But I was wrong. Our ongoing success came down to one thing—people—hiring the right ones and knowing who to do business with. I couldn’t believe how fast we grew, how efficient our financial team was. Within the first six months we had eighteen employees, our ISO certification and several other oil and gas specific certifications. Our ISO was the first to be granted in Australia specifically for OCTG (oil country tubular goods) inspection, a strange industry way of referring to drill pipe, or any pipe for that matter, that’s used in oil and gas. Our company performs non-destructive testing and inspection of basically everything that goes ‘down hole’, as well as all the kit used to lift and handle equipment on a drilling rig. So as well as ISO we had to get our NATA (National Association of Testing Authorities) accreditation as well, to deal with lifting inspection. We were audited almost every week by someone. Don’t think for a second I’m suggesting it was easy, it wasn’t. We just got lucky and after some teething we eventually had exactly the right team to make it work.
The learning curve was as fast and hard as my first desk job after leaving the rigs in 2007. So, as before, I checked my fragile male ego at the door and opened my ears, eyes and mind to new things.
I CAME HOME
one summer afternoon to a wedding invitation; my old friend Ruby was getting married in Sydney. In my past Ruby was a leading influence on all the drunkest, silliest and often flat-out dangerous things I’ve been involved with. You know, the things you do when you’re young and on a crew change from a drilling rig with a house brick of US greenbacks burning a hole through your common sense. For a long time now Ruby had existed only in my memory, frozen the way I remember her, but like me she has grown up and I suppose you could say that, at least physically, we are proper adults now. This was going to be fun because it was Ruby’s wedding. It would also be fun because, being Ruby’s wedding, there was limitless piss-taking to do.
So Clare and I booked our tickets for the big day. Having lived in Perth for the past four years we took every opportunity to get back to Sydney.
Ah . . . Sydney in the middle of summer. There’s nothing quite like it. Our flight arrived on time and soon Clare, Lola and I arrived at the Randwick flat where Clare’s sister Carrie lives. The next day Clare squeezed her three-month pregnant belly into a dress and we made for Bondi, leaving Lola with Carrie and a Wiggles DVD.
Ruby’s wedding ceremony was faultless. It was good to see her so happy. Her husband, Rodrigo, is a gentle soul, full of pride and South American machismo balanced with humour and love. They’re a seamless couple; they’re even the same height.
Everyone was there from the old days, faces I had not pinged in years, all laughing, all having fun. The reception was in a renovated hall directly above the surf club, right on the beach. With the wonderful location and amazing view, Clare and I were both homesick for Sydney by the time dinner was served. We could see our old flat from where we now sat, those heady, child-free days now a distant memory buried under dirty nappies and morning sickness.
Dessert was closely followed by a bar fight, a drug bust, and my wife pulling me out of a photo booth the bride and groom had set up downstairs for the guests to play with. Clare ripped open the curtain, pulled the cigar out of my mouth and dragged me out with a curt ‘Time to go’ as more police ran upstairs.
Five a.m. found me sitting on the toilet in Carrie’s flat, in denial. I thought back to the prawn entree, the unmistakable and all-too-familiar horror of what was about to ensue almost made me cry. Take my word for it, twenty years of working in the Third World and more than one case of dysentery leaves your body’s ability to fight parasites strong but your mind scarred. If I was about to get sick, really sick, then those prawns must have been laced with nuclear waste.
I reckon they probably were, because both ends went nonstop for the next hour.
At 6 a.m. my phone beeped. It was Ruby texting me a question: ‘Are you okay? Some people are a bit sick.’
Poor Ruby. Just what she didn’t need. I had visions of how her big day turned out, somewhat ruined by the entire contents of a full jug of beer being flung by one man at another man but hitting Ruby square in the face. Sensitive to the situation, I replied, ‘No, I’m losing my arse, I think a kidney just fell out.’
Then Clare’s face appeared at the door, and the moment I saw her my heart jumped a beat.
