George says, ‘I’ve never been bitten by a mosquito.’
Lona says, ‘I don’t believe you.’
His phone rings and he looks at the screen and it’s his mum calling and he groans. The movie’s almost at the end, but he takes it anyway. She can hear him talking fast in Mandarin around the other side of the car. She claps a hand over her eyes because the alien is doing some super creepy shit she doesn’t want to see.
‘You can open them now,’ George says, and he’s back again.
She smiles at him. ‘What was that about?’
‘Ah, nothing.’ The movie’s still going, but he’s looking at her now. Their chairs are tight together, back legs sinking into the grass. She’s feeling kind of sweaty and gross from the heat and the nerves. His pinky finger finds hers on the plastic armrest and she guesses that there’s at least a seventy-five per cent chance he’s going to kiss her. She realises she’s never calculated the possibility of her making the first move and this feels like a massive oversight.
She doesn’t have to lean in very far before George is there, meeting her at something close to halfway. The kiss is slow, bruising. Tab throws a sandal at them. It’s one of the European comfort shoe brand sandals that Tab calls her Grandad Shoes. ‘Get a room,’ she calls gleefully.
Lona’s head is a blood rush. Her lips feel tender. She misses the feel of George’s mouth on them already. The credits are rolling.
In the car on the way home he talks about how his younger brother is always waking him up by practising his scales on the piano at 5 a.m. He talks about how his mother refuses to let any of them eat dinner unless they’re all at the table together, which he finds infuriating and nice at the same time. It takes a while in Lona’s lust drunk mind, but she realises dully that he’s making it clear to her: he’s not going to invite her back because he still lives at home.
And so, it seems, the proverbial ball is in Lona’s proverbial court. She does not know what to do with the proverbial ball, so she just rolls it aside for the moment.
‘I’ve got to get up insanely early tomorrow,’ she announces to the car at large. This is only true if a person considers 9.30 a.m. insanely early. She looks across at George in the back seat and there’s a bit of her that wants to just do it. Get it over with. Retract her previous statement and make a simple offer like: coffee, or a beverage of the more alcoholic variety.
‘That sucks,’ he says.
She sits on her hands both literally and figuratively. Nick drops her out the front of her place and George gets out just to walk her to the door. ‘Goodnight,’ she says. It ends with the closing of the door on all other possibilities than: both of them alone, wishing that they weren’t.
Christmas at the hospital
This year the Wallaces do two Christmases. One at home and one at the hospital with Grandpa. He’s gotten over the pneumonia, but he picked up a staph infection in the process. Mum’s furious about it, won’t stop going on about how hospitals are a hotbed for disease and infection. Dad is unsuccessful in pointing out they are also a hotbed for making people better.
Grandpa is not complaining. He is barely even speaking. Christmas at the hospital is bleakly Dickensian. The nurses bring around trays of cold turkey and congealed gravy, which are expressionlessly consumed by patients whose families have not showed up with something better.
Lona unwraps Grandpa’s presents for him. White y-fronts and a pair of slippers. Lona chipped in some dosh for the undies. She was too dispirited by the audio book’s reception to go the extra mile this time. They eat fruitcake and drink champagne. Mum brought enough glasses for the other patients in the room. There is a radio playing Bing Crosby. It is rendered completely inaudible every few minutes by the sound of a patient moaning or an alarm going screech screech screech.
Festivities are interrupted for blood pressure tests and the emptying of catheter bags. ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ Grandpa says more than once. He legs are so lacking in muscle he can’t lift them by himself. He gets Dad and Ben to roll him onto his side.
‘What’s going to happen?’ Lona asks in the car on the way home.
‘We’re going to have dinner, then we’ll do presents,’ Mum says. She knows that’s not what Lona’s asking about.
Back at the house they have the full meal. Aunty Jas and Uncle Phil and Cousin Rob and Cousin Ed arrive bearing a bowl of coleslaw and a box of Cadbury Favourites. Mum’s hair is curling around her face from the sweat and grease of sticking her face in the oven. Dad takes over gin and tonic duty, slicing lemon as he trills along to a boppy early-noughties cover of ‘The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot’. The potatoes are phenomenal, like always. The turkey is not as good as chicken, like always. They pull Christmas crackers and everyone wears the paper hats that slip over their eyes except for Ed, who’s seventeen and has combed his hair back in a very particular, apparently delicate, way.
