Loner

by Georgina Young

  Lona understands that this is how she is meant to feel as a young person, but if anything, she wants to see less of the world. She wants to stay exactly where she is, stagnant, stuck to the ground. She wants to fold herself over until she starts growing inside out. She does not want to run away, she wants to run home.

  Across the table, Mum is staring at her. She will find a way to corner Lona before the afternoon is over. She has been calling every few nights to ask how Lona is going, to ask what her plans are for the rest of the year. Dad always seems to be standing right beside Mum while she’s speaking, impatiently jockeying for the phone. He takes the first opportunity he can get to nick it and start telling Lona for the hundredth time that she should be watching The Crown. Doing his best Claire Foy doing her best the Queen: one does not wish to badger one’s daughter, but one will do so until she heeds one’s recommendation.

  Lona misses living with her parents so much it’s ridiculous. But here, now, she can’t think of anything to say to them. She’s afraid to lift her eyes from her plate.

  Jodie yacks on and on about grabbing the bull by the horns and—contradictorily, in Lona’s opinion—getting the hell away from the bulls during the Pamplona Bull Run.

  ‘You are not running with the bulls, Jode,’ Pat says.

  Jodie rolls her eyes. ‘I’m not saying I was going to. But it is meant to be a life-altering experience. Like, it’ll change your life.’

  Lona doesn’t realise she’s pulling a face until she looks up and sees it mirrored by the one Mum is wearing. Their eyes catch and their lips fold in unison, quieting their laughter with a shared grimace.

  The thing about trolleys

  The thing about trolleys is they’re like the Magic Pudding. By the time Lona’s wheeled one stack back into the supermarket, there are already several more trolleys jammed into the collection point. And regardless of the clearly demarcated bays for BIG TROLLEYS and SMALL TROLLEYS, it is always an absolute shit show.

  As she returns to gather a new stack, she finds a woman shoving what is clearly a BIG TROLLEY into the SMALL TROLLEY depository. Usually, since she avoids conflict at all costs, and is in fact paid to be helpful in a subservient, unintimidating kind of way, she would simply rearrange the trolleys herself once the woman was gone. She would wish plague and petulance on the woman’s entire family only under her breath. But the thing about trolley duty is that there is a lot of time to think about things and what Lona has been thinking about is The Magic Pudding, that supposedly esteemed classic of Australian children’s literature. Lona has been considering how messed up it is that all those humans and bushland creatures used to eat an animate pudding, regardless of whether it would grow back or not.

  ‘That’s not the right stack,’ Lona finds herself telling the woman.

  The woman looks around with a slight look of concern on her face until she sees that Lona is a young woman, and she remembers that she is not required to take young women seriously or respect their authority or their humanity.

  ‘The other one is blocked with the wrong trolley,’ the woman says defiantly, pointing to a SMALL TROLLEY in the BIG TROLLEY depository.

  ‘And so you couldn’t take that out and put it in the other stack instead?’ Lona demands.

  ‘I’m in a hurry,’ the woman says, already starting to walk away. ‘It’s your job, isn’t it?’

  ‘A curse on all your kin!’ Lona yells after her, and the woman starts to jog, shooting an unsettled glance over her shoulder. ‘A biblical frog storm unto your home! Leeches, locusts—’

  ‘Kim!’

  Lona spots Greg, the manager of trolleys, striding across the car park.

  ‘And that was Macbeth, act four, scene seven,’ she calls quickly after the woman. ‘Next time we’ll do The Merchant of Venice, all right? Or maybe some Arthur Miller for a change? Death of a Salesman? “Oh, Biff, football football don’t you want to be like your daddy…American Dream… shattered…masculinity…under…imminent threat…”’

  Greg squeezes his eyes at her suspiciously. ‘What’s going on here? There are trolleys everywhere. Come on, fix it up.’

  The staffroom

  Lona gets her bag out of her locker. Tony, Alan and Yasmin are sitting at the table in the staffroom. Alan is attempting to contribute to the conversation despite having never read the book Tony and Yasmin are discussing.

