched for something and came up with ‘Da’. They glared at me. ‘Dobrae utro,’ I added, which means good morning and explains why Boris Yeltsin always went for the hug instead of the talking thing. The two Russians walked over, their gaze fixed and powerful. Then, as if a blockage somewhere deep in my brain burst, I let go with one. ‘The dog chased the cat,’ I spluttered in Russian.
Kamran defused the fight that was imminent, simply by standing up. Avas emerged from under the table, having retrieved his meatball—and indeed he was eating it—and apologised to the two men, who, having looked long and hard at all three hundred pounds of Kamran, decided that the fight wasn’t worth it and left.
Kamran sat down, looking like a disturbed silverback. He wrapped a massive arm around my neck, tapped his finger against his temple, pulled focus on a space three inches above my eyes and told me what the Cyrillic tattoos on his arms meant, then ordered another bottle. This was one of the few times that I felt grateful for his jailhouse tattoos and size—they definitely saved us. I went back to scanning the floor for my meatball, but Avas had already finished it off, greedy bastard.
3 JUST ADD WATER
My work takes me to some strange places, usually Third World, and often during a coup, jihad, civil war, uprising, or riot of some description. If all that fails to happen then, with my track record, there will be a natural disaster. Only in the oil industry, the messy try-not-to-cut-a-limb-off side of the oil industry, does one realise first-hand that no matter what’s going on in the world, the drilling goes on regardless—mind that landmine.
After enduring the sheer madness of Nigeria, getting shot at in the Philippines, being locked up in Vietnam, getting dysentery in Papua New Guinea, suffering the worst toothache of my life in a Russian tundra hundreds of miles from the nearest dentist—oh yes, and there was that whole rig-sinking thing on that last three-month long job—I thought a nice holiday was in order. Europe with its safe civilised streets, what could possibly happen there?
But before my long-awaited holiday could start I had to get some training courses out of the way. I was looking at a very hectic week. Erwin and I arrived back in Singapore looking and feeling like a couple of parolees. After three months on that rig, I realised I had been out there too long; it was definitely fiddling with my sanity. It’s the little things that make a difference—after a normal, relatively lucid man has been effectively institutionalised on the rig by the rig system, just walking about in regular clothing feels special and everything your senses experience is welcome. People, traffic, toilet paper that doesn’t feel like a lump of coal, toilets that flush instead of trying to suck your guts out of your backside, warm showers, real food, walking more than ten feet in a straight line, lawn—everything.
The following morning was day one of the next job’s DWOP—Drill the Well on Paper—meeting. During these meetings everyone involved in the operation, from the brightest minds in the oil world to a third-generation driller with the attention span of a nine-year-old and obvious anger-management problems, sits around in a nice hotel conference room packed with three-dimensional well bore schematics and more laptops than a Tokyo subway and gets blind drunk for three days. If drinking was an Olympic sport these guys would be the best in the world. I’m not quite sure how I survived it, but I did. Just.
Then we headed off for our training courses, one of which required the crew to simulate doing their job on the drill floor while the training staff introduced various problems, up to and including emergency situations, all designed to closely monitor what each individual does under varying degrees of stress. This is done every few years and, since my last visit, the facility had introduced a new safety protocol: heart monitors. This seemed unusual but necessary given that in the previous year some poor sod had too much excitement and dropped dead of a heart attack.
We all lined up while an extremely attractive nurse shaved our chests, taped a small transmitter to the small of our backs and stuck little round suction cups all over us. Two of the other guys had also just come from long jobs offshore. One of them, an American named John, had spent more than two months on a particularly rough rig in Africa and the poor bugger now had to go through all this shit on his own time before he could go home to his wife. I felt sorry for him. He was young and I could see his mind was already home in bed.
The nurse wasn’t helping much. John lit up like a Christmas tree when she walked in and started preparing to shave us. ‘Gawd-damn,’ he said as she bent over to pick up her bag. Her nurse’s uniform looked like it had been borrowed from a B-grade porno, and in the right light you could see straight through it. Her serious bedside manner and ample bosom just made it worse. From the look on John’s face you’d think she was getting him ready for a lap dance, not an extremely expensive exercise that we all had to pass if we had any chance of working on the rigs again, regardless of how hot the nurse was.
The nurse turned to talk to a doctor who had stuck his head round the corner, allowing all of us to take in her profile. My young friend piped up again, ‘Gawd-damn.’ I looked at him but he just gave me an ambiguous grin and said, ‘She looks like a dead heat in a zeppelin race, man.’
Ten hours later we had finally finished the exercises when a middle-aged man in a white lab coat came tearing up the metal staircase onto the fake drill floor.
‘Number five is having a seizure!’ he shouted. Somewhere an alarm sounded. ‘Where is your number five?!’
