The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,

  I stand and look at them long and long.

  They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

  They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

  They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

  Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

  Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

  Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

  He had to go out in the rain and check a series of valve positions before the power recovery boiler was brought on line. The night was dark, without purpose, mindless as rags flapping in the air. The rain wet his strong jaw and splashed unnoticed down his thick neck and up into his boots; his mind went over the pathetic letter he had in his pocket. One of the men, young, vague and poorly educated, as most of them were, had written a plea to the Samurai. His young sister of twelve had been raped, but being genuinely frightened of the mess the newspapers would make of the affair, he had not gone to the police, some of whom made a lucrative sideline of selling news tips in cases where the victims didn’t have money enough to object. The man, known as Pigeon Post for his interest in racing pigeons, had found the rapist from his sister’s description of him and of the car in which she was raped, but he didn’t know what to do.

  The Samurai knew exactly what he would have done in Pigeon Post’s place, but Pigeon Post wasn’t the Samurai. What could he do for this man? He checked the gas lines from the liquid gas tank back to the boilers—without waking Blue Hills who had insisted on going out into the rain—and went over his answer to Pigeon Post. He would have to do something himself. Revenge was the obvious course: the law would let the rapist off after a few years. Sentences were light for rape and killing, and heavy for stealing, destroying property, shooting at public figures, prison warders or policemen.

  He could call on Pigeon Post. No, better not. Say nothing. Delay the answer until he had done what was necessary, then answer Pigeon Post with a counsel of mercy and forgiveness.

  ‘I could turn and live with animals,’ said the Samurai aloud. He shouted it, filled with a sudden access of rageful energy. ‘I could turn and live with animals!!’ to uncomprehending concrete and uncomplaining steel.

  Walking about in the rain in the floodlit dark, he looked like a burly threatening priest, a contradiction. His heart encompassed mercy and pity and a large capacity for revenge and hate. The falling rain glittered with the fluorescence of the blue tubes all over the structures.

  What was the remedy for his pitiful seekers after help and advice, who from their very natures leaned on stronger men? Should he give Pigeon Post the idea of extending his hobbies, taking up weight-lifting or judo to give himself the illusion that he was not weak and dependent and indecisive, but quick, masculine, strong? Perhaps there was no remedy for weakness.

  Snaking after him on the ground and slithering over pipes and vessels, even his shadow was wet.

  AN ARM, WAVING When he woke Blue Hills took a dawn walk out to the battery limits, ducking past gas leaks from flanges and valves that wouldn’t shut, to get a view of the slopes on the other side of the river where Riverditch rose from the water towards Jerriton and away to Cheapley. He had spent a little time relieving the Glass Canoe on the heater, a little time reading vacantly through year-old newspapers though reading was strictly forbidden, and a little time sleeping in the reactor, sitting on a four-gallon drum.

  There it was again. From a house set apart from its neighbours, with just such an array of trees and shrubs as Blue Hills liked, a waving. Like an arm waving, almost every time he looked that way. Was it a wave of distress? There might be someone in need of help. Or a friend looking at him, disappointed at receiving no answering wave.

  Timidly, he waved. Looked round, to see if any of his fellow prisoners had seen. No answering wave. Maybe it was a free man, retired from industrial or military service and on a pension, someone who didn’t have to spend ten hours a day a prisoner. Ten hours allowed for an hour each way getting ready for work and getting home. It would be great to be like that, not having to clock on and clock off. Naturally, it might not be for long—retirement freedom was a quiet anteroom before the crematorium, but at least it was a little freedom to look forward to.

  Could the waver perhaps be a man his own age, fond of trees and green things, the mate he had always wanted? Blue Hills had acquaintances: no friends. And there was his heart. He didn’t complain at home when he had a mild flutter, as the doctor called it; his wife made life hell for him with her form of sympathy, a great, oppressive cloud of worry. Worry attacked her only when he was present. He found it increasingly difficult to ask if she had taken her pills; this question he considered sufficient indication of his desire for a spot of intercourse. And that’s all it was, a spot. He had to work like a slave to bring her to orgasm.

