The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  Blue Hills, on the turbine landing, went to water and fell to his knees. The breath left him, his chest pained heavily. For what seemed like minutes, he couldn’t breathe.

  Ten minutes later a party of visitors under the guidance of the Spotted Trout descended on the place.

  ‘Due to the latest technical improvements, this is an extremely silent running plant,’ he extemporized. What the hell was wrong now? Several of his party made remarks about metal lying in the quadrangle.

  ‘Is there a cleaning problem here?’ asked a young accountant who would never have tolerated metal fragments on his office carpet.

  ‘Just a moment,’ said the Trout. He asked the nearest prisoner. ‘What’s all the bloody mess?’ The Humdinger looked him over.

  ‘I’ve seen bigger boobs than you,’ he said loudly, glad to have an audience. ‘But I don’t know where. Can’t you see the bastard’s blown to bits?’

  The Trout didn’t want his visitors listening to this sort of talk.

  ‘And in here,’ clutching his loud-hailer and diving into the control room with the charmed rats after him, ‘is the latest in radio communication between control and the operator on the job.’ They were just in time to see the Glass Canoe perform a savage Gotcha on Stretch, who squealed and leaped like an arrow for the ceiling.

  Outside, the Beautiful Twinkling Star was left posted on the worst jobs. But no complaining. He would never let his one-man side down by squealing.

  Under a tarpaulin in the regenerator skirt, a body moved restlessly. Itchy with catalyst dust, the Rustle of Spring settled down for a night’s sleep. It was quieter now.

  AN APPLE A DAY ‘What’s the matter with Herman the German?’ the Enforcer asked Stillsons in the silence of the controller’s hut.

  ‘Osteo-something.’

  ‘They say his hand’s off at the wrist.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Why doesn’t someone tell me?’

  ‘Why don’t you keep your ear to the ground?’

  ‘What are you shitty about?’

  ‘I’m not shitty.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘Not.’

  ‘Are!’

  ‘Not!’

  ‘This osteo is spreading, is it? Can he do his work without a hand?’

  ‘He’s still as good as any six men.’

  SIXTY-DOLLAR CAT The Great White Father brought home a cat in a cardboard box; he’d rescued him from a rich doctor’s house. The doctor’s wife had been boasting of his cost and pedigree and the Home Beautiful deserved the best.

  This cat was a ball of white wool, rolling in play on a harmless floor, pretending to be angry, advancing like a dragon on your shoe, a lion swatting a teasing piece of rag while men roared. White?

  ‘So none of you mob treads on him.’

  ‘What if we see double?’

  ‘Don’t tread on either of him…Many of us were made for the price of a seat at the movies and a bite to eat, or a chocolate malted at the milk-bar, a gin and lime at the pub, or a few cigarettes and a bottle of cheap steam on the golf links, but this cat cost sixty dollars!’

  PICTURES FROM AN EXHIBITION Humpy was out on the turbine landing. It was night shift and in the dark the flue-gas header glowed cherry red under its thick grey sleeve of glass wool. Drops of oil splashed gaily down from the hydraulic connections of the great butterfly valve on the southern end.

  The Samurai gazed without speaking at Humpy up near the turbines. What was he doing?

  Big Dick ran out from the shower holding two handfuls of his prized possession and waving the rest about. He loved to be looked at. The Count followed him: he couldn’t take his eyes off Big Dick. He’d seen nothing like it in the cold land of his birth.

  Out in the panel room, Captain Bligh was doing the rounds, cracking jokes, singing, anything to make a noise and keep the prisoners awake. The Boardrider puzzled him, head in hands, an open plant manual before him. Captain Bligh got down on his hands and knees and crawled along the deck into range, looking up under the Boardrider’s hat. The eyes were just open. The Boardrider had been alerted by the sudden stop in the flow of Captain Bligh’s nagging words.

