The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  But the Python’s eyes were clear and bright. ‘No.’ And watched the man’s face crumple and fall like the face of a man scalped, watched his body sag and shuffle out the door. The Python’s eyes relished the sight.

  Then he did a curious thing. From his pocket he drew a slip of paper on which he had written a passage from a French novel his daughter Nathalie had bought. He thought the book must have been written by someone very much like himself. Very softly he read, ‘When the living get careless and come too near, I attack immediately their weak spot, the delicate unprotected fissure which pulses with life. I sink my teeth, the needle teeth of my intuition, into their warm flesh and soon I feel flowing from them the liquid that contains their nourishing life. It runs over my skin like water over dry sand and sinks immediately without trace. After a while all that remains of their warm and cheerful bodies is a heap of bloodless skin.’

  He hummed a contented sigh. His tiny eyes glittered in the mottled, shiny skin of his face, and right round his head, from one ear to the other, reached his tight-lipped but cheerful grin. He sat perfectly still.

  7

  MEN WITHOUT QUALITIES

  IMPROVISING Whistle Cock had more important work to do. He hurriedly adjusted the oil level in his interceptor, the oil-catching pit designed to stop oil getting into Eel River. Impatiently he added a half brick to the three bricks sitting one on top of the other, which propped up the long-handled shovel which supported the rusty pick-head which adjusted the height of the oil skimmer. Using equipment like this was like using a child’s toy pedal-car to drive ten miles to work. The thing had been broken for years, but there was no money to spare for things like this: The Whispering Baritone’s new extensions to the Termitary gardens came first.

  Whistle Cock had suffered an accident west of Alice Springs seven years before: several wild Pintubis found him dazed in the desert sun when a front wheel came off his car. They gave him shade and shelter for three weeks while his gashes healed and bruises faded and during that time he found out about what he crudely took to be the traditional Aboriginal method of contraception. He was so grateful to the blackfellows and so taken with this discovery that he persuaded two of the least reverent of them to perform the painful operation on his own member. He used this operation often as the starting point of many of his conversations with women, as a persuader when women were obviously morally concerned about the risk they ran of conception.

  He finished his makeshift job and sloped off to label the beer. Beer cans taken on to the job had to be properly re-labelled as soft drink; a rule made by the Great White Father so that foremen would not be embarrassed by the sight of the real thing and the men could enjoy their proper diet even on the plant. The Great White Father was negotiating with a backyard printer to put glue on the labels so all Whistle Cock would have to do was wet them and slap them on. At present he applied glue by brush. He went to the river bank, just outside the high wire fence, taking his glue pot and brush, and squatting in the shade of an old termite-ridden acacia on the bank, did his work on the cans, carton by carton. He took his working tools back and hid them in his locker, returned to carry the cartons up to the plant to be hidden in the ceiling of the amenities.

  Next he brought out a gallon tin of turpentine and a long stick with a rag end. He left this equipment down on the river bank, the Volga Boatman would ferry it back; it was for the bands of wild dogs that occasionally committed a nuisance near the Home Beautiful. The dog laws had made them outlaws. The Great White Father didn’t like using it, but if the barking of the dogs interrupted conversation, got the girls on edge and threatened to draw attention to the Home Beautiful, he would race out with the best of them, joyfully dabbing each dog’s anus with the turps. This treatment was sufficient to take the dogs miles away, barking and howling and missing their footing in their earnest attempts to leave the sting behind. Their anuses maintained the usual distance behind, but the dogs always tried to run faster, just in case.

  He punctured the can with the pig-stabber end of his pocket knife, swallowed the beer and hoyed the empty can far out into the water. It made only a little splash; no more than a seagull peeing in the ocean.

  Round the nearest bend in the river came the Volga Boatman ferrying the Murray Cod over to the Home Beautiful. He pulled in to Whistle Cock’s side of the river to pick up the turps and the applicator.

  ‘Who’s on?’ said Whistle Cock.

  ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice,’ said the Cod with lust.

