The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  After he had gone, some fool cleaned up the yard with a fleet of trucks. No new ashpiles accumulated, no heaps of any sort replaced Ashpit Freddie’s. The rubbish and ash tended by Freddie were eighteen years old, the same heaps at the end as at the beginning.

  THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER High up in a tiny office in the very alps of the Termitary, a man drew a sheet of paper from a tray of start-up instructions on his desk, casually read through a list of typewritten words, casually lifted his company issue (intermediate supervisory grade) pen and wrote:

  Delete Area D. Insert Zone 5.

  A mile away and a month later Zone 5 golf club, chess club, picnic and children’s outing, cricket and keg club, were all going, formed and instituted. The shifties formed their own clubs, they wouldn’t have a bar of the Puroil social club. Zone 5 became a legend to its members inside three months; the starting place and point of reference for everything they did during their daily detention. On this they built their working dreams and constructed their plans ahead for trapping that elusive animal, pleasure.

  JUST LIKE EQUALS With a man of such eminence as the Python, the Glass Canoe was quiet and meek. He knew the Python’s reputation for smiling at you, licking you all over then swallowing you, but man to man and face to smiling face it seemed a different thing. If you treat a man as a sort of father, he’ll soften and come your way, won’t he? The Glass Canoe always did this when he got into trouble and it had always worked so far. It seemed to work with the psychiatrists. He felt better, talking with a real engineer, a man who’d been educated. Not like the shit you had to mix with on the plant.

  ‘I got my boy a model car outfit—he’s very interested in anything mechanical.’ You could never tell what good this sort of private chat might do you. Or your son. The Python might have some advice for his education. The skin of his brown, sleek face grew relaxed and shiny. Men of his education like you to look at ease, they clam up if you’re edgy.

  ‘It’s more than a toy,’ said the Glass Canoe. A grotesque smugness was the nearest he got to a relaxed manner. An ingratiating hangman talking to members of the supporting cast.

  ‘They have clubs, they tell me,’ deigned the Python.

  ‘We’re in one! I’m the secretary and timekeeper of the Toy Minicar Club!’ the Glass Canoe eagerly supplied.

  ‘I respect a man who gives time to local activities.’

  ‘Four days a week. There’s so much work and so many new members I often find myself doing a bit here. In slack times, of course. I map out a few circuits, change them every night, adds variety to the racing.’ He fished in a pocket. Out came a piece of grey paper covered with the loops and whorls of car racing circuits. ‘You get a bit of time on night shift to nut these things out.’ He didn’t see the men making tactful signs to button his mouth.

  ‘Jove, they’re pocket Grand Prix!’ enthused the Python. ‘Have you been able to interest some of the others in this?’

  ‘It’s hard to get them going on something new.’

  ‘Well, keep up the good work.’ He escaped. The Glass Canoe was on top of the world for five minutes and in that short time winded several prisoners with huge pats on the back and kidded Far Away Places about his venereal disease. What a decent lot the bosses were! They talked to you just like equals. They didn’t have to.

  IN AND OUT When there was a dispute at the cracker about the safety of the top firing platform of the vertical down-draught boilers, where men had to manhandle forty pound gas guns at shoulder height under pressure on a narrow platform with a hip-high railing suspended over nothing, the Glass Canoe saw his chance of improving his position. A clear stand against his fellow prisoners might make the management favour him when they handed out the next dustcoats.

  First he agitated to have the Union represented on the Safety Council. The company splashed the Administration and visitors’ area with free safety notices distributed by the State Government but would baulk at any more positive or costly action on the plants. The Union had withdrawn its members, who after all manned the plants, so the remaining members were office bodies who never went near an oil-splashed vertical steel ladder or a slippery grating a hundred feet up at three in the morning in pouring rain, and who didn’t know what a manway was.

  He succeeded in this and got himself elected operators’ representative. The men working the plants had one representative, the rest were other trades, white collar men, drivers, storemen, clerks.

