So Ambrose painted the door in the rain before he took another turn at the warm delights inside. He painted faithfully but not well. The light was understandably bad but he didn’t appeal against it. He didn’t even ask what those two men were doing standing in the rain outside the bed hut, leaning up against the corrugated-iron wall. The Great White Father knew the force for Ambrose of the feeling that he was doing his bit for the common good, and let him have his head. When his turn came and Never on Sunday was on, he would approach her holding his head erect like a sturdy workman who has done a good job, bent on enjoying her facilities with a good conscience.
He wouldn’t have made head or tail of her recital of domestic plans. ‘Another yard of carpet,’ she’d say, or linoleum, or new cupboards, or shoes for the kids, or a bedroom suite. Ambrose didn’t think about what a married woman was doing at the Home Beautiful. For an extra dollar she’d tell his horoscope by the way it felt.
8
MATES
SHE’LL BE RIGHT, MATE The cracker was up again, with waxy distillate pouring in one end and high-grade gasoline flowing from the other; a seven-hundred-ton inventory of catalyst being circulated to reactor and stripper then regenerated merrily in the regenerator fire and the carbon-monoxide from the regeneration process burned in the twin power-recovery boilers and driving turbo-expanders to provide air for the regenerator and for the boilers. After four hours one of the boiler tubes ruptured, putting water into the fire space. The water expanded to steam, the header pressure rose like a rocket, the turbines had to be manually tripped before they blew to pieces, and the plant crashed. Black catalyst through the system, through the turbines—blades and bearings—on the ground, over the suburbs, everywhere.
They’d had to rush several of the boiler tube tests the week before; the tests seemed to bank up on to Saturday morning, the experts took their weekend off and the only engineer left had to take his wife shopping. The remaining tests were cancelled.
‘She’ll be right,’ was the controller’s answer to the Samurai’s questions. ‘They’re engineers, we’re not. You don’t have to worry. Just start her up and collect your pay at the end of the week.’
Three days later the boiler tubes had cooled; two days after that the manways were off and the boiler tube bundles down on the deck. Another two days brought a report from the metallurgists: the wrong metal. The tubes were stacked to one side to wait for the scrap merchant and new tubes ordered.
This was one crash they couldn’t pin on the operators.
WHERE THE WOMEN SAY YES Dadda was in the control room when the boiler tube ruptured; he was the first to see the header pressure rising and the first to press the cancelling buttons on the high speed alarms of the turbo-expanders. He got out of the way, of course, when the panic started: he had a few other matters to think of.
His wife had been changing her pants at work and Dadda found out. He cursed her and the man who had taken his place in her body, and cursed, too, the silence of all the people at the office where she worked. Surely enough people knew about it for someone to spare a phone call and tip him off months ago. The pain was no less if it was deferred. He only intended to go and talk to both of them, but his wife was very nasty about him finding out and one thing led to another; he found himself on a footpath around five o’clock in a back lane starting to swap a few excited punches with the man—who was bigger than Dadda and better dressed—when his wife stepped in to help the other man and collected Dadda’s elbow on the side of the head and went down in a heap. Her head hit the edge of the gutter and that was that.
As the concrete stopped the fall of her body, her pretty dress fell above her waist and the two males stood looking down at the root cause of their differences.
The other man got very worried, he was only along for the ride. I never intended to let it go on so long, he said. I’ve got my wife to think of and the kids. What about your job, too? asked Dadda, who despised him for not loving her. Yes, my job too, the man said, the company doesn’t like anyone to give the place a bad name. Listen, the man said, how about we both shut up and beat it? It wasn’t your fault and there’s no marks on her. They can ask us both questions, but we were never here. Were we? Dadda was so miserable by this time that he said no, we weren’t here. They both left, going different ways and the woman had only stray dogs for company till a milkman found her. By then she had been assaulted by a middle-aged bachelor shy of live girls.