  They had moved from further north than Cheapley, from an old house surrounded by Blue Hills’ specially loved trees; bottlebrush, liquidambar, pistacia, citriodora, snow-gum, even turpentine trees with their dull grey-green leaves, silver underneath, and stringy bark. Orchids in the greenhouse and paperbarks on the wet patch. Moved into a more modern house closer to the works, with no trees: developers flattened the lot. He had gone back many times past the old house, just to see his trees. The Lebanese who had bought the old place left most of them standing. But even their way of waving in the coastal airs, and their leafing shape, had something now that was alien. The thing he couldn’t get over was they were doing just as well for a stranger’s touch as they had for his.

  He turned east, hoping for a sunrise. But the rain still hung about. Morning lay in a coma, flat out for miles, as if it might never wake. He walked over to his little hideaway under the fuel gas tank. There were leaks there, too, but he liked the propane smell. He lay down.

  He was a simple man. He treasured one magic moment on night shift. Once he had gone out a little after four in the morning, twenty minutes before sunrise. Sunrise over Clearwater, that’s how he thought of it. Mauve clouds, Conrad Martens clouds, low in the sky and the silvered tanks magical with reflected violet. Nothing moved but a few early workers’ cars arching over Clearwater bridge. He brought the mob out to look at the sunrise—he was so excited, rushing about in the dawn dark, desperate for them to see the vision splendid—but they rubbished him and went back to sit miserably in the smoke-filled amenities waiting for seven o’clock.

  THE ACHE OF FRIENDSHIP The Samurai bent over his control panel desk in concentration on the masses of paper work connected with the start-up. As usual, he couldn’t keep his mind off the prisoners round him. How far could he keep going, how far could he take his fight for the helpless prisoners who, but for him, had no one to turn to who would be content to help without wanting to imprison them further?

  ‘Wakey, wakey!’ called the Enforcer from his office door.

  ‘They won’t let you sleep here, Samurai,’ said the Elder Statesman, protected by the controller’s presence. ‘What you need is a blanket or two behind the panel! Doesn’t he?’ directed to the Enforcer, who pulled his mouth wide open in a hefty grin, showing the Samurai it was a joke. He was British. What he really wanted was a line of men standing at attention.

  The Samurai said nothing. They thought of sleep when they saw a man sitting still. Was it a reflection of their own inability to concentrate? He went back to the problems of the helpless. He could scare off the Enforcer any time by asking him a question on the plant. The Enforcer had been promoted when the refinery was tiny—hadn’t expanded his knowledge to keep up.

  The open trench under the panel console for air lines and electric cables was full of water from the drain system. Prisoners threw rubbish there hoping the tide would take it away. It didn’t. The trench stank.

  He remembered Blue Hills had been gone a few hours. It was half p
ast six. He walked over to Blue Hills’ little gunyah and looked down on his face which was yellow in the grey morning. He stood there, looking at Blue Hills closely. He could not have told you why. The sign of life was one plume of breath; a sinus blocked the other.

  It was a high forehead, but not wide. Pitted with large pores and the skin supplied with fine light down. Many grey strands grew among the curly black hair. His ears red-brown and very large, standing far out from the head, coming in close towards the lobe, curving out again. The lobe pink-red and full of blood,the skin uneven under the beard, rising to small hills near each sturdy spear of stubble; outside the borders of beard the skin was smooth. He looked at Blue Hills’ nose with its enormous pores clogged with black and the oil from his body giving it a gleam even in this light. A small black ant struggled in the forest of hairs on his calf. Lower down, the dull inherited scar. He was wearing Puroil socks—scrap rag wrapped round the feet inside the heavy boots. He looked away. Again he could not have explained why he wanted to look no further but he felt rising in himself all the pity he felt for his fellow prisoners. Granted they may have been conceived casually, brought up lazily, educated carelessly, but they were here. On earth. Why? To feed the appetite of industry and work to foolish regulations for the sake of the few free men in the world? And they had been kept ignorant of the fact that they were slaves. They thought slaves were some other people, in another time, and probably coloured.

