She washes her hands and splashes water on her face. She used waterproof lipstick last night. She has to scrub her lips raw to get the last of it off. Her hair is so greasy she wants to cry. Shampoo might be a consumerist construct, but without it she feels hardly human.
There’s a knock on the door. A tentative, ‘Lona?’
She says, ‘Yeah, you can come in.’
Sampson opens the door slowly like he doesn’t quite believe her. Their eyes meet in the mirror. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
He shrugs. ‘It’s ok. I just slept on the couch.’
She nods, wants to ask about Melanie, wants never to ask about Melanie, wants salty scrambled eggs on thick buttered toast. ‘Apologies, I almost had to christen the toilet brush,’ she says.
Sampson grimaces. ‘Reagan already did last night. You were right, Lona. Carnage.’
She turns around to face him. ‘I don’t think I can drive yet.’
He nods. ‘You can stay as long as you want.’
Long shower
When she gets home, Lona has a long, long shower. She washes her hair and then conditions it until it falls through her fingers. She finally agrees with Belinda Carlisle vis-àvis heaven’s locality on earth.
Independence
Grandpa has been shipped to a nursing home called Independence or Autonomy or something similarly preposterous for a facility that operates for the sole purpose of housing the un-independent. Mum rings to let Lona know the address.
‘I think you should see him as soon as you can,’ Mum says, then seems to realise how ominous that sounds. She hastens to add, ‘He’s been missing you.’
Lona gets a train and then walks the rest of the way. She cannot get into the nursing home because there is a locked door and keypad and she doesn’t know the code. She rings Mum again but Mum is apparently otherwise occupied. She presses her face against the glass sliding door and ogles the woman on the front desk until the woman gets up and opens the door from the inside.
Lona explains that she didn’t know the passcode and the woman explains that the passcode is necessary as residents are often doing pesky things like expecting to be allowed to leave the nursing home.
Lona has scrawled a room number on the back of her left hand, but she can no longer tell if it’s 18 or 73. Thankfully no one here is trusted to remember their own name or room, so each door is marked with a piece of cardboard. The piece of cardboard is slotted into a metal clamp and can be easily slid in and out like the patients in the rooms. The door to Grandpa’s room is closed. Lona knocks.
‘No tea,’ he shouts from inside.
‘It’s just me, Grandpa,’ Lona says, opening the door.
He’s by the window in his wheelchair. He’s had his hair cut, but not in the way he likes with the short back and sides. It has just been sheared down all over. He has been looking out the window into a courtyard with three white plastic chairs and a wooden trellis table. He smiles when he sees it’s her.
‘Lona.’
She glances around the room: the unmade bed with sheets so thin she can see the waterproof mat through them, the box of tissues, the jug of water, the bedpan on the floor. She does not know where Grandpa’s things are. She doesn’t remember what Grandpa’s things are.
‘Hi, Grandpa,’ she says.
He shucks his wheels back and forth until he is facing her. He is wearing elastic-waisted shorts and his catheter bag is strapped to his right leg. It is half-full.
‘How’s it going?’ she asks.
‘Good, good,’ he says briskly. ‘How are you?’
She picks at the skin around her thumbnail. She doesn’t even realise she’s doing it. The skin there is peeled back and raw. ‘Yeah, good, good.’ She looks around for somewhere to sit. There is an armchair cradling a stack of plastic bags and tubes. There are metal rails on either side of the bed. She puts her bag on the floor and continues to stand. Her body doesn’t like standing. One side of her always eventually starts to sink. Her left leg bends so that her hip moves out of alignment and then she is lopsided. She is comfortable lopsided because she has been conditioned to be comfortable lopsided.
Lopsided = unobtrusive = non-threatening
Like most girls, Lona has made an art form of making herself seem smaller than she is. It is difficult to fight this urge when it has been hereditarily gifted.
There’s another knock on the door and Grandpa bellows, ‘No tea!’
