HAIL AND FAREWELL A small conference in one corner of the drink hut reached a decision. These were the planners, the long-distance drinkers, not the Big Bits type who grabbed beer cans as if they were a last refuge, but men who drank a bit and talked, and thought a bit and ate, and could keep it up for days.
‘We’ll just go up there and kidnap him. Simple,’ said the Great White Father. ‘Three should do it. Including one to drive the Mercedes.’
‘Why are we doing it?’ Angry Ant said.
‘It’s never been done before,’ explained the Great White Father.
‘How will he take it?’ asked the Humdinger.
‘How can he take it? He doesn’t know by sight which shifts we’re on and he won’t be game to tell anyone what happened. If our mob leak it out there’ll be talk, but his best defence will be to shut up and ignore it. We don’t elect him Manager—our talk can’t hurt him. Probably won’t even reach him.’
The Humdinger, Canada Dry and the Angry Ant stood, shook their beer cans for the last drops, and finding none, departed gravely for the refinery. It took them an hour, but it went well, they said. The Wandering Jew looked a little knocked up, there was a wrinkled look about his suit, and the blindfold he wore was a piece of some Sydney housewife’s old dress salvaged in a rag drive and used by Puroil operators for wiping oily hands or for insulation against concrete.
The Great White Father shook his hand—by force—and announced to him: ‘We’re going to see you have a good time, young feller. Where’s Volga?’ Volga rose and approached his leader.
‘Put out more rags, Volga. Here’s the Wandering Jew.’
‘He has the blindfold on.’
‘He’ll appreciate them all the more later.’ Volga ran up some more rags on string and poked extra bits of coloured rag into crevices and on projecting nails round the huts. The place was gay. The Great White Father called his flock together.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I say ladies because it’s well known that four per cent of the male population is homosexual…’ He waited for the laughter to evaporate.
‘Before we’re all completely molo, we’d better say a few words in memory of our fallen brother. Charge your glasses or pierce your cans and we’ll drink to the Glass Canoe. But first, a few words.’
The gathering did not keep proper order and some of them, reverting to their natural undisciplined habits, made no pause in their drinking, but at the signal they all stood.
Unfortunately, the first few words of the Great White Father’s historic speech were lost; he turned and saw an old grey rabbit sitting calmly on a hump of earth in the swamp as if waiting for him to speak. The side of its face and its left eye were pushed out in a great sore; the thing had been infected with myxomatosis and was not long for this world.
‘There’s a poor devil of a rabbit out there in the mangroves. Got a dose of myxo. We’d better kill him out of kindness. If we don’t kill him, he’ll only die, or some unprincipled shopkeeper will cut out the sore and sell him. Will you do the honours, Volga?’
Volga darted inside the drink hut, they heard him standing on a seat and reaching into the roof; presently he came out with a sawn-off twenty-two, fitted with a home-made silencer. Big and clumsy.
The Great White Father took the rifle, aimed, looked round and seeing his congregation silent, decided to speak.
‘Hold it,’ he said quietly. ‘Just keep still. I want to talk to the poor little feller. He’ll stay quiet if we don’t alarm him.’
The bemused party was quiet as their host addressed the dying rabbit.
‘Now, now, little rabbit. Don’t be afraid. This has been coming for a long while. You can’t live forever. If the dogs don’t get you and you don’t starve to death we’re here to eat you up, only for that rotten sore over your eye. What do you think of when you see us here, lapping up the grog? It must be a bit of a mystery, eh—all us big people making a row and enjoying ourselves? Drinking out of cans—drinking gallons and pissing pints? Any other time you could go your way, but look at you! You’re diseased. You’re on the way out. The sight of you could put us all off the grog. Why? ’Cause we did it to you, matey. We poisoned you and we have to put you out of your misery for our own sakes. It’ll be quick. You won’t know what hit you.’
With these words, a bullet was on its way towards the waiting rabbit and eternity caught up with him before he heard the report of the gun. The rabbit flopped and jerked and lay still on the little mound of earth he had hopped to. The audience heard only the faintest whup. It was a handy weapon.