  Yasmin says, ‘I can’t believe you don’t like Thadius.’

  Tony says, ‘He’s clearly working with the Shadow Queen.’

  Alan says, ‘Doesn’t he get killed in the second season?’

  Yasmin gives him a withering look. ‘We’re talking about the books. They’re, like, completely different and better than the series.’

  Lona checks her phone and sees she’s got four missed calls from Pat. ‘Oh, shit,’ she says, remembering instantly she’d said she would fill in at Planet Skate on Tuesdays while Jodie is overseas. She doesn’t ring up voicemail to listen to the messages. She doesn’t want to hear Pat being properly disappointed in her.

  She sends a text like a coward:

  I am so sorry Pat. I completely forgot and I feel so bad. Let me make it up to you. I’ll work anytime you need, just let me know so I can square it with Coles. Lona.

  She is worried that this will be it for Planet Skate. Pat has already been hinting that she should quit, seeing as she’s hardly available for shifts. It wouldn’t be the worst thing. But Lona would miss it. The laps at the end of the night at least.

  Pat replies:

  Ok

  Pat always replies just: Ok. It usually makes Lona laugh. Right now she feels shredded by the guilt. There’s a series of messages from Tab too:

  are you still alive lone?

  heeeelllooo

  reply to me or i shall spontaneously combust

  They have plans, tomorrow or the day after. Or they will, if Lona ever confirms. She should confirm. She should do that right now.

  Another message comes through as she is staring at the screen:

  ground control to major lone

  commencing lockdown engine on

  the papers want to know whos skirts you wear

  Lona laughs out loud, forgetting for a moment about Pat, and the trolleys and about the fact Thadius is clearly an agent for the Mountain Queen, not the Shadow Queen, and how come no one else seems to realise that?

  She messages Tab:

  What are we doing and when are we doing it?

  Kmart

  Tab picks up an orange, long-sleeved t-shirt and asks, ‘Will this work?’ She drapes it over the front of her torso, checking the length of the arms.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Lona says dazedly. They have been at Chadstone Shopping Centre for almost three hours, and Lona’s brain has been reduced to a mush specifically formulated by ambient music and a lack of fresh air.

  ‘I want Violet here,’ Tab indicates, waving a hand over her chest. ‘And then: I DON’T GIVE A DAME printed over it.’

  Lona takes the t-shirt from her. She has promised to make her friend a Downton Abbey top. She is hoping that painstakingly cutting out Maggie Smith’s face with a scalpel will imbue her life with the acute sense of purpose it is currently lacking.

  She has not pointed out to Tab that her t-shirt concept makes no sense, and that Violet Crawley is a dowager countess, not a dame like Maggie Smith. She has also not admitted she is yet to be able to stencil a face that looks like a face instead of a smiling blob. She will let those fun revelations emerge with time.

  Tab checks the price tag. ‘Four dollars!’ she exclaims. ‘I don’t know if I can wear a top that has so clearly screwed someone over at some point. I mean, god, someone’s not getting paid properly.’

  She makes no move to translate her moral indignation into the actual, physical act of putting the top back onto the shelf. Both friends accept her outrage as enough, considering their fiscal insecurity and also their laziness.

  They continue to wander around Kmart for no purpose other than:
they are here, and so is it. Tab remembers she needs some tights and while she is choosing between opaque and semi-opaque and semi-sheer and sheer-opaque, Lona finds herself staring at a headless, legless mannequin in a mostly crotchless pair of underwear and matching lace bra.

  Lona has not bought a new bra since she was seventeen. They do not have to work very hard to hold her in place. She has never needed underwire and she has never wanted lace. She has two beige bras and one black. She tends to wear the black one whenever it’s likely George will be seeing it because she has gathered from television that beige bras do not exist in the same universe as sex.

  Tab finds her staring at the mannequin and tilts her head. ‘Sex robot, très chic.’

