The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (3 page)

The Glass Canoe picked up the reading matter, pocketed a war novel he hadn't read and shot the rest in with the rubbish.

 

THE HOUR OF THE PEARL The frightful noise made by the Glass Canoe in the locker-room woke the foreman, who sat in the far corner of the foremen's room, his back to the door, apparently gazing down at his hands. He had dozed off. He, too, observed the rule that you didn't sleep obviously. Man is a day animal and Stillsons was very tired. He got his name from a habit of trying to do fitters' work: this led unfailingly to Union trouble but he couldn't kick the habit. Supervisors were not to do operators' work. Operators were not to encroach on tradesmen's work. This was the custom of years—without it where would they all fit in?

When Stillsons pulled himself together and tried with cold water to splash the sleep from his swollen face, he found from the Western Salesman, who volunteered the information and asked for action, that the Glass Canoe had damaged the men's lockers. He didn't mention he'd been cruelly wakened. He was one of those at Union meetings who sat well back on the outskirts of the crowd and hurled comments, like grenades, into the centre. Then ducked. Stillsons was on the point of tackling the Glass Canoe about it when some of the others came after him into the amenities room where the Glass Canoe was mopping. He mopped with such vigour after his pill, backing out of the room as he worked, that Stillsons was in danger of being impaled on the mop handle. Those behind pretended they couldn't see him and had him in a squeeze. They turned their backs and wouldn't move, pretending to look at the coloured nudes on the wall. To make clear his position you need to know that the amenities room, where fourteen men had their meals, measured fourteen feet by eight; a large part of the space was taken up by three tables, a cold box, oven and sink, all decrepit trade-ins from a dealer's yard; it was half the size of the foremen's office, which accommodated three. Like every building on the refinery it was designed somewhere in Europe. Stillsons was rescued by the Samurai, who came to the door of the amenities room and said, in his cold voice that was never loud but always managed to silence everyone, ‘The Enforcer'.

The Samurai never allowed himself to be awakened by reveille, he was up and about before the cleaning roster had to start. No one ever surprised him, but then no one was eager to tangle with him either on the job or outside the massive blue steel gates which so impressively guarded the entrance to the works. The first thing he was told when he started on shift was to keep out of the Enforcer's way. ‘Tread on his toes and he'll get you if it takes years.' The Samurai had met men like this before.

Stillsons, however, was made of different stuff. He turned and brushed his obstructors aside and scream-whispered, ‘Where is he?' The mention of the shift superintendent's name was enough. He darted around, his head sinking down into his shirt as if he were an animal retracting its vulnerable parts, as if his body remembered the flogging past, his face white from night shift and blank with fear.

‘Where? Did he come in? Did he ask for me?' In his anxiety he made to touch the Samurai, perhaps by the shirt, but even this human support was denied him. You didn't casually touch the Samurai. It was very hard to touch him. You didn't see his feet move, he simply slid out of reach. Now he kept after Stillsons.

‘Time you went up to report to the Enforcer. There's nothing for you to do here.' Stillsons hesitated. Thank God the Enforcer hadn't seen him asleep. He'd dob his own mother. ‘Unless you want to help with the mop.' The mob laughed heartlessly; no one wanted to side with a foreman, not in a crowd. They would sneak into his office later one by one and square off.

Since this specimen of Puroil management still hesitated, it was necessary for the Samurai to put out a greater effort to get rid of him. To be without a foreman in this part of the morning was a good thing. Once the evidence of the night had been safely stowed and the floors of the amenities, locker-room, toilets and hundred-foot control room had been swept and mopped, and this latest day marked off in scratches on the cement walls, there was time for leisurely dressing and, if you got in early, a shower. There were two showers among the fourteen men, but one wouldn't work if the other was started first. Bubbles was first showered. He wiped a pore closing stink repressant over his armpits for that fresh cool carefree feeling. It kept the sweat in. Choking clouds of baby talc surrounded him. He loved his body and overhauled it for the girls. His tongue was still cocky-caged from the night before, his huge pink belly tight as a drum. He'd had his six hours down. All he had to do now was order a new pair of boots, his present pair were slightly worn at the heel. They'd be worth three dollars at the pub.