  ‘In the name of Christ, what are we?’ pleaded the Glass Canoe passionately. The Wandering Jew made no objection to this intrusion of the Christian religion. He only attended the Safety meetings every three months.

  ‘Are we children, that we can’t trust ourselves to look where we’re going? Do we have to be hemmed in by barbed wire and railings everywhere we go? I can understand the attitude of operators who want this work done, but I can’t sympathize with it. It’s childish; and expensive.’

  They were impressed by his concern for cutting cost. The thing went to a vote amongst office workers, draughtsmen and storemen and majority rule established that the top landing was safe.

  The operators’ Union got nasty and withdrew again from the Council. This freed the Glass Canoe from having to attend meetings. Most of the time they were not represented: majority rule came up with such ridiculous decisions that all they could do was resign in protest. There was no one outside Puroil to appeal to.

  THE FASCINATION OF WAR The Glass Canoe was a sailor once and read avidly every book he could lay hands on that told of the war in which he had been a number. Now he was perched aloft a gas-burning Peabody heater. His duty was to watch the flame through a peephole in case it went out and to give the fire more gas each time the order came. If the fire went out, and he didn’t notice it in time, there would be a build-up of gas in the heater and when it was lit again the lot would go up, the Glass Canoe with it. The Peabody was heating air, which in turn was heating the regenerator. Now and then he swallowed a tranquillizer so he could pass the night feeling nothing. In order to crouch against the warm flanks of the fat regenerator and read his book, he had a scrap of polished aluminium propped on the sight hole. He could see the reflected flicker of flame at the end of each sentence as he glanced up. He talked to himself continually.

  He looked up, grinning at the nothing in the sky. ‘God pulled the chain, the doors of heaven were opened and all the piss pots in heaven were emptied,’ he shouted and made a two-finger sign at the rain.

  He had scrounged a huge slab of cardboard from the sides of a carton in the catalyst shed, bent it in the middle and held it propped on his head in an inverted V shape to keep off the driving rain. There is no shelter on a refinery plant. He was soaking wet.

  The Glass Canoe had been away in hospital for treatment and was discharged with a paper to say he was sane. Picked for promotion and ambitious not because of overwhelming interest in refining but rather out of an overwhelming idea that he was better than the next man, he was sent away to study to be a senior man on this new cracker, but the strain of holding tightly to his conviction of superiority was too great and he started to do wild things in the control room. They took him away, strapped him down and dug away at his insides with pentothal, electrodes, drugs and group therapy, but all they did was get him to talk interminably about himself and accept new ideas quickly. He flitted from interest to interest, hobby to hobby. He was never without an aim. They didn’t touch his sense of being better than other men. Sport? He could be a champion. Business? Could have made a fortune. A week after the Python got his guts on the subject of toy car racing, someone casually enquired after his hobby. He was lost. What hobby? He’d forgotten all about model cars.

  He read nothing but war novels. He was mad on war, a fitting representative of the island race which suffered less than any European combatant nation. Here he was in the open at 3.30 in the morning, soaking wet, reading of Hitler’s glorious panzer divisions grinding across the face of eastern Europe and people dying lik
e flies in a storm. Small areas of wet decorated each corner of his mouth.

  THE EFFECTS OF ENCLOSURE It had been raining for days. The world smelled like a diseased lung. The high wire fence enclosing the Refinery, Termitary and Grinding Works dripped freely in the driving rain.

  Why was there no one to investigate the harm done by this high barbed wire? Sometimes it was as if the wire stretched from one side of the 350 acres of rich industrial land to the other at head height, the rusty barbs constantly threatening to furrow vulnerable human skulls. Those that were once men, and still often were when they had gone outside the blue gates, walked about with bowed-down heads as if in a vast, intimidating cathedral.