  ‘He wants a marriage every time he comes,’ said Volga.

  ‘I want value for money and I want co-operation. I don’t expect to bunk with logs of wood. I don’t care how many notes she makes in her little blue book.’

  ‘You don’t think you’ll give her a new sensation, do you? Anyway I didn’t make up the marriage bit. The girls reckon that about you,’ said Volga.

  ‘Do they? I don’t care. I’m paying and I’ll have it my way. Which one said that?’

  ‘All.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You coming?’ Volga asked Whistle Cock. ‘She likes you.’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘We could fit you in before the Cod here.’ Trying to get the Murray Cod to bite.

  ‘No you won’t.’ The Cod came in. ‘I’m first.’

  ‘Listen, Cod,’ said Volga, ‘the first was such a long time ago even she doesn’t remember.’

  ‘I mean first this morning.’

  ‘She probably did a job on her way to work.’

  ‘Some poor coot dragged off into the bushes,’ chimed in Whistle Cock.

  ‘What you want is virgins, Cod,’ said Volga unkindly.

  ‘Come on, Volga,’ pleaded the Cod. ‘I’ve got a barge pumping. I’ve got to be back inside an hour.’

  The Volga Boatman pushed off across the black water and dipped his gleaming oars effortlessly into the slime.

  A MAN WITH DRIVE The Glass Canoe was his anxious assertive self again. He was suffering a recurrence of the feeling that he must become something more definite than himself. He buttonholed the Samurai because he wanted someone to talk to who would treat his questions seriously.

  There was a dream in his head, always only slightly out of shape, that could have been a bridge between his great body and the place in the world that was really his. It was never exactly in that position between him and this rightful place so that he could step on it confident it would bear his weight. For if he fell. He was so vulnerable. He didn’t want to step off into air. You have to be sure the ground underfoot is solid. Lately he had gone overboard about the new plant, surrounding himself with flow diagrams and product schedules.

  ‘What are you hoping for?’ asked the Samurai as kindly as he could. ‘A dustcoat?’

  ‘Hope?’ beefed the Glass Canoe. ‘Who cares about hope while he’s got two hands and a quick brain? What you want out of life? First prize in the lottery? No prizes. If you work, you’ll eat. And with a full stomach what else do you want?’

  ‘You’ve gone off the track a bit, haven’t you? I’m talking about all this guff.’ Indicating the carpet of plans and diagrams.

  ‘Eh? Oh. You’ve got to keep at it, get right into the study of new plants. The company’s forging ahead, we should forge ahead with them. Their progress is our progress.’ The man was sick.

  ‘What progress? This isn’t progress. This is change. Change is a law of life. Move or perish. Every change you make involves loss as well as gain.’

  ‘I can’t help that. A man can go ahead with Puroil.’ He looked down for confirmation at the broad fingers of his brown hands. They shouted approval. He knew he was right.

  ‘Loss as well as gain,’ the Samurai repeated, ‘and probably in equal parts.’

  ‘Ah, bulls’ pizzles. That’s got nothing to do with me.’

  The Glass Canoe turned back blindly to his flows and pressures, reflux rates and temperature controls. One by one he understood them all, but together they grew confusing. Too much. The plant
was so rational on paper. And so clean. It didn’t matter to him that the Samurai had to watch his plant and water-drain his vessels and bring his systems up to pressure while he sat inside reading. The foremen were weak and never chipped the Glass Canoe. He might do anything. The Samurai would never complain to a staff person about a fellow prisoner. The Glass Canoe had them by the short hairs.

  The place was full of personnel, the Samurai reflected, and short on men.

  A SCRAP OF PAPER He had come through the fractionating section, his boots carried the golden stains of slurry oil all over the floor. No detergent could touch it. Blue Hills walked in.

  ‘I’m going for a hard hit,’ he said, passing the Samurai.

  ‘Did you get your day job?’

  ‘No. That bloody Python.’

