The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  Everything in the world can be un.

  THE AGE OF ANXIETY I don’t know who sent it round, but I have a copy of the form they say is issued to everyone they want to raise up to the staff. You have to answer all the questions, but they give you no clues about what sort of answers they want. It isn’t like an exam at school where they teach you the stuff first. You have to dig in your own head and come up with something.

  WHO DO YOU BLAME FOR YOUR PRESENT PREDICAMENT? What does that mean? The predicament of promotion? Or my wife dead? Funny how I don’t even miss her.

  DO YOU THINK IT’S TOO LATE TO CHANGE?

  DO YOU HAVE TO FIGHT FOR HAPPINESS?

  DO YOU LIKE THE PUROIL UNIFORM?

  WOULD YOU BE HAPPIER IF YOU WERE TALLER OR HAD BLUE EYES?

  HAVE YOU FINALLY HARDENED YOUR HEART AGAINST US? What sort of question is that? They try to sound like God talking.

  WHO IS THE FATHER OF YOUR WIFE’S CHILDREN? They’ve got no right to demand answers. Maybe if you don’t want to answer you can just leave a blank.

  WOULD YOU RATHER BE YOURSELF AND DIE OR CHANGE A LITTLE AND LIVE?

  DO YOU REPROACH YOURSELF FOR YOUR MISTAKES?

  DO YOU PRIDE YOURSELF ON BEING A STRONG CHARACTER? Talking about strong characters, the Sump is still bad with heights; last Saturday when the movies were on at Jerriton drive-in the whole shift was up the structure, not a soul below the first landing, and there he was down below, singing out for us to come down, but no one heard. He must have no guts at all, he’s always saying he’s a coward, maybe he is. I couldn’t say it even if I knew it was true.

  DO YOU THINK OUR POWER IS GODLIKE?

  DO YOU THINK DISCUSSION OF OUR DIFFERENCES WILL PRODUCE AGREEMENT?

  COULD YOU HAVE SAVED THE PLANT IN THE LAST CRASH?

  DO YOU UNDERSTAND US?

  HAVE YOU EVER BEEN HUNGRY?

  DO YOU FEEL YOU KEEP GOOD TRACK OF TIME?

  CAN ONE MAN SAVE THE WORLD? It beats me; I don’t know what they’re getting at. Maybe it’s not a proper Puroil question sheet; someone might have just made it up. An experiment. I wonder if it was one of the young technologists? No, more likely the Two Pot Screamer, he’s very sarcastic at times. When the company was trying to tell us that hydrofluoric acid was just a weak acid—Doctor Death said that for them—he made jokes about going for a swim in carb-soda in the bath they keep over there if you get any on you. He even drew little cartoons and stuck them on the ceilings where they couldn’t be taken down till the cleaners got in. I wish I hadn’t put my foot through the ceiling; I was lying on top of the console and pretending to raise the roof with my legs, but the ceiling gave way.

  HAVE YOU EARNED THE RIGHT TO STAY WITH THE COMPANY?

  ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE MANAGER?

  DO YOU THINK THE WORLD IS SICK?

  WILL YOU EVER TAKE YOUR SAFETY FOR GRANTED IN THE FUTURE?

  ARE YOU SURPRISED THAT WE USE NO FORCE ON YOU?

  NAME SOMETHING THAT IS REAL.

  ARE YOU HAPPY? These questions remind me of the hospital. Examining everything. Carting you off doped, leaving the medical fossickers happy with your nuggets.

  NAME SOMETHING IMPORTANT.

  This really has me wet. There can’t be anything in it. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t let someone else be tricked by it too. Let some other silly bastard worry about it. Old Far Away. I’ll stick it in his bag. Pity old Blue Hills isn’t here, I’d worry him sick.

  He didn’t see the eye watching him from an inch hole in the steel panel. A man stood back there, only six feet away, boots braced on green-painted air mains that branched upwards into ever smaller lines, the arteries reticulating life-giving air to the hundreds of control points all over the complex of plants.

  This man smiled and watched and fiddled with himself under his overalls as the Glass Canoe pulled himself to his feet, clutching the paper, and made for the locker-room, adjusting his symptom list, swallowing a calming pill and checking that his lower parts were covered.