  On the turbine platform Humpy watched as the oil drops smoked and crept slightly downhill toward the glowing section of the header. He looked round for a steam hose. Yes, there was one. And yes, the valve was shut and only hand-tight. One of those multiple-type gas and steam connections.

  The Samurai went out into the panel room. The Glass Canoe talking interminably. He was getting thinner: another attack coming on. He usually lost condition before his illness struck. The Samurai tackled him.

  ‘Do you only talk about yourself?’ he asked sourly. Was it a weakness in him to detest weakness in other men?

  The Glass Canoe didn’t reply. I’ll shut up, he said to himself. But he resumed the conversation when the Samurai was gone. Had quite a serious session with himself.

  The Samurai, as he turned an eye towards the turbines again and Humpy, reflected that everywhere men carried tragedies round in their lumpy chests. He thought of Mrs Blue Hills. She had dropped her bundle again when he went to see her. Lamentations filled the air; she was so worked up that beads of sweat sprinkled her face and at one stage she shot a small fairy.

  ‘Why does the woman always pay?’ she wailed. The Samurai sneered at the commonness of the mind that could vomit forth such stuff in moments of agony.

  The best things in life are free!’ he shouted at her. He didn’t know what to say. Besides, on night shift, at any hour of the twenty-four, his mind was furry and intractable like a strange, disobedient, untrained animal. He couldn’t make out what was wrong with her. He couldn’t make head or tail of her complaints. The visit ended with him having to do what he had no taste for.

  Her tongue was probing, but tasted stale; she hadn’t showered, and stank of urine. He felt guilty because he disliked her. If only he believed in God, or something. He could speak! He could be a trumpet to blaze forth to the world its failings and its ills. He could hold forth the patent medicine of ideology and compel the world to taste and try.

  Humpy, twenty-one and bent like an old man, waited for the oil to flash. He was happy when the flames tore upwards: he had the steam hose ready. He spun the valve, aimed the nozzle at the flame. A fierce jet of vapour shot towards the fire and immediately ignited, right back up the spout of vapour to his hand. The gas at seventy-five pounds had overcome the fifty-pound steam and he was feeding the flames with fuel gas. His stomach on fire with fright, he turned off the gas and looked for a steam hose without any other attachments.

  The Samurai saw the blaze, ran and doused it, bumping trembling Humpy out of the way with an expert hip.

  The Samurai phoned Mrs Blue Hills when he judged that Blue Hills was on his way to work. She was still upset and he thought it best to ask her to meet him. Calm her down. He smuggled her into his car and went out to a motel at Riverditch, local haunt of marriage strays and passionate office lunches.

  The cataclysm that burst on his amazed body left him weak and exhausted. All her woes and miseries and petty hates gathered in a storm of sex and rained on him. His body seemed to swell under her assault. He felt like a whale threshing about in a sea of tiger sharks. She was teeth and tears, feet and heels and fingernails. And all the time her story of tragedy and wasted love and misunderstanding and mistakes poured forth. She referred to Blue Hills as Rumpelstiltskin. She referred to him continually.

  He went home and snatched a few hours’ sleep in the afternoon, but woke around five, sick. Mrs Blue Hills must have given him her husband’s cold.

  Trying savagely to go to sleep, he did drop off into a dream of a world of fantastic order: a world where there was no waste of men or materials, not even of love.

  He was threshing about still when the Great White Father broke in on him drunk.
He had left his Home Beautiful for a day in a fit of night-shift horrors. He was shouting drunk, and seeing the Samurai looking sick, was full of panaceas.

  A PARALLEL Down on the plant—though it might have been on another, harsher planet—the Glass Canoe grudgingly gave Far Away Places a hand with a large, tight block valve. Abusing him all the time.

  ‘You sure you’re not using our lavatory? A man like you, rotten with disease, ought to be careful.’

  Far Away didn’t mind, he was glad to have the big man’s help. The valve was dangerous and hot; the air rippled and shimmered above it. There was not a safety poster in sight.

