The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (20 page)

‘I used to work up in that rathouse,' said Stretch. He meant the warehouse. He'd had to go because of an earlier redundancy policy when the clerks were easier to manage. ‘I'll tell you about the turkeys. Did I ever tell you about the turkeys? You know the Spotted Trout—the PR boozer—well he was providoring a tanker and made a blue on his order form, this was before he was promoted to PRO; he got three thousand turkeys for their Christmas dinner. He put thirty on the order form. He meant thirty, but the stock unit was a hundred. They ate turkey for three months at sea, you should've seen the refrigerated trucks arriving at the wharf, there was a line of them half a mile long but it was too late to turn them back. The drivers wouldn't have gone, anyway. That's when they sent him up to this heap of old iron.'

‘Three thousand turkeys!' snorted one of the Europeans, opening up a bit while no bosses were about. ‘That's nothing!' Then the man, only a fortnight off naturalization, let loose with his conversation stopper.

‘I was in a small refinery inland from Buenos Aires and we have to run some lines from the refinery to the new well-head booster station, and with the new lines go the telephone. So. We need thirty thousand telephone poles. You know where they get them? Eh?'

‘Tell us, Aussie!' said the Humdinger. The Two Pot Screamer took out a piece of paper at this point and loosened his pencil in its holster.

‘They get them from Sweden!' bellowed the man. ‘Across the Atlantic Ocean, thirty thousand telephone poles forty foot long, the best pine from Sweden! Then they take these thirty thousand poles out to put them in the earth, but there is no earth. It is ground. Hard as rock. Rock-hard ground! You know what they do then? They get thirty thousand concrete poles forty foot long, and put the concrete poles in. Good! Fine! Beautiful! Then they think what is going to happen if one of the bosses comes out and sees thirty thousand pine poles forty foot long hanging round in a field and nowhere to go. So they take them out and dig a pit and burn them in the pit and cover them over. But one of the materials bosses comes. He looks up the stocks and the stock-code numbers and he can't find thirty thousand pine telephone poles in stock so he orders thirty thousand more! He didn't bother to ask and no one was going to chip him or he'd have got them arseholed for insolence and insubordination, so they finish up with another thirty thousand pine telephone poles from Sweden and they're still there!'

 

GO BACK, DAVID The Old Lamplighter took over duty in a blaze of light. The bed hut was inclined to be dark even in the day, so she switched on all lights.

‘What I won't do with the lights on I won't do at all,' she said.

It was a puritan thing, this insistence on seeing what she did and making others see what they were doing. Fortunately for her, she had never been pushed into the excesses of feeling that were explored by the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Neither her men nor her own occasional lusts had put her in any danger of self-revulsion. Not even the newly acquired skills of the men who were led by the hand into the magic garden prepared by the Sorcerer's Apprentice and who took to it well. Some did not, of course, and went away scared and ashamed, too bemused to notice her take out the blue notebook and write up her sensations.

But the usual effect of the light on men who were accustomed to sex in darkness—with wives, maybe, who didn't want their faces and filled the dark with faces from the movies or the past—was a bracing, tonic one. They felt no need of refinements beyond the stark surroundings of the bed shed. The bareness of the corrugated iron, the one mirror, the Dettol dish, the nail-holes, these made the women's bodies softer and more lush to prisoners whose hands daily patted the throbbing sides of pump bodies, searching out vibrations that hinted that machinery had been run nearly to destruction, or wrestling in six-man teams with crowbars and levers on hot valves that didn't want to move.

She went to the door and yelled. ‘Who's lucky?'

‘Sump's first!' a voice came.

‘Tell him shake a leg!' There was a sound of beer cans thrown into the wire crate the Volga Boatman brought home one night. Just standing there empty in the park, he explained. No use to anyone there.

She turned her back on the light, as if she had company, and cleaned some lettuce from under her top denture. There was something more; she explored, pushed with her tongue, it was not enough. Irritably, she took both dentures out and tongued her gums. Several tomato seeds and half a peanut. She finished the peanut.

