It's Not You, It's Me
Page 16
Her mom had said this often happened with shock – it was the body’s way of protecting itself; a type of amnesia that made you forget the specifics when something bad happened to you. She’d said Trinity might never remember.
But such a big memory loss? Such a chunk of time?
She remembered the guy stopping to see if she wanted a lift. She remembered opening the car door and hesitating; him saying to her, Sure, I’m going right past the Greek, which had seemed odd to her – what were the chances of someone stopping to pick her up already planning on driving straight past the place she needed to get to? And then she remembered nothing.
When she’d woken up in that scary house, she’d assumed that instead of driving her to the Greek to meet up with Susie Sioux and April, he’d driven her there and taken her upstairs.
But it turned out it was a whole week later. The seventh of March.
She’d been living her normal life for an entire week and remembered none of it.
‘I’m sure I’ve got a story to tell you,’ she said to Brother Orange, feeling the cool keys under her fingertips, ‘but I haven’t a clue what it is.’
Trinity pulled out her desk chair and sat down. She opened the top drawer of her desk, looking for a sheet of paper to thread into her typewriter, and found a stack of letters; picked one up and started reading. She frowned, put it down, and picked up another one. And another. There were pages of letters, none of which she recognised. Some of them had a frantic tone, others were angry, a few of them seemed like an adult had written them, trying to calm a child. All of them were written this past week, she was sure of it.
The chunk of missing time was here, explained in these letters. But, conversely, they explained nothing. If anything, they made everything even more confusing than before she’d found them. Reading them, she’d swear they were written by two different people, living two different lives. One from the future. One from now. Lives swapped. But of course, that couldn’t be right.
Layered through the letters was a sense of remembering. But also, not remembering. Strange images wove together, but there was no clear thread. Trinity felt like if she stepped back she should be able to see a bigger picture, but instead, all the answers were unspooling. The harder she looked, the less she could see.
Day 15
FRIDAY, 14 MARCH 1980
10.42 pm
Trinity stood in front of the crowd, the heft of her electric guitar feeling solid, the weight of it keeping her grounded.
All week she’d had a sense that she might float off. So many strange things had happened that she couldn’t explain. O’Farrell had expected her to turn up to catchup classes in the library on Monday. Coach was looking forward to seeing her at softball training on Thursday. And stranger still, she’d decided to go. She felt like she wanted to do these things. She wanted to fold her clothes and put them away each night. She wanted to make her bed each morning. She wanted to go for her nightly runs again. She even wanted to read Asher Lev. (But not to please the Reaper. Never to please her.)
Susie Sioux’s house was filled with all their friends, everyone there to celebrate Susie Sioux’s birthday. Despite the abduction, despite Mrs Watanabe thinking maybe they should cancel and even Susie Sioux considering postponing, the party had gone ahead. Trinity was happy. She wanted to be here, with her head so full of music she couldn’t fit another thought in.
And right now, she and Susie Sioux and April were the music, the sounds they were creating tying them together in this moment. The music vibrated through each of them, through every person in the room, the dancing bodies plaited into the tapestry of the songs. Her calloused fingers pounded at the strings of this beautiful guitar. Not a Fender or a Gibson. A Lotus.
She stepped forward and yelled into the microphone, ‘This is for Susie Sioux. Happy birthday, Boss,’ and she kicked into the tinny riff that ushered in their final song for the night: ‘Hong Kong Garden’, the inspiration for the transformation of Susan Watanabe into Susie Sioux.
As she sang the last song of their set, Trinity found herself staring across the room at Lewis, who was dancing away. He looked, she realised, exactly like the sort of person a girl would be crazy not to kiss.
As, of course, she’d always known he was.
2.37 am
Trinity and Lewis walked home side by side, their feet keeping lockstep with each other, Trinity feeling pleasantly drunk.
‘So you don’t remember anything from that week?’ Lewis checked, not for the first time, his eyes watching the pavement as if he needed to concentrate on walking a straight line. Maybe he did. They’d certainly had enough drinks to make walking a straight line a test of skill.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I wish I did. It kind of drives me crazy, but Mom says I might never remember.’
‘Me coming out and finding you on the footpath?’
‘No.’
‘Karate-kicking me to the floor in the kitchen, cereal going everywhere?’
He’d asked her this a few times already, and she wished she had a memory of it, because every time she heard about it, it made her laugh.
‘No.’
‘Catching the baseball? Coming to the art room? Lewis Rodda?’
‘No. No. And … no.’ He hadn’t mentioned that one to her till now. ‘Who’s Lewis Rodda?’
‘No one.’