Gifts are exchanged over pudding drenched in white sauce. Lona gets a stack of film for her Polaroid camera and a bookshelf that Mum wrapped by simply throwing an entire roll of paper over the top of it. ‘Tab said your place is a mess,’ she tells Lona, her voice stinging slightly because Lona still hasn’t invited her parents around to see her new home.
‘Do you want to help me drive the bookshelf over there tomorrow?’ Lona asks, bluntly snapping off the olive branch.
Mum shrugs indifferently. ‘I guess I could.’
Lona smiles, and so does Mum, but only when the other’s not looking.
Later, Lona calls George. He doesn’t do Christmas, but he wishes her a good one all the same. ‘It sounds chaotic over there,’ he remarks. She explains that they’ve just started their annual game of charades.
‘I need to meet your family,’ he says, and he’s being about 59 per cent serious. They talk a while and neither of her parents tell her to: get off the phone and spend time with your family. This is most likely because they are relieved that Lona has finally got herself a boyfriend. Lona is less incensed by this injustice than she would’ve been before said boyfriend inserted himself in her life.
Lona tells George about the potatoes and the bookshelf. She tells him about Grandpa’s legs and Cousin Ed’s gravity-defying hair. George asks her questions like these things actually hold any interest for him. It’s bewildering to Lona. She doesn’t know what’s going on. She forgets to ask questions of her own, which leads her to the conclusion: she’s a bad girlfriend and/or human being in general.
She hangs up at the end of their see you tomorrowing, and she’s confused and pleased and exhausted. She is not sure that she can sustain this thing, this feeling of bewildered happiness. It relies so much on someone else and Lona has never relied so much on someone else. It is terrifying.
The Jam Factory
Lona and George meet at the Jam Factory. He wants to see a Spanish film that he says has been generating festival buzz. She just wants to see him. They get to the front of the queue and the boy behind the desk tells them the screening of The Passion of Wild Doves has been cancelled. He asks if they want to see another film instead.
The options are:
a) disgruntled man saves wife and world
b) disgruntled man saves world and wife
c) a young, yet-to-be-disgruntled man gets a wife and saves the world
d) special anniversary screening of What Women Want
‘The Vin Diesel one, it is,’ Lona says. She pulls out her wallet. It’s small enough to fit in the pocket of her jeans. Lona is bewildered by women’s wallets: big, fat steaks of leather jammed with a hundred loyalty cards, spilling faded EFTPOS receipts. She has six cards in her wallet: bank, ID, library, MYKI, expired student concession and flybuys. The wallet has pictures of cats on it. Cat butts, to be specific. A cat butt field guide, to be even more specific. American short hair, Siamese, black and white, Siberian, Persian.
George takes the wallet from her and says, ‘That’s weird.’
Lona had exactly the same reaction whe
n Tab gave her the wallet two Christmases ago, but she is deeply offended nonetheless. She snatches it back. The wallet is made of plastic. It has begun to deteriorate, mainly from being jammed in her back pocket and sat on.
She pulls out a twenty, but George holds a hand over her own. ‘Nah, I’ve got this.’
He fishes out his wallet. Classic man wallet. Dark brown leather that folds over itself. A tiny coin pouch in the centre. Thankfully no blatant condom ring.
‘It’s all good,’ Lona says, shoving the bank note at the boy behind the counter.
‘Put it on card,’ George insists, ignoring her.
The boy looks between them and she can tell he’s about to take George’s card because: the man should pay. But Lona slams the twenty down on his keyboard. ‘Take the goddamn money,’ she says.
Cinema 12
Lona lets George pay for the popcorn so he can recover his masculinity. In cinema 12, they stumble hands out through the dark to find their seats. A couple of pimpled youths are sitting in them. Lona and George do the thing where they look obviously at their tickets and then around for their seats, but the youths don’t even glance at them. They have their hoods cinched tight around their faces and their Nikes kicked up on the seats in front of them. They’re not going anywhere.
