CHAPTER 1
DERRICK THE MAN
'What's in Perth?' Dave Sadler stood in my garage in Sydney leaning against my Kawasaki, scratching his crotch and looking confused.
'Mate, we're moving to WA in two weeks. I've taken a desk job.'
'Oh,' he said. He knew about my promise to my wife, a promise I'd made years ago, that if we ever had kids, I'd stop working offshore on drilling rigs and stay in one place, stay at home and be a father. He knew Clare was six months pregnant, he knew I was worried about finding a stay-at-home job in a city like Sydney, and he knew I would probably move interstate, but he'd wanted to avoid the conversation as much as I did.
'Shit, mate.' He finished his beer. 'I'm going to miss ya.'
Dave had just given me a hand with a new set of exhaust pipes. We'd changed out the baffles, altering the note on a Harley-Davidson XR from a modest rumble to something like King Kong gargling battery acid. Dave grinned as he killed the engine.
I knew I was about to begin a new stage in my life, but I didn't want this one to end. I'd miss our regular motorcycle-maintenance and beer-drinking sessions and blats into the hills. Dave was a motorcycle journalist. We'd met years earlier. For a long time I'd thought motorcyclists in Sydney were a really friendly bunch; every time I was off the rig and belting around the eastern suburbs on my bike I'd get a wave during rush hour on the big lane split into Bondi. Turned out it was Dave every time, just on a different bike each month. When we finally stopped one day in the same place he explained he'd been waving to me for ages. 'Mate, I always had on the same helmet.' I hadn't noticed.
Though I didn't want it to, my time in Sydney was ending. Staying in our tiny flat and rotating out to a different rig every month just didn't fit into our plan now that Clare was pregnant.
We needed a house, with a garden. I needed a normal job, home every night, no more adventures; I knew I could no longer just roll up after a job and jump on my bike and disappear for a few days. It was time to get serious about our future. I had to grow up.
* * *
Shortly after that conversation with Dave, Clare and I packed our life into cardboard boxes, I freighted my bikes to a mate's place and had the obligatory fight with the real estate agent over repainting our flat, and a broken stove (it never worked properly anyway, all I ever did was light cigarettes off it). We had already found a great house to rent in Perth through the internet — compared to our tiny flat it was like Graceland. I had a desk job lined up with a drilling tool rental company in Perth. The move went like clockwork.
In Perth, Clare was blissfully happy. She'd wanted to be a wife and a mother since she was old enough to drape a pillow case over her head and pretend she was a bride. Now she was married and pregnant, and had me permanently at home. And when Clare is happy, she bakes. I came home every day from my new job to wonderful dinners and — I kid you not — cherry pie, unquestionably the sluttiest of the pie family. I couldn't believe my luck. After years of offshore galley dining at 'Chucks' in the Third World and then crawling off to a bunk in a four-man room smaller than my broom cupboard and smellier than the toilets in a cheap cigar factory, I was instead wiping whipped cream off my face and curling up each night in a bed like a sprung tennis court, with my gorgeous, pregnant wife; I was looking like one rabid, but very happy — and fat — dog.
Between all the cooking and the eating, Clare was nesting, so we went shopping, collecting all kinds of shiny new baby stuff. Let me tell you about baby stuff: there are strollers, big, fully integrated, multi-function, dual-directional, go-faster-James-Bond ones with better brakes and suspension than my car. Cots that are stronger, more comfortable and bigger than the bunks offshore. In fact, there are whole superstores that supply every baby thing imaginable. We made endless consecutive trips, collecting carloads of stuff that all needed assembling. We got a pram, a cot, and a baby monitor to wiretap our child's room. We even made the obligatory trip to the brand-new, brilliantly designed mega-Ikea store, joining up with hundreds of other shoppers at the bottom of the escalator like migrating salmon. Everyone had their Ikea face on, that 1000-yard stare into the wonders of modern Swedish pre-fabricated, flat-pack laminated furniture. Clare grabbed the brilliantly designed Ikea shopping trolley, the only item they produce that I actually like, and we entered the one-way river of Ikea zombies. Two hours later, the river emerged into a great feeding hangar — with your eyes shut it sounded like you were stepping into a lagoon full of flamingoes at dinner time. We waited in the brilliantly designed holding zone until a JCB deposited five metric tonnes of flat-packed brown cardboard boxes and an Allen key. All this for one very small baby.
With all the new things for the baby and the house we had to make room. Most of our existing furniture was pretty old, predominantly from the 1950s, but it was well made, so it seemed a shame to toss it. Having moved to Perth from Sydney I was used to just dumping unwanted items on the street. Bondi, where we lived, was for all intents and purposes a black hole where entire skiploads full of old junk evaporated overnight. Furniture moves so fast out there that all the homeless cats in Bondi have nothing left to piss on. (Seriously, you could dump a body on the sidewalk in Bondi and some backpacker would fuck off with it and turn it into a coffee table before you could say, 'Whatever happened to Grandpa?' I once left the most diabolical second-hand mattress on the street, just left it propped up against a lamppost. It looked like someone had shot a snuff movie on it. The next day — gone.)
