The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  THE PLOVER-LOVER A few hours after the crash-down of the refinery, a tanker in the Pacific took a radio re-direction to Sydney. It was low in the water with a full load of gasoline for a New Zealand refinery to bolster stocks during a planned shutdown. Several days later it was in Puroil’s deepwater terminal to spew out its gasoline. Someone somewhere in the Puroil machine wanted the product to reach the market.

  For some reason the pipeline to the refinery was not used for all the gasoline, some was barged up-river from terminal to wharf.

  Loosehead was sent down from the cracker for a day’s exile—day began at 2300 hours—and it was as an exile that he spent his eight hours there. He chatted amiably to the Plover-Lover who did the work. There were often plover on the clay flats, over the swampy areas. He preferred plover to seagulls when he made a stew.

  ‘You’re Polish, aren’t you?’ Loosehead asked. He was hanging over the short section of railing near the gantry which lifted up the fat heavy hoses from the barge decks. The Plover-Lover was opening and closing valves, getting ready to hook up. The river, innocent in darkness, was a picture of flickering surfaces, bright water and the slash of lights.

  ‘I was,’ he replied, grunting as he lifted the end of the hose. It was so heavy he could move it only a foot at a time. Loosehead watched, fascinated.

  ‘What d’you mean? You a New Australian now?’ There was no derision in his voice, only in the words.

  ‘I have the papers. I am Australian.’

  ‘Well, bugger me!’ remarked Loosehead. He felt vaguely complimented. ‘Hey, did I tell you the one about bricking the camel?’

  The Plover-Lover grunted.

  ‘No? Well, maybe you wouldn’t get it anyway.’

  The Plover-Lover knew the joke all right, but he had dropped a hose and coupling on his foot and had no spare breath to answer. He was wearing canvas shoes with rope soles. They made no sparks and didn’t slip on oil as rubber boots slip, but they were not much chop when you dropped an eighty-pound weight on your instep. Loosehead laughed. Thinking of the camel-rider using two bricks on the camel’s incentive.

  ‘Remember the time we helped Volga get the beer in the boat at night and when we got back here to the wharf we passed it all up to a foreman standing there? We thought it was one of us. And remember the time you went down in the rail truck to have a few hours’ kip last year?’ He laughed heartily, the sound carrying well across the black water of the river. Anonymous pairs under Clearwater Bridge stirred and peered anxiously about.

  ‘And you woke up in the marshalling yards at Enmore on Good Friday morning and when they got you out on Easter Sunday your knuckles were down to the bone with knocking and all you could say was “Mess! Mess!” And the railway detectives agreed and said, “You’re in a bloody mess, all right! Try and talk your way out of this!” ’

  He looked expectantly down at the Plover-Lover, waiting for answering laughter.

  ‘It wasn’t mess, it was Mass! I wanted to get to Mass. I always go to early Mass at Easter, like in the old country to St Lukaczewski’s,’ corrected the Plover-Lover.

  ‘Well, Saint Lookawhisky didn’t bail you out of that jam, the Samurai did, while the Puroil nobs were still arguing the toss about who was to go to the cop-shop. I was along with the Samurai; we went in my car and while I was waiting outside, this big copper came along and told me to move on. I’d been in the Home Beautiful and I was pretty right by then, so I up and told him to move along himself. And that mongrel copper hit me. Only once, but he hit me here’—indicating his lower ribs on the left side—‘and I’ll guarantee his fist went in about three feet. I couldn’t speak for half an hour.’

  The Plover-Lover started to heft the lower end of the hose; it was no use interrupting Loosehead and inviting disaster by getting him to work the gantry. He would have to run with the hose to get enough momentum to carry it over underneath the gantry. He would get up on the wharf and hook up himself. He started to run.

  ‘Remember the time the Grey Goldfish opened the seacocks on Barge 56 by mistake and pumped the river up into tank 17? And the Whispering Baritone put up a yellow sign with big black letters: THINK! And next day the Great White Father added a word in big black letters to make it read: JUST THINK!’ He chuckled. It was pleasant watching the lights on the river.

