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Drowning the Charge
Neil Grimmett
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Neil Grimmett has had over fifty short stories published in the UK,
Australia, South Africa, Singapore, India, and the USA, where he has
appeared in Fiction, The Yale Review, DoubleTake, and The Southern Review.
He has appeared online in Blackbird, Tatlin's Tower, Web Del Sol, In Posse
Review, m.a.g., Word Riot, Blue Moon Review, 3AM, Gangway, segue, Eclectica
and others, and he has made the storySouth Million Writers Notable Short
Story list for the last two years. In addition, he has won the Write On
poetry award, the Oppenheim John Downes Award three times, and two major
British Arts Council bursaries and a Royal Society of Authors Award. He is a
member of the US branch of PEN, and his first novel, The Bestowing Sun, came
out last year to strong reviews.
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We’d christened him 'Wheelbarrow',
owing to the fact that when he walked it appeared he was shoving an invisible one along. It was as if
in reaction to his great intellect and physical frailty, some dumb ancestor wanted him to recall the
shape of toil. He was a scientist and spoke way above our heads. Even in normal conversations he
liked to spend all those ten dollar words. Then one day our chargehand, an ex-cook from Hong Kong,
had enough, "I know a fucking big word too," he said, elongating and stressing each syllable:
"in-cor-por-a-tor."
That was the piece of machinery we were running at the time.
Wheelbarrow just looked at him and headed off pushing his imaginary burden before dropping in
to see the principle foreman in charge of production workers. Within a week, the over-weight
and near-retirement age ‘Hong Kong’, had been demoted a grade and placed in charge of loading
the factory’s internal train with crates of explosives and ammo. A job known to break the hearts,
spirit and often bones of even the youngest and fittest. And I got promoted and became the youngest
chargehand in the factory's history with too many lessons still unlearned.
Wheelbarrow got round to initiating me in his own fashion, by spraying
one of my crew with dilute nitric acid and letting me get carpeted for it. There is a curious,
little-known fact about some acids: the weaker, more dilute they are, the quicker and meaner they
can burn you. The viscosity of concentrated acid helps give you a little time to get it off. Mind
you, if you take too long and it does get in, it likes to find bone and keep gnawing.
Along with my ‘Stripes’, as the old soldiers called my elevation
in the pecking order, I got moved into the big, new and untested, nitration house. The hot seat you
might say and in more ways than one. After our trial run, when things had gone wrong – luckily, in
a small unspectacular way - we ended up with the stainless steel vessels in which the nitrous body
comes alive and is caressed towards completion, covered in a layer of drying explosive crystals.
Not a nice thing to try and dislodge. Hard plastic and non-ferrous metal scrapers are about as
risky as you dare. When you know that these vessels are big enough for you to drown in stood up
side by side with four or five of your mates and there are eight of them, you might get an idea
of how much scraping and daring was going to be required to get them clean.
I was sitting in the control room which is an air-conditioned glass
bubble right smack in the middle of the show. One floor up with all the pipes and their fluids pumping
away under your feet and surrounded by forty odd tons of acid bubbling and fuming its way along to
becoming flakes of TNT. The desk in front of me is bigger and has more controls that any fancy
recording studio you could imagine. Behind my head there are banks of alarm panels full of hundreds
of small black squares that can go red in the face and scream their warnings. The air we breathe in
the cabin gets pumped from the other side the huge mound that surrounds this building. It comes in
through filters and tastes sterile and induces a feeling, the old soldiers claim, similar to
altitude sickness.
I watched my crew outside scraping away, wishing I could join them.
On the floor of the cabin there are the escape masks and their small air bottles ready for if it
becomes necessary to evacuate after - God forbid -I ever have to drop the charge into the massive
drowning tanks below each vessel. I have seven men in my crew plus a production chemist and often
some visiting spooks from the Ministry of Defence. There are three masks; and I do not think ‘rank’
will have much privilege in the eventuality!
Not that it really mattered. If we do drown this lot - apparently
they did it once on an island off Australia – it goes up something like a red atomic bomb, then
floats back down to earth as a shroud and stays awhile to share its charms. So you can sit in this
cabin waiting for the filters to clog and start letting nitrous fume etc. fill the place up, or you
can grab a mask with its couple of minutes air supply, try running down the steep flights of steel
stairs and then find your way through a labyrinth of pipes and tunnels to the outside which is
going to look, smell and taste like an upturned witch's cauldron.
Luckily for me, I don't have to make the choice: chargehands, like
the captain of any ship, stay. To leave an explosive building before it is completely secure is a
court-martial offence; and not very 'British' to boot. The chemist is also expected to remain and
try to establish a scientific hold on the geni out of the bottle. So I would get stuck with Wheelbarrow,
waiting for my lungs to evaporate or body to defy gravity and needing a fucking dictionary to
understand his dying words.
