Loner Read online

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Lona has dropped out of art school and no one is quite sure why, least of all Lona. It’s just that nothing in her life seems to make sense anymore, including art. She spends her days sneaking into the darkroom at her old school to develop photographs and her nights DJ-ing at the local roller disco.

  Her aimlessness terrifies her, but everyone else appears oblivious to her fears: her parents are bewildered by her sudden lack of ambition, her brother is preoccupied with his new girlfriend, and her best friend Tab seems to be drifting away. Even a budding relationship with a bass-playing, cello-shredding med student isn’t enough to shake her existential angst.

  Lona knows it’s up to her to figure out what she wants to do with her life: the problem is, she has absolutely no idea where to start.

  Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  The darkroom

  The new lawn

  The reason

  Ben’s old room

  The big chunk

  The band

  An unintentional flurry

  Tabitha Brooks

  Encore

  The train ride home

  Specs

  The real reason

  Planet Skate

  Pentax SLR

  The side fence

  The real reason

  Big fat lie

  Roller disco

  Sampson’s 21st

  Black forest cake

  Kings Way

  Sunday night

  Limbo

  Like

  Left field

  The real reason

  Teensy bit of wine

  School holidays

  Proper job

  No caption

  Shopping trolleys

  Limp dead leg

  Clean undies

  Phone screen

  Bombed out

  The double date

  Moving out

  The rites of passage

  Semiotics

  Warming the house

  Empty plastic cup

  Back in a sec

  Not coming back

  Grandpa’s birthday

  Prosciutto-wrapped melon

  Nick

  Burgers

  Full trolley

  Home for dinner

  Cup weekend

  The real reason

  Emoticons

  NGV

  Doing something nice

  Hotel Windsor

  Cold metal bench

  Voicemail

  The Alfred

  Second date

  Different room

  A series of messages

  All the details

  Drive-in

  Christmas at the hospital

  The Jam Factory

  Cinema 12

  Hello Hello

  Second stall from the left

  IKEA

  New thingo

  In the after

  West Footscray

  Recital

  The foyer

  Birthday drinks

  Around 9.30 p.m.

  Running with the bulls

  The thing about trolleys

  The staffroom

  Kmart

  The Astor Theatre

  At the dinner table

  Late one evening

  Talk about it

  Rehab

  Tab calls

  At the movies

  Indisputable maths

  Each other’s arms

  White people

  Do-It-Yourself bread rolls

  Pictures of The Greatest Band Humanly Possible

  Old Kim

  Enter message here

  Tab’s mother

  A pub in Northcote

  Unisex bathroom

  In the back seat

  Community theatre production

  Tab’s postcard

  Sampson messages

  One of the boys

  Dog

  An educative experience

  Exam prep

  In George’s absence

  Old school stuff

  One a.m.

  Sleeping in

  French toast

  Hypothesis

  The park down the road

  The break-up

  Movie night

  Tab gets back

  Selfie

  Tab replies

  The car ride there

  Inside the house

  Drunk

  Sampson’s room

  The morning

  Long shower

  Independence

  Stack

  The manager

  Fired

  Meme

  Death on the Nile

  Frank

  Dinner party

  The back step

  Nick’s lounge room

  The worst advice

  A spattering of banter

  Commodore 64

  Butterbeer

  Every Thursday night

  Smith Street

  Next week

  Youth Saver

  Moving back out

  Hipster cafe

  Power saver mode

  A bath

  Zine launch

  An ok outcome

  George’s face

  The Worker’s Club

  The beer garden

  Art crap

  Negatives

  Haircut

  An ordinary type burial

  Exhibition

  Apologies and excuses

  The main event

  Wet wipes

  Photo frame

  Call centre

  The last one

  Floor lights

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Dedicated to R. J. Young (1926–2018)

  The darkroom

  Lona is in the darkroom. She fishes with tongs for her photographic paper, shimmying it slightly so that the developer runs from the surface in small, translucent beads. The inside of her nose itches, tanging with the smell of chemicals. She slides the photograph into the stopbath and rocks the tray gently back and forth for a handful of seconds, before transferring it to the fixer.

  The red light on the wall bleeds into the edges of the photographs hanging from a wire line. They are pictures of people, mainly. Tab laughing. Ben loading boxes into the back of a moving van. Grandpa out the front of his house, hands in his pockets. Tab posing with her fingers splayed over her eyes. Tab grinning. The back of Tab’s head. Tab with her tongue pressed against her bottom lip. Pictures of Tab, mainly.

  Lona lifts the latest image out of the fixer and sinks it into the basin of water. She lets it sit there while she inspects the others. They are snapshots, nothing special. The whole thing (the 35mm film, the darkroom) would reek of affectation if she ever bragged to anyone about it.

  She glances at the photo in the water basin. It’s of herself: blurry, out of focus. Tab took it, took the camera from Lona and said: your turn. But Tab’s used to smartphones and autofocus, she never stops to adjust the lens or the aperture. So this is how Lona records herself, in distorted, underexposed images.

