The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

by David Ireland

  The Great White Father was alone. It was two o’clock. The last of the day shift had gone over the river to report back in time to shower, dress and go. The three o’clock starters had not yet come. For once there were no out-of-hours visitors. The sixty-dollar cat stepped delicately in from the mangroves.

  He spoke to the cat. ‘There’s others more wretched than us, cat. When you look around and see ’em all, you allow yourself to feel well off. But we’re not well off. We’re still prisoners, our life’s vile, not one day of our sentence has been commuted, no matter how many golden handshakes.’

  The cat walked carefully over to him. He sat on the step of the drink hut and scratched the cat’s chin. He got up and fetched beer, laying out a saucerful for the animal.

  ‘Wet your whistle, cat,’ he advised. ‘The great thing is to try to make life bearable. That’s all the Home Beautiful’s for—to make the day bearable for my brothers. Such a motley crew we are, cat, but brothers. Our samenesses are more important than our differences. In spite of what the Samurai thinks, it’s better to have a drink with a man than to found new civilizations on his corpse. I can’t see men as coral polyps, dying in order to build the edifice a little higher with their bones. There is no common good that ought to deprive one single man of life.

  ‘I’m a heathen, cat.’ The cat cocked an ear, but did not look up from his pilsner. His tail bent over, nearly touching the ground, moving from side to side. The tip was bent upwards and waved a separate wave. ‘I’d just let poverty and disease and injustice go—they’ll always be with us. I wouldn’t try to alter a thing: all systems woe. A few beers, a soft bunk, away from guards and bosses where a man is only a man. Breathing, sleeping, living. Meat, beer and women.’

  The cat licked the saucer out and turned his affection back on, rubbing against the Great White Father and making cat noises. In the distance the roar of bulldozers flattening the mangroves, this time on the Home Beautiful side of the river.

  AN ACT OF VANDALISM On night shift, Saturday into Sunday morning, Cheddar Cheese entered the Termitary block and starting from the top floor and working on his knees or in a crouch so he couldn’t be seen above sill level, and using a screwdriver, he jemmied open the metal filing cabinets in every office. He worked in the pulsing light of the refinery flare.

  With great patience he transferred part of each set of files to every other office, in an elaborate criss-cross pattern so that no cabinet held the files it should, but all held some of each. He didn’t even read them. He started to halve the contents of the individual filing folders and mix them up with one another but only got through a third of the offices with this refinement of his method. He decided to rip out telephones.

  He took four hours on this job and got back to his plant at five. He felt no elation. Nothing made him happy, not any more.

  At seven on the way out, the wind was so fierce it filled his mouth, he had to turn his head to breathe. He looked at the Termitary grimly and made a filthy sign at it with his right hand; in his dilly-bag, hidden in a pair of dirty socks, was a brand-new wrench some other thief had concealed under a pallet handy to the locker-room. In one shift he had slammed the company that gave four years to a man who ran a mile in four minutes and nothing but a golden handshake letter to a man dying of bad blood. And he had made a small profit. It was the best day he’d had since he got even with the Python.

  Man is a fighter, a destroyer, a savage beast; more vengeful and cowardly, more ferocious and ruthless than the great cats. Cheddar felt more of a man that day.

  24

  SABOTEURS

  RECKLESS WEATHER It was Sunday, the sky blue and no clouds: harshly brilliant weather. A keen gritty wind whipped through the streets, raking away leaves and pedestrians. Sunday drivers responded to the bright day with speed and to the fierce, dry wind with feverish irritation and inflammable tempers. They swerved towards dogs and pedestrians to make sure the road was clear for them and overtook with the recklessness of anger. The erratic Experimenter in the sky had concocted a skull-penetrating wind that blew in its message of immediate hate and selfishness-on-sight and was laughing nastily down on the mess.

