‘I know how it feels,’ said the Great White Father. ‘Sometimes the worker feels like a big gun, loaded and primed, ready to go off. But there’s only one target. Sometimes it feels as if a man is just rotting away in peace—there’s no chance to be put through your paces, nothing to fight, but there’s one target. Men are not made for peace, you say, just as our bodies are not made for sleep. Feet are the only part made to take a man’s weight. And feet are for charging the enemy, and there’s only one enemy! Who is the enemy? Who is my enemy? Who is your enemy?’ He stopped, stooped down, lifted a can and sank it. ‘Your own brother is your enemy! The only target is your fellow man. He is your primal competitor. And more than that when you are led into battle by one set of leaders against your enemy-target-brother who has another set of leaders, the leaders of both sides have a funny knack of stepping aside at the last moment to leave you face to face with your target-brother. You fight him, you kill each other, and who survives? Leaders. They live to lead another day. Then what happens? The emergency and the hate are past, the fights over, the dead buried, words forgotten, vows broken, revenge forever unsatisfied…as we sit down to sup with our enemies and go to bed with the dead and enjoy it.’
Another can at a noisy gulp.
‘We are the eternal rabble. In our name shame comes. We never benefit. We are the same before as after. We kill ourselves, our brothers, for what? Not for ourselves, but for those skilful enough to make a profit from our wars. We never profit, we have no skills to make money from death and conquest and spheres of influence. Standard of living? Maybe it falls if we get beaten? It’s more likely to rise. Was life any worse before the airplane and the TV set and the megaton bomb? We could go back there any time and we wouldn’t take more than a day to get used to it. But who wouldn’t get used to it? The bludgers that have all the things this world can give them—things we make—the free ones that toil with other people’s money and go to bed on the wealth that we and the machines produce.’
‘Sounds a big red rag to me,’ said the Glass Canoe.
‘No, mate!’ shouted the Great White Father. ‘No! That sort of thing is bull! That’s changing one set of masters for another more efficient at keeping you in your place. And what’s our place? At the bottom, the arse of the pile; we’re the undiluted, eternal crap. No. No isms. The only way is our way. The vast underground life of prisoners, working when you have to, but not too hard unless you feel like the exercise, taking time off, pulling the whole thing back with a steady pressure, the whole juggernaut!—having a drink when you feel like it, like they do up there!—jumping on a bunk with a free and easy sheila when you feel like it!—just like they do up there!—eating as well as you can…The whole edifice of civilization is built with our bones cemented together; the streets are paved with our brothers; we are like little coral animals whose skeletons make the foundations on which islands rest! We have only one life. Let it be as easy as you like to make it, there is no other.’
He sat and drank again. Somewhere in his great eye-sockets a tiny team of nerves worked shoulder to shoulder and squeezed a drop of saline solution along his tear ducts into the corners of both eyes. As soon as he was aware of these drops his sinuses seemed to swell and he knew motion had taken him by surprise. He blew his nose strongly and dismissed the tears.
BOURKE STREET FREDDIE When the Two Pot Screamer heard of Bourke Street Freddie’s death he made up a few verses and stuck them with Puroil resin to the wall of the drink hut.
Bourke Street Freddie, dead a week
Ignored the crown and anchor board, the cry
Of ‘Heads a dollar’, the hated smell of soap,
The glowing forge and ring of steel on steel.
Storm water in the drain with care arranged
His bones, conveyed a graceful, swaying motion
To burst stomach, water-whitened legs
And all his private skin the water changed.
His arms were broken backwards, eyeballs gone,
Children poked his pubis with long sticks,
One foot was missing, dogs had licked his blood,
But this man was our brother, and is home.
The Great White Father liked it, but criticized the feel of the last line. I asked the Screamer about the reference to crown and anchor and it turned out he’d lost all his money on it himself, the money he was to go into the hotel business with, ten years before. He didn’t know whether Bourke Street Freddie had ever played either crown and anchor or two-up. And there was no blacksmithing done any more. Bourke Street had had to become assistant to a young fitter, there was no provision for getting qualified in another trade once yours was redundant. I thought it rather sad.
