Loner Read online

  Even the shaky-cam concert footage.

  Even their guest-programmer slot on Rage.

  They are arguably the sole reason Lona gets up in the morning. This is their only Melbourne show. ‘This is so great,’ she says to Tab between songs.

  Tab agrees. ‘This is so great.’

  There’s a difference between what they’re saying, even though the words are the same. When Lona says ‘This is so great’ she’s trying to articulate that she cannot even comprehend this evening and what it means to feel big big love for a concept instead of a thing that has the capacity to love you back. When Tab says ‘This is so great’ she’s saying ‘This is so great’.

  An unintentional flurry

  Despite preferring the big chunk, Lona occasionally opts for the flurry of messages when excited and/or drunk. As the set progresses, she looses several increasingly incoherent messages to Sampson.

  Lets do coffee

  Coffee tomrorrow

  r you free tomorrow?

  *tommorrow

  coffe tommorrow ok

  Tab doesn’t ask who Lona is messaging because she probably assumes it’s her mother. Lona rarely messages anyone other than her mother. If it’s not her mother then she’s messaging with Tab, and Tab is currently being told to put her hands in the air and so her fingers are nowhere near her phone.

  Tabitha Brooks

  Tabitha Brooks is a wild woman. In solidarity with her best friend she has adopted the second track off the band’s first EP as her favourite, to Lona’s begrudging approval and mild irritation. When the song plays towards the end of the set Tab turns to Lona and grins. Tab is of the belief that friends must share what is most important to them. And moreover, that there is no must about it—friends simply do. Lona does not like to share, particularly with friends. Sharing, when sanctioned, is on the terms of the giver. The terms being:

  a) That Tab may be allowed to like this band, but she cannot like it as much or as fervently as Lona does.

  b) That her opinion cannot be sought above Lona’s on the topic when it arises at parties. (It never does.)

  Tab doesn’t fully understand the extent of Lona’s mental arithmetic, the disordered thinking that occupies her mind. Even as she listens to her favourite song Lona is thinking about how she will describe this night later to anyone who asks, how she will insert it into conversation if no one asks, the likelihood of Sampson being here this evening (very low, considering he hadn’t heard of this band when Lona mentioned it back in February, he doesn’t go out much, he lives five train stations away, stranger things have happened), whether this is even her favourite song anymore, and the fact that it is so hot in here that Tab’s hair is glued to her forehead and there are dark, invisible circles under each of Lona’s arms.

  Tab is having fun.

  Encore

  The band plays an encore, which is simultaneously infuriating and gratifying. It’s not like anyone could see it coming when they walked off stage without playing either of their biggest hits.

  Lona gulps down what’s left of her now-warm cider and stamps her feet with the rest of the room. One more song. One more song. Her phone vibrates in her pocket and she tugs it out. Stares at the screen.

  A message from Sampson.

  Shit.

  ‘What’s up?’ Tab hollers into her ear.

  Lona reads the reply. Apparently she’s doing coffee tomorrow.

  ‘Sampson,’ she shouts.

  Tab nods. ‘Nerd from uni?’

  ‘Nerd from uni,’ Lona confirms.

  The nerd from uni is making her insides squelchy. She jams her phone back in her pocket so she doesn’t have to think about him and those three simple words: sure sounds good. It’s too easy to make it difficult. Or alternatively: she’s too difficult to make it easy.

  The drummer comes back onto the stage and bangs his sticks together. A one, a two, a one two three four. And here we go again.

  The train ride home

  There are few things in the world that Lona likes more than the train ride home. It means that the night is over, and however good the night is, Lona is always glad when it’s over.

  She and Tab sit side by side, Tab’s head on Lona’s shoulder and Lona’s eyes out the window. Tab hums and Lona thinks.

  Specs

  Lona makes sure she’s got her nose in a book when Sampson pulls out the chair opposite. He says hello and she looks up like a woken dreamer—Oh, hi, Sampson—as if she’d forgotten he was even going to be there.

