Loner

by Georgina Young

  She turns on her wheels, eyes closed, arms moving through the air around her and finding a blissful nothing in their way. It’s sudden, the switch, from frustrated to serene. She’s never been able to make it happen when she wants. She forgets, instantly, what it was like to feel anything other than what she’s feeling when she’s feeling it.

  She stops, dizzy, and opens her eyes. Someone is waiting for her, elbows on the edge of the rink. She blinks her smudgey vision, but it doesn’t help. There’s still someone there.

  ‘Hey,’ George calls. ‘Don’t let me interrupt you.’

  It’s too late though. Lona skates over to him, feet pushing out in a gentle sideways motion. They stand on either side of the barrier and she begins to roll backwards very slightly without meaning to. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks.

  ‘Ouch,’ he says, grinning. ‘I thought we could get dinner.’

  ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s this thing called Uber Eats. You press a few buttons on your phone and some poor guy on a bike brings you food.’

  He’s trying to be funny, but he’s not being funny. As girlfriend, Lona feels a certain obligation to laugh. As human being, Lona feels an overwhelming desire to make it stop. She says, ‘I’ve got a bit to do here before I can close up.’

  ‘I can help,’ he says. He eyes the clump of dust and lolly wrappers by the edge of the rink. ‘I can take out the rubbish.’

  ‘Like a man,’ Lona says.

  He shrugs. ‘Why else would you keep me round?’

  She rolls forward so that she can kiss him, lightly, on the lips. It feels like she’s giving him something, a gift. She is aware that it shouldn’t feel like that. She is unsure why she can’t make it stop feeling like one of them is indulging the other. She is unsure how to cede some control without ceding all control, without wanting to take it all back.

  ‘Dust pan is under the counter,’ she says. ‘Just let me get out of my skates.’

  Exam prep

  Lona doesn’t hear from George for a couple of days, but she only realises it’s been a couple of days when he messages:

  Sorry it’s been hectic this week

  Exam prep (UPSIDE-DOWN FACE) (VAMPIRE) (TOP HAT) (BOMB)

  I might have to cancel on dinner tomorrow night sorry

  She messages:

  All good! Good luck!! (RED HEART) (RED HEART) (RED HEART)

  It’s the first time he’s shown any outward concern over his studies. Round mid-sems she’d asked him if he needed to revise instead of watching yet another Noah Baumbach study of bohemian-bourgeois dysfunction. He’d taken her arm in his and turned it this way and that, naming all the bones in her wrist. She called him a smart arse, they watched The Meyerowitz Stories. That was that.

  The fact he is studying both medicine and music is insane when she actually thinks about it. Especially considering he spends at least three nights a week with her.

  He never talks about his theory or clinical units with her, maybe because he thinks she wouldn’t understand or be interested. She doesn’t know which is worse. She realises, shamefully, that she’s never really asked.

  They get dinner on Thursday at Fonda on Chapel Street. George is preoccupied. He keeps fidgeting and is doing bizarre things like: not eating his beef brisket tacos the second they are put down in front of him. ‘I’m not worried exactly, if that makes sense,’ he says. ‘It’s just… I’m worried I’m not worried enough, if that makes sense.’

  Lona has a gob full of quesadilla, and therefore simply nods.

  ‘I’ve been distracted,’ he says.

  ‘Wha—?’ She swallows. ‘Getting distinctions instead of HDs?’ She’s joking, but she can see straight away that she’s hit the mark. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘It’s not good enough unless it’s good enough.’

  ‘Says your parents?’

  ‘Says me.’

  She shakes her head. ‘You’re being too hard on yourself.’

  ‘So what? Everyone who’s any good at anything is hard on themselves.’

  She stares at him, this him she doesn’t know. The twitchy, ambitious him. She realises that this is a George he was hiding from her all this time. That she’s not the only one who hides things. She wonders why he didn’t want her to see this.

  She finds his ambition a turn-on. It reminds her of herself. The herself that she misplaced a while back.

  ‘I’m sorry, I think I’m going to have to go into study hibernation these next couple of weeks,’ he says.

  She says, ‘Do what you’ve got to do.’

  In George’s absence

  In George’s absence, Lona finds that it’s Tab she misses. More than before, when she could wedge other feelings, other things, into her days. She misses being talked to, talked about: oh, that’s just Lona. She resents her missing, but she misses the pain when she swings at it and only hurts herself. She shuts down, stays in, responds to any invitations she receives: can’t go. She gets on with things.

  In the meantime, she works a couple of extra shifts at Coles and tramps grudgingly through some Kerouac. Sim gets tired of Lona watching her paint in the evenings and brings home another second-hand easel so they can paint together. Sim paints geometric shapes, and Lona a bowl of pears. Lona has painted before—making it up as she went along in high school, back to basics in the required intro classes at uni—but it was always photography she found most pliable. For the first time, she looks at paint the way she does film. Like it is capable of presenting unreality as likeness. Like it is something alive. She can’t remember having enjoyed anything so much in a long time.

  George messages at night:

  How’s your day?

  She says:

  Good, you?