But in Perth, in the refined environs of Nedlands, the items I left out — which I'll have you know were by no means crap — just sat there for weeks. Which left our house marked as the one moved into by trailer trash. Joggers would scowl at me while I watered the front garden; drivers would slow down and point. I found it quite annoying, although eventually I amused myself by standing in our messy front yard in just a pair of tracky pants and a stained wife beater, scratching my back with a toilet brush and belching my name. In the end, though, I had to pay someone to haul the stuff off just to stop us from being run out of the neighbourhood.
There's a strange kind of dynamic lethargy and indifference in Perth. People are almost snobby but not enough to piss you off. New luxury shops are springing up all over the place as the current mining and oil boom has injected billions of dollars into the local economy, lining the pockets of the real estate lucky and the people who work in the right industries. CUBs are popping up like mushrooms — albeit mushrooms with oversized status handbags and Armani sunglasses. CUBs: this was a new term for me — cashed up bogans. Blue-collar guys earning more than Somalia's national debt, and looking to buy new toys.
The family across the road had clearly benefited from the boom years. The dad was in real estate and had recently had all his tats removed. Their house was impressive, two storeys of limestone and marble with a manicured front lawn big enough to host the next Olympics on. Their daughter was around nine, and had more toys scattered over the front yard than I had ever seen when I was her age.
One morning I went outside and a bouncy castle bigger than the flat I grew up in was just sitting on their lawn. I couldn't help comparing it to the toys I'd had at that age.
When I was a lad I had to make do with improvised bits of shit I found on the street or hand-me-downs from my older sister. She hated having to share her toys with me. But hell, whoever said necessity was the mother of invention was onto something. Barbie, with her hair cut off and a texta-applied beard, in clothes made by my mum, made one hell of an action hero. The other kids had the real deal of course, GI Joe, Action Man, Stretch Armstrong, Big Jim, and Steve Austin with his mechanical arm and bionic eyeball. Austin was the best. You could peek out the back of his head through his bionic eye, and that was about as cool as it gets when it's 1979 and you're ten. I did my best to make my sister's former Barbie look manly: I took a bastard file to her boobs, and beefed up her arms with gaffa tape. I ran the edge of a hot knife down her cheek, distorting her right eye and leaving her looking like she'd been through the windscreen of a truck. I renamed her 'Derrick the Man', and convinced the other kids he was special and could breathe fire.
Still, I couldn't compete; one boy had the Evil Knievel action figure — it came with the Harley-Davidson XR750 and a ramp. We would have wars in the backyard, and every time, without fail, Evil would shoot through the air on his bike and save the fuckin day. Steve Austin, Action Man, Big Jim and GI Joe would cheer, while Derrick the Man just stood there looking like a tranny.
Until I put a hot nail through his pursed lips and filled his head up with lighter fluid. The resulting inferno nearly put the lot of us in hospital.
* * *
My reverie was broken by a bloodcurdling scream. The little kid from over the road was standing in the street screaming at her parents; listening in, turned out the bouncy castle wasn't the one she wanted. The dad was trying to calm her down, then he spotted me sitting there watching and waved the way you do at a neighbour you don't really know. He smiled, blindingly white teeth, bleached to perfection. My mind tripped and I found myself thinking about kids in West Africa expiring in the dust with perfect complexions and the whitest teeth you have ever seen ...
I should have gone inside and forgotten about it, but I couldn't. There was a pitch-dark rage building inside me. I wanted to watch that bouncy castle burn. Just as I was thinking I should get the fuck out of there before I said or did something Clare would later bollock me for, the dad wandered over and tried to strike up a conversation.
I was sitting on the weekend paper; our front step was wet from the rain earlier. He made me squint when he smiled. He was clearly just so happy with his stuff: the big house, nice car, his wife, his toys, his kid.
'Are you reading that?' he said, still smiling, pointing at my newspaper.
'Yes,' I replied flatly. 'I have an eye in my anus.'
His smile faded and he asked me what my problem was. My anger deflated. He was right, I was being a jerk. I got up and handed him my paper.
'What happened to your ink?' I gestured towards his forearms.
'Not so good for business, you know?' He shrugged and smiled again, a bit uncertainly.
I smiled back. He once had a young man's tattoos. What now? What images could cover the scars left behind that would accurately capture impending middle age? Precisely how does one illustrate an irritable bowel and mortgage repayments? But I didn't say any of this. Just gave a non-committal wave and wandered inside. I knew I'd been a rude prick. I was missing the rigs, missing the old days, missing those giddy flat-out rides into the hills with Dave. For twenty years I'd been running all over the planet, rig-hopping from one job to the next, completely free, no ties to anyone or anything. Now my crew had moved on and I was in a suburban utopia more imposing and alien than any jungle I'd worked in. I told myself this was the new life that I so desperately wanted, but honestly? It was on the verge of blossoming into a real three-fingered prostate exam.