The Sumpsucker. Him again. She had been a model at his old camera club, where most of the members had no cameras and there was a big turnover in models. He was married then. Keep her barefoot and pregnant, was his motto, but his wife got sick of both and left him after only two pregnancies, one of which she aborted. The first pregnancy was at high school now.

She applied a little gin to her bottom, and spread the jellied poison over her diaphragm which was the largest size. She was a big woman, whichever way you looked.

There was no knock, but the Sumpsucker was in the room suddenly, undoing buttons and reciting.

His eyes flashed narrowly either side of his long, lumpy nose. He sniffed at the gin.

She recoiled, in spite of her vast experience. She never liked chirpy customers; she preferred to have them approach diffidently and with scruples, then encourage their good spirits herself. Motherly inclinations.

‘You still use that thing? Get with the strength and use the pill!'

How would he understand? The pill brought on her fits again.

‘This is the strength. The pill costs too much.'

‘You got the cash, spend some of it!'

‘I put on too much weight with it and it turns me off the job.'

‘Well?'

‘Well what?'

‘Put it in! Let's commit spermicide!'

‘I hate gabby men.'

‘Do you hate money?' Crinkling the dollars in his trousers, which he threw on the floor. He was very crude about money.

‘I believe the widow's house is chock-a-block with big black drums.' She couldn't resist having a shot at him.

‘Only the back and sides. There's room on the front lawn still.'

Through the Sumpsucker's performance she talked incessantly. She always refused to co-operate with him exactly—she said he hadn't paid enough money for what he wanted—and there was his smell.

‘It's funny when I'm home and I have to tell the kids to wash their hands after they play with the dog. Here I am with you dirty dogs all day and half the time I eat my lunch with no wash.'

Her words came down from her mouth and through the mind of the Sumpsucker like trains through an empty station.

‘Is the Samurai on today?' she asked, but getting no answer, pulled away from him until he answered.

‘Yes. He's in,' said the Sump, and fastened on to her again. Why had she said that? she wondered. What did she care for men? Just the same, why didn't the Samurai come down to the Home Beautiful for the girls?

Sumpy let her talk.

‘It's funny. The family knows I do this. Remember the cruiser at Bobbin Head?' She grabbed his ears and shook his head.

‘Sure. I remember.' She was a big woman, six feet tall and very strong. If she had been a man the Sump would have been afraid of her. ‘You don't still have fits, do you?'

‘No. Only a couple a year, now. Do you really remember Bobbin Head?'

‘My back remembers it. We were having a tread below decks and your son David comes looking for you. Where's Mum? he yells and instead of waiting for an answer he jumps down the hatch right in the middle of my back. Hullo, Mum, he says. And you say, Go back, David. Do I remember? Neither of us could get our breath back. “Go back, David!”' He mimicked her voice.

She was gratified. Her son had been worried she might go into a fit, but the strange thing was the fits had come less often after he had seen her at it. Strange how you feel your children have a hold on you, forcing you to put on a good front.

‘I'll have to have a shave soon.' She glanced at her legs, black with stubble. Her armpit patch was long. A woman has so much maintenance. Men were lucky. Just their faces. Forgetting the Sumpsucker was there, she eased up one buttock.

‘Sorry.'

‘You won't take the Humdinger's crown. He can clear a room.'

Reflectively she picked her nose with her little finger. The other fingers enlarge your nostrils, her mother told her. You don't want to look like a native, do you? Mentally, she consulted her calendar. The twelfth. Should be on the twenty-fifth. That meant five days off work. If she could make sure of ten men a day until—that meant she wouldn't notice the drop in money.

‘You finished?'

‘I was finished back at Bobbin Head.'

‘Why didn't you say something? I could be making a dollar! What do you want for five bucks, bed and breakfast?' She shook him off like a helpless puppy.