The Great White Father looked round with great compassion at his own people, a compassion not unmixed with a certain humour. He began to smile. Before he knew it he was grinning broadly, the grin became a chuckle, the chuckle turned quickly to a laugh, and the moment he hit the full broad notes of an uproarious laugh the puppets around him laughed too. Some of the girls had turned up; the Sandpiper had ideas of taking some of her regulars out into the paddocks, much the same as a beast of prey cuts out stragglers from a flock of sheep. The Sandpiper laughed. Everyone roared. At nothing. At the Glass Canoe, at themselves, at the rabbit, at the Wandering Jew, at being human, at the beer cans, at Big Bits,at the Wild Bull of the Pampas, at the whole idea of the party.
So the Great White Father’s first words were lost in the general din.
WHO CLOCKS OFF EARLY? ‘…so the great operator goes home. And we consign to Rookwood his craft of ambition, promotion, pills, and a vision that saw the grand design, the noble acres of Eel Flat sown with brand-new plants. Pumper, panelman, delegate, golfer—he stood up at every Union meeting. Now ended his brief span, a one-man band of all the talents has gone down.
‘We heard him in debate, ear-splitting or prophetic, up one day, the next completely down. We saw him by shock-treatment unsoured—the energetic come-back, the dustcoat in his sights. Here was a man in whom great issues brought to light genius to grapple them. On a poised rail, danger drew steel and height struck fire from him: the black tide of death filled his impetuous mouth with sand.
‘Who clocks off early? A man whose strength and strong bent for suicide will stand for ages yet to come; a myth, his stormy heart now stopped and destiny fulfilled, our Glass Canoe is shattered and gone home.’
THE RECEDING UNIVERSE That fine sharp sand—why did it spill? Was it only to give the Great White Father a line to speak in a funeral speech?
All drank to the memory of their fallen fellow-worker, their mate, their tormentor. But the emotion and the beer had been too much for Big Bits. He had made a come-back after his stomach’s gesture of rejection, but not for long. He did not settle back to drink like the rest, but sought support from the post of the rough veranda built on the drink hut. He had the wild impression that this post was in danger of falling away from him and with it the universe and that he was supporting both, unaided.
‘She’s going! She’s going!…There she goes!’ he shouted. But it was he that was going, losing his grip and falling flat like a length of timber on his back. Even on his back he was concerned for the post falling and the universe receding from him and did not seem to notice how long the one took to fall or the other to disappear. He lay like that for a long while, unable to move. At last he drifted off into an uneasy, dream-filled sleep. People just stepped over him.
A NAVEL SALUTE When more of the girls came, the Great White Father got them dancing to music from someone’s transistor. He got the Wandering Jew fixed up with the Sandpiper, thumped him heartily on the grey-suited back—leaving a handprint in beer—and roared in his ear, ‘Have you got the right knack o’ dancing yet?’ The assembly doubled up at this old joke, but the Wandering Jew didn’t get it. Some enjoyed the dancing; the fabric of the dance and the sheen and irritation of the music settled round their limbs as a taut lacquer; their surfaces became alien and set.
The Great White Father’s joke was carried a few days later by the Wandering Jew back to his secretary, who deciphered it for him
, then spread it through the office where it was seized upon by irresponsible persons and torn to shreds.
Embarrassingly, the Old Lamplighter took one of her rare fits during the dance and had to be held down. Her arms and legs kept going, however, as if she were still dancing, and she continued to drink from the blue and gold can she held; no one could take it from her grasp. Beer slopped everywhere. They had to take her away into the bed hut and stay with her. She was quiet in a few minutes, brought up everything, got back on her feet and began all over again.
Into the party ran the Sandpiper, dragging Far Away Places by the hand. For the last half-hour her body had been home to him. The Great White Father rose to salute them.
‘Here’s a toast to the heroes of Australia’s latest navel engagement!’