A carer enters the room with a plastic tray in plastic gloved hands. He puts it down on Grandpa’s table. ‘No tea!’ Grandpa repeats. The carer leaves and there’s a plastic cup on the plastic plate beside a plastic-wrapped biscuit and the cup is full of tea.
They both stare at the tea.
‘I need to get out of here,’ Grandpa says.
Lona fishes out the book she’s reading. It’s early, but she’s desperate. She pushes the bags and tubes back and sits on the edge of the armchair. ‘The narrator is an AI,’ she explains, before she begins.
‘A what?’ Grandpa asks.
‘An artificial intelligence,’ she says.
‘A what?’
It’s a science fiction novel about a mammoth spaceship that has been sent halfway across the universe to colonise a new planet. There are dangerous space molecules and laser guns and problems with the ship. There are always problems with the ship. The narrator is the artificial intelligence embedded in the ship that starts to question the meaning of life. Grandpa starts to question the meaning of the story.
‘Can the robot feel empathy?’ he asks.
Lona blinks. ‘No. But it can conceptualise it. Also, it’s not a robot.’
‘Why would a robot think in human language?’
‘Because it’s programmed to…I guess. I mean, I don’t know…but it’s not a robot robot, like I said…’
‘1984—now that’s a good science fiction novel.’
There’s another knock on the door. A different carer comes in for the tray. ‘Oh, you didn’t want your tea,’ she says.
Lona sees the fury flash behind Grandpa’s eyes, but it’s gone, withered, in a split second. Because the carer is gone and the tray is gone, without waiting for a response. ‘Five bloody times a day,’ Grandpa grumbles. ‘Tepid and weak as anything. I’d murder a man for a decent cup of tea.’
Lona remembers the kitchenette she passed on the way in. She could offer to make Grandpa a cup of tea the way he likes it. Milk, no sugar. But that would mean staying and she doesn’t know if she wants to. She doesn’t know if she’s a properly shit person or just an ordinary person.
‘I think I’m going to take a nap,’ Grandpa says.
He stares at the wall until she goes.
Stack
Lona has her earphones in listening to Dolly Parton. She is working nine to five at Coles today, and has been listening to the applicable song on repeat for approximately an hour. It’s cold and her fingers are numb and blue except for on the tips where they are bright red. She links up a stack of trolleys with a lime green strap and pulls tight.
Her gloves are almost worn through across the palms. Her vest is inside out and no one has told her. Her hair is nearly faded back to the bleach.
She has, against all odds, started to enjoy her work. She likes that she doesn’t have to talk to anyone. She likes that she can feel the muscle in her arms and it’s because she’s actually doing something, not just going to the gym. She likes that she now wears the same t-shirt every day to work and no one cares.
She pulls the trolleys out of the bay and swings them around. The sound of the wheels on the asphalt is thunderous, drowning out Dolly and Lona as she breathlessly sings along. It’s after three and the car park is chockers with mums and kids. Lona can smell the end of the shift.
One of her earphones falls out of her ear and she reaches for it, a one-handed grip on the trolleys as she rounds a corner. She’s missing the last chorus, which is the best chorus. Her cold fingers struggle to plug the earphone back in. The wei
ght of the trolleys tugs on her arm and she clamps both hands on the handle a moment before a kid steps out in front of the stack.
‘Shit, watch out!’ she yells, jerking the trolleys away with all she’s got.
The little boy looks up and stands there, frozen, as the trolleys skid past him. Lona’s hold breaks, and they go barrelling away from her. ‘Fuuuck,’ she says, running after them. A car backs out of a space up ahead and Lona knows what’s going to happen and of course it does. There’s the thunder of the wheels and the squealing grind of the stack making contact as it collides with the rear of the SUV.
She’s got her hands on the bar and she’s pulling the stack back and there’s another scream as it scrapes across the bumper of the next car along. She pulls it tight, gets it to stop, but the damage is done.
