She moves slowly to join them.
In the back seat
On the way home, George switches the radio in Nick’s car to Triple J. He doesn’t listen to anything else. He has told Lona on multiple occasions that she is a bogan for listening to Triple M, and an old woman for listening to Gold. He is just teasing her, but it sticks pins into her jaw nonetheless.
The boys talk about their friends and Lona wonders for the millionth time where the idea came from that girls are the gossipy ones. Lona learns that Nick used to be involved with Katie. She detests him for daring to be involved with anyone ever aside from Tab. He yawns loudly and lengthily, which is always a good sign from the person whose ability to concentrate is determining whether or not the car stays on the road. He and George start to sing along to a song Lona has never heard.
‘It’ll top the Top 100 for sure,’ Nick speculates.
In the back seat, Lona relives the night again and again, fixating on and pulling apart bits that make her cringe. She does not want to be doing this. Her mind, on the other hand, has a sadomasochistic desire to tear itself apart.
‘I’m knackered,’ Nick says.
Lona nods, picturing herself blanketed on the couch. ‘Buffy then bed.’
George groans. ‘Please, I beg of you, no more Buffy.’
He is a little bit joking, but mainly serious. George has developed an animosity towards the Vampire Slayer and associated media. He thinks Lona spends more time with Anthony Head than with him. He does not understand that a television show can be a happy place where the world isn’t so shit for 43 minutes. He watches bleak crime series and satirical news programs in which a man in a suit sits behind a desk and is cynical about everything within reach.
She says something like, ‘I promise it’ll be a Spike season,’ but she is upset. She does not want to feel embarrassed for wanting to be happy. Especially not at the end of a long afternoon of scrutinising the social and intellectual cues of every new person she meets, trying to work out who she should be with each of them. She bristles at his sweeping of Buffy into the category of: guilty pleasure. She detests not only the insinuation, but the concept itself.
It feels like a condemnation of the very thing that makes her her. The obsessive, giddy, impassioned her. The her that cares about something, even if it’s a television show. Her jaw feels tight. She is quiet, but she is often quiet, so George has absolutely no idea of the hurt she is X-ray beaming through the back of his headrest.
A new song comes on and he declares that Father John Misty is a prophet for our age and Lona snaps, ‘Ironic misogyny is just as harmful as genuine misogyny.’
He ducks slightly, like he has no idea where that was lobbed from. There’s a confused, wounded look on his face that she catches in the side mirror. The satisfaction and regret hit her at the same time.
‘You know, I think you’re right, Lona,’ Nick says.
Oh shut up, she thinks.
Community theatre production
Dad buys two tickets to a community theatre production of Shrek the Musical. Astonishingly, Mum does not wish to accompany him, so the ticket is offered to Lona.
Lona and her father are seated two rows from the front. They are close enough to the stage that Lona recognises Sampson’s friend Martin through the heavy green face paint. He again demonstrates his penchant for high kicks as he belts out ‘I’m a Believer’. Dad has already downloaded the Broadway soundtrack and silently mouths along with the musical numbers.
Lona is pretty sure that she saw the tunic Martin is wearing at Kmart when she was there with Tab. She wishes Tab were here to witness the full glory of the Elsternwick Players Society. She wishes Tab were here.
After the show, Dad insists they hang around in the lobby of the town hall so that he can congratulate the fifteen-year-old kid playing Donkey for providing an exceptional level of professionalism in what was otherwise, he whispers confidentially to Lona, a grade-A shit show on the level of the production of To Kill a Mockingbird the Musical that Lona and Tab participated in at high school. ‘Not that you weren’t great as Member of Lynch Mob Number Five,’ he adds quickly.
Dad believes in the power of positive thought and he believes in Lona. When he asks her how things are going, whilst straining to look over her shoulder for any sign of the cast, she says, ‘Good.’
