The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  ‘There’s my car. I run it without gasoline.’

  ‘That’s tough for the refinery.’

  ‘We’re switching to plastics to make houses that never need painting. Never need cleaning, either; all dirt drops through the mesh floor.’

  ‘How do you do all this? All this genius must come from somewhere.’ Even as he said it the Humdinger wanted to step back to duck a fist, but the Glass Canoe didn’t turn a hair.

  ‘The clinic. I go back to get shots of power. Actually it’s a lubricant for the steel, too. Special nurses give me the shots in the backside. Pretty, too, those nurses.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’

  ‘Yes, I wouldn’t have any ugly ones touching my backside. Trouble is, they take my blood at the same time.’

  ‘What, steal it?’

  ‘For the blood bank. I have a sort of composite blood that can be used by all blood types; they fill their blood bank from my bum and they think I don’t know.’ He chuckled. ‘I let them go. It’s for the sick and those not as fortunate as I am. I don’t mind giving it away, just like the Great White Father gives grog away.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind having some of the money you give to charity.’

  ‘I’ve thought of that. I’m having a fund set up so everyone in the refinery will have his wages made up to a thousand dollars a week.’

  ‘I wish every millionaire was generous like you,’ said Bubbles.

  ‘That’s the trouble.’ He was serious. ‘They can get away with all sorts of wrong doing and wrong thinking. But I’ve fixed that. I’m having a new surgical law passed. The law is too literary, too many words. There’ll be a little operation, a small capsule in the head of each citizen. No second chance—there’s far too many people on earth. The first wrong doing and the head blows up, immediately. No fuss. No formalities.’

  ‘There’ll be bodies everywhere.’

  ‘Won’t matter. Seeing automatic punishment will help others to be intelligent and do the right thing.’ They tried not to look at each other. The first one to laugh might snap him out of it.

  ‘How are you getting on, batching? You going to get married again?’ The Humdinger tried to get him back to ordinary things.

  ‘I’ve got it all teed up. Marrying a young girl who’s never seen a man before. She holds a VC from the World Health Organization.’

  ‘VC? For Valour?’

  ‘Virginity Certificate. I don’t want a woman whose personality has been warped by contact with other men.’

  ‘How about your boy?’

  ‘He’s written a pop song called “My Dad”. The revenue it’s bringing in for Australia is so huge he’s getting a knighthood.’

  ‘With all your money you could buy Sydney,’ said Bubbles. ‘I’m the agent for it, actually. Interested?’ The man was harmless. Off his head. Someone ought to make a phone call.

  ‘Sydney belongs to me. Whoever sold you the agency put one over you.’

  ‘When do you go for training? In the throwouts,’ said Congo. Any idea of sympathy for a sick man was over his head. The cruelty had started. Some edged towards the door. But the phone rescued them.

  ‘Hey,’ called Cheddar, smiling greenly. He never quite forgot his own woes. ‘There’s a phone message from the main gate. People waiting to see you. Trucks full of crates of champagne.’

  ‘It’s OK to let them in.’

  ‘Champagne?’

  ‘For the whole refinery. Just a little gesture of appreciation to the workers.’

  ‘They’ll nail your hide to the blue gates for this,’ said Congo with relish.

  ‘They can’t touch me. I could jump from up there’—he pointed to the top of the reactor—‘and not feel it. These steel rods are powerful as any of the steel out there.’ He pointed to the steel structures as if they were rivals he had surpassed. ‘And I can see from what you say about the British that we should go and jump off the top. So I’ll jump for all the rest.’ He was Christ.

  ‘You can’t be British,’ said Congo. ‘The British would get someone else to do it.’ This provided a laugh for the rest. The Glass Canoe was surprised at its jeering tone. Someone must have made a joke he didn’t see. He went out toward the reactor lift. They started to speak of something else. When he got to the top and looked down, there was not a soul watching. He expected them to be out there to see. He went back. As he came down the structure his elation began to diminish.

  ‘I told you I was going to jump off the top. No one watched.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ said several, to get rid of him. The joke was paper-thin; any moment he might start swinging.

