Loner

by Georgina Young

  ‘I can never say exactly what I mean,’ she says, and like all deeply true things it just sounds like shit.

  He brushes a thumb over the inside of her wrist. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Her voice is an empty chamber. ‘I’m sorry too.’

  Each other’s arms

  They sleep in each other’s arms and it’s about 98 per cent less romantic than it sounds. He has to bend his tall body to fit in her bed, and she knows it’s uncomfortable for him, and she knows that he wishes she’d get a bigger bed, but part of her wants him to say, ‘Ok, I’m sleeping on the couch,’ and for it not to be a big deal.

  It’d be pointless trying to explain to him that buying a bigger bed had always seemed unnecessary and overly optimistic to her. That she hadn’t expected him. That changing things for his sake makes her feel weak. It’d be like talking to him about her parents. He’s understanding but he doesn’t understand.

  She likes it when he holds her and they talk with their faces close, but she can’t sleep like that. She’s too aware of him, too possessed by him and his self and the space he fills in space that has always been just hers. She is awake for long hours and then she is asleep. In the morning, she’s on her own. George gets up early, he can’t help it.

  He makes the most of having to watch the TV with the volume down and binges an intense Scandinavian crime show on Netflix. Lona likes knowing that he is just on the other side of the room divider. She lies in her bed by herself and she loves him dearly.

  White people

  Lona rings the doorbell because she is no longer sure whether she should use her keys or not. Harriet answers, which makes Lona irrationally irritable.

  By way of introduction, she says, ‘George, this is not a member of my family,’ or more likely she says something politer and less true.

  Everyone else is in the kitchen. Lona has not told her parents anything about George. Mum and Dad turn around with expectant faces, and there’s an infinitesimal flash of surprise when they clock George. It’s just a small: this boy is not white. Mum and Dad are not racist, they are simply white people who assumed their white daughter was bringing home a white boy. White people will do that. Any confusion is gone in a split second. ‘George,’ Mum says. ‘Lovely to meet you.’

  Dad shakes his hand, as does Ben. Lona can glimpse the patriarchy in the air sealed by their palms. George accepts the beer he is offered. He glances sideways at Lona with a look that says: easy peasy. Last night’s argument is still sitting in Lona’s joints, making it hard for her to relax. She watches the way George charms her parents and another familiar feeling hits her: that in their enjoyment of each other’s company, her presence is becoming redundant with all of the people she loves.

  Do-It-Yourself bread rolls

  Dad’s favourite meal is Do-It-Yourself bread rolls. This involves serving guests the ingredients for a sandwich and making them make it themselves. Lona can tell that George is fascinated by this insight into the white, middle-class mind. He makes himself a ham-and-cheese focaccia and tells Lona’s parents the things he knows parents love hearing: that he studies medicine, that he plays cello, that he gets on well with his brothers. He seems slightly puzzled that Lona’s parents don’t already know these things. He is attempting to gauge how much Lona has told them. He is failing to ascertain the relevant data, as the information is not only off the chart, but the chart simply does not exist.

  ‘I’m not sure if Lona told you, but when we played at the Toff last week—’

  ‘Played?’ Dad interrupts.

  ‘Yeah, Hello Hello, my band—’

  ‘Your band?’ Ben says.

  ‘Hello Hello?’ Harriet chimes in. ‘I think I heard you guys on Triple J Unearthed a while ago.’

  George is attempting to be modest, but he’s glowing so much Lona feels compelled to pull out a Geiger counter. ‘Yeah, as I was saying, at the Toff we were talking to Nick—Tab’s boyfriend—and—’

  Mum stares at Lona. ‘Tab has a boyfriend?’

  This stops George right in his tracks, his mouth halfway open, and there’s silence all around the table. Everyone’s looking at Lona. Lona is looking at her pane di casa roll. ‘Um,’ she says. ‘Didn’t I mention that?’

  Pictures of The Greatest Band Humanly Possible

  George stares at the pictures of The Greatest Band Humanly Possible plastered to the wall above where Lona’s bed used to be. ‘You reckon I should cut my hair like that?’ he jokes, pointing at a particularly lush shot of the lead singer’s bowl cut.

