The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (28 page)

‘Then they really started on me. The doctors. Strapped down struggling, needles, shock treatment, evil spirits, my soul leaving my body out through the bone of my skull—the top of my head was tender most of the time—I came to believe in the devil, I had strange and peculiar thoughts, terrible filthy words came into my head and stayed there for weeks. I could never remember the words and when I asked afterwards the words they told me were too silly and tame to be right. Words no one ever used before. Afraid to be indoors, yet the windstorms outside could have suffocated anyone, everyone was watching me and I blushed, which is something I haven't done for years, I had visions that told me I was born from a fire and sent here to be a special agent of God. I could hardly stop myself going to pieces.

‘At times I think I'm no good at all. I haven't lived the right sort of life. I get urges to do shocking acts in public, as if I must injure myself or someone else. My sins are unpardonable. I brood over them until they hatch out into the light. I deserve severe punishment. They convinced me of that. They convinced me of everything bad about myself.'

He looked down quickly to see if his clothes were on.

 

THERAPY ‘Now that I'm well and truly churned up inside I ought to try and get out of all this misery. I'll try to float these sharp thoughts off just as if they were little puff-balls bouncing off the top of my head. Or they might float out through the back of my skull under my hair. If it helps me I'll keep doing it—even in hospital next time they pull me in off the street.'

Day, which had remained respectfully outside, was blind as a madman with mist and cloud. On the turbine landing men sweated, working a foot from red-hot glowing 48-inch flue headers, their sweat drying quickly, faces burning; cursing the company, the process, themselves, and their mates who disappeared in emergencies or wouldn't get off their bottoms.

 

RATIONALE ‘But why should I expect to be happy and comfortable all the time? Once upon a time a man could stare out a window or yell at people or have a fight or walk off by himself without all sorts of bastards rushing out to drive away your bad mood or lock you up alone with it. You've got to be desperate sometimes. You've got to fight and be alone and have stinking things happen to you now and then. Anyone happy all the time is mad. I'm not mad: just nervous. If you're in good health you must get unhappy whenever you've got good reason. Without having to apologize or be anxious about it.

‘Why should I try to adjust to the way everyone else is? Who says they're worth adjusting to? I'll be myself. Use my own brain, push my own talents to their capacity. What does it matter if I'm not popular with anyone?'

 

DREAMS Inside the Glass Canoe the weather changed again. In a sudden mood of elation he went straight on down to the river Eel and ferried across to the Home Beautiful. He was welcomed there only by the Great White Father, no one else would give him the time of day. He was not aware of this. If he felt like hailing his workmates cheerfully, he did so, and straightaway thought how cheerful everyone was. If he didn't, he was absorbed in himself and didn't notice others.

The Great White Father had got some small-leafed ivy from one of Puroil's ornamental garden walls and was training it over the huts. He didn't reject the Glass Canoe's offer of help, but allowed him to plant a few dozen of the rooted cuttings provided by the gardener. After half an hour the Glass Canoe had begun to remember vaguely that it was his own idea to use the ivy, and he thought out a few modifications to the Great White Father's plans. After an hour he was convinced of it. This renewed his confidence and from that point he lost interest in the actual work and was easily drawn into the clutches of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. He took her techniques and manipulations for flattery. He didn't mind what she wrote in her notebook. He was used to people writing down what he said and did. He jumped up the steps to the drink hut.

‘Here's the Glass Canoe!' said Bubbles who was squatting naked in one corner of the hut ready for his encounter with the Apprentice. ‘He'll tell you! Didn't Big Bits stay away on night shift?'

‘Don't ask me,' said the Glass Canoe. ‘I'm not the pay office. I don't keep a check on my workmates.' This was untrue; he was often seen going through the time cards, looking for workmates who had exceeded the overtime limit.

‘Well, he did, anyway,' grumbled Bubbles. ‘And he got his mate—I won't mention names—to clock him in and out. When the Enforcer kept coming in and asking Where's Big Bits?—they told him He's still out there.—What, still? said the Enforcer. He's been out for six nights now.—You keep missing him, they said. He had to go away, there was nothing else he could do. A whole seven days' night shift and he got paid!' He shook his head a long time, filled with envy. ‘That's what I call a mate.'

