My Life as a Hashtag

by Gabrielle Williams

  I stood by the lift and watched the numbers scroll up to the floor he worked on, then scroll back down from twenty-five through to seven, to six, five and four. I pushed my hair back behind my ears. It felt messy in my hand, so I checked myself in the mirrored door of the lift.

  After all the effort I’d gone to brushing my hair, he wouldn’t even know it.

  Stupid autumn wind.

  Stupid Hesperus.

  Three. Two. One. The numbers of the lift changed to the letter ‘G’, the mirrored doors opened with a ding, and Dad came out smiling.

  Behind him was a woman.

  ‘You remember Tosca?’ Dad said to me as he dragged me to him and gave my forehead a kiss. ‘My PA?’ he added.

  He hadn’t shaved.

  He was wearing army fatigues, and a striped T-shirt.

  He looked slightly crumpled.

  I need to put this in perspective for you. Casual clothes were not a part of my dad’s wardrobe vocabulary. He usually wore a suit and tie every day, or at very least a pair of smart pants and a polo top.

  Army fatigues and a striped T-shirt? No.

  Unshaved? No.

  Crumpled? Definitely not.

  He turned back to where Tosca was standing behind him and said to her, ‘You remember my daughter, Marie-Claude? MC.’

  I don’t know why he threw the whole ‘Marie-Claude’ thing in there. No one ever calls me that.

  Okay, Yumi and Liv occasionally call me ‘Marie-Claude et Philippe, beep’, because when they were learning French back in Year 7 they had to listen to Les Aventures de Marie-Claude et Philippe and recite the words in time, turning the page every time they hit a beep. Even now, four years down the track – neither of them studies French anymore – they still call me that sometimes.

  But not Dad. Not until that particular day. Tosca, meet Marie-Claude (without the Philippe or the beep). It was just plain weird.

  ‘Of course I remember Marie-Claude,’ Tosca said. ‘Hi.’

  ‘MC,’ I corrected her. ‘I don’t know why Dad just called me that. Why did you call me that?’

  He hugged me to him again and kissed the top of my head. ‘Don’t know,’ he said, then held me an arm’s length away from him and looked at me. ‘I thought maybe, because you’re growing up – look how tall you’re getting – maybe you needed a longer name to go with those long legs that you never used to have.’

  I grinned at him.

  I missed having him at home.

  He should be home.

  I looked at Tosca and smiled. I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for her. Mainly because of her hair. Talk about wreck of the Hesperus. She obviously had no clue about Dad’s preference for neatly brushed, slightly nerdy hair. Hers was an absolute mess, curls twisting out at all angles, defying gravity, defying science, defying maths, defying logic. It was like her hair was its own completely independent structure that just happened to be growing out of her head. It was the type of hair a person would never be able to have any control over. It wouldn’t have mattered if she’d tied it up, straightened it out, wore a hat, or gelled it into a solid mass – it would still do whatever the hell it felt like. It was kind of great hair; the type of hair I loved. But I knew Dad would hate it.

  ‘We’ve got this huge project going on at the moment,’ Dad went on as he hugged me to him one last time then started walking towards the lobby doors, me and Tosca following, trying to keep up with his long, important strides, ‘and Tosca’s given up her weekend to help me, so I thought it only fair that she join us for lunch. That okay with you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘For sure.’

  Tosca had on a T-shirt with ‘Harvard Law’ written across it in big shouty letters, and ‘just kidding’ underneath in smaller letters. She was wearing bangles that clicked up her arm then clacked back down again whenever she moved it. She wore ripped jeans – Dad hated ripped jeans – and ankle boots – he wasn’t crazy about those either, said they looked like something gnomes wore – and the softest leather jacket you’d ever seen, which even Dad couldn’t not-like.

  We walked back out into the wind, which jumped straight back onto me, tugging and pulling and behaving badly.

  ‘What’s with the beard, by the way?’ I asked, my shoulder banging into him as the wind got particularly insistent. ‘You look different.’

  He grinned down at me. ‘Well, you know what they say,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s good for a man to have a hobby.’ He laughed at his joke, and Tosca laughed too, the two of them grinning at each other.

