The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  He loved life, whatever shape it took, and was eager to extend the privilege of life to objects and creations not usually thought of as living. He could pick up a stone and ask it about the things it had seen in the millions of years since it was formed.

  A scuffle in the lavatory. Canada Dry and the Humdinger emerged dragging an overalled prisoner, a stranger.

  ‘Here he is! The man that pees purple!’ called the Humdinger.

  ‘Caught him in the act,’ said Canada Dry triumphantly.

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ said the Great White Father, striding in towards the stainless steel wall they peed against like dogs.

  ‘How can we fix him up?’ they asked, when the great man came back.

  ‘Fix him up? What do you mean fix him up?’ bellowed their leader. ‘If a doctor treats this man he’ll be different. Leave him alone. He’s magnificent! Purple pee. I’ve never seen the like! You come back whenever you like,’ he said to the man. They let him go. He ran out like a dog used to kicks. He wasn’t used to tolerance.

  THE FACE ON THE LAVATORY FLOOR ‘Phone for Terrazzo.’

  ‘Anyone seen Terrazzo?’

  ‘Probably in the shouse.’

  ‘With his pencil.’

  ‘Who’s Terrazzo?’

  ‘If he’s in the shouse, he’ll be sketching.’

  ‘The funny thing is,’ explained the Humdinger to the Great White Father, ‘every time he goes in he takes his notebook. Finds faces in the terrazzo floor. In the patterns of the little bits of stuff they gum together to make it.’

  ‘Is he looking for one particular face?’

  ‘Hey! That’s a thought! The lost face on the shouse floor!’

  Terrazzo approached, worried.

  ‘Lost it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The spitting image of the Colonel. You know, up in the pay office. The one that called the Whispering Baritone a male whore. Probably never find it now. I had a girl’s face there once, the most beautiful face I ever seen. You think I can find it? Say, are you the Great White Father?’

  ‘Yes, that’s him!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t drink Loosehead’s coffee.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘After he cooked his frankfurts in the urn, he boiled up his socks.’

  ‘Too late now,’ said the Great White Father, making a face. ‘Answer the phone, you might have won the lottery.’

  He hadn’t. One of the clowns had rung Dial-a-Prayer and Terrazzo listened, stunned, to ‘…all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.’

  BIRD-LOVERS ‘Did you see in the local rag,’ said the Great White Father, ‘where some poor lame devil applied for a job and the Garfish said, “We’re not employing any bloody cripples here.”’

  ‘Wouldn’t put it past him,’ said Canada Dry. ‘Some of our blokes are worse than any Wop-whippers, boong-bashers or Kaffir-kickers!’

  ‘Who wants to buy some racing pigeons? Nice pets for the kids,’ asked the Western Salesman, seeing a profit in the crowd.

  ‘Don’t buy ’em,’ advised Canada Dry and the Western Salesman thumped him playfully. He would like to have been admitted to the privileged circle of those who thumped the Samurai, but he never made it. His eagerness for overtime and promotion cruelled him.

  ‘You’re spoiling my pitch!’

  ‘They fly back home to his place!’

  ‘Shut up! Let ’em buy if they want to!’

  The Western Salesman would have sold pigeons to his own mother, knowing they would fly home to his coops the minute they were let out.

  ‘Did I tell you about last Sunday morning at the flats?’ asked Bubbles, taking out his lighter to smoke a cigarette. Bubbles was a contraction of Bubble-guts; it referred to his impressive chest which he carried low, and the unkind called a brewer’s goitre. ‘Out the back Sunday morning in the sun minding my own business and all of a sudden this count appears with an old army rifle on full cock, waving it about. “Was you whistling at my wife?” he yells. “No,” I said and it was the truth. I was watching her though. She weeds the garden every weekend, always bending right over in these little skimpy shorts; everyone’s on her. He goes raving round asking all the single blokes, but it turns out two old people have a canary and it was whistling. He poked the rifle at the cage and blew the canary to bits. Lucky the windows were open and the doors; the bullet went right through the house without breaking anything. He didn’t even apologize to the old people for shooting the bird and they were too scared to say anything. Feathers everywhere.’

