This is the second excerpt from the first chapter of my adult novel, AT SEA. The first installment can be read by clicking on the link below. I’d recommend reading Part One before beginning this section.
I enjoyed reading your responses to the first pages I’ve shared of the novel. If and when this work is published, inshallah, know that your feedback and enthusiasm had a direct influence on my confidence and ability to continue chipping away at rewrites, revisions and the repetitive - but vital - process of editing a book. Something something marathon not sprint…
Anyway. Enough navel gazing dilly dallying. Let’s head back into the world of the Carissa Clyde…
As they passed the door to the enclosed mud tanks, Zainab glanced inside for the rig hand on duty. She had spent many years as a derrickman herself, crouched next to broiling pits of viscous fluid, collecting samples, calculating levels and checking the liquid was flowing only when it should. Zainab squinted through the hot mist. The tank room was eerie quiet. Empty. A small red flag unfurled in the back of her mind, the gruff voice of her old well control instructor coming back, unbidden.
‘A little gas bubble will fuck you roundways if you don’t deal with it pronto,’ the instructor had warned. ‘It might seem innocent and harmless at 20,000 ft underground, but if it escapes the rock and flows into your well, you have a problem. You know what they call that?’
Zainab felt the word heavy in her stomach. A kick.
If there was more mud coming out of the well than being pumped in, kick. If the mud in the tanks was flowing when the pumps were off, kick. When oil or gas enter the wellbore, kick. Kicks are manageable, Zainab had learned, so long as they are caught in time. She had performed hundreds of kick drills, as a roughneck, a derrickman, and a driller. Shut the well in, circulate the hydrocarbon bubbles out, make the mud heavier, and you’re good to go. But if a kick is not caught in time, if the hydrocarbons are left to migrate up the well, that’s when they can cause real trouble.
‘We not talking hand-grenade bad,’ Zainab’s well control instructor had sneered. ‘We talking fully blown disaster.’
The instructor had punctuated each statement with a loud clap.
‘Everyone on board. Dead.’ Clap.
‘All the fishes and birdies. Dead.’ Clap.
‘Crude oil covering the ocean all the way to Alaska.’ Clap
‘People on TV talking about your well. And you. And all your friends. Being dead.’ Clap, clap, clap.
‘Understand?’
Zainab had understood. An uncontrolled kick was the rig’s biggest threat. It was nature, reminding them who’s boss. It was the one thing offshore Zainab was grateful to have never seen: a blow out.
One of the few ways to detect a kick was to monitor the tanks. A mind numbing job when all was going well, but a critical, uncompromisable line of defence against a blow out. Zainab looked back into the tank room, Bryce’s concern and her instructor’s caution echoing loudly in her skull.
‘Who’s on tanks, Guy?’ Zainab called, but her voice was lost to the din.
Night was falling fast, and with it the temperature. Guy left Zainab at the foot of the derrick, the tall, brightly lit tower in the centre of the platform. The doghouse, the control centre of the drilling operations, jutted out from the rig floor, suspended 30 ft above.
Zainab hopped up the steps to the dog house two at a time. She knew she shouldn’t, best practice was always ‘three points of contact on the stairs,’ but she couldn’t help herself. She was here now, with a well to finish and a mission to complete, and she was raring to go. Zainab paused on the final landing to catch her breath. Wrapping her gloved hand around the handrail, her gaze caught the tableau of the Carissa Clyde.
Subhanallah, she thought. How lucky am I?
Despite the darkness blanketing the miles of vastness around them, floodlights turned the rig’s twilight into a uncanny facsimile of day. Zainab’s gaze settled on the large green helipad in her immediate line of sight. Bordered by mustard lights and safety nets, a dozen or so men roamed the octagon, moving through the motions of their post shift exercise routines. Some jogged along the helipad’s edge, alone or in pairs, while others squeezed out push ups, crunches and slow Tai Chi moves in the centre. One of the men noticed her watching, and raised his hand in greeting. Zainab raised one back, and smiled.