CHAPTER 2
COVER YOUR ARSE
Having over the course of the last year got married, stopped working offshore, knocked up my wife and moved to the 'burbs of Perth, I was now officially middle-aged and boring. Let me tell you how I learned this.
Clare's brother Mathew came to Perth the first week we were there, in his role as manager of a band that was playing a gig in a city club on Saturday night. It was all a bit last minute and rushed but my wife is very tight with her family and it was her only opportunity to see her brother. So, even though she was eight months pregnant, we went along.
We got to the venue, parked out the back, and Matt was there, grinning. He told us the band was a breeze to look after. As well as managing a band, Matt also plays with his own group, The Drugs. The Drugs play hard and party harder. To give you some idea of just how hard, Matt's stage name is Ian Badly. After one of their tours, I once saw Matt with a laminated card around his neck that read: 'My name is Ian Badly. If I am drunk and/or wasted, not making any sense or passed out, I am staying at the Holiday Inn. Please contact our manager on ...' By contrast, the biggest problem Matt had getting these other guys on stage was dragging them away from their hairdryers and make-up.
Matt is the funniest and most disturbing of all my relatives and in-laws; his sense of humour is sharper than a new razor and equally dangerous. He often has pink streaks in his hair and most of my oilfield mates would assume on first appearance that Matty is gayer than two cocks touching. Matt's short stocky frame and boyish good looks often lead people into making benign assumptions about him, when in fact beneath his good looks and quirky charm is a head space that should have danger signs around it.
The three of us chatted for an hour or so, then the band went on and about a thousand chicks rushed the stage. I wandered to the bar to get a beer; pausing to look into the back of the venue, I saw a group of eight girls staring at me. I smiled, they smiled, and the cock-eyed optimist in my pants shouted up to my brain, 'Yup, you've still got it.' Then one of the girls broke free. She was around twenty, or probably not, and she was wearing a very short skirt and a push-up bra. My balls twitched; it was like a koi pond down there — I was doing my best not to clap.
'So are you with the band?' she asked, thumbing a Bic lighter.
'What makes you think I'm with the band?' There was no way she saw me talking to Matt, I told myself; I have so still got it.
She snorted smoke out. 'Well, you're either someone's dad or you're with the band.'
I was crushed. That's right, I'm thirty-nine. Where's my pregnant wife? What the fuck am I doing here?
* * *
On Monday morning I was sitting at my desk con- sidering this same question. What the fuck was I doing there? I was the Rental Tool Manager; I'd been in the job for a week and already I was making quite an impression. The previous Wednesday I sent a quote to a drilling company for a bit of kit called a split bowl. Not a difficult task, and I certainly knew what a split bowl was. Problem was, my business writing skills were not quite on par with my equipment knowledge: I sent them a quote for a split bowel. And then I signed off as the Rectal Manager. Oh yeah, I'm the man. The drilling manager responded a few days later; a guy I'd worked with years earlier, he signed off by saying he always knew I was an arsehole.
Simple things that others took for granted mystified me. For example, on my first day the bloke at the next desk emailed me a request. I read it, looked to my left and said, 'Sure, no probs.'
He gave me a sympathetic smile and responded via email, explaining as a footnote that I needed to cover my arse by putting absolutely everything in an email from now on. This struck me as both good advice and a horrible thought. It didn't matter if the person you were talking to nodded and said, 'Yes, I understand, I'll do that today.' No, I had to follow up with an email, get t-shirts printed, and put post-it notes on the wall in front of me to remind myself not to let him forget so that I would have some proof when he did forget and so we could assign blame correctly.
What the fuck did we do before email? How did we assign blame? Or was the 'give a fuck' factor just higher then?
How many emails would I have to write, just to cover my arse?
I was not the boss anymore, this was not a drill floor, and my fragile male ego made me want to tell everyone politely just to fuck off. Instead I had to suppress my urge to kick people as they sleepwalked through their day doing just enough not to get fired. There was no work ethic like I was used to. On the rigs, the crew would back each other up in every way. But onshore, in a regular job, I was clearly on my own.
The drilling guys would quickly weed out the weak link in the work chain, or just refuse to go offshore with someone lazy or indifferent — they're too dangerous. Years ago, I was sent to work at a supply base for a month while the rest of my crew went offshore. I was being punished for destroying a hire car — but that's another story. I was on half pay, working seven days a week loading out drill pipe and prepping it for inspection. Buffing tool joints with an angle grinder in the sun for twelve hours a day and being made to work with guys I looked down on was a good head check for me.