  He looks phenomenally undateable. Hair short and blunt cut along his forehead, small wire-framed glasses with one broken arm, David Tennant peering out through the door of the Tardis on his t-shirt.

  Lona’s loins are instantly ablaze.

  ‘What’s up, Specs?’ she asks, diving for cover inside the familiar banter.

  The name works its usual magic, the blush creeping up the sides of Sampson’s cheeks. He grimaces. ‘Very little of significance.’

  Lona has her thumb in her book, like she’s still considering it a viable alternative to the unfolding conversation. She wants him to ask her what she’s reading. She wants to know why no one ever asks her what she’s reading. It’s just about the only thing she wants to talk about and she never gets the chance.

  ‘How are you?’ he asks.

  This is the most deeply uninteresting question there is. This is the question that no one ever asks genuinely and that no one ever answers honestly. This is a question for people who barely know each other. Lona sighs disappointedly. ‘Yeah, all right.’

  They get coffee. Lona only ever drinks coffee when other people are. Like a social smoker. She does it because of the itchiness that starts up in her hands when she runs out of things to say to people. She says: let’s get coffee. She means: let’s do something that enables us to sit opposite each other for a period of time without questioning the point of it all.

  Sampson alternately makes her feel giddy and bored. She spends half her time forgetting why she likes him and the other half remembering again. They are woefully incompatible. He looks like he should be smarter than her, but he’s not. He studies communication design, but he’s doing it for the coding and processing units. They met in Illustration for Narrative, an elective for both of them, during Lona’s second, uncompleted semester. Lona had wanted a class outside the self-conscious posturing of the art faculty, and while she adored the unit, he thought it was a waste of time. For the first assessment they had to design a poster for a film or TV series. They both picked Buffy, and always sat together after that. Their friendship is seventy per cent talking about television shows.

  Sampson gets chocolate foam on the corner of his mouth. It gets beyond the stage that Lona can point it out without it being obvious that she hasn’t pointed it out, but has been thinking about pointing it out, for several minutes.

  ‘I miss the caramel slice from that cafe under Building H,’ she says wistfully.

  ‘They don’t sell it anymore,’ he tells her.

  She fiddles with her cup and saucer. She has nothing else to say to him. They have run their course. Lona is relieved when he goes.

  It takes five minutes for her to start wanting him back.

  The real reason

  The real reason Lona dropped out of art school was because she liked being told what to do. Being told what to do gave her something to rally against like it actually mattered, and she really just wanted something to matter. But then she realised that she liked being told what to do and it scared her.

  Planet Skate

  Lona works at Planet Skate on Friday nights and weekends. There are four things she could be doing at any point during any shift. These are:

  1) Handling children’s shoes and exchanging them for skates that have soaked up the sweat of a hundred feet.

  2) Melting cheese onto corn chips in the canteen microwave.

  3) Doing loops of the rink to make sure no one’s fallen on their bum.

  4) Mopping up chu
nks of corn-chip spew from the bathroom floor.

  Lona got the job at Planet Skate because her boss is her mum’s best friend. This sort of nepotism is beneficial less for Lona than it is for her mother, who wanted her out of the house. Lona’s mother works from home. She got tired of hearing the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme coming from the television five times a day.

  Pat is Lona’s boss. She is also Lona’s godmother. Lona spent a lot of her childhood at Planet Skate, and now it looks like she will be spending a lot of her adulthood there too.

  Pat’s daughter Jodie also works at Planet Skate. Lona and Jodie have a long, sordid history of Jennifer Lopez dance routines, SingStar, Hama beads and Colin Firth Pride and Prejudice marathons. They don’t hang out so much anymore because they both realised there were other people out there who have more in common with them than: mothers who are friends. Jodie became someone who was interested in boys. Lona became someone who was interested in pretending not to be interested in boys.