  ‘Why don’t you go up to the main gate and get the champagne?’ prompted Humdinger tactfully. The Glass Canoe had always been a dead bastard but you couldn’t see him come to harm.

  ‘Champagne? What champagne? What you talking about, champagne?’

  ‘Forget it. Forget it.’ He walked away.

  The Glass Canoe shook his head. Poor Humdinger. Soft in the head. All that filth he goes on with has got to him. There’s always been a vital connection between moral health and mental health.

  ‘If you’re going to jump, who don’t you?’ said the Congo Kid. ‘You British have no guts. You fight like rats—when you’re backed against a wall and forced to fight. Here they’ve put you in the throwouts and you do nothing.’

  The Congo Kid was an unknown quantity. He had towelled up the Woodpecker, it was true, but he hit Woody from behind, and besides, it was only from being called a bastard. Funny people, Europeans; a man should be able to call you a bastard. The Glass Canoe shook his head massively, the British lion shaking off fleabites. Something they said had lodged in his mind. He was slated to go for training in a fortnight; he, who’d once done a top operator’s course. A reject. And he only ever tried to please them.

  He went up to the top of the structure again. Life wasn’t so important; a man should be able to take it up lightly and lay it down just as casually. Our civilization doesn’t teach us what the ancients knew and that is how to die. And what to die for.

  At the top, on the landing above the seventh floor, he looked down. The Samurai was watching from the regenerator top, but no one was out below. He tried to remember if the Samurai had been in the amenities room. No. The Samurai turned away and went on walking over towards the top of the boilers on the connecting landing and down the steel ladders to the concrete bed in which the whole plant was set.

  The Glass Canoe looked out over the refinery, away west to the squat crematorium stack, the misty, hazy concrete of the city skyline, round to the sand hills at Botany, and back to the activity round Clearwater; rubberworks, brickmakers, tanneries, gaol, the Puroil tank-farm and the huge suburban vista right through the age-old river basin to the western hills. Now my own life is folding up, he thought, what would be more natural than wanting to take a few others with me? He wrestled with the thought of getting half a dozen of the boys up with him, herding them into an angle of the safety rail and tossing them over one by one, then jumping with them. What a temptation to strike a man! But he would be no better than the Congo Kid; he’d do something like that. As if he couldn’t stand to do the deed without dragging someone else into it out of spite. No. He was better made than that.

  To the east, he saw a couple behind the shed on the land belonging to the Clearwater boat club. He could see several men on Clearwater wharf, watching them. Presently the man put the girl across the seat of the propped-up motor-bike and mounted her from behind. When he had been making certain movements for a few minutes the men suddenly shouted ‘Hey!’ He saw their faces split apart with the action of shouting but couldn’t hear the sound of their voices—the cracker plant was not going but steam was roaring from vents—and he saw the couple assemble themselves hastily into more usual order of dress and speed away on the motor-bike. Life went on two wheels.

  The Glass Canoe could not find it in himself to smile at them. Instead his heart, full of himself, burst out into words—that did not, ho
wever, seem to him to issue past his lips into sounds.

  ‘Handsome heights! Embrace me, I reach out to you! I am your equal. Metal! You can’t hurt me. See! I fist you with steel hands. My nerves are dulled, my skin thickened. My head well protected by a great steel case. It refuses to be dented. Try and make me bleed! I heal quick as lightning. I fall many times to tempt you; in every way I try to make you smile at me and nod. Still you look the other way. The whole world looks the other way. Every single thing in this world ignores me! You plants, sitting at my feet like pupils listening to a teacher, drinking in the milk of the word, you are dead! I am life and I laugh at you! I am greater—one step and I am over you. This is my proper height, this elevation is my proper view of you. No longer do these things around me embody part of my life and my history. They are become cold, wasting objects, feeling nothing, reflecting only the light reflected from my body. I hate the world! Nothing loves me of its own accord.’