Innumerable eyes lamped round on the Sandpiper, who was cheerfully dressed in a pair of gaping, unbuttoned overalls, and on Far Away Places, who had put on her pink swami Woolworths briefs, forty-nine cents’ worth and cheap at half the price.
After a while they went bush again. He was an ordinary little man and she a hearty trollop with a dirty tongue, but hand in hand into the branches of the mangroves they seemed innocent as boy and girl and clean as kids on a beach.
THE ORGANIZATION MAN The Wandering Jew was frightened at first, but the beer relaxed him.
‘Who is the leader of these rebels?’ And the Great White Father answered him.
‘Revels, man. Revels.’
‘What’s behind this notice I see glued up to plant walls everywhere?’
‘Puroil 1852 or the other one?’
‘The other one.’
‘Ah,’ said the Great White Father, and recited, rolling the words out, ‘Men that were once bludgers and thieves are now become eminent foremen and controllers. Some are Suction Heads now who before were rabble-rousers and whisperers of rumours, still with the same evil faces which now shine with sweat above white shirts and semi-stiff collars. Those there are who run and hide when no man approacheth, only the Wandering Jew. And this, too, is a matter for wonder, for this Wandering Jew is not as other Jews but goeth about unpersecuted, rather persecuting others; and persecuting in the name of the only free men: the far-off anonymous shareholders and owners of the world. For no man can be free whose livelihood is on the line every time he takes a stand for his own opinion, or insists on having his self-respect whole or retaining a little human dignity. Even an animal is allowed to pee in peace; even a dog is allowed to finish his dinner undisturbed.
‘Things there are that were once men, crawling under the plant structures, carrying their heads forward like rodents. From the sagging belts around their guts swing the shrunken heads of their victims. Honest men wait in hiding for them to pass by, carrying lumps of mild steel.’
BLOOD BROTHERS ‘Did you write that?’
‘No. We have an author in our midst; a maker of notes, a scribbler, a signwriter, a stealer of other men’s lives, lines and lies.’
‘Who?’
‘You’re not advanced enough in drink for me to tell you. He’s writing down everything that happens here. All the stupidities. I bet your understrappers don’t tell you those things. Anyway, let’s think of something cheerful. I’ll sing for you, and you’ll appreciate it when I stop.’
He sang, to the tune of ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus’:
Safe in the arms of Puroil
Safe on the weekly staff
Sitting astride a pension
We can afford to laugh.
His voice a pleasant bass. The Wandering Jew, under his blindfold, tried to gauge whether these men were desperate enough to harm him. They had been a little rough getting him out of his car, but probably no more than necessary to persuade him to go quietly.
‘Did Simsy come to the party?’ asked the Humdinger. ‘He was supposed to be going to give us a quote on that heap of junk up in the Puroil yard—that cracker thing.’
‘How about swearing in the Wandering Jew as a blood brother?’ asked Loosehead, who got brilliant ideas rarely. The others winked at each other and said enthusiastically, ‘That’s it! Reckon he deserves it. When he’s a blood brother he won’t be giving away any secrets.’
On the spot the Great White Father thought up a ritual of splendid mumbo-jumbo, somewhere between that of the Masons and the Knights of the Southern Cross, two secret societies whose rituals were widely known. When it came to the final swearing of brotherhood, they actually cut into his arm with a little penknife the Great White Father had on his key ring, and pretended to mingle the blood from his arm with some beer from their cans. They pushed him to his knees.
‘There we are. How about if we raise our brother out of a state of darkness now?’ yelled the Great White Father. And in reply the assembly, except for those lunatics still playing cricket in the distance and whose wild shouts could be heard, responded with a completely valueless mass affirmation of brotherhood. With a flourish, the blindfold was lowered so that it became a sort of scarf round the Wandering Jew’s neck.
‘Now you are one of my twelve. Go not in the way of the brass and avoid the haunts of the trusties, the ambitious, those for whom the word of Puroil is enough.’ This was a strange thing to say to a manager, but no one minded.