  Behind the counter at Planet Skate, Jodie and Lona box step to the Vengaboys. Pat harrumphs and tells them to find something useful to do. Due to the fact that Planet Skate is an almost entirely useless facility, this seems impossible to Lona.

  The minute Pat turns her back, Jodie says, ‘I’ve got a date tonight.’

  Lona says, ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Any chance you could lock up?’

  There’s no point in Lona pretending to have a life. Jodie has known her long enough to know Lona reserves her Saturday nights for no reservations. ‘Whatever,’ she shrugs, secretly pleased.

  Lona likes locking up because it means she gets the place to herself. She likes the big resounding sound of the silence when the music’s been switched off and it’s just the smooth roll of her wheels on the worn linoleum. She does laps of the rink, spiralling into the centre, getting closer and closer until she’s just spinning on the spot.

  At home she knows there’ll be Thai takeaway and a debate over which movie to watch on Netflix. Mum will make gin and tonics. Dad will put on the soundtrack to the original West End production of The Phantom of the Opera. Grandpa will fall asleep in his chair.

  Lona goes skate skate skate until her legs are numb.

  Pentax SLR

  Lona likes being in other people’s rooms when the people aren’t there. It’s much better than when they are. Grandpa has the photograph she gave him propped up on Ben’s old dresser. Pride of place.

  Grandpa finds her there, looking. His walker enters the room before he does, dragging his bad leg behind him. ‘I found something you might like,’ he tells her. He motions to the cardboard box on the floor. Lona crouches to open it. There’s a camera on top of the books. An analogue Pentax SLR.

  ‘Cool,’ Lona says.

  ‘You can have it,’ Grandpa says.

  She looks at him, sitting on the seat of his walker, his hands in his pockets, just like they are in the photograph on the dresser: as if hiding those small parts of himself is enough to keep him secure.

  ‘There’s a roll of film in here,’ she remarks, turning the camera over in her hands. It’s in better nick than the old Nikon she got from the Salvos. The film counter is up to nineteen—almost a full roll of pictures, forgotten, probably half-deteriorated in the camera all these years.

  ‘Nothing important,’ Grandpa shrugs. ‘You can tug it out if you want.’

  As if the very prospect of tugging film out of a camera doesn’t go against every fibre of Lona’s being. ‘How long have you had this?’ she asks.

  Grandpa takes the camera from her and looks at it like an artefact from another life. ‘Got it in eighty-something.’

  Lona recalls her mother talking about Grandpa and his cameras: always snapping away, same as you, always fascinated by the latest gadget. He hands Lona the camera back, face blank like he’s completely lost interest. He liked it when it was new, when it was symbolic of the future and his ability to shape it. Lona likes the camera for the very opposite reason. She appreciates the staidness of analogue tech, the slowness of it. The necessary deliberateness, because film is finite. She likes using something old for something new, like the act of creation is merely reverb.

  ‘Thanks, Grandpa,’ she says, and she feels social conditioning kick in, demanding a kiss on the cheek. But it’s just her and Grandpa so she grins instead.

  Grandpa almost smiles.

  The side fence

  In her room she draws the curtains and turns off the light. She rewinds the film and presses the spring release for the back of the camera. She slips the used film into an empty cartridge and puts it in the top drawer of her desk. She’s got a couple of spare rolls of black-and-white film, so she loads a new roll and pulls the rapid wind lever.

  She used to have a lot of trouble loading cameras. She would take her film into the Michaels shop in the city and spend days wondering how the photos would turn out. Inevitably they’d call her and tell her the film was compromised. On one occasion the film had jammed and she’d taken all 24 photographs on one cell. All the images were superimposed over each other. She had to strain her eyes to see the layered, ghost-like imprints of her mother, Tab, the foreshore at Beaumaris. All of her world a pancake.

  She was annoyed with herself back then. She was meant to know instinctively how to do these things. Art wasn’t meant to be a thing you had to learn.