Neither Lona nor George says anything. They take the next seats along. They will stew in their resentment in silence, as is their god-given right.
The ads start. There’s a ratio of about one movie trailer for every reminder to switch off your phone. Lona can hear herself chewing her popcorn and she wonders if George can too. The youths are on their phones. Every few minutes one erupts with the unintelligible cacophony of a snapchat story. Lona is giving them her fiercest side eye, attempting to convey something along the lines of: will you please shut up, can’t you see some of us are trying to enjoy this ad for TGI Friday’s. George leans over her and says, ‘Hey, you mind?’
Lona goes rigid like a dead animal. Her wildest dream and most hideous nightmare has come true. Her gentleman caller has: done something about it.
The youths respond with the timeless classic: ‘Oi, fuck off.’
Someone down the front yells out, ‘Shut up back there!’
‘Come up here and make me!’ one of the youths hollers.
The movie is starting. The man down the front has thrown a middle finger back at the youths and now they’re jostling in their seats. Lona looks at George. ‘How much do you want to see Vin Diesel’s pecs protect the universe?’
On the escalators on the way out George stands backwards and even though she’s on the step above him, they’re staring straight into each other’s faces. He says, ‘I don’t know why, but I’m getting a hankering for TGI Friday’s.’
Hello Hello
George’s band plays at the Curtin. They are an eight-piece ensemble called Hello Hello, after the Cat Empire. Tab gets a margarita and Nick gets a whisky sour, the same as Lona, much to her dismay.
There are a lot of people who know George, who like George, who squeeze his shoulders and give him a good ribbing between sets. Lona feels swamped by it, made redundant by it. There’s another feeling though, a gut-deep feeling, something like pride. Seeing him up there, hand around the neck of the bass, rocking in time. He is hers to hold, to press her lips to after and say, ‘Shit, you’re hot.’
She is the one he wants, out of this room, out of this world. She’s the one he wants touching him. She’s mellow spirit drunk. George is glassy beer drunk. They Uber back to hers touching touching touching but when they get there she says: it shouldn’t be like this. Not the first time.
It’s been weeks now, since the NGV, since the first time she recognised the acute possibility of this eventuality. Lona has explained it to him: the virgin thing. She has also explained to him: the anxiety thing.
He has nodded and assured her that it’s no big deal. But what he is missing is that it is a big deal. It is Lona’s deal. These are parts of Lona that she has learnt how to circumnavigate. She does not like it when the map changes. She does not like it when she can only see a few hundred metres ahead.
This time, after the Curtin, she can tell that George is pissed. He doesn’t say anything other than, ‘All right,’ but it’s obvious. She’s pissed too, at herself and at him. They’re breathing hard in each other’s faces and she can still feel the blood hot where he was just beginning to touch her. She can feel him hard against her leg.
He gets up for water and maybe to get away from her. Pulls back the sheet curtain and steps through. She doesn’t know what she wants it to be like or what it will take. She’s not entirely sure what’s stopping her at this point beyond: she’s been so long like this.
He comes back and the anger’s gone. He lies down beside her and brushes the hair away from her face, kisses her on the spot just above her left eyebrow. She wants very badly to take his hands and put them on those aching places.
She says, ‘You want to watch Game of Thrones?’
Second stall from the left
Lona leaves 5 Seconds of Summer playing while she goes to the toilet. Planet Skate is swarming and all the way to the bathroom she has kids yelling requests at her from inside the rink.
‘I’m not playing Kendrick Lamar,’ she says for the millionth time. ‘Do you want me to lose my job?’
‘Yes!’ a mulleted young chap yells back.
She bumps the sides of her fists together like Ross does to Monica in Friends, and they are all too young to understand or be offended by the reference.
The bathroom is full of giggling girls when she pushes open the door. There are two or three by the mirror swapping Lip Smackers. They are still in their skates and are finding it difficult to stand up straight on the slippery floor surface. A tall girl comes out of one of the stalls with too much speed and smacks into the sink.
