The Old Lamplighter loved to listen to the Great White Father. She loved the bright patches of twinkle in his sea-blue eyes and the rough, chesty voice. When he got around to her in his regular test of the girls she tried to keep him talking so she could see the movement of his firm, dry lips and feel the vibrations of his voice against her chest. She never listened to what he said, she was unshakeably convinced that whether they talked of cars, government, life or death, men never said anything important.
She splashed her bottom with gin to stop bedsores.
‘Come in, son,’ she said to Ambrose. ‘You’re next.’
The Volga Boatman finished dressing in a hurry and made way for Ambrose. He knew the Old Lamplighter had been thinking about the Great White Father all the time. It didn’t bother him.
‘You’re a funny boy,’ came the lady’s voice clearly. ‘Not many men dress on the right.’ The answer from Ambrose was inaudible.
‘What’s the matter? Lose the string?’ The taunt came to the drinkers’ ears.
‘String?’ They heard him this time.
‘If you’re not particularly well hung you should tie on a piece of string. Helps you find it. Good in cold weather, too.’
‘Take it easy in there!’ called the Great White Father. ‘Don’t forget this next one’s his first!’
Ambrose had gone in expecting to come out triumphant, brandishing his experience. Volga took the paper bag and crossed the river back to the refinery.
YOU HAVE TO BE A BASTARD Anyone else would have had a bad moment meeting the Good Shepherd—guilt and suchlike—but not Volga.
‘Hullo Volga.’ The Good Shepherd knew every sheep by name.
‘Great day for it.’ Volga knew, as everyone knew, that the Good Shepherd was being gradually outed. His superiors reasoned with him and threatened him to make him change his attitude to the men, but how did you reason with a man whose actions were controlled not only by what Puroil asked, but modified by outside, abstract things called principles?
‘You have to be a bastard,’ they told him piously. Church members with a lifetime of worship of the gentle Jesus behind them in their cold stone churches, all thought like this. For the sake of the Company you must be a bastard to the humans in it. It was taught as gospel in Basics of Supervision.
‘I get more out of the men my way,’ he answered.
‘We don’t care what you get out of them. When Puroil says Jump all you have to do is say How High.’
‘My way leaves them a little human dignity.’
They shook their heads. He was not an Oxford or Cambridge man, not even a proper university man. He had gone through—the phrase appropriate to a degree factory—on a part-time course. Working his way through, taking jobs as a waiter by night to pay his fees. They despised this. All the regular engineers were equipped with parents who could at least afford a university. Puroil preferred men with a solid background and when top appointments were made they went to men from the best universities.
‘I won’t ask what’s in your little brown paper bag,’ the Good Shepherd said archly.
‘A pair of false teeth, a truss and an arch support,’ said Volga matter-of-factly. He couldn’t help noticing the frayed cuffs. The Good Shepherd gave a tenth of his salary to his church.
The Good Shepherd folded his arms and laughed immoderately. It was a good joke, there wasn’t much room for laughter in Admin. Volga walked on, the Good Shepherd got into his car and drove out of the blue gates, but not before he opened the boot of his car. Somehow, vertebrates like the Python could take home scrap paper and foreign orders, and slimes like the Slug could drive humbly out with jacks, oil cans, aluminium sheet, greaseguns, spanners, instrument fittings, ladders, cement bricks, cups, urns and supplies of tea, but men like the Good Shepherd were always stopped by the guards.
The Volga Boatman pressed on to the Elder Statesman’s summer residence, giving his tremendous calf muscles a thorough workout by striding through and rising on his toes at each step. His boots had cut-down heels to give him more movement of the ankle and to make his calves settle to a natural angle when he stood still.
‘Volga!’ called the Elder Statesman. ‘What do you think of this? This is a new pressure vessel from the States’—he indicated a twenty-foot erection on which clambered several visored and helmeted men—‘It’s got a quarter-inch hole in it, but not a soul in this country can fix a quarter-inch hole in cast aluminium—they have to fly out Yanks to do it from the firm that made it!’
Sure enough, the men on the vessel made the monotone drawling noises that denoted use of the American tongue. There was a confidence about them, the manner the English used to have. And these were only welders. Now and then they looked down at the watching natives. They were proud to be Americans and didn’t hesitate to show their pride, even if it meant not speaking to second-class citizens. After all, they were members of the club, they could only be easy with other Americans. The rest of the world were foreigners.
Volga got away long enough to go in to the amenities room and hide Blue Hills’ teeth, truss and arch supports in the Elder Statesman’s large gladstone bag, then made a sly phone call to the guards at the gate.
The Elder Statesman had dobbed him in to the screws—to Captain Bligh—for being off his plant when something went bang. It was true, but the Elder Statesman was in no danger of getting blamed so why put him in? Luckily, Volga had seen Captain Bligh tipping sample bottles full of gasoline into his car—parked near the plant—so the foreman didn’t want to know about Volga.
Volga had no trouble being a bastard and he’d never even had the benefit of Basics of Supervision.