  He knew he didn’t need to jump. There was no compulsion inside him. Simply that he was capable of it. Knowing it made him a whole man. Not all the threats of Puroil to put him among the rejects could take that from him. He looked down, without thinking, to check if he was naked.

  THE FALL Far Away Places came round the reactor and there, in front of him, was the Glass Canoe standing on the handrail, supporting himself with one hand from a light standard. He was bellowing loudly out into the space between the rows of plants.

  Far Away could see him now as he saw him that day when he came upon him with the Rustle of Spring under the stripper skirt. There was still the hole in the backside of his overalls. He took his own hands out of his overalls, crept up behind him and seized one side of his bottom in two hands, making a thick horizontal steak of flesh bulge out. His teeth almost met in the Glass Canoe’s left buttock.

  Sudden pain sucked the Glass Canoe’s breath away, threw a black screen behind his eyes. He could no longer see his steel audience. Arms and legs jerked, out of control, he wanted to pull air into his chest. Involuntarily he pushed forward to take in air.

  The instant the Glass Canoe was airborne, Far Away Places ran and scuttled, jumped and stumbled down stairways, across landings, round vessels, through manways to the shadows on the other side of the main structure. He stood breathing quickly like a terrified rabbit.

  He didn’t see the fall, nor see the body hit. He was spared, for a while, the sight of blood.

  The Glass Canoe had landed on the concrete apron, but his corpse was hidden from the control room by drums of spent catalyst standing irregularly around.

  Some had seen the fall, and ran towards the spot.

  THE EFFICACY OF WORDS He talked as he fell. Even in dying he would not be silenced. Talking to himself. He had to keep issuing the words to his distribution centres, even if they got no further, just as they were minted in his brain. As if they had some value.

  MOTION OF A BODY The actual manner of the fall was not without a certain interest. When the body stepped forward into the atmosphere, it left the support of the metal it had so lately defied and abandoned itself to the mercy of gravitation. From an upright position the body fell forward into a flat position, like a diver entering the water with a belly-buster. This attitude was maintained only down as far as the last railing, for at this point the boots struck metal and imparted a spin to the body—the last thirty feet was traversed in the motion of a propeller—and it spun many times, landing flat, in a face-down position. His right arm was pinned beneath his crutch, as if he were readying his member for insertion in the earth, mother of his mineral-fed flesh.

  THE LOVE OF SOLID OBJECTS On the ground the dying flesh of the Glass Canoe spoke out of its agony. No sounds came from the big brown lips.

  ‘This is reality, these ironworks, gauges, furnaces, vessels, valves, compressors, turbines, gratings, concretes, just as much as the soft pith of a man’s body coating once brittle bones.’ Even then he knew his steel interior hadn’t shattered. It was flesh had let him down. ‘Steel girders are precious, I want to cling to them. Through them I heard the vibrations of the earth. I stroked the handled wheel. These things exist. I felt the friendly steel. I want a piece of iron, the wood of a living tree, the side of a firm house to cling to! Don’t let me go! Stop me from dying! Keep me with you! And with the sunset and surf and purple hills. And the clear, clear, clear, clear…’ It was the last word. The next was to have been ‘sky’. It had been called for—ordered, if you like, selected—but between the stock of words at his command and the actual attainment of sky there fell eternity.

  THE COLOUR OF ETERNITY The Glass Canoe. His head was on one side, turned away from the reactor and regenerator and the turbo-expander landing to the open side of the quadrangle.

  In this position he looked at the world out of the corner of one eye, as if it were somehow behind him, as if he had momentarily turned his head from the important things lying under the skin of the earth, the minerals and elements from which he sprang, to the fleeting, fading constructions on its surface and the mocking infinity of sky.

  Out of the corner of his eye. Not worth his consideration. Irrelevant. With head turned, eyes open to the sky. A fly, on thin legs, stepped delicately on his eyeball.

  But the blue above him shrank rapidly, bordered on all sides by a roaring, rumbling wave of black. The blue of the sky became smaller, the blackness growing and roaring, the sky quickly diminishing now and black nothingness triumphant until the blue of day was tiny as a pinpoint and when it flickered out the world stopped.