  He sends her an emoticon that her phone doesn’t recognise. It shows up as a blank box. Lona amuses herself attempting to guess what he sent her.

  A spitting llama.

  A whirling dervish.

  A solar eclipse.

  She doesn’t tell him that she can’t understand.

  Old school stuff

  On the morning of George’s last exam, Lona sends him a gif of SpongeBob SquarePants giving a thumbs up. She has the day off from work and has promised Mum she will sort through all the old school stuff Mum is attempting to clear out of the study room cabinet.

  She catches the train home and helps Mum carry the stacks of art folios and exercise books out into the living room. They stack them on the rug in haphazard piles. Lona notices a year-seven science test sticking out of one pile.

  ‘Jesus,’ she says.

  ‘You were the one who wanted to keep it all,’ Mum says. ‘Something about: I may need this some day. For your memoirs, I assume.’ She laughs.

  Lona fishes out a short essay written in French she can no longer read aside from the words: Buffy Summers, Planet Skate and Tab Brooks.

  ‘It can go,’ she says. ‘All of it.’

  Mum laughs again, but stops when she realises Lona is being serious. ‘Look through it,’ she advises. ‘There may be something you want in there.’

  Mum goes back to the study to work, and Lona clears a space in the middle of the rug for her to sit with her legs crossed. She surveys the task and realises that she couldn’t possibly begin without some music. She scrambles across the floor to the stereo cupboard, and finds a few of her old albums jammed in between Dad’s various recordings of Les Misérables and Mum’s New Wave collection.

  Barbie Summer Fun Party Volume Two is the soundtrack to her gradual disillusionment. Boy bands and girl groups and ‘Strawberry Kisses’. She is ruthless in her culling, bewildered and mortified by her decision to hoard every scrap of validation she ever received in the form of a score out of a hundred.

  It’s rubbish, mostly. Things she was proud of, mostly. Tests she aced, positive feedback, praise. The occasional C+ she kept in an act of: I’ll show them, I’ll show them all! Invitations to pool parties, handwritten notes fro
m Tab. Of course it was for the memoirs. Of course it always is. It was important, seemingly imperative, and now it is meaningless. Or, means only: good at school. Whatever that actually means. All she knows is that she would no longer be good at school. Not when it all so clearly means nothing, when it leads only to sitting on her parents’ floor embarrassed by the poetry she once wrote from the perspective of Abigail in The Crucible.

  Lona was undoubtedly a good student.

  This is both true and highly irrelevant to anything.

  The Saddle Club is singing ‘Hello World’ when Lona finally gets to her art folios. She had been looking forward to this part, but finds herself turning the pages rapidly, desperately. Maybe doing three forms of art in VCE was what led to Lona believing she could do what she wanted and everything would be all right. She thumbs through her Studio Arts, Visual Communication and Fine Art folios numbly, the pads of her fingers smudging greylead drawings and photographs of Tab with a colander on her head and 3D glasses so that one eye is flashing angry red and the other a cool blue.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Lona asks herself.

  But all the annotations are full of their own importance and gravitas. Sixteen-year-old Lona believed in herself, but she also believed in the significance of transhuman expressionist art.

  The complete loss of faith in herself and her ambition occurs as Lona sits surrounded by all her old school stuff on the rug in the living room of her parents’ house. The art that is in these folios is not bad, just as the answers she gave in all those soon-to-be-recycled tests were not wrong.

  It’s the simple fact that Lona has always done well, but doing well has done nothing for her.

  Lona glances around at her work. Almost a decade of being ambitious and good at things. A hundred photographs and drawings and attempts to make something that people look at and call beautiful or weird or whatever she wants them to say.

  It’s not enough, she realises. It’s not enough to respond to a prompt. It’s not enough to subvert or to push back on the assessment criteria. Not when she relied on the rubric in the first place, to know what she should be pushing back on, to define the trajectory of her small artistic and conceptual rebellions. Not when she is now so lost without a set of clear directives.

  The hollow, pressing feeling in her gut is inevitable, because always, always, always, she returns to the part of her that is tired and scared and tired of being tired and scared.

  Because: what’s the point?

  In any of it.

  Lona’s phone screen lights up and it’s George messaging: Woooo all done! Do you want to g…

  She doesn’t click on the message to see the rest because what’s the point. She lies down on her back on the floor and she would probably cry if she was the kind of person who cried without instantly challenging the validity of her own emotions.

  Mum walks in and says, ‘Do you want tea?’

  Lona says, ‘Please.’

  One a.m.

  You’ve reached Tab, or, more accurately, you’ve reached a digital recording of Tab’s voice. Leave a message and I will do my very best not to be such a pernickety smart arse when I call you back.

  Beeeeeeeeep.

  Sleeping in

  George calls in the morning because he is worried that Lona hasn’t replied to his messages. She misses the call because she is sleeping in for as long as sleep will have her. When she gets up at 11.30 a.m. she sees the four messages and the missed call and she is irritated that she is required to do something about it.

  She is scowling when she sends the message:

  Congrats! (FACE BLOWING A KISS) Sorry I was AWOL, phone died yesterday (PILE OF POO)

  He instantly shoots back:

  Thought something must be wrong

  Are you ok?

