The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (36 page)

The Whispering Baritone took great pleasure in drafting the notice of the stoppage, careful to mention that no specific reason had been given by the operators.

On the cracker the notice couldn't be put up, there were no pins. After vainly searching, Captain Bligh directed that it be nailed up. None of the men would touch the paper. We're not carpenters, that's a carpenter's job with hammer and nails. He drew a blank with the fitters, too. They wouldn't touch something that concerned operators. Eventually, he found a great nail on the ground outside the control building and nailed it up with that.

It was only a few minutes before Big Dick wrote near the nail: One of the Original Nails used for the Crucifixion. It was a very large nail.

When the parties were before the authorities and the workers duly warned back to work, there were a few things said about the ultimatum given to the helpless workers. Nasty things. Not even judges can be relied on to refrain from sarcasm at the expense of the employer, though the employer's profit is usually safe in their hands. They feel themselves in a position parallel to that of the employer rather than to the humble, unwieldy multitudes of workers who do, after all, get under the feet like so many cow-cakes in a paddock.

‘You'll have to deny this threat you made of standing them down,' said the Brown Snake.

‘Deny it?'

‘They misunderstood you, that's the line. The Commissioner said the threat caused the stoppage, so we must make it appear there was no threat. It was only word of mouth, so it's your word against theirs. Because of the court's criticism, it is obvious the time isn't right for bulk dismissals: only One Eye is to go. We'll get a stand-down clause written in to the next agreement.'

‘But it wasn't my word, it was the decision of all of us, and besides, they'd already decided to have a stoppage.'

The Brown Snake yawned. There was no problem here. He was tired of these amateurs, men who couldn't tell a convincing lie. How could they hope to hold a job requiring a sense of responsibility?

What was the Good Shepherd to do? Resign rather than lie? Spend hours, days, in soul-searching conflict with himself? How delightful if we could say yes. But it wasn't so. If he had resigned for that reason, the Company would have been hurt. Loyalty to his superiors won, and for their sake he scarred his soul, which he thought of as immortal. He stood up on his hind legs, lied like a man and the men jeered.

 

VIRGIN SODS UPTURNED The Great White Father was visited by many prisoners in need of more than sex and beer and refuge from the forces of a society which had nothing for them. He knew they were beyond his ministrations.

‘The body,' he said, looking at their empty faces, ‘has a wisdom we know nothing about.' He was about to drag in a reference to the Glass Canoe, whose great body was designed for emergencies it would never meet in our phase of civilization, but the man himself was at the back of the drink hut, moody, sipping his beer. The Great White Father thought he knew how such a man was feeling, imagining himself blocked off by a few tinpot executives who could say when he worked and when he didn't: men the Glass Canoe could crush without ferocity with one great brown shiny hand.

‘We are the body of the company. Sometimes we are the first organisms to sense coming danger or ill-health. Some day there may be a new way of organizing places like this so we won't have to have stoppages, but in the meantime our civilization is founded on mutual distrust; our world is full of cops and screws, talebearers and auditors, bosses, dobbers and governments.

‘It's a great inspiration to me to see you all listening with your mouths open—the better to drink your beer. You know what we are. We're the crap. We don't argue with that. To them up there we're a crowd of zombies with numbers—we look sideways at them in their nice coats and ties and what do we see? We see them looking sideways at us. They're just as worried about us as we are about them. We're here in captivity, we always will be. They pay us not to walk the streets; they pay us to keep out of mischief, because there's so many of us that if we got into mischief we'd end up rocking their old employment boat and shorting their profits and maybe cutting off a few heads for a laugh. But we're not interested in that sort of thing'

‘Why shouldn't we think about it?' came a voice from the back. The Glass Canoe had risen to speak, but found his position false in that atmosphere and sat down again. He said weakly, ‘It's better to die standing than live on your knees. And that's what we're doing.' Something in him wanted to be accepted by both sides.

