Free The Unknown Industrial Prisoner by David Ireland Page A

sniffed as he passed the man and marched up to his desk at the back of the office and took out little cards with cost formulas on them for the supervisor to see, then busied himself with his art gallery. He was a sculptor. His ‘Mother and Child’ was his finest work. It was constructed from two straightened paperclips, a spring, a disc of metal with three holes in it, a twig, and a short bent thing. The child was the twig. There were long-legged creatures and twisted wire faces: he spent most of the day on them. His phone trilled. He listened.
    â€˜What does Procedure say?’ He listened again.
    â€˜But what’s laid down?’ He lost patience and took a firm stand, gambling on the other’s ignorance of the rules. ‘No! International Puroil Procedure says it must be countersigned by three officers, none in the same department. I don’t care how many signatures you have to get. Three counter-signers, O’Grady says. Goodbye!’ He hung up. The man waiting patiently for attention sighed. If only he had a job where you could play children’s games instead of the boring business of staring at the floor or furtively reading stale newspapers.
    Soon the rest of the staff were in. They would rehash till midday Wednesday the sporting events of the past weekend. From the half-way point of the week they would anticipate the coming weekend. All sniffed something peculiar in the air.
    At eight o’clock industrial music started. Now and again a huge payroll machine chewed into a lump of silence and crunched it up with a frightful racket. Shortly after it started—and if the man waiting patiently for attention had been there every day he would have noticed that one followed the other—three whistlers started too.
    They began with ‘Drink to me only’; their whistles were nearly a semi-tone apart, though this was sometimes increased to a full tone or decreased to a precarious quarter-tone. And sometimes, just before the end of a phrase, they would all be dead on the knocker, all in triumphant harmony; then on the last note fall into a tableau of dissonance and hold the dissonance until breath gave out or until their supervisor, the Garfish, rubbered his head round to look over the partition separating him from them, in which case they would stop as if they had never whistled in their lives.
    When the machine got a go on and looked like carrying all before it, they began to whistle deafeningly. The others frowned on the whistlers, not on the machine whose noise they took to be inevitable.
    The man waiting patiently for attention nearly got served when a tall, redhaired clerk bounced in and asked, ‘What can I do for you?’ but the man took more than a second to answer and by that time the clerk was gone amongst the tables and chairs, singing. He was the only one who didn’t sniff the air.
    The working class can kiss me tail
    A bludger’s job will never fail!
    Everyone stopped work to talk to Should I.
    â€˜Did you fellers read the latest?’ chattered Should I. He held up a sheaf of eight-by-five pamphlets.
    â€˜Epistles from the Apostle Lewis,’ he orated. This was the Puroil Chairman of Directors, Australian Board; another bum-boy to the distant owners.
    â€˜Puroil and the Credit Squeezes!’ he declaimed. ‘During the past twenty years, Government-inspired credit squeezes have had a marked effect on the Australian economy.’
    â€˜Where’d you get ’em?’ sibilated the Black Snake.
    â€˜They’re everywhere,’ Should I declared. But the Black Snake’s question was rhetorical. He was making notes, watching to see who said anything against the company.
    â€˜Severe competition has been encountered, the monthly increase in sales is getting less, new oil companies coming in, higher wages bill, caught in a cost price squeeze, major internal reorganization, economy drives, disastrous effect of the lifting of import