My Life as a Hashtag Read online

  This project was assisted by a residency at Varuna the Writers’ House

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2017

  Copyright © Gabrielle Williams 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760113681

  eISBN 9781760638061

  Teachers’ notes available from www.allenandunwin.com

  Cover and text design by Debra Billson

  Cover images: hand girl © Wave/Stocksy; wolf-hat girl © Howl/Stocksy; icons © inroad/Shutterstock

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  To S&B with love

  Contents

  18th September

  Introduction

  16th April

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  17th June

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  31st July

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  19th September

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  18th September

  These are what happy days looked like

  Yumi’s house was strictly back-door only.

  The front door was for electricians, plumbers, and religious freaks rummaging in the shrubs for converts. It meant someone inside the house had to get up from what they were doing to let you in.

  The back door required no more heavy lifting than an arm raised in a wave. The back door was friendlier. Which is why I always went through it.

  Wilder was slouched on the couch, a movie streaming on the teev, his hand raised in a lazy wave as I came through the back door.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, without looking over at me.

  ‘Hey,’ I said back.

  This is probably as good a time as any to tell you a little something about Wilder.

  Wilder is Yumi’s brother. If I were a couple of years older … if I’d only just met Wilder at a party … he’d be my number-one draft pick.

  He has slim hips and long legs, and his fingers look like they belong on the keyboard of a piano.

  His voice is deep and soothing. He should be on the radio. Except he’s too handsome for the radio.

  He has dark hair that he wears longish. Sometimes he tucks it back behind his ears, or pushes it off his face and keeps it there with one of Yumi’s headbands.

  His toffee-coloured eyes have a molten quality to them, like they’ve been poured straight from the saucepan. His mouth is slightly puffy, as if he’s been punched, but you know he hasn’t been punched because no one, no matter how crazy, would ever want to damage such a beautiful face. Sometimes he bites his bottom lip when he’s thinking, creating a chink in the cushiony softness and breaking thousands of girls’ hearts everywhere with that one tiny tooth-bite.

  Wilder has this group of friends who are the same as him: a tsunami of cool and handsome, wrecking any female who happens to be in the vicinity.

  Except me. They don’t wreck me, because I’ve known them since they were toy-car-pushing, plastic-soldier-exploding boys. Since the days when the dining table would be draped with blankets and towels, and sandwiches would be slotted through to us by Yumi’s mum as we sat cross-legged in the muddy light of the blanket-world.

  I’ve been bench-pressed by Wilder – me and Yumi both have – when he hit thirteen and wanted to build up his muscles.

  I’ve helped Yumi peel the skin off his back, when he got sunburnt a few summers ago.

  I’ve spent as much time with Wilder as I have with my own brother. Wilder didn’t wreck me. None of them wrecked me.

  Actually, that’s not strictly true. Harley ended up wrecking me. When he stopped talking to us all; stopped being friends with Wilder. But back when I was walking through Yumi’s door that day … back then … Harley wasn’t wrecking me yet.

  Harley’s my brother. One of the toy-soldier aficionados. Ever since we were kids, it’d been me and Yumi, Harley and Wilder.

  Say goodbye to that.

  But wait, this is supposed to be the happy part of the story. The sunshine, lollipops, rainbows and butterflies part.

  This is the Before part.

  ‘Where’s Harley?’ Wilder asked, his thumb scrolling upwards as he checked his news feed on his phone.

  ‘He’s coming,’ I said.

  The movie Wilder was watching had an old guy sitting behind a newscaster’s desk, his hair wet like he’d been stuck in a downpour. There were a couple of clocks on the wall behind him showing different time zones. He seemed angry, going on about how banks were going bust, and people were scared of losing their jobs, and shopkeepers were keeping guns under their counters. Saying that the food was unfit to eat and the air was unfit to breathe; that things were bad – worse than bad; things were crazy, and we were all supposed to sit there and take it.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked, kneeling on an arm of the couch.

  The same couch we’d dragged the cushions off all those years earlier to make teepee villages.

  ‘Network,’ he said. ‘Number sixty-four.’

  Wilder had started film school that year, and he’d made it his own personal mission to go through the Top One Hundred Movies of All Time. Anytime you went round there, he was as likely to be watching The Babadook (no. 71) as he was Cool Hand Luke (no. 67), or Annie Hall (62) or Toy Story (56).

  Or Network (no. 64).

  Yumi came in from the kitchen, a cheese toastie in her hand, her black hair pulled back into a messy ponytail.

  ‘MC!’ she said, putting her arm around me. ‘I haven’t seen you in ages.’ (I’d seen her at school assembly ringing out the end of Term 3, Year 10 a couple of hours earlier). She smooched my cheek, then settled down on the arm of the couch next to me.