  16

  A GREAT DAY FOR FIRST THINGS

  FIVE HUNDRED PAIRS OF HORNS The tea was warm and the Beautiful Twinkling Star sucked in a mouthful. There was no warning, no flicker. The electric power failed. Everything. No lights, no pumps, no electricity. After a second the emergency generator cut in and restored lights on the panel alarms, the red, amber and white sixteen-volt bulbs. It wasn’t enough to see by. When in the darkness men touched each other they sprang back in fear. The rest was uproar.

  To move more quickly the Star spat out the tea—it went down his overalls—and raced for the door. The power failure lasted half an hour and in that time the plant crashed again. If the stand-by boiler feedwater pumps had been assembled they might have saved the boilers. The electric pump was silent. No water. The Humdinger cut the fires by the light of a torch. The great compressor stopped without high-pressure steam, it was no use making gasoline vapours to be compressed. The whole complex was down.

  When he got back inside, the Western Salesman, one of the urgers who had bludged during the emergency by looking for nonexistent work down at the opposite end, noticed the wet on the Twinkler’s overalls, saved his breath till he had a good audience, then let go. ‘Look who got a fright and pissed hisself!’ Pointing to the wet stain.

  The Beautiful Twinkling Star had never had this reaction before; never, that is, long enough for it to remain unsuppressed. Perhaps it was the aches and pains of the flu or the accumulation of the feeling that because he did his work he missed all the lurks and perks others enjoyed. Whatever it was, he lashed out.

  The Twinkler had lived a clean life and worked hard and yet he was very strong. His right fist flashed at the man’s middle and seemed to go through to his back-bone. ‘You bludging mongrel,’ he said in his polite voice. For a long time those who liked the Twinkler, and they were many, called him the Beautiful Twinkling Right, or Beautiful Twinkling Knuckles. Perhaps one of the Salesman’s buttons was undone, but the Twinkler scraped his knuckles enough to draw blood. He went to his locker for the bottle of red dye. Empty. He went out to the control-room stationery cabinet and filled his unlabelled bottle from the red ink supply for the instrument charts. Unselfconsciously he dabbed his cuts with red ink. The Samurai was the only witness. If the others had seen, his credit would have been gone forever. He looked back squarely at the Samurai as if the bottle contained an expensive antibiotic.

  ‘Is that what you dab their cuts with?’

  ‘I dab their cuts with care and consideration and love.’ The Samurai didn’t pursue it.

  The Twinkler was ashamed of his fistic outburst, but something in the way it was received by the others took the edge off his self-blame. As if they liked him now he was human, instead of only respecting him for his good deeds and Christian intentions. He went further. He left the plant, a thing he’d never done before, and walked down to the river, hailed the Volga Boatman and visited the Great White Father.

  ‘What’ll it be, a drink in the bar, a woman in the master bedroom, or both? There’s Never on Sunday in there waiting to tell your horoscope by the way it feels.’

  ‘Can she do that?’

  ‘No. She feels nothing. She reads up the horoscopes in the afternoon papers.’ He raised his voice. ‘She’ll buy a new dress for herself with your five dollars.’ A cry came back.

  ‘I never spend it on myself! That would be wrong!’

  ‘Isn’t that nice and homely?’ said the Great White Father. ‘Interested? You can take your pick. Old-fashioned, Fido, Sidecar, Furniture, Corpse, Lung Cancer, TV, Ballet, Carpet Snake? You can call the tune if you pay the piper.’

  ‘No, thanks.’ He settled down on a seat. No, he said to himself; I left home today with the kiss of my wife wet on my lips; I’m not likely to want the women down here. Perhaps I’m peculiar.

  ‘Well, you are peculiar,’ said the Great White Father.

  ‘I can’t change myself.’ He liked the Great White Father. Envied him. Wanted the great man to like him. Wa
s he so weak with a temporary sickness that he needed human props and stays?

  ‘I wondered when you’d come down here for a pow-wow. Did you kick over the traces or something?’

  ‘Sharp of you.’

  He looked grateful just to sit and talk. Was that the suspicion of a tear in the corner of his eye? The great man laughed.