  Lona doesn’t know how to ask the question she wants to ask. She is imagining herself in the sex robot ensemble. She is imagining George touching her in the sex robot ensemble. She is then considering the grossness of wrapping women’s body parts individually only for the sake of being opened and accessed.

  ‘Do you…’ She looks at the neatly folded piles of see-through undies on the table. ‘Should I…’

  But she doesn’t get the question out, and Lona is relieved when Tab drifts over to the back wall where there are racks of high-waisted, cotton undergarments. The kind that Lona’s mum wears. Tab says, ‘This is exactly what I need. I’m so sick of wearing things around my hips. I’m migrating north, baby!’

  Lona is pretty sure that Tab doesn’t wear crotchless underwear. That the very prospect offends her particular brand of feminism. Lona is unsure what her own particular brand of feminism is, when it’s detached from Tab’s.

  She finds the thought of George finding her sexy sexy. But the thought of wearing something just because a man will find it sexy is complicatedly icky. She is also dubious about the functionality of crotchless undies. It’s not like they’re everyday wear. But she is dubious about lace and pale pink and little love-hearts and anything that is aggressively feminine anyway. She cannot work out whether that means she has rejected the patriarchy or internalised it.

  She follows Tab to the checkout, glancing one last time at the headless, legless mannequin with the ample-but-not-too-ample bosom and the flat stomach.

  And she wonders: why is that a thing I’m trying to be.

  The Astor Theatre

  She’s already in her dressing gown when George arrives. ‘They’re showing a double bill of Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle at the Astor tonight,’ he tells her. ‘I got us tickets.’

  This would be sweet if it wasn’t for three factors:

  1) Lona is already in her dressing gown

  2) Lona wants to remain in her dressing gown

  3) Lona is still terrified of No-Face, a decade and a half after Mum borrowed Spirited Away from the video store because she was sick and tired of Lona making her watch Cinderella 2 every Friday night

  ‘Oh,’ Lona says. ‘I thought we were just going out for dinner.’

  Lona had been hoping to downgrade going out for dinner, to the much more luxurious staying in and making strangers bring tacos for dinner. She has the pressing tingle of an almost-headache just above her left eyebrow.

  She does not want to go out to stare at a gigantic wall of light and colour. She wants to stare at the small box of light and colour on their TV stand until she feels sick from nausea, and then she wants to go to bed.

  ‘Come on,’ George says. ‘It’s just the Astor. It’s not that far.’

  But the getting out of the house is the hard thing. The making herself the person she is for everyone else is the painful thing. Lona opens her mouth to explain, but she doesn’t know how. George would be hurt if he thought she was hiding some of herself from him. He understands there are masks she wears, for friends, for family, for strangers, but he wouldn’t understand the one she wears for him.

  He would be hurt by her need to hoard herself for herself. The sad, restless Lona. The weak Lona. The Lona that she folds away for when no one else is around, keeping all the gory insides out of sight. He would say: give it to me, all of it, and I’ll help. But Lona doesn’t want him handling those parts. Those parts are hers.

  She wanted to be alone tonight, but she was willing to concede dinner. She is fumbling for a way to say: I want you, but I don’t want you now.

  She can’t find a way to make them both happy and so she says, ‘All right, just let me get dressed.’

  At the dinner table

  Lona finds herself torn between a deep longing to go home for dinner and a fear of talking to her parents about her decisions in life. In the end, the prospect of a meal that isn’t either pesto pasta or kale salad wins out.

  She nearly falls asleep on the train and almost misses her station. She gets through the doors just as they are closing automatically, her outstretched limbs presenting an obstacle that the mechanism doesn’t expect. There’s a moment when it’s almost as if they’re going to crush her, then the system relents and the doors go slack.

  She touches off with her travel card and is told she has -$1.37 on her MYKI. She has a couple of dollars of change in her wallet that will get her back to Carnegie.

  It’s a fifteen-minute walk to her parents’ house. She’s done it so many times she doesn’t have to think about it, just lets her feet carry her under the overpass and down along the golf course. It’s bright still, and warm.