The Samurai was quickly dressed and had the next hour to himself for thinking or just picking over the laundered overalls to see if his friends had left him one of his own pairs. He enjoyed this one hour of the shift. At seven they would be out the gate and gone. He had never worked on the better sections of the refinery—pump-houses, utilities, bitumen, distillation, platforming plants—where, on night shift, if the plant was producing and running steady, the men waited for the visit of the mobile canteen at midnight, then for the foreman's visit soon after, then half went straight down, taking their turn in a civilized manner and were wakened at six by the foreman ringing their phone. Yes, that was a better reveille. There were no vacancies on those sections. Months ago, when the Good Shepherd was telling them of the European owners' expansion plans, he'd said ‘The honeymoon's over.' With the new investment would come a more rigid control. The cracker was the first big complex needing its own on-the-spot supervision. On all other plants supervisors were visitors; the men kept the plant steady so there'd be no visits.

 

BIG DADDY The Samurai sat watching the rest of his shift come dressed from the locker-room. Technically they were citizens, allowed to reproduce at random. A place had to be found for their children, too. As he watched, something like a fine despair seemed to spray up from somewhere inside him and shower his organs of concern with a set of patterned words, the same words that had often risen to his tongue when he saw them attacking each other openly or in secret. It was man against man at every level and the company suffered from the situation's wastefulness, but no one saw it as a blot that should be published, condemned, eradicated. Poor devils, you can't take care of yourselves, you need a father to watch over you and fight the battles you should be fighting against the false and the unfair, the cruel and the oppressive…And, as usual, he knew that although he had heart and ability for such a fight and many wanted him to be their delegate, to stand in the front line and take the company's first shots, he had never convinced himself that he had the basic inclination. Mostly the Union attracted men looking for an excuse to get off their plants when they felt like it. Those with ideas, energy and initiative got a second job outside. The Union knew only one thing: how to go for money. But what was the use of a wage increase awarded because prices had risen and industry could afford it, when as soon as the increase was awarded prices rose again because industry couldn't afford it? If the Samurai had been a man of ambition, self-seeking could have carried him through and he could have built a career on serving them, but not from love. He did not—he could not—love his brothers.

And yet he had no inherited ankle scar to scratch.

 

Official, pompous things amused him. He chuckled still over the name Puroil Refining, Termitary & Grinding Works painted in large letters on control block walls. Every so often it was painted out, but it always reappeared. He repeated the name aloud to the others. Few laughed. Only the Great White Father, who had written it. He met this man on his first day at the plant, as he started on afternoon shift, just before the day workers went home.

He said, ‘There's our termitary', as they passed the administration block in the company bus, and sure enough there were the little ant-people running up and down stairs, on view behind plate-glass, arguing silently with each other or sitting impassively for hours in offices equally on display. A glass box, completely enclosed except for tiny ventilation holes. He had worked there himself before transferring to the works, but he had never seen the building this way before. A great manorhouse watching over its feudal fields and wage-serfs.

‘What about the grinding works?' he asked the Great White Father, who was exceedingly tall and bony and good-natured.

‘The whole thing is a grinding works. Each man, if he lets it happen, is ground down a little each day until, finely and smoothly honed of all eccentricities and irregularities and the originality that could save him, the grinding suddenly stops at sixty. Then they shot you out. You wait five years to qualify for the old age pension, and when you qualify you make your choice: whether to take the government one or carry on with the company pension. They're pretty close to the same thing, in cash. Under our beneficent social system, one disqualifies you from the other. Most of us won't have to worry, we're all specially picked and processed so we peg out within a year or two of retiring. The system is further safeguarded; in the last few years of service they down-grade you so your pension won't be much, anyway, in case you escape the health hazard. You see, your pension amount is tied to your earnings in your last couple of years service. Demote you, pay less. You're just an item of cost. The bigger the organization, the smaller the value of each man in it. And this one's huge.'

