Diamond Plate - Page 4

I’m street trash. It’s a long walk back home down dusty red roads and I’m doing it in a body suit and stripper boots. I’m dying to take these vinyl shackles off, but my feet are so soft-skinned I’d tear them up long before I got home. That’s the one downside of having an obsessive footcare routine, I guess.

It takes me a second to get my bearings from Johnno’s place. I reckon I was walking for 15 minutes before I even got off of his HUGE property: One of the perks of living out in woop woop. I nearly give up and turn back when I realize it’ll be at least a 4 hour walk back to my place, but then I have a brain wave: If I just walk as far as the mine, I can take a loan car home.

With nothing but flat earth stretching out for kilometres, it makes the mining facility all the more imposing. It’s the easiest way to orient yourself out here, which makes you grow dependent on it. The moment you escape it, you find yourself looking back at it again for guidance. Even in my dreams, apparently.

That pit in the ground and all the things built around it: That’s my Uluru... my sleeping giant.

The mine grows as I doggedly approach, and before long I’m working my way up the service roads. There’s a small buzz of activity beyond the wire fences despite being the weekend (the mine never fully shuts down), but there’s an unspoken agreement that the weekend shift does the bare minimum to keep the machinery moving and hit their quotas. Case in point: I wave hello to Harry on security and hold up my ID, but he doesn’t even notice that I’m dressed like a stripper. He just opens the gate, ruffles his newspaper and continues reading. Another professional doing his duty.

I make my way to the admin area, step up off the dirt, and climb the stairs into the office. Again, that sweet kiss of A/C hits me and I could almost collapse from relief right here. But the office feels very... odd. Usually I’d be wearing my hi-vis, my hard hat, my steel-cap boots. And there’d be about a dozen other guys identically dressed passing through here between shifts, shoving sandwiches down their gobs or hitting on our office staff. I’d float right through here, getting by with some nods of recognition and a couple pats on the back.

I try to ignore it and cross the wide expanse of scuffed, cobalt blue vinyl flooring between the front door and the entry into the refinery itself. But then, just before the PVC strip curtains, a loud CLANG echoes through the empty office as my heels strike something metallic. There’s a threshold here...a threshold of diamond plate.

How had I never noticed this before? I must have walked over it every day for the past five years. I know floors don’t exactly demand your attention, but this diamond plate is so shiny. There’s not a single panel of diamond plate that bright in the rest of the facility. I crouch down to get a look at the pattern: The embossed shapes look like little fish oil capsules... or suppositories. I think they call this a teardrop pattern. We don’t have this pattern anywhere else, I’m sure.

Is this new? Why didn’t anyone mention it? SOMEONE should have mentioned it: Mundane little changes like this comprise 80% of conversation at the mine. One time they changed the vending machine option from Pub Squash to Solo and the men were just about ready to go on strike. So... what the fuck is going on here?

I slap myself: What am I getting in such a tizzy for? I must just be exhausted... yeah. That’s all it is. I’ve sweat through the crotch of my stockings, my makeup feels like dried mud, and my head is weighed down like a sandbag.

I stand back up and try to ignore the diamond plate. I gather my determination, take a few steps back to get a run up, then I strut. I strut over it like I’d strut on stage. My heels clang on the diamond plate, and each step feels like I’m stomping it down into place. I don’t want to look down at it.

And I keep strutting. Past the locker rooms, past the carpark, into the refinery. Past the blast furnace which I can now never not see as one big goon sack waiting to be tapped. I keep strutting past the workers turning to give me queer looks and past the cauldrons being relayed over my head and past the steaming slag piles. I wind through an interconnecting maze of catwalks slapped with fading yellow safety paint (without getting my heel stuck a single time, by sheer divine intervention).

And then, I halt. I find myself at the flash furnaces. At Diamond’s workstation. The temperature in these furnaces can get up to 1350 degrees Celsius. That’s hot. And not hot in a “sniffing a rugby player’s used jock strap” kind of way, more in a “hellfire and brimstone” kind of way.

Think about it: Have you ever been burned by steam? It’s nasty: Your skin just slides off, and it gets all filled with pus. One PSSSST of steam and you’ll be scarred for life. So that’s 100 degrees Celsius: I wonder what 1350 degrees feels like? I wonder...

I wonder how bad you’d have to feel to be willing to find out.

Tears loosen up my dried-on foundation, snaking their way through the cracks like trickles of water on a dry lakebed. Fuck Diamond... was it really so bad? You were kind, considerate, funny, talented, and fucking gorgeous. Was that so much? Was that some unbearable burden?

Or was it just the burden of others that you wanted to burn away. The load you took on. Was it some curse that you had to help us; some curse only purifiable by flame. Would it have been easier if we’d have left you alone...

I grab one of the grease-stained rags hanging off the furnace’s handle, dip it in a quenching bucket, and rub at my face. The water mixes black soot with bronze foundation, smearing it, the coarse threads scratching my skin. I sit on a stack of cinder blocks and yank off my boots. I throw them into the furnace, along with the rag, and finally, though it nearly stays my hand to do so, I take off my wig and chuck that in too.

My silent display has brought in a new audience. I’ve not had an audience look at me like this before. They’re not amused or aroused, but more like... scared. They hang from the catwalks and peek out from behind machinery like curious monkeys.

I leave them to their gawking and make my way over to the smelting facility’s rail system. Slabs of copper anode sit loaded on board each car, stacked to the brim. They’re ready for transport to the next facility. I climb aboard the load just as the operator sets the system into motion.

As my rail car trundles forward, I perch myself on the edge, stockinged legs dangling down. I watch as the light hits the ground, exiting the smelting sheds and emerging out into the rapidly warming day. The sunlight bounces off the copper sheets, blinding me with their tawny glow.

The copper here is at least 98.5% pure, but that’s not useful. So, we send them off to be further refined, to achieve 99.9% purity. Because only once they’ve been stripped away over and over again are they good enough.