Dadda made his way to the Home Beautiful, where the Great White Father was putting down stone paths and garden borders and better drains for the various types of liquid effluent from the huts.
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Dadda.
‘If you feel like it,’ said the Great White Father. ‘But don’t wear yourself out. We want you for the talent quest up at the pub tonight.’
‘What’s it worth?’
‘Two hundred dollars and the boys’ll be backing you to win. How’s the cracker plant? Right down?’
‘The works. See the smoke? We put the rest of the refinery down, too. Boilers and all.’
‘Smoke, yes, and catalyst.’
‘Lucky the wind was south-east. Lucky for you.’
It was a break, getting away from that stinking place to the Home Beautiful where any little thing you did was for yourself and the boys, and you could see it. It wasn’t for some rich bastards the other side of the world. And the only women in the place always said Yes. As he walked inside, the sun lowered itself heavily on to its western bed.
The police came for Dadda later that night. The usual phone call was made from the guardhouse and every plant alerted. Police were not allowed past the gate, but the bun-truck was sent down to the cracker for Dadda.
The driver had a few cups of tea while he waited in the unproductive silence for the prisoners to come back from every part of the plant where it was likely a man would hide. No Dadda. The driver left and reported back; various foremen and controllers and even Suction Heads came down, but not even a great increase in supervision made any difference to the job of finding Dadda.
A man detached himself from a work party shutting valves, darted down over the nearest clay embankment and was unsighted for an hour. He headed for the river.
A CONTRAST Two men who spoke no English were working high up on the tenth landing of the prototype vertical boiler when the tube burst. They went over the side carrying a heavy metal tool-box between them. They didn’t touch the rungs of the vertical ladders on the way down and when their four feet hit the concrete apron at ground level they ran, the box between them, for several hundred feet. The rumbling stopped. They broke step and walked, looking back. The rumbling and shaking started again, soot, smoke and flame spread heavily from the stack, and they ran on. They headed for the river and were never seen again. Their sponsors, an Italian construction company, waited vainly for them to come back and pay off their passage money plus the debt they owed for the privilege of working, but in the end had to take their names off the books.
Rumours of a primitive hut in another part of the mangroves sometimes filtered through to the pleasant atmosphere of the Home Beautiful, but as the reports were brought by men dazed and wandering in drink, no one took notice.
By contrast the Count, an Englishman of impeccable and ridiculous appearance, was still standing on the third landing taking pressure-tapping readings while the boiler rocked and rumbled and its guts fell down inside. An hour later, when all was still and everything going had been tripped out, he was collecting samples of flue gas from the stack and giving it the standard Orsat test for carbon-dioxide, carbon-monoxide and oxygen. He was surprised at the high oxygen content and rushed in to the foreman with the test results as if he’d made a discovery.
‘What do you want? A Nobel prize? Get out, you stupid bastard,’ said Captain Bligh. ‘Do you have to see a notice on the board before you know it’s crashed?’
LEADERS OF THE COUNTRY The Glass Canoe was still bent over plant manuals and flow diagra
ms up till the time of the latest crash. He seemed to be bewildered in the days following the break in Puroil profits, and when it was known the boiler tubes were made of the wrong metal he didn’t seem able to take it in. As a relief to his feelings he took to long bouts of talking, with and without audience. The other prisoners would move near him now and then to see what he was talking about, but there never seemed to be any subject to his monologue.
‘There’s no need for this sort of thing; these men are trained for years, they know more than us, they’re bent over books and calculus and things we’ve never heard of while we’re out cat-shagging around and learning to get on the piss and even back in infants’ school they start to get training to be leaders of the country. If you ever think you can do better than qualified men, I’ll warn you: don’t. Things they do always have a reason behind them otherwise why are they the bosses? They wouldn’t be in that position if they were nongs like us. Their position deserves all the respect we can give them and if we co-operate and do our part properly and don’t let the side down, the plant’ll go for years and years like they told us. What right have we got to stand up and say they don’t know what they’re doing?…’ And so on.