I watched him trundling round and round the outside of the cabin.
Then he came in.
"Michael," he said, "I have been thinking."
And that, was some of the worst news I could hear.
Wheelbarrow was not happy about the time that it was taking to
get the building cleaned up. He wanted to hurry the next run underway and put his theories as
to why this one went wrong to the test. He’d worked out, scientifically, that weak nitric acid
would dissolve the crystal and flush it gently into the tanks below. My part in his plan was to
connect a hose to one of the feed lines of dilute nitric acid and then have it sprayed over the
contamination.
He looked at me as if I should be joining in with his boyish
| "I sent my leading hand, Kirk, out. I did it because my
wife had told me that his wife was shagging their fifteen-year-old newspaper delivery boy. Doing it
every single chance she got, the gossips claimed, secure in the knowledge that once Kirk was inside
this security zone he wasn’t going to get out until the end of the shift. " |
excitement at the idea. It is down to me to make the final decision about everything that is not
written in the operating instructions. Wheelbarrow outranks me by a million miles, is paid ten
times what I earn, and has no doubt forgotten more than I will ever know about the science behind
this madness. But I get to carry the can.
Wheelbarrow must have sensed my reluctance. He would do it, he
stated. But he required a member of the crew to stand outside the cabin as he performed the task
to make certain that nobody came walking in or he did not get tangled up by the pipe. My say so
and just an observer was all he needed.
I brought the rest of my crew into the cabin and told them what
was going to happen. We all watched as Wheelbarrow got an engineer to come in and make the
connection to the feed line. Then I had to pick someone to go out while the rest of us sat
nice and comfy and took in the show.
I sent my leading hand, Kirk, out. I did it because my wife
had told me that his wife was shagging their fifteen-year-old newspaper delivery boy. Doing
it every single chance she got, the gossips claimed, secure in the knowledge that once Kirk
was inside this security zone he wasn’t going to get out until the end of the shift. You
didn’t want rescue services searching the ruins for someone who had slipped out unknown for
whatever reason. Kirk and his wife had four kids and I’d decided, in this new position of
power, not to allow any feelings of sympathy to influence my decisions. So I did it for no
better reason than to prove I could.
Wheelbarrow appeared dressed in a full protective suit and
carrying the black rubber hose like spaceman with a ray gun. He gave the thumbs-up signal
to Kirk who hit the pump’s start button.
The hose instantly turned into a snake: a spitting cobra.
It must have been the pressure at which the acid was being delivered, combined with the
feeble little hands trying to control the pipe’s whipping movement, that did it. I watched
them in slow-motion as Wheelbarrow struggled to gain control and Kirk tried to find the
stop button. I say tried, because most of the acid was hitting him in the face and so hard
he was going backwards.
In this state-of-the-art, multi-million-pound complex, there
are a load of old enamelled bath tubs filled with freezing cold, near-stagnant water. If you
get splashed with acid you are supposed to submerge the limb in the water and just rinse it
off . Three of us ended up grabbing Kirk and plunging him bodily into one of the tubs. He
had tried to run for it in panic, pulling his acid-coated goggles off first so he could
see and allowing the liquid covering his hat and forehead to blind him.
He fought like fury, thrashing and even trying to swim as
we kept dunking him under. I got one of my crew to take my place holding him while I
grabbed two of the special eyewash solution bottles and went to work on his eyes. I
had to take my protective gauntlets off to do it and within seconds my forearms and
hands felt like they were being eaten by a swarm of hungry fire angry ants. But I
could not bear to stop squeezing that liquid into his eyes; not even for the second
it would take to give my arms a nice cold splash. Not while he was still able to see
me, if he was by then.
The whole time this went on Wheelbarrow just stood there
watching, his little silver-booted feet protected and unmoving in a pool of bubbling,
yellow acid.
Afterwards, he never said a thing. No word of apology
or regret. It was an experiment that might have worked was, I guess, how he viewed it.
The union did try and do something about it. But Kirk should have been wearing a full
protective suit; his chargehand should have made sure he was. "You were lucky not to
lose your stripes," was the whisper the foreman gave me after the enquiry.
I went round to visit Kirk with two of the crew and his
plump, pretty wife managed to crush one of her tits against my hand as she reached to wipe
the stream of tears that would not stop flowing from his permanently damaged eyes. She told
us, as he could still not speak, that he’d written on his slate that he was glad he would
not be coming back to work. “Well, he’s lucky he will have you here to look after him all
of the time,” I said as we got up to leave. I thought I saw Kirk smile at me, but it may
have just been the new shape of his features.
* * *
Shortly after this we started the first full production
run and I got a new Leading Hand and a trainee.
