It's Not You, It's Me Page 4

  ‘What are you making?’ Loolah called from the lounge room where, from the sound of things, she was watching morning cartoons.

  ‘Peanut butter and jelly. Want some?’ Holly yelled back.

  ‘Yeah. Thanks.’

  Holly put two slices of bread in the toaster and wondered exactly how much of each ingredient she was supposed to put on top. Did you use butter as well? And which went first, the peanut butter or the jelly? So many questions, and no smart phone to google with.

  While she was waiting for the toast to pop, she picked up the newspaper lying on the bench. It was the same one she’d seen the night before. Friday, 29 February 1980.

  Yesterday Holly hadn’t really registered anything aside from the masthead and the date, but now she started reading, catching up on what was news in 1980. If she wasn’t going to get tripped up in this stranger’s life, she needed to know what was going on. A nuclear moratorium had ended. Guerillas had released thirteen people from an embassy in Colombia. Sperm donors were being awarded the Nobel Prize (seriously?).

  At the bottom of the front page was the weather: mid to low seventies. Was that hot, cold or mild? Through the window it looked sunny. She remembered from yesterday afternoon that the air had felt coolish when she’d woken up on the footpath – on the sidewalk. If February in Australia was the end of summer, it must be the end of winter here in the northern hemisphere. She guessed it might be around about twenty degrees Celsius. Again, a smart phone wouldn’t go astray here.

  She started leafing through the paper. Carter’s Dilemma on Inflation (ahem, that’d be President Carter). Florida Getting Radio Moscow on AM Band. Ads for Fred Astaire Dance Studios. The toast popped, but Holly didn’t notice – she was too engrossed in 1980. There were illustrated fashion ads featuring men with their arms folded across their chests and a look as if to say, I might be a pen-and-ink drawing, but I can still look stylish and lead board meetings. Not to mention an entire page of cartoons – Andy Capp and the Wizard of Id and Dennis the Menace and Star Wars and BC, and that didn’t even cover half of them.

  She flipped over to a page featuring a column of horoscopes. Holly wasn’t a horoscope reader as a general rule, but these were not general-rule circumstances. If anything was going to make you reconsider your stance on astrology and all things supernatural, it was waking up to find yourself in someone else’s body forty years into the past.

  Sometimes referred to as the Date of Resetting, the column read, February 29 is thought to contain a peculiar spiritual vibration that impacts directly on time and makes time travel possible (time, of course, being the fourth dimension, and February 29 occurring once every fourth year).

  ‘PBJ,’ Loolah called out from the lounge room. ‘Waiting on my PBJ. Sometime before the end of forever would be nice.’

  Holly didn’t answer.

  Leap days that fall at the start of each new decade are considered especially auspicious. Today’s leap day has an incredibly rare spiritual frequency because it is the last Date of Resetting for the twentieth century, as well as being the last Date of Resetting for this millennium. This is a once-in-a-thousand-years date and enormous mystical events can be expected to transpire.

  Loolah marched into the kitchen. ‘Where’s my peanut butter and jelly?’ she demanded.

  Holly looked over at her, eyes glazed, then pointed at the toast going cold in the toaster.

  ‘I don’t want toast,’ Loolah said. ‘You said you were making peanut butter and jelly.’

  Date of Resetting. Time travel. Enormous mystical events. Once-in-a-thousand-years.

  Holly wasn’t sure what any of it meant, but for the first time since she’d woken up on the footpath out the front yesterday afternoon, she had a sense that if she thought about it hard and long enough, she just might be able to grasp what she was doing here.

  12.04 pm

  The two sisters rode their bikes down the streets of Los Feliz without helmets – in the crazy, chaotic LA traffic, young heads exposed, soft brains ready to be crushed like goo against car bonnets.

  Holly had gone all through the house searching for helmets.

  ‘Since when have we ever worn bike helmets? Do we even own bike helmets?’ Loolah had said. Then she’d added, ‘I guess if you’re a forty-year-old from Melbourne you might need one,’ and laughed at her own joke before hopping on her bike and riding out of the driveway without even stopping to look first.

