The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (17 page)

‘Britannia rules the waves,' came a voice from the crowd. It was impossible to tell who spoke; white shirts and cacky overalls were in a tangle. It came from the side of a prisoner's mouth, in the manner learned when his forebears dragged ball and chain.

‘More chiefs than indians,' said the Samurai. The visitors towered over the Wandering Jew. Many of them had been athletes and sportsmen at University and had the idea they were leaders of the country, but here, after their glorious youth, they were congregated obediently round this risen weakling. The Samurai thought it was funny.

He looked around at the lowest prisoners. Fitter Dick was there, one of the bravest amateur aviators still living, full of reckless deeds outside the blue gates, but here strangely weak and bowed down. And the Mad Bloke, a shell-shock case, who took fits and could bend iron bars: he stood bent and deflated merely at the sight of the white shirts. What was it that so quickly burst the bubble of a man's pride? Was it the eight-foot wire fence, the white shirts, the senseless labour? Was it that those not dressed in white were the new negroes—the submerged mass on whom the edifice of society pressed most heavily? Or was it the humiliation of knowing that their occupation behind barbed wire was only to keep them off the streets? That Puroil and the other agents of the world owners could afford out of vast profits to support even more men when they became available from school or from redundant jobs rather than let them clutter the streets and become the new political menace. Instruments were available and being used in America that could have run this plant with two men and an instrument mechanic: the balance of the men—and the foremen with their crisis-producing orders—were superfluous.

In the high corners of the control room, spiders went about their age-old business of making safety nets for flies.

 

SHADOWS IN THE CAVE In the drink hut at the Home Beautiful, the Great White Father prepared a sketch to hang on the wall. He planned to get Terrazzo to draw some faces later.

‘I'm sorry, did I tread on your foot?' he repeated aloud, reading the caption of the sketch. It showed the Good Shepherd apologizing on a scaffold to the hangman—the Python—for having stepped accidentally on his toe. The Great White Father laughed at his invention.

He wondered if his men would find it funny. He knew it was prophetic; bad people always drive out the good and men like the Good Shepherd die disgraceful deaths, apologizing.

Cinderella was in the bed hut with the Count. He was peeling at her blouse, looking as if he expected the white-green flesh of a young gum-tree to appear from beneath flaking bark. Or perhaps he was apprehensive about the hoots.

The afternoon proceeded, sunset dreamed away and died, the silence in the sky stiffened into night and darkness was there. The girls—shiftworkers too—came and went, shameless as dreams.

‘Lend me your ears, prisoners,' orated the Great White Father, ‘and listen to my general theory of civilizations, and how every generation inherits the worst of everything. Every conqueror that ever made a successful takeover bid destroyed the things the conquered were most proud of, and left the things that would be a reproach and a mockery. All the good buildings and statues and paintings and plays were torn down, ripped up, and thrown on the tip. The crap was kept; that's the stuff we idolize. Just imagine what the good stuff was like. All this shows the gradual deterioration of man; you won't hear it at your schools. Remember the fuss they used to make over finding inscriptions and marks and drawings on buried columns and tablets and tombs? Well, those were only the lavatory scribbles of louts like me. And the elderly louts that dodge work and go looking for them just pretend they say nice, stupid things; when all the time they're finding the worst the ancients could leave us. Look at me. Riches to rags. A living example of progress in reverse. Once I had a string of gallopers, a stable of trotters, and gym full of boxers and a house of ill-fame with twenty girls. What happened? I went bad. The gallopers started to trot, the trotters started to gallop, the girls started to box and the boxers started to—well, they started, too.'

As they drank and spoke and moved about the hut, their shadows played fantastic games on the walls, for all the world like shadows in a primitive cave deep in the earth, safe from monsters outside. And because of the magnification of their size and speed on the walls the shadows seemed to possess more life and vigour than the men who made them.