The Leading Hand, Ray, was an ex-marine and as tough
as they come. I got on great with him and knew he took it all about as seriously as
was necessary but would guard your back as he expected you to do the same. He lived
in a house on a cliff with a blonde opera singer and told us that they liked to lie
in bed all day exploring each other’s bodies and drinking bottles of iced Sancerre.
Wheelbarrow was in the cabin and listened to this bit of information as if it was a
lecture on the breeding habits of primates. Ray watched him walk out of the cabin
and start mooching around in his oversized, red gauntlets and designer goggles taking
samples from the nitrators. He’d left just as Ray started describing in detail, the
'Blonde Bomb's' amazing breathing technique when it came to oral sex. "That is one
dangerous son of a bitch," Ray exclaimed.
“Maybe, it’s just that his wife is a ‘spitter’,” I
said, trying to lighten the mood as the rest of the crew looked disturbed by Ray’s
assessment.
The trainee, Carl, was about five foot four and weighed
in at seven stone soaking wet; and was scared. It pays to be a little nervous - complacency
and all that. But scared is worse - it is a disease that can spread too easily into panic.
I tried to find out why the hell he’d come to this place and the closest I could get was
that his wife thought it would be a good idea. Then one of the boys said he’d met Carl out
with his wife and mother-in-law. The wife, he said, was a big brutal-looking German Frau;
her mother made her seem like a sweetie. They had Carl carrying this fat basset because
‘Ze poor thing’ had become too tired to keep going. According to the tale, Carl was
red-faced, staggering on his last legs and only too glad to stop and talk. Which was
unusual, because he hardly ever spoke, and when he did, it was in a whisper that made
you ask him to repeat everything about three times. It drove you wild, especially on
an irritable, too long, night shift.
Ray had enough, "Speak up you cowardly little shitbird,"
he bellowed as another cold dawn broke beyond our sight and smell, "you think the sound
of your voice is going to set this stuff off."
Ray had already nicknamed Carl, 'Whispering Maldoon',
and did not like him. Which was also a sentiment being voiced by the rest of the crew,
and understandable, when you needed to convince yourself that all of your mates could
and would pull you out of the deepest trouble imaginable. And here that was deep!
I sent Maldoon out of the cabin to do some samples and
let Ray cool down before things got ugly. Any fighting on the plant resulted in instant
dismissal for all parties concerned and I had seen Wheelbarrow taking note at the exchange.
He looked at Ray in the superior, ‘you got it wrong and I'm going to set you straight’, way
he had, "It might be," Wheelbarrow explained, "that Carl has hypersensitive hearing. It is
possible that he feels we are shouting at him every time one of us speaks."
Well I reckon the picture of Maldoon believing we were
mad at him about something he did not know, and were bawling him out over it, must have
struck everyone in the cabin at about the same moment. Our laughter was non stop.
Wheelbarrow stood there observing us as if we’d gone crazy.
When the noise died down a little he tried again, "I can assure you, that the condition of
hypersensitive hearing does exist, and would probably be possible to treat."
We all started up again and Wheelbarrow walked out. I
had a message waiting in the foreman's office at the end of the shift stating, that if
anyone was disrespectful to the senior chemist on duty, they would be placed on a charge.
And that just about summed up our relationship with Wheelbarrow.
There was something about him though, you could not help but
admire. He always got the production up to maximum and was never too tired to sort out a problem
or give you a full explanation about anything you asked. It was all magnets and no miracles when
he finished, but most of his colleagues treated us as if we were too dumb to bother speaking to.
Also, he made me feel that if it came to a crisis he was going to be as cool as liquid nitrogen.
The boys had taken to scaring Maldoon, dropping things on the
steel decking behind him or dripping water on him if he was below them
| "The steel floor under my feet began to tremble, then
shake. A low-pitched growl became a deafening roar. I stared back into the cabin - which according
to the letter of the law, I should not have left - and saw Wheelbarrow's face. I had never seen such
a look of horror on anyone in my life. He had gone white and his eyes were starting to bulge." |
and yelling, acid. Or their favourite: setting off the 'test' on the alarm panels. There were
three banks of alarm panels, on each of them about one hundred individual small squares. When a
temperature started to climb, or a feed got a little low, or a seagull somewhere over the Bristol
Channel cried 'quark' too loudly, one of them lit up. Sometimes you might end up with three or four
of them going at the same time with their accompanying audible warnings filling the cabin and everyone
rushing around twiddling knobs and sliders trying to calm the dragon back to sleep.
Also, there was a small test button for the engineers to see
that all the alarm panels were working. It was a famous way of waking up a dozing member of your
crew or testing the bottle of a newcomer. To suddenly see every alarm in the place pulsing blood
red and wailing like a hundred banshees was a real shock the first couple of times it caught you
out. Maldoon went for it every time, and badly.