THE EXPANSION OF HATE Later that day a teenage contractor was seen inside the Puroil prisoners’ locker-room. Twenty dollars missing. The boy was caught in an hour. For the following twenty-four there was a crazy mess of rumours as to his nationality. The Two Pot Screamer took notes like mad. The nationality of the thief depended on the present retailer of the rumour. It was easy to pick out those who hated Scotsmen, the Irish, Estonians, Hungarians, Germans, English, Welshmen, South Africans. The only ones not mentioned were those nationalities the speaker had never heard of. The limits of their knowledge were thus the limits of their hates, or to put it another way, hate expands with the available facts.
THE LIMITS OF SYMPATHY Everyone spares a thought for the man who is disabled through no fault of his own. Scene: the Humdinger in the bed hut, the light on, the Old Lamplighter wanting conversation.
‘Who’s that poor man with his arm off?’
‘Arm off? I don’t know anyone with an arm off.’
‘From the elbow down.’
‘Thick-set joker, bullet head?’
‘Sort of hefty, yes. Always eating apples.’
‘Herman the German. But he’s only got one hand off. Disease in his bones.’
‘He’s got an arm off now.’
‘An arm?’
‘At the elbow.’
‘Poor bugger. Must be spreading.’
‘Will it go right through him?’
‘I hope not, poor sod. Listen, are you going to keep your mind on the job or not?’
COINCIDENCE The Enforcer was put into hospital one night with broken arms, skull fractures and bottle cuts. Three men who did this sort of thing for hire waited for him near his garage which he reached by driving along an unlit lane, asked him for a light and proceeded to do him over. A bottle from behind, a tyre lever from in front and a man with heavy boots to work on the sides. It was eleven-thirty at night and no one heard his yells.
‘Someone must have hated his guts,’ commented the prisoners.
‘Probably the neighbours did it.’
The assailants beat him up from fifty yards behind the house right round to his front veranda. The first blow with the tyre lever broke his right arm. The second broke his left. By a curious coincidence he was disabled for six months exactly, the same length of time the Corpse was on day work. The funny thing was, the Corpse didn’t hire them. He’d been talking in a pub about the bastard that dobbed him in, and a little man who said he was a psycho and feared by the police thought he’d do the Corpse a favour. It was a love job.
HALFWAY UP A WALL Nat’s Girl, watching them all from her perch halfway up a wall, smiled. She had been taken in every conceivable position; every inch of her body had satisfied some seeker as a sexual object: there was no waste on her. Hair, nose, ears, feet, eyes, hands, elbows, buttocks, neck, thighs, breasts, heels, navel, toes, lumbar region, instep, ribs, tongue, shoulders, teeth, knees, chin—everything. Every square inch. There was as little sexual waste on Nat’s Girl as there was economic waste on any of the sheep, cattle or pigs bred for man’s other satisfactions.
She made no moral judgments. A man’s a man, that was her starting point. She watched as the Samurai came in to her little room while the plant was steady—it wasn’t going and nothing could be done until the skeleton staff of fitters bolted a few lar
ge flanges.
He had had a dreadful interview with Mrs Blue Hills. She was looking for him on the weekend when he took off for the country with girls and was determined to be very bitter about it until she was able to make him suffer, then she would turn in mercy and forgive him. But not until he showed some signs of suffering and remorse, though what this meant for her or what satisfaction it was remained obscure.
To cap it all, he had a visit in the lab from Blue Hills himself. Words had flown like erratic birds from Blue Hills’ mouth: words hurt and strange. The Samurai listened like a priest. Blue Hills was sure someone had been seeing his wife. The euphemism hurt him as it issued from his shapeless lips. What he wanted to say was that another man, who hadn’t had the expense of marrying his wife and keeping her in food and clothes for fifteen years in return for household services and infrequent sexual intercourse, this other man who had been spared the drag side of his woman had now come along and was being given as much sexual intercourse as he wanted, with none of the other irksome duties like being with her all the time and taking her out and seeing her when she was not fit to be seen and smelling her when she was not fit to be sniffed, and being set up for his rare sexual trick with an impatient scarecrow in pins and curlers.
