We Are Not The Same Anymore

by Chris Somerville

  I never mentioned the girl to anyone. I didn’t really know what to do in that kind of situation. I suppose I could have talked about my father, who shot himself in the end, but all I could think of at the time were my mother’s words, on her birthday, after she’d been drinking most of the afternoon. Her voice was distant and mournful and she said that my father had made a real mess of things.

  I didn’t tell any of this to the girl. I didn’t even remember to ask for her name.

  Karen came back into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around her. She had a smaller towel wrapped around her head. Her hair was long and thick and hard to get dry. I liked her hair. When she walked over to the dresser to find something to sleep in, a rock came in through the window. It bounced a few times and then came to a standstill on the floor. It wasn’t any bigger than a tennis ball.

  ‘God that gave me a fright,’ Karen said, though she sounded calm. She was pressing her hand to her chest.

  I climbed out of bed and went to the window, but the street was empty and completely quiet, apart from the sound of the ocean in the distance. Most nights you could either hear the waves crashing or the sound of the highway in the opposite direction, depending on the wind. I didn’t mind either. I found the sound of the ocean relaxing, and the sound of traffic on the highway reminded me that there were other people awake and doing things. I found it a comfort. The neighbours’ house was dark now.

  ‘Can you see anyone?’ Karen said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘It’s lucky the window was open. Do you think they knew that? Were they trying to break something?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  Karen leaned over and picked up the rock. She balanced it in her palm, gauging its weight. I closed the window. Karen put the rock on top of the dresser and put on a singlet and underwear. She got into bed.

  ‘Are you going to go look around?’ she said, arranging the bedding around her.

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ I said.

  ‘You’d have to find the torch and I don’t think it has any batteries in it.’

  ‘I can’t see anyone outside,’ I said.

  Karen shrugged in a way that meant I’d be going outside. For a while we’d had a dog, this tan-coloured mix we’d picked up at the shelter. It was short-furred and sometimes it would bite at us, or stand in the middle of the living room and bark for no reason. Karen adored it. ‘Do you think he loves us?’ she’d say, looking up at me from the floor where she’d be rolling around with the dog and letting it jump all over her.

  The dog vanished from our front garden after a month. Karen was pretty heartbroken. I put up a few signs around the place, but it had gone before we could get a photograph, so it was really more of a description. I wrote Answers to Max on the bottom of the flyer, because that’s what Karen had named it, though it hadn’t been with us long enough to learn this.

  We hadn’t done so well with the dog, but now Karen wanted a baby, I knew that much. Sometimes in bed she would roll towards me and I’d put my hand on her and try and guess at the emptiness she felt inside her, but still I was hesitant about having a baby. I looked at the rock sitting on the dresser. It was big enough to have done some real damage.

  Deep down I think Karen knew I wasn’t really cut out for fatherhood. She sometimes said that my own father had done a real number on me. She used that exact phrase. ‘A real number.’ This felt unfair, but it might have been because I’ve always had trouble explaining things properly.

  I once told her that when I was fifteen I was standing in the bread section of the supermarket with my mother as she picked up and squeezed loaves of bread, testing each one. I couldn’t bear to watch this process, so I looked over at my father, who was standing in the fruit section, picking up and squeezing the avocados in the exact same way. I’d thought to myself that it was no wonder they’d ended up married.

  My father had let the avocado he was holding fall down his sleeve, then he’d picked up another and done the same, before looking around and walking back over to my mother. I was pretty sure I was the only one who had noticed.

  I’d recounted this story about a dozen times, but never in a very satisfying way. My father was prone to these sorts of things; he’d once held me under water with a broom in a swimming pool; he’d yell at people on the street over parking spaces. I could never remember him ever being much of a happy man, and I’d try to explain to Karen how much I enjoyed being puzzled by my father, but I could never really make her see it this way.

  I picked my pants up off the bedroom floor. I pulled them on and stepped into my shoes, without socks. ‘I think I might look around anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be too long,’ Karen said.

  Apart from our bedroom, our house was dark and I didn’t turn on any lights as I moved through the living room and down the hallway towards the front door. Now and then I placed my hand on a bookcase or a doorway to ground myself. Outside it was brighter. The moon was out and a streetlight was shining through the leaves of the tree in our front yard. I was a little on edge, and I clenched my fists in anticipation of being jumped. I made sure to close our front door behind me; I was afraid that if I left it open someone could simply walk on inside.

  Standing on our grey front lawn I looked around. Now that I was out here I wasn’t entirely sure what I was supposed to do. The street was empty and I couldn’t see a sign of anyone. The right side of our house, where there was a path leading to our backyard, was completely dark.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’ I heard a man’s voice say.

