by This Is Not a Drill- Just Another Glorious Day in the Oilfield (retail) (epub)
Our base in Port Harcourt was a five hundred-square metre concrete compound, with various workshops and two single-storey office buildings, all surrounded by a high concrete wall festooned with razor wire and protected by armed guards on duty twenty-four hours a day. Every morning we would run the gauntlet of impoverished locals waiting for our car to arrive at the main gates. It took a few minutes for the guards to unlatch the lock and swing open the doors, and in that time the car would be surrounded with requests for a few naira, Nigerian currency, and sick babies would be pressed against the window. Begging with babies is, unfortunately, something I’ve seen many times in many parts of the world, and occasionally the infant is quite obviously dead. If there was time before the guards came out and pushed them all away, we would slip them a few bucks.
During a particularly hot still day, I was working on some equipment in the middle of the yard. We had so much equipment in the base at that time there was no more space left to work in the shade. So, using the forklift, I dumped everything in the open and set up an umbrella. Two guys were giving me a hand, and we passed the morning chatting about the usual stuff as we worked. Then around lunchtime I noticed they were shooting glances over to the far wall near the corner. There was nothing over there at all. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘Target practice’ was the response. Then I saw a man’s head and shoulders appear at the top of the wall; it was fifteen feet high so he must have been propped up on something. I looked closer. It was the handicapped guy I had seen begging at the front gates.
The two blokes I was working with suddenly produced slingshots from their pockets and began firing rocks with money wrapped around them at the poor guy’s head. I stood there horrified. ‘What the fuck?’ A rock bounced off the guy’s head, but he didn’t go down.
‘Do you want a shot?’ One of the blokes, the bigger one, offered me his homemade slingshot.
‘No, I don’t want a fucking shot! Stop it.’ They ignored me and went back to their fun. The rocks were small bits of dried cement wrapped with money, and occasionally they disintegrated against the wall in a puff of dust and paper. But every shot that went high would have sent the beggars on the other side into a frenzy. This had obviously been going on for some time, and all the people on the other side of the wall had ganged up on the handicapped guy and made him the target.
‘Cut it out,’ I tried to stop them.
‘Make us,’ said the big one without looking at me.
‘You guys are fucked!’ I wasn’t getting into a brawl, but I had to stop them somehow without creating a problem. Then the handicapped guy dropped down and that was it. In the five minutes he was up there, they had fired off perhaps twenty dollars in small bills; the poor sod they were shooting at only got hit once and that, it seemed, was an acceptable reason for his pals to grab him and shove him into the line of fire.
The next day when I arrived at the workshop gates I saw him off in the background; he was sitting with his back against the compound wall and drooling while the others banged at the car windows. Later that morning I thought of a way to stop him from getting hurt, but still allow the money to keep coming in. I told one of the other guys about it.
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked me.
‘Do you know who Ned Kelly is?’ I said.
‘Ned who?’ He had just come from South Africa on his first job overseas so I didn’t bother explaining it to him.
‘Google it,’ I said and went off to the paint shack to get a bucket. Once I found the right bucket, I washed it and cut out a little slot so that when Ned had the bucket on his head he would be able to see what was going on. Then I tied two rubber straps to the brackets that held the handle. I went out through the gates with the bucket and found Ned still sitting there in the same spot. The others weren’t quite sure how to react to me and just watched. I stuck the bucket over Ned’s head and ran the straps under his arms. He may have been sitting there in his own shit and drool but he knew that with his new bucket he wasn’t going to lose an eye in today’s session.
I went back to work on our tools in the yard with the two sadistic maniacs. Bang on lunchtime they pulled out their slingshots and loaded up. Ned appeared, his head rag-dolling from side to side, and they lost it, unloading all their cash at Ned and missing altogether. Ned was a hit. It went on for the rest of the week, and by then Ned was cashed up. On the following Monday morning he was sporting a new shirt, his bucket under his arm as he waved and howled at me through the window of the staff car, spraying the entire vehicle in spittle. Another week went by and Ned was in new shoes, and he’d painted his bucket and stuck bottle caps all over it. He was ecstatic.
