The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (32 page)

 

The Beautiful Twinkling Star for once didn't rush out to help. They squash me and bypass me and tread on me because they know I won't complain. A tiny voice whispered in him, Why are you taking on the whole world? Are you daring extinction? This world isn't made for the kind man. Wake up to yourself. Get thee behind me, Satan, he answered. But inside him the whispering continued. A battle had started on a lonely field in his brain. Whatever the outcome, he would be the victim.

 

What a beautiful picture. A burst economizer tube, fleeing foreigners, a Grey Goldfish with battery disconnected, a Beautiful Twinkling Star demoted and resentful, a Python grinning maliciously, depraved Humdinger heroically saving the day and standing up against foreign domination, Ambrose laughing at a non-existent joke, and Far Away Places ignominiously flied. Advance Australia!

 

A GAME OF CHESS The plant was down two weeks. Another week and it had struggled to its knees.

In a filthy corner of the locker-room, chess was the game between Canada Dry and Humdinger. The chessboard was of paper spread flat on an upturned carton. The chairs they sat on were not burnished gold but battered sheet-iron and had been rescued from an old building torn down to save the wages of two canteen workers. The locker-room was filthy because the present shift had taken over from No. 1 shift, notoriously shy of the broom and the mop.

‘When you going to Canada?' asked the Humdinger, as Canada Dry was lining up an attack with both knights.

‘Next September.' He had been saving for two years to go to Canada. He had enough cash to get there, and back as far as Hawaii.

‘The Enforcer will think twice before he goes over to the fractionator again. See the slurry all over his shirt?' Canada Dry had forked his king and rook. He moved his king.

‘That would be the first time he ever went out on the plant. I'm waiting for him to come out with an opinion on the running of it.' Canada took the rook.

‘Get that up you,' he exulted calmly. The Humdinger moved a bishop back to the queen's square, the knight was trapped in the corner.

‘They had a good night last night,' said Humdinger. ‘Got down in the start-up hut, rags on the tables and the heaters on. Some log crept in, though, and emptied a pint of piss on the heater bar. The stink! Like when we did it on the steam lines in the boiler house. Full of ammonia as a baby's nappy.'

The boiler men were noted for their disinclination to leave the boiler house. Their bed was behind the back wall, they defecated on a shovel and threw it in the combustion chamber together with their lavatory paper. You could murder a man there and get rid of him completely through the explosion door.

The Humdinger cooked socks in the tea urn, he couldn't leave that habit behind, but his most spectacular bit of foolery was to come up behind Captain Bligh who was holding a billy of milk by his side and talking earnestly to the Two Pot Screamer, and drop his donger in the milk.

‘Like a lizard drinking,' he said admiringly and Captain Bligh looked down for a second then threw milk, billy and all as far as he could. The Humdinger was too cheerful about his vileness for anyone to be angry.

 

THE HUNGER FOR WAR Stretch appeared briefly with his hollowed-out plant manual in which he hid war novels. He was nervous about being discovered breaking the reading rule despite the fact everyone did. When Slug or Enforcer came round, he turned a page and pretended to be reading about impulse and reaction turbines. He wouldn't have known one from the other, but he knew that page of words well and could answer a quick question on it. When the covering page wore out, he had to read the preceding page. In this manner he was learning something, even though he was doing it backwards and had started from the middle.

He had no sympathy for chess and the Humdinger despised him. He went away restlessly. He was one of those who shone at training schools and wrote long and erudite handovers for the following shifts, but if you walked down to his plant and asked why he was doing something, he couldn't answer.

He found a locker-room corner and got into his paperback. He was back on the Eastern front, his mouth watering as he chewed through a delicious story of German and Russian soldiers competing with each other several decades ago in torturing temporary prisoners spectacularly in the snow. What were once men were cutting off live men's toes with wire-cutters, shoving barbed wire into places where it would cause discomfort, cutting out eyes, crucifying men with barbed wire, cutting off hands, testicles, fingers, noses. By now the survivors were respectable family men; friends, not enemies. Stretch read, swallowed hard the saliva this story brought into his mouth, blinked so he wouldn't miss a word.