  She pokes the photograph with a finger. It sinks beneath the surface of the water, then rises to breach it again.

  ‘Anyone in there?’ someone calls from outside.

  Lona tenses. One of the hanging photographs drips.

  ‘Hello?’ the someone says.

  Lona snatches the photographs down from their pegs, crushing them to her chest. She pulls her film from the enlarger. It isn’t until she is pushing her way out of the darkroom that she remembers she’s left herself swimming in the water basin.

  Out in the corridor she finds Tristan, her old printmaking t
eacher. Her eyes take a moment to adjust, sensitive even to the dull afternoon light. She squints at him. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Just finishing up.’

  Tristan frowns, trying to place her. ‘Laura?’ he says at last. Close enough to spear a girl through the heart: not quite remembered. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asks.

  She shrugs, the safe answer.

  ‘It’s Sunday,’ he tells her, an admonishment of some sort. A crinkle digs between his eyebrows. It’s coming back to him. Printmaking 101. Lona with hunched shoulders, drawing black rings around her cuticles. ‘You don’t go here anymore.’

  There’s nothing Lona can say to that. Her hands are full. She’s about to drop her photographs.

  Tristan has dark hair that’s thinning on top. What’s left of it is pulled back into an insignificant tail. He has a wife who is a well-known printmaker. Lona wonders if it cuts him up, being with someone who is better at the thing they both love. If there is a part of him that despises it. Lona couldn’t stand being with someone more talented than her.

  Tristan smiles at her sympathetically. ‘You can’t be here.’ Which she knows, and he knows she knows, but these things must be said.

  ‘Last time, I promise,’ she tells him.

  They walk down the corridor together, the soft, worn soles of their shoes barely making a sound. Tristan escorts her to the lift. Keeping her company. Making sure she goes. Either or.

  The new lawn

  It’s been eight months since Lona dropped out. They’ve finally finished the new lawn.

  It’s green, wide, flat.

  There are ping-pong tables as well. BYO paddles and balls. Other than that, everything’s pretty much the same. She walks across campus and there are a bunch of feelings elbowing each other in her chest.

  If there’s no point in studying art at university, there’s even less point in dropping out after a semester and a half. Unqualified and spineless. Lona reckons she should put that on a t-shirt. It’s not sad if she can stencil it ironically in purple fabric paint.

  As a direct result of it being a Sunday afternoon, campus is dead. The cafe Lona used to go to on Wednesdays for coffee is closed. All the cafes are closed. There are a few students in the library. PhD candidates and international students whose sharehouses don’t have central heating. Lona can see them at the desks pushed up against the big, glass windows. Laptops and backpacks. Jackets shrugged over the backs of chairs.

  It’s April, and cool. Lona finally gets around to jamming her photos into her bag and then she’s got her hands free to hold in front of her face while she blows on her fingers. It’s not necessary, but she enjoys overplaying it: as if this afternoon is something bitter to be suffered through. She’s experiencing the pangs of what could’ve been. What could’ve been is not necessarily what she wants. But everyone knows that the pangs of what could’ve been are irrational.

  The new lawn is soft and afternoon-dewy beneath her tread. She ignores the signs that tell her to keep off the grass and tramps diagonally across it, cutting a line that’s as sharp as she can muster, corner to corner.

  Take that, grass.

  She gets to the train station just in time to miss her train and so she sits. She plugs her earphones in and pulls up an appropriate soundtrack for the moment. Something with drums like ba-dum-ba-da-bum and a bridge that goes low and slow before it gets really good. She’s only got the volume halfway up because she’s afraid of going deaf, so it’s music stew with all the cawing and beeping and whistling that’s going on around her, but what does it matter. The sun’s hitting that sweet spot where it’s molten amber on the tops of buildings and the girl gives herself a chance to feel all right.

  It lasts as long as the song does.

  The reason

  The reason Lona dropped out of art school was because she didn’t like being told what to do with her art—or with anything for that matter. She has hacked off her nose to spite her face so many times there’s nothing left of it. She will continue to cut off all appendages if necessary.

  Ben’s old room

  Grandpa moves into Ben’s half-empty room. It’s been half-empty since last June when Ben took half of his stuff halfway across town to live with his girlfriend in a house half the size.

  Ben’s single bed looks too small for Grandpa, but Lona doesn’t say anything. She makes it up with flannelette sheets and dusts the shelves of the dresser and the cracks on the bookshelf between the books that Ben didn’t deem worthy of accompanying him. Kid books and books Lona gave him that he never liked. He always preferred stories about men wandering around post-apocalyptic wastelands and shooting things to those about wizards brandishing magical stones.

  The top of the wardrobe is packed tight with toy cars and broken nerf guns Ben used to torment Lona with, but the clothes rail is empty aside from a stack of wire hangers pushed to one end and a leather school jacket that looks like something from Grease. Lona can appreciate why he would’ve left that behind.