5
CRASHDOWN

QUITE EARLY ONE MORNING Before the break of day in the Puroil mental asylum run by its inmates, as the inmates described it, before the day's batch of dayworking industrial prisoners had awakened in their suburban and Sullage City huts, a group of sleep-hungry prisoners were taken outside by a foreman to try to keep them awake. He told them it was to be a lecture on the operation of the steam let-down valve and was surprised they did what they were told right away. Most foremen would never realize the men often wanted to work as long as there was some sense in it; they honestly didn't know when the orders they gave were senseless and certainly didn't expect the men to know. The normal pressure in the upstream line was 700 pounds a square inch, the temperature of the steam over 400 centigrade. As they stood there a square patch of inch-thick steel blew out of the high-pressure line. The group dispersed.

 

INSTANT PUDDING Land of Smiles, the foreman, ran seventy-five yards on his knees deaf with terror, sick in the chest, his mind paralysed. The others were in full flight before their knees had a chance to jelly. When they stopped, each man had a small patch of wet in the fork of his overalls. They knew what it meant to go to water.

Two hundred thousand people in surrounding suburbs woke immediately, sprang bolt upright and cursed Puroil from their beds.

 

AN INTEGRATED SYSTEM The plant collapsed. Turbines tripped, the power recovery system was dead, the pressure dropped, catalyst was siphoned from the pressured regenerator over through the power recovery boilers down through the turbine blades, out the vents and feet deep in the stack.

The refinery collapsed. Everything collapsed. Refinery plants of all ages were hooked up to the new plant's steam system. Fortunately for Puroil's compensation insurance premium rate no prisoners were cut in half, as they would have been if they were standing in front of the escaping steam.

 

AN EMERGENT OCCASION Sea Shells, that constant sound in everybody's ears, was in the lavatory when the metal blew. He ran out starkers. He always sat on the seat naked, but kept his boots on.

 

MIXED EMOTIONS Down at the wharf in the darkened locker-room, the Grey Goldfish sat up straight on his concrete bed, shedding rags. He had no shirt or singlet under his overalls. He strapped his hearing aid to the skin of his naked chest, switched it on. The blast came through clearly. He smiled. He could hear things, he wasn't completely deaf yet. He switched the thing off, no sense wasting the battery. He slept with his glasses on; his grey eyes swam lazily beneath thick lenses.

 

CAGED ANIMAL Blue Hills, on eight hours overtime, had found refuge on the flat top of a floating roof tank after having decided against a slanting bed on a fixed roof tank. He looked wildly round for the violent blast of sound that woke him. Something shivered inside his chest, something that seemed no part of him, a live, fearful animal darting about looking for something to attack. He checked his ears, to make sure his earplugs were in—they were—and lay back down, put his palms over the earplugs and shut his eyes. The sound was like a strong wind blowing inside his rib cage. The animal within shivered with fear, but gradually quietened as Blue Hills breathed more heavily.

 

AN INQUIRING MIND Stillsons had left his office and bent over a drain to investigate the source of an apparent water leak. Was it a broken cooling water line? If so, the water should be salt. Or fresh condensate. He scooped his hand along a shallow break under the concrete surface, where the water calmly rippled and slid along. He lifted his hand to taste the water briefly, but came to no conclusion. He scooped again and straightened up just as the noise took his legs from under him. He knelt then by the stream, transfixed, his paralysed hand squeezing out through thin fingers the components of a giant turd.

 

COMMUNICATION The blast continued. The Grey Goldfish turned on his hearing aid again and started phoning all the plants to find where the noise came from. To speak on the phone he used the mouthpiece first, then clapped the other end of the phone to his chest, round which his mechanical ears were strapped. His mates usually laughed at this, but not while his eyes swam at them under glass. He held grudges tenaciously and cherished them tenderly for years.

 

RAPPROCHEMENT Humpy, a young man who had never been young—he took to shift work at sixteen—was in bed with his wife when the blast broke loose. He lived handy to the works in a soot-covered house. For miles all the houses were soot-covered. He married at seventeen without realizing double beds were only four feet six inches wide and that his habit of sleeping with his knees up in a foetal position would not give his wife enough room in bed. Sometimes he kicked her, sometimes just kneed her in the back. All night they pushed and prodded each other. She was glad when night shift came, except that then he wanted sex during the daytime. When the high pressure line blew they did opposite things—she involuntarily doubled up and he straightened out.