  Lona is sitting on her desk chair, slowly swivelling from side to side. It’s strange having a boy in her room. Stranger still that’s he’s standing right where her bed used to be. He slides his hands into his pockets. ‘Don’t you tell your parents anything?’

  She shrugs. ‘I tell them things. Just not…all things.’

  ‘I don’t understand what the big deal is.’

  She shrugs again. ‘I don’t understand what the big deal is if I don’t.’

  He looks at her uncomprehendingly. ‘Because that’s what you do with the people in your life. You share things with them. You tell them things.’

  ‘I think that’s one of humanity’s greatest errors.’ She’s approximately sixty per cent joking. ‘I’m sorry. I promise I’ll give them a beat-by-beat review of every gig you play from now on.’

  He doesn’t say anything for a bit. ‘It really doesn’t matter to you, does it?’ he says finally.

  ‘Are we talking hypothetically, historically or… allegorically?’ She’s trying to make him smile, but he’s not smiling. ‘George, I love you and I love my parents. I just don’t feel the need to tell everyone everything all the time. In fact, I prefer to tell people nothing.’

  He stares at her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who do you talk to?’ he asks softly.

  ‘You. Tab.’

  ‘About everything?’

  She shakes her head.

  He leans back against the wall, pancaking the poor band. ‘Why not?’

  She sucks her bottom lip, can’t explain it, can never explain it. The need to hoard herself for herself. She doesn’t feel like herself in this conversation. Has forgotten which self she’s trying to be. She opens her mouth but she can’t think of anything. Her eyes skit and skate until they land on the polaroids blu-tacked to her wardrobe. Snaps of Tab and accidental snaps of bare walls and kitchen tiles. Between them, illustrations ripped out of magazines, postcards of artworks and ripply jet-cartridge prints of old photography projects. A handful of self-portraits.

  All she’s ever wanted to say, all she’s ever wanted to howl. Art like artillery, like an act of self-surgery. Art makes it easy to be brave, makes it easy to rage and strut and feel. It’s all there, if he would just look.

  Art like articulation. Like screaming soundlessly to be heard.

  Old Kim

  Old Kim corners Lona by the dumpsters round the back of Coles. ‘I’ve got a favour to ask you, darl,’ Old Kim says. This is an ominous start to a conversation, so Lona squints, ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘I was hoping you could cover my Saturday morning shift,’ Old Kim says.

  This coming Saturday is the first Saturday Lona has had off in months. She is looking forward to turning her alarm off. She is looking forward to a Friday night spent up till the wee hours with Graham Norton and Ellen Page.

  In lieu of a better excuse, Lona goes with: ‘Ummm…’

  Old Kim nods. ‘My own fault, of course. Saw a flyer for an art class and signed myself up, an impulse thing. Beginner’s watercolour at the CAE. I always wanted to be Beatrix Potter when I was a girl.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lona says.

  ‘It’s a six-week course. Worst comes to worst I could miss the first one.’ She shrugs like she’s already accepted it. There’s no grievance, no resentment in the way she claps a hand on Lona’s shoulder. ‘But how are you doing out here, darl? I hardly see you these days. Do you always take your break out here?’
>
  Lona has got a fist full of half-eaten muesli bar. She is crouched on a step where the smokers smoke. She has never smoked aside from that time with Mr Higgins. She wants to look like the kind of person who smokes. There’s something about it: the back step, the dumpsters, the same sort of muesli bar day after day. She’s been waiting for someone to find her like that.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she says.

  Old Kim has brought a homemade ham and cheese sandwich for her lunch break. It’s in a sandwich box, the kind Lona’s mother used to pack her for school. Old Kim sits down beside Lona and eats. Lona knows that the longer she stays there, the more likely it is she is going to offer to take the shift. There’s an inevitability about it. Lona is not generally a shit person. Only sometimes.

  ‘How are Jack and Robbie?’ she asks.

  Old Kim rolls her eyes. ‘Boys will be boys.’

  Lona nods. After a bit she frowns. ‘What does that mean?’ she asks.