He accepts this because of course his daughter who he thinks is brilliant is ok. It is inconceivable to him that she might be anxious or not-ok and so she does not feel as though she can be these things around him. She wants to be the things he thinks she is. The competent daughter. The on-top-of-things and ever-reliable and always-fine daughter. She is, with him.
‘Oh,’ he says, patting the front of his jacket. ‘This arrived in the mail for you.’
He pulls something out of his pocket and hands it to Lona. A postcard. A glossy picture of Puffing Billy, the old steam train that runs through the Dandenong Ranges. A postcard from Tab. Sure enough, the flipside is covered in spilling, loopy handwriting:
salutations old chum!!
The room erupts in applause as the cast begins to trickle in. Lona struggles to concentrate on Tab’s message, and pockets the postcard for later. Martin emerges, waving a cupped hand like the Queen of England. There is still a slight smear of green on his cheek. He sees Lona before she can duck out of sight and he gives her a strange look.
‘I came here for Shrek,’ she blurts. ‘Not you.’
Across the room, Dad is shaking a bewildered Donkey’s hand. ‘Lona,’ he calls, enthused. ‘Did you want an autograph?’
Tab’s postcard
Lona reads Tab’s postcard while Dad’s ordering food at the bar. The lighting in the pub is bad and she holds the card close enough to her face that the words stop squirming around.
salutations old chum!!
Tab has always hated capital letters. She thinks they’re angular and unlovely. Except for Q’s and O’s and S’s and the obligatory I’s. She likes lines that swoop and swish. She likes d’s and e’s and a’s. She likes running them together with m’s and n’s so that they’re hardly legible. She writes like someone whispering loudly. Like she’s sitting in the booth opposite Lona and she’s just grinned and leaned over to say:
hope this finds you—forgot your new address, woooops!
Em dashes too. Always flat and wide and tucked close to the words at either end. Like a thought that was spring-loaded into the previous sentence. Breathless, like she’s bursting to say:
apologies for running off like I did. needed some space & it was one of those now or never kind of things—or like one of those “why not???” kind of things
All the punctuation. Any punctuation, anywhere and everywhere. Wherever it looks nice, wherever it fits. A tiny score of Tab in each tiny decision made, in each bit of blue ink that joins with another bit of blue ink to form a pattern that means something more than scores of ink. Something like:
been to miss marple’s for scones & puffing billy (obvs). been walking a lot and thinking a lot. decided to stay a bit longer. hope all is well with you
I can smell someone’s wood fire
it’s so goddamn pretty up here I want to cry
lots of love,
t
There is no return address. No way of replying. Of writing cheerful words or angry words or sympathetic words or passive-aggressive words. No way of asking: where did you go? In your head, where have you gone? Asking: how long have you been there? I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I don’t know where I’ve been.
Dad comes back from the bar still humming ‘What’s Up, Duloc?’ and Lona puts away the postcard. Competent, ok, fine, she reminds herself.
She smiles, says, ‘Tab’s having a nice time in the hills.’
Sampson messages
Sampson messages something objective like:
Do u want to come to buffy trivia tonite?
Lona receives the message as something subjective like:
I am inviting you spe
cifically because I know you specifically like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I specifically wanted to see you.
He is giving her very little notice, but as a person Lona requires very little notice. She has no plans. She leaves him on read for half an hour and then replies:
Sounds good (SMILING FACE)
Then:
You should know I’m very competitive
He leaves her on read for an excruciating hour and then replies:
I’m counting on it (TROPHY)
It’s the sort of thing Lona always used to mistake for flirting. She has finally realised that flirting should not need to be read into. Flirting is not subjective, flirting is objective. Flirting is not when a person knows more than one thing about you and is able to use those two or more things to make conversation with you.
George messages later:
Dinner tonight?
Lona says:
Got plans sorry
She feels slightly bad about it. She considers inviting George along, but George has made it clear how he feels about Buffy. He would be trivia dead weight.