  ‘Did the bullet hit anything on the other side of the house when it went through?’ asked the Great White Father.

  ‘Only the bakery wall,’ answered Bubbles righteously. ‘In the afternoon the same bloke took a few of us up the Leagues Club—I didn’t take the car, I knew I’d get tanked—and we were choofing along Highway One about forty-five or fifty when all of a sudden we see this wheel going past. Just slowly, as if it only wanted to overtake. “Somebody’s lost a wheel!” this joker yells and he doubles up laughing at the stupid wheel sailing along with every now and then a little bump over the seams of the concrete. You shoulda seen the oncoming cars scatter. The wheel finished up in the showroom of one of the big car saleyards. It cleared the traffic, bounced over the gutter, hurdled the ornamental garden and through the plate glass. It was Sunday and no one came out to see who belonged to the wheel. We got to the club and it wasn’t till we turned in to the car park and slowed down that the car heeled over on one side. It was our wheel. The car was so evenly balanced with our weight it didn’t tip over till we turned sharply.’

  ‘Did you get the wheel back?’

  ‘Not a chance. He wasn’t game to go back for it. He put the spare on. We waited for him inside. You should have heard him laugh when we left him. He was still laughing when he got inside for a beer.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ said the Great White Father, ‘of a time I was in bed with the wife of a friend of mine, when all of a sudden, just on the vinegar stroke, I heard her husband’s car come up the drive.’ He had their attention. ‘My luck held. His nearside front wheel came off just as he put the brake on. He changed the wheel then and there and I had time to have a shower and get dressed and wait outside the bedroom window for him to come inside so he wouldn’t see me leaving. What do you think he did? I was still outside the window when he raced right in—she was still naked in bed—threw the covers off her and started to kiss passionately what I’d just left. He thought she was waiting naked for him and it inflamed him. You should see him go to town! Tied in knots on the bed, wriggling like snakes, sweaty skins slapping and sticking. I had to leave.’

  STONE WALLS Far off, a sound of singing. Some clear voice lifted itself from its prison floor and overcame all barriers to dance out on the moveless air of the control room. High and tremulous were its top notes, full-throated its descent into the lower registers. It was a moment of beauty. Even the few working stopped to listen.

  ‘Hullo,’ remarked the Sumpsucker. ‘Humdinger’s singing. He must be on the throne.’

  ‘Let’s wish him a long reign,’ murmured the Great White Father loyally, and brushed dust from the Puroil 1852 poster fixed to the wall with Puroil resin. Each time someone took it down another appeared. The resin was so good the concrete had to be chipped away to get the notice off. Luckily it was diluted by the paint makers who used it. It was so tough that undiluted it would have lasted a thousand years. No paint maker wanted that.

  Our friend the moon, with no blood staining her image yet, rode high in the daytime sky. Men looked up and wondered at her white laughter.

  VIEW FROM THE TOP Unfortunately for this pleasant group of prisoners the start-up work was proceeding and the Sumpsucker wanted to get near his control panel and had to screw up courage to ask them to move away. Naturally they refused. He went away and came back with Stillsons, who pleaded with them to hol
d their conference somewhere else. He had no other or higher members of the hierarchy to back him up, so they grabbed him and locked him in his office.

  When the Humdinger came back he said, ‘Want to see my flower arrangements?’ and disappeared behind the control panel. Presently, from a round hole left vacant by an instrument scrapped before it could be used, came a large stalk. Loosehead was mystified, but grabbed it and pulled.

  ‘Let go!’ yelled a voice urgently.

  ‘I can’t understand it,’ said Loosehead to an appreciative audience. ‘It’s wilting, yet there’s still sap in it.’