The Glass Canoe bought some cans and settled down to drink, dreaming of promotion, efficiency, progress, greatness. The Great White Father would never be able to wean him from these dreams and Puroil would never dream of fulfilling them.

9
LIGHT ON A DARK NIGHT

GOING HOME IN THE DARK Going out of the refinery at night, hanging their heads, straggling like convicts loosely chained, the lowest grade of prisoners looked in on the occasional parties held in the dining-room where staff men and girls ate from buffet tables lobsters, roast beef and soft pink hams, stood around drinking from dainty glasses and talking of Puroil and its concerns and the details of their lives daily given for the company in return for monthly bank deposits.

The men passing by in the dark were conscious of their own badges. Their red necks, heavy hands and every word that proceeded out of their mouths, their lack of interest in office affairs, their partial interest in the actual messy business of refining—these were inseparable from them and an insuperable barrier to intercourse with the elegant creatures from the Termitary. It was another world in there. Office people didn't care what the process was on which they and the prisoners depended: their skills could be transferred to the refining of toffee or the manufacture of hearing aids with no significant difference. The less they knew about oil the cleaner they felt. The men down on the job never understood this—they sneered at accounting people for not knowing refining processes, never realizing that business people didn't need to know and certainly didn't want to know anything but through-put and production figures, sales and stocks on hand, costs and revenue, payroll-tax and salary. If there can be said to be a literary culture and a scientific, there must certainly be a business culture in which it is necessary to be able to define money, recite a selected passage of company law and to be inward with the Banking Act of '45. The men going home in the dark belonged to none of these cultures.

 

A GRIN IN EVERY GRAVE At the water's edge, waves muttered little asides and slapped the stone slabs in irritation. Out on the bay, the hop and splash of mullet swimming for their lives. At night the money plants of the refinery were covered in lights; for miles they were Christmas trees on the dark plains of industry. From cars and house windows people admired their fairy grace and pointed happily to them as sights to be seen.

Coming out of the dark it was heartening to see the light in the mangroves. At the Home Beautiful, Blue Hills came on the Great White Father talking to the Glass Canoe. He went past them to get a can of beer and the Glass Canoe dated him savagely, making him jump. He knew the man did this in order to interrupt the Great White Father so that a third person wouldn't hear him giving advice to the Glass Canoe. Blue Hills had left this sort of pride behind him; he waited frankly for the Great White Father to finish so that he could tell his own troubles.

The Glass Canoe's manoeuvre did not silence the Great White Father. ‘You want me to continue this some other time?'

‘No, no! There's no privacy about it. I have nothing to hide.' The doctors impressed on him that he must never again seek privacy, he must confess and be open about everything. With everyone. Privacy was unhealthy.

‘Good,' said the Great White Father in his deep, dry, crackling voice. ‘So you've got high blood pressure now. OK. Don't fight it. It is you.'

‘Don't fight it? You mean let it kill me?'

‘It is you. It's like Puroil. Take the kicks as they come. If Puroil toes you up one buttock, turn the other cheek. Same with life. You are a person with high blood pressure. Don't fight it. Be yourself, not a half-dead ninny trying to side-step death.'

The sting in the tail of the speech fought with the public nature of the advice, given in front of Blue Hills, to decide whether the blood should recede from the Glass Canoe's face or flood it with a shaming blush. Blue Hills won and the red started to glow behind the greasy brown of his cheeks.

‘Whatever you are, you are you. Live with yourself and try to like it or lump it.' The Great White Father turned to Blue Hills. ‘How are your tomato plants, Blue?'

‘Not bad,' said Blue Hills and the Great White Father looked at him keenly. Poor Blue Hills, it was impossible to get him excited. ‘I cut out the middle to make them spread,' he added, feeling that ‘not bad' wasn't much of an answer.

‘I cut mine, too. Always. Only I pick off the laterals, then at eight feet I pinch off the tops. They spread out like a willow and bear much better that way.'

‘Jesus,' said Blue Hills reverently. ‘I can't do that with mine.'