‘Get me to the hospital,’ she said as she fell backwards into the hall. I don’t know if it was just sheer will, but I managed to stop expelling prawns and staggered into the hall calling out to Carrie, then remembered she had just left to go to work. It’s these moments, unplanned and frantic, where you find yourself. I pick up my wife, get her dressed, wake up my daughter and drag them out to our hire car. Clare lay there crying, a towel wrapped around her waist, another shoved down the back of my pants. ‘Not again,’ she wept, ‘I can’t lose another one.’ Blood was soaking through the towel, and I drove hyperaware and terrified while Lola screamed in fear in the back seat. The hospital was, fortunately, only five minutes from the flat. I pulled up level at the doors, left the car running and ran in, holding my wife, her legs trailing blood on the white floor. Within seconds she was on a gurney and rushed down the corridor towards the emergency ward.
I stooped to pick up my daughter, scared and struggling to keep up. ‘Just wait here, Mr Carter,’ someone said as a firm hand was raised in my face and the emergency doors swung shut.
Lola looked up at me, confused and frightened, her face covered in tears, as I then fled towards the bathroom at the end of the corridor. I had to get my arse on a toilet seat.
‘Are you doing a ka ka, Daddy?’ she asked as I hurried into a cubicle.
‘Daddy’s not feeling very well, angel. ’ I was so grateful that she amused herself on tiptoe with the hand-dryer while I tried to compose myself.
We found a corner of the waiting room between a wall and a vending machine and sat on the floor.Wrapped in my jacket Lola eventually fell asleep. A long hour went by. The room bright in fluorescent light was quiet; there were only two other people there, reading old magazines. We all looked up as a doctor walked around the corner, his eyes scanning the room.
‘Mr Carter,’ he said, and hurried over to me. I stood up, leaving Lola asleep on the floor. ‘Your wife is stable and sedated, but I’m afraid she’s going to lose the baby.’
There was nothing I could say.
‘You can come and see her now,’ the doctor prompted. I picked up Lola and followed him down the hall.
Clare lay on a bed in hospital greens, full of morphine and anger. Morphine can make a sounding board for emotions that’s big enough to raise the roof. ‘This is fucked,’ Clare said, as her head rolled from side to side. I put the still-sleeping Lola on a couch in the corner of the room and tried to comfort my wife, but she was livid with rage. I can’t remember how much time went by. No one told me anything so I assumed the baby had been taken out and was already long gone. The doctor did say they had administered the maximum amount of morphine and that Clare should be much more sedated than she was. This is the fight that lives in my wife; she was not letting go, not for any reason.
Suddenly she sat bolt upright. ‘Bathroom.’ Her right hand ripped out the drip and amazingly she got to her feet in a second. I rushed in to steady her and help her to the toilet. As soon as she sat down she passed out, slumping forward into my shoulder. At that same moment our child fell out of her, into my left hand.
Time stopped, warm blood dripped between my fingers. Clare’s unconscious weight started a lifeless roll to the left. I grabbed at her neck and sat her upright, reached across her shoulder and punched the big red panic button on the wall. I could hear myself screaming inside that the first person through the door would not be my daughter. But when Clare pulled the drip and other wires off her body, an alarm must have gone off somewhere, because two nurses burst through the toilet door as soon as I hit that button.
The rest was another blur. Again my wife was rushed away and another doctor was stopping me from following. I turned to look over my shoulder in time to see a nurse leave our room with a blue cloth in her hands. ‘Stop!’ I yelled without thinking. I looked back at the doctor, he was frozen, the nurse was static, halfway out of the room, her eyes darting between the doctor and me.
Maintaining eye contact with the nurse, I walked across the room that was now thick with a palpable awkwardness. My hands black with Clare’s blood, I lifted the blue cloth and there was our baby, in a stainless steel kidney-shaped dish. Tears rolled off my nose onto tiny remains. The floor dropped out from under me, while my heart sank so low in my chest you could hear it breaking.
I raced over to Lola—somehow still wrapped in my jacket and asleep on the couch in the corner—and swept her up into my arms. ‘You’ll take me to Clare, right now,’ I said to the doctor. The doctor nodded his head and held the door open for me.
Sometimes, if I have a fever or a nightmare, I see that dish, in technicolour; it wakes me up every time.
