The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  The Glass Canoe’s manoeuvre did not silence the Great White Father. ‘You want me to continue this some other time?’

  ‘No, no! There’s no privacy about it. I have nothing to hide.’ The doctors impressed on him that he must never again seek privacy, he must confess and be open about everything. With everyone. Privacy was unhealthy.

  ‘Good,’ said the Great White Father in his deep, dry, crackling voice. ‘So you’ve got high blood pressure now. OK. Don’t fight it. It is you.’

  ‘Don’t fight it? You mean let it kill me?’

  ‘It is you. It’s like Puroil. Take the kicks as they come. If Puroil toes you up one buttock, turn the other cheek. Same with life. You are a person with high blood pressure. Don’t fight it. Be yourself, not a half-dead ninny trying to side-step death.’

  The sting in the tail of the speech fought with the public nature of the advice, given in front of Blue Hills, to decide whether the blood should recede from the Glass Canoe’s face or flood it with a shaming blush. Blue Hills won and the red started to glow behind the greasy brown of his cheeks.

  ‘Whatever you are, you are you. Live with yourself and try to like it or lump it.’ The Great White Father turned to Blue Hills. ‘How are your tomato plants, Blue?’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Blue Hills and the Great White Father looked at him keenly. Poor Blue Hills, it was impossible to get him excited. ‘I cut out the middle to make them spread,’ he added, feeling that ‘not bad’ wasn’t much of an answer.

  ‘I cut mine, too. Always. Only I pick off the laterals, then at eight feet I pinch off the tops. They spread out like a willow and bear much better that way.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Blue Hills reverently. ‘I can’t do that with mine.’

  ‘I’ve got a very high fence. Makes it easier.’

  The Glass Canoe laughed loudly, trying to break the spell embarrassment had cast around him.

  ‘You don’t have vegetables, do you?’ asked the Great White Father, trying to include the Glass Canoe. ‘You go for flowers, don’t you?’

  ‘Flowers?’ Trying to remember what he might have said a week ago, a year ago—any time—about flowers. Mercifully he remembered the gardenia his wife had been trimming of its yellow leaves. It had wet feet. ‘Yes.’ What a load was lifted when he could qualify to be in the swim of the conversation. ‘Yes, flowers. But I’m thinking of going in for beans and lettuce next.’ Anything to keep his head afloat. ‘With maybe a patch of strawberries, just for the wife.’ Was he afloat? He didn’t know. Perhaps he had sunk and didn’t realize it yet. ‘What do you think of cabbage and cauliflowers?’ They say drowning is quite pleasant. You just float off easily.

  ‘They’re OK for the chooks,’ said the Great White Father.

  ‘You’re not having me on, are you?’ the Glass Canoe said with strain in his voice. He got to his feet uncertainly.

  ‘Not to the point of physical exertion. Sit down. I don’t fight with anything but words. Or, better—with grog.’

  ‘I’ve got to go back, anyway. There’s some blanks to be put in the lines, and the fitters have to be shown where they go.’ He went, no longer afloat.

  ‘You’re lucky you can turn everything to a joke,’ said Blue Hills. ‘He can be very nasty.’ Something felt wet in his underpants, perhaps the Glass Canoe’s finger had made the blood come.

  ‘It’s hard to make him laugh,’ admitted the Great White Father.

  ‘Not many down here today.’ If it was blood he could expect the place to itch later.

  ‘Just you and me and the Sleeping Princess. You want to cut yourself a slice?’

  ‘Me? Goodness me, no. Too early in the day. Besides I have a wife at home and there’s such a thing as love.’

  The Great White Father looked away. ‘Love,’ he said. ‘What’s love? Will a man lay down his life for love? A soldier does it for a soldier’s pay. Will a man go hungry for it? So he will to pinch and scrape and make a million. Will a man for love swim when his strength’s gone, duck under a hail of bullets or cling for days to a ledge of rock? He’ll do the same to keep a whole skin. Will a man for love obey a foolish order? He’ll do it to earn his daily bread. Love. What’s love? Is it a word? If so it falls off the end of the tongue and vanishes—dissolves to the air that made it. Who’s got love? A mother for her baby? So has a mathematician for his equation, a physicist for his demonstration, an astronomer for his theory. Can you see it, hear it, touch it, taste it? Does it live on after you’re gone? Can you see where it was? No. No to every question. Yet without love a human isn’t a man. Without love an animal has no young. Without love the world is full of carcasses and dead stones.’