  Far Away admired the eruption of energy each time the big man took the strain on his heavy wheel key. The top of his overalls was open, tanned chest showing, the red-brown tits set in a dark hair-mat moving along with the slabs of muscle underneath. Those hairs—they were so shiny. The man’s body was in beautiful condition. Far Away Places eyed the sweat running down his neck and gathering in bright crystal drops under his chin. Was he resentful of this man who had tortured him and even now was abusing him in time with his pulls on the wheel key? Side by side with resentment was admiration—for the Glass Canoe’s strength, the electric energy, the rhythmic flow of his efforts on the heat-stiff steel.

  What a sly thing is a man! This admiration for strength co-existent with resentment for ill-treatment was like a population’s half-willing, half-unwilling subjection to a strong leader.

  THE COMFORT OF INDIFFERENCE None of the various grades of prisoners was aware of it, but while the hours and years of their detention passed, the captive moon swung round the tiny earth, the tides slid in and out obediently and the piece of galaxy in which our solar system nestled comfortably swung slowly in the nothingness that enveloped all existence and this nothingness tugged gently at all that had substance; prying loose, looking for weakness, drawing all things to it.

  And perhaps, although it may not be considered in good taste to mention the fact, we might remember that the tiny earth which entertains us as guests, or lice, upon its surface while its present chemical state endures somewhere between the unbearable heat of the past and the unbearable cold of the future—this nice little home of ours is dying under us. We are now clever enough to measure by just how much our day is lengthening, and just when we shall draw the moon in to us as a ring of rocks and dust, and when we shall fall unnoticed into the sun. And cheerfully set out this information for children to understand, in books with coloured pictures showing the future final disaster. Just like a fairytale.

  We don’t know when we came here, or where we came from; we’re having a free ride through space and call it life. And we are now aware that the earth is indifferent to us. She is not complimented when we set aside areas of natural beauty for ourselves, nor concerned when we wreck our surroundings. Her fate is sealed. We may as well plunder, exploit, bomb, bulldoze, alter, shift, drain, kill—anything—for all she cares.

  QUICK RESULTS Nevertheless, despite the obliteration to come, we carry on as if life is important. If we don’t, our attitude and behaviour become conspicuous.

  The plant was readied again as if gasoline was important. Safety was discussed and circularized as if human life was important. The Spotted Trout did great strokes proving to hosts of innocent people how safe the plant and how kind Puroil was.

  Three weeks—and the plant still starting up. If they had sense enough while the plant was down to do all the work notified as faulty or dangerous instead of rediscovering it when the plant was on the way up. But the pressure was on the brass from Melbourne, London, Europe to skimp on maintenance and show a quick result.

  11

  THE COLOUR BAR OF MIND

  MUCK A saboteur at work. In every book in use in the distillation plants, ethylene, cat cracker, pump-houses, utilities, the word MUCK appeared in crude capitals. It was in and on books, overalls, drums of products in the yards, on the bodies and doors of trucks. On tanks.

  Alone in splendour sat the Great White Father. His Home had not been defaced by MUCK. Oblivion was not muck, it was a solid product and of infinite use for as long as history extended. ‘Not that our life and graduation as humans was a cosmic joke: it was simply a mistake. There is an ingredient in us we cannot use. This ingredient looks upward to a life without greed and hate. And greed and hate are necessary to keep our digestions balanced, our bodies in the pink, our identity separate, private property intact and our economy healthy. We are a spoilt batch—a monkey batch, the distillation boys say. Our life, for which we are not properly equipped, is better spent in the oblivion of alcohol or drugs. Death will come sleepily, the shock cushioned, a pleasant continuation of drugged sleep.’

  He was talking to himself. His long, brown, confident fingers played with a small pearly button from Cinderella’s blouse sleeve. It had come off while he was performing his regular test.

