The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (49 page)

 

WHERE THE RACE IS NOT TO THE SWIFT For flags they borrowed a carton of scrap rag—bits of women's dresses, all colours—and ran them up between the huts. They hung in tatters and flapped drunkenly, but to the prisoners they were Mardi Gras.

The ice-making machine was borrowed from the main lab and connected to the illegal power loop at the Home Beautiful, but this had to be arranged on the Sunday because Custard Guts the lab boss couldn't be relied on to be generous in the week, when he was there. Big Bits was one of the early starters, mixing whisky with beer in the same glass. The older drinkers knew the score with him—he would be first to start and first to finish—and only watched him to make sure he was shepherded away as soon as his eyes got glassy; it was not safe to be anywhere near him when he started heaving.

By midday Monday they were organizing foot races. Bubbles, the fattest man there, won the marathon which was run over a course in excess of forty yards. It was a boat race, of course; the others held back, developed lameness, stumbled. Big Bits, already far gone by then, didn't have the idea at all: he kept trying to race ahead and it took the efforts of several dozen race officials—all claimed to be officials—to trip and push him out of the race. It was unthinkable that any man but the clumsiest and fattest should win the marathon.

Big Bits was persuaded to carry on drinking to drown his sense of failure; these younger fellows couldn't get it into their heads that they were not supposed to win. All they ever thought about was beating the other man. You can't have a friendly atmosphere when people run around with this attitude. They didn't blame Big Bits; they knew the pernicious influence of family, school and industry was still upon him, with its estranging emphasis on competition between man and man.

The best race was the five and ten yards dash; this was run from anywhere and it was left to each runner to decide where he came in the race. It was one race, not two.

Big Bits successfully drowned all sense of failure. By the end of the foot races he was observed to have a never-ending stream of vomit erupting like lava from his overburdened intestines. From some instinct of cleanliness and decency he attempted to fit his hand over his extended mouth, but the stuff escaped past his fingers.

‘Whisky is an emetic,' said the Great White Father wisely.

Big Bits' fumbling fingers found, for a few moments, a button grip on his wide-stretched lips, but two smaller streams, back-pressured by this grip, issued from his nostrils.

The Great White Father led him kindly outside, where he sat on the step and continued this exercise.

 

THE WILD BULL OF THE PAMPAS A little after lunch a great new diving champion was discovered. It was the Wild Bull of the Pampas. Alcohol had different effects on him, depending on the temperature, the time of day, the season of the year and whether he was due for a psychiatric check-up or had just had one. This time it took him in the legs. He wasn't content with the rigours of the ten-yard dash, he had to go straight for the river. Through the swamp, over stumps, knocking down saplings and bouncing off larger trees, nothing stopped him—merely deflected him—until he reached the river bank, ran off into the air and by a superhuman effort fell forward and entered the emulsion of oil and water that was Eel River, head-first. He was under the water two minutes. This was unintentional; the river was shallow, the soft mud deep, and he spent those two minutes pulling his head and chest out of the sucking mud into which he speared himself. The Volga Boatman refused to go after him with the boat because of the blue-black mud all over his body, and the smell. He liked his boat ship-shape. No one was very surprised when he came back black, clothes and all, heavily wagging the water away, nor was there any prejudice against him on account of his colour.

 

A GENTLEMAN'S GAME The Donk, a cricketer himself and the mainstay of Sullage City Diggers, insisted on a game of cricket. The only place this game could be played was in the space between the huts, and there was quite a bit of interest in it for a few minutes, mainly because there were no proper balls: empty beer cans had to be used instead. With half a fence-paling as bat. It was contrary to the spirit of the Home Beautiful to have a wicket or to bowl from any one place—those ideas gave a rigidity to the game that any drinker would deplore—but after the thing developed a trace of bitterness evidenced in the aiming of the cans, it had to be banished to the pathway between the Home Beautiful and the river. This was very narrow and gave the batsman the assurance that he could not be hit by cans coming from an angle. Until they took to the trees and hour by hour carried the game farther from Home.

