The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  His luck was unbelievable. At 8.30 the Spotted Trout came in with a busload of visitors on a sightseeing tour and when they were nicely spread out through the control room, he was ready to go. Bubbles and the others couldn’t hold back, they had to help make this a winner. The idea was so good petty rivalry was forgotten. Bubbles and the Samurai, who came in from doing start-up work, and Far Away Places, all amazed the Trout by taking little groups of visitors helpfully in hand and getting them strung out along the length of the control room, giving them innocuous but good-natured lectures on the parts of the panel they were facing. Most didn’t know the place at all though they worked there every day, but they read out the labels on the instruments and put in words that sounded technical and the visitors didn’t know the difference. Just as in the technical bits of a TV commercial, they made up additions to the table of elements.

  When the gabble was stilled and the lecturers had attentive listeners, the Humdinger held his stomach against the eight-by-six hole and let the birds out into the lighted room. The panic started slowly, then accelerated like the panic of a person wakened in his own bedroom by the police.

  The lights blinded the birds, who flew erratically from one end of the room to the other. There was no space for the visitors to get out; by some chance there was a gaping, grinning, ducking crowd of overalled operators at the exit end. People milled, women screamed. Men lashed out to protect themselves from the little winged bullets, which were too fast to get away from. Beaks hit faces. Clubbing hands hit other people.

  The Slug took one look from outside the door and stayed out to examine the spray water pump. How could he be blamed if he was outside when it happened? Captain Bligh had a rolled newspaper in his hand and stood valiantly in the middle of the floor and batted the birds as they came from either end.

  He was a hero. He missed many at first, but when the birds started to slow down after knocking their heads on the concrete walls at either end of the long room, he got more and more. Birds lay stunned, were trodden on. Feathers filled the air. Softened the concrete underfoot. The Humdinger and his crew unblocked the exit end and adjourned to the locker-room to finish their laughing. It was very pleasant to be the Humdinger. Bird lice would keep him scratching for days, but it was worth it.

  The Trout managed to get his hysterical visitors out to the bus, apologizing and swearing. He explained he was swearing at the birds, not at them. Next day he reported Captain Bligh for having a newspaper. Reading matter was forbidden. He couldn’t report the happening, or he’d have been in the gun for the failure of his tour.

  Bubbles had tearfully, joyfully handed the palm to the Humdinger for the joke of the year and went on laughing for the rest of the shift. Disneyland came back, puffing from his four-mile run round the outer roads of the refinery.

  ‘I’m back,’ he said. He didn’t know why they were laughing and didn’t know how to find out without exposing himself to their laughter. Sweat beaded his forehead, collected in the scar and ran down into his eye.

  ‘Look at my calf muscles now,’ he finally said to the Humdinger. ‘They’re getting bigger, I think.’

  The Humdinger took time off from enjoying his success and said, ‘You better go round again, I think.’

  He went. Hysteria resumed. The world was full of fools.

  THE DIMINISHING WORKER The creator of the Home Beautiful asked a few tactful questions in the cracker panel room.

  ‘Seen Blue Hills about?’

  ‘Not since earlier,’ said the Humdinger cautiously.

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘Gone? The company must have taken him away.’

  ‘Haven’t heard anything. Keep your ears open. If there’s no news, keep it dark.’

  ‘No names, no packdrill.’

  Handed down from convict days, the freemasonry of fear of the authorities kept the news of Blue Hills’ collapse quiet.

  ‘What if he got up and walked away?’ said the Humdinger.

  The Samurai walked in the north door. The panel room phone rang. The Great White Father picked it up.

  ‘Yes,’ regally, ‘this is the Great White Father. Herman the German? No. Where is he? Out of the anaesthetic? We’ll send up a party each day to visit him. Poor old bastard.’ Herman was no more than five years older than the Great White Father. Hearing the name, the Samurai walked up to listen.

