The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (6 page)

The mangroves grew thicker and thicker, the path made sharply angled turns. It was the only solid ground into the mangroves, all else was wet mud flats. The water reached it at high tide, enough to keep it swampy. There was another entrance from a little spur road off Boomerang Street; only these two men knew it.

Some of the equipment for the buildings had been brought in the secret way, though most had been carried piece by piece from the banks of the Eel River. Certain contractors' corrugated iron and timber frame sheds had been left out in the open too long. They disappeared overnight one Christmas Day and were re-erected facing each other deep in the swamp where the mangroves were tallest. Three large sheds, with a courtyard in the centre. One for drinking and eating, one for comfort and one for rest.

Cinderella went to the comfort shed. It was her day on duty and up to ten men would be deafened if she felt super. When she felt super she hooted triumphantly like a great liner leaving port. When she was normal she hooted like a cheeky little tug. When she was off-colour she could only manage an owl hoot and perhaps this was the most nerve-racking of all. The hoots started when the men started and continued till they finished. Right in the ear. She didn't know why she did it. She would make about forty dollars today, maybe fifty. The Great White Father had experimented with giving the girls a guaranteed wage, but it didn't work. The Sleeping Princess slept too long, and there were complications with the others. He let them earn what they could, five dollars a throw. The men wanted a straight go, mostly. No frills, not too much fuss and quick as possible. He tried to liven things up by suggesting variety but they were in such a hurry to get it off their chests they settled for the usual.

‘You've just come off the plant. Why don't you have a snore?' said Volga kindly, watching Cinderella climb the step into the shed. Her heels were dirty as usual. Never mind, the legs were a beautiful shape and clean shaven.

‘I might do that,' said the Great White Father obligingly, seeing him eye Cinderella. Volga liked to be first. Even so, he'd worry that she might have stopped on the way to work. He had a puritan streak: it accounted for his weightlifting, his diets, his regular routines. He was as proud of his strength as Uncle Tom of his master.

The Great White Father of his people entered the empty sleep hut, threw himself miserably on a stretcher, said, ‘Hell, do I have to die again?', then slept for two hours, two hours in which the course of life revived at the hideaway. Volga visited Cinderella, who kept her shoes on all the time and hooted like a departing liner into his right ear. He opened a can in the drink hut, then rowed back to the Puroil wharf. He was on duty.

The refinery opened its mouth and swallowed 750 more people. They were day-workers who sat at desks or maintained equipment or stored spare parts so that our 260 heroes of labour could operate the production end. Unfortunately for our metaphor, the refinery took in its crude oil and production supplies at the other end, so that if its true mouth extended down into Clearwater Bay, the employees must have entered the other end of the refinery's alimentary tract, for that was the end that discharged the company's products, suitably refined, into the waiting arms of the public.

Men came and went, the number of cans dwindled, Cinderella racked up more customers and her hoots diminished to the tortured sound of a weary owl, while at the Refining Termitary and Grinding Works man was alienated from his true essence; he became functional in the service of a handful of far-off anonymous shareholders. His labour, his opinions, his family were for eight or more hours this day, depending on his local status, owned as a means of wealth by someone not himself. It would have been no use to tell him that instead of serving a few shareholders of great wealth, he might be privileged to serve the common good of millions. He would still be serving someone not himself. He would be constantly at war within himself; his deepest instincts of self-preservation, selfishness, greed and hate constantly at loggerheads with his collective, anonymous, meaningless duties to a society too large and varied to be intelligible to him.

Those who took time off from this servitude to visit the mangroves, their energy went into talk and drinking, and when even this got too much for them and the spectre of lifelong bondage to an enterprise they couldn't understand rose up terrifyingly before their eyes, they retired to Cinderella's shed for comfort in the eternal soft arms, between the everlasting breasts and bore with fortitude her continual hoots.