 

HAIL AND FAREWELL A small conference in one corner of the drink hut reached a decision. These were the planners, the long-distance drinkers, not the Big Bits type who grabbed beer cans as if they were a last refuge, but men who drank a bit and talked, and thought a bit and ate, and could keep it up for days.

‘We'll just go up there and kidnap him. Simple,' said the Great White Father. ‘Three should do it. Including one to drive the Mercedes.'

‘Why are we doing it?' Angry Ant said.

‘It's never been done before,' explained the Great White Father.

‘How will he take it?' asked the Humdinger.

‘How can he take it? He doesn't know by sight which shifts we're on and he won't be game to tell anyone what happened. If our mob leak it out there'll be talk, but his best defence will be to shut up and ignore it. We don't elect him Manager—our talk can't hurt him. Probably won't even reach him.'

The Humdinger, Canada Dry and the Angry Ant stood, shook their beer cans for the last drops, and finding none, departed gravely for the refinery. It took them an hour, but it went well, they said. The Wandering Jew looked a little knocked up, there was a wrinkled look about his suit, and the blindfold he wore was a piece of some Sydney housewife's old dress salvaged in a rag drive and used by Puroil operators for wiping oily hands or for insulation against concrete.

The Great White Father shook his hand—by force—and announced to him: ‘We're going to see you have a good time, young feller. Where's Volga?' Volga rose and approached his leader.

‘Put out more rags, Volga. Here's the Wandering Jew.'

‘He has the blindfold on.'

‘He'll appreciate them all the more later.' Volga ran up some more rags on string and poked extra bits of coloured rag into crevices and on projecting nails round the huts. The place was gay. The Great White Father called his flock together.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,' he said. ‘I say ladies because it's well known that four per cent of the male population is homosexual…' He waited for the laughter to evaporate.

‘Before we're all completely molo, we'd better say a few words in memory of our fallen brother. Charge your glasses or pierce your cans and we'll drink to the Glass Canoe. But first, a few words.'

The gathering did not keep proper order and some of them, reverting to their natural undisciplined habits, made no pause in their drinking, but at the signal they all stood.

Unfortunately, the first few words of the Great White Father's historic speech were lost; he turned and saw an old grey rabbit sitting calmly on a hump of earth in the swamp as if waiting for him to speak. The side of its face and its left eye were pushed out in a great sore; the thing had been infected with myxomatosis and was not long for this world.

‘There's a poor devil of a rabbit out there in the mangroves. Got a dose of myxo. We'd better kill him out of kindness. If we don't kill him, he'll only die, or some unprincipled shopkeeper will cut out the sore and sell him. Will you do the honours, Volga?'

Volga darted inside the drink hut, they heard him standing on a seat and reaching into the roof; presently he came out with a sawn-off twenty-two, fitted with a home-made silencer. Big and clumsy.

The Great White Father took the rifle, aimed, looked round and seeing his congregation silent, decided to speak.

‘Hold it,' he said quietly. ‘Just keep still. I want to talk to the poor little feller. He'll stay quiet if we don't alarm him.'

The bemused party was quiet as their host addressed the dying rabbit.

‘Now, now, little rabbit. Don't be afraid. This has been coming for a long while. You can't live forever. If the dogs don't get you and you don't starve to death we're here to eat you up, only for that rotten sore over your eye. What do you think of when you see us here, lapping up the grog? It must be a bit of a mystery, eh—all us big people making a row and enjoying ourselves? Drinking out of cans—drinking gallons and pissing pints? Any other time you could go your way, but look at you! You're diseased. You're on the way out. The sight of you could put us all off the grog. Why? 'Cause we did it to you, matey. We poisoned you and we have to put you out of your misery for our own sakes. It'll be quick. You won't know what hit you.'

With these words, a bullet was on its way towards the waiting rabbit and eternity caught up with him before he heard the report of the gun. The rabbit flopped and jerked and lay still on the little mound of earth he had hopped to. The audience heard only the faintest whup. It was a handy weapon.

