The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  WITHOUT REPRISAL You’re nothing but a number, now.

  The phrase became a sort of greeting, an open password, in the grounds of the Puroil Termitary and Grinding Works and beyond it into the pocket-handkerchief lawns and cell-like rooms of the worker-spawning laboratories, dormitories and marshalling yards known as suburbs.

  Some prisoners still relied on charms to ward off the company’s all-powerful displeasure and the cold winds of separation. ‘Someone told me I’d be a foreman before long…’ ‘I’m an old digger, they’ll look after me—I go the company’s way…’ ‘The Enforcer is my brother-in-law—they wouldn’t sack me. No, I can’t tell you why.’ The old fictions.

  The good old days had never seemed so precious and so remote as now when they appeared to be gone for ever. Instinctively the men should have huddled together, in fear, in anger, in a mood of action. What they did was divide, every man for himself, and were an easy prey for the triumphant managing class, who still lived among them—their houses dotted here and there—without reprisals, though in the main they tended to gather in suburbs they wished to call their own, safe from the smell of the product and poverty.

  BRASS BUTTONS Yesterday Kramden had been a company-oriented trade unionist; today he was newly appointed safety officer. They dressed him in the black uniform of a fire officer. Macabre had been outed. In the shake-up they had made him responsible for plant safety but given him no authority or initiative. All he could do was recommend action to the safety council, who opposed action if it cost money and only acted if the fuss made by the men rose to danger level on the fuss-meter. The new man was quite content to be told what to do. The company had what it wanted; a man who followed orders, didn’t clutter the air with his own opinions, and could be left holding the bag if something happened.

  Yesterday Kramden had been flipping cigarette butts into sandboxes full of paper and laughing at the blaze; today it was a safety hazard.

  ‘Get the proper rubbish tins for those papers or I’ll have your smoking permit!’ he roared at some cracker men.

  ‘Let the company put tins there.’

  ‘You apply for them. You want us to do everything for you!’

  ‘Take the smoking permit, then, and Puroil will have you for rocking the boat.’

  He wore the uniform proudly and strutted as poor Macabre never did. But then Macabre was never dressed in a uniform, with shiny brass buttons.

  The sixty-kilo boiler water had to burst the rubber hose some time and it chose a moment when the Gypsy Fiddler was holding it, directing it down a drain. He was scalded from chest to knees. When they carried him in Kramden abused him and Calamity Jane refused to treat him. She never touched men there.

  Next day the plant plot was crowded with big yellow signs: safety hats must be worn at all times.

  THE CONFIDENT-AUTHORITATIVE MANNER Far Away Places had a few lungfuls of acid from the alkylate plant and went to see Doctor Death about his cough in his own time. Sometimes he couldn’t blow a whole tune on his mouthpiece for coughing.

  ‘I make a weekly tour of the refinery,’ said Doctor Death. ‘There are no bad drains or fumes anywhere in the whole complex of plants. We have an unusually high degree of freedom from noxious gases and dusts.’

  Far Away coughed a little, trying to direct the droplets of moisture away from the placid expanse of Doctor Death’s beautiful suit. He was trying to cough softly, so as not to appear by his actions to be contradicting the physician’s statements of faith in what he had been told by his chief contact, the Spotted Trout. There were no tours of the refinery. A lie in these circumstances, though, was no worse than a lying word of comfort and good cheer to the about-to-be-bereaved relatives of the terminally ill.

  18

  THE FALL

  TEXT FOR THE GLASS CANOE ‘A man’s internal development marches a little way on before his achievement and his achievement is a little ahead of his reputation. A man needs all the self-confidence he can muster not to believe of himself the things others believe.’