Oh shit, who’s number five? We all exchanged blank looks. Everyone was on the drill floor. Everyone except John.
The whole crew took off looking for him. I ran into the change room—empty. I looked frantically at the toilet doors and noticed that one of them was closed. I kicked it in and found John with his dick in his hand, no doubt engrossed in some lurid fantasy involving the nurse. ‘Nice one, you fuckhead!’ I yelled while he tried to shove his boner back in his pants. ‘Next time take off the heart monitor first.’
John fumbled to deactivate the black box and promptly dropped it in the toilet.
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br /> The next day I was sitting in a departure lounge in Singapore’s Changi Airport about to board a flight to London; finally, my happy, quiet, safe holiday could begin. As luck would have it, my arrival in the UK coincided with a wave of terrorist bombings. Only a few hours before we landed, the aircrew had announced that London had succeeded in winning the much-coveted host city campaign for the 2012 Olympics. Now elation had dissolved into horror. The sun was shining as I wandered the streets, but the air was thick with uncertainty and people hurried past me with pained, worried faces. Literally millions were stranded in the city, unable to go home because of the gridlock created by the closure of the underground train system and all the major bus routes.
Within a few hours the streets went from crowded to bizarrely empty. London had been brought to a standstill. I could feel the panic leaching up my spine, and soon I found myself no longer admiring the grand old city buildings but visualising them going from sturdy symbols of culture steeped in rich history to shattered rubble. Britain’s backbone could be brought down like New York’s by our generation’s Achilles heel. Namely some shithead with high explosives strapped to his back. I should have stayed on that crappy rig; I’d be halfway to Korea by now.
I hired a car and waited for the traffic to ever so slowly start moving again. I found the A1 and headed for bonny Scotland; perhaps I would spend the next three weeks in the highlands drinking my favourite single malt. Pitching a tent in the heather and drinking the Macallan all day sounded pretty good . . . Unless someone decided to blow up the entire Spey Valley, I felt confident I would be pretty safe.
Instead I was pulled over for speeding before I’d even reached the city limits. It was nice to see the police officer approaching my car with only a stern expression. Gone are the days when your local ‘bobby’ carried a truncheon and a whistle in his pocket. Gone forever are the days when a criminal would hear the words ‘STOP . . . OR I’LL SAY STOP AGAIN!’ as he was pursued down the street by said bobby blowing his whistle while brandishing his truncheon that’s about as threatening as your average dildo. Now they carry automatic weapons and only say ‘STOP’ once. And you’d better stop.
Luckily, in this case, no shots were fired and I ended up having a perfectly excellent conversation with my terribly polite and completely informative constable—yes, strange, even for me. He let me off with a warning, then told me a story about two of his fellow officers that’s worth retelling.
One dark and stormy night they were sitting in their police car, close to the Scottish border in Cumbria, patiently waiting for someone like me to drive by a little too fast. It was the dead of night, black as pitch and so overcast there was no moonlight, no ambient light, just the black hills and these two cops sitting in their car with a thermos of hot soup.
Then from the south they heard a screaming high-performance engine. The sergeant got out, grabbed the hand-held speed gun and pointed it into the darkness. The vehicle they both heard shot by them at an unbelievable rate, straight out of the night, doing 190 miles per hour with no lights on at all. Both men stood stumped on what to do next. While they were discussing the matter, the car screamed past them going back the other way at an even faster pace. This went on until a road block was finally set up, to reveal two Tornado pilots in a black Lamborghini with full night-vision helmets on.
I drove on. The A1 had gone from being the biggest carpark in Europe to a fast-flowing motorway, and before long I was in the Cotswolds heading for my sister’s place. The last time I dropped in on my sister seven years ago she lived in Dorset, famous for its cider. We spent the day in her local pub, called ‘The Headless Woman’. I sat at the bar next to a farmer who looked like he’d just come from Middle Earth and heard all about how, back in 16-something just after the pub opened, the local witch was beheaded on the bar for possessing a cow. He gave me a pint of ‘Scrumpy’, the local brew, a dark cider that tasted great even though it had toenails floating in it and got me so drunk I passed out tongue-kissing his border collie.
This time we stayed away from the local pub and instead enjoyed a walk in the rolling green hills with my sister’s dogs. She has two, both Northern Inuits; basically they’re wolves, only they howl more and eat more. At one point I got a stick and instantly became the target. I took off running through a wheat field feeling a bit like Kevin Costner, until they bailed me up and ate my new denim jacket.