‘Better still to sit down and have a drink,' suggested the Humdinger.

‘I know how it feels,' said the Great White Father. ‘Sometimes the worker feels like a big gun, loaded and primed, ready to go off. But there's only one target. Sometimes it feels as if a man is just rotting away in peace—there's no chance to be put through your paces, nothing to fight, but there's one target. Men are not made for peace, you say, just as our bodies are not made for sleep. Feet are the only part made to take a man's weight. And feet are for charging the enemy, and there's only one enemy! Who is the enemy? Who is my enemy? Who is your enemy?' He stopped, stooped down, lifted a can and sank it. ‘Your own brother is your enemy! The only target is your fellow man. He is your primal competitor. And more than that when you
are
led into battle by one set of leaders against your enemy-target-brother who has another set of leaders, the leaders of both sides have a funny knack of stepping aside at the last moment to leave you face to face with your target-brother. You fight him, you kill each other, and who survives? Leaders. They live to lead another day. Then what happens? The emergency and the hate are past, the fights over, the dead buried, words forgotten, vows broken, revenge forever unsatisfied…as we sit down to sup with our enemies and go to bed with the dead and enjoy it.'

Another can at a noisy gulp.

‘We are the eternal rabble. In our name shame comes. We never benefit. We are the same before as after. We kill ourselves, our brothers, for what? Not for ourselves, but for those skilful enough to make a profit from our wars. We never profit, we have no skills to make money from death and conquest and spheres of influence. Standard of living? Maybe it falls if we get beaten? It's more likely to rise. Was life any worse before the airplane and the TV set and the megaton bomb? We could go back there any time and we wouldn't take more than a day to get used to it. But who wouldn't get used to it? The bludgers that have all the things this world can give them—things we make—the free ones that toil with other people's money and go to bed on the wealth that we and the machines produce.'

‘Sounds a big red rag to me,' said the Glass Canoe.

‘No, mate!' shouted the Great White Father. ‘No! That sort of thing is bull! That's changing one set of masters for another more efficient at keeping you in your place. And what's our place? At the bottom, the arse of the pile; we're the undiluted, eternal crap. No. No isms. The only way is our way. The vast underground life of prisoners, working when you have to, but not too hard unless you feel like the exercise, taking time off, pulling the whole thing back with a steady pressure, the whole juggernaut!—having a drink when you feel like it, like they do up there!—jumping on a bunk with a free and easy sheila when you feel like it!—just like they do up there!—eating as well as you can…The whole edifice of civilization is built with our bones cemented together; the streets are paved with our brothers; we are like little coral animals whose skeletons make the foundations on which islands rest! We have only one life. Let it be as easy as you like to make it, there is no other.'

He sat and drank again. Somewhere in his great eye-sockets a tiny team of nerves worked shoulder to shoulder and squeezed a drop of saline solution along his tear ducts into the corners of both eyes. As soon as he was aware of these drops his sinuses seemed to swell and he knew motion had taken him by surprise. He blew his nose strongly and dismissed the tears.

 

BOURKE STREET FREDDIE When the Two Pot Screamer heard of Bourke Street Freddie's death he made up a few verses and stuck them with Puroil resin to the wall of the drink hut.

The Great White Father liked it, but criticized the feel of the last line. I asked the Screamer about the reference to crown and anchor and it turned out he'd lost all his money on it himself, the money he was to go into the hotel business with, ten years before. He didn't know whether Bourke Street Freddie had ever played either crown and anchor or two-up. And there was no blacksmithing done any more. Bourke Street had had to become assistant to a young fitter, there was no provision for getting qualified in another trade once yours was redundant. I thought it rather sad.