  ‘I’ll be damned. Off at the shoulder, eh? How long has he got, did they say? A year? Probably means three weeks. Well, we’ll make him as comfortable as we can. Any relatives? OK man, we’ll do our best. He’ll have visitors.’ He hung up sadly. Looking down he saw the Samurai’s overalls flecked with good beach sand.

  ‘Dying?’ asked the Samurai.

  ‘Looks like it. This bone disease keeps spreading and they keep chopping bits off. We’ll have to get him on the beer.’

  ‘He’s a teetotaller.’

  ‘Up to now. He won’t be when I get hold of him.’ Where would the Samurai pick up sand? Concreting?

  ‘Off at the shoulder. This mob’ll sack him now, but he’s still as good as any four men.’

  ‘Yes, they don’t employ bloody cripples. They said so.’ Perhaps he’d walked through one of the contractors’ sand heaps.

  THE RANGE OF FRIENDSHIP The Samurai received his usual number of thumps on the arm from the Humdinger. Lately they had been getting more frequent, both from the Humdinger and Two Pot, even from Bubbles; not to mention several of the quieter prisoners. They were very fond of him and instead of holding his hand or kissing him as women might their women friends, their contact was limited to a thump or two.

  The arm, near the shoulder, was getting very sore. In his judo experience, he had seen men with bad legs from years of repeated foot contacts. He had started to turn his shoulder away or to present the other one. But they didn’t seem to like hitting the left shoulder. It left his right arm free.

  He couldn’t ask them to ease up: that was like pleading. They were human enough to attack more if they suspected weakness. And this would only bring on confrontations, which he wanted to avoid. He tried to anticipate their friendly blows and move out of range.

  NO MAN PROVOKES ME WITH IMPUNITY A week later, after his arm turned blue-black just below the shoulder where the muscle crossed the bone, he took himself along to a doctor, who told him he would have to avoid anything that might knock his arm. He should have taken the week off, but relied on being able to persuade the boys not to thump him on that muscle. He knew he was kidding himself.

  Ten days after that, the skin started to break as if it had been undermined. It smelled. He had seen gangrene and knew this was the end of work for a while. The Humdinger and Bubbles looked offended when he showed them the arm.

  It was better in three weeks, but had not healed in the deep wound-trench where the gangrenous tissue had been cut out. Still, it was good enough to be back at work. Thickly strapped.

  He noticed a certain coolness from the Humdinger, who looked at him as if the whole thing was some sort of frame-up. Very likely they would never forgive him for what they had done.

  Why was he the one to take injury from the casual, tongue-tied affection of these poor creatures? He was used to the sight of it now: the others thought it a horrible disfigurement. But the sore had transferred itself to a place inside him and was still spreading. When would he find an opponent worthy to fight? The festering inside him would only be checked by violence. Revenge. Revenge. But on whom? Had it taken only this little wound to sour him? Was he soured or merely sufficiently provoked?

  NOT A FOOT WRONG He was back at work for yet another start-up. The latest crash had been disgraceful, they told him; men milling round the instrument panels; the Humdinger trying to break through a group of fitters having a conference in front of the fractionator instruments and failing to get through in time to save the column puking; starting the reactor with five instruments not working; broken-off probes still in the plugged tappings of key controls; running blind on levels; only one
slide working on the double-disc slide valves on stripper and regenerator; discovering there were no other probes in the refinery to clear plugged pressure-tapping points; a violent mix-up of supervisors, technologists, engineers, foreign experts crowding round the main panel and showing resentment if operators tried to elbow them out of the way to reach controls. The only good thing had been Gunga Din, who always made sure the urn was full of water for the next brew of tea.

  The Humdinger tried to get to the high-pressure steam let-down valve in time, and finding his way blocked, stood back with arms folded. There were loud bangs outside. Bomber Command saw him.

  ‘Either they get outa my way or she crashes,’ he said above the babel of voices.