  The Great White Father had glued the Wandering Jew’s letter to a board in the drink hut and was carousing in splendid loneliness, raising can after can to toast the golden handshake invitation, while the wind blew overhead. Several customers and drinkers had called in, but the Home Beautiful was peculiarly empty this weekend. Sunday pleasure or freedom for the Monday-to-Friday millions: work as usual for the shift-working thousands. That vicious wind swept sand, dust, soot, men—all before it. On refinery plots corrugated-iron sheets on shelter sheds and field lavatories clanged and rumbled, flapping like paper. Over flat refinery acres the wind rushed, blowing through scattered plants and mazes of lines, hurrying in fear. Its pursuer never came in sight.

  Steam plumes, gas leaks swept straight north; flames were torn at right angles from the mouths of the flares. Under this assault men tried to keep their lives at their usual low-tension level of monotony.

  A POOR ATTITUDE TO AUTHORITY The Congo Kid was due to go off at three. Monday and Tuesday were his weekend. It was time he did something about getting revenge on this company and these stupid Australians. On the polymer plant he opened the gas drain from the butane accumulator. There were so many leaks, another little plume of gas wouldn’t be noticed. On the alkylation plant he opened the hydrofluoric-acid drain from the spent acid vessel and as a final touch cracked open the hydrogen-sulphide valve draining the line into the sulphur plant. That would keep the bastards busy; they couldn’t get near one for the others. He walked quickly away holding his breath so the hydrogen-sulphide couldn’t get him. Everyone had access to all plants. Even contractors walking from one job to another trudged unsupervised past the most dangerous processes. They didn’t know what the different-coloured paint denoted.

  No Australian bastards would ever correct him again. No sir. The wind took the gas, the acid vapour and the H2S away from the control hut. A pity. Never mind, the wind might change later. Some of the gas was heavy, and condensed in the atmosphere to liquid, finding its way to the drains.

  A SMALL PROFIT Captain Bligh, keen for Puroil’s sake, sent all the hopeful overtime seekers home except the Gypsy Fiddler, who got a double shift watching the gas tank level. In three years the level instruments had not been fixed or replaced. For half that time a man had been kept back on overtime every shift, three shifts a day, seven days a week. Local management couldn’t authorize the expenditure necessary to put in new instruments; it was easier to blame the workforce for absenteeism when the overtime figure was questioned. There were reams of cost breakdowns up in the top office but what they proved was anyone’s guess. There was no breakdown of individual amounts. The subterfuges, inaccuracy and cover-ups at the point of origin of the figures made nonsense of accountants’ conclusions.

  The Donk had applied for a day job. Shift hours were getting his wife down. She’d rather have him out of the way in the daytime and home minding the house at night. It was so bad after eighteen years that either he got a day job or he’d have to leave.

  No day jobs, they told him. Was there a price on his head? Could he get the handshake? No. He had to resign. On this fine raw Sunday, since he didn’t get an overtime shift at double time he missed the bus on purpose to be late up at the gate and get sixteen minutes’ overtime. You didn’t get paid for the first fifteen minutes until you’d done sixteen. On the way up, going through his own section—the usual short cut—he carelessly whacked a piece of pipe against a concrete pier.

  In doing this, he flattened the low-pressure tapping line to a pressure differential controlling valve on the alkylation end of the slurry loop. The valve opened wide to try to bring down the resulting high differential recorded in the differential pressure cell. Since the return flow to the fractionator was much greater, the side flow to the alkylation heat-exchangers was starved. If no action was taken, these coolers would p
lug completely in half an hour. Unplugging them required the plant shut down.

  Donk carried on, walking as slowly as he could. He might stretch it to twenty minutes. At double time, that would be eighty-five cents.

  He, too, made a profit that day. And in his bag he had the foam-rubber mattress on which he’d slept so many overtime hours away. He wouldn’t see another night shift.

  AN UNREASONABLE LITTLE FELLOW Dadda was back in town. He chose this Sunday as a nice time to get even with the company that put the police on to him.

