We Are Not The Same Anymore

by Chris Somerville

  The overhead compartment was closed. Beckman’s mother leaned over him and said to the flight attendant, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing serious. The woman who was sitting here just needs some medication.’

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘She had a diabetic fit.’

  ‘I’m a nurse, I have training,’ Beckman’s mother said. ‘If you need a hand let me know.’

  ‘Thank you. We’ll let you know if you can help,’ the flight attendant said, and walked back to the rear of the plane, carrying the woman’s small purple bag.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t think they want my help.’

  Beckman’s mother had never been a nurse, he wasn’t sure if she’d even done first aid training. He didn’t say anything and his mother pulled the in-flight magazine from the pocket on the seat in front of her. She flicked through it.

  ‘You see?’ she said, sounding unimpressed. ‘Someone’s already filled out the crossword in here. You’d think they could replace the magazines once they’re done.’

  The plane started to descend. He thought that now was probably the right time to come clean with his mother. Outside of the window was suddenly grey. This was usually when Beckman felt worry overcome him, when he was convinced that the world below had suddenly vanished. He’d think about the people in the aeroplane being the only things left, circling around where the planet had been. His mother coughed beside him and kept turning the pages of her magazine and Beckman waited for the plane to dip back down from out of the clouds.

  Athletics

  I’d spent most of the week sitting around my house, waiting for my ex-girlfriend Catherine to call. I’d lied to my work and told them I was sick from food poisoning. Mostly during this time I was feeling sorry for myself, watching television or eating or checking my email. Sometimes I would go for walks, or stand in my kitchen and watch boats on the river down the hill, but it had been raining most of the time and I was really only afforded a view of wet trees and the occasional soaked bird sitting plump and grey on the railing of my veranda. I felt like I was wasting time.

  On Thursday, around noon, my brother Adam called me. We hadn’t spoken in a while, though we kept a loose line of contact with each other. He usually sent a postcard or made a few phone calls around Christmas. He never sent me anything for my birthday. I was surprised to hear from him.

  I said ‘Adam, hello’ and then he launched into a speech as though he was being interviewed. He told me that he was calling from a phone booth because the commune he was living at didn’t have a phone. He said that he was watching the raindrops wriggle down the outside of the booth like tadpoles.

  I listened to him and looked at the phone cord that attached the receiver to the phone, then followed the line that came out of the phone to where it connected to the wall. It made me think of the plant that had sprung up in the floor of my shower, between the tiles. At first the idea that there were plants holding my place together had been a pleasant one, and then I’d torn the weed out and felt its damp grittiness, like river silt, and the whole thing had made me feel nauseous.

  I waited long enough to seem polite and then said, ‘So what’s the problem?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Adam said. ‘Nothing terrible, but I was wondering if maybe you’d do me a huge favour and drive down here to pick me up.’

  ‘Right now?’ I said.

  ‘That would probably be for the best, yeah.’

  I looked outside at the rain. It wasn’t heavy but it was constant, and I could hear the comforting tap-tap-tap of water on my rooftop. The sun was out there somewhere, though I couldn’t see it exactly. I said, ‘I’m not going to turn up there and all of a sudden you’ve changed your mind, right?’

  ‘Trust me,’ Adam said. ‘There’s no chance of that happening at all.’

  He gave me directions and I copied them down on the back of an envelope. He was somewhere south, just over the border, in one of the valleys scattered throughout the hinterland. His voice grew quieter the more we talked, which meant he was upset. I wasn’t going to mention it, but I hoped that he’d ask me what I was doing home in the middle of the week, and then I could tell him about staying indoors and Catherine leaving me. I hadn’t left the house for days.

  Adam didn’t ask, and before hanging up I told him I’d be there as soon as possible. I went and put on a different t-shirt and an old jacket and a pair of sneakers. I left on my tracksuit pants because I didn’t think they looked so bad. They were black and had two white stripes running down each leg. I looked both formal and athletic, like maybe I owned a gym.

  The drive down was unremarkable and I listened to the radio and watched the wipers lean towards each other, never touching, back and forth across the windscreen. Catherine had broken up with me in a café down near the beach. She had a cold and pulled a tissue from her sleeve. She’d had her light brown hair cut short the week before and it suited her very well. She ordered lemon tea.

  ‘I might get some eggs,’ I said.

  ‘If you want to order food you can, but I don’t feel like eating.’

  ‘Do you want half of what I order?’

  ‘No, I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Are you sure? Will you want to eat my food once you smell it?’

  Catherine was silent for a moment before she said, ‘I’m leaving you.’ Then she put a nasal inhaler in her right nostril, sprayed it, then did the same with the left.

  The sea was green-blue and choppy. People on surfboards were floating out behind the small waves. We hadn’t been together for very long. Catherine cupped her hand over her mouth and coughed.