  The Plover-Lover ran, came to the end of his rope, and sat down. He came at it again and put all his Polish last-ditch courage into this run, for it was night shift and his stamina would soon give out. Loosehead thought to himself: he takes this seriously! The ex-Pole ran suddenly along the steel deck and triumphantly lugged the end of the hose over under the gantry. He gave a raucous cry of exultation even while his feet were slipping in the diesoline which came from the hose end and without interrupting his wild cry changed it subtly and with pure instinctual skill to one of alarm and then through the stages of alarm shaded his yell straight into terror. The black water closed over the sound but did not altogether cut it off: Loosehead heard it bubbling up from the depths. Each bubble that broke on the surface contained a fragment of yell.

  ‘That steel sure is slippery,’ remarked Loosehead when the Plover-Lover surfaced. ‘Specially when it gets a bit of dieso on it.’ He looked down for confirmation of his wisdom, but the Plover-Lover was struggling. Loosehead flipped over a length of rope which was looped on the rail and watched his mate climb up it on to the steel deck of the barge. The Plover-Lover shuddered when he followed the rope with his eye, up over the rail and down on the planking of the wharf where all that held it was Loosehead’s large boot. If Loosehead had lifted his foot…The Plover-Lover climbed sadly up the iron ladder spiked into the turpentine poles and set about moving the barge downstream a little, for the hose wouldn’t reach the connection. He slackened off the eastern rope from the bollard and re-tied it when he had another six feet. He came back along the wharf to the western rope. He slackened that off, but before he tied it again he had a thought.

  ‘Hey, Loosehead!’ and Loosehead had to smile at the cheerful voice coming from the soaking, clinging overalls. ‘Remember the time you had to go and get a six-foot ladder to climb up on a rail truck and all you could find was a twelve-foot and you cut it in half with an oxy torch?’

  ‘Sure. I remember,’ said Loosehead with simple pleasure. ‘And when they asked me why I said the other one was too big. And they had two ladders instead of one! When I told them they had a profit, the Good Shepherd didn’t understand me.’

  The more he chuckled and enjoyed this memory—which the Plover-Lover had felt sure would embarrass him—the more miserable the Plover-Lover became. As he turned back to the bollard Loosehead asked him, ‘How did you get your name? Do you really go after the birds up on the clay flats?’ He jerked a thumb in the direction of the land reclaimed from the mangroves but not yet sown with refinery plants. ‘And cook them?’

  But the Plover-Lover was too busy to answer. The barge had swung, unnoticed and silent, away from the wharf and the Plover-Lover was standing there with only another yard of rope to go before his end of the barge got away. Slowly the barge swung as he strained like Sandow to hold it back, bracing one foot against the ten-by-ten ironbark retaining plank.

  As the last of the rope paid out and the barge went, he uttered a lost, despairing cry of ‘Jesu!’ with a Polish inflection and soft J and followed it into the black water.

  When he surfaced, still holding the rope, Loosehead with commendable presence of mind threw him the rope with which he had accidentally saved him before and shouted to him to tie it to the rope he had. The Plover-Lover did this and handed himself back along this rope to the wharf. This time Loosehead fastened his end of the rope to the bollard. It was only a thin rope but it held till the Plover-Lover got a winch.

  ‘You sure get into a lot of trouble,’ said Loosehead. ‘You ought to be like me. I don’t do anything, so I can’t make mistakes.’

  As he watched the Plover-Lover depart in search of a winch, Loosehead said aloud to the bay
and the distant lights, ‘He’s not afraid of the water, I’ll say that for him. Wish I could spare him a bit more time, I’d teach him to swim for sure.’

  A CHANGE OF COLOUR Before they started up, too many of the gratings were missing—not yet finished by the construction crews, and if finished, not yet erected—too many safety railings not installed on completed landings; the oil and gas guns on the top landing of the new boilers were so placed that when the prisoners removed them—under pressure, as they must—a forty-pound gun at head height and facing upwards nearly took the men over the hip-high railing one hundred feet in the air. Too many discrepancies existed between the safety posters papering the administration area and the actual conditions on the plant plot. Many valves, like the catalyst valves, were twenty feet in the air with no platform underneath, yet they required relays of four men with crowbars to open or close them. For want of a platform, men took up to eight hours to shut one valve.