  Blue Hills ignored these sentiments.

  ‘What do you do when there’s no one around?’

  ‘You mean besides testing the girls?’ smiled the Great White Father. And went on, to save Blue Hills the trouble of thinking up a reply, ‘I dream of things to come.’ He was silent a while. ‘And the blessings of the past.’ Opening two more cans. ‘Like the time I fell twenty feet off the turbine landing.’

  ‘How was that a blessing? Did you fall on your head?’

  ‘It saved my life and that’s a fact.’ The Great White Father was able to fall flat or on his head against solid objects with no ill-effects. ‘Now all I’m fit for is ease and pleasure, low company and high living. My ambition is to be the local emperor of rollicks, bollocks and beer till a man more worthy of the title comes along. Life is only a short glass, Blue Hills, better fill it up. Because though there’s a grin in every grave, there’s no sound of laughing. What did you come for, Blue? About your transfer?’

  ‘I didn’t get it!’ Blue Hills burst out. ‘I put it in writing, but the Good Shepherd wrote No. I watched through the window.’ The Good Shepherd had to rubber-stamp the Python’s decision.

  ‘Tough,’ murmured the great man. ‘But what is, is. I was born, I think, from a dream of strong drink around several campfires—’

  Blue Hills was gone. In his place sat a young innocent lad clutching his first can of icy beer, his mouth open ready for burps, laughter, profanity, his ears open for instruction in the ways of the Great White Father’s endless struggle against the total enslavement of man.

  ‘—In order to have me my venereal Dad and Mum got blind, blotto, bloated, buried, canned, cockeyed, crocked, embalmed, high, lit, loaded, lushed, owled, oiled, ossified, paralysed, pickled, pie-eyed, plastered, potted, pissed, schickered, soused, sizzled, stewed, stung, stinko and stiff. And from enslavement to Puroil I will lead my groggy troops into enslavement to the delights of women and the bottle. In short, to inertia. A vast underground movement of inertia. To exist, to be, is all. Inertia will save us—our ability to live at the lowest pitch. This will save us from all the Puroil brainwashing in the world. Cunning, solidarity behind me—not behind the guards in that detention camp—sharing evenly all the windfall benefits we find, these are our safety factors.’ The boy drank it in—words, beer, the lot.

  SET-UP The Glass Canoe strode into the control room wearing a large list of his symptoms pinned to his chest like medals. Seeing the Good Shepherd coming round a corner he flicked his hand at the Sump’s solar plexus, winded him, then stood back with hands on hips, having judged the Good Shepherd’s entry well. The Sump, seeing the open target of the Glass Canoe’s chest, retaliated lightly with his fist. You never hit the Glass Canoe as hard as he hit you—he might land you one. Just as the Good Shepherd came in the door, what he saw was the Sump’s fist in the Glass Canoe’s middle, and the Glass Canoe doubled up with a great show of agony, like a footballer trying to get a member of the opposing side sent off.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ he roared righteously, winking at the Sumpsucker. Seeing the wink, the Sump didn’t know what to say. He was disarmed. The Glass Canoe knew this and intended his hesitation to be taken for guilt.

  ‘Hey, Shep!’ full of good humour, ‘your supervisors have started to bully the workers.’

  ‘So wha
t?’ said the Good Shepherd genially. He hoped it was the right thing to say and in the right tone, and passed on quickly. How could these men persist in wasting time on what amused them instead of devoting themselves to the company that nourished them?

  ‘That had him in!’ laughed the Glass Canoe to the Sumpsucker as if they were conspirators together. ‘He didn’t know what to make of it. Hey, I passed the widow’s place yesterday and her front lawn was full of forty-four gallon drums stacked two-high.’

  The Sump made no answer, but peered at his chest, trying to make sense of the Glass Canoe’s symptom list. He failed. The words were written upside down so the Glass Canoe himself could read them if he glanced down his chest. The symptoms of his disease were the aims, ambitions, resolutions, promises and cautions he wanted to bear in mind in his rise to the top.

