The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (7 page)

‘What if they pull down the mangroves?' piped up the Ant, quoting a rumour.

‘Get behind me, Satan. You smell not of man but of machines. To help us survive the coming machine age we must cultivate our peculiarly human abilities and attributes. Machines can't be beaten at their own game, but the bigger governments and organizations get, the more escape holes there are. We'll never go short of a Home Beautiful even if we have to burrow underground! In the last resort democracy or dictatorship, freedom or slavery are in here.' A hand on his stomach. ‘No matter who's giving the orders. They can't beat us—' he moistened his voice passages briefly ‘—while our aim is to drink till the bald moon's hairy. You know the ones the system finishes off? Those who rely on foremen and show an obedient spirit, those who show initiative in their work, those who make suggestions, those who step back and let others go first. And those who think the company's fair dinkum and will reward those who look after its interests.'

The people he was speaking to nodded, but they were the very ones the Great White Father described. To a man they felt in their bones merit was rewarded, that the company could see into the heart and was a just parent who handed out appropriate rewards for nice conduct and for sucking up to its petty officers. None of them had a clue that the higher ranks, though their technical knowledge was greater and their shirts white, were the same sort of people as themselves, scrimmaging for scraps that fell from richer men's tables, dobbing their lifelong friends as soon as they imagined they were in the slightest danger of disapproval from above.

His few hearers settled further into their places; listening and not listening. The words were enough, the deep, penetrating voice and the great man's concern for their tiny fates. The hooting came slower. It should have stopped. Someone was holding out, getting his half-hour's worth.

‘When I was a boy I first woke up to our sort of economy when I saw string being wasted. If I'd rescued it from the waste bins, that would have been stealing. It had to be burned in the proper way. Like the overalls and boots. Burned and written off. Take one out the gate they dismiss you for theft. Built on waste. Why all the records at the top office? They burn 'em in a touching little ritual at the tip. Why keep 'em in the first place? Why make all this colossal mess in the first place? Why the gasoline? So a few million motorists can burn it up going from nowhere to nowhere, then come back and buy some more. We can't even say, Look! I made this! I'm proud of it! The damn stuff's gone up in smoke.'

He sat down, his eyes glazed with alcohol and anarchy. He continued from a sitting position, legs sprawled. The hoots stopped, then started again after half a minute. Cinderella was coining money.

‘Beware the evils of temperance and sobriety and embrace the worship of the bottle! Beware the dangers of isolation from your fellow man in haunts of coot and hernia! Every man needs homoeopathic exposure to germs and windy ideas. The temperate man sees the same world always, the proper inebriate finds the world never presents the same aspect twice. The bottle keeps a man away from his family, preventing over-exposure and low ratings. Stops him working about the place. Diminishes self-esteem which is a good thing, the world of keeping up with appearances and neighbours is a world well lost. Be not led into the wretchedness of right conduct. Temperance drains off surplus money into the maw of commerce. Without the bottle there's women always hanging around for wrong reasons; you become a victim of intolerance, covered with the bruises of respectability, narrow and evil-minded. Compare this with our present seclusion with the eternal bottle as god. Let me give you an example of early man's lead in the matter. One of my ancestors was a missionary in Northern Rhodesia—grog forgive him—and he found the noble savages in obedience to custom everlasting had grain for bread and grain for beer and every year or so they endured a cruel shortage of food rather than touch the grain set aside for the beer. With such a magnificent lead from primitive man, what else can we do but drink? Drink! And the deliverer from this bondage and the refuge to which you fly are in you!'

The hoots stopped. A quickie.

 

TENTACLES Prison sounds followed prisoners wherever they went. Sleeping by day, off night shift, the scream of motor mowers and power tools brought the life of the factory into every backyard; and radio and television with their howl of advertising extended the market place into every private house.