  There had been no bad accidents since the construction stage, but for some reason the men who worried about their own safety were shy of working the plant. Some, though, would climb out over the drop to an inaccessible valve, then come down and report it unsafe, though by their action in getting to it they demonstrated that it was accessible. That was all the proof the company required that they need do nothing about it.

  The Good Shepherd took a risk by writing in his report book that the whole plant was unsafe in its present condition. Loosehead wandered in and read this. ‘Six months behind in safety,’ the Good Shepherd had written.

  ‘Christ help him when the Python sees that,’ said Loosehead, then wandered outside. He drifted by when Slug was being taken round by one of the faceless bosses and this man was having no difficulty getting the response he wanted from Slug: all he had to do was state his own opinion and wait for the echo.

  The Samurai tailed these two in case a deal was being made. When he caught up, Slug, looking at a distant imaginary prospect of further promotion, said to the Samurai while the faceless one unsaw them both, ‘Well, I think in the light of what this gentleman has said, the company will do all the necessary work we have asked for, so we can go ahead and start up now.’

  The men had to threaten before they could get gratings installed, holes filled over hundred-foot drops, ladders to inaccessible valves or extensions to narrow firing platforms. If the company said it was safe, who was there to appeal to?

  The Samurai said ‘No.’ The gentleman saw him then for the first time. ‘Let the men look first at what’s written in the instruction book.’ Slug and the gentleman knew. They followed the well-known industrial relations principle that anything at all could be written in black and white under the noses of the prisoners, but the prisoners saw nothing and drew no conclusions until some agitator picked it up and waved it in front of their eyes and started to get angry.

  The Samurai went back, taking the Slug with him, and in front of the dozen men he mustered showed Slug the Good Shepherd’s instructions.

  ‘There it is: Do nothing until that safety work is done.’

  ‘No! That’s right!’ bleated the men. ‘It’s in the book!’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Slug, ‘yes, I think that’s best.’ He blew with the strongest wind. ‘We must get these safety jobs done first before we even attempt to start up.’

  The plant was declared black. To protect himself, the Good Shepherd should not have written his instruction until after the plant had changed colour. It was better for all those above the rank of prisoner to appear to stick together and only to sanction a cease-work after they were forced to.

  Loosehead gave the good old Samurai a friendly thump as he went his way, happy that the extra two feet of standing room and higher safety netting would be provided on the top firing platform before somebody took a dive.

  THE CHRIST OF THE CRACKER Now Loosehead ambled on, one boot after the other. He climbed to the enclosure at the top of the polymerization plant and woke Bubbles, knowing he would be still asleep from the way his eyes looked when he came in the previous afternoon.

  ‘Come on, Bubble-guts. Wakey, wakey.’ Bubbles stirred, woke, roused himself, fell half asleep again, knocked his elbow on one of the empty drums of polymerization catalyst with which he had surrounded himself so that he couldn’t be seen from the door; woke again with a start and a flurry, sprang to his feet still half in the horrors and scattered rags everywhere, looked down, fell down in a heap of ceramic balls, picked up armfuls of rags trying to hide them, found no place to hide them, and sank down again groaning.

  ‘I’m crook. I’m crook. Crook. Christ, I’m crook,’ he said with emphasis.

  ‘Stay here another four hours, Bubbles, and you’ll meet yourself coming on shift. You’ve been here twenty, stay for twenty-four.’

  He couldn’t leave him like this. ‘What have you been doing to yourself, anyway?’

  It took Bubbles a while to answer.

  ‘I was in the pub at Cheapley. They told me about the haunted house. You know it?’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘I picked up this sheila, pretty old.’

  ‘I thought you were fixed up with someone else’s wife.’

  ‘Yeah, but she was working last night. I’m in the pub, and this sheila—not real old, about sixty-five—she bets me I’m not game to take her to the haunted house.’ Bubbles was twenty-seven.

  ‘Was it haunted?’