  ‘You boys have the wind in your tails today,’ said the Great White Father approvingly, but their get-together was spoiled by a crowd of visitors stumbling through the door. Loosehead let go. A roar of disappointment came from the tea-drenched throats of the prisoners, who stood round gaping at the neatly dressed prisoners out on a holiday from other detention centres. They couldn’t resist glancing in at the men peeing up against the stainless steel. The lavatory was on view to all who came in the door. The Spotted Trout led them in, they trotted along behind him as he waved casually at the few hundred instruments on the control panel, then took them along to look at the one-way radio system no one used. Since the man on the job couldn’t send a message back, no one knew if he received the call or not. For the operators it was quite satisfactory, unless they were being warned something was about to blow up. The visitors gaped and laughed when the Trout brought out his usual joke.

  ‘We have this sort of communication system so we can tell the operators what to do and they can’t answer back.’

  ‘That’s why we scrapped it, son!’ called the Great White Father. The Spotted Trout had no answer. No one told him the radio didn’t work: the Section Heads made noises of agreement when he referred to it. It was the only thing he understood about the plant.

  The visitors didn’t even snigger at the discomfiture of the Trout. Since they were in their suits and ties and best shoes, and the working prisoners in overalls, they had that glorious holiday feeling of freedom so rare in the life of an industrial detainee, though they wore that insignificant look men get when they’re dressed alike. As soon as they had looked at the defunct radio and perhaps at the television screen showing the condition of the gas flare they would go out to the main reactor structure and ascend two hundred feet in the lift cage, get out on the swaying landings and be pleasantly giddy looking at the view from the top.

  It wasn’t to be. A cloud of hydrogen-sulphide gas blew from the gas-treating plant; the Congo Kid was draining a tank and had opened a valve wide; he had the wind behind him and was quite safe. In concentrations of over a thousand parts a million this gas was odourless and fatal almost immediately, but luckily the concentration was much less and the rotten-egg smell much greater and thirty-five visitors and one guide were sick on the gravel outside the control room. All the operators had tossed their stew at one time or another, they had no sympathy for the visitors. Some even laughed. The Trout bundled them on to the company bus as soon as he pulled himself together, and got them out of there, apologizing. As they left, Stillsons was awkwardly emerging from one of the metal-framed windows, covered in greasy dust from desk tops and sills. Despite their collective sickness, the visitors stared from the bus windows, fascinated. They were even more fascinated later when they looked at the money in their pockets. The gas was so penetrating it tarnished all their silver brown.

  CHEAP AT HALF THE PRICE Bomber Command, waving books of tickets, entered from the southern end, making a noise some distance away as you do with animals to let them get used to your approach. But they saw the tickets and were enraged.

  ‘Men, I’ve come to liberate you!’

  ‘Toss the bugger out!’

  ‘Beat it!’ His familiarity made them contemptuous.

  ‘What’s he selling?’

  ‘What’re you selling?’

  ‘For the price of a few cents a week, we can all have a ticket in hope. There’s money to be won, one chance in twenty and the extra chance of a jackpot. Dob in, men! Liberate yourselves from the hopelessness of working for a living. Buy a ticket in sunshine and sport and twelve months holiday a year.’

  ‘He’s selling freedom. I’ll take one.’

  But not all the men parted with their cents. Many of these gallant prisoners, detained as soon as they were freed from school-prisons and conscious always of the tremendous debt they owed the country of their birth, kept their heads and did not go about wasting their substance in riotous living in a spirit of despair or irresponsible hope. Some, indeed, had never spent a penny in anger.

  THE HOLLOW MAN ‘Hey, Far Away! You got a job?’ The Glass Canoe had gone out on the job for once and now was back in the control room, covered with the golden stains of slurry oil. The pump seals were bad, there were leaks everywhere, waxy oil was inches deep on the concrete. The palms of his hands were black with grease. Whoever was on the cleaning roster wasn’t game to chip him about the stains he trod into the floor.

  ‘Yes, over on the reactor. Won’t be long.’

  ‘That’s all right, don’t hurry back.’

  ‘Won’t be long.’ Eager to get away.

  ‘Don’t hurry back: hurry both ways!’ roared the Glass Canoe for the benefit of the bystanders who sniggered uneasily, putting themselves on side with the bigger man.