  The wind nudged me, taunted me, as if to say, You’re missing something. As if Dad was obscuring something, performing a magician’s trick, saying this thing over here with this mirrored hand – Good for a man to have a hobby –while the real meaning was smoking over in the hand I wasn’t looking at.

  #

  When I got home from lunch in the city, Maude and Prue were sitting at the kitchen bench with Mum.

  ‘… either way,’ Maude was saying as I came in the back door, ‘as soon as the money started rolling in, things changed.’ She put two fingers up towards Prue and then patted them against her lips, sign language for ‘pass us a fag’.

  They had used to go outside to smoke, the three of them. But since Dad had shifted out, all rules regarding ciggies and passive smoking – especially the damage it causes to young lungs, for example mine – had been skittled.

  The three of them swivelled to look at me as I walked into the kitchen.

  I went over to the fridge, opened it, looked inside for something to eat. Not because I was hungry, but because it’s my stock-standard thing to do when I get home; a habit. I closed the fridge, went to the pantry, opened it. Nothing. Closed the pantry door and sighed, because there’s never anything to eat in our house.

  ‘How was lunch, darling?’ Mum asked, tapping the tip of her cigarette against the lip of the ashtray then bringing it up to her mouth and dragging deep, as if it were a breath of fresh air.

  Which, clearly, being a cigarette, it wasn’t.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It was good.’

  ‘How was Your Father?’ she asked.

  Your Father. With capital letters. Like she didn’t really know him; hadn’t been married to him for twenty years. Like he was My Father, and not related to her in any way.

  I opened the drawer. Took out a glass. Went back to the pantry and took out the family-sized tin of Milo.

  It was the only thing family-sized about us these days.

  I could feel three sets of eyes on me as I walked over to the fridge.

  ‘He was fine.’ I shrugged.

  I opened the fridge, took out the milk. Grabbed a spoon. Jemmied the lid off the Milo. Started scooping it into my glass.

  I decided not to mention Tosca.

  Well, I didn’t not-mention her, but I didn’t mention her, if you see the difference. Apart from anything else, it wasn’t that big a deal. Not enough of a deal to mention.

  ‘Where did you go after lunch?’ Mum asked.

  ‘What makes you think I went anywhere after lunch?’

  ‘It’s quite late,’ she said, looking down at her watch.

  ‘Oh. Right. Yeah. No, just lunch.’

  I twisted the lid off the milk, admiring, as I did, my glossy, cool-as-fuck black nails that I’d had painted after lunch. It had been Tosca’s idea to go and have a manicure. She’d gone for electric blue, and I’d chosen can’t-go-wrong black.

  I poured milk into my glass, the spoonfuls of Milo at the bottom too dense to be penetrated. Drinking Milo always reminded me of the outdoors – the dirt of the Milo and the sky of the milk.

  I picked up my glass to take to my room. Which was when Maude slid her eyebrow up, just one, for emphasis, and said, ‘I like your nails.’

  Prue paused, her cigarette hand halfway to her mouth, and looked at my manicure. ‘Very nice,’ she agreed slowly, her chin dipping down towards her chest as she studied my hands.

/>   I could feel the mood in the room mixing with the cigarette smoke to create a thickness, a slowing-down of time, but also the distinct fizzing, spitting sound – the crackle – of a fuse being lit.

  The three of them looked at each other, then back at me.

  ‘Where did you get those done?’ Mum asked, taking my non-glass-holding hand in hers and examining my nails as if they were a clue.

  ‘Um, South Melbourne?’ I said. I could feel the booby trap in the conversation; I just wasn’t sure where exactly it was and how exactly to step around it. ‘We stopped on the way home. Dad took me to have a manicure.’

  That was true. Ish. Dad had taken me to have a manicure. He was the one who had paid for my manicure. The fact that he hadn’t actually sat in the next chair on from me, with his bangles jangling and his Harvard Law ‘Just kidding’ T-shirt on and his wrecked hair spiralling out of control – the fact that he wasn’t the one getting his fingers and toes painted an electric blue – the fact that he wasn’t the one asking what my favourite subjects were and which cute boys I liked – was beside the point.