  ‘We get there—after she’s sick in the car, but I don’t worry about that on account of her age—she shows me to this old house with the windows broken and I go in. When I look round she’s gone—turns out later she goes and hides in the car. Lucky I’ve got the keys on me.’

  He took a deep breath and tenderly felt his side. ‘I’m in there—it’s dark as the insides of a cow—and I don’t know whether to go on or go back—I feel this touch on my arm—“Darling,” it screams, “you came!”—“I came,” I said, “but I’m gone now!” But she fastened on to me. What with one thing and another I said OK, we get stuck into it on the floor and she was on!’

  Loosehead let him rest before he went on. ‘Go on, you’re working me up, anyway.’

  Bubbles went on grimly. In pain.

  ‘Work? Work’s the word. I didn’t have to do anything. She did it all. She had this funny soft mouth—all loose—and there was something banging me on the hip. Whaling into me!’ He rubbed it gently.

  ‘This wet mouth was starting to give me the horrors—she kept sucking my tongue into it—and what with this thing hitting me on the side I tried to get away.’

  ‘You must have been tanked,’ said Loosehead.

  ‘Pissed as forty arseholes,’ admitted Bubbles. ‘So I managed to get us to the door and open it and we got on the wooden veranda—it was a nightmare!—she must have been eighty if she was a day—no teeth—frightful!’

  He shuddered violently. ‘And she only had one leg—the other off above the knee—smacking me on the side Whack! Whack!—look at this!’ He opened his overalls, displayed his hip.

  ‘Black and blue from the stump—and I think I’ve ricked my neck trying to keep out of the way of those gums. Pecking at me like an emu! My head going from side to side to make her miss!’

  Loosehead sighed. These young fellers.

  ‘Better stay here the other four, Bubbles.’ He left him. He’d gone a few steps down from the top floor and the story was gone from his head. His mind was always fresh. Nothing burdened him long. The Beautiful Twinkling Star was coming up the stairs fast. Even in a crashdown he worked as hard as he was allowed.

  ‘Don’t go up there,’ said Loosehead calmly.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Something you shouldn’t see. There’s a bloke up there, you might report him.’

  ‘Me? Report a man?’ The Beautiful Twinkling Star was hurt. He would do the man’s work, get rags for him to sleep on, but never report him to prison authorities.

  ‘You would if you did your duty. The best way out is not to s
ee him.’

  ‘Is there something I can do?’ Making to go up. Loosehead barred his way.

  ‘Self-inflicted.’ Significantly. The Beautiful Twinkling Star nodded wisely, forgivingly. An industrial saint. He took his own goodness seriously and was almost as understanding of his fellow-prisoners’ weaknesses as the prisoners themselves. Loosehead thought to himself, irreverently, The Christ of the Cracker.

  ‘I’ll keep people away,’ said Loosehead, ‘or it might be outski for him.’

  ‘God forgive him,’ said the Beautiful Twinkling Star, with a look of prayer about him.

  ‘He’ll forgive himself, when he’s better,’ said Loosehead. ‘No need to go dobbing him in to the Almighty.’

  A GENTLE PUSH The Glass Canoe was the only man ever to report that he hit another car in the car park. Confessing belligerently. He wasn’t afraid to face the truth of what he’d done. Now he was happy. He always knew when he was happy. The divisions between his moods were too marked to be missed.

  If there were no happiness, it would be necessary to create it. It was good to have thoughts with a little depth to them. A man stopped feeling like a prisoner for a few seconds when he got a good thought floating through his head. Where do thoughts come from? Are they merely the mind manipulating the stock of words that a few years of life, listening and reading have pumped into your head?

  His fears, his inabilities, his God-given incapacities encased him in an ever-hardening shell. The limits that originate within every man were conspiring to keep him a prisoner. Was there no way to break out of this shell that had grown round him since birth? True, it had been a protection at times, when he was unwell and unfit to cope with the persistent devils fighting and wrecking inside him, but when he felt better it always seemed to him this hard shell was a hindrance. He was isolated inside it. He could hardly hear or know what was going on outside. Often he longed to be without it, to feel, to mix—flesh to flesh—with his fellow men. In free communion. ‘I want to be brothers with the whole world,’ he said softly.