Loner

by Georgina Young

  Lona finds that she misses him. She finds that it aches. But what doesn’t?

  Movie night

  Rach brings up categories on Netflix and clicks through to Romantic movies. Lona says, ‘How about Action?’ She wants to watch something with Jason Statham pulling off a heist using only a crowbar and his thick cockney accent. The smell of fatty acids is permeating the house. There are potato gems in the oven. There are peanut M&Ms in a bowl. If Lona was at home, Mum would have bought wedges and sour cream and a block of Top Deck chocolate. Sim and Rach don’t know her so well. They are guessing because Lona never tells them anything about herself.

  Rach does not want to watch Jason Statham pull off a heist using only a crowbar and his thick cockney accent, and like always, she wins. She does strike a compromise though. Shaun of the Dead. The girl’s got ok taste, Lona will concede that.

  ‘I’m really attracted to the guy from Black Books in this,’ Sim says. ‘Like, I don’t know why. He’s such a tool. I think I’m attracted to tools. Problem is, they’re tools.’

  She is perched on the arm of the couch. Sim always perches on the arm of the couch. Lona always says, ‘There’s room on the couch.’ Sim always says, ‘I’m ok. I’m not going to watch the whole thing.’ But she inevitably does, from the arm.

  ‘I’m really attracted to Simon Pegg,’ Rach says. ‘But not like in this. Like, now. Like, 40-year-old Simon Pegg.’ She twists her hair back into a bun and tucks it into itself so that it stays done up, even without a band. Rach’s hair is big and thick enough for it to work. Lona has tried to do it herself. She gets a little knob that unfurls as soon as she lets go. Lona hasn’t washed her hair in two weeks. She has decided she’s never going to wash her hair again. Shampoo is a consumerist construct, like razors for women. The internet says so. Tab once sent her a link.

  Lona hasn’t received a message from anyone in five days.

  Sim opens a bottle of pink moscato. They drink it from mugs. It’s been months, but still the only crockery they own is mugs. Sim gets out her sketchbook and does scenes from the movie. Rach rubs the pendant at her neck, the Sagittarius archer. The timer goes off for the gems and thankfully it’s Sim who gets up.

  ‘Not too much salt,’ Rach calls.

  Lona can hear the prolonged crunch of the grinder. Sim brings the gems out crunchy and sodium snowflaked. She squeezes Lona’s shoulder. Lona understands that this is all being done for her. Sim and Rach only just found out about the break-up, even though it happened a week ago. They are doing these things to make Lona feel better. They are avoiding asking any direct questions and Lona is glad.

  She doesn’t want to talk to Sim and Rach. She barely knows Sim and Rach, not in any of the ways that really count. She wants to talk to her parents, or Tab. Not about George. About books or films or the correct use of the word literally. She doesn’t want to be here, in this home that isn’t a home, with these friends who aren’t friends. She wants to be alone. She wants to be able to watch a movie and laugh at all the bits she wants to, not the bits she feels she can around other people.

  She wants George.

  Stupid, true, not all the time.

  He said: relationships are about always being there.

  But always is obliterating. Always is asphyxiating. Lona has never been able to stay still inside the arm of another person.

  She takes a potato gem hot off the plate and it scalds the inside of her mouth.

  She watches the movie and she laughs when the others do.

  Tab gets back

  Tab gets back from Sassafras and apparently turns her phone back on. She messages:

  heard about george

  i’m sorry

  u ok?

  Lona can feel the sediment of hurt and resentment stirring in her stomach, but she knows it would be hypocritical to begrudge her friend for wanting some time alone. She replies:

  I’m all right. How was your trip? Do you want to get lunch sometime this week?

  The green dot indicating Tab’s chat window is active disappears after a minute. Lona waits for it to reappear. It doesn’t. She is on her break. Muesli bar in fist on the back step by the dumpsters. She closes her chat window. Opens it again.

  Still nothing.

  Selfie

  ‘Ahh, you’re doing a selfie,’ Sim remarks, coming to stand behind Lona. Lona cannot paint when there is someone standing behind her. She does not want to look like she cannot paint when there is someone standing behind her. She makes a couple of insubstantial strokes on the canvas, blending blue into blue.