 

CORROSIVE PRAYER The man next door to the Samurai was a fireman, also a shiftworker. His wife was working and he was alone with his dogs, for he was a great lover of dogs and of what they could do for him. His dogs were greyhounds and provided they had the best of care they were very little trouble. One had become sick with distemper before he could arrest the disease and although to his wife and relations and anyone who cared to listen he was overpowering on the subject of his love for dogs and the money they won in races, he was at the mercy of a disastrously quick temper. The Samurai was also at its mercy. He had a sleep of perhaps five hours to look forward to and had enjoyed only an hour, so that at nine o'clock, when the Great White Father was bounding amorously from shed to shed at the Home Beautiful, the Samurai was wakened from the deep, dreamless sleep of the shiftworker by sounds of terror and hysteria under his window. The man next door had despaired of the dog's recovery and reacted with his usual speed.

There he was, unselfconsciously wielding a hammer. He got in a good blow on the dog's head, having thoughtfully taken the precaution of muzzling it, though if you asked him point blank he would have been surprised if you suggested one of his dogs might bite him. The dog's legs gave out and the howling beast was reduced to dragging itself along on its underparts. The man was upset by this time and ended by dispatching the dog with several dozen poorly aimed blows with an axe, weeping all the time. He buried the dog behind his outside lavatory—an unsewered area—and because he was fond of animals and had a special love for that dog, he sliced off one of its ears and kept it in his pocket in a matchbox.

The man went to bed and slept soundly, but sleep was gone for the Samurai. He was tortured by the man's cruelty and by the inaction that his own private principles of conduct bound him to. First it was the other man's dog and second, the man was smaller than the Samurai. The Samurai would have been less frustrated if he had been a smaller man: the range of his adversaries then would have been so much greater. He could with honour fight only an equal or larger man. Such a man might beat him, but defeat was honourable.

A prayer on his wall, written on a piece of cardboard, consisted of three words: Help, Care, Listen. Confronted with a situation that did not call for violent action, he found that Help, Care, Listen often fitted well. Since he was a man of action, he had no fretful thoughts about the corrosive effect on himself of his short motto with its suggestive initials, HCL, which he repeated to himself as he tried to find a way to help the man next door. This good intention kept him awake for the remainder of his sleeping time.

 

PRIVATE MORALS Back at the plant by three, working a love-shift for a man who'd run out of sick-pay, he moved among the men of a strange shift like a man apart. His week of seven night shifts weighed heavy on him. Several of the shift, noting his dazed condition and because of it moving in for a quick thrust, taunted him with being hungry, believing he was called in on overtime. Many left their phone numbers prominently displayed so they might be called in on days off. He wouldn't bother to correct them. The trouble with a private system like the Samurai's was that others had to learn, over a period, where the boundaries were they could not cross.

He walked out on the plant at sundown, checking over his plant knowledge, following lines. The cracker was a graft on to a patchwork of old plants. Puroil expected men to acclimatize to the old, the feeble, the makeshift, but this was new. It should work.

The sunset was magnificent, but it was butchered by a few malicious minutes, and fell in ruins to discoloured cloud.

There was a little flurry after dark. The Good Shepherd visited the wharf while girls were there; not everyone took advantage yet of the privacy of the Home Beautiful. These girls were rowed from Clearwater Bridge directly to the wharf.

Quick Tip, quick on the uptake, barred the doorway with his thick body and racing conversation—he had been a bookie's penciller in real life—while the others got the girls into lockers. Since you could open all the narrow-shouldered lockers with a paper clip, this took only a few seconds. The Good Shepherd left after they had given him a cup of tea. Part of his saintliness was in accepting their tea in mugs tasting of mouth and brewed in their urn. Socks were washed in it. After he left, the gallant seamen of the wharf continued their exercises.

‘Back to navel manoeuvres!' shouted Quick Tip joyfully. It was a phrase coined by the Two Pot Screamer, who delighted in making up words for others to say.

But the time was ripe to take the women off the job. No consultations were held, no meetings arranged, the general trend of thought moved naturally and gratefully in the direction of the Home Beautiful.

