It's Not You, It's Me

by Gabrielle Williams

  ‘You’re too busy to see your own daughter, as per usual.’

  ‘Let me guess, Frances. Something’s come up, as per usual.’

  ‘You forgot, as per usual.’

  Holly remembered trying so hard when she was growing up. To be sweet. Helpful. Easy. To get good marks at school. To be pretty. Exceptional. Perfect. Except she never got it right – or at least never got it right enough for her mum to want to hang around for more than a day or two.

  Everything was too confusing, too painful and strange and incorrect and inexplicable to be put into words. And now, on top of everything, ‘as per usual’ – the straw that broke the camel’s back. Holly burst into tears. Unstoppable, bawling sobs.

  The mood in the kitchen flipped. Trinity’s mom brought her in close, hugging her. ‘Oh hon, I’m sorry. I’m just worried about you, that’s all … been a hard few months … just want you safe and happy …’

  As the litany of soothing words continued, Holly slowly settled down. She couldn’t be sure how long they stood in the kitchen, her head resting against the mom’s shoulder, her arms around this stranger. At first she was clasping Trinity’s mom because she needed someone to hold her steady, and then she was holding on to Trinity’s mom because it felt nice. She wished her own mum had hugged her like this, maybe even once in her entire life.

  She’d had Grannie Aileen, though. She’d been a big hugger. A cascade of hugs fell through Holly’s memory.

  The broken-collar-bone, ‘you’ll be fine, it’s not a big operation’ hug (it had been a big operation, a steel plate screwed into her bone, but the hug made her feel better).

  The ‘clever cookie’ hug after another glowing report card.

  The ‘I’m here, I’ve got you’ hug after she’d fainted. That had been a common one in her teenage years—

  And then Holly remembered.

  When I came out of my joint, he was trying to lift you into his car… I asked him what was going on, and he said you’d fainted…

  ‘The guy told Lewis I’d fainted,’ Holly said suddenly.

  ‘You’ve been doing that a bit lately,’ the mom said. ‘You have to remember to eat. Have you drunk any water today?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Holly mumbled. ‘I don’t remember.’

  The mom resumed rubbing her back, saying, ‘It’s okay, you’re okay, everything’ll be all right,’ setting off a new round of tears from Holly.

  As her sobs subsided again, the mom took a deep breath. ‘Now why don’t you go and wash your face, get ready for your special birthday dinner? My big four-year-old girl.’ And she gave Holly a kiss on the forehead.

  Holly smiled. The same joke must be said to every leap-year baby alive.

  7.04 pm

  Trinity’s sixteenth-birthday dinner consisted of prawns with artificially coloured orange seafood sauce served in cut-crystal champagne glasses, beef stroganoff with rice and cooked-too-long peas, and sponge cake with pink icing. Four candles were poked into the top of the cake (that leap-year joke again) and lit with a match, to be blown out by the birthday girl herself.

  Except not exactly the birthday girl herself.

  Holly’s head felt like it was being chiselled from the inside. Like she was about to explode from the weight of the day. The phone had kept ringing throughout dinner and Loolah kept jumping up to answer it, holding the receiver out in Holly’s direction and saying, ‘It’s for you, it’s …’ [Susie Sioux, Aprilmayjune, Heather, Lewis, take your pick, someone different each time]. And in response, Holly had just kept on shaking her head because she didn’t want to speak to any of them. Didn’t know what she’d say.

  The only person who received more than a ‘she can’t talk right now’ was Lewis, but it wasn’t Holly who spoke to him. It was the mom. Holly could hear her in the kitchen now, asking him what had happened that afternoon, but it sounded like she was getting a similar response from Lewis: don’t know, not sure, can’t say exactly.

  There was so much Holly didn’t know: for example, the classic, ‘Why am I here?’ … or, in her case, how? Although perhaps the ‘why’ was just as important, as surely it wasn’t possible to land in a whole other person’s life without there being a good reason for it? Then again, it wasn’t possible to land in a whole other person’s life, full stop. It just didn’t happen. And yet here she was.