  Would it be inquiring perhaps too closely to ask whether the fumes from the men’s slowly corrosive discontent were not making thinner and more brittle the wires caging them? But it was only an experimental plant; there would be more plants built and new and tougher wires extruded to hold and cage more securely these men who came daily to the blue gates offering their lives in return for the means to continue them.

  FEAR OF NUMBERS When the Samurai left the Termitary for the larger and more exhilarating life of the works, his former fellows felt the first breath of uncertainty about their earning future. They were comfortable prisoners of the trusty class and looked anxiously beyond the Samurai’s leaving for a sinister reason. They saw not far off the computer processing of the work they did, and were afraid. Within three months the staff which previously had 2 per cent Union membership, added 93 per cent. The boys of the personnel office gracefully refrained from paying Union dues out of a nice feeling to those above them that as they knew many secrets of the company’s industrial dealings, they should not be thought to share them with the rank and file of an industrial Union. They thought of this as loyalty. The cashier, a Unionist, refused one day to handle pay dockets prepared by non-Union labour, the company ordered the 5 per cent into the Union, and that was that. They were amazed the company didn’t need their loyalty.

  The Samurai was happy to hear the first result of the landslide. Most increases in pay had been absorbed into their above-award wages for some years until they were back on award rates; entry to the Union changed all that. The threat of a white-collar strike—unheard of—put the next wage increase into their pockets. The Samurai smiled when he thought of the distaste with which most of those trusties would have approached a defiant attitude to almighty Puroil, and of the wonder in their struggling hearts when they saw Puroil back off from all its righteous protests and offer five dollars it didn’t have.

  The Samurai was a little ashamed he hadn’t stayed with them to fight, but had the good sense to realize that his action in leaving their ranks spoke more eloquently than words.

  The two things were of course not connected, but shortly after this, in the interests of economy, white-collar prisoners were denied the use of their separate dining-room and were obliged to eat the company lunch in the larger mess-hall, rubbing reluctant white shoulders with storemen and packers, fitters, electricians, riggers, drivers, gardeners, drum-rollers—anyone. Khaki overalls, boots, ragged shorts and buttonless shirts, grease on the chairs, chipped tables; there was a lot to put up with. The trusties were no longer separate. The staff dining-room was no longer. And for those whose lives were bounded by Puroil and felt a glow when they saw its advertising on television and who used to feel they were dining out in society when they sat elegantly at the staff tables with no roughly dressed prisoners in sight, this was bitter punishment. To sit and lunch at their work desks in sight of the depressing evidence of their indeterminate sentence of industrial imprisonment brought on feelings too heavy to be borne and thoughts too sharp and offensive to be allowed to become conscious. There was only one place to eat. Nibbling a packet of sandwiches in the sun was no solution, for trespassing on the attractive lawns was forbidden, they were only to be looked at. Only employees saw them, and salesmen trying to get favours from the company, but the principle was the same.

  The energy tensions that create the illusion to our eyes of a solid substance, in this case a group of persons and a demarcation of one group from another, had broken down. Molecules of fitter and administration officer were seen to mingle. Nothing was the same again.

  The only consolation left to the trusties was they were not branded as lower grades were. They didn’t punch a card under the eyes of Heels or Hanging Five or the Prohibited Import or the Black Snake: all they had was Luxaflex peeping out through venetian blinds. They had no numbers stencilled on chests and backs or on the foreheads of their safety hats, although they learned gradually that they did have numbers. The new machine payroll system required a number inserted as a key-figure on their monthly salary entry, but so far they avoided the indignity of being addressed directly by number and the self-destructive habit of thinking of themselves as numbers rather than persons.

  NEW DEAL The Wandering Jew, the newest manager, altered office working hours, came down hard for punctuality and saved money on plant maintenance. Even more privileged prisoners were not exempt. One fine morning the Whispering Baritone arrived at five after eight to find the Manager in his chair. Their conversation was reported by a typist talking to the Manager’s secretary in the next office.