Christmas that year was good for the crew, and everyone got a bonus. We got a cheque and the local guys got what they wanted; not cash, that was too simple. They wanted to be given a gallon of cooking oil, a twenty-five-kilo bag of basmati rice and a live chicken on Christmas Eve. So the company made sure it was the right type of oil the majority would expect, that the bag of rice did weigh twenty-five kilos and not nineteen, and especially, that the chickens were all alive and kicking; no Nigerian wants a dead chicken, with no electricity at home for a fridge. Christmas was good for Ned too. He got a new stainless-steel bucket with foam and rubber lining to reduce noise, and a slingshot so that if by chance his hand–eye coordination somehow returned, at least he could shoot back.
A good tip for anyone going to work in Nigeria is that you will be asked on more than one occasion, ‘What have you got for me?’
The answer is, ‘My blessing on you and your family.’
Trust me—it works every time.
11 THIS LITTLE PIGGY
Home in Sydney again after our honeymoon, Clare was back at work and I was sorting out my visa for my next job in Russia. This time the campaign was supposed to be an improvement on last year’s shambles. I sat in my office remembering how miserable I got out there. But most of all I remember how hungry I was by the time we got from the rig to the hotel, a day later. I ate leftover bread rolls off room service trolleys in the hotel corridors on my way to go out and eat with the boys. That’s hungry. Money before you eat when you’ve been offshore on a rig that serves dog food has no value at all.
Last year after a massive three-month Russian stint we gathered in some nice restaurant. As usual it was Erwin’s choice—I think he instinctively knows where to go. We had each purchased one of those bargain-bin business shirt and nasty rayon tie combo packs, and we arranged ourselves around an expansive table adorned with pressed tablecloths and silverware as if we were the rulers of our own special empire. It was worlds away from shuffling along with plastic trays in our hands. Ambu clapped and read out the name of the company that printed the menus for the restaurant. We ordered an aperitif and read the menu with Ambu. It felt like we were about to have the greatest meal of our entire lives.
Before, during and after dinner we decided to drink, along with wine, a great deal of gin and tonic. Last time it was vodka, before that single malt, before that tequila and so on, from one end of the bar to the other in more than a dozen fine restaurants around the world. As usual everyone degenerated into ‘male-violent’ lunacy, everyone except Erwin; he always maintains control of himself and thereby us, which explains why we haven’t been kicked out of more than a dozen fine restaurants around the world.
‘Would this gin and tonic help me to avoid malaria?’ I asked Erwin.
‘No.’ He was studying the label on the back of the bottle.
‘What if I had another one?’
Erwin looked over at me. ‘The gin and tonic, Pauli, was created as a way for Englishmen in tropical colonies to get loaded in the middle of the day while at the same time ingesting their daily dose of quinine, used to ward off malaria, right?’
‘Right.’ Excellent, I thought, he’s off, he’s going to tell me all about gin.
‘Modern tonic water still contains quinine, though as a flavouring rather than a medicine. To answer th
e question of how many modern G&Ts would need to be consumed to deliver a preventative dose of quinine? Sixty-seven litres.’ He was well and truly off. How does he know that? Why does he know that?
Ambu was loving it. ‘I like gin,’ he beamed.
‘Let’s have a martini, Ambu,’ I suggested and grabbed the cocktail list.
Ambu started reading out the names on the list. ‘Pink Slapper,’ he said as his stumpy finger moved across the letters.
‘Slipper,’ Erwin corrected.
I found the gin-based cocktails, nudged Ambu and, doing my best Sean Connery voice, said, ‘Why don’t you slip out of those wet clothes and into a dry martini, young Ambu?’
He gave me a blank look. The waiter came over and we ordered three martinis, shaken not stirred.