War was keeping a man awake: performing, years after, a valuable industrial service.

 

THE EASY WAY Into this peace a voice called, wavering, ‘She's going down!' Men got to their feet, ready for flight. Strange noises outside.

‘The boilers are rocking,' yelped Mister Puroil, who belonged to the pump-house where emergencies of this nature never happened. He left quickly on his company cycle for the safety of the tank farm.

‘They are, too,' said Humdinger, looking out the high window. ‘Look! There's the Count. Up there pulling levers again and she's coming down round his ears. Get on it, will you!'

There he was, fifty feet up, working the pressure-tapping levers one after the other. The noises inside the boiler, fearsome to the others, meant nothing to him. He'd never bothered to find out anything beyond his own immediate routine. He was there for a weekly pay packet and to follow orders. A dead loss.

‘She'll be wearing pink pyjamas when she comes,' sang the Humdinger, running out to the control room. People were rushing about, trying to arrest runaway levels and failing pressures. This was the time when the turbo-expander machines usually tripped. But not this time. Instead, one of the machines took the easy way out and blew itself up. The bang stopped the Count in his tracks, but the pieces of casing and fragmented blades were on the opposite side and descended in a shower on the plant plot for distances up to a hundred yards. The rotor core, twisted and bent, fell to the grating. The rest of the machines surged and tripped, the plant collapsed.

Blue Hills, on the turbine landing, went to water and fell to his knees. The breath left him, his chest pained heavily. For what seemed like minutes, he couldn't breathe.

Ten minutes later a party of visitors under the guidance of the Spotted Trout descended on the place.

‘Due to the latest technical improvements, this is an extremely silent running plant,' he extemporized. What the hell was wrong now? Several of his party made remarks about metal lying in the quadrangle.

‘Is there a cleaning problem here?' asked a young accountant who would never have tolerated metal fragments on his office carpet.

‘Just a moment,' said the Trout. He asked the nearest prisoner. ‘What's all the bloody mess?' The Humdinger looked him over.

‘I've seen bigger boobs than you,' he said loudly, glad to have an audience. ‘But I don't know where. Can't you see the bastard's blown to bits?'

The Trout didn't want his visitors listening to this sort of talk.

‘And in here,' clutching his loud-hailer and diving into the control room with the charmed rats after him, ‘is the latest in radio communication between control and the operator on the job.' They were just in time to see the Glass Canoe perform a savage Gotcha on Stretch, who squealed and leaped like an arrow for the ceiling.

Outside, the Beautiful Twinkling Star was left posted on the worst jobs. But no complaining. He would never let his one-man side down by squealing.

Under a tarpaulin in the regenerator skirt, a body moved restlessly. Itchy with catalyst dust, the Rustle of Spring settled down for a night's sleep. It was quieter now.

 

AN APPLE A DAY ‘What's the matter with Herman the German?' the Enforcer asked Stillsons in the silence of the controller's hut.

‘Osteo-something.'

‘They say his hand's off at the wrist.'

‘Do they?'

‘Isn't it?'

‘It is.'

‘Why doesn't someone tell me?'

‘Why don't you keep your ear to the ground?'

‘What are you shitty about?'

‘I'm not shitty.'

‘Yes you are.'

‘No I'm not.'

‘Yes you are.'

‘Not.'

‘Are!'

‘Not!'

‘This osteo is spreading, is it? Can he do his work without a hand?'

‘He's still as good as any six men.'

 

SIXTY-DOLLAR CAT The Great White Father brought home a cat in a cardboard box; he'd rescued him from a rich doctor's house. The doctor's wife had been boasting of his cost and pedigree and the Home Beautiful deserved the best.

This cat was a ball of white wool, rolling in play on a harmless floor, pretending to be angry, advancing like a dragon on your shoe, a lion swatting a teasing piece of rag while men roared. White?

‘So none of you mob treads on him.'

‘What if we see double?'

‘Don't tread on either of him…Many of us were made for the price of a seat at the movies and a bite to eat, or a chocolate malted at the milk-bar, a gin and lime at the pub, or a few cigarettes and a bottle of cheap steam on the golf links, but this cat cost sixty dollars!'

