The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (60 page)

How long would it be until war was given—as a great gift from the experimenters on high that we have freely called gods—to make the remnant appreciate merely being alive?

I not only don't love my fellow men, I dislike them. Is this the other side of the coin? The reverse of my mission to force them to their feet? And what happened to my idea of fighting only larger opponents? What about the small people knocked about in the coming struggles? The Samurai had travelled a little way from feeling he was set apart to be a fighter for one or two unfortunates, to mapping out a programme of destruction to bring about a chaotic state of affairs in which his unfortunates and the industry that half-heartedly employed them would be pulled into gear and made to work. There were no political clubs or parties in Australia to help him form ideas appropriate to the conditions around him, no newspapers to say anything that touched his life at any point. The parties and the newspaper proprietors were anonymous private groups responsible to no one but themselves. Their first duty was to their own continued existence.

His programme was himself.

 

THE GIFT OF LANGUAGE The Samurai arrived at his room. He fished out his latest notebook and tossed it into the small carton in which the others were neatly packed. He tipped them out on his bed and began to leaf through them. It was a crazy impulse, nevertheless he shuffled the notebooks as near as he could get to the order in which he filled them, took a pad of notepaper from his little table and a Puroil ballpoint pen and started to write.

Catching sight of himself in the mirror on the opposite wall he smiled at his reflection, a thing he had never done before, but did not lay down the pen. Instead he went over to the old motto
Help, Care, Listen
that he had on the wall, crossed it out and wrote
Hate, Chaos, Leadership.
A more corrosive mixture.

Was he writing about the men he'd worked with? Did they exist? He had the feeling that now he had decided to leave them they had collapsed from inside like balloon faces when the air is gone. Were those men he knew or thought he knew, were they projections of himself? Only alive while he was with them? Extensions, reflections, enlargements of small characteristics of his own?

And the face in the mirror on that opposite wall: whose reflection was that? What aimless forces had moulded him? A man born to change his world and until now denying himself the power.

And the language. Their continual swearing—would he be able to include this accompaniment to everything they said? Or modify it? But no; it was more than accompaniment; he had worked with them, drunk with them, slept alongside them: their S's, F's and B's and FS's, FB's, BF's and all the rest were often the whole substance of what they had to say. What a pity he was not clever enough to interpret these sounds—perhaps they were the outward forms of weird, shapeless desires that welled up inside them; desires for which there were no words yet made. And their preoccupation with bowel functions, a major part of their days.

He looked at his reflection again. A writer was a dangerous man, substituting words for crimes. He put his stolen biro to paper and words formed lightly in blue tracings. Were they original words, a private language? Or simply a rearrangement of patterns he had become used to in his few years' exposure to the words that surrounded him. Patterns he was so familiar with they seemed to him his own voice.

 

Judge for yourself. I found this fragment, possibly his first attempt to put on paper his feeling for the refinery, in his room after the visit by those I shall mention next:

‘All I see is magnificent. Cool, clean, ringing steel; smoking, redhot, radiant steel; dust and motes that paint the sunsets of the world and glorious dawns; flame with its million changing faces and fairy bodies. I look in the flames and see the endless shapes of the world; smoke and vapours rising like ghosts, moving lightly in the upper air. Rich rust, bitumen black and black, concrete warm far into the night with the tradesman's handprints immortal. The grubby mites crawling between the limbs of columns, among girders, are men like me. All I see carries the stamp of a man's hand. The men I see carry the stamp of everything they touch. And all I see is magnificent.'

He was in love with industry.

 

BLISS BY COMPULSION As his door flew open he tried to remember if he had left it unlocked or had given Mrs Blue Hills a key. Of course—he was trying to grapple with four men, but his greatest disadvantage was that he had for once been caught off guard and two of them held him from behind—of course she had a key, the key she used to get in before.

