Loner

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Loner Page 4

by Georgina Young


  In between the it’s been so long-ing, her hair gets a good tug. ‘Aaaaah, it looks soooo good.’

  Lona glances around for Tab. She spots her around the back of the big table, talking to some guy Lona’s never seen before. The hyena laugh is getting a good work-out. Lona waves with two fingers. Tab flutters her hand open shut like a clam.

  She chooses what she always chooses when she can’t get to Tab: the bar. The cheapest white wine on the list. She cannot work out whether saying Sav Blanc or properly pronouncing Sauvignon Blanc is wankier. She spends her entire time in the queue deliberating.

  ‘Saw-vig-non Blank,’ she orders, having finally reached a compromise.

  It is 8.07 p.m. Lona is begrudgingly willing to give these people one hour and fifty-three minutes of her life, but after that she’s outta here.

  Back outside, she taps Pujita on the shoulder.

  ‘So glad you could make it!’ Pujita says.

  ‘So glad I could come!’ Lona says.

  Pujita cannot remember enough about Lona to extend the conversation beyond abstract pleasantries. Lona cannot remember why accepting Facebook friend requests used to seem like a good idea. In her opinion, Facebook seems to function for four sole purposes:

  1) circulating memes about The Simpsons

  2) letting you know when people you vaguely know are interested in a vegan food festival

  3) facilitating farewell drinks with everyone you’ve ever met

  4) making you feel shit about yourself

  Lona finishes her wine and scopes out the least soul-killing conversation to join. She spies Rowena Cox and makes a beeline for her. Lona and Rowena used to play softball together at school. Lona was left field and Rowena was right. The rest of the team barely tolerated them for being shit at a sport they were forced to play.

  ‘Ahoy,’ Lona says.

  Rowena has been pretending to message people on her phone. She has actually been making a Spotify playlist tentatively titled: The wish you were at home in bed. It is fifty per cent Nirvana Unplugged.

  Rowena says, ‘Hey, Left Field,’ with a grin.

  Rowena is studying art at the university where you are meant to study art if you take yourself seriously. Lona studied art at the university where you are meant to study law or science. Lona liked it because no one ever seemed to know that the art department existed, let alone where it was. Their classrooms were part of the old technical college that the university incorporated. They were grimy and dim and full of people handing in artist statements about: what is art.

  ‘But I hated that everyone already had a back-up plan,’ she tells Rowena.

  Lona has brought Grandpa’s Pentax along with her, kitted out with the flash she bought online for her op-shop Nikon. She takes a picture of Rowena baring her teeth at the camera through plum-coloured lips. ‘Now one on my phone,’ Rowena says, handing over her Samsung. She wants the photo instantly so that she can take it back and say: ew, oh my god, I look gross. Then she’ll want another one taken and this one will be just the right amount of growl to look sexy yet fierce for her Tinder profile.

  Lona takes a few more analogue shots of people around the table. They look up, blinking, when the flash goes off. They loathe Lona for taking an unprepared moment from them. In any other circumstance she’d feel self-conscious, but behind the viewfinder she feels safe.

  Rowena chooses a black-and-white Instagram filter.

  Grandpa’s camera goes snap snap snap.

  The real reason

  The real reason Lona dropped out of art school was because the girls still talked about nail polish and The Bachelor and all she really wanted in life was to find a place where the girls didn’t talk about nail polish and The Bachelor.

  Teensy bit of wine

  The music gets louder and the balcony gets more and more crowded. There is a television mounted on the wall playing a martial arts film on mute. There is a teensy bit of wine left in the bottom of Lona’s glass. There, gone.

  Lona considers the likelihood of Sampson walking into this very bar at this very moment to greet her with the very words she wants to hear (she doesn’t know what these words are, but she will when she hears them). The projected probability is not favourable.

  Tab waves Lona over after a bit and introduces her to the boy she’s been talking to. ‘Nick went to primary school with Pujita,’ she explains.

  Nick has a close-cropped beard. He is wearing a beanie despite it being a mild night, so he is either going bald or is a twat. He says, ‘Ah, the famous loner.’

  ‘Lonaaaaa,’ she corrects, even though she doesn’t usually bother with anyone else.

  There’s an empty stool, but she doesn’t sit down. She rests an elbow on the sticky tabletop and instantly regrets it.

  Tab motions to Grandpa’s camera. ‘Hey, let’s get a photo of us!’

  Lona points it at Tab and Nick, gets it so Nick is sliced in half and Tab’s waving her hand in front of the lens, mouth open because she’s halfway through saying, ‘No, one of all of us!’ The shutter folds over the moment, saves it for later reflection.

  Tab rolls her eyes. ‘Hold your horses, Lone. Get someone else to take one.’

  Lona gives the camera to Rowena and joins Tab and Nick around the back of the table. In a perfect world, it’d be Tab in the middle, an arm around each, but Lona can only get around the table on the side closest to Nick. She hovers at the shoulder of this person she doesn’t know and tries to arrange her face in a way that suggests she has no problem with being there.

  She can feel the tips of Tab’s fingers reaching for her behind Nick’s back, reminding her: hey, I’m here.

  Rowena says, ‘Smile.’

  School holidays

  School holidays at Planet Skate are their own particular brand of hell. Pat opens every day of the week for the duration. Thankfully the winter break only goes for two weeks, whereas the summer holidays always seem to stretch into eternity. Nonetheless, every day brings with it a new horror.

  The kids are younger and the parents skate too, entering the rink on unsteady legs to hold their children upright and inevitably cause massive, collective stacks. At any other time there’s usually some semblance of order out there, with kids doing laps all in the same clockwise direction, the more nimble children weaving between the others, tapping their less capable friends on the shoulders as they pass, advising: you’ve just got to relax. But on school holidays, all bets are off. Chaos reigns.

  Tab comes in on the first Wednesday. Tab is a terrible, if eager, skater. She brings her own roller blades, which she’s had since she was eleven—the kind of one-size-fits-most blades that click click click out as your feet grow. She’s wearing a flowing, witchy skirt that keeps getting caught under everyone’s wheels. She waves her hands above her head to S Club 7 and swings a scarf around like Stevie Nicks.

  ‘Get her out of there,’ Pat tells Lona. ‘She’s a hazard to all.’

  Lona takes great delight in popping her lanyard whistle in her mouth and letting it screech. She skates over to Tab, sending little kids scattering in all directions. ‘Remove yourself from the rink, madam,’ she directs. ‘Please, before someone gets hurt.’

  Tab sticks out her tongue and tries to skate away, but Lona’s hot on her heels. She smacks right into Tab, and they both skid into the barrier, Lona’s body over Tab’s, pressing her into the wall, no escape. ‘Listen here, missy,’ she says breathlessly. ‘We’ll have to call your mother if you don’t start behaving.’

  ‘Not Linda!’ Tab cries, hand pressed to her forehead. ‘I’ll be grounded for a month.’

  They slip, skates sliding out from under them suddenly as they tumble to the floor, all arms and legs. Lona blows her whistle over and over. She feels a hand on her collar: Pat pulling her up by the scruff of her neck.

  Someone’s just chucked up a heap of Smarties in the boy’s toilets. ‘And guess who’s cleaning it up.’

  Proper job

  Mum says, ‘You need to go back
to uni or get a proper job.’

  Lona is unsure what qualifies as proper. She assumes it means a job that requires her to wear a certain sort of outfit. A uniform, or a dress code. Not just whatever she wants with skates thrown on.

  After several thousand hours spent on the family desktop computer filling out applications for frozen yoghurt stores and sending pointless query emails to bookshops that aren’t hiring, she gets a job at Coles.

  The job requires buying black pants, so she’s pretty sure it counts as a proper job. On her first day the manager gives her a second-hand red shirt. It has a nametag already attached to it: Kim.

  ‘We’ll get you a new one soon,’ the manager tells her.

  They don’t. Everyone calls her Kim.