Then there were Wheelbarrow's lectures. One of the crew would
get him started when Maldoon was stuck in the cabin learning panel control from me. Some stupid
leading question about the effect of nitric fume poisoning; or the accumulation of TNT in the blood
system. And, of course, Wheelbarrow would give you every little detail until you could feel yourself
dying slowly and in agony.
However, Maldoon brought the worst one on himself. Was it true,
he asked Wheelbarrow, what Ray had told him about a toluene fire? And Wheelbarrow assured him
that yes it was. A toluene fire did indeed burn with an invisible flame and you could open a
door and walk into its embrace without seeing it was alive. With the amount of that chemical
we were always spilling I could see that everyone, even Ray, was shocked.
But Maldoon was petrified. I followed him back along the tunnels
a couple of times after meal breaks or at the start of a new shift and watched him fiddling
about with his boots or safety clothing outside the doors waiting for Ray or me to stroll in
front of him like a fucking mine-sweeper. I knew he was not going to last a lot longer but,
for some reason, still felt reluctant to be the one to finish it. The foreman, Bobby,
‘Don’t-yous-fucking-call-me-Jock’ McCluckie, had a quiet word with me, and asked if I
wanted to get rid of Maldoon? One bad report from the chargehand about any member of his
crew was all it took. Ray and the rest of the boys got to hear about it and started going
around slapping each other on the back. "I’m giving him more time," I told them. I could
see them trying to pluck up the courage to argue with me but not being quite brave enough
to risk it, which was wise. I let Bobby know that I wanted to keep Maldoon for a while
longer at least and he gave me a sly wink. Our foreman once went through the fire and was
a wise old man.
* * *
I was alone in the cabin with Wheelbarrow and Maldoon; everyone
else had gone off to first break. I sent Maldoon down to ground level to take a couple of samples
and stepped outside the cabin myself to do a couple of quick checks. And everything went to hell.
The steel floor under my feet began to tremble, then shake. A
low-pitched growl became a deafening roar. I stared back into the cabin - which according to
the letter of the law, I should not have left - and saw Wheelbarrow's face. I had never seen
such a look of horror on anyone in my life. He had gone white and his eyes were starting to
bulge. My legs no longer wanted to support me or follow my command and I had to force them to
move and get me back into the cabin. The noise was getting louder and the building was moving
as if an earthquake had hit.
"What the hell is it?" I said as I got in. Wheelbarrow stayed
frozen. Not one alarm light was lit. Everything, according to what was supposed to be one of
the most sophisticated systems in the world, was A-okay.
Then Wheelbarrow came alive. He rushed to the door and I knew
he was onto it. I watched as he left the cabin and reached the top of the stairway. Unbelievably,
Maldoon was hurrying up them on his way to help. I’d thought that he’d probably be about a mile
away by now and going strong. Wheelbarrow tried to jump over him.The stairs ducked under the steel
floor we were on, so if anyone felt frisky enough they could do a couple of chin-ups on the way
down. Wheelbarrow head-butted the sharp edge and fell backwards, blood jetting out of his head as
he hit the stairs. He got to his feet and shouldered Maldoon aside before clearing the rest of
them in a bound. Even above the noise, I heard him smash his way out of the door and the rubber
flapping of his boots as he kept on running.
"What is happening?" Maldoon asked, just about clear enough to hear.
Whatever it was, it was getting worse and reaching an intensity
where you knew it was going to end in the biggest and worst way possible.
I smashed the glass case containing the emergency lever to
drown the charge. My hand closed around the smooth, untouched handle connected to the
innocent-looking, gleaming steel rod. I glimpsed the huge, toxic red mushroom about to sprout,
probably ending our lives and contaminating so many others, and hesitated.
"It's the stirrers," Maldoon gasped, grabbing my hand, "they’re
not moving."
I looked out and saw he was right. The enormous driveshaft
that ran the length of the building was still turning, but each stirrer, dropping via its gears
and bearings into the vessel, was still. I pressed the stirrer stop button. The most beautiful
silence and stillness touched the two of us.
An oil flow had become blocked and the bearings had seized up.
The engineers found it out during the inspection, and said, as always after one of these near
misses, that it was a miracle. This time, that none of the hot steel had gone into the explosive
and set the whole lot off.
We were informed that Wheelbarrow had suffered a nervous breakdown
and had been given a desk job. The head of production told Bob that me and Maldoon had done our
duty and no more, but we would get a ‘mention in dispatches’! A couple of months later a memo
came from the official enquiry. It stated that if I had pulled the lever and drowned the charge,
it would have been the correct action according to the rulebook. And, in this place, that was
the only necessary thing for me to ever do.
* * *
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2004-2008 the Dublin Quarterly--to see familiar things with unfamiliar eyes!
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