He plunged his hands in his pockets and looked away. Then he looked back at her. ‘Me holding your hand?’ he asked.
She put the brakes on, and turned to look up at him. He stopped beside her.
‘Wait. When?’
‘In the art room.’
‘You weren’t going all Olivia Newton-John, John Travolta on me, were you?’ she teased.
He started walking again, a grim set to his jaw. She raced up to him and grabbed his arm.
‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘I’m joking. I don’t remember it. What happened?’
He looked at her as if he didn’t quite trust her, and then he took her hand.
‘Nothing much. I did this.’
She looked down at their two hands, holding each other. She looked back up at him.
‘And then what happened?’
‘Then? You let go.’
‘You see, that’s when you should have known for sure something weird was going on with me.’
‘Really? Why? How do you think it should have played out?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Maybe something like this,’ she said.
And she stepped closer to him, their hands still entwined.
He looked down at her, checking that she wasn’t teasing, then moved in towards her, close enough that they were nearly kissing, but not. Only an inch between them.
‘And then?’ he asked.
And then Trinity made up the rest of the distance. That tiny inch.
Day 86
SATURDAY, 24 MAY 1980
12.01 pm
Trinity’s mom and dad sat her and Loolah down. ‘We have to tell you girls something,’ her mom said, holding her dad’s hand.
Trinity watched her parents carefully. When they’d broken up just before Christmas, she hadn’t seen it coming, and she still wasn’t quite sure why it had happened. But now that they were back together, she was keeping a close eye on them, determined to make sure they stayed together this time around. Ready to step in if need be.
Instead of seeing clues of friction, though, she’d seen clues of forgiveness. The way Dad would look at Mom, like she was a gem and he was never letting her go again. The way Mom had given him a hard time at first, the cold shoulder, but then relented because, after all, if they were going to stay together she couldn’t keep punishing him. The way, over the past month or so, they’d all settled into a rhythm that felt right, good, happy, solid. Complete.
Nearly complete.
‘Remember that baby, Trinity?’ Dad said. ‘The one you donated blood to?’
Trinity nodded, because yes, she knew about that baby. She’d read all about her.
‘We’ve decided to adopt her,’ Mom interrupted, Dad’s pace too slow for her, his story-telling getting in the way of the punchline.
Trinity’s brain went into some kind of transmission breakdown, unable to comprehend the next few sentences. The news was too big, too abstract, too unbelievable. When she finally managed to tune in again, Mom was saying, ‘She’s the dearest little thing. I mean, I often fall in love with the babies that I help deliver, but this one, she’s different. I got to know her mom a bit, before she moved back to Australia. She’s only young. Twenty. She wasn’t ready to have a baby, and she worried that she wouldn’t be able to take good care of her. We discussed it, the three of us – her, me and your dad. She gave us her blessing. The final documentation went through the lawyers yesterday.’
Trinity felt all of her organs plummeting and twirling and beating and spinning. Rearranging. Flipping. She thought she might be sick.
‘Maybe we should have spoken to you two about it before now,’ Dad said, ‘but we wanted to make sure all the ‘t’s were crossed before we told you. We didn’t want you getting your hopes up only for it to fall through.’
Tears unexpectedly began to fall down Trinity’s cheeks. It had all been there, in the letters. That little preemie baby who had grown up to live a life that wasn’t what she wanted.
… everything I’ve ever been told is a lie. I think that’s why we’ve swapped: so I can fix things and have a better life second time around.
Loolah jumped off the couch and clapped her hands, bouncing on the spot. ‘I’m gonna be a big sister!’ She threw her arms around Trinity. ‘What are you crying about? This is the best news!’ She ran over to Mom and Dad and jumped into their faces, knocking Dad’s teeth with her excitement and laughing at the pain she’d caused with her exuberance.
‘We have a few things to finalise,’ Mom said, wiping away tears of her own, ‘but we thought we might go down and visit her today. Introduce you girls to your new baby sister.’
Trinity had now shifted up a gear to full-blown, messy sobbing. Mom came over and sat close beside her, rubbing her back. ‘We don’t have to go today if you don’t want,’ she said. ‘I know it’s a lot to take in. Are you okay?’
Trinity wanted to say something, but all her words were too small and ineffectual. They didn’t have the capacity to express what her body was feeling. This was so enormous, so huge, so gigantic, so completely and utterly right.
The best she could manage was, ‘Yes. See her,’ and that right there, those few small words, were about as accurate an expression of what she was feeling as anything.