‘He told us he was hypermanic when he got back from hospital: I reckon he’s hypercomic.’
‘I don’t see how a big man like that can have such a small heart: he’ll get down and lick their boots if he goes on like this,’ said Oliver Twist when he had listened in to the Glass Canoe. It would make a good story to tell the Brown Snake.
‘And while we’re standing here rubbishing the Glass Canoe, the Beautiful Twinkling Star is outside doing his own work and four others’,’ said the Samurai, who drew on his work gloves and tramped outside, his valve-key swinging at his side like a six-gun. No one followed.
A FAVOURITE POSITION After losing forty tons of catalyst out the vents and over the rest of the equipment, and sucking out six hundred tons along the unloading line to the hopper, there was still sixty tons below the air inflow spider—15 to 50 micron silica-alumina dust. After three days the regenerator had cooled enough to unbolt the manway door. They sent the men in with stiff brooms to push the catalyst down the vacuum line. The men put the brooms in the dust, pulled them out. Puffs of flame, and the bristles were gone. A day later the welders had made up long rakes, with two-inch plates at the business end. Enough to push a cupful at a time. ‘Bad workmen always blame their tools,’ they were told when they complained. Two more days it took to get the latest means of clearing catalyst—the long-handled shovel and its mate the short-handled shovel. Vacuum hoses cost too much money. It was better to waste a week’s production. After all, the Wandering Jew could sign only for 200 dollars’ expenditure. Any more had to be referred to Europe.
When a few of the health- and future-conscious narks among the prisoners wondered aloud what sort of masks they were going to use, it was their own hardy and ignorant mates who gave the thumbs-down sign. In the face of men saying What’s the matter with you? Worried about a little bit of dust? When can we get some men instead of these old women? the narks kept quiet and didn’t press for masks. They objected a little to the heat inside the huge vessel until the same sort of mates said What’s a few degrees of temperature? But even the self-confessed hardy prisoners drew back from the fierce heat when the first foot of catalyst was taken off the top of the heap. The following day they came to work with brown faces. Burn scabs. They asked Puroil for masks. The Python said ‘You did it without masks before. You don’t need masks.’
On the Samurai’s shift they had been shovelling four days and it was the end of night shift. The Sumpsucker, who had never had to shovel dust and never had the vacuum line block and blow it all back in his face and felt sneakingly uncomfortable about this, and thankful too, leaned in at the open manway and said, ‘OK. You can go down at three.’ This was his bonus. There was a pretty picture below as the Samurai and two others froze in silence, covered in fine grey dust which filled their ears, penetrated boots and clothes, entered the nose and eyes and was spat out for days in their mucus.
They went down gratefully on rag-covered concrete in the darkened locker-room. The Samurai found himself a thick cardboard carton, collapsed it flat, piled a few dirty overalls on it for a mattress and had three hours in the land somewhere between sleep and waking. His heavy boots waggled awkwardly on the ends of his legs while the lay on his back, his favourite position, so he turned on his side in the narrow space between the rows of lockers. His back was turned on Blue Hills, his face towards the kicked-in, dented bottoms of the thin iron lockers. Like sleeping in a gutter.
A DREAM OF PRISONERS The Sorcerer’s Apprentice beckoned him in to her flat. This was no sordid hut with nail-holes peeping in corrugated-iron walls: she lived well, her body was clean and smooth. The fingerprints of the men who had handled her body were not visible as they are on the skins of some prostitutes; rather her skin seemed to have absorbed them, perhaps as quicksands absorb what is thrown on them and appear smooth and innocent afterwards. She sat on her divan naked and laughed at him for some reason. Why should she look innocent and untouched and still laugh? Mockingly. She opened her mouth wide in laughter, her tongue writhed in her mouth, and presently it turned into a thumb and poked out at him. The thumb itself moved and jerked: it was a man’s thumb, the skin stained and cracked, the thumbnail dirty. He noticed he was now naked and she was sitting in a live chair, which moved ceaselessly under and around her: the legs were live legs, the arms live arms, the back a human back, the seat two great convex buttocks.