They have moved beyond the Father John Misty outburst, but she still feels like she’s chafing around the edges where she’s started to graze her elbows on the walls of: being with someone. It doesn’t help that sometimes the very last thing she wants to do is be close to another person. That some days she doesn’t want to talk to anyone, and George doesn’t seem to be able to comprehend that he can be part of that anyone while also meaning more to her than almost any of the other anyones.
She knows she should tell him: I’m going out with Sampson. It shouldn’t be a big deal. It’s her life and she can go where she wants and see who she wants. Sampson’s a friend, that’s all. She was never going to be: one of those girls. She was never going to let anyone else tell her what to do.
She messages George:
Tomorrow xxxx
One of the boys
They call themselves: Anya Mark, Get Set, Go. They’re almost all boys aside from her, which is a buzz, even if they are nerds. There’s one other girlfriend—not that Lona is a girlfriend. Lona taps Sampson’s arm and says, ‘Olvikan.’ The others shake their heads, and they write down the wrong answer. They do not realise this is probably the one and only thing in life Lona could not possibly fuck up.
Lona gets a parma like everyone else and enjoys feeling like one of the boys. Tab would say: this is due to social conditioning to value the respect of men more than the respect of women. But Tab is AWOL so she can’t critique how Lona chooses to spend her time.
They do not win. They place in the nebulous unplaced middle with all the other teams who thought they were better than they are.
Lona stays for a beer after, but she doesn’t like sitting next to Sampson and not being able to talk to him properly, so she says she has to get home. He says, ‘Yeah, I’d better head off too.’
They walk to Windsor station. For Lona it’s the same as it always used to be. She enjoys his company. He repeats things that she’s said, throwaway things, as if they’re funny. She gets the sense that she has the upper hand. The upper hand is unfamiliar to her, but she is enjoying becoming acquainted with it.
‘That was fun,’ she says, and she means it. ‘I like your friends.’
Sampson’s friends are easy, or at least they’re the kind of people who Lona is easiest with. People who convene to argue about Peep Show and Rick and Morty before going home to watch Peep Show and Rick and Morty. With George’s friends she feels under pressure to be the optimal version of: George’s girlfriend. To be as creative and cynical and intelligent as he tells people she is.
Sampson and Lona both get on the city-bound train. It pulls in at South Yarra and she taps his knee lightly with the back of her knuckles. ‘It was good to see you.’ She pushes down the part of her that wants to see how far they would go, if ever she were to initiate it. She gets up and steps off the train without looking back.
She blames TV. She blames the unresolved sexual tension between cops in serialised crime shows. She blames anyone who ever insisted that: we’re just good friends. Because that must be it. That must be the reason that she can want Sampson, that sometimes she thinks about Sampson and how he would run a thumb along the inside line of her hipbone and how that would feel.
She doesn’t want to not be with George. It’s just sometimes she also wants to be with someone else. A glimpse of a tattoo on the inside of a stranger’s arm can send the blood rushing to her head. She can’t help thinking: him, her.
It must be TV, must be something about the fact she never pressed her mouth or her body up against any other mouths and bodies in high school, that she never stopped wanting anyone, everyone, all at once.
Unless it’s normal. Unless maybe this is what it’s like.
Dog
Ben and Harriet get a dog. They have spent months filling out online breed compatibility tests and after weeks and weeks of Ben getting matched with a shih tzu, he finally managed to rig it so he got what he wanted all along: a dachshund. The puppy is a wriggling thing. It nips at Lona’s toes and the laces of her Docs and it runs around and around until it collapses suddenly, exhausted.
The name of the dog is Edith. Harriet chose it. ‘I like it,’ Lona tells her. Harriet does not know if Lona is being sarcastic. Lona isn’t being sarcastic, it’s just that sincerity never leaves her mouth fully intact.
‘We were going to get one from the RSPCA,’ Ben says, ‘but then we found a farm in Kyneton.’
What he’s saying is: they wanted a new dog, a fresh one. Not some curmudgeonly old jack russell whose equally curmudgeonly old owner has just gone into a nursing home.