BIG BROTHERS The Samurai was watching the aluminium welding. Some of the men who passed thumped him gently on the arm in rough affection. Everyone liked the Samurai, he was like the bigger boy in class, who shouldered the responsibility for other kids’ adventures and, if need be, stood up and swapped punches with the teacher. The men who thumped him playfully took care to move into his field of vision, though, before they showed their affection.
Even the Good Shepherd came by to watch the American welders. They worked fast, Americans had a name for having the finger out. The prisoners were grudgingly impressed. Only the Good Shepherd and the Samurai realized they worked fast because their system of payment was different from the Australians’: they were paid for the whole job. The sooner they got home, the sooner they earned more dollars. Australian welders were paid for their time; they saw to it their jobs took time. The Good Shepherd would have been more impressed if the vessel had been cast without the quarter-inch hole.
He was depressed. He knew the company should not do provocative and cruel things to the detainees under its control—the ban on books was absurd: it penalized the brighter prisoners—and yet he knew there must be a hierarchy of control in the camp and felt deeply that the equality that was supposed to exist between high and low was a dark, shadowy thing with no substance. His mind swam away from the clutches of these irritating thoughts as a tiny fish glides past the gently waving fronds of the anemone. Not into safety, but away from immediate danger.
A DEDICATED MAN The Great White Father called in at the wharf at six one morning, just the time the nit-keeper should have wakened those who were down. All were asleep. There was only one barge in and it was discharging steadily with three hours to go before it was empty. They had transgressed the unwritten law that you didn’t let yourself go to sleep while you were keeping nit for your mates, and they’d had a clancy. The Corpse had been about to have a shower before waking the others: he liked to clean up early and walk to the gate without waiting for the bus, to be out of the place at the earliest possible moment. It was a mile to the front gate. He had dozed off with the water running, there was water slopping everywhere.
This was not an important clancy except for the sleepers, who had water lapping round their rag beds on the concrete. The Gypsy Fiddler was doing a shift at the wharf—they spared him from the cracker st
art-up because someone had to make up the number at the wharf, they didn’t want men back on overtime. He’d never worked at the wharf before and he missed learning how to start his own unit, but it saved money. He woke thrashing sleepily about with his arms, splashing the water. Blue Hills was down there, too, exiled from the hateful cracking plant for the same reason. He’d never worked on the wharf before, so he had to be guided every step of the way. He received some of the cold splashes from the Fiddler’s waving arms. Blue Hills rarely spoke up for himself, so he was often sent away to other plants.
They looked up, wet, at the same moment.
‘I just work here for tucker money,’ said Blue Hills, stupidly. He’d been dreaming of a five day a week job.
‘We’re afloat!’ yelled the Fiddler, waking everyone. The Corpse was the last to come round. He had gone to sleep sitting in a chair: only his boots were under water.
‘She’s sinking!’ he roared, leaping for the door. They held him down so he wouldn’t go over the side of the wharf. Men did funny things if they were suddenly awakened.
The Great White Father looked around and told them how to get the water away so the next shift wouldn’t dob them in for the spill. He was organizing his system of look-outs for the Home Beautiful for the following week, but wisely decided to have no part of this lot.
The distant noise of the starting-up cracking plant beckoned him. He left the wharf and walked up the road towards the gas screaming in the forty-eight-inch lines, the shattering roar of banks of compressors and blasts of steam.
The Sumpsucker was on deck, pacing the concrete floor of the control room, hands clasped on his forehead, pushing down into his chest cage his small bald head on its retractile neck. He always had two T-shirts under his shirt; he let the bottom one rot off from inside, then put a fresh one on. That way, one was always warm. Decomposing, if you like, but warm.
The Father knew the Sumpsucker’s ambitions for a dustcoat. The company had recently cut out overtime payments for foremen; an operator with overtime got more cash. The white shirt made up the difference. The Father decided to use Sump as a lookout; the more he had on him now, the better.
‘It’s your turn on lookout.’
‘I was there last day shift.’
‘You’re there again this day shift.’
‘Chee!’ He was thinking.
‘You want club privileges?’
‘Yes, yes! I’ll do it! Who’s on today?’
‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice!’ He could have added that she had a new trick, but it wasn’t necessary. ‘Plenty of beer, too.’
‘As long as she’s there, you can have the beer.’
‘You’re a dedicated man.’
‘I don’t care who knows it!’ He was joyful, he would have a stop on the way home before he saw the widow. That would make two today, if he could get the widow to send her daughter up the shop for half an hour. He took no notice of her complaints that the backyard was full of black catalyst drums, stacked two deep. Higher than the fence. They stopped the grass growing, didn’t they?
THE BASIS OF OBEDIENCE The Good Shepherd saw the Great White Father from a distance. He knew he was not on shift today: he knew where he had come from, but was capable of turning his eyes away from little irregularities. A confrontation with the Great White Father was not always comfortable for a man who served an organization; the Great White Father could call on all the resources of his originality when he argued, but an officer of the company had to use borrowed words, and the cause for which Puroil would have a man lay down his integrity was usually long dead and putrid. He often wondered if his sense of loyalty was stronger than his personal faith in honesty, truth, purity and organized religion. Organization again. Was it a purer thing to serve your religion as God gave it to you personally or to uphold the tradition of your fathers? He wondered if he was as out of date as he sometimes felt in a world where one out of every two people on earth lived under rulers who openly condemned religion. It was a lonely feeling. His father had never known it.
