The heat stuck to my skin. But I felt cold, and my sweat was cold, too. After that feeling, I shivered to the core. If I look in the mirror, I will see the colours completely gone from my lips. My face turned overly yellow, and spots of bruises started to sore on my back. I decided against the temptation to check on myself in front of a mirror and walked to the garden instead. I went past the kitchen and opened the screen door. I haven’t had much time to care for the vegetables, plants, and flowers. They look alive and well, though. I stood immersed in the cool air mixed with the faint fragrance of the camellias in the sun. I bent down to my knees, putting my weight in the soil and plucking out the weeds one after another. I started to feel the warmth, and it suffused from my fingertips to the whole of my body.
I remember they told me earnestly, “You need to stop thinking about feelings when you get like this, and when it occurs, the best thing to do is to go to the deli by Flinder Street Station to buy a meat pie. We have been there since you were little. Eat the meat pie as slowly as you can. Stop thinking and just taste the pie. Feel the crust flake off its buttery flavour, melting with warmth, the meat juice dispersing in every bite from your moving teeth. And then, you can let go of that feeling. Just keep going. Get to where you want to go.” Flinder Street Station is a happy place. The deli right by it has the best meat pie. Passerbys at the station are busy finding out and getting to their platforms. I liked to look at these people’s focused eyes. When people concentrate on the goings and doings, I can see the world around me. In those mere seconds, I search for the relaxed, almost kind eyes in them.
I became a high school commuter, taking trains from Flinder Street Station. Her name is Catherine. She stood by the gate most school days, wearing her name on the security employee’s badge on her uniform.
Occasionally, some older adults either lost their tickets or struggled to put the tickets in the machine, and she would give a hand or lead these people to the help desk. The elders, grinning in their blue eyes, said to her, “Oh, dear”. I would hear some chatting and laughter behind me as I went through the gate to take my train to school. Sometimes, random young men and women ask Catherine, “Excuse- moi, which way is Melbourne City Backpackers?” Catherine would smile and give them directions. The young men and women wearing wrinkled T-shirts with tangled, messy yellowish hair smiled back and winked at her with a “Thank you”. “Aucun problème”, Catherine said proudly. I glanced at her among other people waiting for the train. She whistled a happy tune. Her forehead turned redder than usual. Her pink cheeks plumped up with two healthy, shiny spots. I wished I was like Catherine.
On the day of my high school graduation, they came to Flinder Street Station with me, and it was their first time using the tickets to get on the train. They looked like children, half giggled, half nervous, and half lost. They have never been inside. I took them to the ticket vending machine. I showed them which colour button to push, that each button meant a destination, and that the price was marked as it was. The further we go, the higher the price will be. They laughed when they pushed the buttons to order the tickets. The machine gave out two rectangular tickets, like two tongues that got cut off in the mouth and dropped out flat. When we got to the turnstile, they inserted the tickets opposite.
“NO! THAT IS NOT HOW YOU DO IT!” Catherine looked at them coldly and tersely. They looked down at their ticket inserts. Guilt on their faces, holding their train tickets. Their hands continued to try the ticket inserts, but they did not look at Catherine. Sheepish smiles on both their faces. One stopped trying. The other tried again to get the ticket to go through. It came back out again. “NO. YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG,” Catherine said with her hands in her trouser pockets. People queuing up behind us. All eyes were on us. Their faces turned intense yellow ochre, and their lips white. The crowd created a commotion around us. I grabbed their tickets from their hands, pulled their wrists, and we ran to the meat pie fast. We ate, standing and looking at the travellers’ focused eyes together. We taste the pie while navigating the oily wrapper to keep the hot pie from slipping out of our hands. It is important to savour the flavour and stop thinking about that feeling. Catherine’s irate. Her sharp words, slashing on their meek expressions at the gate, framed a picture in my mind and reappeared like a silent arrest.
The next day, I went alone to collect my high school diploma. On the way back, I saw an ambulance waiting by the brick of the alleyway, and neighbours stood about the place. Then I saw them lie in the middle of the road with spikes poked through their backs, pale lips, and intense ochre skin. At the morgue, I took one of each spike with me in my bag and brought it with me to college.
I didn’t cry after their deaths. To be more accurate– I couldn’t cry. I spent the early mornings in the garden until noon. I idly walked for an hour to the only dumpling stand by the river under the highway and ordered ten dumplings to eat on a plastic plate. The dumpling stand underneath the highway was so noisy I couldn’t hear myself. The wind rushed onto my skin from all directions until I felt my face turned into rubber. After lunch, I walked the same way home. No dinners. The only thing I wanted to do was to read about the Yellow Ochre Disease until I had no energy left to keep my eyes open. That was my routine for three months.
“What is this on your neck?” Colin asked me while lifting me to sit on top of him. In Colin’s library, there were no plain walls. Each wall was filled with books. He had a big window facing the sun on the right side of a sofabed. The sun sprinkled on my eyelids like the tickling sensation I felt when Colin first laid eyes on me.