In moments like these, Zainab felt like she was outside her own body. Who was this woman, strong and assured, who worked offshore oil rigs like it was nothing? She had gone from a mere worm to running the joint. If only her eighteen year old self could see her now.
Her bosses had told her the novelty would wear off, that she would become angry and jaded like the rest of them, but it hadn’t happened yet. Sure, the men had made it hard for her, impossible, even. But she always came back. Nothing else compared to working in a world so few would ever see, drilling for precious treasure, buried thousands of meters underneath the earth’s crust. Kareema had never understood it, but then again, Kareema didn’t know what it was like. She hadn’t flown a helicopter to work. Hadn’t felt the thrill of hitting the pay zone after months of drilling into barren rock. Hadn’t sat on the rough surface of a helipad, gazing out into the dark ocean, the curve of the horizon close enough to touch. Kareema would say Zainab was running away. But Zainab saw it differently. She was running towards. Towards a place where people didn’t ask questions. Towards a place where people didn’t care about your past. Towards a life, on her own terms.
Zainab glanced at her wristwatch. It was almost time for the official handover, but she wanted to see the rig floor first. She wanted to make a good impression on the driller. Zainab scurried up the remainder of the steps, three points of contact at all times.
‘Good afternoon, folks,’ Zainab said, announcing herself. Closing the door behind her, Zainab took a few confident strides into the centre of the cold room.
The square shaped doghouse was plain and neat, Zainab observed. The checker plate aluminium flooring looked recently cleaned. Folders of safety notices hung beside the Blow Out Preventer (BOP) control panel at the back, columns of indicator lights appropriately green. Zainab took note of the wooden broom, mop and bucket tucked behind her, and fire extinguishers in the other corners. This was impressive, she thought, ignoring the pictures of Playboy women, hung up on the walls in the driller’s line of sight. At least they kept their house in some sort of order.
Hanging her hat on an empty hook, then sinking into the one available plastic stool, Zainab turned her attention to gigantic window behind the drilling console. Zainab loved watching pipe emerge through the rotary table, the gateway to the subsurface through the rig floor. It was a never ending magic trick. Miles of glistening steel pipe, each joint ten meters long, threaded together into a powerful, glittering string. Through the window, Zainab could see two men in knee high wellington boots and mud darkened boilersuits standing outside, garishly lit by orange overhead floodlights. They stood a respectful distance from the hole in the floor, watching the drill pipe being pulled out of the wellbore. One of the men, a young, lean character that reminded Zainab of a whippet, stood closer to the pipe, tightly gripping a flimsy tube of elastic around the stand. Like a windscreen wiper, the plastic cleared the mud off the pipes’ wet steel surface. Straight up into the night sky the steel pipe soared, a bullet train headed to the moon. On the floor, hot liquid splashed all over the roughnecks like afterbirth.
Zainab glanced over at the driller. He had not yet spoken, although Zainab had noticed his green reedy eyes flick to her and back as she strolled in. He was reclined in a race-car shaped swivel chair, one hand on the joystick, facing the rig floor. Catching the name stitched into the top pocket of his grey coveralls, Zainab cast her mind back to the paperwork she’d read on the chopper. Dusty was the driller on duty from noon till midnight. An experienced hand, according to Bryce. Zainab withheld judgement. While she gave everyone new the benefit of the doubt, they had to prove they knew their shit. Too many dickheads coasted on other people’s achievements, Zainab knew. She had once worked with a Company Man who boasted of discovering the Atlantis oil field in the Gulf of Mexico. She later learned he had been an intern onshore for a completely different team in the company years after the discovery was made. Dickhead.