The funny thing was, they stayed like that. It was the start of a new understanding. That night they planned a honeymoon weekend and bought a new supply of contraceptive pills out of Humpy's overtime. He could always get overtime; he wasn't too proud to ask for it, and after all, the Sumpsucker was his brother.

 

POINT OF DEPARTURE Some contract prisoners—migrant welders, fitters and their mates—were smoking in the pig-pen just outside the amenities room. They were on night shift, too. The pig-pen was a barred enclosure in the open, set aside for contractors' eating and smoking. They were not admitted to the luxury of the control-room amenities, but often leaned in at the window to get water. When the line blew, they froze in sitting positions because of their jellied knee ligaments until someone yelled behind them out of the amenities window, ‘Run for your lives!' They took off then, all nations united in flight, wearing bits of fence.

 

SOUND The Glass Canoe, who yelled at the scared workers, loved sound. He could lose himself in something more powerful than he was. The noise filled him, swelled him up so that he sang. At the top of his voice he roared, singing. The sound deadened his limbs: he felt he could smash steel with his fists. He could have charged across and butted the regenerator with his head. He ran out on to the gravel area round which was spread the plant in a huge incomplete rectangle and laughed and sang all the time the blast continued, waving his heavy arms and beating his chest.

 

INTERFERENCE Up on the reactor top Dutch Treat was tuning his little radio, ready for the signals he expected. He was getting a few beeps when the plant exploded beneath him. He clapped his hands over the earphones, pressing them into his skull. It didn't help. He stood up, outraged, cursed Australia and everything Australian. As a good European he didn't curse his distant masters.

 

THE LAST TRUMP In another part of the mangroves, near the rival oil installation which Puroil supplied from its under-river pipeline, someone had taken an old and once-loved Plymouth to let it decay in peace. The Great White Father found the Plymouth and hired a man to live in it. He picked the man up around 6.30 one morning in a shiftworkers' pub, thinking he would be glad of a job and a home. Surprisingly, the man had a wife. They lived in odd lanes, parks, gutters, backyards, under bridges. They moved in, did up the car, the wife put curtains in the windows, the man bricked up the car, put oil round the bricks to keep out the wet and discourage ants and weeds and in a short time they were settled in. The watchman's duties were simple; as soon as he heard someone going through the mangroves in a northerly direction he was to blow the whistle the Great White Father gave him. It was an Acme Thunderer with a plastic pea for longer wear and blew a beautiful fluttering, piercing note. Just like a football referee signalling a penalty. He could blow and whistle, too, if he wanted help with marauding kids, or dogs, but he never did. He liked being alone. He didn't even want to go to the post-office for his pension cheque, but sometimes had to when his wife got sick. She liked to dress up and go out once a fortnight. When the blast came they huddled together on the cushiony car seats under their war-disposals blanket. Maybe it was the end of the world. With a sudden access of life in their aged limbs they connected, just in case it was their last night on earth.

 

THE CONSOLATION OF RELIGION The Beautiful Twinkling Star was first back to the broken line. He isolated the broken section by shutting a block valve upstream in the high-pressure side, then the downstream side to prevent the medium-pressure steam escaping after the desuperheater. Neither valve shut off properly, but that was normal. As he did these things he sang heartily—but couldn't hear himself sing—‘Jesu, lover of my soul'. The Welsh surge and pathos of the tune gave him extra strength. ‘While the nearer waters roll, O receive my soul at last!' As he closed the huge valves, he felt faith had overcome the frightfulness of the stormy blast.

 

SOMEONE ELSE The Great White Father rolled over in the drink hut. He'd slept on the table.

‘You hear something just then?' he asked Volga, who was wearing shorts and doing one-leg squats. He watched the exercises with surprise but no envy. Exercises on night shift? The man's heart must have been as big as a watermelon.

‘They've blown her up,' was the calm reply. The calf muscles bulged, lengthened, bulged, lengthened, bulged.