  She works in the deli. This is a coveted position, apparently. Lona firmly believes that no coveted position should involve handling cold, raw fish. She works with two older women, Janine and Kelly. Jan and Kel. She cannot tell them apart for the first two weeks. She has to wear a hair net, and even though she gets a fresh one every shift, she is constantly convinced she is getting lice. Customers complain when she scratches her head between handling their salami and chicken loaf.

  Jan likes to bitch about her ex-husband. Kel likes to bitch about women who bitch about their ex-husbands. Lona likes to nick twiggy sticks when no one’s watching.

  Unfortunately someone is always watching on CCTV.

  Lona is demoted to stacking shelves. ‘You’re lucky we’re keeping you on, Kim,’ the manager tells her, before passing her over to a new manager.

  There are apparently numerous managers at this particular supermarket. Every second person she meets in store is a manager.

  She stacks pasta sauce with Alan in aisle five. He explains that he is manager of aisle five, but Jess is manager of pasta sauce. ‘Stick around until the end of August and you never know, you could manage nuts and dried fruit,’ he tells her.

  Lona finds herself the unwitting protégée of Old Kim. Old Kim says, ‘Us Kims have got to stick together.’ Lona never questions why this would be the case. Old Kim teaches her how to catch people scanning their capsicums as onions at the self-serve checkout, and how to cut open a cardboard box without slicing any of the packets of mi goreng inside.

  Old Kim is the manager of feminine hygiene products. Out back in the staff break room she likes to loudly inform certain female members of staff that Libra Slim Tapered Tampons are on sale this week. ‘I know you’re a Carefree Super Pads kind of gal,’ she tells Cathy—manager of minced beef—and the room at large. ‘Might want to stock up while it’s two-for-one, darl.’

  Lona works five days a week at Coles and still does Friday nights and weekends at Planet Skate. She picks up whatever photography work she can scrounge up and stay awake for.

  Mum has been dropping hints about making her pay board. Lona will not pay to live with her parents. She will move out and pay to live with people she likes less than her parents. It’s the principle of the thing.

  The Coles where she works is just around the corner from home. It is where all the parents of the people she went to primary school with shop. She asks Alan from aisle five to sub for her in the checkout whenever she sees any of them coming. Alan only obliges when he’s trying to make Yasmin at the express checkout jealous. Otherwise Lona’s left to listen to Kristy Tucker’s mother divulge overly intimate details of her life.

  ‘Is that you, Lona? I haven’t seen you since the bastard left me for his PT…’

  ‘You must be thinking of someone else.’ Lona points to her tag. ‘My name is Kim.’

  Someone’s manager walks past and tells Lona to do up her vest. By now Lona is the manager of checkout number three, so she explains that she’s altered the dress code in this particular section of the store.

  The other manager, the manager of tinned tomatoes, nods. ‘Oh, I didn’t realise, sorry.’

  No caption

  Lona sees on Facebook that Sampson has been tagged in a photo with some girl. He has his arm around her and they both have small, camera-ready smiles, like this is something that has been done before. There is no caption. The girl doing the tagging is different to the girl doing the being inside of his arm.

  It could be anywhere, anytime. The photo gets twelve likes. Lona doesn’t like it. Lona doesn’t like it at all.

  The girl inside the arm is called Felicity. She was born on 2 February 1998. She went to Lauriston Grammar. She is a team member at Kmart. She has 458 friends, or at least there are 458 people who were willing to trade an invasion of their privacy for an invasion of hers. She likes Arrested Development and Kanye West. She has had red hair since four profile pictures ago, before that she was a soft brown and had braces.

  Lona and Felicity have no mutual friends aside from Sampson. Lona and Sampson have eleven mutual friends. Sampson and Felicity have nine mutual friends. Sampson was born on 14 May 1996. He went to Elwood High. He has 326 friends, or at least there are 326 people who were willing to trade an invasion of their privacy for an invasion of his. He likes pages dedicated to Stargate: Atlantis and Donald Trump even though he has told Lona on multiple occasions that he hates both of those things. He has looked phenomenally undateable since he first joined Facebook in 2010.