  ‘Have you been watching this?’ I asked her, my eyes fixed on the ranting man.

  ‘A bit. But I got kind of bored. And toasted cheese sambos were calling me,’ she added, looking with love and longing at the toastie between her fingers, then biting into it because she could resist no longer.

  She was only human, after all.

  ‘How can you say this is boring?’ Wilder said to her. ‘World’s best – well, sixty-fourth best – movie of all time, classic Sidney Lumet, Academy Award winning, culturally significant, blah blah.’

  ‘You’re not even watching it,’ Yumi pointe
d out to him. ‘That’s how amazing it is.’

  Wilder chucked his phone onto the cushions of the couch and folded his arms across his chest, turning his face TV-side, to demonstrate watching-it for his sister.

  Harley came in the back door and walked straight over to Yumi. ‘Something smells good,’ he said.

  ‘That’d be me,’ Wilder said.

  ‘That’s so sweet of you to make that for me,’ Harley said, grabbing Yumi’s arm and making like he was going to snatch the toastie out of her hand, his mouth open and ready to start chomping.

  Yumi wrenched her toastie out of reach of his mouth. ‘You know where the kitchen is, buddy boy.’

  Harley let go of Yumi’s arm and plonked himself down on the couch next to Wilder. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, folding his arms across his body.

  ‘Network,’ I said. ‘Number sixty-four. Academy Award Sydney Harbour something something.’

  ‘Sidney Lumet,’ Wilder said.

  ‘Same difference.’

  The newscaster guy was pointing his finger straight at the camera, saying that he was sick of us holding on to our toasters and our TVs and our steel-belted radials. He wanted us to get mad.

  He stood up from his desk, agitated; waved his arms like an orchestra conductor motioning for all the instruments to play to the crescendo. He told everyone to stand up, to go to their windows … to open them, stick their heads out, and yell, I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore! He windmilled his arms about, saying it over and over again, like he was stuck on a loop: ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore! I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’

  The movie had our full attention now. It cut to a street scene, night-time, somewhere in New York. The weather was vicious, but people were opening their windows anyway, leaning out into the squalling rain, yelling that they were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take this anymore. A chorus of people, shrieking, howling, lightning spotlighting them and thunder underlining their fury.

  I wanted to be there, in that moment, one of those shaggy-headed seventies girls living in New York, fire-escape stairs zigzagging across the back of my apartment building, yelling into the rain that I was mad as hell and I wasn’t going to take it anymore.

  I wasn’t really. I wasn’t mad as hell about anything – not back then I wasn’t – but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d yelled my loudest and stamped my foot. Probably not since I’d been a kid.

  Wilder got up off the couch and walked over to the sliding doors leading out into the backyard. It was a beautiful start-of-spring day in Melbourne, sunshiny, clear blue, no clouds. A wash-load of clothes hung clipped to the clothesline outside; a Joy Division T-shirt pulled lazily against its pegs.

  I knew exactly how warm the air would be when Wilder stepped into it, because I’d been walking in it only ten minutes earlier. It was the kind of temperature that is no temperature: where bare arms don’t feel the lick of the sun or the bite of the wind, or even notice they’re bare; the first warm day for months, where finally, finally, it feels like winter is packing up its bags and moving to the northern hemisphere to annoy the people there for a change.

  Wilder stood on the back verandah for a moment, then he tilted his head up at the sky, threw his arms out crucifixion-style and howled, ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’

  I could see, even from behind, that he was grinning. There was a flippantness to him; to the simple enjoyment of standing in the warmth and yelling abuse at no one in particular and everyone in general.

  Harley laughed. He got off the couch and ran outside, doing a speccy on Wilder’s back as he joined him, yelling that he was mad as hell too and wasn’t going to take it anymore.

  Yumi threw the crust of her nearly finished toastie onto the coffee table; then she grabbed my arm and ran me outside with her, yelling at the world before she’d even got past the couch, repeating the same sentence over and over, changing the way she said it, trying out a different emphasis on the words each time: ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore. I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.’

  Standing with the three of them, I tilted my head upwards, facing the perfect blue of that early-spring day. I opened my mouth but, suddenly uncertain, my throat clamped like a vice, the words snagged on a vocal cord.

  It felt strange, awkward. Like if I started yelling, someone would notice and yell back at me, ‘You’re not mad as hell. Not even by half.’

  But then I realised that it was just noise. Freedom. Letting loose. No one would listen, and no one would care. The words unsnagged and came hurtling out of my throat, rattling against the trees in Yumi’s backyard and blaring up into the cloudless blue of the sky.

  ‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore. I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore. I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.’

  Putting the entire globe on notice – just because I could – that I was mad as hell.

  And I wasn’t going to take it anymore.

  Seven months later

  16th April

  The butterflies can’t be trusted

  Chapter 1

  I sat on the train watching the wind rage at the tops of trees. Hassling, arguing, berating, tearing off leaves, throwing seed pods and branches onto the ground. Stomping its foot, having a tantrum.

  Mad as hell at the world.

  Welcome to autumn in Melbourne.

  The clouds were dark and heavy, like they badly wanted to squeeze out even a baby-sized rainstorm, but the bambino was staying where it was, stubbornly refusing to be ejected from the cottonwool of the clouds. Maybe tomorrow the storm would come. Or later tonight at the party. Or maybe next week. Who knew.

  I snapped a shot of my feet on the seat and sent it to Yumi, Liv, Anouk and Hattie.

  ‘City. Lunch. Dad,’ I captioned it.

  It was a Saturday. And I’d brushed my hair.

  I wouldn’t normally have done either of these things: brushed my hair, or gone into the city to meet Dad for lunch. But things were different now that Dad had moved out.

  My parents had split up seven months ago. The day after Harley and I had been round at Yumi’s place yelling that we were mad as hell.

  Them splitting is no biggie in the scheme of things. Terrorists still blow up random public spaces. People off their heads on ice still attack whoever they’ve decided has looked at them funny. The globe is still warming like a pot of water on the stove.

  A mum and a dad splitting up is microscopic. A speck on a speck of a speck. That’s as much as it matters.

  Except in our speck of a house, on our speck of a street, in our speck of a suburb, the split felt nuclear-bomb-ish. One atom’s nucleus splitting into two unbalanced nuclei – me, Mum and Harley one fragment; Dad the other.

  Explosions all round.

  So now when I wanted to see Dad, I didn’t go into the kitchen and shove him out of the way of the toaster, or take the remote from him and change the channel. Instead, I had to go round to Grandpa’s house, where he was staying at the moment, or catch the train into the city to have lunch with him.

  And on this particular day, in honour of lunch in the city, I’d brushed my hair.

  I would generally consider myself to be a staunch anti-hair-brushing type of girl. I don’t like how neat it looks when a brush has been dragged through it. Too fluffy. Too magnetised. Too to-the-shoulders.

  When Dad lived at home, he’d look at me when I came downstairs and say, ‘Your hair could do with a brush, MC. You look like the wreck of the Hesperus.’ Whatever that was.

  Actually, I can tell you; I googled it. After Dad moved out, I thought I should find out what he’d been saying to me all those years. I expected it would be something to do with Greek or Roman mythology – you know, like the Hydra or the Minotaur or Hercules – but it’s not. It’s a poem by this guy c
alled Longfellow.

  It’s about the captain of a ship called the Hesperus, who takes his daughter on board for one of his trips. A crewman warns him that a hurricane is coming, that his daughter shouldn’t come on the trip, but the captain ignores him, thinking he knows better. When the storm arrives, the captain lashes his daughter to the mast to prevent her from being swept overboard. The storm is so fierce that everyone on board dies, and the next morning a fisherman finds the daughter’s body, still tied to the snapped-off mast, drifting in the surf.

  A happy, cheery poem to refer to each morning when your daughter hasn’t brushed her hair. Thanks, Dad.

  So on this particular Saturday when I was catching the train into the city to have lunch with my dad, I brushed my hair.

  Call it a peace offering, an olive branch. Call it an unwrecked Hesperus, daughter not yet lashed to the mast.

  I got off the train at Flinders Street Station and walked up Elizabeth Street, the wind shoving me in the back, pushing at me, hurrying me along. The weekend-shopper crowds swirled around me, together with the autumn leaves. I slipped out of the mainstream and washed along Little Collins Street, away from Myer and David Jones and the Bourke Street Mall, towards my dad’s work. Up the guts of the canyon created by the buildings. As I headed towards the mirrored, fuck-off towers of William Street, the wind still hassled me, like a drunk wanting my spare change, only leaving me alone once it had pushed me aggressively into the foyer of Dad’s building.

  I texted Dad. ‘Downstairs.’

  There was a gurgle of nerves in my stomach.

  Nerves.

  Over meeting my dad.

  That’s what happens when your folks split up. Suddenly, lunch with your dad feels like a date-type thing: a serious, important, don’t-mess-this-up-type event, instead of a don’t-brush-your-hair-because-who-cares-type meal.

  I felt like things were fake-comfortable with Dad these days. Everything was nromal – you see what I did there? Exactly the same, but shifted around slightly.

  He texted me back: ‘Coming down.’