  Old Kim looks at her, then barks a laugh. ‘Who knows?’

  Jack and Robbie still live at home with Old Kim, even though they’re both in their thirties. Her husband went to the 7-Eleven for a Four’n Twenty pie fifteen years ago and hasn’t been heard from since. Old Kim has no time for people who mumble and no time for posturing. Her hair looks like it’s never seen conditioner. She’s had her red Coles vest since she was at least two sizes smaller. She doesn’t laugh if something’s not funny, not like Lona, whose laughter is an involuntary stutter when she feels uncomfortable. Old Kim stares at people until they say something that is actually worth being said.

  ‘I’ll cover the shift,’ Lona says.

  ‘Thanks, darl,’ Old Kim says through a mouthful. ‘I owe you one.’

  Enter message here

  Lona messages Tab. The words sit on the screen in the palm of her hand:

  Hey what’s up?

  They sit there and they don’t do anything. It stuns Lona suddenly that she expects the tapping of fingers onto a piece of glass and plastic to mean anything to anyone. She waits for a reply, for pixels to show up on her palm in the formation of sentiments she wants to read. Something easy like:

  not much

  how bout you?

  Or better, something warm and eager like:

  you me hot chips now

  All she gets is a white box that advises her to enter message here. She puts her phone on the coffee table while she watches Buffy. She can’t concentrate. She finds the phone in her hands without consciously reaching for it. She presses the screen and it lights up and not only has Tab not messaged her, but no one else has either. She is the definition of sitting by the phone, except that now the phone sits with her wherever she goes, tucked into the inner pocket of her jacket.

  Tab continues to not-reply. It’s been two weeks since the night at Macca’s. Lona has already told everyone she knows about it. No one seems to think it’s that interesting, probably because no one died.

  Lona finds that in this uselessly, preposterously connected world, Tab’s silence is astoundingly abrasive.

  Tab’s mother

  Lona calls Tab at home, which she hasn’t done in a long time. She has to rack her brain for the landline, but the string of numbers is still there, snagged on memories of long phone conversations about Inkheart and Neighbours before they switched to mobiles for good. Tab’s mother picks up. She tells Lona that Tab is in the Dandenongs for the week.

  ‘With Nick?’ Lona asks, instantly peeved that she’s been left out of the loop.

  ‘No, by herself,’ Linda says.

  Lona cannot keep the surprise out of her voice. ‘What’s she doing?’

  ‘You know Tab,’ Linda says wearily.

  Lona does know Tab. She knows that Tab loves the mountains and trees that are a hundred people tall. She knows that Tab has always dreamed about running away to a cabin in the woods to get away from everything. The dream has always stung Lona very slightly every time Tab brings it up because it’s in the everything that Tab wants to get away from that Lona exists.

  ‘I’m worried,’ Linda says. Lona wishes she hadn’t said that because she doesn’t want to be confided in. She doesn’t want to be treated like an adult who is capable of hearing her best friend’s mother talk about her daughter like she is a problem. ‘Has she said anything to you, Lona? About why she’s struggling at uni?’

  The question strikes Lona dumb. This is the first she has heard of it.

  Linda sighs. ‘Last year when she failed those two units I thought it was just an adjustment period. This year… well, it shouldn’t take so long.’

  There’s a faint whistling in Lona’s ears, like the air rushing around a falling object. ‘Tell her to call me if you hear from her,’ she blurts. ‘Thanks Linda.’ The goodbye tumbles out of her mouth, half of the words on top of each other. She hangs up.

  A pub in Northcote

  The information that Lona receives is that someone George knows is turning 21. Or possibly she receives more information than that, but that is all that sticks with her. To celebrate, drinks are being had in a pub in Northcote. Nick gives Lona and George a lift. Nick does not seem to know any more about what is happening with Tab than Lona does.

  ‘She’s just getting some fresh air,’ he says.

  Lona spends the car ride there steeling herself for prolonged exposure to other people. ‘You’ll finally get to meet the gang,’ George says. She cannot remember what gang he is referring to and it is far too late to ask him to clarify. She’s met the band and his friends from the music faculty. It must be medicine. But Nick’s invited. So the soccer team? School?

