We Are Not The Same Anymore

by Chris Somerville

  Parachute

  I was playing mahjong with three older women at a Macanese Club dinner and my cousin Chute had wandered off from our table to try to buy some pot. He’d patted my shoulder when he’d stood up, but I hadn’t really been paying attention. Chute’s grandparents had been born in Macau but I wasn’t related to them. I wasn’t Macanese at all. I was blond and blue-eyed, with harsh features which, I felt, exaggerated my moods. The three women were speaking to each other in Portuguese and I couldn’t follow what they were saying. If I’d been paying attention I would have encouraged Chute not to leave. I was worried that the women were talking about me. I had only ever played mahjong on my computer.

  I was wearing a tie I’d borrowed from my father. The dinner was being held in a church hall, a suburb over from Chute’s parents’ places. They were divorced but their houses were within walking distance of each other. It was one of those modern churches that’s hard to distinguish from any other building except for the sign out the front. The women kept talking and arranging their tiles down on the table as neatly as piano keys.

  I wanted Chute to come back, even though he could only speak English.

  Before the dinner, while we’d stood on the grass out the front of the church, Chute had told me that he’d recently tried to get into the army. He was two years younger than me and had finished high school at the end of last year.

  ‘Don’t tell Dad that I tried to join,’ he said. ‘They’re not going to let me in anyway. It turns out I’m colourblind.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I can’t see red or green, no one ever told me.’

  ‘My grandfather was colourblind,’ I said. ‘He didn’t find out until he was driving and couldn’t see a traffic light.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘A fair while ago,’ I said. ‘Maybe in the forties, maybe before then.’

  We were smoking my cigarettes. I thought that Chute and I acted the same, but we looked nothing alike. Chute, much like his mother, looked Japanese and had a flat face that resembled a piece of wood worn smooth by water. His eyes were heavy-lidded and he sometimes looked like he wasn’t paying attention to anything you said. Our fathers had always been close, and we didn’t have any siblings, so we had always been encouraged to treat each other as brothers.

  Chute had been given the nickname when he was eleven and had jumped off his roof with a bedsheet, held at the corners, fluttering out uselessly behind him. He’d broken his leg and cracked a couple of ribs. He’d done this a week after his parents had divorced and everyone in our family said that this had something to do with his jumping. I think it was more than that, just like I never think there’s a sole reason behind anything.

  ‘Can I tell your dad you’re colourblind?’ I said.

  Chute considered this for a while before saying, ‘No.’

  I’d given up on the mahjong and so had the other players, or at least I assumed they’d given up. They talked to each other and now and then they’d nod at me. When they did this I tried to smile, but it was a weak smile and I couldn’t meet their gaze.

  Chute was walking back across the hall between the tables, which were really school desks covered with white tablecloths and placed together in groups of four. He stopped to talk to his grandparents, who were up at the head table. The whole room was arranged like a wedding reception.

  I had always been a little jealous of Chute’s grandparents. His grandfather owned a chemical company and looked and dressed like a gangster. He let Chute ride dirt bikes in their backyard, or bought him fireworks, and he once let him fire a .22 rifle into a paint can balanced on a tree stump. My own grandparents, all four of them, seemed boring in comparison. I was never allowed to visit Chute’s grandparents. I don’t think they liked me very much anyway.

  Chute walked back over to the table and said, ‘Looks like you made a mess of the game.’

  ‘I don’t think it was my fault,’ I said, looking at the tiles in front of me. I was pissed that Chute was blaming me, even if he was joking. I often had trouble telling that kind of thing.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, and then patted the pocket of his jacket and nodded once with his eyes closed in a way that meant it was time to go.

  Chute rolled a joint in his car. He did it with complete care and seriousness. I didn’t speak. He lit it, inhaled, then handed it to me.

  ‘It was a good dinner though,’ he said, untucking his shirt. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without them.’

  ‘You had a good time?’

  ‘I think my mother’s right when she says this kind of stuff is important.’

  ‘I guess so,’ I said.

  Now and then Chute had these strange bursts of nationalism. He’d once supported Portugal over Australia during a soccer game and in the resulting argument his father had balled his fists, as though he was about to thump him. Chute had stared back silently for a second, his eyes half-closed, and then told him that it was something he just had to do; it was a feeling he had that couldn’t be explained. Sometimes I wanted that feeling.

  When we were younger Chute and I used to fight a fair bit. We’d mostly argue and we only ever beat each other up once. Chute had always been shorter than me, but still he landed a few good hits and managed to wind me. I hit him in the face with a stray punch that made his nose bleed. After that we stopped. I was bent over and Chute was holding his bleeding nose with one hand and had the other on my shoulder. Whenever he recounts this to people he makes out like he won the fight, probably because he thinks he did.

  After smoking the joint we drove around for a while. Chute being stoned behind the wheel made me feel nervous, but I didn’t say anything and he drove carefully enough around the streets near his house. He wanted to get home after his dad had fallen asleep.

  ‘We should go out tonight,’ he said. ‘Some friends of mine are at this house party.’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know them.’