  ‘Trin?’ the mom said, coming back to the table. ‘You’ve gone white as a sheet. Are you okay?’

  Holly’s heart was beating hard, not a racing thump-thump-thump, but an irregular thumk-pthrumpth-th-rump. She thought she might throw up.

  Shifting into nurse mode, the mom put the back of her hand up to Holly’s forehead. After a moment, she took her hand away, satisfied there was no fever, but clearly still concerned there was something else wrong. She looked at Holly searchingly. ‘Do you feel dizzy? You’re not going to vomit, are you? Maybe you hit your head this afternoon?’

  Holly looked up. Concussion. The mom thought she had concussion. And actually, it made sense. Amnesia would work too. In a flash of understanding, she realised the most logical answer: none of it was real. She’d made it all up. She was a sixteen-year-old girl called Trinity, and this was her life, and it always had been. It was the only thing that made sense.

  ‘I think I must have knocked my head when I fainted,’ Holly said, half to herself, ‘and I got a weird kind of … altered memories thing, something like that. I thought I was forty years old. From Melbourne. But that’s not right. I’m sixteen. Today is my birthday. My name is Trinity Byrne.’

  ‘You thought you were forty?’ Loolah asked, a giggle escaping her.

  ‘You thought you were in Florida?’ the mom said.

  Holly looked from one to the other. Apart from everything else, there was a Melbourne in Florida? Who knew?

  ‘Or are you talking about Melbourne Avenue? Around the corner?’ Loolah said.

  Holly wasn’t sure if there really was a Melbourne Avenue around the corner, or if Loolah was making a joke.

  ‘Who’s the president?’ Loolah asked, seemingly enjoying this peculiar new version of her sister.

  Holly would have struggled to name the prime minister of Australia at this point. ‘Boris Johnson,’ she finally managed. And then she shook her head. No. He was the UK prime minister in the future. The president. America, 1980. It was … ‘Ronald Reagan?’ she guessed.

  The mom laughed uncomfortably. ‘Hope not,’ she said.

  ‘No, wait,’ Holly said. ‘I’ve got this.’

  Her mum had been in the kitchen, handing Grannie Aileen a bag. She was wearing a T-shirt – a souvenir from the time she’d spent in LA – with ‘CARTER’ printed across it in big letters, and ‘MONDALE’ underneath. ‘I can’t do this anymore. I need Holly to stay here with you for a while. It’s all too hard.’

  ‘Carter,’ Holly finally said. ‘Jimmy Carter. And Walter Mondale.’

  ‘Maybe I should take you to the hospital,’ the mom said.

  ‘But Carter’s right, isn’t it?’

  Mondale she was a little hazy on, but she was positive it was Jimmy Carter.

  The mom nodded warily.

  ‘See. I’m fine,’ Holly said.

  Because she was this girl, Trinity Byrne, and the alternative reality simply couldn’t be.

  2.14 am

  Holly’s eyes blinked open. She didn’t know where she was, but the bed felt wrong. The pillow wasn’t hers. The very darkness of the room was a different shade and texture from what she was used to. The streets outside sounded nothing like home. Her body was unable to move, in that way of deep, deep sleep. Maybe she was dreaming. It was hard to tell.

  Someone was standing in the middle of the room, looking down on her. A thought filtered up through the fog of her brain. A man had been trying to put her into his car. He was dangerous. He wanted to do her harm.

  The person leant towards her now. Close. Closer. And then a female voice whispered, ‘Just checking. You feeling okay?’

  And H
olly realised that it was Trinity’s mom and mumbled a vague, ‘Hm,’ before drifting back to sleep.

  Day 2

  SATURDAY, 1 MARCH 1980

  8.47 am

  Holly lay with her eyes firmly shut. She didn’t want to open them. Didn’t want to see if she was still in the strange life of a sixteen-year-old girl in Los Angeles in 1980. But she had to admit there’d be a sense of disappointment if she woke up to find herself back in her old life. Didn’t want to be her old self. Didn’t want to be someone new.

