It's Not You, It's Me Read online

  Other Books by Gabrielle Williams

  My Life as a Hashtag

  The Guy, the Girl, the Artist and His Ex

  The Reluctant Hallelujah

  Beatle Meets Destiny

  First published by Allen & Unwin in 2021

  Copyright © Text, Gabrielle Williams 2021

  Copyright © Cover Illustration, Kim Ekdahl 2021

  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

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76052 607 8

  eISBN 978 1 76106 270 4

  For teaching resources, explore www.allenandunwin.com/resources/for-teachers

  Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes

  Cover artwork by Kim Ekdahl

  Pages i and iii artwork by Kim Ekdahl

  Page vii diagram created by Gabrielle Williams, set by Sandra Nobes

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For Andrew, Nique,

  Harry and Charlie xxxx

  Contents

  Day 1: FRIDAY, 29 FEBRUARY 1980 Holly

  Day 2: SATURDAY, 1 MARCH 1980

  Day 3: SUNDAY, 2 MARCH 1980

  Day 4: MONDAY, 3 MARCH 1980

  Day 5: TUESDAY, 4 MARCH 1980

  Day 6: WEDNESDAY, 5 MARCH 1980

  Day 7: THURSDAY, 6 MARCH 1980

  Day 8: FRIDAY, 7 MARCH 1980

  Day 8: FRIDAY, 7 MARCH 1980 Trinity

  Day 15: FRIDAY, 14 MARCH 1980

  Day 86: SATURDAY, 24 MAY 1980

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Day 1

  FRIDAY, 29 FEBRUARY 1980

  Holly

  4.16 pm

  This is what Holly Fitzgerald knew for sure: She’d been out for lunch. She’d come home. She’d gone inside. End of story.

  So she was having trouble figuring out what she was doing lying on a nature strip, staring up at the sky, blades of grass pricking against her wrists and the backs of her legs. Her bones felt bruised. She suspected there was a very big chance she would tip out the entire contents of her queasy stomach if she lifted her head off the ground.

  There was a gap where her memory was supposed to fit.

  She remembered sitting at lunch, celebrating turning forty, toasting the new decade. Like turning forty and 2020 were good things. So far (and it was only February): her best friend had died; millions of hectares of bush had burned in worst-in-a-century bushfires; a thing called coronavirus was sweeping the world; people were saying Australia might have to go into ‘lockdown’ (whatever that meant); and just to make the perfect start to the perfect year even more perfect, her boyfriend had gone off to Sydney for a golfing long weekend and was missing her birthday altogether.

  And now here she was, lying face-up on the footpath.

  Her senses prickled with strangeness: strange smells, strange sounds, strange light. She struggled up onto her elbows, keeping her stomach in check by a sheer effort of will.

  The street was quiet, the neighbourhood unfamiliar, the house styles varied: a Californian bungalow here, a white two-storey there, a Spanish hacienda on the other side of the road. On a busy main drag visible beyond the corner a few metres to her right, traffic was bumper to bumper. Except all the cars were long and boaty, like from America in the seventies. And they were all driving on the wrong side of the road.

  A young guy leant into her field of vision. ‘Trinity?’ he said. ‘You okay?’

  Add strange person calling her a strange name to the mix.

  Holly looked down the length of her body. She was wearing a faded pink T-shirt with ‘Disco Sux’ written across the front of it. Her legs poked out of a pair of cut-off denim shorts, and she was wearing black Converse runners. But none of them were hers. The canvas runners, the T-shirt (she liked disco), the shorts, the legs … all of them belonged to someone else.

  She sat all the way up and went to put her head in her hands, to cover her eyes, to think for a moment, but her hands weren’t hers either. These ones were smaller than she was used to. The nail polish was baby blue.

  She’d just turned forty. She didn’t do baby-blue nails.

  Holly wiggled the fingers to make sure she could operate them; turned the palms towards her, then away again.

  ‘What are you doing?’ the young guy asked her.

