The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  Blue Hills mouthed a moment and finally shouted; he was dying in strength and panic, the hard way.

  ‘I’m still strong! You can’t let it take me! Look!’ His twisted face thrust close to the Sandpiper’s, he sat up straight. ‘Look, I’ve got all my strength! All I ever had!’ He flexed his arms, straining against the thing fighting him from inside. But he wilted first, not his internal opponent.

  ‘Where is my strength going? How can I be dying?’

  Next moment he was flopping and heaving. He died with a shout, a squeal, as if he had been pulled down shrieking from beneath. Blue Hills forgot the terrors in the sky, forgot all about the distant waving of the unknown person on the Jerriton hills and the beauty of the silver tanks at sunrise. He never knew there was no person waving—it was the tip of a revolving sign at a Puroil service station on top of the hill, hidden by houses. Just peeping by the corner of a red texture-brick house as its triple arms revolved in the wind, beckoning consumers. No one at all; not friend or woman or lifelong undiscovered mate.

  The Sandpiper stood, then stooped to pick up something that fluttered out of her clothes and remembered the photograph. She glanced at the absurd thing for an instant before flicking it away. Poor Blue Hills. The last memento, the last solemnity, thrown away with a sneer as soon as he was dead.

  It curled in the air and returned like the miraculous boomerang, landing near the heroic ant which was, by this time, a little farther on towards its own destination.

  ACTIONS WITH NO CASH VALUE They brought the Great White Father to him.

  ‘Bad,’ he said, when he saw him apparently dead, and stooped to change the expression on the poor face, smoothing away the terror and leaving the trace of a smile round the mouth. This faded, though, and the face settled into vacancy, but at least the terror was erased.

  ‘We can’t have all the boys thinking death is as bad as that, can we?’ Heartily. Death had scragged Blue Hills before he’d started to live, and flung his scraggy cadaver carelessly on the clay.

  ‘Must have gone off his rocker, eh?’ said the Humdinger. ‘Never seen him with the girls before.’

  ‘Will we say some words over him?’

  ‘If words were heartbeats, yes. He’d live. But it’s too late for words.’

  They all stood round looking. Hearts fail daily, millions relax and rot, millions struggle to birth. Millions of heads lean over, watching.

  ‘Did he die before or after?’ the Great White Father asked the Sandpiper.

  ‘After of course.’ Professional pride was involved. And the dead don’t contradict.

  It might be considered hard and unfeeling to show a cut-rate prostitute walking away unconcerned from a pitiful death. If only we could show the Sandpiper, golden-hearted at last, bestowing a farewell kiss on that commonplace brow that was rapidly losing temperature, and dropping a few womanly tears on the corpse or the surrounding clay. Not on the lion-hearted ant, though, to whom a teardrop would be a flood.

  These desirable events did not happen. Perhaps if she had known that members of the public—one or two—might some day read about her, she might have trimmed her actions to suit the prevailing taste; she might have done the thing she would like to read about, but this would have falsified the actual events and her own nature.

  While we’re on the subject, consider how little sympathy you would expect from a high-class prostitute: no one expects to see riches and virtue together. But a cheap little prostitute—she has nothing: how tempting to expect love and sympathy, tears and gentle sobs from such a person. Look at all the old fables with which our collective childhood was poisoned about unfortunates being kicked out of palaces and given shelter in huts by other unfortunates whom the savage blows of misery and poverty had made gentle and forgiving.

  How easy it is to assume the Sandpiper will want to lay up treasure in heaven by displays of beautiful actions with no cash value, while her richer sister, hardened by money, steps unconcerned from corpse to corpse, making a fortune. But—and this is the tiny grain of truth in this mountain of ore—no one expects the pursuit of money to have a softening effect. And the corollary? Lack of money doesn’t have a softening effect either. This is the truth illustrated by the Sandpiper as she walked away towards her next five dollars.

  They covered Blue Hills with a tarpaulin. The flies were bad.