 

THE EXPANSION OF HATE Later that day a teenage contractor was seen inside the Puroil prisoners' locker-room. Twenty dollars missing. The boy was caught in an hour. For the following twenty-four there was a crazy mess of rumours as to his nationality. The Two Pot Screamer took notes like mad. The nationality of the thief depended on the present retailer of the rumour. It was easy to pick out those who hated Scotsmen, the Irish, Estonians, Hungarians, Germans, English, Welshmen, South Africans. The only ones not mentioned were those nationalities the speaker had never heard of. The limits of their knowledge were thus the limits of their hates, or to put it another way, hate expands with the available facts.

 

THE LIMITS OF SYMPATHY Everyone spares a thought for the man who is disabled through no fault of his own. Scene: the Humdinger in the bed hut, the light on, the Old Lamplighter wanting conversation.

‘Who's that poor man with his arm off?'

‘Arm off? I don't know anyone with an arm off.'

‘From the elbow down.'

‘Thick-set joker, bullet head?'

‘Sort of hefty, yes. Always eating apples.'

‘Herman the German. But he's only got one hand off. Disease in his bones.'

‘He's got an arm off now.'

‘An arm?'

‘At the elbow.'

‘Poor bugger. Must be spreading.'

‘Will it go right through him?'

‘I hope not, poor sod. Listen, are you going to keep your mind on the job or not?'

 

COINCIDENCE The Enforcer was put into hospital one night with broken arms, skull fractures and bottle cuts. Three men who did this sort of thing for hire waited for him near his garage which he reached by driving along an unlit lane, asked him for a light and proceeded to do him over. A bottle from behind, a tyre lever from in front and a man with heavy boots to work on the sides. It was eleven-thirty at night and no one heard his yells.

‘Someone must have hated his guts,' commented the prisoners.

‘Probably the neighbours did it.'

The assailants beat him up from fifty yards behind the house right round to his front veranda. The first blow with the tyre lever broke his right arm. The second broke his left. By a curious coincidence he was disabled for six months exactly, the same length of time the Corpse was on day work. The funny thing was, the Corpse didn't hire them. He'd been talking in a pub about the bastard that dobbed him in, and a little man who said he was a psycho and feared by the police thought he'd do the Corpse a favour. It was a love job.

 

HALFWAY UP A WALL Nat's Girl, watching them all from her perch halfway up a wall, smiled. She had been taken in every conceivable position; every inch of her body had satisfied some seeker as a sexual object: there was no waste on her. Hair, nose, ears, feet, eyes, hands, elbows, buttocks, neck, thighs, breasts, heels, navel, toes, lumbar region, instep, ribs, tongue, shoulders, teeth, knees, chin—everything. Every square inch. There was as little sexual waste on Nat's Girl as there was economic waste on any of the sheep, cattle or pigs bred for man's other satisfactions.

She made no moral judgments. A man's a man, that was her starting point. She watched as the Samurai came in to her little room while the plant was steady—it wasn't going and nothing could be done until the skeleton staff of fitters bolted a few large flanges.

He had had a dreadful interview with Mrs Blue Hills. She was looking for him on the weekend when he took off for the country with girls and was determined to be very bitter about it until she was able to make him suffer, then she would turn in mercy and forgive him. But not until he showed some signs of suffering and remorse, though what this meant for her or what satisfaction it was remained obscure.

To cap it all, he had a visit in the lab from Blue Hills himself. Words had flown like erratic birds from Blue Hills' mouth: words hurt and strange. The Samurai listened like a priest. Blue Hills was sure someone had been seeing his wife. The euphemism hurt him as it issued from his shapeless lips. What he wanted to say was that another man, who hadn't had the expense of marrying his wife and keeping her in food and clothes for fifteen years in return for household services and infrequent sexual intercourse, this other man who had been spared the drag side of his woman had now come along and was being given as much sexual intercourse as he wanted, with none of the other irksome duties like being with her all the time and taking her out and seeing her when she was not fit to be seen and smelling her when she was not fit to be sniffed, and being set up for his rare sexual trick with an impatient scarecrow in pins and curlers.