  She’d forgotten he was there. Time felt clunky and pulled out of shape, as if one thing didn’t necessarily follow straight on from another.

  ‘My hands,’ she said, holding them up to him in explanation.

  ‘What about them?’ the young guy asked.

  ‘Look at them.’

  He clasped them for a couple of seconds. ‘They’re clammy,’ he said, staring at her. ‘Trinity, are you okay? What happened?’

  She had no idea why he was calling her Trinity, but as she stared back at him a name came into her brain. She had insight. Clarity. Knowledge.

  ‘Lewis,’ she said, clicking her fingers and pointing them gun-like at him.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You live next door.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He stretched the word out like bubblegum, stalling for time, before asking again, third time lucky, ‘Are you okay?’

  Holly thought for a moment, giving the question due consideration. ‘Uh … no, not really.’

  Understatement of the century. Or technically (as it would turn out), understatement of two centuries.

  ‘You wanna stand up?’ Lewis asked, hauling her up onto her feet.

  As she stood up, a hank of long blonde hair fell forward, the tips dyed black. She grabbed it and brought it up in front of her eyes; turned the hair over, watched the light catch on it. It was cut into layers, soft, shiny, pretty, pale, the black edge in stark contrast.

  ‘My hair,’ she said, holding it out to him.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s not mine.’

  Lewis shook his head as if he didn’t quite get the joke.

  In fact, now that she was starting to get her bearings she noticed that her voice didn’t sound like hers either.

  Dizziness overwhelmed her and she sat back down on the nature strip, her legs not fit to hold her upright. Lewis squatted back down beside her, concern all over his features.

  There was a lag between what she was seeing and hearing, and the fact of it settling into her brain. How could her hair not be hers? Her legs, her hands, her fingernails. Her voice. Why were the cars on the wrong side of the road? Where was she? How had she got here?

  Lewis reached over and picked up a fringed suede shoulder bag that was lying on the ground close by. Handed it to her. Handed her a pair of mirror-lensed Aviator sunglasses that had been lying next to it. She took them both, simply because she didn’t have the energy to explain that they weren’t hers, and opened the bag. Inside was: a leather purse with flowers embossed on it, a pack of cigarettes (without the gruesome health warning or accompanying photo), a Zippo lighter, a Ray-Ban glasses case, and a thin book of poetry by Walt Whitman.

  No phone.
>
  And by the way, going back to the fact of cigarettes … this definitely wasn’t her bag.

  She put her hands up to her eyes, pushing blackness into her vision. She just wanted to be home, surrounded by things she recognised. Her own hands and legs, at the bare minimum.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s going on. Can you call me an Uber?’ she said, keeping her hands over her eyes, trying to steady herself.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An Uber. I just want to get home.’

  ‘Home?’ Lewis said, then nothing more.

  Holly looked up to see him pointing to a house a couple of doors down the quiet street. He seemed to be indicating that it was her house, but it wasn’t. It definitely wasn’t. For one thing, it wasn’t on her street, and surely your most basic expectation was that your house would be on your street.

  Lewis stood up and held out his hand to bring her back up level with him.

  She looked up at him, frustration overwhelming her, wanting to yell, No, you don’t understand, that’s not my house, this isn’t my neighbourhood, it’s not my name, what are you talking about, you don’t even know me.

  But it was exhausting to even contemplate saying so many words out loud. Besides, there was something about Lewis that this body trusted. Holly could feel it in her slowly settling guts.

  So she abdicated all responsibility over to the unfamiliar body she found herself in, and let him bring her back up to standing. Together, hand in hand, they walked towards the house he’d pointed at.

  There was a neat green lawn with a concrete path cutting straight through its centre, from footpath to verandah. The verandah was big and breezy and cast a deep shadow over the front windows. The roof was broad and shingled, with a large attic window. Rising out of the lawn on the right-hand side was an enormous pine tree with a gnarly trunk, and down the left ran a driveway.