  TWO MYSTERIES No one could make head or tail of the bite marks, which showed clearly.

  No one could account for the sand that came from the mouth. When the head—flopped on one side—was still, and the eyes fixed, this fine white sharp sand spilled on to the concrete.

  THE INSUFFICIENCY OF EYES The Beautiful Twinkling Star looked out the window, to check if there was reason to worry about the Glass Canoe. He saw the fall and the other man on the landing. Others saw his body give a start, as a fist clenches. When he retracted his head others looked out.

  ‘Don’t look,’ he advised, so they crowded round. The Glass Canoe was in the air. All the eyes in the world couldn’t stop his fall or send up a beam to support him. Several swore they saw a spark struck from the last steel rail. They were too late to see the other man running over the structure. Only the Twinkler and the Samurai saw and recognized Far Away Places.

  BITE MARKS The Samurai had seen the fall and was first to run down to find the body. He could see no brown of overalls or tanned skin—the catalyst drums were in random groupings and hid the Glass Canoe well—and he was up to the spot before he knew it. There had not been much blood, but what had come from the Glass Canoe’s cracked head had been gathering in a tiny depression in the concrete apron and only started to flow when the Samurai was about ten yards away. Then it flowed quickly and spread to a foot-sized pool just under the rubber of the Samurai’s left boot. He slipped in the blood and disappeared from the view of those following.

  From the direction of the wet gas compressor came the Slug, but while he was yet a long way off, he howled to the approaching multitude, ‘The Samurai! Get first aid!’ Thinking the Samurai was the only fallen body. He hadn’t seen the Glass Canoe. One that trailed the field broke off and ran back and spread the word that the Samurai had fallen.

  The rest disregarded the blowing and breakneck babble of the Slug. Some glanced at the Glass Canoe and saw he was dead, then went on to help revive the Samurai. Others gathered round the dead body and stood in a circle, looking down, heads leaning inwards like a Salvation Army street-meeting at public prayer over the fall of sinners.

  The Slug’s lower lip billowed loose and swung from side to side as he moved; a slim channel of dribble flowed from each corner of his mouth. His hearers were concerned when a liquid level built up behind the middle of that slouching bottom lip: this liquid was likely to spray out over them along with his aspirates.

  Far Away Places
slipped round to the back door of the control block and walked through after the prisoner had phoned for the first aid man. He walked out to the solemn ring of men, just as the red fire truck pulled up on the concrete apron. As he got to the body and the blood he heard a man say, ‘What do you make of a dead man with bite marks on his bum?’ He put a hand to his mouth and innocently bared his teeth. Unthinkingly he closed his powerful jaws on the fat knuckle of his index finger. The Samurai watched the teeth with a mild fascination. Big, beautiful, strong-grained teeth. Looking up, he saw the Samurai looking straight into his eyes. Guiltily he put his hands back in his overalls and resumed comforting his private parts. He could piss with the rest of the crew now.

  The Sumpsucker walked up from one of the southern units and while still a few yards away called out: ‘A group of five men or more constitutes mutiny.’ No one answered.

  He waited his chance to get even. When they were all inside with cups of tea and breaking out lunch packets he came to the door and sent ten of them out on jobs. There was no set lunch hour. They complained, but not loudly. No one chipped him about the widow’s catalyst drums, which had overflowed two deep on to the footpath outside her house again.

  Dutch Treat was detailed to go and check for leaks on his fuel gas lines. He was glad. This was something like. It didn’t matter that the job was useless: he had a boss on earth as he had in heaven. Someone told him what to do, right down to the smallest details. It didn’t matter what the orders were, as long as he had a boss. Without orders he wouldn’t do a tap of work. He was happy.

  THE CONVERSION OF QUICK TIP Men were gathered round the time clocks waiting for their turn to go down and tend the machines. It was ten-thirty and a fine night.

  Quick Tip stumbled in, precarious on his pigeon toes, elbows and knees moving in his broken-down boxer’s gait; his face, battered smooth, alight with joy.