He judged it better to be subdued and conscious than defiant and unconscious. He stopped struggling. Who could these men be? He asked them, but they gave unsatisfactory answers and bundled him outside towards their car. They made no attempt to rob him: he had his own car keys still and his holiday pay. They pulled the door shut on the way out, locking it. This seemed to please him; perhaps he thought a locked door made his room safe.

On the way out he saw several people he knew slightly and called to them, trying to interest them in his plight, but each one in turn became afflicted with a sudden and total deafness and remembered urgent business that required attention in another direction. They even pointedly looked away from the car so there would be no likelihood of their remembering the licence number and being burdened with inconvenient information.

It was understandable. For all they knew, he was going to be murdered and no one wants to get mixed up in things like that. Even if there were no cause to fear private revenge, the ordeal in the witness box was enough to take years off their lives being made fools of by arrogant counsel and judges who had no contact with the world outside their courts, being forced to say yes or no to questions that required more words, and having to observe an etiquette and use words that had vanished from the world outside the courtroom. It was understandable.

They took him to the house of Mrs Blue Hills, put him on her double bed and tied his arms and legs crosswise to the four corners with sash-cord. This seemed to be the extent of their duties; they sat and drank some of her beer in the kitchen and left soon after.

‘My brothers,' she said grimly to the Samurai. She proceeded to rip his clothes from his body with no respect for their wholeness. He watched with regret as a good shirt met its end and with amazement as she used scissors on his trousers. Her next action was more familiar. She undressed carelessly and commenced torturing him.

Night slumped down on the earth, squeezing out the last light under its vast western edge.

 

INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS Many little deaths later she allowed his body to rest, and threw her own carelessly across his.

‘Did you blow up the refinery?' Out of the blue. She couldn't be serious.

‘Are you serious?'

‘It's blown up. Finished. On fire.' She got off him and manipulated the blinds.

The sky to the south was red, a premature and brilliant sunrise. Had he done that? But the air line he pinched in was not in service. He didn't know it, but the line he choked off led to an open end.

‘You knew all this and didn't say a word?'

‘I wouldn't care if a million factories burned.'

‘Oh yes you would. You'd care,' he said seriously, thinking of economic consequences.

‘I'll live, factories or no factories,' she said confidently.

‘It's not a factory. Refinery.'

‘Who cares? One less—a lot of smoke. So what?'

‘People might be dead there.'

‘Millions die in wars, famines, cyclones, earthquakes, in agony. Every way. I'm not going to bleed for them. I'd rather see twelve million Australians dead than go without one thing I want.'

‘But they're men from round here. Blue Hills worked with them.'

‘I don't care who they are or where they come from. It's their funeral. It'd be all the same to them if I did sympathize or if I didn't. I'm just a woman with one life to live. When I die the world dies. I care about us.'

‘Why didn't I see it?'

‘We're in a little fold in the hills, here.'

‘Why didn't I look?'

‘You sound sorry you missed it.'

‘There's still time. Let me go. There might be something I can do.'

‘I'll let you go if you promise to come back.'

‘Promise?' Stupidly.

‘Or you stay tied up. A slave of sex.'

‘I'll come back. Get me some of Blue's trousers.'

‘Promise?' she demanded.

‘I said so, didn't I?' She prepared coffee and created music with cups and saucers made of earth, marshalling them like a general in the field, herself made of softer clay.

It was clear he had involved himself in a relationship it wasn't easy to get out of. Perhaps she thought her exploits on his undefended body had impressed him with the depth of her physical love; perhaps she considered he was now bound to her. Nevertheless, she dressed and fed him.

Just as humans are interchangeable in the eyes of industry and governments, so perhaps are men in the eyes of women. At all events Blue Hills' trousers fitted him and she didn't seem surprised. He was waiting for her to say something about Blue Hills and where he might be, but she didn't. Puroil had asked her if Blue Hills was coming back to work but were holding the pension and holiday money due to him. With the Samurai keeping her she would have the necessary economic security to allow her to enjoy the change from Blue Hills.