‘What should I do about this man?’
‘If you can’t satisfy your wife, she’s got to get it somewhere. If you can’t, leave her. Get someone you can satisfy and that can satisfy you. That’s all I can say. Now beat it.’
Nat’s Girl smiled down from her elevated position at this male wisdom.
DOUBLE BUNGER In the control room the Samurai heard WHUMP WHUMP! and didn’t move an inch. Sure enough, as he turned his head, there was the grinning face of the Humdinger peeping round behind the metal panels on the end of the middle console. Soft thumps on those panels produced sounds like the surging and tripping of the banks of turbo-expanders. But others hadn’t seen the Humdinger.
There were people everywhere inside ten seconds, milling round in the control room, running for the door. Panic. Those wanting to rush out and do something couldn’t get out the door for bods running in. Dutch Treat was nearly trampled to death in the doorway. It revived the Samurai’s spirits a little to watch the ignorant and fearful scatter.
Who was it? What was it? Some looked across the yard to where the Sump was supervising the removal of empty polymer catalyst drums so that he could take them out off night shift. Most blamed the Sump. He was easy to pick on. They were still calming themselves by diverting their fear of a plant crash on to hatred of the smelly, dirty and defenceless Sumpsucker, when a hot spot on the flue-gas header blew out with a roar. The turbo-expanders tripped on low flow, the header pressure dropped and the white-hot catalyst was sucked over the top of the boilers with the flue gas, following the drop in pressure out of the hole in the header, and through the turbo-expanders.
In seconds there was catalyst over everything and men running in circles. The Humdinger cursing and swearing, putting the plant down, throwing cut-off levers and emergency steam cut-ins, none too sure that his little mock whumps hadn’t caused the whole crash. He had slumped the catalyst bed so the whole six hundred tons wouldn’t be lost; now it would have to be vacuum unloaded from the reactor and stripper and from the regenerator down to the air spider level, then the remaining sixty tons below shovelled. Three days for the catalyst to cool, seven days’ shovelling. The catalyst was 87 per cent silica and some of it as fine as 15 microns and what it did inside a lung was nobody’s business.
The Western Salesman came in, jubilant.
‘Shovels, chaps! Twenty cents an hour!’ He wouldn’t have understood if you asked him how twenty cents an hour made it all right to breathe the dust.
After all, it was an economy plant.
13
TOMB OF THE UNKNOWN INDUSTRIAL PRISONER
LIFE IS NOW Witnesses heard the Great White Father going to town on several despairing prisoners whose great cry every day for their past dozen years of detention was ‘Seven hours and fifty-nine minutes to go! Come on three o’clock.’ Or seven, or eleven; keeping up a running commentary on the time left each day. They wanted time to be past, wanted their lives behind them. At sixty they could be free. Delightful.
‘This is life now,’ said the Great White Father. ‘Not tomorrow. Not three o’clock. It’s not a practice for something later. Later you won’t exist. This is all the life you get today. There’s no more. Tomorrow’s another world.’
DEDICATION A dozen sat in the locker-room to watch their leader polish off a few cans of warm beer. With his air of being a visitor to the place, never involved in work, he restored to them a hint that they might be men, not merely extensions of the nuts and bolts outside. They had this feeling only from contact with him, they were not strong enough to hold it firmly and live by it. Constant exposure to the wiles of ever-present Puroil and its concerns made them lose contact with themselves: they had not only no importance, they had no existence. Completely overshadowed and the life sucked out of them by this world-gripping monster that seemed so often stronger than governments—though owned anonymously—they had to be reminded they were men. Even huddled together in the Union meeting, where their conflicts of self-interest were most evident, they had no such feeling of sharing in the life of individuals as he gave them. They needed him as weak people need drugs.