  Bomber Command came good and urged a dozen out of the way, saving the boilers and making himself unpopular with his superiors, but this was an exception. He kept clear after this and the next crisis saw the plant down nicely. The experts conferring were world famous in their line, but they were not familiar with the state of the plant at that particular moment. And in fact they were not discussing it. They were considering future modifications to the most recent modifications and in this gentle atmosphere of erudite technical speculation the plant as it was at that moment diminished in importance and receded to the farther limits of their horizons. Sharply rising and falling chart lines were objects to them, not disasters. The local brass were the same, they didn’t so much walk around to see what was going on as stand stiff in attitudes. Leadership. Rebuke. Progress. Ambition, Kindliness. Authority.

  Attitudes, no more. The Samurai shook his head. It was the same everywhere. All over the world machines replace men, the men don’t take any trouble. The people above don’t care about the job to be done—they despise it because an interest in it is the infallible sign of the subordinate not the manager type—they care about moving on to the next job, slightly higher in status, promotion from job to job until the final bright day when they reach management ranks, always the eye on the future in the approved cautious, self-protecting style, never on the immediate task; that was safe with the subordinate type. If they left their desks to visit the plant often, others might get at their papers, or Admin might denounce them for not being on the job. Or they might be accused of fraternizing with the enemy.

  It was madness. Men who waffled knowledgeably at executive meetings, sooner saying nothing than daring to put a foot wrong; so scared of making one mistake that they made the mistake of doing nothing that someone hadn’t thought of first; these were the Puroil men and they thought they were running a refinery. What made them think this? Well, the overseas bosses pour money in; equipment, foreign experts and construction crews are imported, you put in a management structure diagram, observe Puroil International Procedure, hire people to get their hands dirty, give them flow diagrams and a pay packet and the refinery runs itself. Feed goes in here and product comes out there. Madness.

  TECHNIQUES OF CONTROL Gradually the lines of decision-making and control became more numerous, more tangled. Competition between departments, out of place in this type of refinery where marketing was handled by a different company, raged fiercely. Those responsible for planning the refinery’s structure thought their problems solved by administrative innovations, pruning here, expansion there, alteration everywhere; arms, voices, memos flailing uselessly at disorder, without supplying on-the-spot control at the point where the crude oil and later streams were refined; without emphasizing the prime importance of the basic operations for which the refinery was built. They cut the cracker complex in half and doubled supervision: this worked one half against the other nicely. All this was very like the steam system over the refinery which was so complicated only three or four people understood it. Lines, valves, loops crossed and backtracked. A nightmare to work on.

  Each supervisor had his own remedies for plant conditions; little points which, if observed, would keep the gasoline flowing in spite of the uninformed efforts of all the rest. One would surreptitiously change the pressure controller on the gas-absorber column from automatic to manual; another would open a bypass on the fractionater bottom level; one liked to run with a carbon reading of 0.3 per cent on the catalyst; another liked 0.55 per cent, just on the edge of a coke condition. There were as many panaceas as there were foremen, supervisors and controllers and they all fiddled with a good conscience and usually to opposite effect.

  When nasty things happened, as always they did, the Education Officer—traditionally a spare-time post for a not too well-entrenched body in Personnel—went round with the official company reasons for failure and the excuses for the inevitable tightening-up. This tightening-up worked in the same way on the prisoners as it did on the immense valves on the process gas lines. Something that showed a dangerous leak under a temperature of 600 centigrade would be shut down and tightened cold. When it was hot again, no half dozen men could move it because of the tightening-up.

  One of the new men, a cracker-expert from another country, had been on deck six months when he pulled up the Samurai over a certain arrangement of the reactor recycle flows. He had no authority—this was the refuge of such men, who gave opinions and directives no one really had to obey—but the Samurai wouldn’t have obeyed. However, he gave no reasons for refusing to take the man’s advice. The Boy Wonder saw this from a distance and knowing both of them, waited till the engineer stamped off red-faced. He whispered to his staff colleague.