The very tall man's sea-blue eyes sparkled and danced so much during this short lecture that the Samurai kept listening attentively so as not to miss the joke, which he felt sure was coming. But no, the Great White Father was serious. He seemed to enjoy talking—the sort of man who enjoyed everything. Laughter patterned his deeply creased face, lined with the scars and lacerations of a varied, reprehensible, non-respectable, wholly enjoyable past.

‘You said, if a man lets it happen…'

‘If you let them grind you down, yes. You don't have to.'

‘What else?'

‘Fight 'em! Every step of the way!'

‘They've got the whip hand. What do you fight with?'

‘Smiles, a quick wit, sex, alcohol, and never say Yes to the bastards. Once you recognize the place is a prison, you're well off. The best that can be said is everyone draws an indefinite sentence. The final horror of a life behind barbed wire is mercifully withheld.' He glanced out at the high wire fence they were passing then, topped with several strands of barbed wire. ‘You see, the battleground where they beat you is in here.' His long, friendly brown hand lay relaxed on his own high, resonant chest.

But just where the Samurai was expecting him to go on, he suddenly stood. The bus stopped. Their crew was decanted like a carelessly handled bacterial culture outside the host body of the low grey control block on their growing plant. Drawn by a power unseen, the human bacteria quickly made their way inside and were apparently devoured. Gunga Din, lean, brown, small and dry, went first to the urn to check the water level and turn it on ready for the first cup of tea.

The Samurai tried to catch up with the Great White Father, and did succeed, but all he would say was: ‘That's where your Gallipoli is, in there.' And a long, bony finger prodded his chest, then was gone, busy with locker key and bootlaces.

‘What do you mean, an indefinite sentence?' He felt foolish as he persisted, but this seemed to be a man worth talking to. The rest talked interminably of second-hand cars and overtime.

‘Indefinite? You don't know when you'll get the bullet, do you?' And turned away to sniff his boots, then to scratch his right ankle. When he had his boots on, he went to wipe some dried mud on to a pile of rags in the corner, but stopped himself in time. The Glass Canoe didn't, and was busy rubbing his feet on the rags before the Great White Father tapped his shoulder.

‘Humdinger,' he said. The Glass Canoe looked down. The rags stirred and stretched, yawned and looked up.

‘Is that what you think of your fellow workers?'

‘Christ, I'm sorry, mate,' said the Glass Canoe and everyone gaped. Perhaps he was getting sick again.

On the job, events moved slowly. On the drawing board in the Admin block though, for eight hours a day, the pace was frantic until four, when the white-shirted multitude suddenly went home. Their effort might have been more wisely spread over the twenty-four hours to take advantage of the quiet of the dark hours, but white-collar men don't yet do shifts.

The tall man had another word for him when he was dressed for work. ‘No one enters those blue gates only to make gasoline, bitumen or ethylene from crude. Oil
and
excreta, that's what they fractionate here. Us and oil. With foremen, controllers, suction heads, superintendents, managers and all the rest, there's maybe forty grades. Forty grades of shit. That's all any of us are. White shirts, brown shirts, overalls, boiler suits, the lot. Shit. The place is a correction centre. The purpose of giving you a job is to keep you off the streets. It's still a penal colony. All the thousands of companies are penal sub-contractors to the Government.'

Puroil's land included a stretch of what had once been parkland. Residents' petitions, questions in Parliament, real estate developers' organized, agonized pleas, no amount of democratic pressure was able to beat a foreign oil company. A few words were altered on a piece of paper somewhere, the parkland was declared industrial land and Puroil had a foothold in New South Wales. The total of 350 acres included, on the river side, some of the swampiest land this side of Botany Bay, but mangroves were cleared, swamp flats partitioned and drained and filled until only a few dozen acres on the river bank were left in their natural state. Another hundred acres of mangroves still stood on the other side of Eel River, just down from the gasoline depot of a pretended rival of Puroil: Puroil supplied them from a nice fat silver pipeline that nuzzled into the slime of the river bed and came up again out of the ground handy to their shiny white tanks.