  Over time she’s forgotten those early failures. Now it’s easy, instinctive. She opens her curtains and points Grandpa’s camera out at the side fence. Increases the aperture with a click click click. She pulls the focus close so that everything melts, then pushes it out again.

  There’s a big satisfying snap as she presses the shutter release. The shutter closes over the moment as it captures it. This is the first photo Lona always takes, on every camera she’s ever owned, to make sure it’s working: the side fence. She never trusts the first shot to anything substantial.

  She squeezes the lens cap back on.

  The real reason

  The real reason Lona dropped out of art school was because she felt dead inside every time someone held up a piece of paper with a couple of dots on it and called it art. It was because she looked at what she was making and she realised it was a piece of paper with a couple of dots on it.

  Big fat lie

  On Thursday night, Lona photographs the year eleven formal at her old high school. She’s been doing it since she was a student herself. Back then she did it so she didn’t have to feel sucky about not having a date. These days she gets a cool two hundred bucks for the effort.

  She roves the function hall, tapping shoulders and asking if people want their picture taken.

  ‘You’ll get it back,’ she jokes, over and over. No one gets it.

  The girls turn instinctively to display their good sides, the boys try to look tough or suave. Both of which are difficult with rampant, take-no-prisoners acne.

  She has a small crush on the shorthaired girl wearing a suit and tie who’s all arms and legs on the dance floor. She asks Lona if she can take a picture of her, on her lonesome, resting an elbow on a cardboard cut-out of Elvis.

  The theme is Old Hollywood. The theme is always Old Hollywood. It has been Old Hollywood since the formal committee held a bake sale to raise money to buy the Elvis cardboard cut-out fifteen years ago.

  Lona sneaks off to the kitchen every now and then. Mike the Chef keeps her in champagne. There’s a certain delight to being a tipsy adult at an underage event.

  She finds Mr Higgins, her old Psych teacher, outside smoking, and accepts a drag, just for the sheer novelty of it.

  ‘What are you up to, Lona?’ he asks.

  ‘Shit all,’ she replies. She explains the realisation she’s had: it’s a big fat lie that school is the best it gets for the popular kids. ‘It’s the best it gets for the nerds,’ she says. ‘Like, I’m out here in the world and I walk around and no one knows that I’m smart or good at things. It doesn’t matter anymore.’

  Mr
Higgins nods, but Lona can tell he isn’t listening. He is twisting his left cufflink around and around, so that the little boat it is shaped like repeatedly capsizes.

  Mr Higgins is teacher-attractive. The criteria for teacher-attractive is:

  a) under 35

  b) not incredibly unattractive

  All the girls used to have a crush on him. Lona spent her entire school life expecting him to be one of those teachers. The our-love-is-real-not-wrong teachers.

  He lights another cigarette and shows Lona photos of his new baby. Lona flicks through the pictures she’s taken on her DSLR and Mr Higgins tells her which kids are dickheads.

  Roller disco

  Since the start of the year, Lona’s had to DJ the underage roller discos that Planet Skate puts on every Friday night. Jodie used to do it, but she’s since got a life that involves going out with friends and other Friday-night-type things. It was assumed Lona could take up the mantel, considering her known distaste for all Friday-night-type things.

  Every Friday she sits up in the raised booth at the far edge of the rink, plugs her ancient hot pink iPod nano into the stereo and plays whatever she wants.

  The crowd is almost always identical. Neighbourhood kids plus a few who make their parents trek across town and then ban them from coming inside and embarrassing them in front of their friends. Eleven- and twelve-year-old girls mostly. Trying to work out the things that make them cool. They’re gone by the time they reach thirteen, replaced by a new batch.

  What they want to listen to, what everyone wants to listen to, is music they can barely remember from their very young years.

  Lona plays them songs that their older brothers and sisters and cousins would’ve bought on CD. Songs they somehow know the lyrics to even if they don’t know what they’re called. Just for fun, Lona sometimes messes with them. Plays the same song five times in a row.