Lona is surprised by how much effort is required just to be in the same room as a puppy. If Edith isn’t flinging a rope toy at her, Ben and Harriet are demanding that she acknowledge how much cuter Edith is than any other puppy that has ever existed.
‘Have you been in to see Grandpa recently?’ she asks Ben, an attempt to short circuit the loop.
He nods. ‘Last weekend. They’re getting him ready to move into a nursing home.’
‘What?’ Lona says, surprised. ‘He didn’t tell me that.’
‘He probably didn’t want to worry you. You’re the favourite, after all.’ In his voice, partially buried: sibling rivalry, the most archaic of feuds. Edith drops the rope at his feet and he picks it up and throws it across the room. ‘Ahh, look at her!’
Edith runs after the rope and bounds straight back with it, a boomerang of a dog. She tries Lona, but Lona is distracted. ‘I thought he was coming back home,’ she says.
‘Yeah, he was, but the rehab hasn’t gone like they thought. He doesn’t have the muscle capability anymore—hey, Hat, get a photo of her like that!’
Harriet already has her phone out and is crouched on the balls of her feet, recording a video of Edith rolling on her back on the carpet. The audio will be an incomprehensible soundtrack of squealing and oh my gaaad-ing. Lona seems to be the only one who remembers she and Ben were having a conversation. Her camomile tea has reached the tepid stage that she loves so that she can gulp it all down quickly. She watches Ben and Harriet tussle with Edith. Sixty years ago, there wouldn’t have been a dog. Edith would’ve been a bun in Harriet’s oven.
Lona momentarily forgets what she is doing here. Forgets that Ben is her brother. The same brother who used to find it funny to throw tennis balls under her wheels when she was practising on her skates up and down the driveway. He’s a real person now. Lona is a patchwork doll.
She feels slightly ill.
An educative experience
Friday night at Planet Skate, Lona decides to treat the children to an educative experience. She plays them Shed Seven and Hole and The Greatest Band Humanly Possible. They all hate it and beg for the Veronicas, but Lona does it for the one girl who’s going to go home and type into Google: destroy my sweater song.
Lona’s hair has faded into something closer to grey than blue. The
roots are showing through dull blonde. She is wearing old jeans and a big woollen jumper that used to belong to her mother and comes down to her knees. Her heart is not in it, not in anything other than checking her phone every few minutes. It’s not like she’s texted anyone, not like she’s expecting a reply. She hasn’t heard from Tab since the postcard.
Pat waves from across the room and shouts, ‘Ten minutes!’
Lona brings up a One Direction playlist she has on her iPod for what she maintains is this purpose and this purpose alone. She is forgiven for her previous musical indiscretions. The kids return their skates to the front counter and Lona steps down from her podium and sets about mopping up the place.
‘You good to lock up?’ Pat asks. ‘Tiges are playing the Pies tonight and Bill says it’s a close one.’
‘Yeah, all good,’ Lona says.
She’s left the music on shuffle. It’s going through her saved songs and playing all the shit ones, or maybe it’s just that time of night. Planet Skate feels cavernous with the music and just her. She does the obligatory laps with the hairy mop, collecting all the Fantales wrappers and corn chip crumbs, pushing it all to one side to deal with later. She keeps going without the mop. Her legs feel stiff, but she pushes them regardless, skating so hard into the floor it’s like she’s trying to crack through. There’s a part of her that knows she’s doing it on purpose, that the more her body objects, the more she forces it. There’s a part of her that’s always detested her capacity to be weak, to feel vulnerable. It drives her harder, to hurt more, feel more, to legitimise the pain by making it physical.
She can feel the sweat on her back. She turns sharply, skidding so that her legs split and she’s reaching out to hold the floor before it holds her. She’s ok, just out of breath, her heart racing. She can feel her pulse thrumming in the sides of her face. She gets up slowly and she’s kinder then, to the linoleum, to herself. She glides and it is exactly that: gliding.
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