  She helps Grandpa with his bags. A couple of old suitcases, the kind that buckle over the zip. A couple of boxes full of books that he can’t read anymore because his eyesight’s gone haywire. Lona starts slotting them between Ben’s rejects, just to give her something to do, while Grandpa sits on the edge of the bed looking forlorn.

  He’s got three copies of Death on the Nile.

  ‘You like that one?’ Lona asks him, and he shrugs.

  She doesn’t know what to say when it’s just her and him because usually her parents are wheeling around asking them both personal questions that neither wants to answer in the company of the other. Icky subjects like catheter bags and plans for future study. Their relationship hasn’t existed much outside of birthdays and Christmases up until now. Just kissed cheeks and blank envelopes with a twenty-dollar bill slipped inside.

  Grandpa stares at his suitcases like he’s wondering how his life got flayed back to this. Lona stares at the books she’s shelving because books are interesting and easy to cope with. The fact is: unpacking them is potentially premature. Mum offered Grandpa Ben’s room for the meantime. The meantime insinuates a time outside of the mean. Grandpa knows he’s here on good behaviour. Any sign he’s going to be more work than Mum can handle and he’ll be moved along.

  Lona feels a kinship in this predicament.

  ‘Hey, I’ve got something for you,’ she says, and she darts down the hall for a moment. Their rooms are connected at the back of the house by a small hallway. She and Ben used to have conversations from their beds when they were kids and meant to be asleep. Remember whens, they called it. Remember when you always picked Rainbow Road on Mario Kart because you knew I sucked at it. Remember when you made us watch Cinderella 2 every Friday night. Remember when we broke Dad’s favourite mug playing the floor is lava…

  This was all prior to Ben becoming a moody teenager who didn’t want to play video games with his sister anymore, and the solid few years he refused to acknowledge his association to his oh-so-embarrassing family in public. These days their relationship consists mainly of watching comedies and quoting them over meals in a spitfire had-to-be-there rush that annoys everyone else at the table. Now that he’s moved out, Lona has no one to appreciate her shouting lines from 30 Rock out of context.

  She finds what she’s looking for on her desk and goes back to Ben’s old room. She hands Grandpa the photograph: Grandpa out the front of his house, hands in his pockets. He holds it and doesn’t say anything and Lona knows instantly that she’s done the wrong thing. Of course he doesn’t want to look at the house he’s just had to pack up and leave.

  Lona took the photo one day a few weeks ago when the entire family was at Grandpa’s, pointing at chairs they wanted to inherit and clearing out the moth-bitten worthless stuff. It’s all still sitting there, but it’s only a matter of time until Grandpa sells the house and its contents are shoved in the sheds of the various children and children-of-children.

  Lona says, ‘You want tea, Grandpa?’


  He nods. ‘Please.’

  The big chunk

  Tab messages in a flurry of texts. She much prefers the flurry to the big chunk of text. The flurry is in deep synchronicity with her rapid mindfire. She messages:

  where are we meeting?

  what time?

  are we getting dinner?

  how much do i owe you for tix?

  All four texts are time-stamped 5.39 p.m.

  Lona prefers the big chunk response. She likes to agonise over particular words and ensure that she is making herself clear. It is one of Lona’s great fears that she is not making herself clear. She never wants anything she says or writes or types or does to be misconstrued. Misconstruction leads to miscommunication and embarrassment.

  She messages:

  How about Richmond? 7.30? Yes, dinner sounds good (SMILING FACE) anything’s good with me. $25—you can just buy me food.

  The text is time-stamped 5.54 p.m.

  Lona makes sure that she answers every query in a separate sentence in the order that they were fielded so as to avoid confusion. This is messaging etiquette. If more people followed it, the world would be less fucked.

  Tab messages:

  awesome!!!!

  seeee you thereeeee

  The band

  They’re onto their fifth song of the night. It’s the favourite of everyone here who hasn’t listened to the whole album. Lona is waiting for the second track off their first EP—a completely underrated masterpiece in her opinion. Their new stuff is good, but it’s not as crunchy and commanding as the early stuff. Tab recently explained to her that taste is just another name for internalised misogyny. So that smug feeling she gets now, hearing the crowd sing back the lyrics to a song that is too mainstream and not the band’s best, is really just a manifestation of self-hatred. Good to know.

  Tab’s there too, dancing in the dark. Her hair’s everywhere like always, desert red and bum long and straight where it likes and kinked where it likes. She grins at Lona, pumps her legs, dances like she’s in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Lona sways like there’s a rod in her spine. Twitches from the neck, left and right, brain hitting the sides of her skull. When she sings along she’s got all the words, knows exactly when the licks curl and the beats kick to life. Lona loves this band more than anything. To her they are The Greatest Band Humanly Possible. She has watched everything they’ve ever said or sung or done on YouTube.