Loner by Georgina Young

Author:Georgina Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

At the dinner table

Lona finds herself torn between a deep longing to go home for dinner and a fear of talking to her parents about her decisions in life. In the end, the prospect of a meal that isn’t either pesto pasta or kale salad wins out.

She nearly falls asleep on the train and almost misses her station. She gets through the doors just as they are closing automatically, her outstretched limbs presenting an obstacle that the mechanism doesn’t expect. There’s a moment when it’s almost as if they’re going to crush her, then the system relents and the doors go slack.

She touches off with her travel card and is told she has -$1.37 on her MYKI. She has a couple of dollars of change in her wallet that will get her back to Carnegie.

It’s a fifteen-minute walk to her parents’ house. She’s done it so many times she doesn’t have to think about it, just lets her feet carry her under the overpass and down along the golf course. It’s bright still, and warm.

Lona is feeling shit about things, both generally and specifically. (The stiffness in her shoulders, the twitch in her right eye, the amorphous shape of her future, the removal of Sliding Doors from Netflix.) She is attempting to see past this afternoon to a time when she doesn’t feel shit about things, neither generally nor specifically. It shouldn’t be hard, but it is.

At home, Mum makes gin and tonics. Dad has just signed up for Spotify Premium and, as Lona feared he one day would, he has discovered Hamilton. She knows she will spend a good portion of the next five years listening to him rap about American political history.

Lona sits in the armchair opposite the one that Grandpa used to sit in. It was only Grandpa’s for the few months that he lived here, but Lona can’t stop seeing it now as: Grandpa’s chair.

Mum attempts to chat to her from the kitchen. She finally cracks it and demands that Dad turn down the music. The talk that follows is small: weather, neighbours, work. Lona is wary of the impersonal nature of these inquiries. All it tells her is the meaty stuff is still on its way.

She is tired. Her phone is tired too. It’s almost run out of charge and she is eagerly anticipating the time when she can no longer be held responsible for not replying to the nice and cosmically pointless things people have messaged her.

At the dinner table, the physical and metaphorical knives come out. Mum asks if Lona has been in to see Grandpa recently. When Lona says no, her parents share a look. They tell her something she already knows along the lines of: family = forevs = more important than binge-watching televisual sci-fi.

Mum asks whether she’s thought about going back to uni. Lona shrugs non-committedly. The prospect of studying art is sickening to Lona. The prospect of studying anything else is horrific.

She understands: her parents have lived their lives the way they have so that she can live her life the way they planned.

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