The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  10

  THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE

  WET DREAM Next night a fire in the reactor riser where catalyst at 600 centigrade met waxy feed at 75 centigrade and travelled together one hundred feet up in the reactor. The catalyst persisted in escaping from leaks in the expansion bellows and inducing oil to follow it. Given the chemical composition of the old and the temperature of the catalyst, fire was the only possible outcome in the open air.

  When the plant was safely down, its usual state now, prisoners were split up and distributed over plants of which they had no knowledge. This was to reduce overtime and increase the efficiency of the work force.

  The Samurai went to Eel wharf. He helped tie up two barges, connect several fat rubber hoses, then went down on a heap of rags on the concrete floor of the darkened amenities room. He dreamed of Mrs Blue Hills.

  He woke miserably, water lapping round him. Water covered the floor. The Grey Goldfish had left a pump running and put his head down; half the river was up on dry land, unsubsidized and duty-free. The amenities block was an island. It took two days for the water to subside.

  ECONOMY PLANT And two weeks to get the plant back up. More tankers re-routed.

  Hooked in as it was as an integral part of the catalytic process, the power recovery section, the money-saver, made the whole complex of plants vulnerable. The American idea was to tack it on the end of the plant so that disturbances to it, though they put the money-saver out of action, would not crash the money-making end of the process. This was known to the European designers, but they preferred the more ambitious, in-balance design. Installed in a modern refinery, where every other plant on the refinery grid was new enough to be reliable and where a closer, more threatening grip on the workers was possible, it could have worked.

  But at Clearwater! Uneasily joined to plants which had been scrapped years ago but still ran, and of a size the humble prisoners at Puroil had never seen, trying to get going under staff policies and Union policies appropriate to an old-style shearing shed or convict compound, the complex had no chance. Every new thing a graft on the old.

  An old bitumen plant was churning out three thousand per cent of design production. Four valiant old boilers had been scrapped once a year for ten years: they were still producing. Seven years before, they had been sold for scrap for next to nothing, but someone found they needed them and Puroil bought them back for an additional fifty thousand dollars. Puroil took more outside contracts for steam. A new hysterical direction came from above that in an emergency, if the steam flow was jeopardized, the men had to jettison process plants and sell steam. High costs? What did it matter? The consumer paid.

  Middle-aged humorists in Melbourne, following orders from overseas, dictated a staff policy for middle management which meant that engineers who were relied on to prescribe for the ills of failing plants were pitchforked into and out of different types of plants too quickly for them to master the operation of any one plant. Plants have personalities inbuilt by designers and suppliers of equipment and foibles that cannot be taught at universities only learned on site. The reason for this policy was to give these men experience on various types of plants; this varied experience was to help them rise in the Puroil organization. Some might say the aim should have been to make the highest possible profit rather than provide careers for employees. Here again the American practice was to keep an engineer on one type of plant for ten years at least. In this time his salary was not tied to his breadth of experience but to his value to the company. After ten years he might be earning as much as the manager; his plants ran steadily and efficiently for long periods and made fantastic profits.

  The men Puroil attracted were usually mediocre. This couldn’t be helped: brilliant men did research or went back to the universities. Hierarchical organizations were most attractive to cunning conformers like the Wandering Jew, who ignored Clearwater and kept his sights on Head Office and the Board of Directors.

  With the lowest prisoners, the policy had been at first to employ almost anyone off the street, then more recently to be severe on the old hands and to employ young men with better paper qualifications. Another rough graft that didn’t take. The new men wouldn’t nurse failing equipment the way the oldies did: they expected everything either to work or to be fixed immediately.

  The ideal plan would be to employ operators who did their own fitting, instrument and electrical work—all gathered into one company union and called ‘staff’. This was impossible: each craft wanted to stay separate from all others and preserve its own identity.

  At the tail end of the power recovery section, just before the stack, where hot flue gases had given up most of their heat to the boiler tubes, these gases did one last duty in an economizer, where at no extra cost they heated up the boiler feed water before its entry to the lower tubes and so on to the top of the boiler where the gases were hottest, over a hundred feet up, by which time most of the water was steam.

