It's Not You, It's Me

by Gabrielle Williams

  One interesting thing – I went to the library so I could find an encyclopaedia to look up time travel, soul swapping, whatever it is you’ve done to me, but then the librarian showed me the computer and look at me go. I could look up anything. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still plan to DESTROY you, but the internet is pretty cool. I searched for myself in there, but couldn’t find me. What does that MEAN? What have you DONE? By the way, in good news, I found your credit card in your tote. I’ve bought a plane ticket to LA for Monday and when I get there I’m gonna HUNT YOU DOWN. You’ve got five days to swap us back. The clock is a-tickin’. You’ve been warned.

  And then silence.

  Holly pulled the page out of the typewriter and reread the words. Bloody Trinity. This wasn’t what Holly needed to read after the day she’d had. Furious, she rolled in a fresh piece of paper, ready to type a reply, but there was a knock on the bedroom door, throwing Holly out of the zone.

  ‘Hon,’ the mom said, coming into the room.

  Holly instinctively ripped the page out of the rogue typewriter in case Trinity started typing from the future again; rested her arm on the keys to make sure no words could be typed.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ the mom said. ‘Loolah’s in bed, and do you mind?’ Meaning, Do you mind not typing because no one’s getting any sleep with that racket going on.

  But Holly needed to write back. ‘Yeah, of course. Sorry,’ she said, trying to remain calm. ‘I just have one last small thing to write, and then I’m done. One tiny sentence. Is that okay?’

  ‘Sure.’ The mom came over and kissed the top of Holly’s head, then looked her square in the eyes, like she was about to say something. Instead, she lightly touched Holly’s cheek, then turned and left the room.

  Holly put in a piece of paper.

  Trinity. You need to get a grip. I’ll write to you tomorrow, but you need to stop blaming me. When will you realise none of this is my fault? I’m trying to fix things here. And maybe stop and think. It’s pointless for you to fly to America because I’m here in 1980, not 2020.

  No point mincing words.

  Holly whipped out the page and tossed a jumper over the keys to stop any further communication. She wasn’t sure if that would help, but it was the best she could come up with at short notice.

  3.24 am

  Holly woke up to a person crawling into bed alongside her.

  For a moment her body softened, thinking it was Jamie, but then she remembered she wasn’t with Jamie anymore. She was with Michael. And then she stiffened, because this person was a completely different shape and size from Michael, and hang on, this wasn’t her bed, this was Trinity’s bed. The voice of the other person, soft and whispery, said, ‘I had a nightmare.’

  Loolah.

  Holly settled back against her pillow and opened her arms, folding them around the little body, feeling the fresh-out-of-bed warmth as she held Loolah close. ‘You’re okay, shh, you’re okay,’ she whispered into Loolah’s ear. Same as the mom had said to her only a few hours ago when they were looking down at baby Holly.

  ‘I dreamt someone was in their car, watching the house,’ Loolah said, her voice getting sleepier now she knew she was safe with her sister. ‘And I was trying to call out, but no one could hear me, and …’ but even as she was saying the words she was drifting back to sleep, taking Holly with her.

  Day 6

  WEDNESDAY, 5 MARCH 1980

  7.32 am

  Holly half-heartedly ferried cereal from her bowl to her mouth. She felt tired and unsettled. She had to find Frances and Nathan, but all those Kings in the phone book … Even if she assumed that Nathan lived on his own and went straight to the N Kings, it would take weeks to ring through all the columns. She wanted to stay home from school today and start making calls, but presuming he had some kind of job, he wouldn’t even be there to pick up the phone. She could leave a message on his answering machine, but that was only if he had an answering machine. How many people even had answering machines in 1980? Were they common or rare? Dime a dozen or seriously fancy? Besides, how could she say what she needed to say in a message on a machine?

  If only she could ask Trinity’s mom to get the forwarding address out of the hospital files – surely Frances would have had to give details of where she was staying. It would be much quicker and guaranteed to have all the details correct, but there was no way she’d be able to convince the mom to do that.

  Lewis leant against the kitchen bench, eating his cereal. He reached into his schoolbag and pulled out a couple of sheets of glossy photographic paper as he chewed, then pushed them towards her. ‘Thought you might want to take a look at some of the shots from last week,’ he said, the proof sheets on the counter between them. ‘I developed them yesterday. I’m booked into the darkroom at lunchtime today to develop the other roll, and then that’s all of them done.’

  Tiny black-and-white photos ran the length of each sheet, sprocket holes along the edges of each strip of film. Each tiny photo a close-up of the neck and mouth of a girl: Trinity.

  She’d stood against the blank white wall of his bedroom, angling her head, pouting, sticking out her tongue playfully, running it over her lips, flirting with the camera, trying to make her neck look as long and appealing as possible. Her palms pressed against the cool plaster as, eyes closed, she tilted her head back and rested against the wall. She opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling, then dipped her chin and looked down the barrel of the camera at him. He straightened slightly so he was no longer looking through the camera lens, instead looking over it, straight at her. And then she laughed and said, ‘Bite me,’ and the moment shattered, like a bowl filled with Frosted Flakes.