  Lona is painting her first ever portrait. She is, of course, painting herself. Lona used to joke in high school: I am my own muse. Sometimes it was the more self-effacing: I am the most available subject I have. Or: if I’m going to digitally manipulate someone’s face, I feel most comfortable using my own. She could never say it like: I like looking at pictures of myself. Even though that is the truth.

  She is painting her face front on, staring at herself. It’s not her, not really. Her skin is yellow blue pink. Her hair is silver blue white. She uses a thumb to smudge a bit of Paynes Grey beneath her eye.

  Sim cocks her head. ‘It’s a bit choppy,’ she says.

  Lona doesn’t know what she means, but she also knows exactly what she means. The colours are all there, they’re just not cohesive. She steps back and looks at it.

  The left eye is wrong and she doesn’t know how to fix it. The lips are too full.

  ‘You know when everything is shit…’ she says.

  Sim claps a hand on her shoulder. ‘Keep at it, Loney.’

  Tab replies

  Tab replies so late that Lona forgets what she’s responding to:

  bit busy at mo with uni

  soon ok

  Lona is unsure how to proceed when she knows more about Tab’s situation with uni than Tab realises. Lona hates that she knows. She hates that she isn’t better at being there for her friend. She hates that she spends more time thinking about how inconvenient it is for herself. She messages:

  All good (SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES) How is everything going?

  Tab replies:

  same old

  Lona types out a couple of responses. One so earnest she backspaces immediately, afraid she is going to unintentionally send it and then the truth will be there forever in a blue speech bubble and it will sit as a line of code in a machine in the desert and someone will find it one day and use it against her and that’s how she’ll be remembered.

  Her panic and frustration curdles fast into apathy and in the end she leaves it. Doesn’t say anything. The not saying anything is so relieving, so anarchic, it buoys her. So Tab needs space. That’s fine. Lona pockets her phone and goes back to painting.

  The car ride there

  Sampson has a housewarming for the house in Preston he has moved into with his brother and his brother’s friends. Lona doesn’t know anyone else who’s going. No one else from uni has clicked attending on the event.

  She has borrowed Mum’s car and she listens to ’90s punk on the way there, turned up loud with the windows down. The lead singer was most definitely on crystal meth when it was recorded. It just zings right along.

  She’s wearing jeans and a black turtleneck. Lipstick that is too orange for her face. Her hair is mangy. It’s been almost a month since she last washed it and it is pulled back into a low, greasy bun. She is trying just enough to make it seem effortless. She is having conversations with Sampson, glancing at the empty passenger seat as if he is there. I’m glad I came tonight too, she tells him. She imagines it’s darker than it is.

  Where are we going? no one asks.

  Just wait, she says.

  She takes a wrong turn and the GPS on her phone starts to shout at her. Next left. Next left. Next left. Her phone is jammed into the cup holder. She can’t see the map. When she takes her eyes off the road for a minute she almost hits the car in front of her.

  Shit.

  The Sampson in the
passenger seat is gone. It’s just the music and her singing along: I could crush you like a bug/ I shouldn’t have said that. The line peels over into the next one so it half-rhymes. Lona likes that. There’s something satisfying about the way it sounds.

  She parks two houses down because the street is crammed with cars. She sits in Mum’s car for ten minutes thinking that she couldn’t possibly go in. It has taken her 45 minutes to get here. She is frozen still. If she leaves now then no one will ever know she was here. No one will miss her.

  She misses Tab, because this is always when she needs her most. Tab as human shield. To duck behind in a room full of people. To belong to, beside. But Tab is not here. Tab has not been here for some time.

  In her place, a hope niggles at Lona, selfish, horrible: maybe for once she can be the one that people like.

  She checks her makeup in the mirror. She gets out of the car.

  Inside the house

  She finds Sampson in the lounge. ‘Lona!’ he says. ‘You made it!’ She gives him his gift: a toilet brush. ‘Um, thanks,’ he says.

  ‘Four boys sharing a house,’ she says. ‘I can only imagine the carnage.’

