The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (30 page)

The prisoners were often more realistic. Oliver Twist the delegate was first to the water connection, which was some distance from the fire and the point from which the hoses were run out. He let others have the honour of holding the fog nozzle.

 

THE MAGIC OF NIGHT Certain hours of the day possess special qualities. Consider the magical period between 2.30 and 5 in the morning. Primitives think this belongs to the night, but sophisticates such as shiftworkers live for years with the undeniable fact that this is part of an ordinary day. Workers must be up and doing; up reluctantly and doing as little as possible.

The Great White Father returned one day at 3.45 from the Home Beautiful to carry out some menial tasks the Super had set him. He was one of the few who were never seen exhausted from anything but drink.

He came upon Reflux just inside the door. Reflux was having one of his night-shift spells. He stood full height, head slightly bowed, eyes closed. His arms were raised sideways forming a cross with the rest of his thin body and bent at the elbows until his closed fists, led by the knuckle of his first finger, pressed at the base of his nose. He was a television antenna. More than that, he was imitating the Garfish, who could be seen in this position inside the pay office until the glass was thoughtfully painted over to stop the crap looking in. After that only his own staff could see this ritual.

‘Is he going to be all right?' asked the Two Pot Screamer, walking round him, inspecting.

‘He's in tune with the Infinite,' pronounced the Great White Father.

‘Look out,' alarmed the Humdinger, ‘or he'll floor the lot of you.' Everyone was glad of the diversion. The Great White Father stood off a few paces and examined Reflux.

‘Floor me? What weapons could he possibly muster against me?'

‘Brains,' said Humdinger slyly. Reflux was noted for his one-eyed approach to plant operation: whatever went wrong, his remedy was always either more or less reflux.

‘Small arms?' questioned the Great White Father. ‘Against—' tapping his own skull—‘against the nuclear deterrent?'

‘Night shift's got him. He's eaten too many pies in his lifetime.'

 

KISSING MATES The control-room door opened and let in a blast of sound.

‘The header's alight!' yelled Loosehead. ‘Ant's up there.'

The Great White Father ran to the door and disappeared a hundred feet up the boilers in a cloud of smoke.

The Enforcer came out, the Sumpsucker close behind.

‘What's up?'

‘Fire!' Men left to look. The Great White Father climbed the vertical steps like a tall monkey, looking for the Angry Ant. The siren wailed. In a few minutes the Good Shepherd was down from his company residence to join the search for his lost sheep.

After they put the fire out and the fire truck arrived, several prisoners and the Good Shepherd reached the Great White Father on the landing bridging the tops of the two tall boilers. The Great White Father worked rhythmically on the Ant, pushing and blowing, giving him the mouth-to-mouth treatment. It took a few minutes.

‘I can see why you ran up the stairs,' said the Humdinger. The Good Shepherd looked uncomfortable when he heard the boys pretending.

‘What's the Ant like to kiss?' pursued the Humdinger.

‘Sweet as a nut,' said the Great White Father. ‘Reminds me of a widow I knew at Richmond. Whenever I visited her and a plane went over she'd drop whatever she was doing and rush over for a smoush. No matter what she was doing, no matter what she was eating, no matter whether she had her choppers in or out. Always affected her like that.'

‘Has he been chewing garlic sausage?'

‘I like garlic, but he's got his choppers downstairs in his locker,' said the Great White Father.

‘No, I haven't,' said the Angry Ant righteously, reviving completely. ‘No. They must've dropped out when that stinking bloody smoke started to choke me. That's when I started to toss up my goodies.' Grinning at the Great White Father, whose mouth folded in distaste.

‘And I thought your breath was like that naturally. Better wait for daylight to look for your teeth.'

‘Perhaps we could help him downstairs,' suggested the Good Shepherd, anxious to stop the talk.

‘Never mind,' said the Great White Father bravely. ‘Friends have no germs. Only strangers have germs. Females have fewer germs than males. I'd much rather kiss a woman than kiss Ant. Wouldn't you, Shep?' He dug the Good Shepherd in the lower ribs.