  True, they were obliged to tell the police where he was, but way back in his mind there was a little unreasonable fellow insisting they ought to protect their own. In his work for them he had saved far more money than his wages cost them. Other little men in his head more reasonably insisted that the company owed no loyalty to anyone, but the first little fellow took no notice of what was reasonable. They didn’t have to back up the lousy coppers, he grumbled, forgetting that the coppers were in existence to back up Puroil.

  There were too many people coming and going through the blue gates at three o’clock for the guards to know who was who: he walked straight down to the oil interceptors, lifted out the skimmer plates and threw them in the main interceptor. He felt a twinge in his left arm when he picked up the plates: just another souvenir of Puroil. He got back to the gate and clocked out the first card he picked up so the guards would hear the bundy clock bash and not be suspicious; by that time oil was spread down Eel River about a quarter-mile.

  He didn’t have to wait. He knew what would happen.

  They need someone to teach ’em, he said to the little unreasonable fellow in his brain. To teach ’em they ought to treat us like we were all one lot of people together. It’s a pity more of us didn’t slam ’em when we got a raw deal. He rubbed the slight bump on his left forearm where the broken radius had set out of line.

  DRUNK AND INCAPABLE Loosehead had been to the Ex-Servicemen’s club before coming to work and his way of working off the beer was to go looking for something to do. He didn’t want this work to be picked out for him by the Slug or Captain Bligh: he wanted to choose it himself.

  Something troubled him. Had the feed nozzles up into the reactor bed been tightened or left undone? He climbed up inside the reactor skirt and belted all the nozzles with a four-foot length of two-inch pipe, trying to sing at the same time. The singing, however, came out broken at the joints, like cries from a zoo. He couldn’t hear it for the roaring of the process.

  He loosened the joints of the flanges that clamped the flow orifice plates in position, but didn’t know this. He intended to tighten them—he was given the job to do a week before, and dodged it.

  The fierce heat which dried the sweat on his skin as soon as it formed helped him get some of his wits about him, but only enough to make him realize he was drunk. When he was tired of hitting, he sat down on an upturned four-gallon drum, waiting for the heat to dry him out.

  VERY PRIVATE ENTERPRISE When plants were shut down, process lines were blocked off with round flat discs of steel called spades or blinds. These were inserted between flanges and bolted into position so nothing could pass along the isolated pipelines. They were left on platforms near the flanges where they were used. There was no regular check of them, naturally.

  On this day of days, the Thieving Magpie was congratulating himself that four days’ work was finished and every last spade had been taken where it would be some use. He wasn’t able to move those of the largest kind: the forty-eight-inch stainless steel blinds needed block and tackle, and he’d taken all portable block and tackle. He got away with sixteen hundred-weight of mild steel in those four days from Wednesday to Saturday. That was on the credit side. Debit to his account the slight damage done to his car springs with an extra four hundred pounds in the car each day and the extra gasoline and still he came out with a large profit. And the beauty of the thing was he had no capital outlay. He fingered the silver cross on the chain round his neck, brought it out and kissed it for luck.

  ETERNAL FIRE There was a place in the petriment lining inside the regenerator where Slackie had once bashed and bashed with twenty pounds of mild steel bar three feet long. The lining had come away from the metal skin months ago, then later cracked and the fire in the regenerator got behind the lining. It was daytime and the hot-spot could not be seen glowing, but the metal was raised slightly in the beginnings of a bubble. Beyond that skin of steel was a world of whirling fire that the company wished was eternal.

  THE VICE OF MEMORY The Kraut, down on holiday from Brisbane, picked this weekend to visit Clearwater. He was only ten in April ’45 and four years too young to die as a German soldier, though not too young to die as a civilian in the famous thousand-bomber raids then in vogue. When he crept round the Puroil fence it was almost like being on a mission through enemy lines, a situation made familiar in countless movies. It was broad daylight when he untwisted the wire stays the Thieving Magpie had left in the cyclone fence. The original wire was ten-gauge and too stiff for fingers: the Magpie had replaced it with sixteen-gauge, nice and easy to bend.