‘Ouch,’ she says, gripping her stomach.
All of them glance at Lona with a mixture of interest and ambivalence. She locks herself in her favourite stall (second from the left) and sits down for a blissful couple of minutes of not having to look at or be looked at by anyone.
The girls leave and so does their chatter. All that’s left is the dulled sensation of fourth- or fifth- or whatever-wave pop punk making Planet Skate’s foundations groan.
The door to the bathroom croaks open and a couple more sets of wheels glide in. ‘Look at this,’ one of the girls says.
‘Oh my god, you look amazing!’
‘Here hold my phone a second while I get…’ There is the sound of a bottle being unscrewed. ‘Try this.’
A second later: ‘Ugh, what’s in this?’
‘It’s Dad’s. Like, sambucha or something.’
‘It tastes like liquorice.’
Lona flushes the toilet and closes the lid like a good girl. When she opens the door of the stall and steps out, arms crossed, the girls are facing the mirror, fixing their hair. They look young enough to still be playing with Bratz dolls. They watch Lona out of the corner of their eyes as she steps up to the sink and washes her hands. Without speaking, they both turn to leave.
‘Hold up,’ Lona says, holding out a hand.
She half-expects them not to stop. She doesn’t even know what she’s doing, what she’s going to do. ‘Give it to me,’ she says, flexing her fingers in a gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight motion.
The girls look at her blankly. ‘What?’
‘Give me the flask,’ she says, guessing.
They share a glance. If they were twelve-year-old Lonas they would have already handed it over. Not that a twelve-year-old Lona would have ever thought it was a good idea, or even a particularly worthy cause, to sneak alcohol into Planet Skate. The thought wouldn’t have even crossed her mind. These girls aren’t like Lona, and she can see they’re about this close to rolling their eyes and pushing their way out of the bathroom. They probably know that Lona wouldn’t go to any great lengths to stop them. They probably know they intimidate her with
their ne’er-do-well behaviour that shamefully reminds Lona that she has never even dabbled in ne’er-do-well behaviour. But they don’t move. The girl on the left has three studs in her earlobe, which seems insane for a twelve-year-old. But she’s also wearing a t-shirt with a picture of iCarly on it.
She huffs and pulls a small plastic bottle out of her jacket pocket. There is a colourless liquid sloshing around inside of it. Lona takes it and the girls stand there like they are waiting to be chided. Lona had forgotten that part was necessary. She says, ‘Didn’t Harold the Giraffe tell you that alcohol kills brain cells?’
iCarly says, ‘What’s Harold the Giraffe?’
‘From the Life Education van,’ Lona says incredulously, to an absolute lack of reaction. ‘It comes to your school? A woman sticks her hand up Harold’s sock-puppet butt and he tells you not to smoke? Geez, how the hell are you meant to be educated about life?’
She can tell she is freaking out the children. The sock-puppet butt thing probably did it. ‘Ah, get out of here,’ she says, waving a hand at them.
They oblige eagerly, muttering loudly as they scoot out. Lona stares at the bottle of sambuca in her right hand. Feels the thick soup of satisfaction and self-loathing that comes from being a lifelong goody-two-shoes.
She hesitates, but of course she tips it down the sink. She makes sure she rinses the bottle out properly before putting it in the recycle bin.
IKEA
Lona decides to make the dreaded pilgrimage to IKEA. The one-kilometre-long store in Springvale. She brings Tab with her, and Tab brings Nick with her, and Nick brings his little sister with him. Nick’s sister’s name is Cassidy. She is fourteen and loves IKEA. She loves IKEA with the kind of enthusiasm that a child is only able to muster before the world has broken them.
Lona has forgotten how infuriating IKEA is. She has fond memories of it because Mum used to dump her in the ball pit before heading inside. Outside of the ball pit, IKEA operates like the ten circles of hell. Just when she thinks they’ve reached the end, she realises they’re only up to the kitchen display section. It is detrimental to stray from the marked path because this only leads to becoming stranded in the warehouse.
Loner Page 8