The Great White Father looked round with great compassion at his own people, a compassion not unmixed with a certain humour. He began to smile. Before he knew it he was grinning broadly, the grin became a chuckle, the chuckle turned quickly to a laugh, and the moment he hit the full broad notes of an uproarious laugh the puppets around him laughed too. Some of the girls had turned up; the Sandpiper had ideas of taking some of her regulars out into the paddocks, much the same as a beast of prey cuts out stragglers from a flock of sheep. The Sandpiper laughed. Everyone roared. At nothing. At the Glass Canoe, at themselves, at the rabbit, at the Wandering Jew, at being human, at the beer cans, at Big Bits,at the Wild Bull of the Pampas, at the whole idea of the party.

So the Great White Father's first words were lost in the general din.

 

WHO CLOCKS OFF EARLY? ‘…so the great operator goes home. And we consign to Rookwood his craft of ambition, promotion, pills, and a vision that saw the grand design, the noble acres of Eel Flat sown with brand-new plants. Pumper, panelman, delegate, golfer—he stood up at every Union meeting. Now ended his brief span, a one-man band of all the talents has gone down.

‘We heard him in debate, ear-splitting or prophetic, up one day, the next completely down. We saw him by shock-treatment unsoured—the energetic come-back, the dustcoat in his sights. Here was a man in whom great issues brought to light genius to grapple them. On a poised rail, danger drew steel and height struck fire from him: the black tide of death filled his impetuous mouth with sand.

‘Who clocks off early? A man whose strength and strong bent for suicide will stand for ages yet to come; a myth, his stormy heart now stopped and destiny fulfilled, our Glass Canoe is shattered and gone home.'

 

THE RECEDING UNIVERSE That fine sharp sand—why did it spill? Was it only to give the Great White Father a line to speak in a funeral speech?

All drank to the memory of their fallen fellow-worker, their mate, their tormentor. But the emotion and the beer had been too much for Big Bits. He had made a come-back after his stomach's gesture of rejection, but not for long. He did not settle back to drink like the rest, but sought support from the post of the rough veranda built on the drink hut. He had the wild impression that this post was in danger of falling away from him and with it the universe and that he was supporting both, unaided.

‘She's going! She's going!…There she goes!' he shouted. But it was he that was going, losing his grip and falling flat like a length of timber on his back. Even on his back he was concerned for the post falling and the universe receding from him and did not seem to notice how long the one took to fall or the other to disappear. He lay like that for a long while, unable to move. At last he drifted off into an uneasy, dream-filled sleep. People just stepped over him.

 

A NAVEL SALUTE When more of the girls came, the Great White Father got them dancing to music from someone's transistor. He got the Wandering Jew fixed up with the Sandpiper, thumped him heartily on the grey-suited back—leaving a handprint in beer—and roared in his ear, ‘Have you got the right knack o' dancing yet?' The assembly doubled up at this old joke, but the Wandering Jew didn't get it. Some enjoyed the dancing; the fabric of the dance and the sheen and irritation of the music settled round their limbs as a taut lacquer; their surfaces became alien and set.

The Great White Father's joke was carried a few days later by the Wandering Jew back to his secretary, who deciphered it for him, then spread it through the office where it was seized upon by irresponsible persons and torn to shreds.

Embarrassingly, the Old Lamplighter took one of her rare fits during the dance and had to be held down. Her arms and legs kept going, however, as if she were still dancing, and she continued to drink from the blue and gold can she held; no one could take it from her grasp. Beer slopped everywhere. They had to take her away into the bed hut and stay with her. She was quiet in a few minutes, brought up everything, got back on her feet and began all over again.

Into the party ran the Sandpiper, dragging Far Away Places by the hand. For the last half-hour her body had been home to him. The Great White Father rose to salute them.

‘Here's a toast to the heroes of Australia's latest navel engagement!'

Innumerable eyes lamped round on the Sandpiper, who was cheerfully dressed in a pair of gaping, unbuttoned overalls, and on Far Away Places, who had put on her pink swami Woolworths briefs, forty-nine cents' worth and cheap at half the price.

After a while they went bush again. He was an ordinary little man and she a hearty trollop with a dirty tongue, but hand in hand into the branches of the mangroves they seemed innocent as boy and girl and clean as kids on a beach.