  Nick parallel parks on High Street. It’s somewhere between three and four in the afternoon. ‘I’ll need to move the car in two hours,’ he says, looking at the parking sign. ‘Can you guys remind me?’

  Because it is of absolutely no consequence to her, Lona instantly forgets. She tucks an arm around George’s because she is feeling self-conscious and he is looking particularly hot with his old jeans rolled at the cuffs and his baggy Hawaiian shirt and his The Cars tee.

  ‘You’re nervous,’ he says, which is not a long shot considering it would be an accurate statement approximately 73 per cent of the time. He squeezes her hand. ‘Don’t be.’

  As if it was that fucking easy.

  Inside the pub George and Nick quickly spot their friends. Some of them wave and some of them make the effort to stand up and pat the newcomers’ backs. Lona is motioned to and introduced. She pinches the front of her red corduroy skirt and smiles edgily.

  George says, ‘Come on, let’s get a drink.’

  She feels instantly better the moment she has something to grip in her fist. George assures her that she is going to fit right in. She wants to stay standing at the bar with him, but he is rudely wanting to spend time with his mates.

  Back at the table she is introduced to a Katie and a Pete or potentially a Kathy and a Pat. She’s too busy concentrating on being nice to them to absorb their names.

  ‘Lona is an artist,’ George says, which surprises her. She’s never described herself as such to him, and he’s never actually shown an overwhelming interest in her art. Not that there’s been much of it lately.

  ‘Oh, awesome,’ his friends say, nodding indulgently.

  ‘Uh, yeah,’ Lona says.

  ‘She does event photography too,’ George adds. ‘Which is sort of how we met—or met again, at least.’

  His arm has wound itself over the back her chair. She says, ‘But most of my time is spent hanging around a Coles car park.’

  ‘For her job,’ George quickly interjects.

  Katie prods her drink with a paper straw that has gone soggy. ‘I did art in school,’ she says.

  ‘So did I!’ says Pete.

  Unisex bathroom

  Lona finds herself wedged between Katie and Nick. They are speaking across her about Rupi Kaur. ‘Instagram poets are everything that is wrong with the world,’ Katie says, somewhat hyperbolically in
Lona’s humble opinion.

  ‘Insta influencers are everything that is wrong with the world,’ Nick agrees.

  Lona thinks she has got the hang of it. ‘Instagram is everything wrong with the world,’ she says.

  The other two stare at her like she is unhinged.

  George is on the other side of Nick and he keeps missing the SOS she is Morse coding at him with her eyelids. Blink blink blink. Bliiink bliiink bliiink. Blink blink blink. Nick asks, ‘Are you all right, Lona? Is there something in your eye?’

  She pulls a pen out of her jacket pocket and doodles on a crumpled napkin. A boy’s face which, according to rules of representation, turns into a girl’s face the moment she jams a couple of eyelashes in the corners of the eyes. She gives the girl a cute patterned vest and triangular eyebrows. She draws a speech bubble and writes the word: cowabunga.

  Katie notices and she says, ‘Aw, that’s cute.’

  All of a sudden, the napkin is being handed around the table. ‘Lona is an artiste,’ someone is narrating for the benefit of others.

  Lona wonders when she was upgraded to the sophistication of the French noun. She aims her stoniest look at George, who is trying not to laugh.

  She excuses herself to go to the bathroom. This involves half the table standing up to let her out. The toilets are unisex and Lona squats over a urine-splattered seat as she stares at the graffiti and peeling band stickers stuck to the back of the stall door.

  There is a Sharpie-scrawled: eat pussy not meat

  There is a crossed-out phone number beside: call jez 4 a gud time

  There is a: jesus loves you

  With an arrow leading to: if your a heteronormative white man

  Which someone, Lona is satisfied to see, has corrected to: if you’re a heteronormative white man

  She takes her time washing her hands in the trough sink. She stares at herself in the mirror, comforted somehow by the grimace she receives. Back out in the pub she hovers by the wall for a couple of minutes, watching George be with his friends.