Let us not heap reproaches on Puroil Refining Termitary and Grinding Works. No matter who owned the labour and the life of any of these workers and no matter how many times they switched owners, they would be in the same position. The whole world is Puroil Refining, Termitary and Grinding Works. Except for little outposts of a better order, hidden away from official eyes. Outposts like the Great White Father's.

We know man is alienated from his true function, but what is he? What is his true function? That is the hardest question. What should he do? What should he try to be?

 

ONE DAY AT A TIME Late into the morning, the Puroil men spoke of what seemed to them to be the past, but which swirled in great gusts around them as the present.

The Outside Fisherman, with his prominent drinker's lip and long silver hair always covered with a hat, was amusing Cinderella, who could be persuaded to spend some of her money and have a beer now and then, with a little story of the nearly finished cracking plant.

He was close to sixty and had been looking forward for years to getting his gold watch. His thirty years' service would be up two days before he was due to retire. There would be a regular slap-up feast attended by three or four long-service men and forty to fifty office staff to make it look well attended. The decaying prisoners would be presented with reliable gold watches and the freeloaders would clap. He would just make it.

‘There's the phone inside and here's the wall. Like that. So? You couldn't get at it. What did I do? I says to the Good Shepherd, why not make a hole in the wall, nice and neat and put the phone on a little ledge in the middle and you could get at it from both sides? OK. The Good Shepherd always sees sense where there's sense and he gets the contractor to bash a hole in the wall. Comes knock-off and a new shift, we pass the information on about my idea, but the maintenance men are in a different division. They don't get any messages, so they wall it up again nice and neat. Night shift does nothing. Next day we bash the hole in again, maintenance patch it up. Three weeks that went on.'

Cinderella shook her head, finished her can, went to the toilet and back to the comfort shed, open again for business.

Who will condemn them for trying to imitate their leader and be earthy, loud, mean, generous, shifty, gay? For being sometimes fascinated by being alive? For wanting to be alive in no other age than this one for the simple reason that they were workers, slaves from time immemorial and therefore at home in all ages.

Once they stepped ashore on the stone-slabbed bank and made their pilgrimage through the thick mangroves and entered the magic circle, they couldn't help enjoying each day as if there had been no fall.

 

SILVER BELL The Great White Father experimented with special calls on the Puroil steam siren, but the management was alerted by an ill-disposed prisoner, so the prince of prisoners commandeered a bell from a museum. It was once ship's bell on a pleasure craft plying from Sydney to Broken Bay the century before.

It was a beautiful thing—its tone like highly polished silver—and rang clearly but not loudly from the dense mangroves over the river and on a fine day could be heard at the blue gates. It was rung when a new girl came on, and in emergencies. So far there were no emergencies.

It reminded some of the prisoners of a church bell and the Two Pot Screamer suggested the hideaway be called The Church in the Wild Wood or The Refuge of the Latter Day Saints, but the Great White Father didn't want his underground movement contaminated by association with religion, which was famous for making men kiss and polish their chains.

 

THE STINK OF SLAVERY At nine o'clock the Great White Father woke and it was a new day. He strolled into the drink hut and swallowed a can of Gold Label.

‘Had a dream about atoms,' he announced. ‘Some with single bonds, some with double and others, like carbon, with four bonds. I was just on the point of making a tremendous discovery that would tie up the behaviour and the future of man with the theory of chemical bonding, when what d'you think stopped me?' He stopped impressively, standing at the head of the trestle table with one can of Gold Label high in the air.

‘You got up for a wee-wee,' ventured Desert Head, aiming a crack at his own skull to disperse his constant halo of mosquitoes.

‘No,' said the Great White Father. ‘I remembered this is Animal Week and I've got to take the ferret for a run!' He bounded outside and flew in at Cinderella's front door, his long legs only touched the ground twice between the two sheds. Thump! He descended on the bed, there was a second of quiet, then he came crashing back into the drink hut with a fine disregard for his limbs and years.

‘Who's been eating salmon and onion sandwiches?' he bellowed.

A small voice piped up, ‘Me.' It was the Angry Ant, squatting quietly in a dark corner of the shed after visiting Cinderella. He loved the hoots, he thought she pretended with the others and he was the only one who actually forced the hoots out of her.

