Loner

by Georgina Young

  They clink water glasses and empty coffee cups. Ben passes his phone around the table saying, ‘Look how much Edith has grown!’

  Mum and Dad are very proud of their son. They nod at each other when they think no one else is looking, thinking: job well done. Ben helps himself to Lona’s chips and grimaces. ‘Ugh, god, that’s disgusting.’ Lona watches him go back to eating his smashed avocado on vegemite toast and says nothing.

  ‘Sorry to hear about Coles, Lona,’ Harriet says.

  Lona says, ‘Thanks Hat.’

  Power saver mode

  Mum and Lona visit Grandpa at the nursing home. Grandpa is in a bad mood. He doesn’t want to talk about anything other than the things that the nurses are doing wrong. He is convinced there is some conspiracy to do with his television screen. ‘They keep switching it off when I’m watching it,’ he says.

  Lona spends most of the visit going through the television settings. This way she can do something and not feel so useless. This way she can not feel so bad about not wanting to talk to him. She works out that the power saver mode is active. She switches it off. ‘It should be ok now,’ she tells him.

  Grandpa is not out of bed. He hasn’t been out of bed in two days. The physio is too much. ‘When was the last time you had a shower, Dad?’ Mum asks.

  ‘Did I tell you about that nurse, the Indian one, trying to give me the wrong pills?’

  Mum smiles tightly. ‘Yes, Dad, last weekend.’

  He purses his lips and doesn’t say anything more. Mum asks Lona to get Grandpa’s electric shaver charger out of the drawer. Lona notices that the polaroids, one of her, one of Mum, have been knocked down behind the chest. She picks them up and puts them flat on the bench top. She hands Mum the charger and Mum plugs the shaver in. ‘Do you need us to do anything else?’ Mum asks, and Lona can hear the desperation in it. The desperation for the answer to be no.

  Grandpa says, ‘It’s fine, fine.’

  Lona thumbs the polaroid of herself with her blue blue hair. It was taken over a year ago now. In the other, Mum is smiling, hair tied back, the strap of an apron around her neck. Both photographs are slightly bent. Lona’s about to tuck them in her pocket for safekeeping but Grandpa looks across at what she’s doing. ‘My girls,’ he says gruffly, protectively.

  She puts them back.

  A bath

  Lona stands at the door to Ben’s old bedroom. It is void of Ben. Void of Grandpa. The single bed, a twin of Lona’s own, is made up. Ben’s bed has never moved from this spot, never shifted beyond an inch or two, and even then it would leave marks in the carpet that showed how long it had been in the one place.

  The books on the shelf are sagging sideways without bookends. Ben’s Alex Rider and Grandpa’s P.D. James. Lona pulls an old book out. The title has rubbed off the spine. She opens it to the title page: The Underwater-Man. The paper is thick and creamy. She presses her nose into it and breathes deeply.

  In the next room she runs a bath. She has to rinse it out first because no one’s used it for yonks and it has collected an unappealing drift of fingernail clippings and stray pubic hairs. There’s no bath bubbles in the cupboard, but she finds a stinky Lush bomb she remembers getting for something like her seventh birthday. She chucks it in and it hits the bottom of the tub with a clunk and roils and fizzes.

  She gets out of her clothes before the water’s ready so she sits on the cool edge of the bath and her nipples go hard and wrinkly and the hair stands up on her legs and she’s fatter than she was two years ago and has hair in places no one ever told her she was going to get hair, but she’s tired of fighting the way her body wants to be.

  She gets into the bath and tucks her hair up behind her head and starts on Grandpa’s book. It’s boring. She drops it into the water and it sinks. She pulls it out, dripping, and stares at it. Dunks it under again, for good measure. Lets it sit in the bottom of the tub with the bomb grit and the Lona grit while the water gets cool and her skin gets pruney.

  She gets out and pulls the plug. The water runs out with the suck until it’s just the book sitting there in the sandy basin. She should hang it on the clotheshorse or fritz it with the hair dryer until the pages bloat and buckle. Stop it from going mouldy.

  She should.

