We Are Not The Same Anymore

by Chris Somerville

  ‘It’s okay, Dad’ I said.

  ‘Hurry it up,’ he said. ‘I’m parked in that bus stop over there.’

  We walked over to his car and my father threw my bag on the back seat, which was mostly taken up by a bag of golf clubs and a golfing umbrella. The car was shiny and black and looked new.

  ‘I bought a whole bunch of golf balls on sale,’ he said. ‘I’ve been driving to the river at night and smacking them into the water with a nine iron. There’s a certain kind of therapy in it.’

  I nodded and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Do you like this car? It’s new, I just got it.’

  ‘It’s pretty nice,’ I said.

  ‘Touch the roof,’ he said.

  I hesitated, then reached out and touched the roof of the car.

  ‘I had it waxed. The whole car’s like a big black slippery rock.’

  I smiled and tried to seem enthusiastic, then went and sat in the passenger seat. My father climbed in behind the wheel. Up close I noticed that he hadn’t shaved in a while and that his suit looked like he’d been wearing it for a couple of days. He smelled faintly of liquorice, and underneath his eyes were dark smudges. He spat out his open window and pulled out onto the street.

  ‘I’m not used to this car yet,’ he said. ‘The indicator’s on the opposite side to my old car, and for some reason this means I occasionally make left turns when I want to go right. It’s mixed my brain around or something.’

  To illustrate his point he swerved the car back and forth.

  ‘That sounds pretty dangerous,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not as serious as you’d think,’ he said.

  We briefly drove through the city, now and then waiting at traffic lights and looking for a parking space on the street, until my father gave up and parked under a shopping centre. We climbed out of the car. It felt airless down here. Whenever cars turned the corners of the car park their tyres whined on the concrete.

  ‘Can you believe I’ve never had a car that’s had automatic locking before? Do you want to press it?’

  ‘Press what?’ I said.

  ‘Do you want to press the button that locks the car?’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m not a child.’

  My father shrugged and said, ‘I thought you’d get a kick out of it.’

  I wasn’t sure if he was messing with me. The car made a whistling noise and its indicators blinked. We walked up a staircase to street level and my father headed down the street immediately. I followed him, only a few steps behind.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I said to the back of his head.

  ‘A bar that I go to sometimes,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll like it, it’s quiet and it’s dark.’

  My parents hadn’t fought that much while they were married; they were more like two people politely talking to each other on a bus. Maybe it would have been easier for me if there was more to get angry at, but it was more casual than that. I started stealing things after my father left. I took small things that I didn’t really need, like batteries and toothbrushes. I did this for a few weeks and then I gave it up, I think because no one really noticed.

  The bar we were headed for was down a flight of stairs. It was under a store that sold discounted books. There were booths along the sides of the room and barrels as tables, with bar stools around them, over near the bar. My father nodded towards a booth, meaning for me to sit down, and ordered two pints of beer. It was almost three in the afternoon. There weren’t many people in the bar.

  ‘I have to get a train before six,’ I said when my father sat down across from me. ‘That way I can still catch the bus home.’

  ‘Listen, I’ll drive you home and that’s that,’ my father said.

  ‘I don’t want to put you out.’

  ‘No. It’s no trouble.’

  I drank my beer. There was a soccer game playing on a television above the bar, but the sound was muted. My father drank too. There were three loud men sitting around one of the barrels. All three of them looked like businessmen, but had dumped their jackets and ties.

  ‘I know it’s been a while but you’re looking good,’ my father said. ‘When you were younger I always worried that you had too shapely hips, but I guess you turned out all right.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘It was just an observation, there’s no need to get offended about it.’

  ‘I’m not offended,’ I said.

  My father was already halfway through his drink. I said that I needed to go to the bathroom and I got up. He nodded and held up his hand. I walked across the empty dance floor and scratched at the back of my head, which is something I do when I feel like I’m being observed. The bathroom smelled of soap made from citric acid and there was a cockroach lying dead on its back near the drain of the urinal. I wondered if I could get out of the bar without my father noticing. Our booth had a clear view of the staircase we’d entered by, but even if I did manage to escape he’d probably still track me down at the train station.

  When I came out of the bathroom my father wasn’t alone. There was a woman sitting next to him, tipping her head back to drain her glass. She brought the glass back down to the table. It had a lemon wedge stuck in the bottom of it and a few ice cubes. There was a black straw discarded on the table. I guessed that the woman was at least ten years younger than my father. I sat down across from them but didn’t say anything. The woman had thick blond hair and earrings that were large and looked like they were made from varnished wood. She was chewing on an ice cube. It made my teeth ache.

  ‘Here he is,’ my father said to her; then to me, ‘Evan, this is Patricia.’

  ‘Hi,’ she said, after swallowing.

  ‘Evan here is an engineering student. He just built a dam, an entire dam. He designed the whole thing himself.’

  ‘That’s pretty amazing,’ Patricia said. ‘You seem too young to have done that.’

