The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (50 page)

 

THE ORGANIZATION MAN The Wandering Jew was frightened at first, but the beer relaxed him.

‘Who is the leader of these rebels?' And the Great White Father answered him.

‘Revels, man. Revels.'

‘What's behind this notice I see glued up to plant walls everywhere?'

‘Puroil 1852 or the other one?'

‘The other one.'

‘Ah,' said the Great White Father, and recited, rolling the words out, ‘Men that were once bludgers and thieves are now become eminent foremen and controllers. Some are Suction Heads now who before were rabble-rousers and whisperers of rumours, still with the same evil faces which now shine with sweat above white shirts and semi-stiff collars. Those there are who run and hide when no man approacheth, only the Wandering Jew. And this, too, is a matter for wonder, for this Wandering Jew is not as other Jews but goeth about unpersecuted, rather persecuting others; and persecuting in the name of the only free men: the far-off anonymous shareholders and owners of the world. For no man can be free whose livelihood is on the line every time he takes a stand for his own opinion, or insists on having his self-respect whole or retaining a little human dignity. Even an animal is allowed to pee in peace; even a dog is allowed to finish his dinner undisturbed.

‘Things there are that were once men, crawling under the plant structures, carrying their heads forward like rodents. From the sagging belts around their guts swing the shrunken heads of their victims. Honest men wait in hiding for them to pass by, carrying lumps of mild steel.'

 

BLOOD BROTHERS ‘Did you write that?'

‘No. We have an author in our midst; a maker of notes, a scribbler, a signwriter, a stealer of other men's lives, lines and lies.'

‘Who?'

‘You're not advanced enough in drink for me to tell you. He's writing down everything that happens here. All the stupidities. I bet your understrappers don't tell you those things. Anyway, let's think of something cheerful. I'll sing for you, and you'll appreciate it when I stop.'

He sang, to the tune of ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus':

His voice a pleasant bass. The Wandering Jew, under his blindfold, tried to gauge whether these men were desperate enough to harm him. They had been a little rough getting him out of his car, but probably no more than necessary to persuade him to go quietly.

‘Did Simsy come to the party?' asked the Humdinger. ‘He was supposed to be going to give us a quote on that heap of junk up in the Puroil yard—that cracker thing.'

‘How about swearing in the Wandering Jew as a blood brother?' asked Loosehead, who got brilliant ideas rarely. The others winked at each other and said enthusiastically, ‘That's it! Reckon he deserves it. When he's a blood brother he won't be giving away any secrets.'

On the spot the Great White Father thought up a ritual of splendid mumbo-jumbo, somewhere between that of the Masons and the Knights of the Southern Cross, two secret societies whose rituals were widely known. When it came to the final swearing of brotherhood, they actually cut into his arm with a little penknife the Great White Father had on his key ring, and pretended to mingle the blood from his arm with some beer from their cans. They pushed him to his knees.

‘There we are. How about if we raise our brother out of a state of darkness now?' yelled the Great White Father. And in reply the assembly, except for those lunatics still playing cricket in the distance and whose wild shouts could be heard, responded with a completely valueless mass affirmation of brotherhood. With a flourish, the blindfold was lowered so that it became a sort of scarf round the Wandering Jew's neck.

‘Now you are one of my twelve. Go not in the way of the brass and avoid the haunts of the trusties, the ambitious, those for whom the word of Puroil is enough.' This was a strange thing to say to a manager, but no one minded.

With rough ceremony, he was yanked to his feet by the scarf, blinking in the strong daylight, and forced to shake hands with the entire crew. Each gave him a bone-crusher grip.

‘What are you going to do when the mangroves come down?' he inquired in retaliation. The silence was thick. Only the Great White Father was unmoved.

‘It'll happen some day, boys and girls. We'll move some day, plans are being considered.'

But this idea was almost too much for his simple flock: they found it hard to defer worry. They also found it hard to defer drinking and the Great White Father wisely gave the order that anyone found with an empty glass would be thrown in the river.

‘Let's have some entertainment,' he said. ‘How about the Sandpiper singing for us?'

She obliged with twenty-one verses of Abdul the Bulbul, Emir, in the locker-room vernacular.

The Wandering Jew, well on in liquor now, sang a little Termitary ditty. ‘I wish I was', it was called, and the verses went from ‘I wish I was a little Eskimo', through ‘I wish I was a fly upon the wall', to ‘I wish I was an automatic lathe', and as last verse, ‘I wish I was a chair in the typing pool'.

The assembly picked the words up quickly enough to join in the refrain. He considered giving them the Rugby Union song, but reflected that they were more likely Soccer or Rugby League supporters, being industrial prisoners of the lowest grade. Even sport had its class distinctions.

‘Thank you, Wandering Jew!' shouted the great man joyfully. ‘A man who can drink and sing a song is not all bad. Feel free to wander among us, but remember, that way lies a ducking in the mud of Eel River.' He pointed the way of the track to the river. The Wandering Jew made a vague sign that meant he would behave, but after wandering about watching the party-people he found he could not approach them. There was a barrier still up in spite of the levelling alcohol, so he gradually made his way back to the Great White Father and eventually these two sat down together in a place where the sun angled down between a gap in the branches overhead, and drank steadily and talked.

‘Why is a man like you so thin? I expected a man five by five with fat, not seven by two of bone.'

‘It's worry over my next drink. It's because I never eat. It's because I couldn't do my falling-flat trick with a belly—I'd roll like a barrel or rock like a seesaw. How did you get on with my flock?'

‘I make them uneasy.'

‘Yes. You see that here Jack's considered not only as good as his master, but likely a damn sight better. To these people, riches and power are corrupt.'

‘And if they had the chance at my job?'