The Good Shepherd watched as he led the way, ready to support the Ant if he felt dizzy again. The air was full of flue gas, pouring from the leak below, which had flashed. The flue gas contained 7 per cent carbon-monoxide, but the men's noses didn't detect it. There was also a small amount of vanadium: they were unaware of its effect. In the distance the hydrofluoric blow-off from a neighbour chemical plant was caught in the lightest of breezes from the west, and was bearing down in a thick, horizontal discoloured column towards Puroil. The local industries tried to keep their noxious and pestilential blow-offs till night time to avoid being seen and reported by residents of the surrounding suburbs on whose houses and through whose windows the vapours, acids, ash and soot fell.

The Good Shepherd remembered the last time he had overheard the Great White Father giving advice to one of his tribe. ‘Better not tell the Sumpsucker the steam pressure needs upping: tell him the trouble's due to the difference in ambient temperature—then he'll fix the steam pressure.' He wondered how many ball-ups were averted by the good offices of men like him, cheerfully circumventing the idiocies of those above. He sighed, as much as the poisoned air allowed, and mentally erased such thoughts. The Company was somehow bigger than the individuals of which it was composed, wasn't it?

Was it? His Christian Good Shepherd instincts started to prepare for conflict, but before they could make a row inside him, something else stronger in him made those instincts lay down their arms. That stronger thing was an amalgam of loyalty and reverence for the established order. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.

The Great White Father was capable of internal conflicts but he had a governor inside him that automatically resolved them in favour of people, not companies.

 

THE ARMOUR OF FEAR The Trout appeared at 4.30 in the control room. Unshaven and red-eyed.

‘I've been sitting in the car all night over at Riverditch and the noise of this plant is terrible,' he wailed. Like most of the aspiring executives he wailed and complained to the prisoners with zest and abandon, but minded his language very carefully in the presence of those nearer him in the Puroil scale of values.

‘Don't you fellers know the company is up for big fines for smoke and noise?'

‘Tell the Sump. Don't bother us,' said the Angry Ant. The vertical split separating department from department meant the Ant could defy anyone from another department. The Spotted Trout had no business talking to an operator.

‘It must be cold in the car this time of morning,' said the Great White Father kindly, and the Trout left, miserably, and went to complain to the foreman about a man peeing out on the utilities section of the plant. It turned out to be the Beautiful Twinkling Star hosing down his unit. Grease, birds' droppings, rubbish, had to be hosed off the concrete with cold water that dribbled from hoses. Using the fire hydrant with free salt water from the river and 180 pounds pressure he could have done the job in half an hour, but he'd been standing hosing for four hours of the night and was nowhere near finished. The job would have to be done again tomorrow and every day.

‘Consider the Trout and be wise!' declaimed the great man. ‘Encased in the armour of fear!' He took a breath. ‘Puroil is the concretion of the fears these men have exuded and is built up strong in steel and concrete because men are weak and afraid. They have built round themselves a fence, a protection and now it is become a prison. No one can get at those Puroil protects—only Puroil!'

The foremen in the office heard, but stayed put, waiting for him to go away. Lifting his voice high above the outside roar of turbine and compressor and venting steam, the Great White Father of the operators sang:

It was no use trying to shut him up.

 

THE BLOOD MARKET The Samurai met him in the car park. ‘What's the price of blood, Cheddar? How's the market?'

Cheddar wasn't going to take the trouble to answer, but the Samurai might not have understood silence, so he brought out a few reluctant words.

‘The ass fell out of it.'

The Samurai could hear the misery of a man who has suddenly lost profits.

‘What's the story, Cheddar?' Try as he might, he could not keep the sympathy out of his voice.

‘Well,' it came out with a rush, ‘after I jacked the price up, suddenly there was millions of people with my blood disease. About two hundred people in the metropolitan area reckon they have it now and more every day. They all want to be in it and sell their blood, so what happens to the price? The bludgers. Not a thought what happens to the price. They spoil it for everyone. Now I've got to try and live on wages alone.'