  ‘It was for a company I was doing work experience with,’ I said, surprised how impressed my father sounded. ‘It’s not very big.’

  Earlier in the year I had built a dam on a river out in the hinterland, not too far from where I was living with my mother and Greg. Before construction began I had gone to the site and walked up and down the river. It was a hot afternoon and there was no one around. I didn’t see any animals either. At certain points the river became so thin it could be easily jumped over, but it flowed steadily and I had sat by it for a while, throwing sticks into the water and watching them float downstream. For about a week I went over the plans looking for faults until I had to force myself to quit worrying about it. Next thing I knew I was waking in a panic, though I still wasn’t entirely convinced this was on account of the dam.

  ‘Do you two know each other?’ I said.

  ‘Not yet,’ Patricia said.

  My father fished the wedge of lemon from Patricia’s empty glass. He sucked the pulp off it then dropped it onto the table. We all looked at it for a moment. It looked like a broken yellow boat. I finished my drink.

  ‘Do you want another one?’ my father said.

  ‘We should probably go.’

  ‘We just got here, we don’t need to go just yet.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Patricia said.

  Patricia’s hands were under the table, and I figured it would be strange if I asked to see them. My father leaned back into the booth. He looked at me in the same way he did when I was younger and he used to beat me at chess.

  ‘I’m dropping the kid here off at his mother’s.’

  ‘And we’re late,’ I said.

  ‘We’re not late, you don’t have to be there at any set time,’ my father said. He turned to Patricia. ‘He always used to get like this when he was a kid. You should’ve seen the panic on his face if we were ever late fo
r the movies. He used to look like he was ill.’

  ‘We were always late for movies,’ I said. ‘We always missed the start.’

  ‘Not always,’ my father said. ‘Usually just the trailers.’

  Patricia looked at the table and flicked one end of the lemon wedge so it spun on the spot. Her nails were painted a shade of pink that was barely noticeable unless they caught the light.

  ‘Hey look, maybe you should come with us,’ my father said. ‘It only takes about an hour or so to drive there.’

  Patricia looked at me and I tried to smile, but I’m sure it was obvious that I was biting my tongue. My father had a habit of inviting strangers to spend time with us. He once brought a young couple into our house on Christmas morning. They had been trying to find a way down to the beach. My father had offered them a drink, which they politely declined, but he insisted on it and made a big fuss until they were standing with us in our living room, each with a glass of champagne.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Patricia said. ‘You two go have your fun.’

  We walked back towards the car. It was getting late in the afternoon but the sun was still hot and white between the buildings. The sky was bright blue. My father walked beside me this time, at the same pace.

  ‘I’m glad that woman’s not coming with us,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it would have worked out. It would have been a pretty awkward ride down there.’

  ‘I thought you were seeing someone,’ I said.

  ‘Is that what your mother said? Maybe, I don’t know. I don’t need to discuss this kind of thing with you.’

  ‘What would you have done if Patricia had wanted to come with us?’

  My father stopped walking and considered the question. People walked around us. I tried to keep out of the way.

  ‘I suppose I hadn’t really thought about that,’ he said. ‘We could have ditched her on the street probably.’

  To get to the car park we walked into the shopping centre and down a concrete stairwell. My father unlocked the car as soon at it was in sight, raising his keychain like he was firing a gun. Before we drove off we sat with the engine on and the air conditioner on high.

  ‘I need to cool down before I drive,’ my father said. ‘I can’t even think about driving this thing until that happens.’

  A car stopped in front of us in the car park, waiting for us to pull out of our space. My father looked at the car for a long time, then he put his car in gear and followed the exit signs out onto the street.

  We drove south with the sun making its slow decline behind the western hills. My father didn’t talk much, or have the radio on, and we sat in a silence that was only interrupted by the steady clicking of the indicator when we changed lanes. Sometimes the car would drift a little and hit the audible lines on the side of the road. Whenever this happened my father would swerve the car suddenly, as if burned, and straighten our course. I would have tried to get some sleep, because I felt hot and exhausted, but there was a fair chance I’d wake up shouting or in a panicked sweat and I didn’t need my father seeing that.

  By the time we turned off the highway the sun was out of sight. We followed a road past a service station and empty green fields. I watched a flock of white birds flying in a loose formation. My mother had moved out of the city and into the hinterland a month after my father left, to an acreage of dirt and rocks and trees and a house with three small bedrooms. There was an above-ground swimming pool in the backyard filled mostly with rainwater. There was usually a layer of leaves and eucalyptus oil on the surface of the water.

  ‘Are we almost there?’ my father said after a while.

  ‘I think so,’ I said, looking around. The road we were on looked unfamiliar. ‘Just keep going, I’m sure it’s this way.’

  ‘You’re sure.’

  I nodded. There was a river beside us that I thought I’d seen before. The sky was a deep blue. My father put his headlights on.