‘They couldn't stick it. They don't have your need to impose yourself on the world about you. You have drives they know not of: drives to avoid poverty and subordination. They don't. They have fewer fears and fewer wants than you. It was their condition of wantlessness that made me despair of their ever bettering their condition by their own efforts. I came to the conclusion that democracy was not for them. They aren't capable of competing on equal terms with the rest of the world. The good God above simply made them a little slower than their brothers, a little duller, a little less worried about survival. Your urge to survive and, having survived, to get ahead, awakes no echoes in them. They hear the words, but there is no answer inside.'

‘How did a man like you come to be occupied with people like this?' asked the Wandering Jew.

‘The poorest and humblest and nakedest are more comfortable to be with. They have no extra skin for a man to penetrate. No veneer. And the life I live, like this, with no worry and plenty of grog and being the Great White Father to the little people in my little pond—it's very satisfying. I refuse to compete. I have only one life, my friend, and it's not going to be taken up with futile things I don't like doing. I'll go down with them into the past. They know there's no place for them in the future.'

 

HERESY IN LOW PLACES ‘Why have you let the micrometer and the nickel-alloy tools and tension wrenches be replaced by the sledgehammer?'

‘I don't follow.'

‘Months ago I saw fitters working on your German gas-compressor up there at the cracker, aligning the machine by bashing the bed at the turbine end with sledgehammers.'

‘You're pulling my leg. All you've been saying is a leg-pull.'

They both laughed.

‘And all this effort and conflict to put a bit of gasoline in the cars of citizens so they can wander aimlessly round thinking they're seeing Australia every time they get beyond the suburbs.'

‘You talk as if it's childish,' chided the Wandering Jew. Not that he cared. Technological progress was here to stay. He thought in these terms, as if progress were an edifice men had decided to construct.

‘No, I don't mean that only Puroil is puerile: I mean the whole vast undirected effort. A means of making an internal combustion engine is found, so one is made. This is ridiculous. Where is the thought of what will happen when it is made? This thing is fitted to a body with wheels and there are no laws that say it can't be given to a private citizen. So it is given. Fantastic. We change ourselves with every change in our technology. A way is found to make any number of unrelated things—so they are made. Crazy. Automation will help us, they say. But who is us? These poor devils? You and me? Or a few people who are only too keen to get rid of human components? We are allowing these random things, these inventions springing up like mushrooms in a night, to dictate the course of our own history, when we have the means to direct it now to any ends we wish. If we can think of any. We sit back as if all this were the will of God and nothing could be done. As if everything new were a gift from a spirit world. Superstition. My quarrel is that because a thing is discovered, use is made of it. I know that in the course of using the artefacts, new artefacts are made or needed or hinted at, but why allow this random, mushrooming growth to dictate the movement of history? Methods of invention have been invented. You can slow the machine down or speed it up, give us longer or shorter lives, make us different people from the genes up, but not just allow everything to happen by chance. Chance isn't the only sort of god. We can build the sort of world we want, and if we make mistakes, start again. Climates can be altered, new rivers gouged out. We could act like gods, get into history and make it for ourselves rather than watch and wait in fear and trembling. We're in the game, we're no longer spectators. The future cannot only be made and predicted, it can be planned. Totalitarian? Perhaps. But at least a dictatorship by people: what we have now is dictatorship by blind events.'

 

ARE YOU ONE? From these promising beginnings might have come a few words which in the hands of some young pampered genius might have been fashioned into a key to unlock the secrets of the future, or an ignition key to start the rusting, neglected engine of hope, but unfortunately for these vagrant, irresponsible, unsubsidized wishes and unfortunately for the peace and goodwill of the establishment, one of the less civilized of the drinkers chose that moment to rush up to the Wandering Jew and yell at him, ‘We're not inside the barbed wire now, you're just crap out here!'

The Great White Father didn't demand an apology from the Outside Fisherman for this breach of etiquette, for he believed men say exactly what they mean even if they mean different things at different times, and he encouraged them to stand by what they said, no matter how stupid it was.

‘Take it easy, Fisho,' he said. ‘If he's crap outside the gates, what are we?'

‘That's all right,' the Wandering Jew assured his host. ‘I am not affected by either tact or brutality.' He said this so grandly that the Great White Father looked at his glass. Empty again. He signalled to the Ant for a fresh jug. The Outside Fisherman, not yet startled by his audacity in yelling at the Manager, had staggered away to bury his teeth in the Sandpiper's neck. It was years since his own wife had an unwrinkled neck, it was such a belly-warming pleasure to mouth a young girl.

Out of the blue, Ambrose said in a loud voice to the Wandering Jew, ‘We're all against homosexuals here.'

‘What's wrong, Ambrose?' asked the Great White Father.

‘This nice chap is one,' he declared flatly. His beer rocked in a sort of counter rhythm to the motion of his body.

‘Attention, everyone,' yelled the Sandpiper. ‘We've found one!' Movement stopped. The Humdinger took the Wandering Jew by the shirt-front and glared into his glassed eyes.

‘Are you one?' he roared.

‘No!' shouted the Wanderer.

‘He's not one,' said the Humdinger and released him. Everyone was relieved. The party flowed again. Ambrose wasn't satisfied, but the Wandering Jew lurched a few steps to the north-west and Ambrose lost sight of him, for he could only see straight ahead.

 

SELF-PITY The Two Pot Screamer, referred to earlier by the Great White Father as a stealer of men's lives and lies, had taken a few notes, but alcohol had overtaken his writing-hand. His body was propped by one wall of the bed hut, notebook clutched weakly in his left hand. He had sense enough to put it into his inside pocket, but not enough to catch sight of a sheet of paper that dropped from it.

Another man did, who had slyly taken care not to drink too fast. He picked up the paper, unfolded it and read: