HOST

Samantha Oakley

We can start with a quiz. You lot seem to like those – forever showing off about the things you know. The things you invent. Rewarding yourselves in your thirst for knowledge and innovation with scant regard for the danger you put yourselves in.

Pathetic, really.

So: what am I?

You can’t see me.

Or hear me.

Or feel me or taste me.

But you’ve heard of me. 

You know I’m everywhere. We are everywhere – in the food you eat, the air you breathe.

And far, far too late, you’re starting to worry.

**

“Michael,” says Helen. I can hear her leafing through the pages of a newspaper. “Apparently, tamarind can wash away microplastics.”

“Interesting,” he replies. He sounds bored. 

“They say it’s got a natural binding agent that the microplastics in our bodies actually stick to.”

Michael says nothing. He’s tapping away on a keyboard.

“I’ll get some from Moore Wilson’s,” she says.

See, I told you you’re worried.

**

I’ve been here for years, but Helen’s actually my second host. I used to belong to Mia. She’s highly obnoxious these days but she used to be a sweet girl.

When she started school, she had a bright pink lunchbox adorned with unicorns. At lunchtime, the noisy boys would charge about but Mia would stay and open up the lunchbox, curious to know what her mother had packed for her. It was almost certainly a bland, healthy offering. 

But the lunchbox often came home containing remnants of other children’s lunches.

“Mia!” Helen would say. “What are these chocolate crumbs doing in your lunchbox? Where did they come from?”

Mia would say that a friend gave her something, or she swapped with someone. 

Given that she was such a good-natured little thing back then, it was easy to imagine her presiding over a tabletop food swap to ensure her little friends were happy with what they got.

“Just stick to your own lunch, please,” Helen would say as she scrubbed the bright pink plastic.

**

It was all that scrubbing that dislodged me, you know. The lunchbox was scratched, and I found myself evicted during a frenzied scouring at the hands of Helen the Hygienic. I managed to attach myself to a water droplet on her finger, and before I knew it I was carelessly dripped into her wine glass. As simple as that.

So here I am. A drearier existence.

To say nothing of the ghastly journey I endured to get here: the ignominy of – quelle horreur! – passing through Helen’s digestive system, only to enter her bloodstream and be pumped around at alarming speed. It was with some relief that I finally got stuck in the curve of a teeny-tiny fissure and I’ve stayed put ever since, quietly residing above the thalamus. Surrounded by the old bore’s white matter. Helen’s conversations are about all I get to hear now. Or whatever rubbish she’s watching on television.

I’m not the only one. Surely that won’t surprise you?

Over the years quite a little population of microplastics and nanoplastics has formed in various nooks and crannies of Helen’s corpus. Not that we can communicate with one another, of course. I’m not asking you to suspend your disbelief that much.

**

I bet you haven’t the faintest idea how old plastic is. You probably think it’s some modern invention à la birth control pills and colour TV.

Wrong! 

Wanna know? 

Of course you do.

Well, buckle in, plebeians. Brace yourselves.

After many variations of plasticising natural fibres, by many people, a Belgian chemist pioneered the first wholly synthetic plastic in 1907, combining formaldehyde and phenol under heat and pressure. Et voila! He called it Bakelite.

But plastic didn’t take off straight away. That happened decades later. After all, something needed to be done with all those gorgeous waste products coming out of oil and gas production. As luck would have it, a British company was the first to have real commercial success with Perspex in 1932. What a splendid moment that was. What a gift to mankind. What harm could it possibly do?

**

Helen has thrown out all her plastic bowls and utensils. Swapped for glass and ceramics. Banned glad wrap as well. 

She’s been zealous about it.

You should’ve heard her when Mia went online and bought a load of tat – I mean, goods – from China. She tried to get Mia to return it.

As if that’s going to make a difference now!

**

You probably know the jury’s out on how dangerous I actually am. I could just sit here benignly for the rest of Helen’s life and not cause any fuss at all. Just stay here until she dies and decomposes, and I might eventually – over hundreds of years – become part of the soil on which she is laid to rest. Perhaps I’ll be washed away. Who knows where I might end up after that? In a river. In the sea. Or perhaps inside some other unsuspecting creature.

Or perhaps I’m not so benign. Perhaps I’ll kick off some inflammation, which – combined with other health conditions and lifestyle factors – could be the start of some dreadful disease. Cancer and Alzheimer’s are the ones you’re probably thinking of. Trust me, Helen drinks like a fish so she’s not helping herself there.

“Oh my God!” she says one day. 

The rustle of flimsy paper.

“The average person has a teaspoon of microplastic in their brain!”

“That can’t be true, darling.”

“It says it right here!” Helen pauses. “They did a study and found people who had dementia before they died had ten times more microplastic in their brains!”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Michael, again, sounds uninterested. 

I hear the screw-top of a wine bottle opening. The glug, glug, glug of sweet nectar as it’s tipped into a glass. It’s a hefty pour.

**

You might be all right, you know.

Some clever scientists might find a way for us to safely decompose. To just disappear. Helen’s read about a fungus that might do it. Or a miracle seaweed. You might be lucky.

Until then, though, I’ll be sitting right here. Tucked away. With a life expectancy of thousands of years, the possibilities for me are endless.

I’ll just stay right here

Waiting.

Waiting to see where the world takes me.

—

Samantha Oakley has a Master’s in Creative Writing from Massey University, and lives in Wellington with her husband and two children.