  It was five in the afternoon. The plant was getting up again after the last fire. On dayshift, ominous bangs and rumbles had come from this economizer and two men imported from Europe for the start-up which had been proceeding now for eighteen months were looking at it and listening and guessing in a foreign language. They would shortly take steps.

  THE EXAMPLE OF OLDER MEN At the same time in the amenities room, Ambrose had been trapped into looking at a sheet of paper on which was sketched a plan of the control-room circuit lines and drains together with a phone number and several words like ‘Micky Muncher’ and ‘Leg Belly is a Crap House’. This opus was pasted on the concrete wall. Seeing him coming, several seated prisoners looked fixedly at the paper and chuckled. Ambrose stopped, looked, hesitated, looked again, chuckled timidly, searched their faces, almost decided to ask them what the joke was, thought better of it, and single-handed laughed his head off at the diagram. The others laughed louder; this accelerated his stupidity. Soon he was helpless with laughter, even pointing to bits of the diagram with his finger and enjoying the fun piece by piece. His tormentors obligingly roared each time he pointed.

  MEANWHILE... At five o’clock, the Grey Goldfish and One Eye had taken the rowing-boat across the river to get set for a little prawning. They loved a feed of prawns and the price was reasonable. They would leave empty kerosene tins and several nets on the bottom, in sight of the wharf. When it was dark they would row over quietly and commence operations more interesting than lining up hoses of discharging barges. The tide would be just right.

  On the stroke of five, the Beautiful Twinkling Star received the first news that he was being transferred to a lower job.

  At the same time the Python was locking his office desk ready to join the peak-hour traffic. He made sure there was nothing on his desk: anything could be incriminating given the circumstances. He pocketed the desk key, not like others who hung theirs on a hook under the desk. Head office auditors had a habit of descending suddenly on a Termitary, grabbing keys, impounding the contents of desks, humiliating anyone who broke the slightest regulation. Fortunately they came only once a year and usually descended first on the pay office and the cashier. He often chuckled over stories of how these incorruptible pimps, in the interests of their own careers, had come into the offices, running their fingers round picture rails for keys conveniently hidden.

  What could be so important that it must be made a matter of life or death to lock it away and to hide the key? One or two desks and cabinets, yes. But all desks? And a paper clip would open them. All for a precious line or two in the auditor’s report: ‘Three desks unlocked, four keys found after superficial search. Please comment.’

  One year an office boy, having heard of these procedures, broke up several razor blades and stuck the pieces into the timber of the picture rails in the pay office and accounts office. This was a bonus to the leader of the audit team, who got himself good marks first by reporting the injuries to his team’s fingers, and again by reporting the carelessness of his assistants in no
t getting up to look for keys instead of searching with their fingers. The organization man can make capital from anyone’s mistakes—staff friend’s or labour enemy’s.

  The Python cleared away everything. He was thinking of a solution to Puroil’s labour problem. A labour problem exists when a management is under pressure to reduce its establishment, and this pressure came from Head Office staff division without any regard for local needs of new and untried plants or different labour attitudes. Aloud he said, ‘Sack the lot! They’ll come crawling back for jobs!’ That was his solution. That attitude was behind every dealing he had with the lower orders. As a man rises in the world, the lower orders begin just below his own status, so they seem to be multiplying and becoming more complex and unwieldy all the time. Unnecessarily numerous.

  He left his office and walked the corridors of local power. Every room empty. Where was the power? If the leaders were not there, and not there in Melbourne, London, New York, Hamburg, Paris, where was the power? Or was there nothing? Was it only in the minds of its prisoners? Was it, unknown to the world of prisoners supporting it, was the whole vast enterprise in angel gear? He shivered.

