She also realises that going to a gallery is a terrible idea for a date, despite what movies and books have always suggested. George seems far more interested in the clay pots than she is. He spends more than five seconds on each, which makes no godly sense to Lona. Thus, they are moving through the exhibition at different speeds.
She sees him, occasionally, across the room. She spends half an hour in the gift shop afterwards waiting for him to spurt out of the exit. She buys a tiny clay pot for Grandpa. She makes peace with the fact she will never see George again after tonight’s spectacular failure. He appears and says, ‘Lost you there. That was fascinating. Do you want to get something to eat?’
‘Um,’ she says. ‘Sure.’
Doing something nice
George takes her to a bar with glowing mushrooms on the ceiling. The cocktails are all named after books. He thinks that because she likes reading she will like a room that is full of people and has books painted on the walls. She doesn’t have the heart to tell him she much prefers rooms with no people in them that have books you can actually read. He is doing something nice for her. She feels like doing something nice for him, i.e. keeping her mouth shut.
Their knuckles brush like cowards against separate ends of the tabletop. Lona uses her front teeth to peel a strip of pink-grey flesh from her bottom lip. It takes a moment for her to laugh at what George has just said. His relief when she does is a barely audible release of air.
In a film there would be: the cut to, the fingertips numbed on shirt buttons, the breath and the soft black. In this glance there is: the fear and the wanting to move, the not moving. Lona asks, ‘You got much on for the weekend?’
He says, ‘I’m not sure.’
The unfettered fervour with which Lona wants to climb into that weekend and make it hers is frightening. Her knees are weak at the thought of it. Her head is going warm with the whisky.
She slides her fingers into the hair at the back of her scalp. He’s watching her and the thought is simultaneous, is the only thought the night was ever thinking.
Hotel Windsor
They walk to Parliament, elbows bumping. Lona stops to point out a large spider that’s crawling across a window of the Hotel Windsor and when she turns around George is there, so very close, and so very not paying attention to the spider. He moves suddenly and then his mouth is on her mouth and there’s the initial surprise of it: the mashing of lips together. Then there’s the surprise of it being over before it properly got started.
He stares at her and she stares at him and then his hand is on that tingling skin at the back of her neck and there’s the tentative way she tilts her face up towards him so that her lips find his and this time it’s slower and lovelier.
Cold metal bench
They do their goodnighting in the pale, glaring light of the Parliament station bowels. Lona is relieved that there is no invitation. She is afraid of accepting out of politeness. Even more afraid of accepting out of not-politeness.
George’s train is leaving in five minutes. The next one isn’t for an hour. He swallows and his Adam’s apple shifts. He says, ‘I had a good time.’
There’s another kiss, a delicate, broken-winged moth of a kiss, and then he goes. Lona has twelve minutes of sitting on a cold, metal bench until her train. She can’t stop smiling.
Voicemail
In the staffroom at the back of Coles, Lona pulls her bag out of her locker. She’s just come off an eight-hour trolley shift and is, as a result, dead. She tugs her phone out in case Tab or George has texted and she finds two missed calls from Mum.
She accesses voicemail and listens to the messages: Mum’s at the hospital. Grandpa has pneumonia. He’s all right. Thought you should know.
Lona heads straight to the train station and catches a train towards the city. She doesn’t know where she’s going. She calls Mum and Mum sounds stressed but not distraught. The not sounding distraught comforts Lona.
Lona tells her she’s on her way. Mum says she doesn’t need to come if it’s too much hassle. Lona says just tell me where. Mum says ok.
Lona doesn’t like using GPS on her phone. She hates that you can only see a few hundred metres ahead of you at a time and that you never end up remembering how to get home again. She likes physical maps and she likes sitting down and looking at them before she even leaves home. She likes knowing exactly where she’s going and exactly how it fits in with her understanding of where things are.
She gets off at South Yarra and brings up Maps on her phone. She walks with all of everything, everywhere held in her palm and she doesn’t have the time or the headspace to be annoyed.
The Alfred
Mum’s still at the Alfred when Lona gets there. Lona finds hospitals intimidating and confusingly clean and unclean at the same time. She has to go up a specific lift to be able to access another specific lift that takes her to room 18 in C-wing.
Grandpa has been moved out of emergency. He is stable, but weak. Mum grabs Lona’s arm the minute she arrives and pulls her up to the bed. ‘Dad, look who’s here!’
Grandpa looks at her through eyelids heavy with medication. ‘Lona,’ he says breathlessly. His voice whistles with air. Fluid on the lungs.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks, and even though she knows it’s a stupid question, she doesn’t know what else to say and any words in her mouth feel better than none.
He grimaces. ‘Not too bad. Don’t you worry.’
Mum jams another pillow under his head. ‘You gave us a fright, Dad. A real fright.’ She’s shaking, agitated. Like Lona gets when she feels things slipping out of her control.
Lona pats Mum’s shoulder. ‘You want to go get some coffee? I’ll sit with Grandpa for a bit.’
Mum is reluctant, but she’s also worn-out. She looks overtired. Maybe she hasn’t been sleeping well. Lona doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know how to ask. Mum is wearing clothes Lona’s never seen before. It’s a new, strange, meaningless feeling in Lona’s chest: the not being there to notice when things change.