  I turned around. One of our other neighbours, David Rutter, was standing near his fence. He was wearing a fishing hat. He and his wife were both retired and whenever we used to have parties I’d always let them know that there might be some noise, as a courtesy. I hadn’t done that in a while. I walked over to him. I felt my sneaker come down on the garden hose and I stumbled slightly.

  ‘I thought I’d get some air,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a clear night. Very beautiful.’

  I nodded. I looked up at the sky, the stars. I couldn’t really make out David’s face because of the dark, but I could see his shape, his slumped shoulders. I guessed that he had his hands in his pockets.

  ‘Did you hear them earlier?’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The people next to us.’

  I pointed over at their dark house. I half-expected to hear them now, or at least see them moving behind their windows. I looked at the short fence between our house and theirs and the bromeliads Karen had planted alongside it. She’d tried growing other things in our front garden but had never had much luck. So far they were the only things she could keep going.

  ‘No,’ David said. ‘We didn’t.’

  ‘They argue a lot.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ David said. He gave a low whistle and I saw Lucy, his golden retriever, come to him. In the moonlight her coat looked white and luminous. ‘Good girl, good girl,’ David said, bending over to pat her.

  ‘How old is she now?’

  ‘Ten. She’s getting old.’

  ‘She seems to be in good health,’ I said. Sometimes I saw David and his wife down by the ocean, walking together and holding each other in a way that seemed too intimate to disturb. Usually I’d pretend not to see them. Lucy was always with them, running around in the shallows like a maniac.

  ‘We spoil her, I think.’

  ‘I should be heading inside.’

  ‘It was nice talking, take care of yourself,’ David said, in a way that I found strangely final. He whistled again softly and he and Lucy went back inside.

  Clouds were gathered over in the distance, above the ocean. They looked like they were headed for us. All of a sudden the feeling that I was being watched came over me and when I went back inside I deadlocked
the door behind me.

  Years ago, when my father and I were driving at dusk on a two-lane highway, he hit a sheep that had wandered out in front of us. The sheep was only a white blur in the headlights, and he swerved, but he still managed to dash its brains across the road. We spun out onto the gravel shoulder beside the highway.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he said.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  We climbed out of the car and looked around. It was lightly raining. I saw the dark shape of the sheep on the road and had to look away. I’ve never had the stomach for that sort of thing. The right headlight was cracked and had gone out, but the left still shone on down the highway, making the rain look heavier.

  My father pulled the dead sheep to the side of the road and out of the way, even though we hadn’t seen another car for at least an hour. He came back and stood beside me, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans.

  ‘Well, that was exciting,’ he said.

  He was good like that, when he knew what to do.

  Karen was still awake when I came back to the bedroom. I took my shoes off, stepped out of my jeans and climbed into bed with her. She shifted over, closer to me, and folded my arm under her head.

  ‘You’re cold,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t see anybody out there.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would.’

  ‘David was in his front yard, walking Lucy.’

  ‘So did he see anything?’ Karen asked.

  ‘It didn’t come up,’ I said. ‘But I’m pretty sure he didn’t throw a rock through our window.’

  She didn’t say anything else for a while. I went back to reading about the airline disaster. I was starting to get bored with reading about people dying. I kept thinking that Karen was asleep, but then she’d cough or rub at her nose. I considered telling her about the student who’d tried to kill herself, but I’d probably just mess it up somehow. Karen had a tendency to worry about things. She was always going to the doctor.

  ‘He could have thrown it,’ Karen said eventually.

  ‘David?’

  ‘We don’t really know him that well. He just happens to live next door to us, that’s all.’

  ‘I suppose that’s true,’ I said, ‘but it still seems pretty unlikely.’

  The next time my father crashed a car it was more serious. He fell out of the driver’s door and bounced around a bit. He ended up coming out of it okay, but the guy he smashed into wasn’t so lucky. Afterwards, I’d sometimes catch my father sitting in a dark room and crying, or holding on to the edges of the bookcases in our house as though he was travelling through a rough sea. If you spoke to him directly he’d usually jump like you’d snuck up on him. He had a few stints in hospital, but after he got out for the third time he begged my mother never to send him back. Two weeks later he shot himself, sitting in the passenger seat of her car.

  Karen shifted her weight. I could feel every slight movement she made. She was a light sleeper. If there was ever the smallest amount of sand in our bed she’d feel it, and then she’d make us both get up, pull back the sheets, and start hitting at the mattress with her pillow.

  Eventually she pushed herself off me and sat with her back against the pillows. There was a damp patch on my shirt where her head had been and she wiped at it.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’ll dry,’ I said.

  Her knees were up now, under the covers, like snow covered hills. During my life I’d probably done a lot of things the wrong way. I knew that Karen was waiting for me to turn my light out. My mother had died two years before from an aneurism. It got her while she’d been waiting in line at the post office to pay a bill. Just like that. I had a sister who I knew I should call more often. I cleared my throat and didn’t move. I thought that it wouldn’t be so bad, living inside a plane’s black box recorder. It’s what they always discovered, sitting in the wreckage, in the forest, in the snow. Safe as always.

