Read Online The Unknown Industrial Prisoner by David Ireland - Free Book Online Page B

of some scrap paper and began making notes of the things he saw about him.
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    POOR HANS ‘Jesus!’ exclaimed Quick Tip, returning from a session with the girl he had rowed across Eel River.
    â€˜Christ!’ roared the Sandpiper antiphonally, ‘the same yesterday, today and forever!’ She was the girl. There were sandpipers out on the flats, real ones, little stick legs propping too fast to follow; they called her Sandpiper because she got the boys to take her out of doors. Paddocks she liked, open spaces, anywhere under the stars. She was born in Balmain in its dingy days but always wanted to live on a farm. The mangrove flats were the nearest she got to the sticks, and they were further east, back toward the sea, toward the spot where Cook first stepped ashore two hundred years before.
    â€˜Take me, lover!’ she would bellow at some skinny shift-worker. And when he gaped she would add ‘For a walk!’ in a burst of healthy, gum-showing laughter. ‘You get electricity through your feet from the ground,’ as she took off her shoes and expected her companions to do the same. They never did, though, and if you kept your eyes open as you went by the water-cooling tower you could often see a pair of boots tangled up with two bare feet. Usually facing opposite ways.
    â€˜She’s an eye-opener, this one,’ said Quick Tip to the Samurai, belting the Sandpiper affectionately on the left buttock. The Sandpiper would have preferred the Samurai’s hand on her rump, and since she was direct by nature she seized his hand where it rested on the table and applied it to her bottom in an imitation of a slap.
    A small robust fly, Hans to his friends, fresh in from the black filth of the river and the unprocessed sewage which found its way there, was making a meal of a large, monolithic grain of sugar on the table near the Samurai’s other hand. It had been a good life, born in shit and with sugar and stools to lick, sweat of humans to drink and the runny eyes of dogs. The Samurai’s hand, with the Sandpiper’s still attached, returned from her buttocks and killed the small, vigorous fly named Hans.
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    HUMAN BACTERIA He took a walk after tea and went near some of the other plants on the site. But not too near. If you went to some of them unannounced, you could be hosed from the doorway by someone pretending to be cleaning the area; you could collect the slops bucket or the tea leaves.
    There were no barges at the wharf, so the Samurai climbed a finished structure back at his own plant, went through his pockets for something to read, found nothing and settled down in the bed of the empty regenerator under the air spider on two cornsacks hidden there for the purpose and went to sleep.
    He slept soundly while life went on in the refinery and outside. Just as operators’ work was part of a digestive process in the body of the company, so they themselves were germs within that body, in much the same way, if you like, that the bacteriophage attaches itself to the bacteria—hanging on and feeding—and the bacteria, in turn, attacks the host body of society at large.
    When he woke up and went down to the control room they were kicking up a fuss. The man who pissed purple had struck again. There was purple dye all over the stainless steel wall.
    â€˜It must be someone from another plant. Not game to have a pee where he belongs,’ they said.
    A mile away on a corner of Highway One an idiot sat on the concrete footpath with strips of filthy rag knotted thousands of times, old stockings, pieces of soft rope grey with age—all knotted. The whole mess was somehow tied in the middle so that the hundreds of knotted lengths could be reached one by one like the spokes of a wheel. Each strand had dozens of knots along its length. Tying, untying, over and over. Most days he was there: his people put him out every morning. Some days they forgot to bring him in. Pedestrians