Mum goes down to Alf’s Cafe in the lobby. Lona sits on the chair beside the bed with the seat cushion that’s stained in places you don’t want a seat to be stained. Grandpa is struggling to keep his eyes open.
‘You want me to read?’ Lona asks. She gets out her book. It’s a wartime romance about a smart, capable woman and an intense, guilt-ridden man. There are secondary characters called Bunty and Cecil. There are always secondary characters called Bunty and Cecil. Lona reads aloud about the Blitz, the same Blitz she knows Grandpa lived through, that he was evacuated to Wales because of. She’s never asked him about that part of his life. Never asked him about any part of his life.
Mum gets back with a coffee and pulls in another chair from the hallway. Lona has stopped reading, the book open on her lap. ‘Go on,’ Mum says.
Second date
Lona and George go out for dinner. She keeps zoning out in the middle of telling him things, the words falling out of her head as she’s saying them.
‘Are you all right?’ George asks.
She says, ‘My grandpa’s in hospital.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Are you close?’
She slides her knife and fork around her empty plate. ‘I don’t know.’ She’s halfway through an Aperol spritz, but it’s just making her tired. She’s wearing blue mascara and green eye shadow. She’s wearing a top that has a picture of Leia Organa on it with the caption: Don’t call me princess. The word princess is hidden where the t-shirt is tucked into her skirt, so it just says: Don’t call me. Lona has always liked that.
The second date is worse than the first because most of the easy stuff has already been said. The restaurant is loud and dimly lit. Lona feels like she’s in an underexposed photograph. She feels blurry at the edges and suffocated by her inability to see and hear properly. The night is dreamlike. It’s hard for her to care about how she’s coming across when none of it seems real.
It’s late Novembe
r warm outside. George won’t stop looking at her like he’s trying to work her out. She can’t stop avoiding his eye.
There’s an ice cream shop a couple of doors down. They go inside as if they’ve somehow made the decision to do so without any words being exchanged. There are three freezer cabinets filled with every possible flavour: tiramisu, green tea, watermelon and feta, baklava, black pepper.
‘What would you like?’ George asks.
‘Chocolate,’ Lona says.
‘Double chocolate? White chocolate? Chocolate chip?’ he suggests. ‘There’s a mocha. Oh, and a chocolate caramel swirl.’
‘Just plain chocolate,’ she says.
‘You can have two scoops? Two different flavours?’
‘Two scoops of chocolate is fine. Or one scoop. Whatever.’
George gives her a weird look. They eat out the front on plastic chairs. George cannot let it go. ‘Plain chocolate?’ he insists. ‘What’s the point in getting plain chocolate when there are so many other flavours you can’t get at the supermarket?’
She shrugs. ‘What’s the point in not getting plain chocolate when you know that plain chocolate is the greatest of all flavours?’
‘How do you know that plain chocolate is the greatest of all flavours if you haven’t tried all flavours?’
‘Blessed ignorance.’
It may be the sweet potato ice cream that he’s eating that is making George look so concerned, but Lona has a feeling it’s her.
‘I feel like I should be one hundred per cent honest with you before this goes any further,’ she says. ‘I like chocolate ice cream. I like plain chips. I like toast with butter on it. Just butter, nothing else. I like Hugh Grant movies. I get mild sauce on my chicken at Nando’s. I drink vodka with cranberry juice. I’m bland. I enjoy my blandness. I delight in doing the same things over and over again.’
George shakes his head. ‘I had you completely wrong.’
‘Everyone does. Don’t let the air of arty pretentiousness deceive you. I’m actually the most basic bitch alive.’
George leans over and kisses her, both of their lips cold and numb. ‘I like you Lona Wallace,’ he says, as if it’s that easy.
Different room
Lona meets Ben at his office after work and he drives them to the Alfred to visit Grandpa. It’s just the two of them, so they spend the car ride swapping Community references and comments about the music that’s playing. Lona used to listen to whatever Ben listened to and it drove him mad. More than that, it drove him to metal, a place he knew even Lona wouldn’t follow. His car stereo doesn’t have bluetooth or an AUX plug, but it does have a five-stack CD player and a glove box full of mix CDs compiled by an angsty, pre-metal Ben. Lona blasts Evanescence all the way to the hospital.
Grandpa’s been moved to a different room. It has three other people in it. They are separated only by curtains. After several weeks of sleeping in the living room behind a sheet, Lona understands this discomfort.
Grandpa is watching a quiz show on the TV when they arrive. The sound isn’t on, he can’t hear any of the questions or answers or read the subtitles. This momentarily stakes Lona through the heart. He’s sitting up at least. Ben offers him the muffin they brought downstairs. Grandpa can’t stomach it. He pulls a face.
Lona and Ben shoulder the conversational weight, propping it up for their uninterested third party. Grandpa is tetchy and tired. He doesn’t want to be there but it feels like: he doesn’t want them to be there.
In the lift when they leave, Ben says, ‘Maybe it’d be different if we’d spent more time with him when we were growing up. Actually got to know him, you know.’