‘Got any left, Angry?' asked the Great White Father.

‘Half a one,' said the Angry Ant. ‘Here, take it. I'll starve.' The Great White Father accepted the sandwich, shoved it all into his cavernous mouth, chewed a couple of times, then swallowed.

‘Must fight fire with fire' he said, and bounded back to Cinderella singing at the top of his voice the first two lines of the Workers' Anthem,

to the great hymn-tune Aberystwyth. The hooting revived immediately. Urgent, vibrant, triumphant.

Humdinger amused himself by creeping up on each of his friends and shoving his fingers under their noses. They had all been at the same girl but there was something objectionable about being reminded of it.

But even in these surroundings, where the better life had a chance to flourish and where their souls had a chance to grow fat to resist the daily grinding at the works, even here, out of sight of industry, seemingly so safe from the pestilence of work amid the pleasures and luxury they brought with them and renewed daily, even here they took the smell of death with them. Death by plague. They thought the Great White Father was joking when he came back from Cinderella and told them that while he was on the nest he had conceived more ideas for improving the hideaway; naming the sheds properly, painting inside and out and putting a roof over the little courtyard between the sheds. The work would be pleasant because it was for themselves, but it was still work and the smell of it had followed them even here.

‘Well, home to Mum and into bed!' yelled the Humdinger, confident someone would supply him with the reply he wanted. Sure enough. The Sumpsucker poked his head round the door and called, ‘Home to bed and into Mum! If you're lucky you'll get home before she gets out of bed. That's what I do with my widow!' He would also take home a non-returnable polymer catalyst drum—empty—as a present for her. She had no use for the drums, but felt he should pay something for the use of her facilities. The drums were black and three feet high and filled half her backyard.

His widow was not offended, like many of the younger wives, by the sour gas smell that penetrated the prisoners' clothing. Sumpy got a warm reception no matter what his personal condition. Many men, though, whose wives were unwilling to accept the fact that they, just as much as their husbands, were employees of a foul-smelling refinery, were compelled by the boss in the home to keep their street clothes separate from their work clothes, which were denied entry to the family wardrobes. They changed for work in the laundry. As if the fact of their subordination, their dependence on a large industrial enterprise, was something not to be admitted in private.

 

CHRISTENING ‘Prisoners all!' intoned the Great White Father. ‘All of us were born in this industrial prison. Maybe not in the Termitary and Grinding Works, but in suburban wings of the same complex. It is safer for most of us to be shackled in our chains than to be free to fend for ourselves.'

He punched a can.

‘What we have to do is make our little hole in the barbed wire and creep out now and again to our hidey hole where we can forget we are born prisoners and will die prisoners, a little place where there are no bosses and no commands, where nothing we say is taken down and used against us.'

He finished the can.

‘This is our hole in the wall!' Cheering and a great opening of cans. Another can was slid along the table top. It stopped near his great brown bony hand.

‘With the Home Beautiful to come to, life can be made bearable!'

He had christened his hideaway and headquarters.

‘The Home Beautiful!' The flimsy hut vibrated to the toast. They drank gladly.

 

ANARCHY AND ALCOHOL ‘Friends and fellow crabs nestling in the warm armpits and other smelly crevices of Puroil, I have news for you! I am at the end of a period of psychic research, under the influence of an old miracle drug.'

He held aloft a can of Gold Label, solemnly drained it. Cinderella hooted ten yards away like a busy tug in a fog.

‘Those who have gone before us are malicious, waiting above our heads to destroy us. You see, they have arranged the world so that we are more closely prisoned than they were. Every year the screws of supervision pinch us tighter. Even to those of us who are more free than others, they have given an awareness that sharpens our sense of confinement. Everything that spreads this human influence wider over the earth, spreads wider the net that meshes us in. It's our pleasure to escape from this net as often as we can—through the cyclone wire or off the end of the wharf—to our glorious Home.'