  He wrote it out on a piece of cardboard and read it before going to bed, every night for three nights. After that, writing was not good enough: he printed it. It took several attempts before he got it done as he liked it. The cardboard was glossy white one side and bare the other; the box he took it from had contained his dead wife’s last brassiere. The bit of brassiere box was appropriate because the thing it contained had in turn contained a woman’s breasts, pointing steadfastly forward. Tilted slightly upward. Parallel with his own temporarily revived ambitions and his hope in the future that recurred like an illness. So he was in the training pool. He wouldn’t let it get him down, he would overcome this obstacle, too.

  HOSPITALITY The Humdinger stood cursing. Both gauge glasses had blown on the high-pressure steam drums, the Samurai had isolated them. Two years before this, the Humdinger had read up his boiler manual to go for his ticket.

  What’s the first thing you check on your boiler? Answer: The level in the gauge glass. What do you do if there’s no water in the glass? Cut the fires. It is of the greatest importance that those in charge of a boiler shall know with absolute certainty the height of the water level in the boiler. He got his ticket. No trouble. The company was eager for men to get boiler tickets, so his three hundred hours which he hadn’t spent on or around a boiler was winked at and signed as a fact, and they gave him a letter to the examiner, mentioning half a dozen boilers he’d never seen.

  He looked at his instruments. They showed levels. But he remembered all too clearly times they had shown levels when the boiler was empty; he remembered panics when there were no levels on the instrument panel and no time for men to climb one hundred and forty-nine vertical rungs on ten different ladders to the gauge glasses, but there was still water in the boilers. How much? No one knew. It was as much as his job was worth to cut the fires without orders, though if there was an explosion he would lose his ticket immediately.

  In his examination he found the inspector knew nothing of the boilers he worked on. He was asked questions on the Lamont, the B & W, Cornish, Lancashire, Scotch Marine, Locomotive, the Vertical, Colonial, Yarrow, John Thompson, and Stirling. Even the Jackass, of which there was still one in New South Wales. The principles were the same, but he found it strange that the inspector didn’t recognize boilers that operated for months or years at a time, twenty-four hours a day. He was given questions on morning duties, banking the fires at lunchtime when steam demand was low and closing the boiler down at knock-off time. He laughed. He tried to say something about hot carbon-monoxide gas being the main burner on his boilers, with hydrocarbon gas auxiliaries, but the man thought he was being funny. He tried to say these boilers were integrated with a cyclic reaction and regeneration process and their high-pressure steam was vital to a huge compressor on the other end of the process, and that the hot flue gases, besides providing steam, did a second duty in driving turbo-expanders which provided air for the regeneration process and also air for its own combustion chambers, but the man started to talk about grinding up coal.

  He waited. The Samurai found the Slug and demanded fitters. No fitters. The one maintenance man was a mile away on an important job. The sight glasses needed many bolts undone before new ones were fitted. For this job spanners were used, and no operator could even carry a spanner at that stage.

  He cursed Puroil, the Slug, gauge glasses, boilers, the inspector. Then, as if in answer to a prayer, he saw him. The very same man. Supported by Puroil men, the Python and several others.

  Macabre, disgruntled, had made a phone call giving a list of unsafe conditions. The Humdinger didn’t know of the phone call. The Python did: the inspector had spilled his guts after he was wined and dined in the manager’s private dining-room. No PR room for this man, nothing but luxury was good enough.

  ‘G’day,’ said Humdinger. They stopped. They hadn’t come to look at his boilers.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said the Python.

  ‘The sight glasse
s are gone on the boilers.’ He pointed up.

  ‘You’ve got panel indication.’

  ‘Yes. There’s a level here.’ Pointing to the instrument.

  ‘OK, then,’ said the inspector.

  ‘But I can’t operate a boiler without a gauge glass.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You did. You tested me for my ticket.’

  ‘This is different. You’ve got instruments.’

  ‘But you said I must know exactly. These have been wrong before.’

  ‘You’ve got instruments. What more d’you want? You men get everything these days. When I was young we had nothing.’ The Humdinger was licked. He thought he had a cast-iron case.

  ‘Can I have that in writing?’ But his superiors turned away.

  ‘No action required,’ smiled the Python. And the men holding up the visitor laughed and laughed and steered him outside where he looked up at the dizzying tangle of steel, then helped him back to the car. On top of the structure Far Away Places relaxed the grip of his finger and thumb and resumed his pee. He’d had to cut off the flow halfway through in case the Python spotted him.

  CRISIS MAN The new man’s initials were SK. It was the work of only a few seconds for the Two Pot Screamer to christen him SKlation. Escalation was a new word then.

  And it came true. No one knew if the man was like it before he was christened or if the new name forced him into this mould, but whatever was going when he came on the scene got rapidly worse. If the boilers were playing up and SK came through the rear door as the bosses always did, the trouble developed into a crisis very quickly. Things just naturally went bad when he was around.

  He was brought in to make up the number. A revision of the establishment figures in Melbourne showed that One Eye need not have been dismissed, but it was too late. The new figures were to take account of expansion. After a week he went up to the Python and complained he didn’t have enough to do and everyone else sat round all day doing nothing. He left shortly after the other prisoners heard of this.

  WORDS UNDER THE SKIN The Congo Kid had been going on for quite a time in the amenities about English atrocities during the ’39 to ’45 war. His listeners had no facts and his fire and ferocity on the subject were such that no one was arguing with him, but waiting for him to run out of steam. While he was going well, the Gypsy Fiddler was quietly getting up his head of steam; he had seen the bombing of Berlin from the ground and was always particularly impressed by his memories of the unfortunates splashed by phosphorus bombs; he had seen old men and children running round like chickens with their heads cut off, too much in agony to scream, taking refuge in fountains when they could find them. Water covering their burns took the pain away, but the moment they got into the air the phosphorus burned into their flesh. Living fire. And the rooms and cellars full of jellied, roasting children, their flesh and fat running together in the fire; he himself shot children who were nearly in halves, not yet dead and still screaming. Weeping as he fired. At age sixteen he shot dying women; the one he remembered most took his burst in the chest and gave birth to two babies in the last moments of dying. They were extruded from the woman’s body into the street and dried where they lay on the concrete.

  He was ready to talk. He had never burst out with this to British ears, but he was heartened by having another man attack them. He was aware he would be met with the charge that his own people were first to use phosphorus and the argument would be futile, nothing but a balancing of one horror against another. But sometimes futility doesn’t count. If it did, they wouldn’t have stopped to worry about Puroil’s new repressive measures that threatened their peace of mind and their pay packets: they would have kept their heads down and their mouths shut, like better slaves in worse parts of the world.

  The hunter in us that seems blooded from birth, and, lacking a weapon, uses stones or words to kill, was hot on the scent in these two men.

  The Glass Canoe was upset. His temporary emotional revival had passed. His naval experience had not prepared him for this sort of attitude to the war he’d been in or to the nation that suckled him. He was an Australian to the backbone but British at heart. He was trained not to look too closely at individual deaths and the details of dying. A man bought it or he survived: you didn’t make a song and dance, about each little wound. You should aspire to higher things and do whatever you thing is right. Bad things were done, but not by our side. God’s with us after all and He can do what He likes. The country goes to war for the good of the people: running away never solved anything. The flags had been blessed in church and the padres held services every week. They would have known if we were fighting wrong. They weren’t nongs; they would have refused to use the words God, duty and freedom. We always win for the reason that God and right are on our side. That is our British faith, everything is lost when that’s lost. These people are not like us. What’s Congo? A Belgian, a European. Not the same, they don’t have our training. It’s not healthy to linger over details. War is war. You try not to think of it but you must make decisions.

  He was right at the bottom of a trough. He had taken some pills without caring which sort they were. Any pills would do.

  Suddenly he was no longer depressed. His great heart lifted, his strong will bent towards them. He looked round at their childlike faces. Compassion glinted in his eyes.