  ‘This is a two-stage reactor.’ That was what the Samurai expected the chemical engineer to know. It made all the difference to recycle flows.

  ‘Is it?’ Six months and he didn’t know. How did they spend their time? Were there so many pieces of paper to attend to, so many schedules and returns, so much in-fighting necessary to keep their jobs, that they had no time to look at the plant in detail? What was the dreadful penalty for asking questions?

  15

  THE GLASS CANOE SAVAGED BY WORDS

  A PERSISTENT GLEAM OF SANITY There is no me. There are only memories of parts I’ve played in this stupid production called existence. There are only the characters I’ve made up on the spur of the moment, in an emergency, when people demanded I be something definite. I know there is no me. I’d still like to do everything, even the things that occur to me at odd times that at first I think are mad. I remember coming out of the twenty-four-hour sleep they gave me at hospital after the shocks. I said to myself—or someone that just got born said inside me—‘Why don’t you try breathing with your forehead? Thinking with your stomach lining? Singing with your eyes?’

  I came out of it yelling and screaming this and they nearly put me under again, but I realized in time and quietened down. You have to keep your wits about you in case you have a sudden flash of clear-in-the-head, there’s no sense making things more painful if you can help it. When you’re in the middle of it and raving, you don’t care. They can do what they like, it wouldn’t matter if they killed you—snuffed you out in disgust.

  Breathing with your forehead, thinking with your diaphragm, singing with your eyebrows. Wrong again. If you don’t watch it, the right words tail off into something else and before you know where you are you’re saying something different; only a little different at first, but if you don’t get back to the right words immediately, after a few changes you’re right off the track. And the funny thing is it is words that cause all the trouble; they dictate what I think, they dictate what happens to me, they dictate what I make happen to other people. If I could get rid of words I might get better. I might feel more comfortable. Breathe forehead, think stomach, sing eyes. For weeks I couldn’t get those words out of my head. And yet they were no use to me. They made nothing happen. They might just as well have been a set of words that said anything or nothing at all. They were all over me, those words, I couldn’t shake them; crawling up my arms, running through the hairy forests of my legs, popping out of my hand when I made a fist. I wish I could—or I wish the part of me that’s responsible for this could—but all of me
is responsible: I can’t separate any of me off and say that without it I’m the same: I wish I could have expanded enough to say real things like love, fidelity, jealousy, adultery, incest, murder, theft, betrayal, pride, honour, courage, seduction, elopement, horror, rape. And yet they’re not real: they’re emotions that might make me feel real. No, they’re not even that, they’re just words like the others. But let me follow this…If I can say the word, I can do the word. Rape: I could rape someone. Murder: I could do it. When you know something the word stands for, you can do it.

  I could even have a secret language with myself, so that honour meant murder, and saying honour I could kill someone, because the power of knowing the word gives me the power to do the word. What I mean is my own private meaning could be different. And no one need know…I’d better get off this line of talk. Let’s get on to something harmless. You’ve got to keep thinking of something: you can’t just stop yourself like that.

  The thought I had this morning when I was about to switch off the gas when the toast was done—all the things that are un. Yes, that’s harmless enough. Puroil’s unofficial army, unanswered phones, unopened letters, unlit cigarettes—think of the millions of unlit cigarettes resting at this moment in closed packets or cartons or crates or warehouses all over the world—all the untasted tea and coffee and alcohol, all the unraped women, all the unburgled houses, all the unattacked enemies, the books standing closed on shelves unread with the words flattened like springs waiting to leap out at you (words give you so many alternatives, you either do everything or slacken off and do nothing), the unmuzzled dogs, unmasked villains, unaccountable foreign companies, unaggressive Beautiful Twinkling Stars, all the millions of un-American people in the world, the unpolitical Australians, undetected perverts, the undistinguished leaders of the country, unattainable wealth, unavoidable death, the unborn millions in every man’s seed, the uncertified lunatics.