  He looks at her and smiles the way he does with only one side of his mouth. She is fairly certain she is going to kiss him tonight. She is fairly certain he’s thinking the same thing. He hugs her. She has missed it, the press of a body on her own. She thinks of George. She doesn’t want to think of George.

  ‘Where’s the food?’ she says. She hasn’t eaten since lunch. Parties make her nervous and she can never eat before them.

  ‘We’ve only got chips,’ he says. ‘We’ll probably get some pizza later. Do you want a drink?’ He asks the question in this way that makes it clear he’s saying: I want you to have a drink. So they’re both in that slightly sticky space where things happen. Good things.

  ‘I’m driving,’ she says. ‘But maybe half a can.’

  ‘The esky’s in the kitchen. You can help yourself.’

  She doesn’t want to leave him because she knows that she can’t come straight back to him. That this is his party. That he belongs to everyone tonight. That she’s going to have to do a round of the room first. But her mouth is dry, her lipstick feels scaly around the edges of her lips. ‘All right,’ she says, and edges through to the kitchen.

  There are a lot of people. She doesn’t see anyone she recognises, not from uni, and not from trivia. The esky is on the floor beneath the sink. She tugs out a Somersby and turns around and there’s a girl there. ‘I love your hair,’ the girl says.

  ‘Thank you,’ Lona says.

  The girl is also wearing a turtleneck and jeans. She has dark hair pulled back into a high ponytail. She has a necklace with a fox on it.

  ‘I like your necklace,’ Lona says, because girl law dictates a counter-compliment must be proffered in such circumstances. Genuine admiration is not a relevant factor. Scan opposing body for notable clothing and/or hairstyle. Employ flattery.

  The girl waves a hand in an instantly familiar: oh you! ‘It was my mum’s from like aaages ago,’ she says. The deflection of compliment: equally critical enactment of girl law.

  Lona pulls the tab on her cider and realises this girl has her cornered. She looks exactly like the kind of girl Sampson would have been friends with at school. A bit nerdy, a bit odd. A bit like Lona.

  ‘I don’t know anyone here,’ Lona says.

  The girl says, ‘I’m Melanie. Now you know one person.’ Even though Lona cannot recall anything funny having been said, Melanie laughs so hard she snorts. Her lipstick is cranberry red and magnificent. ‘How do you know Sampson?’ she asks.

  ‘Uni,’ Lona says.

  ‘Ohhhh, of course. Groovy girl like you. Of couuurse you’re from design. Do you know what you’re going to do after?’

  ‘It was Fine Arts actually,’ Lona says. Then, ‘I’m already after.’

  ‘You’ve graduated?’ Melanie asks.

  Lona looks over Melanie’s shoulder but there’s no sign of Sampson. ‘I dropped out and now I work at a supermarket,’ she says. ‘I get up in the morning because someone pays me to get up in the morning. Being alive to see the next season of Stranger Things is just about the only thing that keeps me going. So did you go to school with Sampson?’

  Melanie blinks. ‘I…no, I’m his girlfriend.’ She laughs a little bit, this time without a snort. ‘I’ve never seen Stranger Things,’ she says. ‘But I’ve heard it’s good.’

  Lona stares. Tries to comprehend that the girl she is staring at is not just a girl friend but a girlfriend. The two words shoved together in a formation that means one very specific thing: Sampson is fucking someone else, and the same someone else repeatedly. ‘It’s the greatest TV show since Buffy,’ Lona says. ‘Please excuse me.’

  Drunk

  There is a can of cider in her hand. The can is cold, wet with condensation. Her hand is wet with the wet. She wipes her palm on her jeans whenever she meets anyone, holds her hand out to shake. It’s still clammy and cool when they take it.

  Everyone is just a bit afraid of her, the way people are when there’s a girl speaking loudly to people she doesn’t know and nodding along like she understands their high school in-jokes. She is drunk and seeing in technicolour. She can’t remember why she’s hurting, so everything chafes a bit.