  THE VACANT NAME As he walked back to the Home Beautiful, the Great White Father reflected that today a man had died who’d had a name. Now the name was empty. Had he taken it with him? Did the man still exist because the name Blue Hills existed? Elsewhere, new names were being created all the time. Babies were being started all over the world in a daily cycle that followed the turning motion of the earth. As soon as the earth turned away from the sun and shadow blotted out the night, humans were at it. And death was busy at the other end of the production line, feeding constantly.

  DEATH IS A PERSON In the drink hut the Great White Father lifted his beer to signal silence. ‘My friends, for Blue Hills, who would not pretend death was a friend—Well died! Poor little man. You have to admire a hard death. Blue Hills has ridden on ahead, as they say. He has been gathered up—which contradicts my first metaphor, but never mind—he has been chosen to go straight from the Sandpiper to the enormous soft bosom of eternal nothing. To float on clouds of bliss, of which our present alcoholic haze is the first foreshadowing. Drink up.’ There was a necessary pause while supplies cascaded down his throat. ‘Now. What arrangements will we make? I’ll take suggestions from the floor.’

  The Humdinger suggested that as the body was resting on the unhallowed ground of Puroil—at the moment covered with a faded tarp the colour of the surrounding clay—it should be left there and a phone call made to the Termitary. The Glass Canoe drew attention to the fact of the footprints and relics of the Sandpiper’s presence.

  Gradually the mood eased, intoxication increased, and immediate action, its attractiveness, its possibility, receded. The Sandpiper had been allowed to go home. Actually she was put out over this, but they explained to her so firmly that she was upset over the death that took place in her presence, that she could see it was no use arguing that it would be better for her to be active because this would help her to forget. They would have seen through this immediately. She gave it up, but so reluctantly that they passed the hat around and drummed up the best part of what she would have earned the rest of the day. She went away with a good grace.

  ‘I wish,’ said the Great White Father, ‘that we could think of some way of making our late brother’s death work for our cause: the cause of rest and refreshment, ease and plenty. If we could make of his death a great moment in the history of the Home Beautiful, we’d have something to look back on, a monument, a memory that wouldn’t fade of one of our sheep that wandered among the human machines and got lost. I’ll never forget that moment at school, I was a kid when the history teacher taught us—

  Like stout Cortes

  When with eagle eye

  He glared at the Pacific

  And all his men

  Dated each other in mild surprise…

  ‘Just such a moment I look to, when one of you logs has come up with a recipe for it. By his death to slap Puroil in the eye, as a token slap in the eye for all who employ their fellow man as we’re employed, as private, limited-liability slaves. Not like the slaves of long ago: fashions in slavery change as much as anything else. But you’ve heard all this from me before. These people over us, although we can’t get rid of them, we can get in their way. But the boss our bosses represent, the old man with the scythe, we can’t beat him. Have you mob ever thought of the inhabitants of this pretty little earth before we started brewing beer on it? Those soft-bodied pre-Cambrian bits of life, they were a delicacy. For what? What was it that thought them rich pickings? Just picture them, you beer-suckers. Each lot of animals thinks its group is pretty well intact; only a few of their number, relatively, gets picked off by their main predator. So it is with humans. U
s. And what is the monster predator, nibbling at the edges of our ranks, and sometimes getting greedy and reaching in and taking a huge slice of us? Death, my cute little woman-wallopers! He’s our great enemy. Employers and bosses, who have more power over us than we have over them—they are the official agents of death! Weakening us, softening us up for their boss. We are the pickings—for death! and for the grinderies and termitaries of the world. We must be nasty and unattractive to death, just as we are slow and easy and uncooperative with Puroil.’

  ‘I’ll drink to Puroil!’ said Loosehead, who had missed the point completely. The great man went on.

  ‘Death is a person. And here’s mud in his eye!’ He picked up a twenty-six-ounce can of Victorian beer—one of several dozen strangers on the ice—opened it and lifted one side to his wide brown mouth. All present drank to the discomfiture of death and his agents. Most of them had followed at least a few of the tall man’s words. ‘Let’s wait till it’s dark. We can carry Blue Hills in to the cracker control room and say we found him.’

