The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (23 page)

True, he was a nong, but according to democratic principles he had an inalienable right to be a nong. The Humdinger ran him round the Refinery to get him set for the Stawell Gift; had him walking across tank compounds up to his thighs in stinking black mud to help his muscles develop. It was just as good as running through soft sand on the beach or wading in the surf, the Humdinger assured him. And you got paid while you trained.

He got his name from the fact that America was the only country he had heard of and it was his ambition to go some day to Disneyland, its capital. He started as a sample boy at fifteen on shift work, working Saturday and Sunday three weeks out of four. He had never known sport. At twenty he was on adult rates.

‘I'll show you how to hypnotize someone.' The Humdinger stood close behind him, put his arms round Disneyland's chest and squeezed in time to his breathing.

‘Breathe in and out as fast as you like.' Disneyland blacked out after a dozen breaths. He slumped suddenly and the Humdinger lowered him to the floor. He made a fool of him but wouldn't injure the boy.

‘They reckon an African scientist has found a way to double your life span.' Humdinger said once.

‘What is it?' Disneyland was in. It was too easy.

‘Eat sparrows.'

‘Those little birds in the yard?'

‘Spags. Little brown sparrows. There's something in their intestinal tract makes them live forever.'

‘Go on.' Faint, uncertain derision.

‘You ever seen a dead sparrow?'

‘I've shot 'em with my BB gun when I was young.'

‘I mean just dead. Natural causes. Old age.'

‘No. Come to think of it, I haven't.'

‘There you are!'

The Humdinger got him all set to buy another BB gun and make catapults to slaughter sparrows.

‘Half a dozen a day will do. But you have to roast the whole bird. Guts and all.'

‘Feathers?'

‘Feathers, too.'

Disneyland went on a sparrow diet. His mother was waiting for the Humdinger one day outside the blue gates to have a piece of him.

‘She was just as silly,' he said contentedly as he opened a re-labelled can in the Home Beautiful. ‘I convinced her the whole thing was ridge! She went away thinking up recipes, how to get some variety into roast sparrow. I oughta been a salesman.'

The sparrow diet didn't stop until Disneyland's father got out of Long Bay gaol. He threw his first sparrow meal out into the street; plates, saucepans, the lot. He had been in for desertion and non-payment of maintenance. How he could remedy this in gaol was not explained. They never saw him again.

The whole shift followed the Humdinger's lead. They had Disneyland jumping off ladders on their promises to catch him, and when they let him thud to the ground said, ‘Never trust anyone.' Or, ‘Put your hands down by your side', then hit him in the belly. ‘Don't trust a living soul,' they said piously and went away laughing. Disneyland seemed to accept it all as part of being at work. He did nothing else.

But it was fatal to be kind to him. When the Samurai went out of his way to help him with a little plant knowledge, Disneyland rubbished him. He thought he had come across someone weaker than himself. The Humdinger smiled as if to say, ‘It's no use pitying this one', and persuaded Disneyland that the girls would go for him if he had a scar.

‘Over the eyebrow, I think. Yes. Just work a blade over the skin there and before it heals up, open it again. Keep at it and you'll get a nice fat scar. Show the girls you've been in a few fights. They like that.'

Next day he came in with a great dressing over his eye, borrowed an old razor blade and opened up the two-inch cut. ‘It doesn't hurt a bit,' he said and they believed him.

 

A MENTAL SYRUP Ambrose was a different type of fool. Aware of more of the world but his failing was that he took as gospel the first thing he was told. He had been carefully nurtured in religious surroundings and never got over it. Some sanctified joker persuaded him to stand for election as leader of his church youth group and since no one else wanted the post, Ambrose got it. After that, he saw all situations as basic repetitions of church youth situations. He wouldn't tell a lie himself, but believed every one he heard. There were no corrections of first impressions with Ambrose.

Every newspaper comment, every joke and leg-pull were alike God's truth to him. One of the secrets of his certainty and composure was to be found in his habit of taking the tone of voice of the person talking to him as the substance of what was said. The Humdinger and even the Two Pot Screamer could be talking earnestly and kindly to him and interlarding their normal speech with the grossest insults: Ambrose heard the tone of voice, not the words.

He'd gone up to Surfers' Paradise with a few friends and their girls and came back married to one of the girls. The prisoners laughed at him.

‘Why didn't you just find her, feel her and forget her?'

‘She said she loved me.'

They roared.

When the Humdinger asked him one day, ‘Should I be honest?' he replied, ‘Yes.'

‘Wait for it. I haven't finished,' said the Dinger. ‘Now take my case. I'm twenty-nine and have two brothers—one in the Liberal Party and one serving six years for rape and arson. My sister Peg is on the streets and Dad lives off her earnings. Mum is pregnant by the boarder and because of this Dad won't marry her. Last night I got engaged to an ex-prostitute and I wish to be fair to her: should I tell her about my brother in the Liberal Party?'

‘Well,' said Ambrose, ‘I'll have to think it over. Would you be offended if I brought this up at our prayer meeting on Thursday?'

‘Not at all!' said Humdinger joyfully. ‘Bring it up all over the place.'

‘Thanks. I will.'

‘Now I know what Christian charity means.' He even had the effrontery to shake Ambrose's hand. The boy blushed with pleasure and pride.

Ambrose was puzzled. The Two Pot Screamer seemed to hang round him for no reason. Two Pot was listening for any gems of conversation Ambrose might drop, so that he could retail them happily to the boys in exchange for the ready cash of popularity.

