The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (27 page)

‘You must have been tanked,' said Loosehead.

‘Pissed as forty arseholes,' admitted Bubbles. ‘So I managed to get us to the door and open it and we got on the wooden veranda—it was a nightmare!—she must have been eighty if she was a day—no teeth—frightful!'

He shuddered violently. ‘And she only had one leg—the other off above the knee—smacking me on the side Whack! Whack!—look at this!' He opened his overalls, displayed his hip.

‘Black and blue from the stump—and I think I've ricked my neck trying to keep out of the way of those gums. Pecking at me like an emu! My head going from side to side to make her miss!'

Loosehead sighed. These young fellers.

‘Better stay here the other four, Bubbles.' He left him. He'd gone a few steps down from the top floor and the story was gone from his head. His mind was always fresh. Nothing burdened him long. The Beautiful Twinkling Star was coming up the stairs fast. Even in a crashdown he worked as hard as he was allowed.

‘Don't go up there,' said Loosehead calmly.

‘What's the matter?'

‘Something you shouldn't see. There's a bloke up there, you might report him.'

‘Me? Report a man?' The Beautiful Twinkling Star was hurt. He would do the man's work, get rags for him to sleep on, but never report him to prison authorities.

‘You would if you did your duty. The best way out is not to see him.'

‘Is there something I can do?' Making to go up. Loosehead barred his way.

‘Self-inflicted.' Significantly. The Beautiful Twinkling Star nodded wisely, forgivingly. An industrial saint. He took his own goodness seriously and was almost as understanding of his fellow-prisoners' weaknesses as the prisoners themselves. Loosehead thought to himself, irreverently, The Christ of the Cracker.

‘I'll keep people away,' said Loosehead, ‘or it might be outski for him.'

‘God forgive him,' said the Beautiful Twinkling Star, with a look of prayer about him.

‘He'll forgive himself, when he's better,' said Loosehead. ‘No need to go dobbing him in to the Almighty.'

 

A GENTLE PUSH The Glass Canoe was the only man ever to report that he hit another car in the car park. Confessing belligerently. He wasn't afraid to face the truth of what he'd done. Now he was happy. He always knew when he was happy. The divisions between his moods were too marked to be missed.

If there were no happiness, it would be necessary to create it. It was good to have thoughts with a little depth to them. A man stopped feeling like a prisoner for a few seconds when he got a good thought floating through his head. Where do thoughts come from? Are they merely the mind manipulating the stock of words that a few years of life, listening and reading have pumped into your head?

His fears, his inabilities, his God-given incapacities encased him in an ever-hardening shell. The limits that originate within every man were conspiring to keep him a prisoner. Was there no way to break out of this shell that had grown round him since birth? True, it had been a protection at times, when he was unwell and unfit to cope with the persistent devils fighting and wrecking inside him, but when he felt better it always seemed to him this hard shell was a hindrance. He was isolated inside it. He could hardly hear or know what was going on outside. Often he longed to be without it, to feel, to mix—flesh to flesh—with his fellow men. In free communion. ‘I want to be brothers with the whole world,' he said softly.

Yet when the generous mood passed, as it does with whole civilizations and empires as well as individuals, he wriggled his shoulders comfortably inside his tough, accustomed carapace and surveyed the world from a mere slit in his armour, a peephole, and felt safe.

The Elder Statesman was at his elbow.

‘The men on the instrument panel need assistance. They should have approached their fellow shiftworkers. Instead, the four top-category men got together and saw the management by themselves. Instead of through the Union. The men don't like it.'

‘Well,' said the Glass Canoe, sizing up the situation immediately, ‘why not grab them by the throat and tell them?'

‘Because that would look like coercion or intimidation. Standover tactics. We've got to slam them hard and have it look like kindness.' He laughed through tobacco-edged teeth.

There is no such thing as a joke, the Glass Canoe said to himself. When a word is uttered, someone is being fair dinkum about something, even if it's only about not being fair dinkum. That assistant's job would be a good one to go for.