  The kitchen held its collective breath. One wrong move, and it was gonna go nuclear, I could tell.

  ‘What a strange thing for Your Father to do,’ Mum said.

  ‘Very,’ agreed Prue.

  ‘Odd,’ said Maude, scratching a match against the flint of the box and bringing the flame up to her ciggie.

  ‘Dad took you to have a manicure?’ Mum checked, tilting her head to the side, as if that angle would help her see past any distractions. ‘This afternoon? After you had lunch?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  ‘Just you and Your Father?’ Maude asked. I could smell sulphur as she blew out the match – a devilish, dangerous odour in my nostrils.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Sitting in the massage chair as my nails had been painted earlier, a thought had bubbled into my head: that it was strange Tosca was still hanging out with Dad and me, even after we’d had lunch.

  When Dad had offered to drive her home, and then took me first, the bulbous thought had dropped down into my throat, making a glutinous lump.

  When I’d got out of the car and Tosca had said to me, ‘Thanks for letting me crash your lunch. Might see you again sometime soon,’ the lumpish thought had slipped from my throat and wedged itself in my chest.

  But it was only now, standing in the kitchen with Mum and Maude and Prue looking at me, that the wedged thought detonated in my chest into fully fledged knowledge.

  Dad had brought Tosca along because he wanted me to meet his new girlfriend.

  It was so obvious, I could feel my cheeks burn with the humiliation of not having picked up on it till this moment.

  And now it was up to me to tell Mum about her.

  Thanks, Dad.

  Mum leant forward on her elbows, her eyes watching me carefully. She knew. She knew, without me having to say it, that there had been someone else at lunch with us.

  Maude dragged on her fag, blowing the smoke out in a long, slow bloom. She knew too. She and Prue and Mum all knew.

  The kitchen was poised.

  There were no cooking smells. Nothing simmering away in a saucepan on the cooktop. No frying onion smells. No spaghetti bolognaise smells. Mum didn’t cook anymore, not like she’d used to. Without Dad around, she couldn’t be bothered with the chopping and the shopping and the preparing and the organising and the stirring and the saucepans and the pots and the wooden spoons that went into making a home-cooked meal.

  We were eating a lot of takeaway.

  And smoking inside plenty.

  ‘MC?’ Mum pressed. ‘Just you and Dad?’

  There are photos of my mum from when she was my age, her hair blonde, her face open. Making rabbit ears behind people’s heads; laughing with a random boy; standing on one leg with her arms spread out away from her body; cramming into an old-fashioned phone booth with a bunch of other people; staring into the camera, with heart-shaped sunglasses on her face. She looks like exactly the sort of person I would be friends with.

  And now here she was, forty-something, sitting in our kitchen, a spiral of smoke rising from the fag between her fingers, about to hear the news that I’d just gone for a manicure with probably the last person in the world she wanted me to hang out with.

  I looked down at my treacherous nails, each one propped on the end of each finger like an accusation. Like an admission.

  Pointing the finger had never seemed so literal.

  I took a sip of my Milo, watching the three of them over the rim of my glass. And then I brought my drink down away from my face and said, ‘Well, um, you know Tosca?’ and braced myself for the explosion.

  I felt myself flinch, waiting for it.

  But instead, there was nothing.

  Silence.

  A void.

  It made me wonder whether I had it wrong. Maybe my nails weren’t being treacherous. Maybe it was just a manicure after all. Innocent. No big deal.

  Mum took a deep breath. She tilted her head back and looked up at the ceiling, dragged deep on her ciggie, then dropped her chin back to look at me and blew out a plume of smoke.

  ‘Who’s Tosca?’ Prue and Maude said at the same time.

  ‘Tosca,’ Mum said, with something resembling satisfaction – but it wasn’t satisfaction; it was like the toxic cousin of satisfaction – ‘is Dennis’s PA.’

  Maude shook her head, tsk-ing with her tongue.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Prue said, tipping a new ciggie out of the pack and lighting it. ‘That man is the biggest cliché there is. No offence, but seriously. His PA? And let me guess – she’s younger than him.’