  It was not her weatherboard Victorian with tiny front yard and no room for a driveway.

  Absolutely not her house.

  4.28 pm

  Holly knew, even before Lewis pushed open the door, that the entrance hall would be decorated in tones of burgundy and brown. A teak hallway table would have an owl lamp on it (whenever letters arrived for anyone in the house, they’d be put under the owl’s feet). A black plastic telephone with a push-button dial would be sitting beside the owl lamp, a curly cord connecting to its receiver. Beside the phone would be a Teledex containing handwritten phone numbers and addresses for friends and family, school and work. There’d be a lounge room with a fireplace and a couch covered with geometric gold-and-cream fabric; a dining table and chairs with matching skinny black spider-legs. Along one wall would be an upright piano, and on the floor, burnt-orange carpet. Stairs would lead up to the second storey, where the bedrooms would be.

  She followed Lewis into the house, and there it all was: the teak table, the owl lamp, the black phone, the Teledex, burnt-orange carpet, spider-leg table and chairs, piano. Everything utterly familiar and utterly unfamiliar, all at the same time.

  Lewis was watching her reaction. ‘There was a guy,’ he said. ‘When I came out of my joint, he was trying to lift you into his car. Do you remember?’

  Off the lounge room would be a kitchen with bright-orange laminate cupboards, a breakfast table with bench seats, a fridge with a pull-out handle. She could even picture the box of Frosted Flakes that would be inside the cupboard above the sink.

  A bowl of cereal with ice-cold milk would really hit the spot right about now. Except Holly didn’t do sugary crap. Didn’t rely on cartoon tigers on cereal boxes for her dietary choices.

  ‘I asked him what was going on,’ Lewis was saying, ‘and he said you’d fainted and he was going to drive you home. But I pointed to your house and said, “Except she lives there,” and then he just dumped you on the ground and got in his car and drove off.’

  Holly approached the staircase and started climbing it, slowly, feeling like an intruder but knowing no one would stop her. This was her home. Even though it wasn’t. The banister felt well-worn and comfortable under her hand. There was a slight nick in the wood that her palm recognised.

  She could sense Lewis’s eyes at her back; his confusion, knowing something was wrong, but unable to pinpoint exactly what it was. Of course he couldn’t. Who could?

  ‘You want me to make some toast or something?’ Lewis called up after her. ‘I’ll make us toast,’ he decided.

  At the upstairs landing was a hallway. Holly knew that to her left were the bedrooms. To her right was the bathroom. She turned left, feeling a fluttering inside her chest like a bird was trapped in there.

  In the first bedroom, the wallpaper was an assault of oversized yellow sunflowers, red and orange tulips, green leaves. Ditto the curtains and the lampshade, with the same pattern. A poster of Debbie Harry wearing sunglasses and a black beret was stuck to one wall, along with cut-outs from magazine pages. There was a single bed, unmade. Yellow carpet – not that you could see much of it, considering the clothes and books and general crap strewn everywhere. A blue-and-white striped bath towel dumped on the floor. A milk crate tipped onto its side, vinyl records spilling out. A bashed-up acoustic guitar in the corner. And then the one thing that Holly was not expecting to see: on the desk under the window, an orange enamel typewriter. A shiny, new orange enamel Brother 210 typewriter.

  The one familiar thing in all this strangeness.

  ‘I found it at this vintage shop,’ Evie had said, at lunch that day, ‘and I thought it was perfect for you.’ As Holly unwrapped her present, Evie went on, ‘And even more perfect, the guy told me it was made in late seventy-nine, which makes it forty. And now here you are, turning forty. It’s forty. You’re forty. You two were made for each other. Happy birthday!’

  Holly had run her fingers over the smooth orange enamel, marred only by a slight scratch on the top left panel. She’d grinned up at Evie. ‘I love it. It’s perfect.’ She loved that Evie knew her so well that she’d take a punt on a strange gift like a vintage orange Brother typewriter, and get it a hundred per cent right.