  Exactly! Holly felt like calling out to her. She’d frantically climbed onto her bike and followed the little girl out onto the street, wobbling perilously every time a car came close. Which was constantly. The two of them rode handlebar to handlebar (even though Holly kept trying to pull back, worried that side by side they presented a wider target), as Loolah discussed the plot of the The Neverending Story, which she was currently reading.

  ‘… and the Childlike Empress asks him to speak her name out loud, but Bastian doesn’t because he doesn’t believe it’s really real …’

  They rode past mid-century buildings featuring blond brickwork in repeated geometric patterns; neon signs advertising drycleaners and beauty salons and barbers and Chinese restaurants; twenty-four-sheet posters announcing the latest movies: Kramer vs Kramer, The Amityville Horror, Apocalypse Now, Alien, 10, The Muppet Movie.

  Holly took in the palm bushes and dry lawns and parched garden beds in people’s front yards. ‘For Rent’ signs were tied to palm trees, with phone numbers to call to apply. And the cars – there were lots and lots of cars, all of them slung low on the road like hammocks, their looming bonnets coming at her unexpectedly from the left rather than her right, nearly bowling her over at each intersection.

  As they rode along, Holly tried to catalogue the facts as she knew them inside her brain, but everything was slippery and confused. She knew (how, she wasn’t sure – she supposed in the same way she knew everything and nothing about this girl’s life …) that the dad’s name was Woody. That he was tall, dark, handsome: classic movie-star looks, which made sense because he’d been an actor back in the day. His chin was slightly overlarge. Now he worked as a scriptwriter on a daytime soap called Everingham Hospital. That was how he’d met the mom – she’d got a job as a continuity assistant, making sure all the medical scenes were authentic, that the symptoms matched up accurately to the Disease of the Week, that the make-up gave the appropriate sickly hue to the actor. They’d fallen in love, got married, had two kids, and then, unexpectedly, he’d moved out just before Christmas.

  Again Holly wondered what it was like to have a dad. How was she expected to behave? What would they do when they saw each other? Would they hug? Kiss? Shake hands? No, she knew they wouldn’t shake hands. But the hug? The kiss? Who knew?

  A car beeped its horn, startling her, causing her to nearly crash. Brain goo everywhere.

  Holly shook her head, flinging all thoughts of the dad out onto the bitumen behind her and riding away from them.

  ‘… and Bastian ends up in Fantasia, and the Empress gives him a note that says “Do What You Wish”, but every time he makes a wish, he loses one of the memories of his life as a human, and …’ Loolah was saying.

  Tuning in, Holly wondered whether maybe that was going to happen to her. Would she remember less and less of her old life the longer she stayed in this world? Was there a chance of her being Bastianed? She tested her memories, poking gingerly at them like she would a bruise.

  Evie and Noah and their two cutest-kids-ever, Mercy and Hope.

  Thirty-two Mulroy Street, Prahran – the little house she’d bought with the money Grannie Aileen had left her in her will.

  ‘I Am Woman’ playing as they carried Zoe’s coffin out.

  Michael picking her up from Mulroy Street and the two of them driving down to Lorne for the weekend.

  The memories ached against the surface of her skin and deep into her chest. They were real, all right. But what about this – this life she’d been thrown into? The mom. Loolah. Lewis. Her bedroom. The fa
miliarity of it all.

  The tick-tick-tick of the playing cards Loolah had stuck in her wheel spokes made a pleasant, soft sound as Holly fell back into single file, letting the little sister take the lead.

  Loolah skidded to a stop out the front of a two-storey brick building, dumped her bike where she was standing, and ran over to buzz the buzzer. Holly’s heart thumped. She didn’t want to go up. She looked for a bike lock to tie the bikes together but there were none, because this was 1980 and bike locks probably hadn’t been invented yet. She finally leant both their bikes against the wall out the front, wiped her palms down the front of her windcheater, then walked up the stairs.

  At the top was an open front door with a brass number ‘4’ screwed into the wall beside it. She walked in and there he was, standing in the hallway, his arms still around Loolah. The dad. Looking exactly as she knew he would.