  It was cruel. They got no joy from their lives, only the respite of oblivion in alcohol, dreams in drugs, relief in sport or in the Great White Father’s underground movement which was intended to undermine the whole synthetic fabric above them, which might as well be quite different for all it mattered to those beneath.

  Blue Hills couldn’t even give his blood to the bloodbank and tell himself he could help others live. He was anaemic and couldn’t spare blood. It was too much for the Samurai. He felt himself equal to anyone in the great pyramid above him, but Blue Hills didn’t even have that frustrating consolation.

  ‘Hey, Blue!’ he said. ‘Wake up!’

  He shook the sleeper. There was a peculiar ache in his upper right arm. Someone had punched him on the muscle, where it crossed the bone. Playfully, of course. He bent and stretched the arm. The ache stayed. Fifty yards away a shadow flickered on the sides of the catalyst shed. A man running head-down like a rat darted into the tool store. The amount of equipment knocked off bore a direct relation to the size of the men’s bags. The guards looked in the bags but could not put their hands in or unwrap anything. All you had to do was wrap your loot or toss it over the fence like the Thieving Magpie did with his electric motors. Gently, on to a prepared pad.

  The Samurai had his own worries. He had allowed himself to drift into association with a girl, had even thought of marriage, then with a suddenness that surprised him he broke it off. She made quite a fuss. In one of her outbursts she told him she had lied about using pills. She said scornfully he wasn’t a man.

  ‘You can’t even make babies!’ she screamed at him in a crowded street. They had been having intercourse for months; he left precautions to her; as far as he knew his seed might be dead. He had no other children that he knew of. On the other hand his young brother, who was married, only needed to look hard at his wife and she was pregnant.

  He took a small bottle of it to a doctor. The neatest thing he could lay hands on was a small jar with a blue plastic screw cap, previously containing a deodorant jelly. Remarkably like the real thing. In a quiet voice he told the receptionist who he was and what the doctor wanted. He wasn’t a vain or over-sensitive man, but when the woman, hardened to years of sickness and dying, enemas, catheters, and specimens, asked loudly: ‘How?’ he was confused.

  ‘What do you mean How? It’s a specimen of—’

  ‘I can see that! How was the semen produced?’ she roared.

  ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘Mister, there’s a routine here!’ she shouted. ‘I have to put down how the semen was taken: masturbation, ordinary sex, coitus interruptus, electric shock or the special method for Roman Catholics.’

  ‘Masturbation,’ he said quietly. The woman wrote down the horrible word. Her writing was uneven, she broke off after every few letters and repeated them aloud. He thought she would never finish. The waiting room was full of patients all either bowed over in a reading position or looking the other way.

  ‘What is the special method for Roman Catholics?’ he asked obstinately.

  ‘Listen, sir! I won’t be part of any conversation of that sort, thank you. Ask the doctor.’

  Put in his place, he tried to walk erect to a chair in the waiting room. But he knew he was slinking.

  VOLGA BOATMAN As he got ready for the shower, baring his forty-five-year-old bones, Blue Hills wickedly sang:

  Down in the valley where nobody goes

  Lives a little old lady without any clothes,

  and proceeded to chuckle politely as he thought how like a little old lady he looked without any clothes.

  When he had taken out his teeth and left them to soak in a glass of detergent, he tip-toed into the shower cubicle; he didn’t like the feel of cold concrete on his naked soles. As soon as the Volga Boatman heard the noise of water, he sneaked in and pinched Blue Hills’ teeth, his truss and the arch supports from his shoes, all nicely powdered and ready for him when he was washed and dried. It was a stupid joke on poor Blue Hills—toothless, crippled and unslung.

  Volga made a neat parcel of Blue Hills’ effects in a paper bag the showering man had his sandwiches in. He took the bag with him to the Home Beautiful. For the last six hundred yards before the wharf there was new work on the road. He traversed a plank path and the tops of pipelines with the ease of a man who trusts his muscles. He passed the new cooling water tower in which river water was exposed in drips to cold air from fans. It was a marshy area, low. When humidity was 95 per cent as it often was, it simply didn’t work. Another puzzle. The design worked well enough in Europe.