‘James Bond ruined the martini,’ Erwin was off again. ‘A martini is made with gin, and shaking gin muddles its flavours and clouds its appearance. Ambu, you could be a Bond villain.’ Erwin was laughing. ‘But you’d need a shaved cat and a collarless shirt.’
Ambu looked blank again.
‘So where does gin come from, mate?’ I asked Erwin, who was back to the label on the bottle.
‘Oh, gin has a dark past, more daunting and evil than any Bond villain. It’s steeped in black history, it fuelled a billion drunks through Britain’s lowest moments. The Dutch started the whole thing in the lowlands of Holland. One Dr Franciscus de la Boë in the university town of Leiden created a juniper- and spice-flavoured medicinal spirit that he promoted as a diuretic. The new creation spread fast. It was the late sixteenth century. The Dutch christened it “jenever”, the linguistic root of the English word “gin”. Initially it was sold in chemists to treat stomach complaints, gallstones and—are you listening, Ambu?—gout.’
‘I have gout,’ Ambu replied, sipping slowly on his martini.
Much later, we were full, after the wine was gone and we squeezed in a cheese platter and dessert, and a glass of brandy, and one of those little mints, and coffee with its little cookie. My belt had gone back two notches and there was a cigarette butt in Ambu’s mash potatoes. Erwin and John were talking Don out of cutting off his other little toe with a cigar cutter. Don had his shoe and sock off, and was convinced he’d ‘stop walking funny’ if he removed and no doubt cremated it. Then they moved on to motorcycle header pipes. I was telling the others to share the cigar trolley, someone threw the cigar cutter at me, and that was when John made the international sign for ‘the bill’.
Getting the waiter’s attention can involve everything from making eye contact to discharging a firearm in some parts of the world. But then you do a pantomime of writing something on your palm while mouthing the words ‘THE BILL’ at your waiter, a sign recognised universally. When it does arrive it’s passed around and everyone scratches their head for ten minutes, and inevitably it’s shoved in front of whoever’s turn it is to pay. The argument is that some countries are more expensive than others. But that’s the system, it works out in the end; you could get nailed with a thousand-dollar bill in Japan and one month later its two hundred bucks in Thailand.
This year’s Russian campaign surprised me. I was overjoyed to see that improvements had been made, and while the job was going to take three months again, this time we would get changed out with a fresh crew after six weeks. We had a great room on the rig, the shower had hot water, the toilet flushed, the food was edible, but best of all the people in charge were back again. Colin and Ann Smith are a remarkable couple. They are the only husband-and-wife ‘company man’ team I’ve come across (these are people who work on equal time rotation—month on, month off—with the ‘back to back’ person in the team doing your job while you’re on your month off). I try to imagine having Clare as my ‘back to back’ on the rig and I can’t. They are superb people to work for, and they have been working like that for years.
About halfway through my six weeks I was in Colin’s office, having a chat, when he told me about a land rig he and Ann had worked on years ago in Colombia. The rig was in the Cupiagua basin, deep in the jungle. They were frequently attacked by local rebels, who would take a shot at the rig every few days and on a weekly basis try to blow something up. The location was completely surrounded by a high wire fence and security personnel were on patrol twenty-four hours a day.
Not too far from the rig was the tool pusher’s cabin with the company man’s cabin next door. The company man and the tool pusher basically ran the whole operation between them, making them highly desirable targets. The portacabins were very basic, just thin plastic over a metal sub-frame. Inside, the layout was just as simple—a desk, small closet and a metal-framed bed, with a foam mattress on top. The tool pusher hated the bed, and every time he crew-changed back to the rig he moaned about his bed to Ann and Colin. So with the tool pusher’s birthday not too far away, Ann and Colin decided to get the onsite chippy to make him a fantastic new bed. The carpenter did a great job, making a huge frame with two massive drawers underneath, and Ann and Colin got him a big sprung mattress. The real motivation for the new bed, however, was for the drawers in its frame as the tool pusher was really keen on dirty magazines, and Ann was fed up with walking into his portacabin after he had been in there for a month and finding his cock mags all over the place. So a month later the tool pusher came back out to the rig, walked into his portacabin and discovered he had a huge new bed with two drawers full of porn—what more could a tool pusher want?