  ‘You took your time,’ he said. ‘What were you doing downstairs?’

  The façade that she’d managed to keep up while she’d been riding with Loolah crumbled like a sandcastle wall. The strangeness of it all, the fact of having a dad for the first time in her life, not knowing for sure what was real and what wasn’t – it was too much. She covered her face with her hands, tears streaming down her cheeks, too fragile to deal with something as simple as ‘you took your time’.

  The dad put his arms around her, instantly concerned. ‘Wait. Hang on. I was just messing with you, kiddo.’

  ‘She was being weird last night too,’ Loolah said. ‘Wouldn’t speak to any of her friends on the phone …’

  ‘You haven’t had a fight with them, have you?’ the dad asked into her hair.

  Holly shook her head. But who knew? Maybe she had.

  ‘… and then she said she thought she was from Melbourne,’ Loolah went on.

  ‘Melbourne, Florida?’ the dad said.

  ‘… and she fainted out the front of our place yesterday. Mom thinks she’s got … um … percussion …’

  ‘Concussion?’ the dad checked.

  ‘Yeah, I think so, and this morning she asked if I wanted peanut butter and jelly, but then she made toast instead, and she nearly got run over about seventeen times on the way here.’

  ‘You don’t make PBJ with toast,’ the dad said to Holly.

  ‘I know,’ Loolah said. ‘Exactly. And there was some guy, something happened with some guy.’

  ‘What guy?’ the dad asked.

  Hearing the sharpness in the dad’s voice, Holly realised that she hadn’t given this matter enough thought. Yesterday with Lewis, she’d been occupied with trying to get things straight in her head. With the mom, she’d been busy trying to find her feet. She’d had so many other things snagging her attention since she’d woken up on the footpath yesterday, but now, here, within the safety of the dad’s arms, she had to wonder what that guy had been doing. Was he really trying to help a girl who’d fainted as he was driving past? Or was it something more sinister? Should they be going to the police? But what would she say? She had no description to provide, no idea whether he was old, young, or in between, what colour his hair was, if he had any identifying facial features, any of the things police would traditionally ask for in these matters.

  There were too many things she didn’t know. And standing here with the dad’s arms around her felt awkward and comforting at the same time.

  ‘Trinity?’ the dad repeated. ‘What guy?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘He was no one. Just a guy trying to help out when I fainted.’

  ‘You fainted? Again?’

  Holly felt herself being overwhelmed. It was easier to keep sobbing than to answer the unanswerable questions being thrown her way. She relaxed into a full-blown crying jag, really wallowing in it, which actually felt incredibly cathartic. Finally, she started feeling settled despite herself, and the dad guided her to the couch and said, ‘I’ve got something that will cheer you up.’ He unwrapped his arms from around her and left the hallway, coming back with a gift-wrapped guitarshaped parcel with a card sticky-taped to it.

  A guitar. For the most unmusical person imaginable. This was not going to end well.

  Holly read the card (‘Happy 4th Birthday’, of course, ha ha), then unwrapped the present and grimly flipped the heavy case open to reveal an electric guitar nestled in orange velvet. It had a smooth maple neck and two-tone body finish (a white body with a sunburst of rusted red seeping to the edges), a gold bridge, tuners and pickups: words she wouldn’t normally know. The name ‘Lotus’ was written in a flourish at the head.

  A Lotus Strat.

  She put the case down at her feet, then lifted the guitar onto her knees.

  ‘Do you like it?’ the dad asked.

  ‘It’s nice,’ she said, staring dumbly down at it. What the hell was she going to do with this? She didn’t know her A from her middle C. Although apparently she knew her tuners from her pickups.

  ‘I know it’s not a Fender, or a Gibson,’ the dad went on. Holly felt a judder of recognition – that was what Trinity had been hoping for. ‘But the guy in the shop said the Lotus was just as good. Nearly as good. Better value for money. And, you know, I thought …’ and he let the rest of the sentence hang in the air.

  ‘Better value for money’ equalled ‘the others are bloody expensive’.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Holly said, plucking at the strings in embarrassment. And it was – it was a really beautiful guitar. It was just that she didn’t know how to play it. ‘I love it. Thanks …’ She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘Dad’. It just felt too weird inside her mouth.