  From his boat Volga could see the Old Lamplighter’s car parked in Boomerang Road near the children’s swings and seesaws and slippery dips. He tied up and walked to the refuge of the Home Beautiful. The Great White Father met him with a welcome can of beer.

  ‘Take a look at the latest comfort, Volga,’ he said. ‘Something to gladden the heart of men.’

  ‘What?’ asked Volga, swilling beer.

  ‘We have an outside header with a slope downwards, and inside we have individual tubes with bell-shaped funnels on the business end.’

  ‘Who installed it?’

  ‘The Angry Ant. He was a plumber in real life.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Sit down.’

  When Volga sat on one of the new chairs—things appeared overnight, mysteriously—the Great White Father swivelled him round and there, under a tray newly installed round the wall to hold beer and ashtrays, was a round funnel and a pipe from it going through the wall.

  ‘Have one on me, Volga,’ he said kindly.

  ‘The beer hasn’t gone through me yet.’

  ‘There must be some tea there. Or some water. You must have had a drink.’ He felt Volga’s stomach in the region of the bladder. Volga pulled away.

  ‘I’m ticklish. Not on the stomach.’

  ‘I think you’re virginal, never mind ticklish.’

  ‘It’s no good. I’m all dried up.’

  ‘Tell that to the Old Lamplighter.’

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘OK Volga. If you can’t you can’t, but when you can it’s right there. No more stumbling over feet and chairs and upsetting beer to get out. Once you sit you stay till you’re full. That’s our motto.’

  ‘Sure is progress.’

  ‘No such thing as progress, Volga, but I know what you mean.’ He lifted his own blue and gold can. On its sides was a fur of dew pearls.

  ASSEMBLY LINE LOVE Ambrose turned up, a youth of twenty. Just old enough for adult pay
.

  ‘Welcome, prisoner!’ said the Great White Father as he stumbled in.

  ‘What prisoner?’ asked Ambrose, lost. They passed him a can. His eyes crossed as he watched its rim approach his mouth.

  ‘Us.’

  ‘We’re not prisoners,’ he said stoutly. ‘I go home when the shift ends.’

  ‘What do you do tomorrow?’

  ‘Come back here.’

  ‘Why not go away somewhere?’

  ‘I’d get the sack.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I’d have to get another job.’

  ‘And you’re not a prisoner?’

  ‘I can work some other place.’

  ‘Why not just stay home?’

  ‘Cut it out. You’ve got to have a job.’

  ‘Then you’re an industrial prisoner.’

  ‘Then everyone is.’

  ‘What difference does that make?’

  ‘Everyone has to work for a living.’

  ‘Do they? Read the social pages.’

  ‘Working for a living is the right thing to do.’

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘Work is good for you.’

  ‘A good crap’s better.’

  ‘I’m free to starve.’

  ‘Freedom to starve! That’s it. The clause they forgot to put in the Atlantic Charter. Declaration of Human Rights. Freedom to starve.’

  ‘But if everyone—’

  ‘—Not everyone, son—’

  ‘—Practically everyone has to work, then it all cancels out.’

  ‘It doesn’t cancel out, it adds up. We’re prisoners.’ He could see Ambrose was excited and confused. He changed the subject.

  ‘Reminds me of my wife when she was young. She was beautiful, I had to chain her up. But they still got to her.’

  ‘What you want out of life anyway?’ demanded Volga. And the Great White Father answered for Ambrose.

  ‘All he wants is meat three times a day and knock-off time.’

  He was due for holidays in two weeks and the Humdinger and Big Dick had recommended that he visit the Home Beautiful to prepare him for his trip north to Surfers Paradise with some mates and their girls. He was nervous. The Old Lamplighter would treat him right, but she had to do everything in plenty of light. Once her business had been men in suits, appointments and all; here it was first in best dressed. Shorts, muddy boots. The other girls would never be in her class, they could only go down. She never forgot that once she had been a respectable middle-class prostitute. Ambrose couldn’t have managed the Sandpiper with her yen for paddocks and sandflats and bare feet. Or the Sorcerer’s Apprentice with her dazzling repertoire and scholarly approach, recording every new sensation in a little blue notebook.