  ‘Do you remember when we were driving in that national park and we saw that car off the road and upside down and I stopped to see if anyone was inside?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘I know it turned out to be empty, but that was a terrifying thing to do. I hated doing that.’

  What I remembered was standing on the side of the road and looking down a bank at the car, which had been stopped from sliding further down the hill by trees. My father told me to stay where I was and climbed down to see if anyone was hurt. It looked like a suitcase had exploded. I didn’t like seeing the clothes on the ground everywhere.

  It was getting dark and the surface of the road had turned to gravel. The car shook and I could hear individual rocks hitting the bottom of the car, thrown up by the tyres. I looked around but there was just the occasional driveway and trees and not much else.

  ‘I don’t know where we are,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ my father said.

  ‘I thought I did, but we must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.’

  ‘You couldn’t have said something earlier?’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I should have.’

  My father shook his head. He didn’t slow down, instead he kept on driving down the road, following our headlights that were starting to push through the darkness.

  ‘We’ll keep going until we see a sign, then we can try to get our bearings,’ my father said. ‘Have you noticed that some of these driveways are as wide as roads?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘It’s very disorientating.’

  We came to a T-junction and my father slowed down; there were no signs. On the right of us there was a barbed-wire fence and on the left an empty field. Ahead of us were trees. My father stopped the car. He looked around, peering over the steering wheel in what I felt was an exaggerated way. He was acting as though he was losing his eyesight.

  ‘There’s no signs. How do they expect us to get out of here?’ he said.

  ‘Maybe we should just go back,’ I said.

  ‘To where? You obviously have no idea where we are.’

  I didn’t say anything. The dust that our car had thrown up off the road floated and turned in the headlights. I started to imagine that the dust was coming through the air conditioner and blowing into my face and I had to clear my throat from the thought of it.

  ‘Maybe the sign’s fallen over,’ I said. ‘It could be right there.’

  ‘So go check,’ he said.

  I got out of the car and walked across the road. I kicked a large stone on the road with the toe of my sneaker and looked around. There wasn’t anything in sight. Heading back to the car I raised my hand up to shield my eyes from the headlights.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll go back to that service station, ask directions,’ my father said, turning the car around and heading back down the road.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  He drove faster. The road was empty and above us stars were starting to appear as the dark blue sky faded to black. I put my foot up on the glove box, then took it down again. I’d left a shoe print in light brown dust and I wiped at it with my hand.

  ‘I know your mother’s living with someone now,’ my father said, ‘and I’m still adjusting to the idea of meeting him. I don’t need to tell you I’ve been nervous about the whole thing. Sometimes I plan it out in my head and I’m civil and we joke around, then other times all I want to do is punch his face in.’

  ‘He’s away for a fortnight,’ I said. ‘At a business retreat.’

  My father looked at me for a second before turning his attention back to the road. ‘Well, it’ll be good to see your mother anyway.’

  The service station had four petrol pumps. There was a sign with a silhouette of a whale on it in bright red paint. My father stopped in the car park.

 
‘Wait here and I’ll go ask,’ he said. ‘You know, before, when you got out of the car, I thought about driving off and leaving you. I didn’t, though, and I’m feeling much better about the whole situation now.’

  He closed the car door and walked inside the service station, adjusting the collar on his suit. I could see him through the window, talking to the guy behind the counter. My father was leaning forward with both his elbows on the counter. I got out of the car and saw that I had five missed calls from my mother. I called her back.

  ‘Hey it’s me,’ I said, when she picked up.

  ‘Evan? Where are you?’ my mother said. ‘I thought you’d be here hours ago, what happened? Is everything okay?’

  I could see the man behind the counter saying something and my father starting to laugh this big fake laugh. Even from outside I could see that. The guy probably could tell that he was faking it too, and for a second I felt sorry for my father. The guy said something else and my father laughed again.

  ‘I’m all right,’ I said to my mother. ‘Dad decided to drive me home. I’ll see you soon.’

  ‘What?’ my mother said and I hung up and turned off my phone. I walked into the service station.

  On the counter my father was writing down directions in the margin of a newspaper, which he then tore off, and thanked the guy by shaking his hand. When he turned to leave he saw me and frowned.

  ‘I thought you were waiting in the car,’ he said, walking over to me. ‘Did you want me to buy you something?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  The fluorescent lights made him look sickly and much older than he was. I walked over and grabbed a chocolate bar from one of the aisles, below a stack of magazines. I slipped it into my pocket. My father looked at me and I looked back, and I tried to nod at him in a confident way, to let him know I could handle this. I headed towards the door and walked out into the warm night air, my father a few steps behind me.

  ‘Are you taking that?’ he said.

  I didn’t reply. There were bugs orbiting the lights above the pumps. It was quiet enough to hear the hum of cars on the highway, which, I realised then, probably wasn’t that far away. I walked over to the car, opened the door and got in. I forced myself not to turn around and look back. My father got into the car and looked at me for a short time before starting the engine. He pulled out of the car park and onto the road.