  Holly felt a surge of guilt for spying on such a personal memory of Trinity’s.

  ‘There are some good ones in here,’ he was saying, ‘but I think there’ll be some better ones in the next roll. The light was better.’

  Unbidden, a poem popped into Holly’s head.

  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

  She flicked a glance at him from under her eyelashes. Again with that handsome face of his. Except she shouldn’t be thinking of him in that way. Even if the bodies were the same age, the souls weren’t.

  She focused back on the images. As an art teacher, she knew they were great. The lighting, the composition – Lewis knew what he was doing. She pincered her fingers over one of the frames, absentmindedly trying to enlarge it as though it was on the screen of her phone.

  Lewis frowned at her. ‘What are you doing?’

  Holly jumped, realising her mistake. How did you explain something that had no precedent? Technology that wouldn’t be introduced for decades to come? She rubbed her fingers together, stalling for time, and then finally said, ‘I … there was a piece of, like, a hair or something on it.’ And she repeated the motion once more to prove it. Nothing suspicious to see here.

  ‘Okay, well, anyway,’ Lewis went on, ‘I wouldn’t mind you having a look at the rest of the shots. Can you be bothered meeting me in the art room at lunchtime? Give me a victim’s perspective?’ He smiled at her.

  The art room. The one place in this strange world that she’d be completely at home. She could picture it. There’d be lots of natural light, windows running along one wall, paint-spattered tables. ‘Sounds good,’ she said, hauling her nylon Pan Am bag onto her shoulder. ‘I’ll be interested to see them.’

  Lewis picked up his bag and joined her, but as they were walking out the door, he frowned. ‘Where’s your guitar?’

 
Holly looked at him. ‘Um. Upstairs?’

  ‘Don’t you have lessons on a Wednesday?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Did she? She didn’t know.

  ‘Do you want me to come upstairs and brush your teeth for you, too?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Why? What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, seems I have to remember everything else for you.’

  He was joking, but the intimacy of him standing in front of her, leaning over, brushing her teeth … she could picture it. Holly quickly headed upstairs. She needed to find Nathan King and get out of this life. Fast.

  8.24 am

  Maths. Math. O’Farrell.

  Holly went up to him, took out her page of incomplete homework and put it on the table beside him. ‘I hadn’t done it Monday,’ she said without prompting. ‘As you probably guessed.’

  O’Farrell looked at her poker-faced, but the hint of a smile played on his mouth. ‘You surprise me,’ he said. No, she didn’t. Not even a bit.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I tried to do it, but most of it I wasn’t able to finish. In fact, to be honest, most of it I couldn’t even start. But at least, in good news, I’m handing something in.’

  O’Farrell glanced down at the page, then looked back up at her. ‘You’re a smart girl, Legs,’ he said. ‘All you need to do is pay a bit of attention. Do the homework each night, bare minimum. It’s not that hard.’

  ‘You shouldn’t call me Legs,’ Holly said.

  ‘Okay, what about this – I don’t call you Legs, you pay a bit more attention in class. How’s that sound?’

  ‘Deal.’ She wondered if they should shake on it, but decided against it. She turned to go back to her desk.

  ‘You know I take extra math in the library at lunch on Mondays,’ O’Farrell said. ‘I could catch you up. It wouldn’t take you long to get up to speed.’

  Holly considered his proposal. And then she said, ‘Yeah. Okay. I will.’

  He looked surprised. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Trinity?’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Just checking it’s you in there.’

  Holly laughed. He didn’t know the half of it.

  There you go, Trinity: catch-up maths classes. You wreck my life, I’ll wreck yours.

  10.17 am

  Holly sat listening to the discussion about what sort of an impact Vienna would have had on Asher Lev if he’d gone there that first time with his father. Even though she hadn’t read the book, the whole exercise seemed eerily relevant to her – the idea that if you changed one thing, you would change an entire life.

  Exactly.

  She put up her hand to make the point. Waited. Other kids were called on to make comments. The Reaper wrote some on the blackboard. Holly’s arm was getting tired.

  ‘Jacob,’ the Grim Reaper said, looking through Holly like she was made of thin air to call on someone who didn’t even have their hand up.

  Classic avoidance. The Grim Reaper would choose every other person in the class before she asked Holly – only interested in singling her out if she was unprepared.

  Holly went to put her hand back down. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted to say anymore, and besides, if the Reaper wasn’t going to ask her, what was the point? But then something in her body resisted – something in her very bones fired up with defiance. Call it the Trinity factor. And instead of putting her hand down, she put her other hand up to support the weight of her arm. She kept it propped there for the rest of the class. When the bell rang, she felt what could only be described as a sense of satisfaction that Mrs Grimwade had never pointed to her at all.

  1.03 pm

  The art room was everything Holly had known it would be, and more. The smell of it, the paint; the evidence of industry strewn across tables, the floor, every surface. She took in the messiness of it, the spirit of creativity. She wanted to get her hands dirty, grab herself a piece of paper and start sketching, suddenly longing for her own life. She missed teaching art, making art.