The boilers were started again after the header was welded, the noise of the newly starting plant coming on loud and strong, when the expansion bellows blew on the same header. Expansion bellows were provided to take up expansion and contraction of the header between two fixed vertical boilers. Bellows metal was thinner, and the carry-over of combustible material that caused the previous hotspot affected the bellows, too. It was right at the place where the men stopped to take their readings on the performance of the turbo-expanders.
Taffy the Welsh, standing in this position, was nearly cut in half by the escaping gases. The roar of the rupture could be heard above the screaming turbo-expanders and the high-pitched whistle of the fuel gas in the lines. Men ran.
They brought Taffy down. He was out to it; the overalls had been burned off him, but the men did not notice that a small patch of flesh on his side was cooked till they got him down to the control room floor where several bits of cooked meat fell away from his body. There were no stretchers. Macabre, the Safety Officer, had earned good marks from Luxaflex for economy by taking them off the plants: they were half a mile away in the fire station which acted as casualty centre. Taffy was laid on the concrete floor with some flattened cartons and sleeping rag under him for insulation.
A call was made to the main gate to order an ambulance.
‘You’ll have to ring the fire station,’ said the main gate. ‘You must report all accidents to the fire station.’
‘This man’s seriously injured!’ roared the Samurai into the phone.
‘I’ve only got your word for that,’ said the guard cockily. ‘All accidents must be reported to the fire station, and the fire station will authorize us to ring for an ambulance.’
‘Damn it, I’ll ring one myself!’ yelled the Good Shepherd, who had grabbed the phone. Parallel to his decent world was still this other world where suspicion and hate were a law of life.
‘You’re taking the risk that the ambulance you call will not be allowed in at the gate,’ replied the man. The Good Shepherd slammed down the phone and rang the fire station.
‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered to the men gathered angrily about him. No one liked Taffy, but his burns could be theirs. The Good Shepherd felt they deserved some sort of apology. Inside him, he felt sick. He knew there had to be regulations. He knew the people who frame them had the responsibility of making regulations that would cope with the worst emergencies that could happen. This particular regulation was designed to cope only with the problem of dealing with malingerers with a scratched finger who demand an ambulance and a roomful of surgeons to fix it.
He went through the ch
annels and fortunately the firemen responded quickly: he was glad the company hadn’t had its way and abolished the firemen’s jobs. Someone had made an anonymous call to the newspapers, who rang back and checked with the Trout. The idea was dropped.
‘The sooner we get this man to hospital the better,’ he observed to the men gathered around.
‘You’ll take Taffy to Saint Joe’s, won’t you?’ the Great White Father asked the Good Shepherd. ‘You can’t take him to that other place.’ He was referring to a hospital of sinister reputation where the nurses acted like sluts off the streets, dying to get out with their boyfriends, not caring a hoot for anyone. ‘It’s a terrible place. I know a poor devil—he was shot, I admit—he fell down between the railway lines at Banksia and grazed his arm. A pretty bad graze. They left him four hours in casualty. When they did bother to get someone in, they had to take his arm off.’
‘You’re exaggerating,’ smiled the Good Shepherd. That sort of thing couldn’t happen these days. ‘Medical science—’
‘They left him sitting there and he had gangrene in four hours,’ the great man said seriously. ‘I don’t know how long he was getting to the hospital. Now he’s got this much stump.’ He pointed to a spot halfway up the Good Shepherd’s upper arm. ‘Another bloke went in, had half his stomach out with cancer and they found he was rattling all over with cancer lumps. Just after they told him about the cancer and that he was a goner, some pig of a doctor waddled in and called out in the ward, “Who’s dead and who’s not?”’
The Samurai spoke up. ‘You might as well take him to a place staffed by people like us. Just in off the street. You need hospitals where the people don’t work just for their wages—where they’re dedicated. Like Saint Joe’s.’
Just beyond his grasp there was a shining idea; was it the key that could open up this present attempt at civilization so that the whole vast machinery might suddenly get to its feet and work? Instead of slumping, half idle, aimlessly, as it was now.
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner Page 28