The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (15 page)

‘Chee!' He was thinking.

‘You want club privileges?'

‘Yes, yes! I'll do it! Who's on today?'

‘Sorcerer's Apprentice!' He could have added that she had a new trick, but it wasn't necessary. ‘Plenty of beer, too.'

‘As long as she's there, you can have the beer.'

‘You're a dedicated man.'

‘I don't care who knows it!' He was joyful, he would have a stop on the way home before he saw the widow. That would make two today, if he could get the widow to send her daughter up the shop for half an hour. He took no notice of her complaints that the backyard was full of black catalyst drums, stacked two deep. Higher than the fence. They stopped the grass growing, didn't they?

 

THE BASIS OF OBEDIENCE The Good Shepherd saw the Great White Father from a distance. He knew he was not on shift today: he knew where he had come from, but was capable of turning his eyes away from little irregularities. A confrontation with the Great White Father was not always comfortable for a man who served an organization; the Great White Father could call on all the resources of his originality when he argued, but an officer of the company had to use borrowed words, and the cause for which Puroil would have a man lay down his integrity was usually long dead and putrid. He often wondered if his sense of loyalty was stronger than his personal faith in honesty, truth, purity and organized religion. Organization again. Was it a purer thing to serve your religion as God gave it to you personally or to uphold the tradition of your fathers? He wondered if he was as out of date as he sometimes felt in a world where one out of every two people on earth lived under rulers who openly condemned religion. It was a lonely feeling. His father had never known it.

At least he wasn't on the lookout for the men's badness and transgressions all the time, neither did he dob. But the thought of the Great White Father returned. Why did such a man continue to work here? Did he think every alternative as pointless as every other? Could he do without public respect as easily as he could do without God? He never displayed his financial power, yet it was said he was well off, much better off than the Puroil officers who mistook their continued dependence on the company for loyalty. But where was the place for a man who believed in the old things, God and good, sin and guilt and eternal life?

Once, when he went to see a man sick for weeks and was let in humbly—as if he were a bishop or a doctor—he was surprised at all the gadgets this family did without. That was how he put it to himself—did without. As if they had a choice. It was common enough in Sydney to have no sewerage—he had none himself—but this man and his wife had no sink in the kitchen. When he went down the back steps—he could have got the water in the bathroom, but didn't like to open the shut door in case he embarrassed them—there was no washboiler even: only a fuel copper. He was surprised, too, at the weight of a water-bucket. Downstairs, he could smell the black tin in the little house down the yard.

As he looked in the kitchen at the sagging window and nail-scarred linoleum and the whole room not so clean as to make you praise poverty, he thought: I couldn't live like this. But as he moved around helping and both smiling at his talk as if at jokes, he was surprised to find he was getting used to the place.

Only a step away, it was. And made a mental note not to say this to his wife, whose life balanced on the possession of every material thing as soon as it became available. Was he no better, for all his good intentions, than the most abject of the spit-lickers? Worse, was he loyal to a shadow and obedient to the shadows of shadows for no better reason than to maintain his wife's gadget-differential over the poorer classes?

 

TINY DIFFERENCES The Great White Father was in his natural element. Wherever he went, clouds of witnesses gathered round him. Some worked. The start-up was proceeding. Few took it seriously. Only those standing up on the turbo-expander landing, putting one by one the machines into the system, rooted with fear and the terrible scream of the turbines to their action stations, their hands welded to the inlet valve winders, trembling on the butterfly valve that opened the discharge valve in one hit, waiting for the metal fragments to blast them all like shrapnel into infinite retirement.

‘We don't want anyone neglecting Mum because of the Home Beautiful, so we have a suggestion from Pommy Bill here that we issue books of coupons to all married men,' he announced.

Pommy Bill, a small cockney sparrow, stood flushed and pleased as the debate started. But just then a merry ex-Bomber Command pilot came up behind Pommy Bill, inserted a claw between his legs and grabbed joyfully and vigorously at his genital cluster.

