The iron hisses. Pfffffffssss. You know this sound the way you know a name being mispronounced. The shirt on the board is white. Keep saying it. White. White in the way that things become white after you have worked at them past the hour when working at things makes sense, 2:47am, the water, the heat, the pressing-down of your whole wrist-weight like you are trying to convince the fabric of something it already knows. Steam rises into your face. You lean in. The collar surrenders.
White.
But here is the thing about the shirt.
The shirt has a second shadow.
You noticed it three Tuesdays ago and you have been ironing around it carefully ever since because some things you do not press directly into, some things you learn to navigate at an angle, your grandmother knew this, your grandmother could read the weight of a room before the room had decided what it was going to do. She could tell you which Tuesday to stay inside. She is gone now. She is very gone in the particular way that certain people are gone, where gone does not mean what the Australians mean when they say gone, where gone means she put something down somewhere before she left and it is still there, it is still warm, it is a heat without a source. The second shadow of the shirt moves when you move. It does this politely. It is waiting for you to acknowledge it and you will not. You press the collar. Pfffffffssss. The steam goes through the fabric and you swear you hear something on the other side of the steam, something that sounds like your name, the real pronunciation, the one your grandmother used, the one that costs something to say properly.
Are you crying. Is that steam. Is that something else that has gotten into the water supply of you.
The honest answer is all three and one of the three has teeth.
Meanwhile your gari soakings are getting soft.
You left them on the counter because the iron hissed and you obeyed. The gari is in the bowl. It is becoming a paste. The groundnuts are sinking. The sugar is gone, fully dissolved, gave itself up without ceremony, and you think about things that dissolve into situations quietly and stop being locatable and you do not finish the thought. The paste is forming a shape at the bottom of the bowl that is either random or is the outline of the Sekondi coastline from above, that specific curl of the Gulf of Guinea near Takoradi, and your stomach says hmmmm in a frequency that has nothing to do with hunger. Your grandmother used to say that food left to itself will tell you what it knows. You always thought this was metaphor. You are less sure about metaphor now at 2:47am in Melbourne with the second shadow moving at the edges of your vision and the steam rising and the coastline or the random thing at the bottom of the bowl saying something in a language you were fluent in before fluency was educated out of you.
Pfffffffssss.
The train is also late.
Krrrrschhhhh. The app refreshes. 7:09 is now 7:23 is now a rumour. You are standing on the platform in the white shirt. Your collar is the most perfectly ironed thing on this platform. A bottlebrush tree leans over the fence at the platform edge doing its business in the wind. Three sparrows are arguing. Something in the drain grate near the yellow line is wet and still and you do not look at it directly because your grandmother also told you about the things that arrange themselves in drains in the hour between night and morning, the things that are passing through and stop to rest, using the underworld of pipes and the cold breath that comes up from beneath cities, and Melbourne is built on a great deal of cold breath from beneath, you have always felt this, you felt it the week you arrived six years ago standing outside the airport with your one good suitcase and the sky was doing something flat and grey that the sky in Sekondi simply does not do, would refuse to do, would consider an insult to the eye, and you thought what is this place and the place did not answer, the place just continued being flat and grey and very sure of itself in the particular way that places are sure of themselves when they have decided you are a guest.
You are still a guest.
Your collar is white.
Cheep. Gone.
A woman is also waiting on the platform. Coffee. Phone. She does not look at you. She does not look at you with a specific practiced effort and you are very good at measuring this effort now, gold medal, tick tick tick, you have had six years of measuring it, you have developed an instrument for it that lives somewhere between your shoulder blades, and you look at the bottlebrush tree instead. The tree is fine. The tree has no position on your presence. The tree is the most neutral entity on this platform and you would like to thank it but you have learned to keep your gratitudes to yourself in public because gratitude expressed out loud by a black body at 7:19am on a Melbourne train platform is a whole situation you do not have the iron for.
You have ironed the shirt.
The shirt is white.
This is the thing you did at 2:47am. You pressed white into white. You made the white more white. You are wearing the whitest thing you own into a city that will still find a way, will still find the way, to remind you that white is a colour it applies differently depending on who is doing the wearing.
Behind you and slightly to the left something is breathing.
You turn.
Nothing.