  ‘I’m one of the guilty race, Congo,’ the Glass Canoe said.

  The lucid tone, the calm voice got the attention of every prisoner. With the right approach they could be spoken to like reasonable adults. There was a lot to explain to them, such a lot they needed to know. He shifted his great buttocks eagerly on the metal chair. Before he spoke his hands sketched vigorous, inarticulate plans in the air. All his great energy showed in the smallest motions of his hands.

  ‘It’s easy enough to curse England. Leaving us out here like a shag on a rock, but I don’t apologize for being British.’

  ‘Australian, you mean,’ a voice said. It didn’t matter who it was.

  ‘British,’ he insisted, intense and determined, but with the kindliness of absolute conviction. He could speak now. Words had been conquered; they were plastic, usable. ‘Where else in the world but in a British country can a man get an education that makes him a writer better than Shakespeare and speak all languages—’

  ‘You can, can’t you?’ Another voice interrupted. He didn’t bother to look; he knew there was nothing behind the voice.

  ‘Of course. It’s never popular to display that sort of accomplishment. That’s why I never mention it. But it’s silly having other languages. Look at you, Congo. Belgian. What’s a Belgian? Why not one language? All we need is a sort of brain-washing educational machine to convert everyone to English. I’m working on the details now.’ He saw the wonder in their faces. ‘I got the Wandering Jew to help me, but although he’s a great engineer, he’s put me in charge of the project.’

  ‘He put you?’ Another voice. He was surrounded by leafless, branchless trees; words issued from stumps.

  ‘Actually I forced my way to the top. He didn’t know I was an engineer.’ He was grandly silent. The others waited, not sure when the violence would start. He spoke on, knowing his was the one voice that could save them. ‘People have no imagination. No genius. I ordered a million copies—’

  ‘Only a million?’

  He showed no resentment at the interruptions, only a vast patience. The others began to get the idea and waited for a chance to hit him with a question.

  ‘—a million each day, of How to Win Over Friends and Influence, to be distributed to every human on earth. You see, wrong ways of thinking are really symptoms of mental disease and this can be controlled by controlling the words fed in to the brain. Words are the great stumbling block.’ He nodded, satisfied with himself. The fight against words had been worth winning. His hands pledged their loyalty: they must be rewarded.

  ‘Look how pleasant
the air here will be when we cover the refinery with a plastic dome and pipe gases and smoke out to atmosphere. It will be so good you’d want to live here and never leave.’

  ‘So the smoke goes out to poison the rest of Sydney,’ said the Humdinger, offering him a cigarette to take the edge off his words.

  ‘Oh no. We’ll be moving the refinery to the top of the Blue Mountains. One of my projects is to build the tallest distillation column in the world, so all processes can be done in the one spot.’

  ‘There’ll be money in this.’ Even the Gypsy Fiddler was game to have a go, now there were other bodies to hide behind.

  ‘Ah, yes, millions. But it’s all for charity.’ They were all with him now, he could feel the strong bonds of his words pulling their wills, making them show mateship. Waiting for his words.

  ‘Did I tell you about my operation? You’ll never guess how heavy I am. Forty stone. Don’t look it, do I? I’ve had all the bones in me replaced by steel. This arm. There’s steel in it. Nothing can hurt me. I’ve got plans for a machine to do the operation on applicants I select and soon we’ll have the steel for their bones reduced in weight. I don’t mind being the heaviest, it’s no weight for me to carry, but the ordinary man would be weighed down by forty stone.’ This was living. He had reached his rightful place in the world and they acknowledged it naturally.

  ‘I’d like to have the operation,’ said Dutch Treat. ‘Where can I get it done?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait till you’re selected.’ He blew out smoke calmly, with precision. He was no man: he was a god. ‘I’ve had my age adjusted, you know. I’m twenty-five now and always will be.’

  ‘Any other inventions?’ They felt closer to each other now there was a fool to bait.