  She goes into the kitchen and gets a takeaway container from last night’s Thai. Puts the sopping book inside and seals it shut. Because: what’s the worst that can happen. Because: what are you afraid of.

  Zine launch

  Lona photographs a poetry zine launch at Pink Triangle, an installation event space in Fitzroy. There’s not a big turnout. There are a couple of readings and a man in the corner playing house music through his laptop speakers. Lona finds herself talking to the owner of the space.

  ‘How much would it cost to rent this place for the night?’ she asks.

  Rudi is a short woman with a platinum blonde crew cut. She flicks her eyes up and down Lona. ‘How about you shoot my daughter’s bat mitzvah and we’ll call it square?’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t actually thinking…’ Lona squeezes the shutter release. The camera’s off and it doesn’t do anything. Just ping ping pings. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Sounds fair.’

  An ok outcome

  She messages a few people and a few people say no. Sim and Rowena, Lona’s old softball bench buddy, say yes.

  ‘If it’s lame and no one shows up, then we can just get drunk,’ she tells them. They all agree that this is an ok outcome.

  Sim is going to show her paintings of lines and triangles. Rowena is going to exhibit a bioform feminist sculpture she’s been working on. ‘It’ll literally make you sick,’ she assures Lona.

  Lona continues to raid Grandpa’s books, building up a Frankensteined collection. It feels less like destroying than recycling. She decides there’s no point in having books in the end, not if they can’t be read. Mum questions whether this might similarly apply to Lona’s own books. Lona chooses to cite artistic prerogative.

  At night she can’t sleep because her mind is buzzing. She has become used to the anxiety that burrows into her chest at night, and it takes her a while to realise: she’s not scared, she’s excited.

  George’s face

  George’s face shows up on Lona’s Facebook feed. It’s a surprise really. Usually they’re the same. Trawlers, not posters. Thumbing through other people’s photos, videos, in-jokes. Feeling a little bit a part of it without being involved.

  But here he is, a grainy picture taken in the band room at the Worker’s Club. His hair is scuffed up a bit at the front. His mouth is curled halfway through saying something like: put that thing down. It’s posted by Hello Hello, the band’s page. The caption is:

  get down here before the g-man is too fried to play (WINKING FACE) doors open 8. we’re on from 10 (OGRE) (GOBLIN) (TRUMPET) (GUITAR)

  Lona closes her Facebook tab. She feels uncomfortable, irritated, frustrated. It occurs to her: she wants to go.

  The Worker’s Club

  She can hear ‘About a Girl’ through the walls. It’s thrumming with strings and a rat-a-tat kind of percussion that takes a while to get used to. Lona hands over ten dollars to get to the person she wants to see.

  They’re a jumble on stage. More people than instruments almost. George is there, left side of the stage, fingers going plug plug plug on the frets. He smiles at the rhythm guitarist. Lona can’t remember his name. Josh or John. She’s invisible along the wall, back pressed against the naked wooden beams.

  The next song is an original. Lona remembers some of the words:

  this night this night your eyes your eyes

  George gets right up against his microphone to sing the harmony. It’s lyrically challenged. It goes round and round in circles talking about a girl like she’s everything anyone could ever want. Lona is pissed off by it.

  She scooches to the bar. Orders a vodka, lemon, lime and bitters. Elbows pressed in on both sides by other jean-clad sleeves. Everyone’s wearing at least two items of d
enim. She feels like she’s in a cult.

  ‘Lona?’

  Lona looks back and blinks at the face attached to the neck attached to the arm attached to the hand that’s on her shoulder. ‘Nick,’ she says. ‘Hi.’ She glances around automatically.

  He says, ‘She’s not here.’

  Lona doesn’t ask, can’t think of anything more uncomfortable than asking. Tab could simply be at her place, too tired to come out. If the breaking up hasn’t happened, if he doesn’t know, Lona doesn’t want to be the one to pull that decidedly un-magic rabbit out of a hat.

  ‘Does he know you’re here?’ Nick asks, getting way too close to her in the process. She can feel his saliva in her ear and the tickle of his beard.

  She shakes her head.