Lona uses the antibacterial gel pump in the lobby. She wants to sterilise herself of this place, this hurt.
A series of messages
George messages: what are you doing atm? Like he expects the answer to ever be anything other than: skimming Half-Blood Prince for the hefty doses of adolescent angst in an effort to momentarily escape the tedium of existence.
She tells him what she’s reading. First as a joke, and then because he genuinely seems interested. She tells him:
Reading Ulysses (FLEXED BICEPS)
He says things like:
Impressive
She says things like:
Would you be equally impressed if I admitted I am actually reading a book about teenage wizards?
He types like a lightning strike, speech bubble after speech bubble cracking into existence:
I love teenage wizard books
Also books where teenagers go on dates and have friends
All things I never experienced as an actual teenager
What happens is: she’s smitten.
All the details
Tab wants all the details. She says that she is experiencing whiplash. ‘I thought you weren’t into him! Now I hear from Nick you’ve seen each other—TWICE!’ The level of enthusiasm Tab is showing for the knowledge that Lona has twice been in the romantic company of a man is mildly insulting.
Lona shrugs like it’s no biggie. ‘Yeah, well.’
‘Sooooo…’ Tab says eagerly.
Lona experiences the stomach-juice-curdling feeling that accompanies being asked to dredge up what he said and what she said and dissect it in the company of others. Lona does enough of that on her own time. She does not need a public forum for discussion.
‘I…like him,’ she says, somewhat uncertainly.
‘Yeah?’ Tab encourages.
‘We’ve…made out a couple of times,’ she murmurs, somewhat embarrassedly.
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, what do you want to know?’ she demands, somewhat defensively.
Tab sighs a big, loud sigh. ‘What do you want to tell me?’ she asks.
Lona considers her options. ‘I would like to leave it at that,’ she says.
Tab is both disappointed and amused. She rolls her eyes and laughs. They are at a cafe in Oakleigh eating garlic-soaked souvlakis. Lona has pulled out her tomatoes and swapped them for Tab’s onions. It’s been ages since Lona has seen Tab one-on-one without Nick. She can’t help feeling panicked about it ending before she’s even started to enjoy it. It’s making her weird and conversationally uncooperative.
‘I want to do something fun,’ Tab says. ‘Something spontaneous.’
‘There’s a cool historical graveyard up the road,’ Lona says.
‘Something spontaneous and not creepy,’ Tab clarifies.
They go into the city to play mini golf at Holey Moley. They order a sharing cocktail that’s an ambiguous mix of vodka, Red Bull, whisky and lemonade, and is served in a large trophy cup. They get daytime drunk and putt around the course. Lona tries to keep track of the score because she’s the kind of person who’s overly competitive when she’s pretty sure she’s winning. Tab juggles any golf balls she can get her hands on. Someone complains. They are removed from the facility.
They come home via the graveyard where they sit with their backs against a lichen-covered headstone and Tab says, ‘This graveyard is beautiful. I want to die here.’
Lona says, ‘That’s not how graveyards work.’
It’s dusk and the lampposts are lit up along all the paths and they’re orange orbs floating against the dark denim-blue sky. Tab fits her head into the Tab-shaped crook of Lona’s neck and they tell each other things they’ve told each other a hundred times before. ‘I like him,’ Lona says.
This time Tab just nods.
Drive-in
Nick drives them out to the Lunar Drive-in. It’s a sticky summer night and Tab’s flashing her hairy pits in a sleeveless summer dress as she reaches up to open the boot. They’ve brought folding chairs along with them. Tab’s picnic rug, too: for if anyone’s feeling particularly frisky. Nick tunes the car radio to the Drive-in frequency and keeps the keys in the ignition and the windows open.
‘Suckers,’ Tab remarks, looking at the people still crammed inside their cars. ‘This is how you drive-in.’
> Lona and Tab have brought chips and chocolate and sour snakes. Nick has brought beetroot chips and a tub of hummus.
‘Honey, I don’t think we can see each other anymore,’ Tab says.
George offers to get some popcorn from the diner. Lona goes with him. She likes the way it feels to walk with him and wait in line with him and be seen with him. She likes the way he doesn’t try to hold her hand, but he does walk close enough that their arms keep brushing.
The movie is about a bunch of people trapped inside a spaceship with an alien life form that gets more powerful every time it kills. This is Lona’s favourite genre of movie even though she hates the gory bits. She likes having George there because she can say things like: can I open my eyes now.
He probably thinks it’s cute and feminine, whereas she thinks it’s the logical and natural response to seeing Ryan Reynolds get eaten from the inside out.
Tab and Nick are sprawled on the picnic rug, with their shoes kicked aside and their arms folded under their heads. They kiss occasionally in the boring, sciencey bits. Light, little kisses that send a light, little thrill through Lona’s stomach that is half nausea and half a want for George to kiss her like that.
George is watching the film intently. A mosquito lands on Lona’s arm and she slaps at it and ends up with someone else’s blood on her skin. Nick has brought hand sanitiser because of course Nick has thought to bring hand sanitiser.
Loner Page 7