  We stopped at a red light, near a block of shops where there was a bakery and a Chinese restaurant. The last time I had gone to a party with Chute I hadn’t known anyone and I had drunk a fair bit. Chute had left with some other people but had forgotten me, so I’d had to walk around trying to find a bus stop. He was like that sometimes. I’d ended up walking home. We kept saying that eventually we’d move out of our parents’ houses and rent a place together, but he kept putting it off or changing his mind. I had come to accept that it probably wasn’t going to happen.

  The light changed and we stayed in place. Chute didn’t move, he was looking out the window.

  ‘It’s green,’ I said.

  ‘Tonight my grandfather told me that when they first moved over here they were living in this tiny apartment on the third floor and he would stay up all night with a loaded gun on his lap, watching his car in the street below through the window.’

  ‘Every night?’

  ‘I guess it was a pretty rough neighbourhood. He said he parked his car under a streetlight so he could see it better.’

  ‘When did he sleep?’

  Chute shrugged. ‘I have no idea.’

  I was feeling anxious about sitting in the middle of the road. There were no other cars in sight, but still. I was worried that someone would pull alongside us, get out of their car, and kick our windows in.

  ‘Maybe we should go to your place,’ Chute said.

  ‘My parents will still be awake.’

  Chute was quiet. I rubbed at my eyes. They were watering. We started moving down the road, then Chute hit the indicator and did a U-turn. We swung around, back the other way. I put my hand on my door to steady myself.

  ‘Forget it,’ Chute said. ‘Let’s just go to mine.’

  Driving to Chute’s house I wound down my window and let the night air hit me in the face. The sky ab
ove was clear and we passed streetlights and mostly dark houses. It had been cold earlier but I wasn’t feeling it now. I held my hand out the window and let the air move over it. I was enjoying just admiring my hand. When we came to my uncle’s housing complex there were no parking spots anywhere near the front of the house.

  ‘You could park in one of the visitor spaces,’ I said.

  ‘They get really annoyed if you’re there for more than six hours.’

  I was about to say that no one would check, but I didn’t. Chute drove quickly out of the complex’s car park and stopped by the side of the road, under a tree. When we were out of the car and walking over to Chute’s place he stopped all of a sudden and I bumped into him, because I hadn’t been paying attention.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  Chute didn’t say anything. In front of us was a dog. Its head was about the size of a football. It was black and had a short, joyless tail. It was standing completely still, staring straight at us, and making a sound like water beginning to boil.

  ‘Do you know that dog?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think it’s going to do something to us?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  Neither of us moved. For a second I wondered how I could get the dog to jump on Chute and not me. Not so he was injured terribly or caught a disease or anything, but I figured he could handle himself if the dog attacked him.

  Chute didn’t move, though, and the dog was staying unnervingly still. I stepped forward heavily and made a ‘Ha!’ noise and clapped once with my hands. The dog took a few steps back, then sniffed at the ground, turned and loped back off, leaving us behind.

  ‘Oh thank God,’ Chute said, breathing out. ‘How did you know to do that?

  ‘It was nothing,’ I said.

  I didn’t want Chute to know how relieved I was at the dog’s retreat. I also felt guilty for wanting the dog to maul him. I yawned deeply, which sometimes happened if I felt overwhelmed. I felt petty and glum, as I usually did whenever I suspected that I was the architect of most of my own misery.

  The inside of Chute’s house was dark and quiet and we climbed the stairs to his bedroom as softly as possible. He negotiated his room in the dark and turned on his desk lamp and his computer. He sat down in his desk chair. I sat down on his bed. He owned more movies than books and on his walls were flyers for films, at least a hundred of them.

  Chute took more papers from his pocket and rolled another joint. After he’d lit it and passed it to me he hit enter on his keyboard and music started playing through the computer softly. He leaned forward and opened his window. There were several small piles of clothes on the floor and there was a suitcase in the corner, sagging and half-empty. Most of his stuff was at his mother’s place.

  ‘That dog,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty dangerous, just wandering around out there. Did you see the size of it?’

  ‘It wasn’t wearing a collar,’ I said.

  ‘It could probably pop a child’s head like an egg.’

  I handed the joint back to Chute. I didn’t really feel like it anymore. I’d never been much for drugs; usually they had a way of making me feel like everyone was having a better time than me. I pushed myself backwards over the bed until my back was against the wall. His sheets smelled slightly sour, in a not unpleasant way. There was the sound of the toilet flushing, then the bathroom door opening and footsteps padding across the floor.

  ‘My friend Bec wants me to move down south,’ Chute said. ‘I need a bit more money still, but I’m probably going to do it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Not in this State, that’s for sure.’

  A moth walked across the bottom of the computer screen. Chute reached out and gently brushed it away. I wondered how much I’d miss him if he actually left; I couldn’t picture him bothering to write me a letter or an email or even call me on the phone. Chute smoked the last of the joint and we didn’t talk, and when it was done he dropped it into an old Coke can on his desk. I heard it hiss as it extinguished.

  ‘You know we should probably go out and kill it,’ Chute said.