  Lona was born on a date not specified on her profile. She went to a school not specified on her profile. She works at Planet Skate, which doesn’t even have a Facebook page, and Coles, which she would never pledge allegiance to online or in print. She has 294 friends and she only genuinely likes five of them. She has thirteen previous profile pictures but has never posted anything else.

  An hour and some amount of minutes lead to: what does any of this mean.

  It means: somewhere, sometime, Sampson had his arm around someone that wasn’t Lona.

  Shopping trolleys

  Tony dropped out of school at fifteen and has been wheeling trolleys around the Coles car park ever since. He wears a Veronica Mars t-shirt under his vest every day. This makes him approximately Lona’s favourite colleague.

  She asks him why no girls get trolley shifts and he shrugs. ‘Not strong enough.’

  Lona lodges a formal complaint. She attempts to rally other female members of staff. They say, ‘We’re not strong enough.’

  Old Kim is prouder of Lona than she has ever been of her own children. ‘Let’s take down The Man!’ she bellows. ‘We’ll have a hunger strike if we have to!’

  Fortunately it does not come to that. Lona is informed by the end of the day that she can have a trolley shift if she wants it.

  When she leaves, Tony offers her a lift home. His car smells like pickles and chewing gum. ‘Guess what?’ he says excitedly. ‘I’ve just been made manager of checkout number three. Some idiot wanted to switch to trolleys.’

  Limp dead leg

  Lona gets home from work and the house is in commotion.

  ‘What is this, Bourke Street?’ she asks, as Mum runs past with a basin full of soapy water. Dad sprints in the other direction with a dripping, discoloured rag.

  ‘Grandpa,’ he says, and Lona feels a squeeze of panic in her chest.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks, bag going clunk on the floor of the kitchen as she follows Mum down the back end of the house.

  She stops in the door to Ben’s old bedroom. Mum’s on the floor, sponging at a large red stain. ‘Shit,’ Lona says. The sight of the blood does something to her stomach. She feels sick.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks again, but this time her voice is hardly there.

  Dad pushes into the room from behind. Probably neither of them heard her. They are both wearing rubber gloves. The water in the basin is pink brown. Lona realises that this is not the first basin.

  She wonders how much blood equates to how many basins. She wonders how much blood equates to significant loss of blood. There is a spiky trail leading from the bed halfway across the carpet. It ends, so if it ends, the bleeding must have ended. If the bleeding ended, then that means one of two th
ings. Mum not-speaking, sponging on the floor means one thing.

  Lona hears her name called from the other room. She hurries into the bathroom and finds him sitting on his walker, a large padded patch on his leg. Grandpa is grimacing. ‘I thought I heard you get home,’ he says.

  ‘What happened?’ Lona asks. There’s a big bruise of blood through the gauze. The skin around the patch is purple and blue. There’s no muscle in his legs, not since the right one lost all feeling. His skin is like crepe paper.

  ‘Ah, just caught my leg on the bed post,’ he says, resigned. ‘Made a spectacular mess. I’m fine.’

  Lona nods. All that blood from that limp, dead leg.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Grandpa says again.

  Clean undies

  Lona gets her period. It arrives with a vengeance. She wakes in the morning soaked through her undies. The insides of her thighs are smeared with it. She gets up blearily and stumbles into the bathroom with a clean pair of undies and something to jam inside of herself to make it stop.

  Like always it’s arrived when it wants to, this time a week and a half before she expected. She wonders: can she be a proud, strong woman if this innately woman thing makes her feel neither proud nor strong.

  In the laundry sink she rinses out the blood, lets it run diluted down the drain. Mum finds her there and says: keep the tap running.

  Lona leaves her underwear to soak in the yellow plastic basin that was yesterday full of pink soapy water. She gets ready for work.

  Phone screen

  Tab’s phone screen lights up and so does her face. She’s messaging with Nick again.

  Lona tries to focus on the film they’re watching. It’s a psychological thriller about a woman whose split personality may or may not have killed her husband’s lover. Lona is exhausted from work, and her eyes hurt from straining to see what Tab is typing.

 

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