‘I've got a very high fence. Makes it easier.'

The Glass Canoe laughed loudly, trying to break the spell embarrassment had cast around him.

‘You don't have vegetables, do you?' asked the Great White Father, trying to include the Glass Canoe. ‘You go for flowers, don't you?'

‘Flowers?' Trying to remember what he might have said a week ago, a year ago—any time—about flowers. Mercifully he remembered the gardenia his wife had been trimming of its yellow leaves. It had wet feet. ‘Yes.' What a load was lifted when he could qualify to be in the swim of the conversation. ‘Yes, flowers. But I'm thinking of going in for beans and lettuce next.' Anything to keep his head afloat. ‘With maybe a patch of strawberries, just for the wife.' Was he afloat? He didn't know. Perhaps he had sunk and didn't realize it yet. ‘What do you think of cabbage and cauliflowers?' They say drowning is quite pleasant. You just float off easily.

‘They're OK for the chooks,' said the Great White Father.

‘You're not having me on, are you?' the Glass Canoe said with strain in his voice. He got to his feet uncertainly.

‘Not to the point of physical exertion. Sit down. I don't fight with anything but words. Or, better—with grog.'

‘I've got to go back, anyway. There's some blanks to be put in the lines, and the fitters have to be shown where they go.' He went, no longer afloat.

‘You're lucky you can turn everything to a joke,' said Blue Hills. ‘He can be very nasty.' Something felt wet in his underpants, perhaps the Glass Canoe's finger had made the blood come.

‘It's hard to make him laugh,' admitted the Great White Father.

‘Not many down here today.' If it was blood he could expect the place to itch later.

‘Just you and me and the Sleeping Princess. You want to cut yourself a slice?'

‘Me? Goodness me, no. Too early in the day. Besides I have a wife at home and there's such a thing as love.'

The Great White Father looked away. ‘Love,' he said. ‘What's love? Will a man lay down his life for love? A soldier does it for a soldier's pay. Will a man go hungry for it? So he will to pinch and scrape and make a million. Will a man for love swim when his strength's gone, duck under a hail of bullets or cling for days to a ledge of rock? He'll do the same to keep a whole skin. Will a man for love obey a foolish order? He'll do it to earn his daily bread. Love. What's love? Is it a word? If so it falls off the end of the tongue and vanishes—dissolves to the air that made it. Who's got love? A mother for her baby? So has a mathematician for his equation, a physicist for his demonstration, an astronomer for his theory. Can you see it, hear it, touch it, taste it? Does it live on after you're gone? Can you see where it was? No. No to every question. Yet without love a human isn't a man. Without love an animal has no young. Without love the world is full of carcasses and dead stones.'

Blue Hills ignored these sentiments.

‘What do you do when there's no one around?'

‘You mean besides testing the girls?' smiled the Great White Father. And went on, to save Blue Hills the trouble of thinking up a reply, ‘I dream of things to come.' He was silent a while. ‘And the blessings of the past.' Opening two more cans. ‘Like the time I fell twenty feet off the turbine landing.'

‘How was that a blessing? Did you fall on your head?'

‘It saved my life and that's a fact.' The Great White Father was able to fall flat or on his head against solid objects with no ill-effects. ‘Now all I'm fit for is ease and pleasure, low company and high living. My ambition is to be the local emperor of rollicks, bollocks and beer till a man more worthy of the title comes along. Life is only a short glass, Blue Hills, better fill it up. Because though there's a grin in every grave, there's no sound of laughing. What did you come for, Blue? About your transfer?'

‘I didn't get it!' Blue Hills burst out. ‘I put it in writing, but the Good Shepherd wrote No. I watched through the window.' The Good Shepherd had to rubber-stamp the Python's decision.

‘Tough,' murmured the great man. ‘But what is, is. I was born, I think, from a dream of strong drink around several campfires—'

Blue Hills was gone. In his place sat a young innocent lad clutching his first can of icy beer, his mouth open ready for burps, laughter, profanity, his ears open for instruction in the ways of the Great White Father's endless struggle against the total enslavement of man.