  Lewis was standing at one of the long tables, his hands either side of a piece of paper in front of him. Holly walked over and stared down at it with him.

  It was one of the black-and-white photos from the proof sheet, Trinity’s face enlarged to almost A3 size. Her neck was arched, her mouth slightly open. Two small punctures had been drawn in by hand, mimicking a bite, a line of red ink running from the puncture marks and pooling in the brightly coloured chocolate wrappers that Lewis had pasted to her neck. The wrappers in question were from Baby Ruth candy bars, the red and white of the wrappers working tonally against the cream skin of Trinity’s neck, the red of her hand-painted mouth, the trickle of blood. The wrappers were folded down, exactly as you’d do with any bar you were eating, but the way he’d arranged it, it mimicked one of those Elizabethan lace collars.

  The sense being that she was a piece of candy, unwrapped.

  On the table were other wrappers Lewis was collaging together to use on other photos: Tootsie Rolls, Chick-O-Sticks, Mary Janes, all confectionary that Holly had never heard of until now, all of them with female names.

  It wasn’t just the skill and craft that impressed Holly, but the way Lewis carried through an idea. How original, conceptual, the work was. ‘This is genius,’ she said to him.

  He didn’t answer; it was almost like he hadn’t heard her, but she knew he had, because there were only the two of them in the room, and she’d said it out loud. Also, a blush rose from his neck – a blush tonally suited to the Baby Ruth candy bars. To the drops of blood. To Trinity’s open mouth.

  Holly needed to stop thinking of him this way. But was it in fact her thinking this way, or Trinity?

  ‘And I wanted to show you these as well.’ He led her to the bench that ran along the back wall, where three small canvases were propped up, popping with psychedelic hues. ‘I’ve done these for Susie Sioux’s birthday party next weekend,’ he said.

  They were oversized tarot cards. One featured a man painted, bare-chested, sitting on a throne, a goat head on his shoulders. Magazine cutouts of people drinking and dancing were collaged along the base. The second canvas was of a priestess holding a sword in one hand and a rose in the other, again with a party-scene collage running along the base. The third had an angel, wings extended, looking over another collaged party crowd.

  ‘You think she’ll like them?’ he asked, a charming vulnerability underpinning the question.

  The brushstrokes, the confidence of the lines, the collage effect, the way Lewis had used the space on each page – he was a genuine talent. Holly looked over at him, his arms folded across his body.

  ‘These are amazing,’ she finally said.

  He shrugged. ‘They’re not bad.’

  ‘No. You’re being modest. They’re really good.’ But something nagged at her. She knew those lines. The use of collage, the style. ‘Hang on,’ she said, clicking her fingers at him. ‘Lewis Rodda.’ She’d studied his work when she was at art school. But Lewis’s last name wasn’t Rodda. It was Webster.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re Lewis Rodda.’

  ‘Why would you say that?’ he said slowly.

  She paused, trying to think of the right answer. And then she just shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  He looked at her very strangely. Finally he said, ‘Rodda is my mum’s maiden name. I’ve been thinking I don’t really want to use Webster anymore, because I haven’t seen the old man in years, and obviously I don’t want to go with Sinclair, because that’s Rob’s name. But it’s so weird that you would say that, because you couldn’t possibly know.’

  He was right. There was no way she could have known he was thinking of changing his name to Rodda.

  ‘Lucky guess, I s’pose,’ she said limply.

  ‘Trinity. There’s no way you could have guessed that. Ever since last weekend, half the time I feel like I don’t even know you. But then I look again, and it’s you. I can’t explain it, but you’re
different. You’re you, but you’re not you.’

  Holly didn’t answer for a long time. And then finally she said, ‘I think I’ve got concussion.’

  ‘You don’t have concussion.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘What, you’re a doctor now?’

  ‘No. And you don’t have concussion.’

  Holly chewed on her bottom lip, wondering what to say next. Could she actually tell him stuff? Tell him what had really happened?

  ‘Last weekend,’ she finally said. ‘After I woke up on the footpath. I keep … it’s like I kind of … this is going to sound ridiculous, but I can sometimes see little snippets of the future. But not my future, someone else’s. I know it sounds unbelievable, but I don’t know what else to say. I know it doesn’t make sense.’

  She could hear her voice getting shaky. She didn’t want to tell him everything – there was no way she could share all that. Even sharing this much was threatening to overwhelm her.

  ‘There was a crack,’ Lewis said after a pause. ‘Not like thunder. Like a literal crack. Like a plate breaking. An enormous plate. At first I thought it was an earthquake. That was what made me come out of my house. And when I came out, and you were lying on the footpath out the front, with that guy trying to put you in his car, there was a kind of shimmering haze around you. Which doesn’t make sense either.’

  Holly looked up at Lewis. She thought of watching him eat his cereal every morning. Walking to school together. Him complaining that she always made him late. So handsome. And lovely. And tall. Plus, he smelt good.

  He looked down at her.

  It was a definite moment – a moment between the two of them, because he’d heard her, believed her. But, no, it wasn’t. It was actually a moment between him and Trinity, which Holly shouldn’t be there for.

  He reached out and took hold of her hand.