A plastic bag. A normal plastic bag in the wind doing exactly what plastic bags do in wind. You know this. You know this is what it is. And also you know your grandmother, who is very gone, who put something down before she left, that she is above nothing when she wants your attention, she was a woman of unlimited methods, she was a woman who once convinced a government official to reverse a decision using only a bowl of water and a Tuesday. You watched her do it. You were seven. You did not understand what you watched until you were twenty-three and by then she was already arranging herself in platform drains and plastic bags and the second shadows of white shirts in Melbourne at 2:47am.
Fsssssss. The plastic bag. Probably.
Your gari soakings at home are a paste now.
Love is also a paste, eventually. Love is the thing you left on the counter while you attended to the hissing. When you come back it is structurally different, it requires a different spoon, a different kind of hunger, and you eat it anyway because you are from a place where the bowl is a gift, where waste is a word with a serious face, and because the paste at the bottom is shaped like the Sekondi coastline and the Sekondi coastline was always going to end up inside you whether you participated consciously or not. You scrape the bowl. Your grandmother taught you to scrape the bowl. She also taught you that what remains after the eating is just as important as the eating, that the residue has a life, that you should look at it before you wash it away, that the looking is a kind of respect, and you have been looking and what you see this morning is something that looks back.
Pfffffffssss.
Krrrrschhhhh.
Cheep.
The train comes. Lit from inside. White light on white faces looking at white screens. You step on. The doors close behind you. Tshhhhhk. You hold the rail. Black hand. White rail. You notice this because Melbourne has taught you to notice this, has spent six years teaching you to notice this, has made a curriculum of it and never once admitted it is a curriculum.
The man near the door smells of something. A soap, a kitchen, a morning that lives in your sternum before your mind catches up. Mmmmph. That low pull. You turn slightly. Earphones. Sealed. Everyone in this carriage is sealed and looking at the middle distance where Australians keep their most important thoughts and you are the only one who is here and also here and also nine years old in your uncle’s compound in Sekondi watching red laterite dust settle after rain and also standing at your grandmother’s door on the morning she stopped answering it and also on the floor of a flat in Fitzroy in 2019 when a woman said your name correctly in the dark, the real pronunciation, and something in your ribcage shifted like furniture being moved back to where it had always been supposed to be.
The train moves.
Under the train, under the tracks, under the pipes and the cold breath that this city sits on top of without acknowledgement, something moves with it. You feel this in your soles. Older than the diesel-drum. Slower. A different frequency entirely, the frequency of things that have been following you for a long time and are very patient and have no relationship with time in the sense that a train schedule has a relationship with time, which is to say they are always and you are always almost late.
The second shadow of your white shirt is sitting in the seat beside you.
You do not look at it directly.
The woman across the aisle glances at you and glances away. You are wearing a white shirt with a perfect collar at 7:31am on a Tuesday. You are wearing the most ironed thing on this train. You pressed it yourself in the dark. You leaned your whole wrist-weight into it. You are black and the shirt is white and Melbourne sees the black first and the ironing never, and your grandmother is in the seat beside you in the second shadow of the white shirt and she is not saying anything but she is there and her presence is the temperature of her kitchen in Sekondi when the soup was on and you were small and the walls were yellow and the light through the louvres made everything look like it was already a memory even while it was happening.
Even while she was there.
Even while you were.
Pfffffffssss.
Brrrrmmmmm.
Flinders Street. Someone gets off. Someone gets on. The city rearranges itself, which it does constantly, which it has always done, which it was doing six years before you arrived and will do six years after and the train does not wait, the carriage does not reconfigure around your presence, the middle distance stays the middle distance, and the second shadow adjusts beside you without comment like a woman who has been adjusting to situations her entire life and beyond it.
The gari soakings at home are waiting in their paste. Shaped like a coastline that knows where you are from. Shaped like the thing that follows you under the tracks. And when you get back you will sit with it, you will look at it before you wash it away.
You will scrape the bowl with the attention of someone who was taught that the residue has a life.
That the looking is a kind of respect.
That some things you do not press directly into.
That the temperature must be correct.
That the shirt is white.
Is white.
Is white.
And you are not.
And the city knows.
And the iron hisses.
Pfffffffssss.