  Do you want to get brunch? (BIRTHDAY CAKE) (COCKTAIL) (GOBLIN)

  Lona licks her lips. They are dry and cracked. Probably because she rarely drinks even a single cup of the 32 or however many litres you’re meant to drink a day according to Rach. She considers that George wants to celebrate because he is happy exams are over and he gets to, among other things, spend more time with her. She considers that she feels mostly dead inside.

  She messages:

  I’d love to (SMILING FACE WITH HEART-EYES)

  French toast

  ‘Talk to me,’ he says. They are sitting in a small cafe in Murrumbeena that appears to have run out of money halfway through construction. Three of the walls have cracks in the plaster through which brick can be seen. There is a bisection of naked pipes beside Lona’s head that gurgles every time the toilet is flushed. The cafe won Best New Eatery on some website somewhere and it is packed.

  Lona cuts another too-big-for-her-mouth piece off her French toast. She smiles. ‘What do you mean? I’m fine.’

  He groans. ‘You’re not fine. Can’t you understand how frustrating it is for me when there’s clearly something wrong but you don’t want to talk about it?’

  She says, ‘This French toast is delicious.’

  ‘Lona!’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong, George,’ she snaps. ‘This is me. This is all me. This is me this morning. I’m eating French toast and I am fine.’

  Lona looks at her breakfast so that she doesn’t have to look at him. All she wants right now is to be at home watching the musical episode of Buffy, but telling George that would only lead to ridicule, or worse, a sigh. He is the reason she is here instead of there and so she can’t help being annoyed with him.

  ‘Tell me about the exam,’ she says, using the classic diversion tactic of pretending to be interested in his thing.

  ‘I already did,’ he says.

  She obviously wasn’t listening and she is obviously being a shit girlfriend. She says, ‘Oh, sorry,’ and pushes a dollop of mascarpone onto her forkful. The food is so good but her mood is so bad. The taste and her disposition are cancelling each other out until all she feels is numb and slightly queasy because she is eating so fast.

  George rubs his forehead like he’s got a hangover. His hair is hanging in lank strands over his face. She remembers him saying that he was distracted, that being distracted was a problem. That it was bringing him and his GPA down.

  Lona is the distraction. Lona is the pounding, unrelenting ache in his forehead. Lona, or the frustration of being with Lona when Lona is so unpredictable in her wanting to be with him.

  George takes off his glasses so he can knead his eyes.

  Hypothesis

  They climb up the temporary scaffolded staircase to get to the new Murrumbeena sky rail. The station, with its sterile concrete aesthetic, is clearly worth the $1.6 billion dollars the government threw at it. The next city-bound train is in twelve minutes.

  ‘We’re in two different relationships,’ George says. ‘You’re in a relationship with me and I’m in one with you, but they’re not the same.’

  It’s obvious to Lona that this hypothesis is too slick to be something he just came up with. Which means he’s been thinking it for a while. ‘But couldn’t that be said of all relationships?’ she asks. ‘I mean, technically, isn’t subjectivity always a thing?’

  He groans, exasperated. ‘See, there! You’re responding to the wrong part.’

  She blinks a couple of times and wonders if they are fighting. She has never fought with someone close to her before. She is scrambling for data with which to interpret this conversation. Unfortunately, her only data comes from teen TV shows from the ’90s. ‘So, what? You’re breaking up with me?’

  ‘What?’ he says, stunned.

  Potentially Heartbreak High is not the place to turn for advice. But Lona can’t stop now. ‘Well, you want me to change and I don’t want to change. So that’s that.’

  George looks hurt. ‘I don’t want you to change.’

  ‘You don’t want to want me to change,’ she corrects. ‘But you don’t want me to be like this and I am like this.’

  He reaches for her hand. ‘You’re being stubbo
rn.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I am stubborn.’

  The park down the road

  Lona starts to go for walks, late in the afternoon when the park down the road is a roiling pack of dogs and dog-people. She does laps while her head does laps. In the almost dark, she circles closer and closer to the centre of the oval until she is simply turning on the spot.

  At home, she finishes painting her pears and she sits the canvas on top of her bookshelf so that she can stare at it until she switches off her lamp at night. It is so beautiful, and Lona is so proud and surprised to have made something so beautiful.

  George messages and Lona replies, belatedly.

  Later sometime, spiralling ever closer to the middle of the park oval, she asks herself over and over again: what are you thinking, what are you thinking. She says the words out loud and they block out any possible thinking.

  She is exhausted with someone being in her bed, her phone, her reasons for doing things. She is exhausted by sharing. She sits down in the centre of the football field and feels the back of her jeans go instantly damp with dew.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ she asks.

  The break-up

  The break-up is so effortless it’s almost indecent. There is not enough of them materially in each other’s lives to make it cumbersome. There is only a hoodie returned, a book. There is only incomprehension, the feeling of entering a house after being outside in the sun, of blinking until their eyesight adjusts. There are photographs on film not yet developed. There are words and songs that will remind them of one another, strings of messages that will be pushed further and further down the inbox as time goes by.