  ‘Kill what?’

  ‘The dog. We should get rid of it.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like a good idea,’

  ‘We’d probably be doing the neighbourhood a favour.’

  The computer screen was very bright and lit one side of Chute’s face. I didn’t want to go out into the night and hunt down a dog. I don’t know how long I stared blankly at that screen for, but suddenly I was dreaming that I was falling and I jolted awake.

  ‘I’m kind of thirsty,’ Chute said.

  ‘Remember when we got into that fight and I busted your nose?’ I said.

  ‘You got me pretty good.’

  ‘My hand hurt for a week.’

  ‘Remember I hit you with that rock, though, which was way worse.’

  I’d forgotten about that until now, but I remembered the two of us throwing rocks into a hollowed-out tree on a ledge above us like it was a basketball hoop. One of the rocks hit me in the head and made a gash that didn’t seem like it was going to stop bleeding. I had looked down at my red, wet hands and been amazed that there was just so much blood inside me. At the time I was pretty convinced he’d clocked me over the head on purpose.

  ‘That was an accident though,’ I said.

  ‘Well, then, we’re even.’

  I looked at the alarm clock beside Chute’s bed. It was almost one in the morning. Out through the window the moon had made the car park and the trees a dull, uniform grey. I yawned.

  ‘Oh well,’ Chute said. ‘I suppose I should drive you home.’

  In the car I felt more alert. Streetlights rolled through the car, starting at the hood, illuminating the inside and then vanishing. This happened over and over with a machine-like regularity that made me feel seasick. Chute made a turn in the wrong direction, away from my house.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘Keep a lookout for that dog.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if we see it, I’m taking it out,’ Chute said, and he reached down underneath his seat and pulled out a small pistol. It looked like the cap gun I used to own as a child.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ I said.

  ‘That dog is an accident just waiting to happen.’

  Chute laid the gun carefully on his lap and continued to drive. We were driving through the streets around his house. He kept making left turns so that from above we would be making a rectangle box with his house somewhere in the middle. I decided that if I saw the dog I wouldn’t say a thing.

  ‘Can I hold the gun a minute?’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ Chute said. ‘But if we see it I’m the one who shoots it, okay? It has to be put down with one bullet. We don’t want it to suffer.’

  ‘I have pretty good aim,’ I said. ‘I could shoot a dog just as well as you.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Chute said. ‘You’d probably mess it up somehow and wing the poor guy. Hit its jaw and not its head or something.’

  The gun was still warm from Chute’s lap and heavier than I expected. I held it on the flat of my palm. I didn’t want to hold it properly, or point it at anything, for fear of firing it by mistake. It looked pretty mundane and harmless.

  ‘Where did you get it from?’ I said.

  ‘I borrowed it off my granddad,’ Chute said.

  ‘He lent it to you?’

  ‘About a month ago I told him our neighbours were broken into, which isn’t true, and he insisted I take it. I don’t know, I think it’s kind of cool. I’ve been sleeping with it under my pillow.’

  I thought about what would happen if I threw it out the window. Chute would probably get mad, and then I started thinking about a stranger
finding it and murdering someone and the two of us going to jail

  ‘Hand it back,’ Chute said.

  I held the gun out and he returned it to his lap. He kept making lefts. Some houses we passed were dark, others had their lights on. Now and then I looked out for the dog, and at driveways and basketball hoops and the high concreted walls of certain houses. There was no sign of the dog and I was pretty sure we wouldn’t see it again, but I didn’t want to be the first to give up.

  ‘There,’ Chute said, and stopped the car.

  ‘Where?’ I said.

  Chute didn’t answer, he was concentrating on reversing back down the street. We stopped in front of house; a large Queenslander with no lights on inside it. Chute kept the car in the middle of the road.

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ I said, though I hadn’t really looked.

  ‘It’s right there,’ Chute said.

  I looked closely and then saw what Chute was pointing at. There was a brown dog walking on the verge in front of the house with its head down, smelling the grass. It was about half the size of the dog that we’d come across.

  ‘Keep a lookout,’ Chute said.

  ‘That’s not the same dog,’ I said.

  Chute didn’t take any notice of me, he turned and aimed the gun out the window, with both of his hands. The dog still hadn’t noticed us.

  ‘Hey,’ I said again. ‘Hey, I’m serious. That isn’t the same dog.’

  ‘Of course it is. You’re just remembering it wrong.’

  Before he could squeeze off a round I leaned over and hit the car horn. Twice. It sounded louder than I expected and the dog jumped and ran off behind the house, out of sight. Chute turned back and looked at me. I got ready for him to punch me, or worse.

  ‘Why would you do that?’ he said eventually.

  ‘It had a collar on,’ I said. ‘We’ve never seen that dog before.’

  After a while Chute started driving towards my house. Neither of us spoke. For the first time I started to feel cold. I shivered and wound up my window. We drove down the highway and when we hit the bridge I looked out of the window, down the river, where I could make out the endless black shape of the ocean. The tyres on the surface of the bridge made a repetitive sound like train tracks.