The Elder Statesman moved on, searching the shelves of his mind for the next little capsule to place in the next pair of ears. He hadn't been stopped by the Volga Boatman's attempt at revenge. He couldn't change the way he was made. He was born a bastard and would die a bastard. The Glass Canoe heard him ask Canada Dry, ‘Are there many workers get along to the businessmen's club? How much can a worker afford to lose on the poker machines? You can't hold your head up beside men in business who can afford to drop their hundred dollars a week, can you?' Then he moved off again. That was how he spent his day.

He had pushed the Glass Canoe away from shore, into the current. The rapids were still a long way off.

 

MAINSTREAM The Glass Canoe was shaken, though. The reference to the private deal with management had stirred him up, as it was meant to do, but the Elder Statesman's shot at Canada Dry about businessmen's clubs had penetrated down deep clefts in his confidence. He was not a member of that sort of club, but it was obvious he could and should be.

He looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes in prayer and quoted:

He spoke quietly, his voice barely audible in the control room, but in his own head a voice of thunder.

‘I'll write out a clear, concise statement of my aims, the amount of money I intend to get, the time it should take me, what I intend to give in return for the money, and a plan for getting it. Money is power. I'll read it aloud every day—morning and night—I'll see money in my mind's eye, then some day I'll see it in the bank.'

He spoke slowly as if he were receiving dictation from another mind.

‘If I discipline myself, I will get what I want. Naturally, if I didn't have a wife and kids or if I had enough capital to start with, or a bit of pull in the right direction, things would be different. If I'd had a better education or times were more favourable. If other people understood me I might be able to get a job that would be more of a springboard to success than this one. If I could live my life over again I'd show everyone.'

His mind vomited up all the excuses he had ever used to keep him from action.

‘No,' he said carefully, ‘I must fight against this terrible lethargy that comes over me. Dreams are all right, but they won't buy the baby a new bib. It's time to get cracking. I'll write down the plan of my future achievements and read it aloud till I am burningly obsessed by it. Yes, obsessed. It's the only way to get to the top. I must know what I want and stand by it. I will not be deterred. I must not quit. No one is defeated until defeat has been accepted as reality. I'll develop an attractive personality by having a positive attitude, by being sincere, adaptable, prompt, tactful, courteous. With my emotions under control, just and fair to the workers, a pleasant voice and expression, tolerant, frank, with a sense of humour and a bigger vocabulary. Always showing myself to the best advantage. I must cultivate persistence, then the urge to escape poverty and hunger will stimulate my imagination into action. I must root out negative emotions like fear, jealousy, hatred, revenge, anger and replace them with love, sex, hope, faith, enthusiasm, loyalty, desire. I will organize my thinking. Successful men are always doing work they like. I must find the best sources of information, mix with other men who have good brains, read deeply and use my mind for good, not evil. I will become enthusiastic; nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. My attention must be controlled, geared to the task in hand. I'll use the golden rule and opposition will fade away, I'll get willing cooperation, and happiness will prevail. Finally, I must remember certain principles. A good boss must be ruthless, not with his staff but with himself. He must be able to put aside the personal problems, ambitions and personalities of those around him and consider the company first. To stay in his position of authority the boss must be humble, capable of forgetting himself, capable of relinquishing friendships which may otherwise prove embarrassing.'

His voice was a booming sound inside him. It echoed through his whole hollow body.

 

Outside, a compressor surged, its waves of sound passing through the chests of everyone within a hundred yards of it, fluttering their internal organs. Sudden steam hammer in the 700-pound lines made noise like cannons in the operators' ears. The Glass Canoe dimly heard approaching, passing and fast-receding voices of those running to catch the emergent condition before it got out of hand. The spit and snort of steam traps. The high, tilting voice of a strangering young prisoner from otherwhere, a gravelled boot slip, fractional word, the solid air split with words and with the fractional distillation of words and human calls of terror and future pain. Emotions passed through the Glass Canoe like gases through a washing bath of reflux, and bubbled upwards, out to the great world beyond his mind. Men ran. The Glass Canoe sat huddled over the tiny dying fire of his own thoughts. The chemistry of his brain had changed, the mood of confidence and resolution was no longer possible. His religion of business success went backsliding.