  He got tired of toying with the Sumpsucker and strode off outside into the propane-rich air. Over by the steam generators where some contractor prisoners were making patterns in light-gauge aluminium, an Italian face bobbed out under a grey safety hat and an arm plucked at his sleeve.

  ‘Come here, Aussie. Come here.’

  The Glass Canoe surveyed the man over and under. Italian, greasy, short, forty, no boots, only sandshoes, torn shirt.

  ‘Come.’ The man gazed into his face sincerely. If he had seen the upside-down symptoms he gave no sign.

  ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘You will break my arm.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘OK.’ He grabbed the arm in two hands, lifted his knee and braced it against the arm, looking into the man’s eyes. The man smiled expectantly. He dropped the arm.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Please, Aussie. Mister. Break the arm. I go hospital, get compensation. No work for six weeks, my wife sick, I look after. Please. Not be frightened.’

  ‘Give us it.’ He took the arm, lifted his knee, strained, bent the arm a little but couldn’t break it. The Italian’s face was a little whiter and the smile not so wide.

  ‘Please. Try again.’

  He tried again, sweating. No good. Something was holding him back from the effort needed to break the arm. ‘Here. Get down lower.’

  With the man crouching low, the elbow propped on a metal ledge and the hand flat on the concrete, the Glass Canoe lifted his heavy boot. With a peculiar kindness he took out his handkerchief, made it into a pad and placed it under the elbow.

  ‘So you won’t get too bad a bruise.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The man’s smile was back. The Glass Canoe lifted his boot and brought it down on the middle of the forearm. No break. The man’s eyes were on him, warm and brown. This time he grabbed the railing, jumped into the air with both feet off the ground and crashed his right heel down on the arm with all his weight behind it. There was a crack-crack as both bones broke, one after the other. The man rose, his face dirty with approaching shock, and tried to smile. The smile came unstuck and wouldn’t sit square on his face.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He walked off to report the injury.

  The Glass Canoe sweated, but steadied his misgivings by looking down his chest and reading his symptoms, which he repeated aloud like a prayer.

  THE STRONG AND THE WEAK It was after dark, the Samurai lay half asleep in his room hoping for a few hours’ sleep, loathing the approach of ten o’clock and the nightly journey to detention. He was tired to the bone, he had worked a hard night shift on the latest start-up while many went down. His right arm ached where the boys had thumped him; the ache was there every day now. A dark patch that might have been a bruise showed under the skin.

  From his window, even with the blinds shut, the flicker of the flare from Puroil could be seen, on and off, a nervous heartbeat. If the plants were upset and pressure had to be relieved by jettisoning gas, the hundred-foot flames made a pretty picture as far away as the Blue Mountains.

  In his confused dream he was wandering in a local park, followed by the band of cheeky horses that lived there. He took refuge in the Men’s, just in time to help a clean old man who was rolling in pain and embarrassment on the floor. He helped the clean old man back to the toilet seat until he was relieved of the pressure in his bowel lines, lifted him up, wiped his bottom as you would a child’s and cleaned it out with water and soap. An old custom from the Khyber. Joking in his dreams. The clean old man giggled helplessly. The Samurai grew rougher in his actions, he hadn’t meant to tickle him.

  ‘You are a pervert, aren’t you?’ said the clean old man, putting his face up near the Samurai’s. The man’s helplessness, insolence and ingratitude touched a nerve in the Samurai’s self-esteem, arousing a memory of his violence to a similarly helpless boy years ago. He had stoned that boy mercilessly in his own garden simply for looking soft and weak and girlish. He twisted the arm of the clean old man until he screamed like a woman. The horses shuffled restlessly outside, bumping their huge rounded hindquarters on the bricks of the lavatory wall, producing soft thump sounds.

  Was his present service to man a continual effort to atone for one silly act of cruelty?