  She turned onto her side and bunched the pillow over her head. That was the first clue, right there. Holly liked her pillow firm, but this one was soft. She lifted her arm out from under the covers and patted around, feeling the scratchiness of a woollen blanket and sheets. Not a doona. She prodded gently at the cheekbones that felt like they’d been ruled according to geometric principles. The mouth. The eyes. The browbone. The hair that she could drag her fingers through, right past her shoulders. The left ear with the run of keepers up the ridge.

  There was a gentle knock at the door.

  Holly considered lying doggo, but after a moment she pushed the pillow off her head and opened her eyes to an overload of yellow walls, lamp, curtains; clothes on the floor, books junked on top of the bookcase, towel still on the floor.

  The mom was standing in the doorway, arms folded across her chest, leaning one hip against the doorframe. Holly recalled the sweeping sense of safety she’d experienced in the middle of the night when she’d realised it was Trinity’s mom looking down at her.

  ‘How are you feeling this morning?’ the mom asked, coming over and sitting down on the bed, putting her hand against Holly’s forehead, taking Holly’s hand in her own.

  It felt so comfortable. Of course it did. Because this was her mom, and this was her life. She had to remind herself that the whole other this-isn’t-me thing wasn’t real. It was concussion. Although she also had to admit it felt slightly awkward to be holding the hand of a woman she barely knew.

  She pried her hand away and yawned expansively, mouth wide, both hands up in the air, and then plonked them back down on the bed on the left side of her body. Away from the mom.

  ‘I’m good,’ Holly said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Not dizzy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not feeling sick?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘President of the United States?’

  ‘Carter.’

  ‘Okay. Good. You’re looking much better. You were so pale last night. Don’t forget you’ve got lunch at Dad’s today.’

  The mom stood up to leave as if it was all settled – as if Holly was going to go around to some strange man’s house and eat food with him.

  Not that he was a stranger. It was her dad. She was just struggling to remember him at the moment. Concussion would do that.

  Holly shook her head reflexively, pulling her blankets back up around her collarbone.

  The mom frowned, then sat back down on the bed. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t feel well.’

  ‘You just said you felt fine.’

  ‘Not well enough to go for lunch.’

  ‘It’s lunch with Dad.’

  ‘Still,’ Holly said. As if that was explanation enough.

  The mom was having none of it. ‘Toots, Dad wants to see you for your birthday. It was hard enough for him not being here last night. For all of us. He’s expecting you today.’

  Holly slid her eyes away and used her baby-blue, chewed-down fingernail to pick at the corner of one of the magazine pages sticky-taped to the wall. ‘I feel woozy.’

  The mom steamrollered on. ‘Trin, we’re all managing as best we can. And it’s all been arranged. Dad’s looking forward to it, so’s Loolah, and so were you until this morning.’

  ‘Loolah can go on her own.’

  ‘It’s your birthday. And she can’t ride all that way on her own. No, it’s all organised, so scoot, up you get.’ The mom stood up without another word and left Holly in bed.

  Holly couldn’t pretend. This wasn’t her life. None of it was. Deep down in her gut, in her soul, she knew this wasn’t who she was. Holly didn’t know how to behave with a dad. She hadn’t grown up with one. What happened when you had a dad? What sorts of things did you talk about? What did it feel like? She’d always wanted a dad, and now she had the opportunity to have one. Except this guy wasn’t hers – he was someone else’s. He was Trinity’s. And she wasn’t Trinity.

  And then all the swirling thoughts pulled sharply into focus and she couldn’t escape those big questions again: what was she doing here? Why had she landed in this girl’s life? Surely there was more to it than them both being leap-year babies?

  Holly sat up in bed and looked around her. The orange typewriter sitting in the middle of the desk snagged her attention.

  Dear Brother Orange

  Two videos ran inside her head, like on a split screen. On one side was Evie giving her the typewriter at lunch yesterday. In 2020.

  ‘It’s forty. You’re forty. You two were made for each other…’

  Meanwhile, a different video ran on the other side of the screen:

  The Christmas tree in the corner had been too small, with only a few insignificant baubles on it. The two boxes underneath had been professionally but impersonally wrapped. Mom was the one who usually wrapped their presents. Here was proof (as if it was needed) that her parents really weren’t together anymore. There’d been something sad but also, admittedly, slightly thrilling and grown-up about it: her and Loolah and Dad alone, no Mom. She’d torn the paper off her present, more to get rid of the sense of some gift-wrapping stranger in the room than to see what Dad had gotten her.