‘I feel sick,' he said. And he did, with weakness at the knees and various of the shaky ailments, certain orders of trembling, fainting at the stomach, aches within the head. He pulled a bottle of chlorodyne from his pocket and licked a dozen drops from his palm. ‘The chlorodyne may help. At least a pleasant taste. If I relax completely and not use the eyes at all, the oppression of headache is gone. At such times it is easy to say: I shall think away this head; which is, however, full of bundles of words, of various sizes. Ah, there it is; the light around me hurting the eyes. This is disgusting. Filthy sickness. I am disgusting.'

The pain was high in the front of his head on the left-hand side; not a sharp pain but one that eased when he smiled and resumed its grip when his brow narrowed in concentration on himself. His voice, speaking of his sickness, was softer and strangely poetic. Brimming with sympathy.

‘I remember when I was a boy crying myself to sleep after Dad had forbidden Mum to come and put me to sleep, he didn't want me to get any comfort and love for Mum. He asked me was that all I had against him. One other thing, I said. Don't say it isn't true: I remember you dropping me a great height out of a window. You said: Now try and save yourself if you can! And Dad laughed like mad. Even though I had a four-inch nail through each of his hands into the garage door. Now some nails through your legs, I said, since you always made out you're Jesus Christ. You fool! he yelled at me. You fool! You cried yourself to sleep because we woke up to your cunning. Time and again she would go in to see you were all right. We had to stand up to you or you'd have driven us crazy. The other thing you remember wrong is the time the car turned over. It landed on its side and I dropped you out the back window to save your life in case the car caught fire. He didn't cry with the pain and I got the nails out with the claw hammer. He told everyone he got some boils lanced, that's what made the scars in his hands.'

 

His mind switched tracks now as easily as it had before his last committal.

‘That night a mouse crawled up my back and perched on top of my head. Way up high. I knew it wasn't there, but I went to the doctor and got some nerve tablets.

‘They didn't help me with my own boy. He won't recognize me any more, even after I bought him the mini racing set. Just because I work as an operator in cacky overalls. And boots. He even says the car's too old. Don't come to speech day, he tells me. I don't want my friends to see that old bomb parked outside the school. Then I find he's only going there two days out of five.

‘What can I do with him but send him to Surfers' Paradise? Pay his fare and ten dollars a week to spend, then when he gets through six weeks' money in three days he comes home on his return ticket. I wasn't like that when I was a kid. Then he rings up the wife's best friend one day and tells her there's an accident at work and her husband has his scalp lifted and he's in hospital. Come quickly! he says. Then the stupid little bugger ransacks the house—takes everything—calls a taxi-truck on their phone and starts loading everything on to the truck. Their neighbour races out and tries to stop him with nothing but a starting pistol. Front page headlines. Caught. And everyone says he's a good boy at heart. He was lucky to get off with a bond. All the stupid little bastard could say to me when I thrashed Christ out of him was “You always said what a colossal time I'd have when I grew up a bit and now I try and do what I want everyone says it's wrong and call the fuzz. I'd rather be a stinking kid again.”'

He looked at his hands. They were weeping with compassion for him. Good old hands. Hands never let you down.

‘When I got to the asylum they made me sit in the middle of the dormitory. The keepers looked the other way. Patients round me in a circle, shouting at me, and me too stupid with largactil tablets to bash their heads in. All I could do was sit and cry like a baby while they accused me of everything from raping babies to sniffing old ladies' pants. They set up a judge over me and tied me up helpless. Group therapy. I made a dash for the window trying to jump out and kill myself, but I caught my shoulder on the frame. They just let me lie there. So I got up and went back and sat down. When I broke down and confessed everything they wanted, they were happy and let me go. I couldn't even feel angry at them, I was so glad to get free. One of them gave me a tip about the tablets: next time I got them I drank four pints of water with them and they had no effect.