Clare was being prepared for surgery and would not be back in the conscious world for hours. I watched numbly through a glass window for a while, aware only of my wife lying there even though the surgical team worked around her. Then Lola stirred and brought me back to earth and I walked away to the waiting room. I found myself back in the corner on the floor next to the vending machine, Lola now wide awake and bored out of her mind. But we didn’t stay there for long.
‘What’s wrong, Daddy?’ She bounced along next to me as my bowel decided it was time for round two.
Several hurried, sweaty trips to the toilet later I was exhausted, cried out and beaten. Then the vomiting started again. Eventually not bothering to get up and run to the toilet I just put my head into the rubbish bin next to the vending machine while Lola pointed out the fact that there was a distinct yellow hue going on.
‘Does it hurt, Daddy?’ I looked up over the bin at her big blue eyes. Slowly, the blurry background came into focus and I could see that the waiting room was now starting to fill with people, who glared at me in horror and disgust over copies of
Woman’s Day
.The door opposite me flew open, surprising us as it had remained closed for hours.
‘Are you okay? Have you been seen to?’ A doctor in green get-up froze as soon as he saw us. I explained as much as I could about the last few hours and he quickly gathered us up and took us into his office. ‘That’s my toilet, you camp in there while I get you some medication,’ he said as he steered me towards a door then sat Lola down with some toys and books. A few minutes later the doctor returned with drugs to bung me up and hydrates to replenish my bone-dry system. But most importantly he told me he would check on Clare’s situation.
I distracted myself over the next few hours by looking after Lola, cleaning the blood off my shirt, and pacing. I didn’t allow myself to think about what I’d experienced, didn’t let myself remember what I’d seen. All I wanted was my wife back, and fortunately for me it wasn’t too long before we were together again.
Clare needed to stay in hospital after surgery, but typically she soon announced that she was ready to go home, even though she was still weak, woozy and couldn’t walk. We left the hospital with Clare slumped in a wheelchair, her head buried in her hands, Lola crying because Mummy was upset, and me, pale, sweaty and splattered in bodily fluids—unrecognisable from the happy, healthy family who stepped off the plane yesterday. The sense of loss hanging around us leached in and out of every pore like an oil slick and threatened to squeeze the life out of everything.
As I pushed Clare out to the car park and our bloodstained hire car, an early model Ford transit van skidded to a stop directly in front of us.The van’s sliding door flew open and five men in medieval chain mail and armour frantically spilled out onto the concrete. Their full metal outfits clattered together as they rushed around, barking orders at each other, then they dragged one knight who appeared to have a broadsword buried in his shoulder to the hospital doors.
Frozen by a curious blend of wonderment and horror, Clare and I silently watched their maniacal high-speed entrance. The van sat there in front us, its engine still running, several shiny helmets on its floor clinking together as the engine ticked over.
‘Fuck,’ said Clare. ‘I thought I was having a bad day.’
AT FIRST I
sat there in the Supreme Court waiting to be tortured, while staring at the back of our opponent’s head and imagining it exploding. Exploding while the QCs talk to each other and the judge shuffles his papers and listens to the litigation.
We had a good business plan, so good you could nail it to Donald and fling it over Trump Tower. But not according to the man whose head was about to explode, the ‘plaintiff ’. I’d just like to point out here that ‘plaintiff ’ comes from the Anglo-French (the language spoken by descendants of the Norman invaders) for ‘one who complains’.
We had apparently broken the first rule of business: ‘Don’t get sued.’
And the second rule of business: ‘Don’t go into business with anyone you don’t know 100 per cent.’ By that I mean performing due diligence that borders on stalking, crawling up their butthole with a microscope, getting charged with invasion of privacy and, when you’re completely satisfied, hire a professional to do it all again.
The first two court sessions were interesting, but after two years I started to get really bored. The court case just turned into a normal part of our business operations, we budgeted for it, the months rolled by, and the bills rolled in. None of us went to court after the first few sessions unless we had to; we just let the legal teams do their thing and then report back afterwards. For a while I was convinced they all just closed the door and played tiddly-winks for an hour, ordered in lunch and drafted up the bills.