 

DIGNITY OF LABOUR The Samurai was eating. He found a neutral seat to occupy and this was important. There were invisible priorities to the tiny patches of seating space available in the amenities room; special places for sitting and staring at certain spots on the floor. Some sat and stared vacant and unseeing at the floor for seven days till pay day. A few adventurous ones ascended to the top of the structure and followed the movie at the Jerriton drive-in.

Out of the night came Mogo, famous for making rude signs at every refining plant he passed. He knew work was a curse.

‘All you fellers got books?'

The prisoners looked up from their humble pursuits. It was night, they were disoriented, their minds focused uneasily, unwillingly.

‘Good. Stick your noses in them. I'll have a cup of tea but no talk.'

The rebuff was unnecessary. Their heads swung down over books or patches of floor; in a few seconds they forgot he was there. Lovers in the locker-room made noises.

‘How are you, Mogo?' said the Samurai.

‘Stop the gush. You don't care how I am.'

‘Love job?'

‘Love. The Elder Statesman caught me for this one. I'll take the last day off next shift. Suits me.' Mogo was also a soft touch for love jobs.

‘Want the paper? There's a good story on the struggle for leadership among politicians in Victoria.'

‘Politicians are arses. I don't read anti-Labour papers. I don't recognize Victoria. The only good thing about Victoria is they fought on our side in the war.' The other prisoners gaped.

The low control block shot beams of light defiantly out the windows at the dark, which was a live monster crouched hugely above the hemisphere trying to leak darkness gently in at the cracks.

On a peculiar impulse, the Samurai got hold of some scrap paper and began making notes of the things he saw about him.

 

POOR HANS ‘Jesus!' exclaimed Quick Tip, returning from a session with the girl he had rowed across Eel River.

‘Christ!' roared the Sandpiper antiphonally, ‘the same yesterday, today and forever!' She was the girl. There were sandpipers out on the flats, real ones, little stick legs propping too fast to follow; they called her Sandpiper because she got the boys to take her out of doors. Paddocks she liked, open spaces, anywhere under the stars. She was born in Balmain in its dingy days but always wanted to live on a farm. The mangrove flats were the nearest she got to the sticks, and they were further east, back toward the sea, toward the spot where Cook first stepped ashore two hundred years before.

‘Take me, lover!' she would bellow at some skinny shift-worker. And when he gaped she would add ‘For a walk!' in a burst of healthy, gum-showing laughter. ‘You get electricity through your feet from the ground,' as she took off her shoes and expected her companions to do the same. They never did, though, and if you kept your eyes open as you went by the water-cooling tower you could often see a pair of boots tangled up with two bare feet. Usually facing opposite ways.

‘She's an eye-opener, this one,' said Quick Tip to the Samurai, belting the Sandpiper affectionately on the left buttock. The Sandpiper would have preferred the Samurai's hand on her rump, and since she was direct by nature she seized his hand where it rested on the table and applied it to her bottom in an imitation of a slap.

A small robust fly, Hans to his friends, fresh in from the black filth of the river and the unprocessed sewage which found its way there, was making a meal of a large, monolithic grain of sugar on the table near the Samurai's other hand. It had been a good life, born in shit and with sugar and stools to lick, sweat of humans to drink and the runny eyes of dogs. The Samurai's hand, with the Sandpiper's still attached, returned from her buttocks and killed the small, vigorous fly named Hans.

 

HUMAN BACTERIA He took a walk after tea and went near some of the other plants on the site. But not too near. If you went to some of them unannounced, you could be hosed from the doorway by someone pretending to be cleaning the area; you could collect the slops bucket or the tea leaves.

There were no barges at the wharf, so the Samurai climbed a finished structure back at his own plant, went through his pockets for something to read, found nothing and settled down in the bed of the empty regenerator under the air spider on two cornsacks hidden there for the purpose and went to sleep.

He slept soundly while life went on in the refinery and outside. Just as operators' work was part of a digestive process in the body of the company, so they themselves were germs within that body, in much the same way, if you like, that the bacteriophage attaches itself to the bacteria—hanging on and feeding—and the bacteria, in turn, attacks the host body of society at large.