  ‘We can’t leave him out there,’ Far Away objected. Then, thinking he had gone a little far, continued less strongly, ‘It’s a problem. I remember when my old man was dying. Fortunately he died at the right time. You see, we had only two bedrooms and put my sister in with Mum because I was growing fast. The old man should have had a room by himself, but at least he had someone with him when he died. Not like dying on bare clay. With a tarp for a blanket.’

  The assembly was amazed. This was the longest he had ever spoken.

  ‘Pox or no pox, it took some poor cow dying in a paddock to get you outa your shell,’ remarked the Glass Canoe derisively.

  A PERMANENT MEMORIAL The Samurai rolled Blue Hills into the tarpaulin and pocketed a black and white snapshot near his body. He didn’t think footprints would show, the clay was too hard and all the safety boots were the same make. The corpse would be safe in the pipe track till dark. He was surprised at the relaxed feel of it.

  He mounted the steps of a tank in the tank farm and looked about. In the distance the cars of the Termitary workers streamed from the car park. They were a different race of people, leaving the place at four or five, never knowing the strange life of the refinery at night; never seeing the dawn glow in the east, the marvellous lavender-silver tanks, the pink and gold vapours and steam clouds rising with the sun behind them. Another world.

  In two hours it would be getting dark. There was unfinished concrete work on the new gasoline splitter foundations. He had a nice grave picked out for Blue Hills. It was only a matter of lifting out some of the broken stone of the foundations, placing body and photograph in the hole, replacing the broken stone, sprinkling some sand and leaving it till seven in the morning when fresh concrete would be poured. After that the steel tower would go up. Blue Hills would be part of the enterprise.

  Mrs Blue Hills would have to register him as missing. It would be like a bonus to her. The uncertainty about his existence would be the Samurai’s protection from her. Strange, though, the corpse hadn’t stiffened.

  14

  INDUSTRIAL JOKES

  SHIP OF FOOLS Three hundred feet in the air Dutch Treat adjusted his earphones and tuned the crystal set. He had climbed the stack to be nearer to God and His radio waves. The ascent had taken half an hour, birdshit made his boots slip and crusted his hands. A watcher could have marked his progress as he disturbed sleepy birds who fluttered back and settled down after he passed. He didn’t mind breathing the flue gases, as long as he made contact without interference.

  He descended to the control room in case he’d been missed.

  ‘Hey, Dutch,’ said the Humdinger. ‘Make contact with the Big Boss? Where’d you go this time?’ Dutch Treat didn’t tell him. Climbing the stack was dangerous and prohibited. ‘Come on. What did He say? You can tell me. I won’t tell the others.’

  ‘Shut up,’ shouted the bird-spattered climber.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have done all the talking.’

  ‘He didn’t say shut up. I say shut up.’

  ‘That’s not nice. Didn’t He tell you about turning the other cheek and forgiveness and all that jazz?’

  ‘God has nothing to do with forgiveness. He tells and we do,’ the foreigner said sharply. He was one of those who’d never get naturalized.

  ‘You mean He gives orders?’

  ‘Commands. We obey.’

  The Humdinger turned away. Another poor bastard looking for a boss. He turned to his own pursuits and in two hours sold a book and a half of raffle tickets and was thirty dollars richer. He would get a three-dollar bottle of brandy tomorrow and present it to the winner, someone reasonably popular. The start-up proceeded normally.

  Now to fix Bubbles. Bubbles had won a conversational fight. When they got in that day he told how he’d been shacked up with this slut at the Cross with a supply of Hunter River cigarettes; he’d had so much every day of what he should have enjoyed at leisure that he had to have a skin graft. This had topped the Humdinger’s story of the family he had stayed with down at Bega when he was on the road travelling in tea; a girl, her mother and her granny with advanced ideas of hospitality. The story was true. It wasn’t much fun to be beaten on a true story.

  He went to take a drum of water up into the ceiling of the control room, but there was no ceiling. He got a bucket, climbed on the fiat roof, found one of the holes and made it rain over Bubbles. Bubbles arose in wrath, and cursed the misbegotten Humdinger.