  Now, in the car, the road was mostly empty and I took the corners carefully. I didn’t like to drive fast in the rain. When I finally made it to the commune the rain had eased off a bit, but everything was still wet. I drove up a long driveway, through the middle of a field that was empty apart from a few unconnected fence posts and a tractor missing both of its back wheels and pointing skywards. At the end of the driveway there was an old two-storey farmhouse made from dull-grey wood. There were lights on inside, and in one of the upstairs windows. The window frames looked rusted out, and some of the beams over the front veranda were curling from rot, but other than that the place didn’t look too bad. I’d imagined worse.

  Adam was sitting out the front, slumped in a deckchair, with his arms across his chest. When he saw me he stood and held his hand up in the air, then turned and called out something through the open doorway before walking over to my car with his rucksack. He tossed the bag onto the back seat and then sat down in the passenger seat. A fat man came and stood in the farmhouse doorway, his head slightly tilted upwards and his arms resting on each side of the door frame, watching as I turned the car around in the driveway and headed towards the road.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough,’ Adam said.

  ‘It’s no problem,’ I said. ‘The rain slowed me down a bit.’

  ‘I’m freezing, does this car have heating?’

  I nodded and Adam leaned forwards and messed with the dials until he had the heat going. He sat back in his seat. It started to rain again. He smelled damp and the mohair jumper he was wearing had small, silver beads of moisture hanging from its fibres.

  ‘Maybe you should take your jumper off,’ I said.

  ‘It was a nice place, there was a stream out the back. It was peaceful,’ he said. ‘But I really had to get out of there.’

  ‘Why, what happened?’ I said.

  Adam took his seatbelt off and pulled his jumper over his head. ‘Nothing serious,’ he said. ‘They had a generator, but the only things it powered were the light bulbs. Plus everything either in or around the place was always damp.’

  ‘Did they have running water?’

  ‘I mentioned the stream, didn’t I?’

&n
bsp; Adam leaned forward and turned the volume up on the stereo, which spiked loud enough to make the speakers rattle, then he turned it back down low. The windows were starting to fog from the heat, so I adjusted the car’s air conditioning until cold air blew from the vents and the white clouds on the windshield started to clear.

  ‘But I was having a hard time there,’ he said. ‘I kept thinking that the other people on the commune were going to come into my room during the night and strangle me with my belt.’

  ‘And they never did anything?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, it was mostly in my head. I was convinced they would either choke me or poison my food. I know it sounds stupid, but they didn’t have TV or a radio or anything. At night it was so dark, I mean, that kind of thing can really get to you.’

  ‘You’re okay though?’

  ‘Me? Yeah, I’m fine. I’m starving though. We should stop somewhere and eat.’

  I explained to Adam that I didn’t feel like stopping. We were over two hours away from my place, probably even longer because of the rain. It was starting to get late. The road was empty and wound around hills and dipped into valleys. There wasn’t much around except the occasional farmhouse, driveway or burned-out hollow tree stump. Adam and I drove mostly in a silence, with the wipers going and the radio turned down low.

  The first sign of trouble was the red and blue flashing lights catching in the rain on the windshield. I slowed the car down to a roll and Adam said, ‘Oh boy,’ in a defeated kind of way. Ahead of us, parked across the road, was a Land Cruiser with police lights blinking silently on its roof. A policeman wearing a raincoat and a hat with a wide brim was standing next to the Land Cruiser and hailing us. I stopped the car.

  While I wound down my window and the policeman walked over to our car, I had the thought that he was here to take Adam away and I felt a short pang of guilt over how relieved that made me feel. The policeman put his arm up on my roof casually and leaned down to look at us through my open window. Rain ran down the inside of my door.

  ‘Sorry, guys, but you’re going to have to head back. The river down there’s overflowing,’ he said, gesturing down the road to somewhere out of sight. ‘Most of the bridge is under water. Luckily I haven’t seen too many people around.’

  ‘Was there any significant property damage?’ Adam said, leaning towards the window.

  The policeman either didn’t hear or ignored him and said, ‘We’re cutting the road off up here as a precaution.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, trying to appear cheery, ‘if there’s nothing that can be done.’

  The policeman patted the roof of my car three times, like you would a horse, and headed back to his Land Cruiser. I wound my window up, then reversed and swung the car around.

  We drove back past the turn-off to Adam’s commune, and into a small town close by. I stopped at a service station that had a takeaway restaurant. When I killed the engine I sat for a moment, listening to the rain hit the car roof.

  ‘Now you can get something to eat,’ I said.

  ‘There’s supposed to be a better place on the other side of town,’ Adam said. ‘They might be closed, though, so I guess this place will do.’

  I got out of the car and Adam followed. We walked quickly, hunched over in the rain, and in through the service station’s automatic glass doors. The inside of the restaurant was carpeted and smelled like the vomitous air that came out the back of a vacuum cleaner. At the counter Adam ordered a hamburger and I bought a Coke. We took a seat at one of the white plastic tables. It wasn’t very clean; there were spots of black dirt fossilised to the tabletop.