  Lona is feeling shit about things, both generally and specifically. (The stiffness in her shoulders, the twitch in her right eye, the amorphous shape of her future, the removal of Sliding Doors from Netflix.) She is attempting to see past this afternoon to a time when she doesn’t feel shit about things, neither generally nor specifically. It shouldn’t be hard, but it is.

  At home, Mum makes gin and tonics. Dad has just signed up for Spotify Premium and, as Lona feared he one day would, he has discovered Hamilton. She knows she will spend a good portion of the next five years listening to him rap about American political history.

  Lona sits in the armchair opposite the one that Grandpa used to sit in. It was only Grandpa’s for the few months that he lived here, but Lona can’t stop seeing it now as: Grandpa’s chair.

  Mum attempts to chat to her from the kitchen. She finally cracks it and demands that Dad turn down the music. The talk that follows is small: weather, neighbours, work. Lona is wary of the impersonal nature of these inquiries. All it tells her is the meaty stuff is still on its way.

  She is tired. Her phone is tired too. It’s almost run out of charge and she is eagerly anticipating the time when she can no longer be held responsible for not replying to the nice and cosmically pointless things people have messaged her.

  At the dinner table, the physical and metaphorical knives come out. Mum asks if Lona has been in to see Grandpa recently. When Lona says no, her parents share a look. They tell her something she already knows along the lines of: family = forevs = more important than binge-watching televisual sci-fi.

  Mum asks whether she’s thought about going back to uni. Lona shrugs non-committedly. The prospect of studying art is sickening to Lona. The prospect of studying anything else is horrific.

  She understands: her parents have lived their lives the way they have so that she can live her life the way they planned. She is the one who is screwing it up. She is the piano dropping through all the levels of that building in The Aristocats. She is breaking everything that is trying to support her.

  On the bright side: the baked salmon is nice.

  Late one evening

  Tab calls late one evening. She’s driving around aimlessly and she wonders if Lona might want to go for a ride. Lona says yes because the proposed activity requires minimal effort beyond sitting up and staying awake. Tab texts when she’s idling out front in her dad’s white sedan:

  here

  Lona goes out and gets into the car. She’s in her pyjamas and slippers. She has pulled on a hoodie for decency’s sake. ‘What’s up?’ she asks.

  Tab is not in a talking mood. Sh
e is in a driving mood and so she drives. They don’t go anywhere. Or rather: they don’t go anywhere in particular. Lona understands objectively that everywhere is somewhere, even the streets they drive along that look like every other street. Every house has someone or something in it, a person who thinks and feels and worries and wonders, a person with a name and a resolute belief in their own distinct personhood. But this is too great and cascading a reality to comprehend fully without having to clutch the sides of her head, so what happens is: she doesn’t think about it too long.

  Tab’s phone screen lights up and so does the console it’s jammed in. Her mother is calling. Tab and her mother do things like fight with each other and possibly actually mean the things they say. Lona guesses that it’s one of those nights. She doesn’t have any words of wisdom. She only has words she’s heard on television and read in books. She does what she knows how to do: be there. She puts the radio on something they both kind of like and they both kind of sing along.

  Tab says, ‘You want a McFlurry?’

  She takes them to one of the many Macca’s on North Road. Tab gets Oreo for herself and M&Ms for Lona. They sit in the car with the cabin light on, parked facing out over the intersection with its signals going green orange red. Lona switches the music to the Florence + the Machine CD that’s in the player. It’s the recent one. The softer than usual one.

  ‘Remember Jack Kyneton at school camp?’ Tab asks.

  ‘Shitting his pants?’ Lona asks.

  ‘Yeah, wonder what he’s up to.’

  Lona digs out all her M&Ms before their colours marble through the soft serve. Her head’s aching a bit from the cold. There’s a solitary car waiting at the intersection. A green people mover. The light stays red and it just sits there, even though there are no cars coming through from the other direction.