1.12 pm
At St Anne’s, Trinity’s mom and dad led the way to a room with blank beige walls and a crib. Very hospital-y. Inside was a plump-cheeked, blonde baby girl who started giggling and wiggling, holding Loolah’s Holly Hobbie doll, reaching with her arms for Trinity’s parents to pick her up. Dad leant in and kissed the top of the baby’s head, keeping his nose there for an extra moment.
‘She knows us pretty well by now,’ Mom said, and she hoicked Baby Holly, with doll, onto her hip so that she was facing Trinity and Loolah. ‘She’ll get to know you girls too real quick, I’m sure of it.’
Trinity held back, suddenly overcome with shyness, while Loolah stepped right up and put her arms out for her baby sister, loving her immediately, without hesitation. Mom put Holly in Loolah’s arms, reminding her to hold her head, and Trinity watched as Loolah tenderly bent down and became a big sister in one small movement.
All those letters. From this little baby. Obviously, that couldn’t possibly be.
Dad came up beside her and put his arm around her. ‘You doing okay?’ he asked. ‘It’s a lot to take in.’
Trinity looked at Mom. At Loolah. At Dad. And, yes, at her little baby sister. Holly. She felt a swelling of something like pride in her chest, at the thought of everything this tiny wee baby had managed. It was no small thing to Reset an entire future, and look at this. Here she was. Mission accomplished.
Loolah looked over at Trinity, then back down at Baby Holly. ‘You wanna hold?’ she asked.
Trinity hesitated for a fraction of a second, then nodded, holding her hands out. Loolah shuffled the tiny baby body into the crook of Trinity’s arm. Little Baby Holly looked up, clear-eyed, and reached a pudgy hand up to Trinity’s mouth. Trinity smiled, nibbling on tiny fingers.
‘Hey you,’ she said to her brand-new sister. ‘It’s me.’
And, no kidding, she’d swear on her Lotus Strat that little Baby Holly winked right back.
Acknowledgements
If there was more space, these people would absolutely have their names on the front cover alongside mine: Anna McFarlane, Elise Jones and Sucheta Raj. Your intuitive, perceptive, engaged, clever editorial advice was a joy to receive. You gave me the space to go off on any number of tangents and always made me feel safe to explore ideas that may or may not work. Your patience and red pens wrangled this unruly manuscript into an idea that I genuinely enjoyed working on. Also, thanks to copyeditors Sonja Heijn and Hilary Reynolds, who threw in little gems late in the day that surprised and delighted me. To Sandra Nobes and Kim Ekdahl for a cover design that everyone is loving. And of course to the rest of the team at Allen & Unwin, who are always a joy to deal with.
To my early readers – Susan Stevenson, Melody Ducasse, Doone Colless, Anna Robinson, Andrew Williams and Charlie Williams – who read some truly dreadful drafts of this book. Thank you for your genuine enthusiasm. Read this new version, it’s definitely better!
I’m extremely fortunate to work at the independent bookshop Readings, with fantastic staff, great friends, and awesome bosses (a special shout-out to Mark Rubbo and Bernard Vella). Every single day, it’s a joy to come to work. My work as the Grants Officer for the Readings Foundation has shown me what compassionate, community-minded corporate governance looks like: ten per cent of all the shop’s profits go to the foundation. Bravo, Readings! And my work as the Readings Prize Manager has exposed me to all the amazing debut authors coming up through the ranks, with a special plug for the #OwnVoices movement that’s inspired a whole new generation of authors to speak out.
Thanks also go to all the other bookshops and booksellers, book readers and book writers, book bloggers and #LoveOzYA advocates who have been so supportive of me over the years – without you, there is no industry!
To my beautiful and amazing friends, who have been with me through literally every single major event in my life – Alison Marquardt, Kate McCulloch, Lindy Lloyd, Liz Read, Margie Mitchell, Sally Fether, Sarah Larwill, Simone Lambert and Simonette Varrenti, as well as their assorted partners and children. Love!
Also – dedication at the front, thankyous at the back – thanks to Andrew, Nique, Harry and Charlie. I love travelling through time with you (albeit in an orderly, linear, un-metaphysical, un-messed-up way).
And one last thankyou: to Brother Orange. I found him in a second-hand shop in Katoomba, and without him, there would be no this.
About the Author
Gabrielle Williams lives in Melbourne and has three kids, one husband and a dog. In the name of research, she has spent time underground with a clandestine group called the Cave Clan, conducted a series of in-depth interviews with a group of notorious art thieves, and spent an inordinate amount of time working out the metaphysics of time travel. She is the author of a number of critically acclaimed young adult novels, namely Beatle Meets Destiny, The Reluctant Hallelujah, The Guy, the Girl, the Artist and His Ex and My Life as a Hashtag, all of which have been shortlisted for a number of prestigious awards.
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