  ‘I want a state of mind among them. Where all is permitted.’ He was an idealist. ‘They’ve been pushed so far back on themselves by the society we inherit that the only place they can hope for freedom is in their minds. Organized capitalist society is one without opposition or alternatives, its members have as little power over their government as the members of totalitarian societies. And their children are still taught pathetic nonsense about the ballot box being a remedy. What I have here is an underground movement opposing the official government of their lives, the federal, the state, the country, the local council, the union, the company, their next employer. What they want is to go on living, not too keenly, not too laboriously, with as little thought for anyone else as possible. Keeping their heads down, hoping the nasty things happen to others. Minding their own business when they want to and not having anyone pry into it. The only way is to teach them to enter the kingdom of oneself. Oppose everything, not outwardly but in their heads. Never oppose themselves.

  ‘They are prisoners of their own image of themselves. Half the time you see them doing things they’ve copied from other people, and you think it’s a mannerism, then after a while there’s nothing left but mannerism. They’ve become the thing they copied. That’s where I step in. I’ll make them love this little taste of indulgence and oblivion so they’ll think of nothing else, and treat everything else as so much illusion. No matter what happens to them—they may be redundant next week—they will feel self-sufficient, not because they can hold their heads up in this silly world, but because they are in my world, inside their heads, and there they are princes. Princes of the blood, with me their king. That’s what they miss: the colour, the natural subordination to a king whose authority is unquestioned and whose orders coincide with their desires. Democracy is a treadmill for them, a grey, colourless place in which those favoured by birth and brains and a different metabolism forge ahead and take by brute force of intellect and personality the prizes of the obvious world; they need not equality, because they can never be equal, but a purple and gold monarchy. The purple in their mind’s eye: the gold in the amber of their beer.’

  THE ENFORCER It’s like being in the lodge. When you’re here at Puroil, you can’t afford to speak of anything but the job or the weather or something harmless; nothing that would cause dispute, no political discussion, no religious arguments. Not that this lot or any lot of worker chappies could say anything worth listening to: if they had anything in their skulls they wouldn’t be working here. I can’t afford to let my tongue wag, either, or some bright spark will be quoting me and I’ll be up on the carpet getting the boot right up the arse and when the next promotion comes, little old Enforcer won’t be the pea, he’ll be the peanut. I think I’m a decent person and a fair person and a kind person. But right now I’m sick. It makes you want to throw it all up rather than put up with this ugliness. Puroil has a decent, fair record, and it’s always been kind to its people. Why do they always go against the company? It’s almost as if they wanted to keep fighting the boss. As if they thought the company hated them and they’re always trying to get back. B
ut the company doesn’t hate them; we take every care of them. As far as humanly possible. Puroil is good to the staff. We are civilized here; after all, it’s a big company, old enough to have its little quaint ways. That’s why all this ugliness—this stoppage nonsense—hurts so much. I almost wish I hadn’t heard the rumour. It reminds a man there is a terrible side to life. Like having a viper in your bosom. Just because the company rejected all their silly demands. Still, you can’t afford to talk too much about controversial things, someone’s only got to dob you once and your name’s Mud. Once they’ve got it in for you they never forget. Neither do I; there’s still four people working here that I owe something. It doesn’t matter to me if the Corpse gets the sack, I’ll get him. I’ll get him.

  He had reached the wharf and rubbered along, peering inside the fogged windows of the amenities hut.

  ADRIFT Blue Hills had walked a little way from the plant in the cooling air when he saw the Enforcer struggling in the darkness with two or three shadowy prisoners right on the edge of the wharf compound. The light was bad: safe enough for working, but not for defending yourself. Blue Hills was humane enough to go to his superior’s aid, several mild pokes about the body were sufficient to show the assailants the Enforcer was not alone. Fearing the light, the prisoners backed off into the shadows and Blue Hills, breathing with difficulty because of the tension of the moment, turned to face the intended victim. He knew it was a member of the commanding class and expected only grudging thanks. The men were undoubtedly going to throw the Enforcer in the polluted river. With any luck he would have impaled himself on the shore debris of stray timber and bottles. Unfortunately, Blue Hills had left himself wide open by leaving his plant.