A few days later the rebels strong-armed one of the local guys who worked on the rig to plant a bomb in the tool pusher’s cabin. They had the device in a box and the timer was set to go off in the middle of the night. The tool pusher went to bed at the end of his shift as usual, and in the early hours of the morning the bomb went off. The blast shook the whole camp, and the tool pusher’s cabin disintegrated, but he survived. His massive collection of dirty magazines saved his life, they absorbed the shockwave and, along with the new bed and mattress, he was propelled through the roof and into the night sky.
The whole job went very well, even the Azerbaijanis avoided their usual brawling, and Mother Nature left us alone as well. My hitch was soon over. Erwin asked if Clare and I would like to go to his place in Perth for Christmas. Erwin’s is exactly the kind of home you want to wake up in on Christmas morning. His wife, Lucy, produces meals that make you wish you could eat your bodyweight, and his kids, all four of them, are great fun. He has a living room not unlike Captain Kirk’s bridge on the starship Enterprise: one big comfy chair and a plasma TV that fills the entire wall. There are motorcycles, dogs, cats, rabbits and a huge backyard with a giant trampoline that gives me head injuries every time I get on it. In all, I look forward to a Christmas at Erwin’s place.
Most of all, I love the bikes. Erwin has the same fascination with motorcycles as I do. Whenever we get the chance and we’re not both on a rig somewhere, we have track days. Erwin rides a Jap 500 single in a Norton wide-line featherbed frame. I, on the other hand, ride a Kawasaki 650 Twin; it’s a modern bike designed to look like a classic, but he still rounds me up. The bike I’m riding now is my second after I dropped my first bike twice. Riding a motorcycle is total joy, right up to the point when your overconfidence causes your first big ‘Get Off’. My first ‘Get Off’ was just plain stupid.
After a long flight home from West Africa, suffering jet lag and everything else that goes along with modern economy air travel, I arrived in Sydney in the early hours of a Friday morning. It was summer, I was happy beyond words to be home and away from the diabolical shit that you have to deal with in West Africa. I’d spent the last few weeks on the rig constantly thinking about riding my bike when I got home. And here I was at last. I hit the ground running and went straight to the garage. I didn’t bother showering, or perhaps waiting a day so I could get some sleep and allow my body to adjust to being home. No, I was going for a ride. With the battery reconnected and a full tank of fuel, I checked the tyres, threw on a jacket and bolted down the street. I wa
s free, completely free, no-one was going to give me any shit or ask for a bribe or shoot at me. I’m in Sydney, where the roads are made of tar not dust, where road rage is just verbal abuse not a loaded gun, where people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid a fight.
The hours passed, and halfway through my second tank of fuel I stopped in Bondi for lunch. The girl waiting tables outside was nice, we flirted a bit as I paid my bill, she asked about the bike and we chatted about it for a while. It was turning into a typical hot crowded Bondi day; the street was full of people, all the cafés were packed. My bike was parked directly opposite the table I was sitting at. The waitress walked me over to the kerb and I pulled on my helmet and sunglasses. ‘Ride safely,’ she said and winked at me.
‘Ciao.’ I threw my weight down on the kick-start and the Staintune exhaust blew a wonderful note across the sidewalk, turning everyone’s head in my direction. The street was clear, I gave her my best casual wave and she waved back with a white napkin.
Twisting the throttle wide open and dropping the clutch, I felt my back wheel spin off the kerb, the bike slid into the open street and I roared off—a whole two metres. Then the disk brake lock I had put on when I parked bit into the front fork, instantly stopping the front wheel and sending me on a long, unimaginably embarrassing flight over the handlebars, where I executed an interesting mid-air turn and landed on my back in the middle of the street. My bike flipped over, also landing on its back next to me. The entire street stood up and clapped.