The woman in the SUV is out and saying things. The mother with the kid is pointing fingers. Lona is standing in the middle of the car park with her hands locked around the bar and the commotion has shaken up her iPod Nano making it auto-shuffle and now she’s listening to ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’.
The trolley at the front is crusted with red and silver paint.
Fuck.
The manager
The manager, the big manager, the manager of all the other managers at Huntingdale Coles, offers Lona a chocolate croissant from an open carton. ‘$2.99 for a packet of six,’ he says proudly.
There is a picture of the manager on the wall of his office. In the picture he is surrounded by the members of Status Quo and their Down Down Prices Are Down guitars. The manager is smiling in the picture.
The manager is not smiling at Lona.
Her hot pink iPod Nano is on the desk between them, as is her vest.
‘I’ll get my stuff out of my locker,’ she says, through a mouthful of puff pastry.
‘I’m sorry, Kim,’ the manager says.
‘My name’s not Kim,’ she says. ‘It’s Lona.’
Fired
Old Kim is outraged that Lona has been fired. ‘I’ll quit if they don’t reinstate you,’ she vows, but Lona knows that she can’t afford to. She knows that Old Kim will be here for a long time, longer than Lona ever would have been.
Old Kim gives her a hug and it is fierce and Lona is secretly devastated. Tony is openly devastated. He is now returning to trolleys. He does not know how this is going to impact on his relationship with Yasmin from the express checkout. He is too angry to say goodbye to Lona. Kel slips her a twiggy stick. Everyone else has already forgotten who she is.
Lona peels off her gloves and chucks them into the bin on her way out. She catches the train to Carnegie. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do now.
She watches TV.
Meme
Lona doesn’t tell anyone that she lost her job at the supermarket. Sim and Rach must notice she’s around the house more often, but they don’t say anything. No one ever says anything to Lona. It’s like they’re scared to. There’s this assumption that she knows what she’s doing and that no one should question it. She really wants someone to question it. So she can yell at them and tell them they’re wrong.
She finds herself thumbing her phone absentmindedly, and she knows it’s Tab she wants to speak to. More than that, it’s Tab she wants to hear from. Not just the occasional message or tagged meme about The Lizzie Maguire Movie. She doesn’t want their friendship to dissolve into a meme-tagging friendship. But she doesn’t know what to say. Doesn’t know how to say: I’m aching and I don’t know why. Doesn’t know how to deal with an honest answer to the question: how are you feeling. So she doesn’t say, doesn’t ask. So she sees a funny meme about Struggling At Uni on Facebook and she types the @ symbol and then Tabitha Miranda Brooks, the whole name because Tab’s never been afraid of giving all of herself. She doesn’t ask: are you struggling at uni?
Tab usually replies with a comment:
lols
ahahaha
but like 100% accurate
Lona misses her hyena laugh.
Death on the Nile
Lona borrows one of Grandpa’s copies of Death on the Nile. She’s at home for dinner and she sneaks into Grandpa’s room. Ben’s room. Whoever’s room it is. She stands staring at the bookshelf and then she takes one. She takes it back to her place and puts it on the coffee table in front of the TV and thinks about reading it.
Mostly she watches TV. When she gets sick of watching TV she just sits. She picks up Death on the Nile, but it’s nothing to her. It’s one of those days, weeks, months.
There’s a tube of black paint stuffed between the couch cushions. Lona finds the tube in her hand and she uncaps it, presses the mouth to the centre of the pages she’s struggling to read and squeezes, leaves a big gloop that seeps into the spine. She stares for a moment, indifferent to this thing she has done to this object that isn’t hers.
The paint is black black against the yellowed pages. She presses the book shut and holds it between her hands like a prayer. She doesn’t know what she is doing. She is doing and the doing is exciting.
She opens the book to the same pages, has to peel them apart from one another. The paint has spread and bloomed across pages six and seven like a Rorschach test. She sees a skull in it, a horse, a wildflower. It looks sticky and wet like an oil slick, like automotive grease. She presses a thumb into it and smears a line so it’s no longer symmetrical. She blows on the paint, wills it to dry, so she can turn the page over and start on a new one.
