The Unknown Industrial Prisoner Read Online Free Page B

growing plant. Drawn by a power unseen, the human bacteria quickly made their way inside and were apparently devoured. Gunga Din, lean, brown, small and dry, went first to the urn to check the water level and turn it on ready for the first cup of tea.
    The Samurai tried to catch up with the Great White Father, and did succeed, but all he would say was: ‘That’s where your Gallipoli is, in there.’ And a long, bony finger prodded his chest, then was gone, busy with locker key and bootlaces.
    â€˜What do you mean, an indefinite sentence?’ He felt foolish as he persisted, but this seemed to be a man worth talking to. The rest talked interminably of second-hand cars and overtime.
    â€˜Indefinite? You don’t know when you’ll get the bullet, do you?’ And turned away to sniff his boots, then to scratch his right ankle. When he had his boots on, he went to wipe some dried mud on to a pile of rags in the corner, but stopped himself in time. The Glass Canoe didn’t, and was busy rubbing his feet on the rags before the Great White Father tapped his shoulder.
    â€˜Humdinger,’ he said. The Glass Canoe looked down. The rags stirred and stretched, yawned and looked up.
    â€˜Is that what you think of your fellow workers?’
    â€˜Christ, I’m sorry, mate,’ said the Glass Canoe and everyone gaped. Perhaps he was getting sick again.
    On the job, events moved slowly. On the drawing board in the Admin block though, for eight hours a day, the pace was frantic until four, when the white-shirted multitude suddenly went home. Their effort might have been more wisely spread over the twenty-four hours to take advantage of the quiet of the dark hours, but white-collar men don’t yet do shifts.
    The tall man had another word for him when he was dressed for work. ‘No one enters those blue gates only to make gasoline, bitumen or ethylene from crude. Oil and excreta, that’s what they fractionate here. Us and oil. With foremen, controllers, suction heads, superintendents, managers and all the rest, there’s maybe forty grades. Forty grades of shit. That’s all any of us are. White shirts, brown shirts, overalls, boiler suits, the lot. Shit. The place is a correction centre. The purpose of giving you a job is to keep you off the streets. It’s still a penal colony. All the thousands of companies are penal sub-contractors to the Government.’
    Puroil’s land included a stretch of what had once been parkland. Residents’ petitions, questions in Parliament, real estate developers’ organized, agonized pleas, no amount of democratic pressure was able to beat a foreign oil company. A few words were altered on a piece of paper somewhere, the parkland was declared industrial land and Puroil had a foothold in New South Wales. The total of 350 acres included, on the river side, some of the swampiest land this side of Botany Bay, but mangroves were cleared, swamp flats partitioned and drained and filled until only a few dozen acres on the river bank were left in their natural state. Another hundred acres of mangroves still stood on the other side of Eel River, just down from the gasoline depot of a pretended rival of Puroil: Puroil supplied them from a nice fat silver pipeline that nuzzled into the slime of the river bed and came up again out of the ground handy to their shiny white tanks.
    Puroil supplied the depot of another company too, with a line that ran half a mile under cleared clay. Wagons of rival companies that ran out of their own brand, simply called in and gulped down a load of Puroil, went out and sold it as their own. Even Puroil sent out grey unmarked wagons—they had brother companies with different names. The rival companies fixed the price between themselves in the first place, the Government approved their figure then made a big deal of getting them to reduce half a cent a gallon when crude went down a cent. Then they all advertised like mad