 

PICTURES FROM AN EXHIBITION Humpy was out on the turbine landing. It was night shift and in the dark the flue-gas header glowed cherry red under its thick grey sleeve of glass wool. Drops of oil splashed gaily down from the hydraulic connections of the great butterfly valve on the southern end.

The Samurai gazed without speaking at Humpy up near the turbines. What was he doing?

 

Big Dick ran out from the shower holding two handfuls of his prized possession and waving the rest about. He loved to be looked at. The Count followed him: he couldn't take his eyes off Big Dick. He'd seen nothing like it in the cold land of his birth.

 

Out in the panel room, Captain Bligh was doing the rounds, cracking jokes, singing, anything to make a noise and keep the prisoners awake. The Boardrider puzzled him, head in hands, an open plant manual before him. Captain Bligh got down on his hands and knees and crawled along the deck into range, looking up under the Boardrider's hat. The eyes were just open. The Boardrider had been alerted by the sudden stop in the flow of Captain Bligh's nagging words.

 

On the turbine platform Humpy watched as the oil drops smoked and crept slightly downhill toward the glowing section of the header. He looked round for a steam hose. Yes, there was one. And yes, the valve was shut and only hand-tight. One of those multiple-type gas and steam connections.

 

The Samurai went out into the panel room. The Glass Canoe talking interminably. He was getting thinner: another attack coming on. He usually lost condition before his illness struck. The Samurai tackled him.

‘Do you only talk about yourself?' he asked sourly. Was it a weakness in him to detest weakness in other men?

The Glass Canoe didn't reply. I'll shut up, he said to himself. But he resumed the conversation when the Samurai was gone. Had quite a serious session with himself.

 

The Samurai, as he turned an eye towards the turbines again and Humpy, reflected that everywhere men carried tragedies round in their lumpy chests. He thought of Mrs Blue Hills. She had dropped her bundle again when he went to see her. Lamentations filled the air; she was so worked up that beads of sweat sprinkled her face and at one stage she shot a small fairy.

‘Why does the woman always pay?' she wailed. The Samurai sneered at the commonness of the mind that could vomit forth such stuff in moments of agony.

 

The best things in life are free!' he shouted at her. He didn't know what to say. Besides, on night shift, at any hour of the twenty-four, his mind was furry and intractable like a strange, disobedient, untrained animal. He couldn't make out what was wrong with her. He couldn't make head or tail of her complaints. The visit ended with him having to do what he had no taste for.

Her tongue was probing, but tasted stale; she hadn't showered, and stank of urine. He felt guilty because he disliked her. If only he believed in God, or something. He could speak! He could be a trumpet to blaze forth to the world its failings and its ills. He could hold forth the patent medicine of ideology and compel the world to taste and try.

 

Humpy, twenty-one and bent like an old man, waited for the oil to flash. He was happy when the flames tore upwards: he had the steam hose ready. He spun the valve, aimed the nozzle at the flame. A fierce jet of vapour shot towards the fire and immediately ignited, right back up the spout of vapour to his hand. The gas at seventy-five pounds had overcome the fifty-pound steam and he was feeding the flames with fuel gas. His stomach on fire with fright, he turned off the gas and looked for a steam hose without any other attachments.

The Samurai saw the blaze, ran and doused it, bumping trembling Humpy out of the way with an expert hip.

 

The Samurai phoned Mrs Blue Hills when he judged that Blue Hills was on his way to work. She was still upset and he thought it best to ask her to meet him. Calm her down. He smuggled her into his car and went out to a motel at Riverditch, local haunt of marriage strays and passionate office lunches.

The cataclysm that burst on his amazed body left him weak and exhausted. All her woes and miseries and petty hates gathered in a storm of sex and rained on him. His body seemed to swell under her assault. He felt like a whale threshing about in a sea of tiger sharks. She was teeth and tears, feet and heels and fingernails. And all the time her story of tragedy and wasted love and misunderstanding and mistakes poured forth. She referred to Blue Hills as Rumpelstiltskin. She referred to him continually.