‘Gotcha!' he roared. Pommy Bill had his own private ascension.

‘Jesus!' he screamed on the way down.

‘Christ!' came the antiphonal from the faithful.

‘The same yesterday, today and forever!' added Bomber Command solemnly.

‘Amen!'

The coupon motion lapsed with the arrival of Bomber Command who was a plant super. He was eager to get in with the Great White Father and enjoy the superior amenities of the Home Beautiful but he had not been given the invitation. He had a collection of bad photos, yet showing these round, which he did often, was not enough to gain him the acceptance of the mob. He persevered, the world could be conquered by goodwill. He wished they would continue with their previous conversation, but they didn't.

‘Did you hear about the escapees?' he asked. There had been another break at a State detention centre, one of those where men couldn't bundy out each day.

‘They'll be holed up in some warm spot by now,' remarked the Great White Father. Bomber Command was relieved. Getting him to speak relaxed the mob, they were more likely to tolerate his own presence.

‘How about some coffee?' Bomber Command asked Loosehead, who was standing around hoping there was nothing to do. Loosehead was glad to go. He could hang around inside, out of the weather, safe from the foremen.

Loosehead brought the coffee, the Great White Father tasted it.

‘This isn't coffee! Take it away!' Loosehead took it, walked outside, three times round the amenities room and brought the same cup back.

‘Ah! That's better. Why couldn't you do this before?'

The Great White Father found himself loving smoke and heat, the metal of vessels, pipelines, pumps, valves. Because they were there and had, or seemed to have, an existence of their own. The fact that they were fabricated out of anonymous masses of mined metal and shared a common form with multitudes of similar manufactures, did not deter him from seeing something unique in each one. And if you looked you could find the tiny differences that made each one separate from its neighbours. It was comforting to find these differences. He would round his big warm hand over a piece of bare metal, feeling a wonderful affinity with it for no other reason than that it shared with him an existence on the planet he loved so well. In his earlier days at the refinery, he often slept sitting against a giant electric boiler feedwater pump, feeling that it was a large warm animal with comfortable sides. He imagined its vibrations to be purring.

He loved life, whatever shape it took, and was eager to extend the privilege of life to objects and creations not usually thought of as living. He could pick up a stone and ask it about the things it had seen in the millions of years since it was formed.

A scuffle in the lavatory. Canada Dry and the Humdinger emerged dragging an overalled prisoner, a stranger.

‘Here he is! The man that pees purple!' called the Humdinger.

‘Caught him in the act,' said Canada Dry triumphantly.

‘Let's have a look,' said the Great White Father, striding in towards the stainless steel wall they peed against like dogs.

‘How can we fix him up?' they asked, when the great man came back.

‘Fix him up? What do you mean fix him up?' bellowed their leader. ‘If a doctor treats this man he'll be different. Leave him alone. He's magnificent! Purple pee. I've never seen the like! You come back whenever you like,' he said to the man. They let him go. He ran out like a dog used to kicks. He wasn't used to tolerance.

 

THE FACE ON THE LAVATORY FLOOR ‘Phone for Terrazzo.'

‘Anyone seen Terrazzo?'

‘Probably in the shouse.'

‘With his pencil.'

‘Who's Terrazzo?'

‘If he's in the shouse, he'll be sketching.'

‘The funny thing is,' explained the Humdinger to the Great White Father, ‘every time he goes in he takes his notebook. Finds faces in the terrazzo floor. In the patterns of the little bits of stuff they gum together to make it.'

‘Is he looking for one particular face?'

‘Hey! That's a thought! The lost face on the shouse floor!'

Terrazzo approached, worried.

‘Lost it.'

‘What?'

‘The spitting image of the Colonel. You know, up in the pay office. The one that called the Whispering Baritone a male whore. Probably never find it now. I had a girl's face there once, the most beautiful face I ever seen. You think I can find it? Say, are you the Great White Father?'

‘Yes, that's him!'

‘Why?'

‘Don't drink Loosehead's coffee.'

‘Why not?'