  The beer garden

  Nick seems to be by himself, or at least: he’s making himself by himself. He and Lona sit in the beer garden. She says, ‘I’m still on the fence about Murakami. And show me one woman who likes The Trial.’

  ‘I could show you twenty.’ He squints at her. ‘You always think you’re right.’

  The band spills out after they’ve packed up the set. They’re loud and laugh a lot. Gigs transport them back to the people they were in year eight music class, playing together for the very first time.

  She looks up and George is there, receiving a clap on the back from someone she doesn’t recognise. They offer him a cigarette and he declines. He’s got his fist around a half-consumed pint of something dark and fermented. He glances up and sees her and she watches the way what he was saying falls right off his lips, pulling the corners of his mouth down in the process.

  She looks back at Nick. ‘When do things get less weird?’

  He shrugs. ‘Sometimes they don’t.’

  George takes an absolute age to get to them, even though he must know it’s inevitable, even though he keeps looking over when he thinks she’s not looking. When he finally arrives he stands at Nick’s shoulder, bumps him with his now-empty glass.

  ‘What’s up?’

  Nick shrugs.

  ‘Hello,’ Lona says, too softly.

  ‘Hello,’ George says, too loudly. He looks away. ‘Your hair.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. It’s dark with semi-permanent dye. The girl at Hairhouse Warehouse assured her it’s going to fade back to something like her natural colour soon enough. Back to the wistful, wasted blonde she’s never done anything with, that she’s never used to: have more fun.

  George has never seen her natural hair. She wants him to see it. For this not to be the last time. She wants to know him for more than one hairstyle.

  He sits. ‘What’s been happening?’

  ‘I’m doing an art show next week.’

  ‘Cool.’ He doesn’t ask about it, which makes her slightly disappointed and slightly annoyed, both emotions she realises she is not entitled to anymore considering his and her no longer being together and his consequent right to find anything and everything she says or does deeply uninteresting. He says, ‘Have you been watching Game of Thrones?’

  Which is ok. Which is better than nothing. She rolls her eyes dramatically. ‘Don’t even talk to me about it.’

  ‘I know right.’

  Nick is on his phone and Lona tries to care about him, but finds she can’t and if she’s a shit person, well, she’s a shit person. She looks at George across the table and thinks: that’s my friend. She feels the warm and the: I should be so lucky. She feels the love love love. It opens up inside of her and the beer garden is full of it, full of people, and sometimes, occasionally, she likes people.

  ‘So how are you doing?’ he asks.

  She nods, smiles. ‘Yeah, all right.’

  Art crap

  Lona is fossicking through her art crap. Her art crap is the collection of brushes, beads, pencils, stamps, stickers, blades, sketchbooks, needles, Copic markers, inks, paints, paper scraps, embossing plates, scissors, calligraphy pens etc. etc. that fill three out of the five drawers in her dresser.

  She has started working on her fourth book. It’s a tiny hardback edition of Mansfield Park from the 1930s. It’s probably worth something. Lona is about to make it entirely worthless with the assistance of whatever sequins and coloured feathers she can unjam from the corners of her top drawer.

  The top drawer won’t open properly. It’s jamming on something in the next drawer down. She opens the second drawer and reaches in, holds it flat so she can pull the obstruction out. It’s her Van Gogh chain-smoking skeleton tote bag, lumpy and full of something.

  Full of undeveloped film.

  She shakes the canisters out onto the floor and they tumble against one another. It’s been ages since she took a photo she wasn’t paid to take. She opens the bottom drawer. She’s got a half-empty bottle of fixer. ‘Hm,’ she hms.

  Negatives

  Lona turns the second bathroom into a darkroom. She tapes cardboard over the window and nicks a draft snake from Mum and Dad’s room. She pours the developer into the first canister and seals the lid. Gives it a good shake.

  She’s never done prints like this before, but she’s consulted Lord Google. God bless the interweb. She tips the developer into an ice-cream container and fills the canister with fixer. Lets it sit. Watches her watch.