In Britain everyone appears to have a dog. The last time I was there almost every street I walked down, from central London to Aberdeen, had a dog turd with my name on it; I spent more time looking at the ground directly in front of me than at the sights. However, this has changed. Britain is poo-free thanks to heavy council fines, and wandering tourists are no longer head-down but are able to zigzag about willy-nilly with a camera permanently pressed to their preferred eye. As a result I had stupidly developed a false sense of security about all things poo-related.
Consequently, I was a little taken aback a week later while wandering down a crowded Paris street. I was there for only a few days, trying to drum up new business. I left the meeting feeling positive and decided to kill my last few hours watching the fourteenth of July Bastille Day parade.
I stopped, turned to cross the street, and there directly opposite me was a huge Chanel store. Standing in the entrance was an immaculately dressed middle-aged woman holding a delicate silver lead in her gloved hand, attached to which was a spotless white poodle puckering up and attempting to squat, and no doubt eventually shit, right in the middle of the signature black-and-white doormat that probably cost more than my car.
But people wandered past looking relaxed and there was an air of celebration in the city. The French lady politely ignored her poodle, which was punching out the poo of its life. Well-dressed young people stepped over it as they made their way up the expansive marble steps into the Chanel building.
Finally it was over, the little dog bounced up and down with joy next to what looked like its own bodyweight in shit. Then, to my surprise, the lady opened her Louis Vuitton handbag and produced a dainty pink tissue. Oh, I thought, she’s actually going to make some sort of effort to get rid of it. I was curious about what technique she would adopt for such a delicate manoeuvre, short of retrieving a shovel from her bag. But, no, she simply bent over and wiped the dog’s bum, stuck the tissue on top of the turd and minced off down the street.
I enjoyed the parade. All of France’s military might have marched by, gleaming in bright colourful splendour. I left central Paris looking like Ken Done just threw up all over it. Here’s a hint: wear your old shoes if you go, and if you visit the Chanel store remember to check the mat before you wipe your feet.
4 ENDURING THE RIGGERS
There was a time when I didn’t know my father. There was a time when he didn’t know me. Now, there’s rarely time enough to take a breath between conversations.
He is very happily retired these days, but in his past he was a Royal Air Force squadron leader, and after leaving the service he embarked on an oilfield career that he excelled in, reinventing himself as a directional driller and, by all accounts, a very good one. In his mid-thirties at the time, with my mother and two young children to support, a complete change of career and environment must have been hard to deal with, let alone working on the rigs. I never made the effort to spend any time with him following my parents’ divorce when I was nine. And it didn’t help when my mother, my sister and I moved from England to Perth when I was fifteen. It is only now, at thirty-six, that I’ve started to realise what I have missed. He is, after all, my father, and as I discovered on my last visit he has the same interests as I do, indeed he has the same walk when he’s pissed, the same laugh and the same ability to fall on his feet no matter how badly he’s fucked up. Every now and again I run into an old drilling hand on some rig in the middle of nowhere who knew my father; it’s a big industry, global, but within the drilling side it’s very small. You can have a bad job one week in the Middle East, and a week later t
hey’re discussing it on a rig in Australia.
Dad looked relaxed. A few years had gone by so we had a lot to talk about. I told him about Clare, my girlfriend, and how, despite all the years of listening to horrific divorce stories in locker rooms offshore from here to North Africa, I was ready to ask her to marry me. His response was perfect: ‘Marry for love, son, but if she’s rich, don’t forget your dear old dad,’ and with that he burst out laughing. We cracked a bottle of Macallan and talked through the night.
I told him about a motorcycle accident I’d had a few years earlier. The recently restored bike was pristine until I had a classic ‘Get Off’, sending my bike that had taken two years to complete into a wall, then I went offshore the next day with a cracked rib and large chunks missing from various parts of my body. I nearly lost my job at the time as I had trouble strapping myself into the four-point harness on the chopper in Russia. Dad gave me a hard look, had a sip on his whisky, delivered a brief lecture on late braking and wearing leathers, then launched into a story about the time he decided to ride his Vincent ‘Black Shadow’ down the hall and through the bar of an Officers’ Mess on an air base forty-odd years ago.
He was drunk, but that goes without saying, got as far as the entrance, hammered the throttle, dropped the clutch and just held on, but didn’t actually go anywhere. After a couple of seconds he realised that the thirty feet of red hall carpet the bike was sitting on was being hurled out the door and into the carpark by the Vincent’s spinning back wheel. Then he ran out of carpet, and the bike shot out from under him and landed in a trophy cabinet halfway down the hall. He was in serious trouble, but landed on his feet.
‘Wasn’t too long after that when I met your mother in Germany,’ he said and smiled, then mysteriously left the room. When he came back he handed me a small velvet box. Inside, twinkling at me, was a beautiful antique engagement ring. ‘This is the only engagement ring in the family, son. It’s very old, I’ve been holding onto it for you.’