  When we were younger, when I was sixteen and Adam was fourteen, we had gone through a weird kind of follow the leader. I had been the one to teach him about drinking, about smoking and drug use and sex. But where he’d smoked steady jets of smoke behind the bus stop at school, I had coughed and spluttered; and where he’d said the whisky we’d sneaked at my uncle’s barbecue had burned a little, he’d still seemed unfazed, while I’d felt something awful rise in my throat and had thrown up into the bathtub.

  By the time Adam’s hamburger was ready I’d finished my drink and was staring out the window. I was rotating my empty can on the tabletop, the can turned slightly on its side like a loose tyre about to spin to the ground.

  ‘They didn’t let me have meat out there,’ Adam said, lifting his hamburger.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, not exactly, but none of them ate meat and there was this real kind of judgement thing going on. You couldn’t cook meat in any of their pans, or use their plates or cutlery, because then it would taint them with suffering.’

  ‘Suffering?’

  ‘Yeah, one of the guys there, Richard, actually said that to me. So now and then I’d sneak into town and eat a steak. One time I spiked their lentil soup with blood. Not a lot of blood. I know it sounds wrong, and it was probably a bad thing to do, but it kept me sane.’

  Apart from the rain, the bottom of the Coke can slowly spinning on the tabletop was the only sound to be heard.

  ‘It’s hardly my fault,’ Adam said.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘Then what? I said you didn’t have to come get me if you didn’t want to.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘You know I wasn’t going to leave you stranded out here.’

  When Adam had graduated from high school I’d still been living with our parents. Adam had gone off and tried out a number of things – working on a tuna boat, selling fruit on the side of the highway, making pillows in a factory – but none of these things had ever seemed to stick. He was definitely always the black sheep. Where I had planned, he had always schemed. His last proper job had been at a car rental booth at an airport.

  Sometimes I wondered why my life was so stable and his was a mess. Other times I worried that he was a genius and I was wasting my life.

  Adam finished his hamburger and crumpled his wrapper into a ball. He bounced it weakly into the middle of the table.

  ‘You know, I didn’t really like you much when we were growing up,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think we were ever supposed to be friends,’ he said.

  ‘We were both pretty popular in high school. We were both in the track team.’

  ‘I don’t think that made a difference.’

  I nodded and stood up and told Adam I had to make a phone call. My mobile phone didn’t have any reception, but there was a public phone over near the counter. I dropped in some change and dialled Catherine’s number. The phone started ringing on the other end and after about three rings I lost my nerve and ended the call. I could see Adam over at the table, throwing the wrapper a short distance into the air and then catching it. He did it over and over without distraction. I pretended to have a conversation. I said, ‘Hello?’ to the dial tone and then kept saying ‘Okay’ over and over again, nodding with my head down, as though I was being lectured. After about a minute of this I hung up, collected my change from the phone, and then went into the small bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I felt suddenly exhausted. The bar of soap sitting beside the sink was mostly mush and I squeezed my hand into it, like soft clay, down to its firm centre.

  When I returned to our table the wrapper was gone and so was my empty can. Adam was leaning with his arms crossed and both his elbows up on the table. I stood behind my chair.

  ‘Look,’ Adam said. ‘There’s that policeman.’

  I looked out the service station window to the petrol pumps, where the Land Cruiser was now parked. The automatic doors opened and the policeman walked inside, shaking rainwater from his hat. He ordered a coffee and started chatting with the woman behind the counter. When he noticed Adam and me he gave us both a nod and kept on with his conversation.

  When his coffee came, in a white po
lystyrene cup, he fixed a lid onto it and walked back out to his car. The policeman drove off and headed in the opposite direction, away from the roadblock. I told Adam that we were leaving. After we’d run through the rain and hopped into the car, I pulled out of the car park and headed down the road, back out of town.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Adam said. ‘The bridge is out, remember?’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Then where are we going?’

  I didn’t answer. I drove back along the road, a little faster this time. I had the windscreen wipers going full bore. I slowed down when I saw a white wooden barricade sitting across the middle of the road. There wasn’t a sign of anyone else around. I figured there wasn’t much of a police force in a place like this. Down the hill I could see, in a dense, ink-black area, the river.

  ‘You see, let’s just go back, okay?’ Adam said.

  ‘Come and help me, we’ll move it,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Actually, you stay here and drive through once I clear the way. The faster we do this the better.’

  Adam didn’t say anything and I jumped out of the car. I ran through the rain and over to the barricade. It was cold outside and the air smelled rich. I lifted the thick wooden beam, which was heavy but not as heavy as I’d expected, and shuffled it over to clear the road. Rain was hitting me everywhere. I leaned up and waved Adam through. Once the car had passed me I returned the barricade back into position. When I climbed into the car Adam had already shifted back over to the passenger seat.

  ‘Simple,’ I said.

  The surface of the bridge had vanished, but the guard rails were still sticking up out of the water like the remains of a jetty. I accelerated down towards it.

  When we hit the bridge, water fanned out from the car, thrown up by the tyres. There was a smooth, clear sound underneath our feet. Adam inhaled quickly and put his hand on the dashboard to steady himself. I felt for a second that the car might float away and we’d be carried off, but then I felt the tyres catch on the road and we emerged from the water.