  She rinses the negatives and then goes out into the other room so that she can have a look. It’s a roll from June last year. A couple of shots of Grandpa and Mum. Then a whole bunch she took at Pujita’s farewell. She squints at the cell in which Nick appears for the first time. The next one with the three of them.

  She spends the afternoon developing film. Some of the rolls are from two years ago. There’s another one in which George pops up in every second frame.

  Five rolls in she comes across a series of shots she doesn’t remember taking. Pictures of a beach she doesn’t recognise and a backyard she realises is Grandpa’s. It doesn’t look right though, the trees are different. There’s one of Lona in a tree. Lona squints at it. She doesn’t remember climbing a tree—in fact, she’s certain she hasn’t climbed a tree since she was in primary school.

  There are more of Lona. Her brow creases. Who took them? She brings the film so close to her face she’s seeing more of the kitchen through it than the actual photographs. It’s not her, she realises. None of them are her. The woman looks like her, but she’s older. She’s got a different mouth.

  She remembers: the film canister that was in the Pentax when Grandpa gave it to her. The roll of film that’d been in there for at least two decades.

  These are photographs that Grandpa took.

  ‘Grandma,’ Lona says aloud, staring at the woman she never met. She’s only ever seen her in her wedding photo, the one Mum keeps on the mantle in the lounge. The wedding photo was taken at a strange angle, the Grandma in the wedding photo doesn’t look like the woman in these pictures, doesn’t look like Lona.

  There she is, sitting in a tree. Hand shading her eyes. Smiling at Grandpa.

  Lona goes up the other end of the house and knocks on the door of the study. ‘Mum,’ she says. ‘Come look at this.’

  Haircut

  Tab shows up unannounced. Mum and Dad are in Castlemaine for their wedding anniversary and Lona has been working on her books. The Underwater-Man is looking pretty festy. She’s cut a cavity in the pages of Children of Men and is attempting to construct embryonic fluid out of glitter glue and Clag.

  Lona answers the door with scissors in her hand and Tab looks at them and says, ‘Perfect, I want a haircut.’

  Lona thinks that Tab is joking, but Tab is not joking. She explains to Lona that her hair has never given her joy and Marie Kondo says that if something doesn’t bring you joy then you need to thank it and get it out of your life. Lona has no idea what Tab is talking about. She points out that she has never cut hair before. In fact, the scissors she is carrying are pattern-edged blades.

  Tab says, ‘Even perfecter.’

  She drags a kitchen chair onto the back lawn. ‘Lob i
t off like a ponytail,’ she instructs. ‘Someone can make a wig out of it.’

  Tab sits down and pulls her hair over one shoulder and grabs a fist full of it in her hand and brings it close. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers, and then kisses it lightly. There’s a moment when she just holds it, like she’s frozen, then she blinks and tosses it back so it hangs down the back of the chair. Desert red and bum long. Not for long.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Lona asks. She’s always wanted to cut someone’s hair. She’s not going to ask twice.

  ‘One hundred per cent,’ Tab says.

  Lona gathers Tab’s hair into a bunch. It’s so much thicker than Lona’s hair. There’s so much of it and it’s so much of Tab. Lona opens the scissors and makes a cut. It doesn’t do anything. The pattern-edged blades are not sharp and certain enough.

  Lona squeezes the scissors open and shut. She saws and hacks.

  Tab is shaking. Lona is so preoccupied with the task at hand that it takes her longer than it should to realise her friend is crying. Or something in the region of crying. Laugh-crying. Sputters of it.

  ‘Are you ok?’ Lona asks, hesitating.

  ‘No—shit,’ Tab says, leaping up. ‘This is crazy, what am I doing?’

  Her hands go instantly to her hair and her whole body relaxes when she finds big fistfuls of it. She clutches at it like the intrinsic part of her conception of self that she never wanted it to be. She turns to Lona and her eyes are blurry around the edges. ‘Lucky you didn’t…’

  She stops and stares at the small bouquet of hair Lona is holding in her left fist.

  ‘Shit,’ she says.

  Lona is attempting to freeze her face in something like solemnity, but she can’t help herself. The laughter is like projectile vomit, everywhere all at once, and she’s bent over hacking it up.