  ‘Play us something,’ the dad said. He was watching her, waiting. Smiling, expectant.

  She strummed the strings, trying to get a feel for the instrument. She was going to make a fool of herself. But as she started tinkering, her fingers took off with a mind, or a memory, all their own. Her body was plucking the strings, listening for tone, adjusting the tuning pegs, bringing the waist of the Lotus closer under her arm, turning the random notes into a cohesive, beautiful song drawn straight from the soul of the instrument, knowing exactly how long to hold each note, where to move her fingers on the neck. It resonated surprisingly loudly, for an electric guitar that wasn’t plugged in. It had a long … her brain reached for the word … a long sustain, the chords lingering. She felt a buzz in her chest at the thought of plugging this baby in. It was going to sound spectacular.

  Holly couldn’t know how many hours this body had practised, or how much was bred-in-the-bone natural talent, but even listening from the inside of this body, she could hear that the Lotus was being played like a dream. The fingers were confident, feeling their way without her eyes needing to get involved, finding the exact notes without a single wrong move.

  She’d never considered herself musical.

  And yet, here she was.

  4.23 pm

  Holly and Loolah rode home, Holly balancing the heavy guitar case across her knees. You’d have thought the dad would have given them a lift. But no. He’d just waved them off.

  Again, she nearly got bowled over by traffic coming unexpectedly from the left an alarming number of times, although perhaps slightly less often than on the way over. That was what you called progress, right there.

  The mom was in the kitchen getting things sorted for dinner. She tsked when she saw the gift, and made some comment about it being too expensive. Something along the lines of, ‘How many guitars does one girl need?’ Holly looked at the mom’s back and felt the hurt that was clinging to her. Woman to woman, she knew.

  A wet wodge of sadness had lodged in her throat when Evie had mentioned that she and Noah had caught up with Jamie and his new girlfriend. ‘I didn’t expect her to be there, I’d thought it was just going to be the three of us…’

  And Holly had ploughed through the wet wodge to say, ‘Oh, no, no, of course, I mean, Jamie and Noah are good friends, of course you’re going to be hanging out with her,’ whereas what she’d wanted to say was, ‘N
O! You’re MY friends, you should be on MY side, I DON’T WANT YOU going out and having a good time with him and his new girlfriend!’

  Sometimes she wondered if the reason she’d chosen to be with Michael was because she knew he’d never be able to hurt her the way Jamie had.

  Holly looked at the mom’s back and wondered how it must feel to have broken up with your husband, knowing that your children were still going over to see him, spending time with him, enjoying his company. It wasn’t rational to mind that, but even though the reasonable side of the mom no doubt understood it was important for her children to happily see their dad, her emotional side probably leant more towards, ‘NO! I want you to be on MY side.’

  Relationships were complicated. Holly went over to the mom and gave her a woman-to-woman hug.

  ‘A guitar’s good,’ she said, ‘but it’s not a pair of brand-new birthday Aviators.’ She took the silver-framed reflective Ray-Bans from the top of her head and swung them by the arm in front of the mom.

  A pleased smile briefly scudded across the mom’s face before she managed to stifle it and said, ‘Oh toots, I’m not in competition with your father.’

  Of course she was.

  The brriing of the phone interrupted the moment. Holly stepped back, away from the mom, away from the phone. She picked up the guitar and went to go upstairs to her bedroom, but the mom looked over at her, as if it was a foregone conclusion that Holly would pick it up.

  Brriing! Insistent.

  Holly wasn’t ready for the outside world yet, even if it was only coming in through the phone line. The mom pursed her lips, then reached over and picked up the receiver. ‘Hello? Yeah, sure hon, here she is.’ And she passed the phone over to Holly. ‘It’s Susie Sioux.’

  Holly’s instinct was to hang up the phone and deal with the consequences later. But if she didn’t talk to this girl, the mom would know something was up. Slowly she put the guitar back down on the kitchen floor, stalling for time, then picked up the receiver and said, voice neutral, ‘Hello.’