  At five o’clock, at the northern end of the control room, Far Away Places was talking into the foremen’s office to the Good Shepherd when a shiny brown hairless hand came round his body into his overalls—touching his bare skin—and flied him. He stood there gaping at his superior, every button of his overalls undone, everything on show. The Glass Canoe had got him again.

  But what was this new feeling? There was an echo on his bare skin of the touch of his tormentor’s fingers. If he hated the Glass Canoe, why did he like the touch of his hand?

  A PRETTY PICTURE At a minute after five, the economizer burst a tube. The two foreigners took steps—long ones—in the opposite direction. The Two Pot Screamer was watching them from the top of a stack of catalyst boxes. Lying belly-down, just to feel a little pain there. He had a nest in the catalyst shed. The foreigners flew. They seemed to know what to do when danger, smoke and loud bangs filled the air.

  Ambrose carried on laughing. He didn’t recognize the sounds outside as anything but noises. He didn’t know the sound of safety valves. His audience left him. The Humdinger ran to the eco-nomizer, bypassed the feedwater, isolated the economizer, grabbed a piece of angle iron, climbed up beside the safety valves and seated them with a few shrewd blows. The foreigners came back slowly, full of diagnoses and orders. In their excitement they spoke their own language until the Humdinger casually hefted the angle iron under their noses, testing its weight.

  ‘Talk your lingo in the dykes, mateys!’ he bellowed. Men of their standing, spoken to like that in Europe, would have lain hands on the man, struck him in the face, toed him up the trouser. Unfortunately for their egos, they could not do that yet in Australia.

  The Grey Goldfish heard nothing. The battery button was turned off. One Eye cocked his head. ‘Dirty weather up at that big heap of crap,’ he said, and looked at the Goldfish for a confirming grunt. The Grey Goldfish didn’t lift his head. One Eye understood. He let it pass.

  The Python pricked up his ears, listened to the noise of the safeties, and grinned. He was not on the plant. It was a great advantage not to be on a plant when something blew up. Nothing had changed inside humans in the recorded past. He was glad it was happening to someone else.

  The Glass Canoe was no chicken, he would have gone out with the Humdinger if he hadn’t been occupied inside his own head with the Glass Canoe. Why, he asked himself, why do they fight against me? Do I ask too many questions? Do they take it the wrong way when I fart-arse round with them. It’s all in fun. They must know my bark is worse than my bite, by now. I don’t mean them any harm. His mood had changed in a flash since he flied Far Away, it needed no outside stimulus. His internal chemistry was under no one’s control. Its sequences were random.

  The Beautiful Twinkling Star for once didn’t rush out to help. They squash me and bypass me and tread on me because they know I won’t complain. A tiny voice whispered in him, Why are you taking on the whole world? Are you daring extinction? This world isn’t made for the kind man. Wake up to yourself. Get thee behind me, Satan, he answered. But inside him the whispering continued. A battle had started on a lonely field in his brain. Whatever the outcome, he would be the victim.

  What a beautiful picture. A burst economizer tube, fleeing foreigners, a Grey Goldfish with battery disconnected, a Beautiful Twinkling Star demoted and resentful, a Python grinning maliciously, depraved Humdinger heroically saving the day and standing up against foreign domination, Ambrose laughing at a non-existent joke, and Far Away Places ignominiously flied. Advance Australia!

  A GAME OF CHESS The plant was down two weeks. Another week and it had struggled to its knees.

  In a filthy corner of the locker-room, chess was the game between Canada Dry and Humdinger. The chessboard was of paper spread flat on an upturned carton. The chairs they sat on were not burnished gold but battered sheet-iron and had been rescued from an old building torn down to save the wages of two canteen workers. The locker-room was filthy because the present shift had taken over from No. 1 shift, notoriously shy of the broom and the mop.

  ‘When you going to Canada?’ asked the Humdinger, as Canada Dry was lining up an attack with both knights.

  ‘Next September.’ He had been saving for two years to go to Canada. He had enough cash to get there, and back as far as Hawaii.

  ‘The Enforcer will think twice before he goes over to the fractionator again. See the slurry all over his shirt?’ Canada Dry had forked his king and rook. He moved his king.