  ‘Why didn’t you see the Good Shepherd first? The Python’ll never give you what you ask for. The way to get him to come good is make out you’re happy on shift and hate day work. Then he’ll break his neck getting you on day work. Like in the Army, remember? You put what you don’t want as your first choice and what you do want you put second. They never give you your first choice.’

  ‘I’m too tired of the place for all that. I just say my piece and that’s that. Bugger ’em.’

  The Samurai said nothing. Blue Hills went inside, then came back.

  ‘What is it makes these nobs so much better than us? Why do we have to take what they dish out all the time?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, Blue,’ said the Samurai quietly. ‘They’re given a little piece of paper. On this paper it says their name and Process Superintendent, or Suction Head, or Chief Assistant Technologist (Advising). Without that slip of paper, they’re nothing. That paper’s their life. And it’s only good inside the blue gates. Outside the blue gates you can spit on them, because out in the world they’re nothing. Just as much crap as we are. If they had no slip of paper you could spit on them here, too. Like they do on us and we do on each other.’

  Blue Hills walked back inside for his hard hit and on the way called in to the amenities, filled the urn, turned the power to full and spat in the urn just for the sake of equality. The Samurai’s words didn’t reach Blue Hills; if he ever got savage, it would be with his fellow prisoners, not the higher members of the authority-pyramid.

  The Samurai saw him spit in the urn, but still wondered what he could do to help Blue Hills’ transfer to day work. He was human, though, and often had no solution for problems that cropped up. He did his few strokes of work on the Glass Canoe’s plant and moved on to the others for which he had responsibility.

  The world is dead, he thought, moving among the inert metal of pumps and lines and distillation columns, over the concrete apron on which the plants were constructed, over gravel brought from the Prospect quarries. It is a world of age-old stones—picking up a piece of gravel in which glinted minerals unknown to him—of basalt chipped from mountains ages ago, lying around on roads, lying under hills waiting to be plundered. And laughing at humans. These dead rocks were all of them older than the human race which trod them. Each fragment had an immortality. Humans rotted away into the soil in an instant of time.

  What was the power he had that enabled him to lift this fragment of eternity in his hand and decide where to throw it? What had been breathed into his fragile dust that seemed for his instant of life to mock the inertia of rock? Was his own existence supported by a paper warrant somewhere?

  He drew back from following these thoughts. There was a power in him, or rather a power came to him that made him stronger than he needed to be. A power that blew up certain feelings to an enormous size, a secret power. Was he so different from the men around him? What was the mission he had been born to perform?

  He deliberately relaxed. As he looked about him with a new mood the whole world filled with love. Even the dirt underfoot was sympathetic and grateful. He could love these random stones, these heaps of inert, formed metal so far now from where they were mined. He could love the soil itself and everything that was. He needed, at that moment, no written justification of his existence.

  In the control room the Western Salesman spotted the slurry stains and wanted to know what bastard tramped the oil in.

  ‘They don’t give a stuff that others have to clean up their mess!’ he raved. It was his turn to clean up. He was still raving about it when weird noises were coming from his plant, still going to town on Blue Hills whom he had tracked in to the lavatory, while his own plant subsided and died outside. ‘My name’s up there on the roster. I’ll get the kick up the arse for those stains!’ There was no kick for a crashed plant. No one could know whose fault that was. It was all so complicated it was impossible to trace.

  THE IMMORTALITY OF SPARROWS When he was seventeen Disneyland had his car paid off. The Samurai was disgusted.

  ‘What’s a kid that age doing shift work for? He should be out with his mates or playing a bit of sport or taking young sheilas out. The money should have gone on his education. Look at him.’

  True, he was a nong, but according to democratic principles he had an inalienable right to be a nong. The Humdinger ran him round the Refinery to get him set for the Stawell Gift; had him walking across tank compounds up to his thighs in stinking black mud to help his muscles develop. It was just as good as running through soft sand on the beach or wading in the surf, the Humdinger assured him. And you got paid while you trained.

  He got his name from the fact that America was the only country he had heard of and it was his ambition to go some day to Disneyland, its capital. He started as a sample boy at fifteen on shift work, working Saturday and Sunday three weeks out of four. He had never known sport. At twenty he was on adult rates.