With rough ceremony, he was yanked to his feet by the scarf, blinking in the strong daylight, and forced to shake hands with the entire crew. Each gave him a bone-crusher grip.
‘What are you going to do when the mangroves come down?’ he inquired in retaliation. The silence was thick. Only the Great White Father was unmoved.
‘It’ll happen some day, boys and girls. We’ll move some day, plans are being considered.’
But this idea was almost too much for his simple flock: they found it hard to defer worry. They also found it hard to defer drinking and the Great White Father wisely gave the order that anyone found with an empty glass would be thrown in the river.
‘Let’s have some entertainment,’ he said. ‘How about the Sandpiper singing for us?’
She obliged with twenty-one verses of Abdul the Bulbul, Emir, in the locker-room vernacular.
The Wandering Jew, well on in liquor now, sang a little Termitary ditty. ‘I wish I was’, it was called, and the verses went from ‘I wish I was a little Eskimo’, through ‘I wish I was a fly upon the wall’, to ‘I wish I was an automatic lathe’, and as last verse, ‘I wish I was a chair in the typing pool’.
The assembly picked the words up quickly enough to join in the refrain. He considered giving them the Rugby Union song, but reflected that they were more likely Soccer or Rugby League supporters, being industrial prisoners of the lowest grade. Even sport had its class distinctions.
‘Thank you, Wandering Jew!’ shouted the great man joyfully. ‘A man who can drink and sing a song is not all bad. Feel free to wander among us, but remember, that way lies a ducking in the mud of Eel River.’ He pointed the way of the track to the river. The Wandering Jew made a vague sign that meant he would behave, but after wandering about watching the party-people he found he could not approach them. There was a barrier still up in spite of the levelling alcohol, so he gradually made his way back to the Great White Father and eventually these two sat down together in a place where the sun angled down between a gap in the branches overhead, and drank steadily and talked.
‘Why is a man like you so thin? I expected a man five by five with fat, not seven by two of bone.’
‘It’s worry over my next drink. It’s because I never eat. It’s because I couldn’t do my falling-flat trick with a belly—I’d roll like a barrel or rock like a seesaw. How did you get on with my flock?’
‘I make them uneasy.’
‘Yes. You see that here Jack’s considered not only as good as his master, but likely a damn sight better. To these people, riches and power are corrupt.’
‘And if they had the chance at my job?’
‘They couldn’t stick it. They don’t have your need to impose yourself on the world about you. You h
ave drives they know not of: drives to avoid poverty and subordination. They don’t. They have fewer fears and fewer wants than you. It was their condition of wantlessness that made me despair of their ever bettering their condition by their own efforts. I came to the conclusion that democracy was not for them. They aren’t capable of competing on equal terms with the rest of the world. The good God above simply made them a little slower than their brothers, a little duller, a little less worried about survival. Your urge to survive and, having survived, to get ahead, awakes no echoes in them. They hear the words, but there is no answer inside.’
‘How did a man like you come to be occupied with people like this?’ asked the Wandering Jew.
‘The poorest and humblest and nakedest are more comfortable to be with. They have no extra skin for a man to penetrate. No veneer. And the life I live, like this, with no worry and plenty of grog and being the Great White Father to the little people in my little pond—it’s very satisfying. I refuse to compete. I have only one life, my friend, and it’s not going to be taken up with futile things I don’t like doing. I’ll go down with them into the past. They know there’s no place for them in the future.’
HERESY IN LOW PLACES ‘Why have you let the micrometer and the nickel-alloy tools and tension wrenches be replaced by the sledgehammer?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Months ago I saw fitters working on your German gas-compressor up there at the cracker, aligning the machine by bashing the bed at the turbine end with sledgehammers.’
‘You’re pulling my leg. All you’ve been saying is a leg-pull.’
They both laughed.
‘And all this effort and conflict to put a bit of gasoline in the cars of citizens so they can wander aimlessly round thinking they’re seeing Australia every time they get beyond the suburbs.’
The Unknown Industrial Prisoner Page 38