“Souvenir. I have class.” I got off him and walked to the books.
“Are they some kind of stone?” He got off the sofa, walked towards me, and put his hands underneath my jersey.
“Shark teeth. Are you learning David Gruby this semester?” I picked up the book, leaned back on him, and sighed.
“Oh, but they are not sharp.”
“I sanded them. Can I borrow it? Mémoire sur une vegétation qui constitue la vraie teigne”
“Yes, you can. It’s a terrible read. Do you remember Shirley in the lab with me the other day? She said she hated it abjectly.”
“I am curious. Teach me what you know?” I tilted my head and looked at him quietly. I can hear my heart pulsating irregularly. “I’ll ring you,” I said to him. Over the semester, I visited Colin once a week.
Colin lived in his Melbourne CBD apartment for free. I never asked where his parents got all their money. And he liked how much I came to him to ask strange scientific questions. We met in the library in the medicine for disease aisle. I stumbled into him from carrying too many heavy tombstone-like books. He liked one of the tombstones that I borrowed. And then, he invited me to coffee. After a couple of months of countless meetings at cafes and on campus later, when he showed me his home library, I felt the excitement I had never experienced. The sunlight beamed in his library through the large window and reflected on the book binds. They are his lab work journals, class notes, medical books, and research on disease symptoms. Words escaped me. I stood there in silence. And Colin said, “You can come here anytime.”
I went to spend time with Colin in his library whenever I could during the semester. But I am here alone today. After placing Gruby back on its shelf, I thanked Colin in my head and left his apartment key on my way out.
I threw away my oversized beanie that covered most of my face, the big coat, and gloves in a quiet street with no CCTV. I bought a jacket at a used clothing shop and put it on before I took the bus back to Flinder Street Station. I climbed the stairs, stepped on the bridge and warmed my hands in my new old jacket. It was a chilly sunny day, but beautiful and sweet. I looked down from the bridge to see Flinder Street Station, a historical landmark in Melbourne. Its clock showed one minute past eight. In the morning rush hour, people pass each other without noticing anyone’s face. I sprinted in each step on the bridge, watching high school students all dressed up to go to their graduation ceremony. An ambulance blaring in high notes drove past the bridge at frantic speed under my feet, and I whistled a happy tune.
I turned left in the familiar alleyway to get inside my house, the house Mum and Dad saved up for me. I removed my jacket, changed into a white sleeveless cotton T-shirt and black denim dungaree, and tied my hair into a bun. I opened the vegetable drawer in the fridge for some spring onions, somen noodles, and light chicken broth. Before boiling the water and chicken broth mix, I put the spring onion in the pot, as Mum told me to. She said the broth tastes better this way. Mum and Dad were always working. It was rare. But she would cook this dish for Dad and me when they had some time at home and were not completely exhausted from work. She always fried three eggs, so we each had one egg in our soup bowl. I fried an egg and put it on top of the boiled somen with scattered spring onion. I smeared the egg yolk on the white noodles and thought of how I had put the yellow ochre powder on Catherine’s face this morning when I fell at Catherine’s turnstile on purpose and waited on one of the platforms for ten minutes. The soup turned yellow, like Catherine’s face. I slurped up the noodles and remembered her gurgling in pain. Before she was dead, the spikes poked through her back like my Mum and Dad.
It was a good day. I let my skin bathe in the sun, though shivering. I warmed up again in a minute. My ochre-tinted skin gently faded and changed back to normal. I breathed in the cool air flooding in and out like mist and collected my gardening gloves on a basket. I stood in the centre of this overgrown green, stretched to erase the sore on my back, and welcomed all the invading feelings. Gardening is how I cured myself of pain long ago. I didn’t like the meat pies. They are overrated. In the calm of my vegetables and plants, I bent down to my knees and started to remove the weeds. Water flooded down my eyes, dripping into the soil. I can start getting to where I want to go.
Central air eased the disinfectant smell in a white lab and white walls. Students wore white lab coats and surgery gloves. They stood sporadically by the stainless steel lab tables, putting down beakers and measuring liquids into syringes. They looked particularly smart with their safety goggles. Shirley asked Colin, “Have you heard the news that a White woman died of the Yellow Ochre Disease at Flinder Street Station? The forensic team mentioned her acute reaction was caused by the compounds of fungus and Yellow Ochre Disease’s spikes they found in her blood. White people don’t ever get that disease. It seems like a big deal. Hey, Colin! Are you here? I am talking to you. Can I borrow your Mémoire sur une vegétation qui constitue la vraie teigne? I threw mine out %^&$$^&*(#…”. Colin parted his lips. Motionlessly, he stared into an empty glass bottle. Eyebrows pushed towards the middle and made a faint vertical line above the bridge of his nose. Puzzled. Eileen’s odd questions and unique interest in Gruby’s book replayed in his mind. He turned his back on Shirley and couldn’t help but grin inexplicably.