  He still had the man’s arm. It was the stiff arm of a statue, but his own hands were losing their grip on it. It grew swollen and heavy; fattening, lengthening. Was it possible a whole life could be lived in the shadow of a man’s guilt over one tiny action? The arm jerked out of his grasp as a glow filled the room. He woke in a sweat, dragged himself over to the window and parted the slats of the blind. The evening sky alight. The flare was a mile high. He was awake, this was reality. A sunrise in the south.

  Wearily he remembered the hot spots he had discovered and reported on the regenerator days ago. The so-called engineers must have come to their senses and crashed the plant. This was unusual: they got into less trouble from the absentee controllers if they let a failure develop and the plant crashed with great loss and damage than if they gave the order to bring the plant down before the fault blew out. Initiative on the spot was severely punished; the experts in Europe took no one’s word that a stoppage was inevitable. The Samurai wondered if there had been a sudden burst of defiance from his cowed and weak Australian superiors.

  The bright column of fire darkened. Clouds of soot from crashing boilers and clouds of catalyst siphoned from the pressured vessels by collapsing pressures elsewhere in the cycle filled the sky and were illuminated by the burning gas. The plant was down. What if the bosses had really taken the initiative for once instead of running for cover? He lay back on the bed and went to sleep immediately.

  Mogo wasn’t as lucky as the Samurai. He had a fifteen-mile drive home and he too had worked all night with only a break at two to eat his sandwiches. On the way home the heater was on in his car and he nodded off to sleep and ran off the road.

  He had a sleep in the hospital and broke out in time to get to work. Some of his mates joked about the bandages on his head: others sympathized. He told them all to save their breath. He wanted nothing from any man. He wouldn’t even fill in compensation papers. He still worked while others slept.

  Blue Hills, on the turbine platform when the plant collapsed, fell to the grating in shock and put his shoulder out. They took him to the hospital he asked for. The Good Shepherd, as soon as he heard about it, jumped into his car and set out for St Joseph’s to visit him. When he got there Blue Hills was sitting up in bed, shoulder and forearm bandaged, very pleased with himself. For some reason he felt a hero. The Sister, dressed in long, cool, pale-blue robes, with a crucifix of gold on a chain peeping out from the folds as she walked, spoke to him in a voice that sang in his ears like the silver bell at the Home Beautiful.

  A CLOSE MOUTH Far Away Places was alone among the glitter and extravagance of the amenities—Personnel to use this facility only during authorized breaks—but he was not unobserved. The Samurai rounded the corner of the grey building in time to see Far Away lift a bottle of soft drink to his mouth and take off the top with his teeth. Strong teeth. Was it possible a man w
ith so little on show, a man regarded as insignificant by everyone around him, could have secret strengths? And the self-command never to display them? Perhaps the prisoners weren’t all as pitiable as he thought.

  A CONVENIENT WINDOW The Samurai found the house. No answer to his knock, so round through a gate in the white-painted trellis, past a wide-open window. Not past. Back and looking in stupidly. She was sitting naked before a dressing-table mirror, cuddling and stroking a small furry animal with an attractive hand equipped with five petal fingers. The animal said not one hard word to her. Even as he watched, that hand-flower opened one petal, then another. Like a pink rose opening.

  ‘Mrs Hills,’ he said by way of opening.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, looking at him in the mirror.

  ‘I’m from work,’ he said idiotically gazing at her white buttocks overlapping the stool on which she sat.

  ‘Come in.’

  ‘Get something round you.’

  ‘Come in.’ He climbed through her window.

  ‘It’s about your husband.’

  ‘I have no husband.’

  ‘Blue Hills.’

  ‘He lives here—if you call it living.’

  She stood up facing him, her hands still protecting her furry pet and soothing its excitement at the coming of this long-expected visitor.

  ‘You’re welcome to undress.’ And seeing he was not entirely at ease, she said, ‘This isn’t his room. He never comes in here.’ She had mistaken his hesitation.

  ‘Excuse I,’ she said delicately, stepped up to him and with swift fingers flied him. She had left her pet to its own devices and seeing it lonely he comforted it. It was the least he could do. He didn’t feel too badly about it; he reckoned that if she was as easy as this, there must have been others. Since he was one of a number the guilt was divided. He was wrong. There had been no others, though for years she had pretended there were, ready for the day when a live man would lift her window sash and climb in.