Ambrose concluded he was queer. He went over to him one day and said, ‘You hang round me too much. I think you're a homosexual.' He walked away. Two Pot was amazed and followed him back to the plant lab where Ambrose was stationed. This time he said it in front of others.

‘Keep away from me, homosexual!' Two Pot kept away.

Later, Ambrose's ability to hold first impressions blossomed strangely. After he had first been persuaded to go to the Home Beautiful he appeared to go without hesitation or doubt that this might conflict with his church youth ideas. He seemed to hold both things—the church and the Home Beautiful—side by side in his mind in such a way that they didn't quarrel. There was no sort of correspondence between the ideas that settled in his mind: they floated in a mental syrup that isolated them from each other.

 

A SUITABLE CASE FOR TREATMENT ‘The Glass Canoe's studying again.' Woodpecker was keen to keep the talk going in the drink hut.

‘Hope it doesn't bring on another brainstorm,' said Angry Ant.

‘They were packing the shits when he went off his head in the control room last time,' said Woodpecker. ‘He's strong enough at any time, but he raced out on the plant swinging by his hands from some of the RSJs two hundred feet in the air.'

‘I'd give my right hand to be able to do the things he can do when he's off his head,' said Congo Kid earnestly.

‘He's left-handed,' explained the Ant to the Great White Father, who nodded to them both, watching the play of their tiny emotions across their faces, noting the progress the beer made in the flush of their skins and the merciful glaze of their eyes.

‘You can talk to him about it, I'll say that for him,' said the Ant. ‘Once you get him started he'll talk about himself all day.'

The Great White Father spoke. ‘You never know what a word will do to him. He may pass it off or it may bunch up his guts and open his face like a hand and expand his heart and contract his muscles and the next thing you know he's wandering from girder to girder up in the structure like an ape. Or punching the shit out of you down here at ground level.' He still seemed to hear the sound of the Glass Canoe's voice as he was led away last time. Coming from his deep, powerful, protuberant, immensely resonant guts, that voice had a bone-jarring quality; the sound of it carried like the crack of a falling tree. There was a grandeur in his aimless violence, as if the man inside him that broke loose at such times was a hero whose nature it was to attempt the mightiest tasks.

And yet this same man, when the Father had gone to visit him, was flabby from sedatives, sexual indulgence and professional sympathy; he had this foldy neck and his collar too small; he was clean round the mouth but a bit wet. And they said he was better.

 

AN OBLIGING LAD Ambrose walked back to the cracker. A group of maintenance men brought in on contract to keep establishment figures down worked round the base of a huge tall thing. Was it the reactor? He thought it was.

‘Hey son! You're an operator. We can't do this job with that valve turned on. Turn it off for us, son.'

‘OK.' He closed the valve they pointed to. They were older than Ambrose. You don't just say no when people ask you to help them. That's like passing by on the other side.

It was the feed valve. The plant had just got to its feet. Inside the control room things had been going well. The panel room was clear. Humdinger was gazing, in a pleasant trance, at the feed instrument. Flow steady, pump pressure OK. Suddenly the flow pen slid gracefully sideways to nil. No flow. The alarm sounded. What? He slammed the emergency steam handle over and yelled for a man to go out and see if there was trouble at the feed valve. The automatic instrument was no good if the block valve had been shut.

Blue Hills ran out to investigate—despite their hatred of the company men ran in emergencies—and opened the block valve Ambrose had shut.

‘You better come in. Don't touch anything here.'

‘They wanted it shut.'

‘Did one of our blokes tell you to do that? A foreman or someone? Was it Slackie?' then he remembered Slackie had gone. He jumped before he was pushed. One of the new mountains of ore in the west had swallowed him. But he hadn't got away from foreigners.

‘No, those men with the tools.'

Blue Hills shook his head. The kid was an idiot.

‘They wanted it shut.'

‘Tell 'em they can't have it shut.'

‘I couldn't do that.'

‘Don't you know what valve that was? You just shut the rotten place down.'

Ambrose couldn't understand why everyone abused him. How could grown men ask you to do something wrong? He went inside to have a nervous pee. The trough was all over purple.

 

A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS The qualities of manager and worker were listed in a company manual. Far Away Places found a copy of this blueprint just before the Brown Snake lost it, and made sure the Glass Canoe got it. He had no defences against his own mind and the personal interpretations he put on the comparisons shown in the list:

 

 

He looked down at his hands. They frowned at him. Poor Glass Canoe. Sometimes he thought he was a natural manager; sometimes he envied the qualities of the worker. He picked out combinations of qualities he liked. Next day the combinations were different. Most often he picked out as his own the greater part of both lists; he was modest and bold, impulsive and intellectual, aggressive and restrained, inductive and deductive, enterprising and idealistic. Yet he was uneasy. This was dishonest, trying to be on both sides. He should be on one side or the other. That's how it was on the list.

In his worst moments he was so tangled none of the words on the list fitted him. I got hold of it months later in an open locker. One that had become vacant suddenly.

 

NO COMPO From his window the Wandering Jew noticed Herman the German tramping through the blue gates, his left hand in bandages. He was late. Luxaflex too, from between venetian slats, saw the bandaged hand and checked the time. The Brown Snake saw it and rang the Union delegate for information. Oliver Twist, the Brown Snake's lodge brother, promised to find out why Herman's hand was bandaged. He rang back five minutes later.