  ‘Where the hell were you at eight o’clock?’ chattered the Wandering Jew in his inadequate voice.

  ‘Ah—I must apologize for being a trifle—er, late!’ stammered the Whispering Baritone. He twisted his head quickly sideways, his collar had become tight. His thin face grew red. His fingers picked at the tips of his other fingers, the dry skin flaked and came away. He was temperate and ate sparingly; he had no buffer of alcohol or surplus of good food to fall back on in emergencies. Glorious Devon, the previous Manager, had never done this to a man of his status. The Baritone was a devout supporter of the new economy cuts but had never considered that he might be cut.

  Just in case he thought of leaving Puroil in a huff, the Wandering Jew took away his big title of Admin Superintendent and gave him a smaller one to reduce his bargaining power with other employers.

  The maintenance bill was reduced by the simple expedient of taking men off shift maintenance work, cutting regular maintenance programmes and reclassifying fitters so that expenditure on their wages could be charged elsewhere. Managers who saved the company money were rewarded: the Wandering Jew wanted rewards. The crew left on maintenance shrugged, tore a few pages of reports out of the loose-leaf maintenance book and drifted on as usual. Breakdown maintenance became the order of the day.

  RELATIVITY Pixie, a Puroil man born and bred for obedience, now stationary in about the middle orders of the local hierarchy and with little hope from ability, connections or cunning to get any further, first heard of the ructions that followed these economy cuts on a day when he had a Credit Union meeting. They were standing around waiting for the rest of the nine directors. He was full of the ingratitude of the hard-case prisoners who complained bitterly about their maintenance overtime being taken away and the wickedness of their transfer from shift to day work with its consequent loss of penalty rates.

  ‘If anyone complains about conditions at Puroil you feel like taking them by the scruff of the neck and shotting them to the shouse!’ This last word was indelicate, an indication of powerful feelings.

  ‘Tossing them anywhere!’ said Luxaflex mildly. He tried to turn the edge of Pixie’s speech by his tone of voice; there were bottom-of-the-barrel prisoners present who might resent a meeting of a common interest society being turned into a forum for orthodox Puroil doctrine.

  ‘It’s everywhere!’ said the Garfish, also a member.

  ‘Why, over at Aluminium,’ said Pixie, ‘the telephone operator walks six hundred yards to a toilet and makes her own tea. Yet our lazy buggers of girls here only have to turn a corner to find a toilet and have their tea brought to them. They get it too easy! They don’t know when they’re well off! The more they get the more they want!’ He kept an eye on Luxaflex, to see i
f he was on the right track.

  ‘And at Pax,’ said the Garfish, mentioning a nearby refinery, ‘the Manager himself is often up on the pipelines wielding a pair of stillsons, yet here they walk off the job if a staff man so much as touches a set of tools.’ He, too, watched Luxaflex keenly. Alert for any reaction.

  The Two Pot Screamer, the operating prisoners’ representative, took out his notebook. He was elated by the stupidity of their remarks, and copied them faithfully. He knew they had been down to the plants at least once a year and knew nothing of the processes.

  Another man, looking round a corner of the building from outside, grabbed the opportunity of reminding his fellow prisoners of the eternal verities. He wrote the word Eternity in yellow marking crayon in odd corners of the refinery, imitating a famous Australian who for many years did the same thing on Sydney footpaths. Or perhaps consciously carrying on his good work, for the other man had died and was even then tasting his beloved or dreaded Eternity. He stooped and wrote carefully on the concrete.

  THE DISEASE OF WEAKNESS The Samurai was aware most strongly of his own desire always to have the power to do to others what they did to him. But a little beyond that feeling there was another. It was on a little prayer he had copied out from the writings of an uncanonized nineteenth-century saint and carried in his pocket. The Samurai was a natural equalizer, but there was in him a calmness and strength that could find the ring of these words echoing quietly in his own mind. He took out the prayer and read the words half-aloud.