  There is a can of cider in her hand—but it must be another one. It’s cold, straight out of the esky. She does not remember being inside the esky. She talks to Sampson’s brother Reagan who she keeps calling Rogan Josh. Behind her in the lounge, Sampson has his arms around Melanie.

  ‘Rogan Josh,’ she says. ‘I’m meant to be driving home but I think that I probably shouldn’t do that now. You and Sampson have the same ears, did you know that?’

  ‘That’s all good, you can crash,’ Reagan says, then he turns around to someone he actually wants to speak to.

  Sampson’s room

  Lona likes being in people’s rooms when they’re not there. Sampson’s room. Boy room. Chaotic and boy-smelling. George’s room was so neat. Cello in the corner. Bass on a stand. Bookshelves with their perpendicular lines. Sampson’s books are piled up all over each other. Most of them aren’t books, they’re magazines or graphic novels. Graphic novels are books. The Bechdel test. Taste is just another name for internalised misogyny.

  Lona remembers she lent Sampson a book last year. He hasn’t given it back. She didn’t like it but she thought he would like it. That was a bad sign. She thought it was crappily written but that he would think it was good. Taste is just another name for thinking you’re better than everyone else.

  ‘Lona?’

  Sampson is in his room, which makes it instantly and infinitely less interesting than when he was not in his room.

  ‘Give me back my book,’ she says.

  ‘What?’ he says. He steps towards her and his hair is longer and his girlfriend is taller than Lona but only just and they have the same turtleneck and the same intention of getting in his pants.

  ‘The book I lent you,’ she says. ‘Police special task force. Ghouls. Werewolves. Dry sense of humour. I want it back.’

  ‘I haven’t finished it yet.’

  ‘I want it back,’ Lona says, trying to smile. Because it’s a joke, it’s all a joke. Ha ha. She attempts to seductively lean back against his bookshelf, but her shoulder hits with more force than intended. The whole thing shudders. Sampson holds out a hand that almost comes into contact with her arm. It just hovers there.

  ‘You’re such a nerd, Specs,’ she says. They’re close. Lona can feel it, there between them. She’s not imagining it. It’s there.

  ‘Here,’ he says, and he’s holding something in front of her face. ‘Whatever, Lona.’ He leaves her and she turns the thing over in her hands. The book she leant him. There’s still a bookmark in it, about a third of the way through. Shit, he’s a slow reader. She could never really be with a slow reader.

  ‘Sampson,’ she calls dully.

/>   She sits down on the edge of his bed. Her head is sloshing. Eyesight furry around the edges. She lies back and she tells him: I’m here, I’m where you want me. She rolls onto her side, pulls her knees close to her chest. She’s never been this drunk before. Empty stomach. Nervous before parties. Sleep now.

  This isn’t her bed.

  It’s a big bed, big enough for two, three, four. Top to tail like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Top to tail. The music’s loud. ‘Roald Dahl was a terrible person in real life,’ she says. It smells like him. Sampson. George. Someone closes the door because: there’s a girl passed out in there.

  The morning

  The morning is a rank taste in her mouth. No one closed the curtains so the light burns the backs of her eyelids until they are crisp. She opens her eyes and she doesn’t remember and the not remembering is terrifying. She pats herself down, but she’s fully clothed. There is no one else in Sampson’s room or Sampson’s bed. Only her.

  She gets up and she knows she’s going to vomit. It’s been a long time since she last threw up, but her body knows what’s happening. The bathroom is across the hall. She hugs the toilet bowl and it gulps out of her. Just liquid, bile.

  She wipes her mouth with toilet paper and then sits on the toilet, pisses into her spew. Hello, hangover.

  There are voices from the other room. Lona does not want to see Sampson, or anyone. She wants to crawl out the window, but this bathroom doesn’t have a window. She curses Sampson and his windowless bathroom. She curses herself.

  She was stupid and stupidity is dangerous when you’re a girl. The world doesn’t let girls be stupid. If they’re stupid then whatever happens to them is their own fault.

  Her head dips unintentionally, her body calling her down for more sleep. She spots the toilet brush she gave Sampson, now taunting her from beside the bowl. ‘Shut up,’ she tells it. She laughs, despite herself.