Champagne & Rolexes

Some mornings are like that in Adelaide, 30 degrees before 7am. Into those glass balcony doors, light and heat, thickening the air to a slurry. Chris slept half naked, wheezing and slowly desiccating on the sofa. He turned to get an even cook and nuzzled his head deep under the pillow hoping the shade might take him back. Then the cool drape of his brother’s shadow answered, felling him back to sleep momentarily.

“It’s 7:30, Chris! It’s 7:30”, shaking to exhume him from the muffled groans.

As he woke, a vague recollection his flight would be landing in Port Lincoln came to mind. His new boss Brian would be waiting to pick him up. This fact he was sure of, but not yet how it concerned to him. Chris sat up and like watching an old locomotive start, his brother looked on as this circumstance heaved and pushed round the stiffly cogs and seized shafts, hammering out the realisation that he’d blown it, his first and only opportunity.

His brother sunk into a beanbag and Chris, now frantic, scrambled to book another flight. The phone rang, it was Brian.

“Yeah, umm, couldn’t find you at the airport there, so ah yeah?” With one deep breath Chris summoned a response, his concentration yawed through the apologetic new booking - feeling the night’s residue trying to clamber out all at once.

“No more than a few hours mate – sorry to stuff you round like this,” he said, Brian seemed eerily fine with it. Chris took it as a blessing, booked the flight, left a bucket by his brother who’d passed out half-cocked on the beanbag spilling into the hall and called a cab. He was almost out the door when the fire alarm sounded. His brother lay motionless. He tried with outstretched fingers and pointed toes, eyes tearing, pawing and prying at the small round box on the ceiling to silence the cataclysmic instruction about his head. Suddenly it stopped, his brother groaned and settled further into the bag. Again the siren! He pried the battery out with great relief. Again it shrieked, like something possessed and he knocked it from the ceiling, still spluttering in loud bursts like laughing Dionysus, and with a heavy sigh he dropped his heel in and left the apartment.

Underway, the arresting panic subsided more and more with the passing wind of blurred shop fronts and undulating power lines, then arched back again, breathing heavy the stagnant air warming through red brake lights. He didn’t have to think for at least half an hour and sank into a brief catatonic relief in the back seat, which seemed to loosen fragments of the night and numb his wretched feeling. He remembered double fisting drinks and spilling them on himself in front of a woman tight in leopard print, then a series of pubs and clubs, a comical street busker, strip club, a heavy metal bar, his brother barely conscious on the pavement, spewing incessantly and three girls dressed as characters from Alice in Wonderland, in like character offering varying degrees of uselessness and fuss. The cabbies took one look at the ensemble and drove on. He recalled wiping his brother down and hauling him to his feet and with sunrise approaching, they jolted up the street for a less obvious pick up location convincing a driver his brother would keep it down, and amazingly, he did.

Chris approached the x-ray machine with a sense of achievement, as if he’d triumphed over the situation, over the seemingly indignant airport staff, like he’d made it, but of course he hadn’t made it, he’d had to pay for another flight and almost lost his first job on the first day. At the gate he plonked himself down in near stupor and looked around the airport convincing himself he’d made the right decision. A decision based on a notion he could ‘escape all this’, all this filthy mediocrity. He nursed his burgeoning career like a calming cigarette, glowing with aspirations, unbeknownst to him it was already starting to singe and smoke at his fingers. He’d sunk so much capital into it he was unable to put it out, living in the interim of panic and regret. As he was to learn years later, beget this constant addiction.

On the hunt for work earlier that week, Chris glanced reluctantly at a phone number on his desk, it read: ‘Matt – Port Lincoln – Aquaculture’.

“Got nothing mate, but try this guy Brian, he’s always looking for crew”.

He was surprised to hear a voice flayed so shy and effeminate, welling the poor opportunist with promise. Brian made mention, and actively repeated three things Chris hadn’t expected in relation to tuna diving, ‘Construction’, ‘ROV’s’ and ‘cruisy’. ‘Doesn’t sound so bad’, he reasoned, ‘one has to start somewhere’. As he was to discover, behind this callow voice lay a carefully seeded spiel to lure in ‘green’ divers reluctant to work in Aquaculture.

“Sounds great, I’ve gotta throw a few things around, get back to you by Friday?” said Chris, leaving himself an escape route. That was it then. Sitting on his single bed in his small cramped one bedroom apartment half excited, half disappointed – his first job, in Aquaculture, if he wanted it.

He continued his search. After another three straight days making calls all over the world with a stack of cheap calling cards begging for a start, aquaculture was looking more promising. Each call started with around thirty digits - the card phone number, the menu options, the long pin then country codes to get to the actual phone number, only to arrive at wrong numbers, bad connections, bad English, no English and most of all, countless knockbacks. By the time he’d got the full sequence memorised he’d moved onto the next card. Emails were the same, like a wave of flaming arrows to every diving company listed on the International Marine Contractors Association. The majority went unanswered but every so often he got a reply with an encouraging word.

When his course had finished, even though only six out of the initial twenty finished, it felt like salmon fry on their seaward migration and the mad scramble for work began. Soon it would dawn on him that most of the job, all of the job for most in the industry revolves around this constant hunt, always in the background; something the dive school neglected to mention. And also how frustrating nepotism would be, wholly undeserved, trumping skill and experience. The industry was rife with it.

As such, the industry pit divers against each other, always in competition, favouring the diving companies; only the office jobs were permanent. All on-the-job workers were freelancers, to be collected and dropped at a moment’s notice, to be ever available, ever flexible and ever grateful to those, the job givers, and more so, their often autocratic personal assistants. Chris was a young freelance contractor embarking on a ruthless and unforgiving industry, as cyclical and unmerciful as the tide. With each knockback he recycled the garbage they’d sold him on course, ‘plenty of work’, ‘Offshore’, ‘Champagne and Rolexes’, which opened up a wellspring of possibilities for fools, dreamers and adrenaline junkies alike, cultivating that urgency and excitement that feeds the industry.

There’s just one catch to this game, getting hired without experience. No reputable company would take him on fresh out of dive school. He’d heard stories about Port Lincoln and how easy it was to get on a tuna tow. His friend from course had just done one, shot up to the surface after coming face to face with a big White and didn’t go back in the water for three days, seriously re-thinking his career choices. Chris needed experience. He was getting tired of ‘send us your resume and we’ll get back to you’, especially when he knew they had jobs on. Enough. He called Brian and booked flights to Port Lincoln, stopping overnight in Adelaide.