A seven-foot blue book stood against a wall. He opened it, it was a door. He ran from there, grabbing his clothes as he went and trying to put them on. She chased him out into the gently undulating dairy country that surrounded her flat, which now stood by itself, one room in the countryside, while he tried desperately to dress. Out of sight of the house now, she was gone and he was lost somewhere in the breasty hills.
He was a boy again. Animals ran from him. The wooden sword he was using to behead cats and dogs in the fields was running red with blood. It wasn’t human blood, he knew that; he was happy he hadn’t broken the law forbidding the killing of humans. As if to approve his opinion, a great crowd of domestic animals attacked a sick man who had been lying in bed in one of the valleys between two suggestive hills, and the boy Samurai had great pleasure wading through the blood of these savage beasts to save his fellow man. In his frenzy he cut and slew and hacked until the last animal—a large tortoise-shell cat with expressionless eyes—was in small pieces and scattered over a wide area.
The man he saved was full of sores on every visible patch of skin, but instead of thanking him he abused him for being unkind to dumb animals. The boy Samurai protested that he had saved him from dogs and cats, but the man shouted the dog is man’s best friend and cats never attack unless provoked. The boy Samurai had nothing in his vocabulary of life experience to answer this,and the thought came into his mind that he should seek forgiveness and possibly kneel down and kiss the sores of this poor man, when suddenly he became his own self—no longer a boy—and said to himself in a rage, Have I become a leper-licker?
Still holding his bloodstained sword in his hand he left the leper on the bed and tramped across the fields towards the nearest town. He went into the bar of a pub, hiding his bloodstained sword in the belt of his trousers, and accidentally knocked and spilled the beer of a small ginger man standing next to him. The man punched him about the body—he couldn’t reach the Samurai’s head and face—but he could not return the blows, for his assailant was smaller and he would never fight a smaller man. Finally the man struck his hand on the Samurai’s sword and went away cursing and sucking his thumb, which moved and jerked; the skin stained and cracked, the thumbnail dirty.
Suddenly he was walking through the main square beside the Puroil Termitary block. Men were saying the Samurai hasn’t been a superintendent for long, then presently he was in the centre of a hollow square, white-shirte
d clerks were lowering the Puroil flag and the Wandering Jew stepped up to him and stripped from him the insignia of his office—one biro pen, one white shirt, one dark tie, one pair of good trousers and the rest—and drummed him out of the blue gates dressed only in his jockstrap and socks, while a choir of typists and punched-card operators sang hauntingly Naked I came into the world and naked I depart. The guards on the gate peered into both jockstrap and socks for contraband.
HANG THE EXPENSE The Samurai slept soundly for the last two hours of his bonus break, and when he woke at six there was nothing to do but a little cleaning and to listen to a story of a recent disaster at another refinery. Some clowns had wired up a compressor the wrong way: it started, but couldn’t be stopped. It was comforting to hear of disasters elsewhere. Several foremen were wandering about outside with work gloves on, but it was the end of seven days of night shift and the Samurai was too tired to make an issue of it, although they were undoubtedly doing operators’ work.
When the day shift came on, one man went inside to the locker-room and went straight down and in five minutes was fast asleep in his good clothes. He’d been to a wedding and had celebrated all night. Some of the offgoing sleepers shook their heads. Fancy crashing in your good clothes!
PROTECTIVE CUSTODY Dadda turned up that morning; he didn’t run a place in the talent quest, being a little down in the mouth, and the boys had kept him full in the Home Beautiful for ten days to hide him from the police, but he broke away, swam the oily, stinking river Eel and stumbled a mile up to the blue gates to ring off. His clothes were nearly dry then, but the river left them darker.
Pixie, seeing him bundy off, called the police. They found him in the cark park, sitting in his car, too stewed to drive.
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner Page 19