  He lifted the bottom corner of the wire panel and crawled over the narrow roadway to the export valve controlling steam sales to all the factories round about. It was a green valve—air failure to shut—so he bled the air off the diaphragm and left the bleed open. The valve shut obediently. He crawled back, fixed the wire and crept up the roadside drain to his little rented car.

  Swearing commenced immediately among the Sunday staffs of the surrounding factories. At Puroil, someone saw the rise in steam pressure and cut firing a fraction. The drop in steam sales was recorded only out in the pipe-track near the valve shut by the Kraut, so no one in the refinery would know until a customer rang up complaining, or till a reading was taken from the recorder at the end of shift.

  ‘If I can’t get the money out of them, at least I’ll cost them some,’ he commented as he drove away. He would like to have seen fire and smoke and heard deafening explosions. Only disasters could match the loss of the shift-penalty proportion in his severance pay.

  GOOD INTENTIONS The Loch Ness Monster wanted to be helpful. He envied the men who could walk about and fix things, knowing what they were doing. This big valve, now. What a screamer! He read the inscription on the plastic strip: High Pressure Steam Let Down to Medium Pressure. Wonder what that means. He’d only been on the plant twelve months.

  Just look at that vibration. A sort of collar, vibrating on that stem there. He walked a few paces and came back with a brand-new aluminium ladder, propped it against the huge valve and spun the vibrating collar down hard to the bottom of its travel.

  He went away happy. He would go and make tea for the Aussie lads, just for the pleasure of announcing: ‘Tea up!’ It always amused them. Now and then there came into his mind the horrible moment when he had been sent up top to put one side of the new regenerator pressure control slide valves on handwheel control and he had shut off the air to both sides. The valve slammed shut, the pressure nearly blew the top off the vessel and everyone screamed at him. That was the worst—the other lads yelling. He never let this thought stay long. You can’t afford to dwell on the unpleasant things of life.

  The collar he’d spun down on the high-pressure steam let-down valve shouldn’t have been loose, but equally it shouldn’t have been spun down. It was now acting as a maximum stop, the valve couldn’t open further.

  A RESCUE The Maltese Falcon had cleaned that ladder. He watched now from behind a stanchion as the Monster left it by the high-pressure steam valve. As soon as the boy disappeared he rescued the ladder and hurried with it over to the trench inside the fence. He had to paint his two rented houses later and his garage with the three Hungarian boys in it: it would be very handy. And it was such a good price.

  He smiled at that. The way things were left about. All he had to do was come by at eleven, after knock-off. Afternoon shift was always best: you had darkness for cover. Day and night shift
ended in daylight and that was no good at all.

  COMING TO THE BOIL Despite an increase in circulation partly due to the Donk, and despite a rising level, the slurry oil at the bottom of the fractionator was too hot, so the Count was told to go out and shut a bypass round the coolers to force more oil through the coolers and bring it back cooler to the column. Out he went when his cigarette was finished and shut the valve to the coolers.

  By this mistake he allowed the coolers to plug, which they did very quickly, for the water entering the coolers, expecting to be converted to steam, was disappointed and stayed cool, causing the waxy slurry to set in the tubes. Since this instruction was given towards the end of dayshift and no one bothered to check the temperature of the outgoing uncooled slurry the temperature rose past the allowable 105 Centigrade to 150, rapidly to 200, then gradually to 280, 300, running down to a storage tank whose contents were perhaps 70 Centigrade, and which was supposed to contain no water.

  Unfortunately, when the tank-farm men reported no water, they meant that no matter how they drained the tank they could not get the water out. This was not quite the same thing. But pumping and tank-farm boys were different sections of Operations and kept their secrets.

  The danger was that the hot oil would make steam from the water and blow the top off the tank, and that the oil would flash when exposed to air.

  THE VICE OF OBEDIENCE Ambrose was thinking. His wife, on her twenty-first birthday, had made him a present of a confession. She had been his friend’s girl for three years, and married Ambrose when he gave her the heave-ho. So it was true what the men said, his mate had trodden the arse off her for three years. How did they know? Could they tell from his face? It was a mystery. He was worried.