Zainab wondered what stories Dusty had spun. The middle aged man bore his decades as a driller uncomfortably, his bulk straining at the seams of his uniform, flesh pouring over the edges of his seat like thick custard. He wore a purple baseball cap with an embroidered ‘LSU’ logo, and held a plastic bottle half filled with lumpy, brown liquid. Flicking the joystick up with a practised movement of his wrist, Dusty bent his head forward, jowls quivering, and spat into the bottle. Dark saliva oozed slowly through the bottle’s mouth and down its curved neck. Zainab stared, entranced and disgusted in equal measure. She was never able to understand the appeal of chewing tobacco. Cigarettes, sure. Social, relaxing, and had the added benefit of making you look like a rebel. But dip? Zainab suppressed a shiver and looked back out the window.
Outside, the whippet did a double take. His thin neck twisted towards the doghouse, a gloved hand covering his eyes from the glare of the lights. Zainab felt his eyes bore into her - surely he can’t see me from out there? - before he tapped his colleague on the shoulder, and pointed in her direction. The other, more bulldog than greyhound, widened his eyes. Suddenly, both men were laughing at an inaudible joke. Zainab left her expression smooth. She suspected they were laughing at her. Well, they would soon see.
‘You’ve been spotted,’ Dusty said, his Southern drawl low and hoarse. He sounded tired, thought Zainab, taken by surprise. His was the voice of a man without much fight left. Curious.
Zainab said nothing, her eyes on the drill pipe.
‘SLIPS,’ Dusty called through the PA, his voice now strong and authoritative through the exterior speakers. Bulldog, already prepped, stepped forward to throw the slips into the rotary table around the pipe. Not bad, Zainab thought, remembering when she first learnt to use those awkwardly named metal wedges, far heavier than they looked. Slips stop the pipe slipping back into the hole, she would sing to herself, as she tried to copy the smooth motions of her colleagues. She was jealous of roughnecks who could swing slips around a pipe like a slap bracelet, or lob them neatly into the rotary table from meters away, the perfect basketball swish. Bulldog wasn’t that good, Zainab noted, but he was alright. Good enough. Zainab cracked open her tally book, dated the top corner of a fresh page in neat block handwriting, then started noting numbers from the gauges on the console in front of her. She glanced at the bit depth gauge. There was a good 3 kilometres of pipe left to pull out.
Zainab chewed on the inside of her cheek. It all seemed positive, she thought. The rig crew seemed to know what they were doing, and going by the cleanliness of the dog house, they cared for their rig, as much as any roughneck could. Everything looked in order. And yet…unease tasted like fish oil on her tongue. Why was there no-one on the tanks?
The door swung open with a bang.
‘Alright cunts, sort yerselves out. Porno’s back.’
Porno’s beady eyes roamed around the room, then settled on Zainab.
‘Hello there, buttercup. You lost?’
Zainab jumped up with a generous smile, her arm outstretched for a handshake.
‘Hi! Zainab, new toolpusher. On nights.’
Porno looked down at Zainab’s hand, then back up at her face, as if appraising a geological fault.
‘They might have told you I was coming in, replacing Marty?’
Zainab’s voice came out light and buoyant, higher than her usual deep alto. Her body had acted of its own accord, vocal cords thinning and tightening so as not to appear a threat. Zainab felt the reflex, and hated herself for it.
The shadow of irritation flickered across Porno’s face. He pushed past.
Right. Porno’s instant dismissal smarted, but it was nothing Zainab hadn’t experienced before. She was going to have to work for it.
That’s all I’m planning to share for the moment, folks. Hope you enjoy, and again let me know what you liked/responded to in the comments below.
In lieu of Good Chat recommendations this week, I am sharing an urgent call out on the situation in El-Fasher, Darfur. I wrote a piece on it for TRT here, spoke about it on Monocle 24 and urge you to donate to the Sudan Solidarity Fund if you can (money goes to the Emergency Response Rooms on the ground). Further, if you want to deep dive on the roots of the conflict, this is one of the best pieces I’ve read yet.
Until next week, dear friends. I will be in Brussels, inshallah, on a short writers residency (so if you have any recommendations, holla at me!)
Stay well,
Yassmin