Frank
She is making. It’s nothing yet, or nothing complete yet. Her mood is titanium white and her paint is black. It’s a series of experiments more than anything. It’s a what if. It’s a can I. She paints the title page with a large flat dry brush so that it’s like a hairy spirit surrounding the text. She paints the edges of the paper and finds this seals the book shut. She has to peel each page away from the others with a satisfying tear.
She blanks out words with a swipe of a deliciously stinky permanent marker. She circles others, random words:
the
smile
water
her
that mean nothing and are suddenly significant. She pulls a scalpel out of her pencil case and carves out phrases. She paints the cover. She gives it a new title: postmodern d’art. Inside she writes over and over again the same thing: are we post-postmodern or are we just insane? Art school theory chirps in the back of her head: deconstructionism, baroque, modernity, Warhol, Duchamp, ceci n’est pas une pipe. She cuts up squares of Fred Basset cartoons and lines of Leunig poems and sticks them in with masking tape. She tears out pages and sticks them back upside down. She is making.
This thing, at times it is so horrendous to her that she abhors it. She calls it Frank, short for Frankenstein. ‘Alas! Life is obstinate, and clings closest where it is most hated,’ she recites for no one, making her wonder why her sixteen-year-old self felt the need to commit that to memory. She tosses Frank across the room and then goes and picks it up again.
She is making.
Dinner party
Nick hosts a dinner at his place for Tab’s birthday. Lona receives her invitation via Nick. This is a hundred forms of hurtful. But when she gets there, dressed in a multipanelled leather jacket she refers to as her Technicolour Dreamcoat, she realises that this is not Tab’s party. Or at least: it is not a Tab party.
Fleetwood Mac is on the stereo, but Lona knows Tab likes Taylor Swift and the Pussycat Dolls at parties. The wine is red, to go with the ragu. Lona digs out the cider she was hustling in inside her handbag.
Tab appears, dressed in the exact same skirt and shirt combination she wore last birthday. She squeezes Lona’s hand, which she has never done before. It’s like it is a wake.
There’s just a handful of them, and although this is for Tab, Lona’s never met half the guests before. Lona watches the door, wondering if George will arrive, not wanting to ask if he’s coming for fear of it seeming to mean something.
Lona watches Tab acro
ss the table and realises she doesn’t have anything to say to anyone here except for her friend. Tab pontificates, gestures, laughs, knocks over a glass of wine in her enthusiasm to pass the butter.
Lona reaches into her pocket and squeezes the tiny parcel in there. Tab’s present: a set of earrings shaped like hairy legs. A little card attached with red ribbon, the card little so she didn’t have to worry about coming up with something profound to say. Just: happy birthday bud. The person next to Lona is talking to her.
Tab looks over and smiles.
The back step
They sit out on the back step together. Tab says, ‘I’m flunking out of uni. They’re not going to let me continue Arts. Mum’s spazzing out.’
Lona says, ‘Oh shit, I’m sorry.’ She is relieved she no longer has to feel bad about not bringing it up.
Tab pulls her long hair back and ties it with the red ribbon. The hairy legs are dangling from her earlobes, flashing pink painted toenails. ‘I had to go to a review with the head of the faculty.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Lona asks.
Tab shrugs. ‘I’m thinking of being a train driver.’
Lona stares at her. ‘What?’
‘Well, why not?’
‘Well, why?’
‘Why anything?’
They can’t remember what the original question was or anything they’re talking about. Lona gets this scary feeling that she hardly knows her best friend anymore and she wonders if she’s falling out with Tab without realising it. But that can’t be it. If anything, it feels like they’re hardly moving.
‘I got fired,’ Lona says.
‘Shit. What happened?’ Tab asks.
Lona shrugs tiredly. ‘I don’t know. I used to be good at things.’
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