At least he wasn’t on the lookout for the men’s badness and transgressions all the time, neither did he dob. But the thought of the Great White Father returned. Why did such a man continue to work here? Did he think every alternative as pointless as every other? Could he do without public respect as easily as he could do without God? He never displayed his financial power, yet it was said he was well off, much better off than the Puroil officers who mistook their continued dependence on the company for loyalty. But where was the place for a man who believed in the old things, God and good, sin and guilt and eternal life?
Once, when he went to see a man sick for weeks and was let in humbly—as if he were a bishop or a doctor—he was surprised at all the gadgets this family did without. That was how he put it to himself—did without. As if they had a choice. It was common enough in Sydney to have no sewerage—he had none himself—but this man and his wife had no sink in the kitchen. When he went down the back steps—he could have got the water in the bathroom, but didn’t like to open the shut door in case he embarrassed them—there was no washboiler even: only a fuel copper. He was surprised, too, at the weight of a water-bucket. Downstairs, he could smell the black tin in the little house down the yard.
As he looked in the kitchen at the sagging window and nail-scarred linoleum and the whole room not so clean as to make you praise poverty, he thought: I couldn’t live like this. But as he moved around helping and both smiling at his talk as if at jokes, he was surprised to find he was getting used to the place.
Only a step away, it was. And made a mental note not to say this to his wife, whose life balanced on the possession of every material thing as soon as it became available. Was he no better, for all his good intentions, than the most abject of the spit-lickers? Worse, was he loyal to a shadow and obedient to the shadows of shadows for no better reason than to maintain his wife’s gadget-differential over the poorer classes?
TINY DIFFERENCES The Great White Father was in his natural element. Wherever he went, clouds of witnesses gathered round him. Some worked. The start-up was proceeding. Few took it seriously. Only those standing up on the turbo-expander landing, putting one by one the machines into the system, rooted with fear and the terrible scream of the turbines to their action stations, their hands welded to the inlet valve winders, trembling on the butterfly valve that opened the discharge valve in one hit, waiting for the metal fragments to blast them all like shrapnel into infinite retirement.
‘We don’t want anyone neglecting Mum because of the Home Beautiful, so we have a suggestion from Pommy Bill here that we issue books of coupons to all married men,’ he announced.
Pommy Bill, a small cockney sparrow, stood flushed and pleased as the debate started. But just then a merry ex-Bomber Command pilot came up behind Pommy Bill, inserted a claw between his legs and grabbed joyfully and vigorously at his genital cluster.
‘Gotcha!’ he roared. Pommy Bill had his own private ascension.
‘Jesus!’ he screamed on the way down.
‘Christ!’ came the antiphonal from the faithful.
‘The same yesterday, today and forever!’ added Bomber Command solemnly.
‘Amen!’
The coupon motion lapsed with the arrival of Bomber Command who was a plant super. He was eager to get in with the Great White Father and enjoy the superior amenities of the Home Beautiful but he had not been given the invitation. He had a collection of bad photos, yet showing these round, which he did often, was not enough to gain him the acceptance of the mob. He persevered, the world could be conquered by goodwill. He wished they would continue with their previous conversation, but they didn’t.
‘Did you hear about the escapees?’ he asked. There had been another break at a State detention centre, one of those where men couldn’t bundy out each day.
‘They’ll be holed up in some warm spot by now,’ remarked the Great White Father. Bomber Command was relieved. Getting him to speak relaxed the mob, th
ey were more likely to tolerate his own presence.
‘How about some coffee?’ Bomber Command asked Loosehead, who was standing around hoping there was nothing to do. Loosehead was glad to go. He could hang around inside, out of the weather, safe from the foremen.
Loosehead brought the coffee, the Great White Father tasted it.
‘This isn’t coffee! Take it away!’ Loosehead took it, walked outside, three times round the amenities room and brought the same cup back.
‘Ah! That’s better. Why couldn’t you do this before?’
The Great White Father found himself loving smoke and heat, the metal of vessels, pipelines, pumps, valves. Because they were there and had, or seemed to have, an existence of their own. The fact that they were fabricated out of anonymous masses of mined metal and shared a common form with multitudes of similar manufactures, did not deter him from seeing something unique in each one. And if you looked you could find the tiny differences that made each one separate from its neighbours. It was comforting to find these differences. He would round his big warm hand over a piece of bare metal, feeling a wonderful affinity with it for no other reason than that it shared with him an existence on the planet he loved so well. In his earlier days at the refinery, he often slept sitting against a giant electric boiler feedwater pump, feeling that it was a large warm animal with comfortable sides. He imagined its vibrations to be purring.
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner Page 11