  ‘I’ll show you how to hypnotize someone.’ The Humdinger stood close behind him, put his arms round Disneyland’s chest and squeezed in time to his breathing.

  ‘Breathe in and out as fast as you like.’ Disneyland blacked out after a dozen breaths. He slumped suddenly and the Humdinger lowered him to the floor. He made a fool of him but wouldn’t injure the boy.

  ‘They reckon an African scientist has found a way to double your life span.’ Humdinger said once.

  ‘What is it?’ Disneyland was in. It was too easy.

  ‘Eat sparrows.’

  ‘Those little birds in the yard?’

  ‘Spags. Little brown sparrows. There’s something in their intestinal tract makes them live forever.’

  ‘Go on.’ Faint, uncertain derision.

  ‘You ever seen a dead sparrow?’

  ‘I’ve shot ’em with my BB gun when I was young.’

  ‘I mean just dead. Natural causes. Old age.’

  ‘No. Come to think of it, I haven’t.’

  ‘There you are!’

  The Humdinger got him all set to buy another BB gun and make catapults to slaughter sparrows.

  ‘Half a dozen a day will do. But you have to roast the whole bird. Guts and all.’

  ‘Feathers?’

  ‘Feathers, too.’

  Disneyland went on a sparrow diet. His mother was waiting for the Humdinger one day outside the blue gates to have a piece of him.

  ‘She was just as silly,’ he said contentedly as he opened a re-labelled can in the Home Beautiful. ‘I convinced her the whole thing was ridge! She went away thinking up recipes, how to get some variety into roast sparrow. I oughta been a salesman.’

  The sparrow diet didn’t stop until Disneyland’s father got out of Long Bay gaol. He threw his first sparrow meal out into the street; plates, saucepans, the lot. He had been in for desertion and non-payment of maintenance. How he could remedy this in gaol was not explained. They never saw him again.

  The whole shift followed the Humdinger’s lead. They had Disneyland jumping off ladders on their promises to catch him, and when they let him thud to the ground said, ‘Never trust anyone.’ Or, ‘Put your hands down by your side’, then hit him in the belly. ‘Don’t trust a living soul,’ they said piously and went
away laughing. Disneyland seemed to accept it all as part of being at work. He did nothing else.

  But it was fatal to be kind to him. When the Samurai went out of his way to help him with a little plant knowledge, Disneyland rubbished him. He thought he had come across someone weaker than himself. The Humdinger smiled as if to say, ‘It’s no use pitying this one’, and persuaded Disneyland that the girls would go for him if he had a scar.

  ‘Over the eyebrow, I think. Yes. Just work a blade over the skin there and before it heals up, open it again. Keep at it and you’ll get a nice fat scar. Show the girls you’ve been in a few fights. They like that.’

  Next day he came in with a great dressing over his eye, borrowed an old razor blade and opened up the two-inch cut. ‘It doesn’t hurt a bit,’ he said and they believed him.

  A MENTAL SYRUP Ambrose was a different type of fool. Aware of more of the world but his failing was that he took as gospel the first thing he was told. He had been carefully nurtured in religious surroundings and never got over it. Some sanctified joker persuaded him to stand for election as leader of his church youth group and since no one else wanted the post, Ambrose got it. After that, he saw all situations as basic repetitions of church youth situations. He wouldn’t tell a lie himself, but believed every one he heard. There were no corrections of first impressions with Ambrose.

  Every newspaper comment, every joke and leg-pull were alike God’s truth to him. One of the secrets of his certainty and composure was to be found in his habit of taking the tone of voice of the person talking to him as the substance of what was said. The Humdinger and even the Two Pot Screamer could be talking earnestly and kindly to him and interlarding their normal speech with the grossest insults: Ambrose heard the tone of voice, not the words.

  He’d gone up to Surfers’ Paradise with a few friends and their girls and came back married to one of the girls. The prisoners laughed at him.