  Holly stepped over the mess to the desk. Stared down at the typewriter. Ran a finger over a slight scratch in the top left panel. It couldn’t be. The orange enamel was glossy. The keys were glistening, sharp black with pristine white letters stamped on them.

  It was the fresh-out-of-the-box version of the one Evie had given her earlier that afternoon.

  The minute she got home she’d set it up on her desk in the front room. The typewriter sat there, like, ‘gimme paper’. So she’d scrolled in a piece of white A4, then wondered what to type. Her fingers rested on the keys, trying to find the starting words. She decided on a ‘thank you for my typewriter’ letter to Evie.

  Dear, she typed, then stopped.

  The ink on the ribbon was so dry the letters barely registered on the page. It was as if the lifeblood of the typewriter itself had been drained. She needed to get a new ribbon.

  But now that she’d started, she wanted to try it out, hear the clack as the keys pressed down, the clatter as the metal letter arms slapped up towards the page. She could tell, even from having typed a single short word, that it required a different touch to a laptop. Heavier. Firmer. Each letter pressed deliberately.

  So, what to write? Dear who?

  She looked at the still-vibrant orange enamel, the Brother logo in the top left panel, and suddenly her fingers were tapping out:

  Dear Brother Orange

  The next thing she knew, she was waking up on the footpath out the front. And now, here was the typewriter, the exact one, on the desk under the window in this bedroom, brand new, with a sheet of paper wound into it. Holly yanked the page up and stared at the typescript – black as coal, standing out loud and proud against the white page.

  Dear Brother Orange

  Holly felt dizzy. She plonked down onto the bed, putting her head in her hands again. She needed to get out of here. But where would she go? Nothing made sense. She wo
ndered if her drink had been spiked at lunch. It was possible. But surely even if you were completely drugged out of your brain, you’d recognise your own home, your own hands, your legs, your hair, when you came to?

  This wasn’t drugs. This was something else entirely.

  ‘You got no butter,’ she heard someone calling up the stairs. ‘I’ll go grab some from our joint.’

  A vague waft of toast-air brought her back to the room she was in. Lewis. How did she know his name? And when he’d called her Trinity, she’d known it was her name the moment he’d said it – had felt the rightness of it deep down in her chest.

  She wasn’t her. She was someone else altogether. Which made no sense. Conversely, it was the only thing that made sense.

  A simple look in the full-length mirror that she knew was on the inside of the wardrobe door would surely prove her hunch right. But the thought of an unfamiliar face staring back at her filled her with a heavy dread. She chewed down on her thumbnail, a habit she hadn’t indulged in for a very long time, and found that there wasn’t much to chew on; these nails had already been well and truly gnawed.

  To get away from the mirror behind the door, Holly walked out of the bedroom and into the hallway, towards the rest of the bedrooms. Checking that all was as she had it mapped out inside her head.

  The first bedroom had a double bed neatly made up with a quilt of peach velour, floral carpet, glass doors opening onto a small balcony, built-in robes. The parents’ room. Check. Exactly as she’d expected.

  She crossed the hallway to the other bedroom, which followed a similar theme to hers – a chaotic floral design (pink, this time) covering the walls, curtains, lampshades, chest of drawers, quilt cover. Except in this instance, the quilt was pulled up neatly, the pillows plumped, the clothes put away. Everything was ordered and pristine. The way Holly preferred things.

  On the bed, leaning against the pillow, was a soft-bodied ragdoll with blonde plaits, big round eyes and a small stitched mouth, wearing a patchwork pinafore and a cloth bonnet, its arms folded across its lap. A Holly Hobbie doll. Holly had the exact same one herself, given to her when she was born. It was her namesake. Even now, it was in her hallway cupboard, boxed up with all the sentimental bits and bobs she’d never been able to get rid of: a stack of old photos, the letter her dad had written to her mum, Grannie Aileen’s mahjong set.