  ‘That would be the first time he ever went out on the plant. I’m waiting for him to come out with an opinion on the running of it.’ Canada took the rook.

  ‘Get that up you,’ he exulted calmly. The Humdinger moved a bishop back to the queen’s square, the knight was trapped in the corner.

  ‘They had a good night last night,’ said Humdinger. ‘Got down in the start-up hut, rags on the tables and the heaters on. Some log crept in, though, and emptied a pint of piss on the heater bar. The stink! Like when we did it on the steam lines in the boiler house. Full of ammonia as a baby’s nappy.’

  The boiler men were noted for their disinclination to leave the boiler house. Their bed was behind the back wall, they defecated on a shovel and threw it in the combustion chamber together with their lavatory paper. You could murder a man there and get rid of him completely through the explosion door.

  The Humdinger cooked socks in the tea urn, he couldn’t leave that habit behind, but his most spectacular bit of foolery was to come up behind Captain Bligh who was holding a billy of milk by his side and talking earnestly to the Two Pot Screamer, and drop his donger in the milk.

  ‘Like a lizard drinking,’ he said admiringly and Captain Bligh looked down for a second then threw milk, billy and all as far as he could. The Humdinger was too cheerful about his vileness for anyone to be angry.

  THE HUNGER FOR WAR Stretch appeared briefly with his hollowed-out plant manual in which he hid war novels. He was nervous about being discovered breaking the reading rule despite the fact everyone did. When Slug or Enforcer came round, he turned a page and pretended to be reading about impulse and reaction turbines. He wouldn’t have known one from the other, but he knew that page of words well and could answer a quick question on it. When the covering page wore out, he had to read the preceding page. In this manner he was learning something, even though he was doing it backwards and had started from the middle.

  He had no sympathy for chess and the Humdinger despised him. He went away restlessly. He was one of those who shone at training schools and wrote long and erudite handovers for the following shifts, but if you walked down to his plant and asked why he was doing something, he couldn’t answer.

  He found a locker-room corner and got into his paperback. He was back on the Eastern front, his mouth watering as he chewed through a delicious story of German and Russian
soldiers competing with each other several decades ago in torturing temporary prisoners spectacularly in the snow. What were once men were cutting off live men’s toes with wire-cutters, shoving barbed wire into places where it would cause discomfort, cutting out eyes, crucifying men with barbed wire, cutting off hands, testicles, fingers, noses. By now the survivors were respectable family men; friends, not enemies. Stretch read, swallowed hard the saliva this story brought into his mouth, blinked so he wouldn’t miss a word.

  War was keeping a man awake: performing, years after, a valuable industrial service.

  THE EASY WAY Into this peace a voice called, wavering, ‘She’s going down!’ Men got to their feet, ready for flight. Strange noises outside.

  ‘The boilers are rocking,’ yelped Mister Puroil, who belonged to the pump-house where emergencies of this nature never happened. He left quickly on his company cycle for the safety of the tank farm.

  ‘They are, too,’ said Humdinger, looking out the high window. ‘Look! There’s the Count. Up there pulling levers again and she’s coming down round his ears. Get on it, will you!’

  There he was, fifty feet up, working the pressure-tapping levers one after the other. The noises inside the boiler, fearsome to the others, meant nothing to him. He’d never bothered to find out anything beyond his own immediate routine. He was there for a weekly pay packet and to follow orders. A dead loss.

  ‘She’ll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes,’ sang the Humdinger, running out to the control room. People were rushing about, trying to arrest runaway levels and failing pressures. This was the time when the turbo-expander machines usually tripped. But not this time. Instead, one of the machines took the easy way out and blew itself up. The bang stopped the Count in his tracks, but the pieces of casing and fragmented blades were on the opposite side and descended in a shower on the plant plot for distances up to a hundred yards. The rotor core, twisted and bent, fell to the grating. The rest of the machines surged and tripped, the plant collapsed.