  Loss

  I’m going to try and keep this short. But, okay, there was once this explorer who has, by now, been mostly forgotten by history, and he lived with an indigenous tribe for a while. This was on the west coast of Tasmania, up north I think, near the top corner. The most interesting of his discoveries was this musical ritual that the tribe sometimes performed. What would happen was that one of the men would drag this drum out to the side of a waterhole and the tribe had worked out a way that if you hit the drum the sound travelled over the surface of the water, bounced off the rocks on the other side of the waterhole, then came back. An echo, yeah. So the sound would come back, and then they’d hit it again, letting the sound of the drum and the echo of the drum mix together. They’d have entire patterns memorised. Different patterns had different meanings. They had songs for rain, for sadness, for births. They had a song that was supposed to help you if you were having nightmares. Or if you were sick. Of course there’s no real evidence of this; the tribe was wiped out and there wasn’t much evidence of anything. Plus some people think the explorer made it all up, because there’s never been any proof that the indigenous people even used drums, but I thought you’d find it interesting, while we’re standing here, because I don’t know if you hate it, but I do, when the plane stops and there’s that clicking of seatbelts and everyone stands up in the aisle, but the doors aren’t open so we’re all just standing around here, sweating and getting angry.

  Hinterland

  Most mornings I would wake up feeling like I was struggling to inflate a balloon. I was worried that I was grinding my teeth in my sleep. Whenever this happened I would spend a few minutes lying in bed. I couldn’t really understand it, but I thought that maybe I wasn’t eating right. It was during one of these states of minor panic that I decided to call my father. I’d been planning to for a while, but that morning I woke with the memory of this dream I’d had, or maybe something even less than a dream, some small pebble of memory knocked loose during the night, of him lifting his hand up and hailing a taxi in the rain.

  It was coming to the end of the Christmas break and I was about to start my last year at university. I was staying at my grandparents’ house in Bundaberg, and when I travelled back to my mother’s on the Gold Coast I’d be changing trains in Brisbane. I figured I could see my father then.

  It wasn’t until later that night that I actually called my father to talk about it. My grandparents were both early risers and were usually in bed by ten. I hadn’t seen my father since he and my mother had divorced several months before. On the phone he sounded rough, like my call had woken him up, then he coughed and his voice became clear. The first thing he did, after I outlined my plan, was to offer me a lift.

  ‘To where?’ I said.

  ‘To your mother’s,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I can’t make the time, because I can.’

  I could hear the television in the background and the sound of plates being scraped under a running tap. The tap went off then on again. I didn’t know who was rinsing the plates, but I knew it wasn’t my father.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll have lunch first, then we’ll see,’ he said.

  All the lights in the house were off, except for the one in the hallway that was spilling a rectangle of light through the kitchen door. There were insects outside that would be deafening if you paid enough attention to them. I didn’t want to be driven home but I’ve never managed to win an argument with my father about anything. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with it, but when he was eighteen he’d started selling cars for a living. There’s a photo I have of him wearing a tie and a short-sleeved shirt, surrounded by the gleaming hoods and windshields. He was the top salesman every month for years.

  ‘How are Sam and Alice?’ my father said, and it took me a moment to figure out that he was talking about my grandparents.

  ‘They’re okay.’

 
; ‘Is your mother seeing anyone?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, though I suspected he already knew that, since Greg had answered our home telephone a few times when my father had called.

  ‘I really think it’s important that we see each other,’ my father said. ‘I think the drive home will do us both good.’

  I said that I agreed.

  ‘Good, great,’ my father said. ‘Okay then, I’ll see you soon,’ and he hung up.

  Sometimes my father would call my mother, late at night, and she’d always end up putting me on the phone. We’d talk for a bit, but not about much. The only time he’d telephoned specifically to talk to me was when he’d called for my birthday. It was almost dawn and I was still in bed, half-asleep.

  ‘I wanted to be the first to wish you a happy birthday,’ he said. ‘Am I the first? You haven’t spoken to anyone else yet, have you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t.’

  Outside it was starting to get light and I could hear the calls of birds and it made my head feel empty.

  My father was waiting for me on the street out in front of the train station. The city was hot and I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and I could already feel sweat running down my back. My father had a newspaper tucked under his arm and he was wearing a light grey suit with no tie. It was good to see him. He hugged me, thumped me twice on the back in greeting, and took my bag off me.

  ‘It’s been too long,’ he said. ‘I was going to get you a present of some sort, but I didn’t know what to get you. I went into a toy store, to buy you something as a joke, but then I thought it probably wouldn’t be that funny. I’ll buy you lunch, though. And maybe something else.’