  ‘For all that poetry that’s inside you,’ Dad had said.

  Same typewriter, different versions.

  That must be the link. The birthdays weren’t enough. But how? How did a typewriter have the wherewithal to plonk her into this life here?

  Holly got up and padded over to the desk. She stared down at the typewriter like it was a clue and if she concentrated hard enough, it would tell all. She felt that it could sense her looking at it, as though it was waiting for her to do something.

  There was the only-just-started letter from yesterday. Yesterday in 1980 and 2020.

  Dear Brother Orange

  She settled her fingers over the middle band of keys: the ‘A’, the ‘S’, the ‘D’, the ‘F’, the ‘J’, ‘K’, ‘L’ and the semicolon. There was a slight sensation under her fingertips, as if the keys were vibrating. If she didn’t know better she’d swear there was a pulse inside the orange enamel body. A shiver ran down her spine, as if someone had pretended to crack an egg on her head then blown on the back of her neck, like they used to do in primary school. She pulled her hands abruptly away, clasping them to her chest.

  She started shuffling through all the other pieces of paper scattered about the desktop. Letters. Abandoned diary entries. Poems. Bad ones.

  I’m in the classroom, it’s the one right next to you

  You slip a note to me, she doesn’t have a clue

  The fact you’re with her, it really makes me blue …

  She remembered writing this, fingers on the keys, composing line by line.

  They’d snuck out the back at Molly’s party. Keith had put his hand over hers, even though he was with Lisa. When he’d passed her a note in the hallway at school the next day, there’d been a sense of it all being very dramatic, clandestine, doomed. Romeo and Juliet sprang to mind. She’d come home from school that day and started typing up the poem, then yanked the sheet out when she realised she didn’t feel any of it. Didn’t really feel blue, only wrote that because it rhymed with ‘clue’ and ‘you’. Truth be told, she didn’t even like Keith all that much.

  Holly picked up another one.

  Here’s my neck, feel free to bite

  It’s early yet, we got all night


  Just dip your mouth under my chin

  Your teeth are sharp, it’s not a sin

  Now here’s a scar, well lah-di-dah

  You don’t own me, you’re not my tsar.

  I’m not some victim drained and blue

  The tables turned and I own you

  Or maybe not, I can’t tell yet

  But next black night, I’ll cash my debt

  That was more like it. Genuine. Real. Her. And then the last scrap of paper in the pile.

  Dear Brother Orange,

  I’m being held captive in my own home. Grounding is against my constitutional rights. The whole hitchhike grounding thing is a massive overreaction. I’m sick of Mom trying to control me! School was same old today. Boring. Learnt nothing. Hard to know what the point of it all is. Make music, not math, I say.

  She remembered writing it all. Her name was Trinity Byrne and these were her words. Except, of course, she wasn’t. Holly still knew deep down in her soul that she wasn’t this person.

  She pulled the only-just-started page out of the typewriter. Dear Brother Orange. It unsettled her. She wanted it gone. Of everything, that page with those three words was the strangest (and in the current circumstances, that was really saying something). She stuffed it into the rubbish bin, then went downstairs to look for something to eat.

  She could feel this body’s habit of Frosted Flakes in a bowl with cold milk every morning – but she didn’t eat processed rubbish. She started her days with yoga and a couple of quick kata from karate, followed by a breakfast she concocted herself, filled with sliced almonds and pepitas and sunflower seeds and chia seeds and almond meal and dried cranberries and flaked coconut, with a small amount of milk.

  Holly searched the orange-laminate pantry and found bread (white) and a jar of peanut butter. What about the whole peanut-butter-and-jelly thing that Lewis was so against? She’d never had it, but if ever a person was going to try such a thing, now was the time. She found a jar labelled ‘Smucker’s Grape Jelly’ near the back of the pantry.