  ‘Don’t pat me on the back, my own hand is constantly poised for the job. It took no great sharpness. You probably shot the Slug over the top of the boilers and hit someone in the mouth. It was bound to happen to a man who keeps himself under like you do.’ I have no dumb idiot child inside me, the Great White Father assured himself, that I collapse to tears and repentance at a kind word or the lack of it, thinking somewhere there is some great love for me alone.

  ‘It’s not me that keeps me under. It’s the power that entered my life—my religion, to you.’

  ‘Don’t kid yourself, son. You have a lot of muscle in there’—a long brown finger poked him gently in the stomach—‘and you hold yourself in with that muscle, same as you hold yourself on your path of religion. You probably call it following Christ and I honour you for it, but I tell you now it’s not Him that keeps you on your path, it’s you. The government of heaven is in you. It is you.’

  ‘Now, now. Don’t try to subvert my faith,’ smiled the Twinkler, with the tolerant look reserved for the ungodly.

  ‘Subvert? That’s good. I like it when one of my men uses a good word.’

  ‘Your men?’

  ‘You’re all my men. I claim you in the end, when you’re old enough to lose the last bit of faith in your nominal masters and you find your heavenly supports are inside you. But I’m good-natured. I can afford to be: I’ve never really suffered.’

  ‘I’ve never heard it put that way before. The best Christians I’ve heard of have been the ones that have gone through the mill.’

  ‘They’re the ones like you, with the big muscles in the stomach. Plenty of guts.’

  ‘Faith,’ said the Star. ‘When my little girl was dying I prayed for her life. The faith that moves mountains.’

  ‘Did she get better?’

  ‘She died three weeks later. That was the turning point for me.’

  ‘Did you tell God to get nicked?’

  ‘My spiritual turning point. I realized it wasn’t for me to question God’s purposes. Beyond my understanding.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘We must submit with gladness to His will.’

  Appalled, the Great White Father watched him. There seemed to be a trace of satisfaction in the voice. I can’t blame him, he told himself, for reacting irrationally. What sort of God needs the death of a child for any purpose? Then he saw it. The man’s goodness was the product of this turning point. His kindness, never dobbing, getting rags for others but never sleeping on the job, this was his irrationality. The product of an obscene tragedy. Time to change the subject.

  ‘I’ve been through a few mills myself, but what happened was, I got ground to powder. I was in Brazil once, still young and not a grey hair in my head. We were taking cattle to the railhead, five hundred head and we had to cross this river. Well, five hundred head of cattle walked into that river and swam across and five hundred pairs of horns climbed up the other side. Know those little fish with the big mouths? Well, I had my first grey hairs that day. You see, I swam across before the cattle and when I saw their skeletons I went white.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘The ones that were left on the other bank stayed there till they could find a canoe. I went ahead with the horns.’

  He laughed hugely and drank.

  ‘I’ve been through the mill, that’s why I have no faiths left. I used to be a beggar, you know, down in the Haymarket. Begged all day and my man brought the Rolls for me at six. As a boy I was treated hard. Meal times I was put under the table, they threw food at me. I was the last and not wanted. Dad and Mum were camping out and had sex at the wrong time of the month and here I am. They thrashed me to make me walk. Hosed me with cold water in the winter. I was put out the back and left whenever there was a thunderstorm; they thought I might get frightened to death. I was naked, too. Apart from that I wanted for nothing.’

  A WELL-AIMED GRANNY To soften Herman up a little, the Garfish let him into his office without the usual wait.

  Unthinking, Herman put out his hand, but it was ignored.

  ‘You haf called me to the office,’ he began awkwardly, and smiled. ‘Why is that?’ trying to take the edge off the question. The Garfish shuffled some papers, hoping for a good opening.

  ‘Is it about my arm?’ No answer. ‘The arm that was?’

  The Garfish suddenly blurted out, ‘We’ll have to let you go, Herman.’

  ‘Let me go? Go where?’

  ‘Just go.’

  ‘How is that?’

  ‘Not work here’—waving his hands as if giving street directions to a foreigner straight off the boat—‘Not any more.’

  ‘Why is that? My arm?’ He switched his eyes jerkily round to his empty sleeve and queerly sloping shoulder. The great round lump of emptiness in his stomach told him the answer. ‘The sack.’ The words were out.

  ‘No, no, Herman. Don’t take it like that.’