 

THE COSMIC SCALES The street was dark, the houses put to bed, their sheets of grass tucked neatly under at the edges.

The Samurai climbed the short hill and came in view of the vast industrial extension of Sydney, seeing it from the top of a large contemptuous slope. There came over him the feeling of all that air pressing down, and tiny people tightly enclosed below.

Down on the plains of Puroil, the distant traffic over the bridge at Clearwater had an otherworldly look. For miles over the metropolitant area the smoke and dust, carbon-monoxide, sulphur-dioxide, acids of all types, unburned gases and toxic elements combined to cast a light haze over every distance upwards of a hundred yards.

And it was beautiful. This same poetic haze touched the natural dawn with fairy fingers and threw a dome of unearthly colours over Sydney's miles. It filled the sunsets to the stars with red and gold magnificence. The flimsiest suburban box was pretty under its veil.

One part of the refinery was well alight. Blue-black smoke bent in the wind down over the suburbs towards Sydney like a great column crashing down on crowded houses.

As he broke into a run to get to a busy corner and bum a lift, he wondered how many dead there were. High overhead, Sirius flamed in the sky. Down on the plain the refinery flares were huge, burning gas the plants couldn't use: giant candles flickering over the low bed-huts of the poor.

His lift took him past the corner where the idiot sat every day. He was there, sure enough, reliable as Monday morning. His keepers were late taking him indoors. Strips of rag flowed from his hands, covered with knots; there were filthy stockings, rags, light rope; he tied and untied all the knots over and over again. Tie, untie. Fasten, unfasten. The actions of the man's hands, the constant repetition of simple movements—even in this state of mental incompetence the man's body was reaching out obsessively towards process work. The only bar to his placement in a factory was his insistence on performing meaningless motions of his own choice.

The Samurai watched from the stranger's car as they stopped at the lights; watched with horror. Then the eyes of this permanent idiot wandered round in the most natural way and looked into his. The Samurai had a distinct, an astonishing feeling that he was transparent, that the unfortunate was looking clear through him. When the car moved, the eyes stayed looking at the same spot. He must have seen movement round him as a blur. The Samurai, looking from the car, watched with fixed eyes the gravelled road surfaces disappear beneath him, seeing only streaks of motion.

Outside the blue gates was a small girl who lived in one of the residences and was often seen skipping of an afternoon until her mother saw where she was and called her away from the gates. Her rope was turning faster than usual. Crowds were there milling in the dark and she was excited. The Samurai, coming towards her, thought immediately of the man sitting on the corner messing with his knots and twisting his rag-ends. Was the meaning of his own life and the life of the men inside the works—was the meaning of the whole thing in a child's mindless skipping and a man's aimless knotting and untying?

He stopped in his tracks. He saw the mighty Puroil acres shrink and become no larger than the little girl and the idiot, until before his eyes there were these two masses balancing one another: a vast industrial enterprise and two negligible human units. What would happen if he could throw the rest of the humans concerned into the scale—into either side of the scale?

 

ILLEGAL ENTRY Puroil locked its gates—normal emergency procedure. Men who lived nearby came and clamoured at the heavy steel barrier for news from the plants. The absurd guards knew nothing, could hardly pronounce the names of the plants and preserved their usual surliness which they hoped was mistaken for toughness.

The little girl moved closer, still with her rope in orbit about her, and skipped near the Samurai. He moved away, suspicious of kids that got too friendly.

‘Are you real old, mister?'

‘Pretty old.'

‘Wouldn't it be funny if people were born old and got younger and younger till they finished up babies?'

‘Yeah, funny.'

‘Then maybe I could be your mother.'

‘Maybe.'

She lost interest and skipped away. He was glad. Nearby ornamental trees and bushes were clotted with birds. Acacias exploded into blossom like tiny bomb-bursts. High overhead, the last birds were homing, flying on thin bones, trusting to feathers.