‘After he cooked his frankfurts in the urn, he boiled up his socks.'

‘Too late now,' said the Great White Father, making a face. ‘Answer the phone, you might have won the lottery.'

He hadn't. One of the clowns had rung Dial-a-Prayer and Terrazzo listened, stunned, to ‘…all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.'

 

BIRD-LOVERS ‘Did you see in the local rag,' said the Great White Father, ‘where some poor lame devil applied for a job and the Garfish said, “We're not employing any bloody cripples here.”'

‘Wouldn't put it past him,' said Canada Dry. ‘Some of our blokes are worse than any Wop-whippers, boong-bashers or Kaffir-kickers!'

‘Who wants to buy some racing pigeons? Nice pets for the kids,' asked the Western Salesman, seeing a profit in the crowd.

‘Don't buy 'em,' advised Canada Dry and the Western Salesman thumped him playfully. He would like to have been admitted to the privileged circle of those who thumped the Samurai, but he never made it. His eagerness for overtime and promotion cruelled him.

‘You're spoiling my pitch!'

‘They fly back home to his place!'

‘Shut up! Let 'em buy if they want to!'

The Western Salesman would have sold pigeons to his own mother, knowing they would fly home to his coops the minute they were let out.

‘Did I tell you about last Sunday morning at the flats?' asked Bubbles, taking out his lighter to smoke a cigarette. Bubbles was a contraction of Bubble-guts; it referred to his impressive chest which he carried low, and the unkind called a brewer's goitre. ‘Out the back Sunday morning in the sun minding my own business and all of a sudden this count appears with an old army rifle on full cock, waving it about. “Was you whistling at my wife?” he yells. “No,” I said and it was the truth. I was watching her though. She weeds the garden every weekend, always bending right over in these little skimpy shorts; everyone's on her. He goes raving round asking all the single blokes, but it turns out two old people have a canary and it was whistling. He poked the rifle at the cage and blew the canary to bits. Lucky the windows were open and the doors; the bullet went right through the house without breaking anything. He didn't even apologize to the old people for shooting the bird and they were too scared to say anything. Feathers everywhere.'

‘Did the bullet hit anything on the other side of the house when it went through?' asked the Great White Father.

‘Only the bakery wall,' answered Bubbles righteously. ‘In the afternoon the same bloke took a few of us up the Leagues Club—I didn't take the car, I knew I'd get tanked—and we were choofing along Highway One about forty-five or fifty when all of a sudden we see this wheel going past. Just slowly, as if it only wanted to overtake. “Somebody's lost a wheel!” this joker yells and he doubles up laughing at the stupid wheel sailing along with every now and then a little bump over the seams of the concrete. You shoulda seen the oncoming cars scatter. The wheel finished up in the showroom of one of the big car saleyards. It cleared the traffic, bounced over the gutter, hurdled the ornamental garden and through the plate glass. It was Sunday and no one came out to see who belonged to the wheel. We got to the club and it wasn't till we turned in to the car park and slowed down that the car heeled over on one side. It was our wheel. The car was so evenly balanced with our weight it didn't tip over till we turned sharply.'

‘Did you get the wheel back?'

‘Not a chance. He wasn't game to go back for it. He put the spare on. We waited for him inside. You should have heard him laugh when we left him. He was still laughing when he got inside for a beer.'

‘That reminds me,' said the Great White Father, ‘of a time I was in bed with the wife of a friend of mine, when all of a sudden, just on the vinegar stroke, I heard her husband's car come up the drive.' He had their attention. ‘My luck held. His nearside front wheel came off just as he put the brake on. He changed the wheel then and there and I had time to have a shower and get dressed and wait outside the bedroom window for him to come inside so he wouldn't see me leaving. What do you think he did? I was still outside the window when he raced right in—she was still naked in bed—threw the covers off her and started to kiss passionately what I'd just left. He thought she was waiting naked for him and it inflamed him. You should see him go to town! Tied in knots on the bed, wriggling like snakes, sweaty skins slapping and sticking. I had to leave.'