  ‘How can I take it?’

  ‘No. We have to let you go. With great regret.’

  ‘Who regrets this? The desk? The building? The tanks out there? The company?’

  ‘Puroil regrets—’

  ‘Who is the Company? Is it you? Is it me? No one regrets this sack, but me only. I regret.’

  ‘We thought the end of the week. Unless you wish to go sooner. It’s up to you.’

  ‘Up to me? Is it? I want to work! I can do my work with one hand, more work than two men!’

  ‘I’m sorry. The end of the week, then.’

  ‘The end of me! That’s what!’

  ‘Don’t make this any more difficult for me.’

  ‘Difficult? For you? How is this so? For me it is difficult, not you! You sit there now, you sit there next week. Where do I sit next week? And all because I can lift a pipe with one hand and once I miss and pinch my finger.’

  ‘We can’t entertain any workers’ compensation claims at this stage. That’s out.’ His voice resumed its edge. Either these people keep to the regulations or they get no consideration.

  ‘And where is that finger now? Burned in the incinerator with the hospital rubbish. And where is the hand, my hand, that I had for fifty years? Burned to ash! I knew every line of it, every hair, every scar. It was a good hand. And my arm to the elbow! And now the shoulder! With muscles that were ten times the muscles of other men. Because the finger bone was pinched. Because I work hard and not calling the crane driver for shifting every little pipe.’

  He got to his feet. The Garfish was relieved. The fool was only worried about his finger and arm. He had no further responsibility, everyone is supposed to know the law. If a man didn’t make a claim, he didn’t want to make one.

  ‘We need your signature on your refund of pension fund contributions,’ said the Garfish. Let him go, he thought. He’ll get over it. I’ll get the signature on Friday when he leaves. Herman stuck out his hand and the Garfish inadvertently took it. Herman squeezed. The Garfish flopped about like a rag doll on the end of Herman’s fist, making faint whining noises. Herman went out. It wasn’t much consolation, but he’d done something in return. Why did they do this to him? He didn’t want to go to law, he wanted to work. Unemployment benefits weren’t meant to live on.

  From his pocket he took an apple, a large, green Granny Smith. With a ferocious gesture of helpless defiance he threw it at the upper windows of the Termitary, where it struck with a flat sound. It was too hard and green to splash much.

  CONFRONTATIONS One Eye met the Wandering Jew on a narrow walkway head on, and pushed him out of the way. He pushed the Manufacturing Superintendent aside from the entrance to his amenities room, barged through three visitors tha
t were blocking a door, and accidentally elbowed a lady cleaner out of his way as he walked up to the bundy clock on the way out at eleven. He beat the first two easily, drew with the visitors—one of them tripped him—and suffered multiple bruises from the lady, who was in good condition.

  It was a great day for first things.

  LOVE IN HIGH PLACES The Glass Canoe came in from the darkened inner bay of the locker-room where he had been reading a morning paper and for a few moments he imagined he saw himself, tall and straight, standing over his young son. Or was it the Rustle of Spring? He narrowed his eyes and shook his head to get rid of the hallucination, but it took its own time to vanish. No, it was the Great White Father and dirty little Sumpsucker.

  The Rustle of Spring had not been surprised by what he said to him way up there in the top of the reactor, nor by the things he asked him to do. In fact, it seemed to the Glass Canoe that he had been waiting for that very request. Or the boy was very quick-witted. He had been expert; he must have done this sort of thing before. The Glass Canoe was a Navy man for sixteen years and had some experience of other men—a turn in the barrel after the regulation three months at sea—but he thought Italian boys, with their poverty and good looks, were probably exposed more to older men with exotic tastes. The boy had hinted at a little present. Maybe this was a prelude to asking for money straight out. He wasn’t going to pay money, not to some dirty little immoral tike off the streets of Naples. No. Mantova, he called it. Mantua. All they thought of was money. There was so much more in the world than money.

  Nevertheless, as he pulled his attention back to first things and opened his plant manual at the gasoline treating section—he’d studied nearly all the plants in the complex without taking a step outside the control block—and reminded himself clearly and logically of his ambitions. Nevertheless he said quietly and reasonably, ‘I like the little bugger.’ As if it were a blessing he had power to bestow.