  ‘You bastards tell me if he pisses in there with us. I don’t want the jack.’

  Far Away shot out the door, propelled by the venom in the voice of the Glass Canoe, whose arms hung down, slightly bowed, from his great shoulders. His brain teemed with the echoing, strident voices of the men he imagined himself to be. He glanced round the mob faces confidently, not seeing them. He didn’t know what he would do next.

  The sheen was bright on his forehead, the skin tight on his face. He grinned. There was no health in him.

  A FIRST INJECTION ‘This little talk is designed to assist you at the present stage of your training.’

  Luxaflex had called up the Sumpsucker for a first shot of Puroil serum. A foreman at last.

  ‘Your progress depends on many things.’ The word progress was meat and drink to the Sumpsucker, though once he was a foreman where could he go? The next level called for degree men. ‘Among which is the ability to get things done. To do this you need, among other things: Knowledge, Energy, the Right Attitude! To help you gain number one, you have to rely on yourself in on-the-job training. Learn as much as you can, it’s no weight to carry. Numbers two and three, I recommend the Basics of Supervision, paragraphs 1011 to 1271 and 14001 to 14090, and the Staff Guide, and put into daily practice the advice and instructions you find there.’

  Suddenly Luxaflex broke off. ‘I didn’t employ you, did I?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ The Sumpsucker was lost. Was this a threat? Did he know about the widow? Or his penial disability?

  ‘I mean when you first came here to the Refinery.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Luxaflex was relieved. The man’s singlets, peeping out brownly under the V of his open-necked shirt, bothered him. I wouldn’t have employed a man like this, he told himself. He felt powerful, niched in his personnel job. You didn’t have to be an accounting expert; you didn’t have to have technical knowledge, yet you had a say in who went into what jobs, if you said yes or no when you were told to. He would just last out till sixty; young graduates were yapping at his heels, but he’d hold them off for the six years with his excellent grasp of the complicated ins and outs of Puroil procedure, a grasp it had taken him thirty years to acquire. They couldn’t possibly do it in six.

  ‘Remember, when you’re handling men, be consistently courteous and businesslike. If you can make the bodies who come under your control feel the job they are doing is important and appreciated by you, you will be well on the way to getting the best out of them.’

  He was proud of that sentence. It gave him a feeling of fulfilment. Like seeing his function list
ed half-way up the genealogy chart above his head. The trunk of the tree started below his line; he was just above ground. Below him the tree put its roots down into the soil. Beneath the bottom line, unmentioned, was the dense subsoil of operators, clerks, fitters, drivers, draughtsmen, storemen, machine operators, cleaners. He never allowed himself to dwell on the feeling that assailed him when he was off-guard: of being a helpless minor executive in a tiny branch of a vast company more powerful than governments; caught between the vicious, wanton, ungrateful pressure upward of labour, and the grinding pressure downward of the juggernaut called shareholders and capital and successive boards of directors reaching upwards and beyond in an Everest perspective to the ultimate World Board of seven.

  He was proud of his methods of selection of job applicants. A good man is so in tune with company policy that he can rely on a sort of instinct. But he couldn’t guarantee Sumpy’s success. It was up to the individual to learn how to get in the queue to pass the buck and keep his mouth shut, waiting for others to make mistakes.

  ‘Another thing,’ he went on with no sense of transition, ‘you must be a bastard! I remember when I first had my foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.’ It was now on the second, miles of ladder towered above his head, though he was on an eminence Sumpy could never reach. ‘We had some high brass coming to visit. The men in my section were good, they did their work perfectly. The OIC of my department came round to inspect and I didn’t bawl the men out for anything, so he bawled me out. “You’re too soft!” he said. “Not fit to command!” “But there’s nothing wrong with their work. It’s perfect,” I said. “You must be a bastard!” he repeated with great emphasis, and I’ve never forgotten that lesson. With a little effort you can always find something wrong.’

  ‘But,’ said the Sumpsucker, and got no further. Something didn’t fit.