 

SITTING PRETTY Cheddar Cheese was dying and it showed. Those who saw him mistook his leukemia colour for shiftworker pallor, but the Brown Snake knew. The man still did his work, which required effort only now and then. He tired quickly. There was no way to sack him that could ensure an escape for Puroil from the most ruinous publicity. Leukemia-pity was the fashion then and newspapers might conceivably have published a story of cruelty to a leukemia-sufferer despite the threat of withdrawal of Puroil advertising from the newspapers and the radio and television stations they owned.

He tried to have enough energy on hand once a week to visit the girls in the bed hut. This was his turn with the Old Lamplighter. She didn't know about his blood. The doctors called it leukemia so he would have a word for it, but really it was a rare and extremely interesting disease; like leukemia in that it was terminal. They had been very excited when he took his blood along to the researchers, and enthusiastic when he agreed to sell.

As soon as he was settled, he said, ‘I'm sitting pretty! I sell my blood to a scientist!'

‘You ought to keep some yourself.' He was a pale cheese colour; skin like wax fruit, almost transparent, not as shiny.

‘I don't sell it all.'

‘You're a bit yellow round the gills. I wouldn't sell mine if I looked like you.'

‘I get ten dollars a pint. There's maggots in it.'

‘Urk!'

‘Little ones. Too small to bother you.'

‘Still urk.'

‘I'm going for fifteen dollars. Then twenty.'

‘You just take the ten, never mind putting the bite on him.'

‘It's a her. A research scientist.'

‘You ought to give it free. I used to be a blood donor.'

‘Give! Free! You're talking to a shift worker! Nothing for nothing!'

He was so put out by her callous attitude to money that he shot his bolt then and there just to get away from her.

6
TOP PEOPLE

THE MAN BORN TO BE BRANCH MANAGER A manager does his work by example; the way he looks is important. It was considered by the management midwives who assisted at the Wandering Jew's birth as a manager that the expression of the face was significant. It had been an article of faith in their own management training courses and they handed it down.

The Wandering Jew had been issued with a set of company masks for the purpose of setting his expression in approved patterns, and now set out to find the appropriate one. He knew the face gives no idea of what is in the mind and is a mirror of the experience and prejudices of the onlooker, but policy was policy.

‘Let no one in,' he remarked to the secretary who was nominally his but whom in practice he shared with any other of the Clearwater executives that needed work done. Not even a secretary to himself. It would be different when he'd done his stint round the refineries, and was elevated to the Australian board. Then who knows? The London board? He was still young, there was always the lottery chance that he could make the world board. The lucky seven in charge of the second largest company in the world.

It was a tiny refinery by world standards, but one of his predecessors had made the London board. The Wandering Jew did not have his style; he'd been a gentleman, a man the prisoners trusted better than their Unions, who knew every man by name and not only knew but spoke each man's name. Actually took the trouble to speak to prisoners. A man who visited their homes if they were in trouble. They went soft at the mention of his name and spoke proudly for years after of this man they remembered as a man remembers a favourite schoolmaster.

The Wandering Jew took out his Convincing Worry-Earnest Application mask, pressed it into his features for the necessary minutes. It would last all day. One part of his preparation for this job had been an injection into his bloodstream of the main chemical additives to Puroil products: another was an injection of a plastic putty designed to help him retain whatever shape was moulded on him. It could keep his body in attitudes prescribed by top management, no matter what his own natural unregenerate urges dictated.

His ancestors had no connection with convicts and he was not a Jew but because of a chameleon component in his blood he began looking Jewish as soon as he was nicknamed and developed deep indentations above both ankles. Most Australians had the scar on only one.

 

The new plant was being started up again; it must go well. That confounded rotor had been straightened at Cockatoo dockyard. Why should a man's elevation to the Board rest on a rotor? Why couldn't manufacturers make their products sturdier? The thought of the recent recall of half a million new cars from several manufacturers on account of faulty material was a little help, but not much.