  Bubbles went out into the dark, stuffed his earplugs in and whipped open the high-pressure steam blowdown. This little trick caught everyone on the plant—the blast was too big to be ignored. There were white faces everywhere. The Humdinger pointed out joyfully to Bubbles that they were like lawyers, they were the blades of the shears; they shouldn’t be trying to cut each other, but bisecting the mugs between. Bubbles saw the wisdom of this, changed his overalls and led out Ambrose to follow a certain line up the side of the reactor. Following out lines was the first step in the making of an operator. He picked a ripe victim. Ambrose spent an hour climbing, following this two-inch line, up and up, down and down, here and there. It was the handrail. Bubbles called out the entire crew to watch. When he got to the lower stairways of the reactor, Bubbles added to his trick by running quickly to the water drench valve, an on-off tap to quench controllable fires in the skirt-enclosed part of the reactor bed, and gave Ambrose the full spray from the fog nozzles round the outside walls. Ambrose was thrown off his stride and came in dripping. They cheered him. He reddened from scalp to Adam’s apple, and smoked a cigarette deeply as he had learned to do in moments of emotion. It gave you something to be emotional about. Everyone watched, amazed, as he changed into dry overalls and prepared to go up again to find out what was at the other end of the two-inch line. He couldn’t be persuaded he was being had. He spent weeks following that line in the daytime until Mumbles forbade him absolutely to go up there and then he thought he was being picked on.

  In reply, the Humdinger collared Disneyland and fed him a gentle line about being young, superbly built, extremely fit, a natural athlete. Disneyland lapped it up, the broad scar over his eye wrinkling with pleasure. He’d cut himself so often the skin was tissue paper. In five minutes he was running round refinery roads. It was seven and fairly dark. Bubbles replied by pulling Ambrose in and getting him to stand up straight in the control room, look up at the light, then turn round fast. Round and round he spun and of course fell over.

  ‘You’ll have to do it again and again, practise it until you’re perfect, otherwise you’ll never pass your advanced physical.’

  ‘Have I got another medical to do still?’

  ‘You want to be an advanced operator, don’t you?’

  Ambrose was in—hook, line and sinker.

  Disneyland was still away after Ambrose had spun and fallen fifteen times, so they had to look for another victim; neither was willing to admit the other had won by these puny demonstrations of man’s po
wer over man.

  The Humdinger rang in the voice of the Sumpsucker for the services of Goathead, an old long-service prisoner who came round on his bike to test for the presence of gas. When he came, grumbling aloud as he pedalled, he didn’t get past the spray water tank. The Humdinger took him, meter, sniffer, bike and all, with the jet from the three-inch hose.

  This was great fun for the audience, who barracked loudly for the two men after each trick was done. Laughing beforehand to warn the victim was unfair.

  ‘I’ll need some help with the next one,’ said Bubbles. ‘Does anyone know how to do the three-man lift?’ No answer. ‘I’ll ask it the other way. Does anyone not know the three-man lift.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Ambrose. Bubbles couldn’t believe his luck. Soon they had one man sitting on the floor gripping Ambrose’s ankles, another sitting behind him gripping his arms behind his back and Bubbles stood over them as if ready to lift the three men locked together. But instead of lifting, Bubbles bent down and searched until he found something belonging to Ambrose, a pretty little thing with a small, pink mouth and wide, glowing cheeks. He held it up between finger and thumb, showed everyone, then got out the black boot polish he used to smarten up with when he went straight from work to the club, and blacked this little thing all over.

  ‘Beat that!’ exclaimed Bubbles to the Humdinger. The Humdinger scratched his head. A light went on in his face.

  ‘Back in half an hour.’ He was seen creeping out into the night towards the gastail plant and not again for an hour. The Samurai saw him though, and Dutch Treat, who was up the stack again, climbing carefully up the vertical ladders of the two-hundred-foot absorber column, a slim, silver, dizzy column swaying in the wind. Rung by rung, up under the sleeping birds that infested the ladders and railings of the tallest parts of the plant. Clouds of birds came from the north-west every day to sleep. Thousands of starlings, sparrows, swallows. The Humdinger would get under a step with birds on it, snake his hand up quietly, grip a bird tightly and shove it into his open overalls front. He came down with several dozen of these pets, starlings and sparrows, half and half, took them behind the control panel, positioned himself behind one of the cutout sections (new instruments were going in all the time) and waited.