‘I'm sorry to hear so many people are sick with it.'

‘Sick? They're not sick! I'm not sick!' His pale yellow skin glistened transparently, like sweating cheese. ‘All it does is cut a few years off the ass end of your life and who wants to get old?' The Samurai was about to ask him why he didn't go off work and try for the invalid pension, but he remembered the amount invalids and pensioners get.

‘How did the other two hundred get to know of the market for crook blood, Cheddar?'

‘I know how. The Python got to hear of it and he's got a daughter with a blood disease. Not as bad as mine, but interesting enough to scientists. Well, you know the Python. He got his daughter to sell her blood and from her the news spread everywhere.' His horizons momentarily widened. ‘Even in eggs and fruit and fish—and diamonds—they have orderly marketing so the producer won't go down the drain, but these nongs couldn't think of that.' The horizon narrowed right down to normal focus. ‘Fifty cents a pint. It's not worth growing the bloody stuff.'

‘They might stumble on a cure, Cheddar. I hope so.'

‘I hope so too,' he said viciously. ‘That'll teach 'em to spoil someone else's business.'

‘They didn't think.'

‘The Python didn't think, either, when he tangled with me.'

 

NAT'S GIRL They had stripped her from
Playboy
magazine before it was banned. Now she was stuck halfway up a wall in the plant laboratory, every inch of her tan flesh promising juicy bites to sex-hungry men. However cold the winter, she never once complained or asked for clothes.

She was what all men desired: lovely, good to eat, helpless. All you had to do was grab her—she was light as a feather—jerk her horizontal, move her arms and legs to the positions you wanted. She saw many interesting things. If her impressions could have been salvaged somehow from the glossy paper, some that are now industrial dukes, princes and section heads on the earth might have cause to fear.

Ambrose often locked himself in the lab on night shift and by the light cast on Nat's Girl from a neon tube across road 15, masturbated into several sympathetic rags while he gazed over the whole of her body.

Loosehead, who had more imagination than he was given credit for, one night in similar circumstances constructed out of 14-gauge square mesh wire a life-size dummy woman and clothed her with rags from the clean-rag boxes. He stuffed the dummy with rags, too, and lay down on the floor with her, similarly fixing his eyes on Nat's Girl, whose parted lips and confident eyes he imagined so close to his own flesh.

He left the dresser's model in a corner behind a door. He wired the door handle back to the wall so his Galatea would not be discovered. However, next time he came in for a short private orgy he found she had been interfered with. He had to replace some of her soiled rags before he performed his pitiful, convulsive act.

The Samurai came to consult with Nat's Girl. He walked with his judo walk, feet hardly leaving the ground, steps short. A smile sketched itself on his face with the merest lifting of lips and crinkling of eyes.

‘I'm dangerous, girlie,' he said to Nat's Girl. ‘There's two hundred pounds of dynamite here with an inch and a half fuse.' Nat's Girl made no comment.

The Glass Canoe came to see her, but he would treat her as an oracle, trying to tell her his troubles and asking for her advice. ‘…but if I try to teach the other boys what my aims are so they will know me and what I am trying to do, they will understand me and know I am right. I can start to be happy, then.'

Because of his own nature, the way he was made, he would never be able to understand the Samurai's attempts at complete honesty.

‘To lie is to dream,' the Samurai was fond of saying. ‘You have a choice: let yourself lie and you enter a dream world where everything consists of words, and is unreal.' The Samurai didn't understand that the Glass Canoe could do no differently because his circuits were arranged in a particular way.

The Samurai got the pleasure of duty done from some of his pronouncements. Nat's Girl heard him say to one of the Kaffir-kickers: ‘We are brought up to believe in personal integrity, a fair go for others, the value of the individual, good manners…'

The Kaffir-kickers would be puzzled by this emphasis on the rights of others and vaguely dissatisfied. The social air they breathed in Europe had taken one thing for granted, so obviously, so trustingly, they were hard put to express it. It was like something you were always used to and never conscious of. It was respect for authority. And obedience. This was something he hadn't mentioned.