  I wanted to take it back. No, not Tosca. Someone else. No one you know. Just some person. Not Tosca. Just me and Dad. The two of us, lunch for two, him and me, that’s all, la-di-da.

  ‘Tosca,’ Mum said again, shaking her head.

  I gripped my Milo and realised, as I looked at the three of them sitting at our kitchen bench, that this was how it was going to be from now on. Instead of Mum and Dad, it was going to be Mum or Dad. A choice constantly having to be made. A seesawing negotiation that I would never be able to win. A right and a wrong answer, reversed depending on who you were with.

  I thought back to when I was little and Dad would come home from work. I’d hear his key in the door, and I’d run down the hallway, scoot up into his arms, and tell him what I’d done at kinder – the sandpits I’d played in, the climbing frames I’d climbed over – so happy to have him home.

  But then I’d got older and lazier, and when he’d come home I’d be kind of busy, watching telly or doing homework or scrolling through Insta, and I’d look up from whatever screen I was on, and he’d kiss me on the cheek or the top of my head and say, ‘How’s your day been?’ and I’d say, ‘Alright,’ and that was it.

  And now I couldn’t take that back; couldn’t change how I’d been when he’d walked in the door. But the thing was – the unfair thing was – I hadn’t known there was a possibility that he would stop coming home. If he’d warned me, if he’d said to me, ‘This might stop – this, me, here, coming home each night – it might not keep going,’ then I’d have gone back to running down the hallway and making a big deal of him when he’d got in from work.

  I hadn’t known.

  I should have known, but I hadn’t. I needed everything spelt out for me.

  Including the fact that Tosca was Dad’s girlfriend.

  Chapter 2

  After Mum and Prue and Maude had grilled me in the kitchen (the most cooking Mum had done since Dad had moved out) I went upstairs and lay on my bed with my pillow hugged to my stomach, the glass of Milo sitting ignored on my bedside table.

  Dad had a girlfriend. Her name was Tosca.

  Every morning, for the entire time that he’d lived at home, he’d complained that my hair was unbrushed, and now he had a girlfriend – strange word, when used in the same sentence as ‘
my dad’ – whose hair messed all over mine.

  I’d even brushed my hair to go and meet him. Hah. Sucked in, me. I was glad the wind had wrecked it. Glad he hadn’t seen that I’d dragged a brush through my hair especially for him.

  I almost felt angry with him. Except he was my dad, and I hardly got to see him anymore – I didn’t want to spend the time I had with him feeling angry.

  I heard the door to my bedroom bang open.

  ‘Who died downstairs?’ a voice said, then a body threw itself onto the bed at my feet.

  Liv.

  Liv lives next door.

  Try saying that three times fast.

  I looked down the length of the bed at her. ‘What about downstairs?’

  ‘The three of them in the kitchen, looking so serious.’ Liv pushed the sleeves of her jumper up to her elbows, then changed her mind and pulled the whole thing over her head and dumped it on the floor. ‘Mum looks like she’s about to stage an intervention or something.’

  Liv’s mum is Prue – the one who was down there with Mum and Maude, smoking and fagging and grilling me about Dad’s new girlfriend.

  I lifted my legs up so that my feet faced the ceiling, toes nearly touching the hanging mobile that I was far too old for, its flowers naive and innocent-looking, from a time when I’d been the same. Dad had put it up for me when we’d first moved into this house. I’d been meaning to take it down for years, but now that he’d moved out it would seem like bad luck to remove it.

  I flopped my feet back down onto the bed. I wanted to tell Liv that I’d had a shitty day. That Dad had a girlfriend, that Mum was pissed off, and that I was the one who’d had to tell her.

  ‘Nice top,’ I said instead.

  Liv looked down at her chest as if she didn’t remember what she was wearing, then nodded at me, completely and utterly unconcerned.

  ‘Oh yeah. Yours. I came in and grabbed it while you were out. I got this skirt this morning from the op shop’ – she pinched at the tartan pleated skirt, which looked like something out of Scotland in the seventeen hundreds – ‘and thought your top would go perfectly.’

  ‘That’s the ugliest skirt I’ve ever seen,’ I said. ‘Seriously.’