The T8 Line by Alex Plotnikoff
The T8 Line
I only ended up at the church because of food poisoning. I’ve been trying to eat full meals since Sunday, when I cooked something hot for the first time in weeks. Cooked hot, not heated hot, not light-beam particle clean mean hot. Heavy hot. Roast potatoes. Brussels sprouts. I burnt the cauliflower. I have nothing against the microwave, I told my mum over the phone as I left the baking dish to soak. I wasn’t raised hippy-dippy. Hey, I even made that canned tomato bean pan you slide into the oven with a cracked egg in the middle. It looks like an embryo, although it bubbles in a way I’m sure wombs don’t. Protein, carbs, fats. Well-balanced. My mum agrees.
I got the cauliflower because my meds are on the PBS now, and so I save $4.66 on every box. The chemist tells me about the scheme as she accidentally slicks my name over the side-effects warning. She begins to pick it loose, but we’re sticky and the fan is doing nothing and so she leaves it. It says don’t drive, but you’re epileptic, you already know that. I think about Kip and how he was free of seizures for a whole year, but still had to call me. The Service NSW backed onto a Video Ezy at the time. It was on an oddly placed roundabout. They wouldn’t give him a license. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, he kept saying as his runner tapped a hummingbird-wing beat against my dashboard. It did matter, it mattered a lot in Newcastle where everything was tossed about and away from everything else, connected by only one double-laned artery. He pressed his cheek against the window and wouldn’t look at me. There was blood on my heels, and I was missing a toenail. Industrial Drive kept us to its back as we fought each other for the car’s silence.
Yeah, okay, I tell the chemist, even though I don’t have epilepsy, I just can’t stomach lithium.
On Tuesday, it was pesto pasta. I’m so caught up in the Act of Cooking to realise the pesto has already been opened. I must have made pesto pasta more recently than I’d thought, like how I sometimes wash my hair three days in a row. So, halfway through a friend’s baby shower, the place beneath my naval folds over and into itself until my spine starts to break and beg for a knee-to-chin ball. I start to sweat. I need to leave, because there is a pregnant woman and the room is covered in pastels and new paint. I make it a block before my body pings to let me know it’s about to bypass my conscious controls. Older, primordial-soup systems have taken over. My insides are going to hit the pavement. I see a church across the street with its door propped open, although it’s more like a scout hall. It’s a Quakers church. I have no idea what Quakers believe, but I’ve heard they’re less garbed and nicer than most. On their toilet door is a poster taped at the corners, and it says: ‘Conduct is more convincing than language.’ My gut slithers and unspools and I try my best not to swear in a place of worship.
They’re right about that. Kip eyes me over the oily steam of our fried rice. His business shirt has turned dark blue around his neck and armpits. What? I mean sure, it’s a fine placard, but that’s not the point. He bites a piece of baby corn and his teeth click. What was the point? I don’t know. I’ve lost a punchline somewhere in the detail. Whose baby shower was it? You don’t know her, I lie.
The takeaway shop is starting to close, little clay teacups are getting cleared and carried in each other like Russian nesting dolls. The owner is being more than kind- she should have closed an hour ago, but the night is quiet and so are we. She’s moving slow. We’re grateful because it’s the only normal place in Mascot. I tell Kip as we split the bill how I can’t believe he ended up in Mascot, with its airport lights and hotel precincts, in an American Psycho apartment, four aircons, pool, gym, spa. When I met him out the front of Mascot station he was in his work clothes, ones now awkward from the heat, and I realised I hadn’t seen him so dressed up since our Year 12 formal. We never got a photo together, had never thought to. Because you were miserable and full of bronchitis, he says, and then rabbit-quick on the mark, full of shit and bronchitis, at the heels of my laugh, not much shit left in you now though. I stop in the street and put my hands on my thighs like I’m dry heaving, coughing up a good mood. His pause is tight. He must think I’m crying again. When he sees I’m not, at least not properly, he cracks up too.
What if that finally fucking tipped me? My tears are picked up by my sweat, and I’m still laughing, so Kip keeps walking. My bad. I’ll say it at your funeral. Sorry folks, I know she was the star of the show, my bad. His eye flicks and my fingers pull down my face. We’re having a good time. Despite my call, despite my spit turning pink, he answers easy. He met me at the station like we’d been planning it for ages. He’s making a good time. I catch up to him, a wheel on a man’s suitcase falls off ahead of us, and we keep walking.
Some time later, when things are better, my friend and I walk home from an Inner-West bar. Two drunk girls, babies with no pants, ask us where they can get stuff, they’re going to Asha’s, is she any good? I’ve got no idea, but my friend knows, and Asha’s cool, and she’ll give you a good deal, and she won’t screw you over. We stand, uneasy, watching their mousy heads twist into Paramatta Road. They’re not wearing shoes. I think of the skin of my feet dangling like money spiders, the accelerator tacky from dirt and puss. I think of Kip gripping and scrunching the Service NSW documents until they became something sharp. I tell my friend thanks, because I don’t do anything like that. I wish time really worked like how physicists say, I wish we could nudge their blackboard theories into our breathing space, a train tunnel, so I can tell Kip in Mascot how I don’t do anything like that. I keep things small and in my lungs. I sleep close to women in cold snaps. My molars stay white and empty, and I don’t look at the popcorn ceiling for too long, and everything is few and far between. I mind the gap.
I wish time was something you could slip through, like steam or phone static or the Holy Ghost, so I can tell Kip how the Quakers were just outside the door before the joke gets away from us again.
Alex doesn’t have active socials but you can find an Interview with her on the Baby Teeth Patreon on Thursday March 21st.
