We Are Not The Same Anymore

by Chris Somerville

  ‘Man, that was close,’ Adam said, and then laughed.

  I continued on up the road, leaving the river behind us. I felt a single sharp heartbeat of disappointment at our safety. I started to picture what we’d do back at my place. I didn’t have much food in the house, and I worried about what Adam would think, looking at the shelves of my barren refrigerator.

  ‘Can you pull over for a second?’ Adam said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just here.’

  I pulled over, beside a ditch. Adam opened his door and hopped out. He walked to the middle of the road, bent over with both his hands on his knees, and threw up. He straightened, then bent over and threw up again. I got out of the car and walked towards him. The rain was coming down pretty heavily and it was making his sick run towards the edge of the road, over to the car. I stepped around it and put my hand on Adam’s shoulder. He was still hunched over and spitting onto the ground.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think that hamburger agreed with me,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Adam reached up and tapped my hand. It felt like when we were younger and he was bent over on the starting block before a race, waiting for the pistol to fire, before he ran and ran and ran.

  Sleeping with the light on

  The first boy Lillian ever slept with lived two houses down from her and played tennis after school. Sometimes she’d see him walking home from the bus stop dressed in his whites. They didn’t really know each other that well, but their mothers were friends. They’d slept together when Lillian had come home between semesters, in her second year of university. His name was Tim Miller and for a while Lillian’s mother would mention what he was doing in her letters. Tim was flying jets for the air force. Tim was married now, also like Lillian. Her mother wrote to her often and Lillian rarely sent anything back.

  She was thinking about Tim and, more specifically, the shape of his hands, while she stood in the kitchen. Her husband James was in the kitchen too, emptying the last few drops of wine into his glass by turning the bottle upside down and shaking it dry. Lillian had been feeling exhausted all week. No matter how much sleep she managed to get, the inside of her head still felt as dull as cotton. James said something that she didn’t catch.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘I was saying that you don’t look so good.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  The pot was boiling on the stove. The lid rattled and there was water bubbling at its rim, spitting onto the stovetop. James slowly folded a tea towel over in his hand and lifted the lid, looking inside.

  ‘Do you want me to do something with this?’ he said.

  The first time Lillian had gone to James’s place he’d made pasta, but since then he had really only ever cooked one meal a year for her, the same meal, on her birthday. It was something he took very seriously, even though it wasn’t that difficult to fry zucchini and make a light cream sauce. It involved only one egg.

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ she said, taking the chopping board of cleaned potatoes and pushing them into the water with a knife. She shook in some salt.

  James said, ‘What are we supposed to talk about anyway?’

  ‘They’re nice people,’ Lillian said. ‘I’m sure it’ll be easy.’

  About a week ago their neighbours, Hannah and Franklin, had been broken into. When Lillian had heard about it from Hannah she’d invited them both over for dinner. They’d lived next door to each other for years, but still, Lillian and James didn’t know them very well.

  She started to cut up an onion. Then she cut up a capsicum.

  ‘I don’t see why, just because someone broke into their house, you had to invite them over.’

  ‘I don’t know either,’ Lillian said. ‘It just seemed like the right thing to do.’

  She continued cutting. The onions made her eyes sting. She could tell James was thinking it over, he looked like he was chewing. It always made her anxious when he was this deep in thought. He had trouble letting things go.

  ‘They’re at least five years older than us,’ he said finally.

  ‘So?’ she said. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘I’m not saying it’s a problem, I’m just saying that we’re younger.’

  Lillian shrugged. James got on well with people and found it easy to talk to strangers, but over the course of ten or so years of marriage he’d slowly managed to cut most of his friends out of his life. Sometimes Lillian worried this was her fault.

  ‘We should get really drunk before they get here,’ he said. ‘Like really hammered.’

  ‘Hammered?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, so at least then we’ll be interesting.’

  ‘We are interesting,’ Lillian said, ‘and that wouldn’t work anyway, when you get drunk you become so incredibly quiet.’

  She drained the potatoes in the sink, then started frying the onion and capsicum in a pan on the stove. She added garlic, vinegar and chilli. James was leaning up against the kitchen bench and slowing turning his wineglass in his hand.

  She was sleeping with Tim Miller again. They’d run into each other by accident at a hardware store two months ago. He was bigger than she remembered. Not so much fatter, just wider and taller, though he still had no trouble hitting a tennis ball, as he’d shown her one evening on the roof of his apartment building. He’d bounced the ball twice on the ground, thrown it a short distance into the air, then smacked it up onto the roof of the neighbouring building.

  He wasn’t flying planes anymore. Instead he owned a sporting goods store. The apartment was his, he’d bought it as an investment and as a place to stay if he ever worked late in the city. It wasn’t a very big place, and it always smelled of baking. She’d asked him about it once, in bed.

  ‘It’s a trick I learned,’ he’d said. ‘Half an hour before someone arrives you stick a croissant in the oven and heat it up.’

  ‘Really?’ Lillian had said.

  ‘Or a muffin. I picked it up from our real estate agent when my wife and I were trying to sell our house. She flipped over the idea and started doing it all the time. Whenever we’d have guests over she’d shove something in the oven.’

  Lillian had lifted up Timothy’s arm and bit him then, hoping that he’d think she was being playful, though really she’d done it because she wanted him to keep quiet about things like that.

  ‘Are you done with that?’ James said, nodding towards the dishes that were stacked neatly beside the sink.

  ‘Yes,’ Lillian said.

  He moved to the sink, poured in a bit of detergent and turned on the taps. White foam, like a child’s model of Antarctica, bloomed in the water. He pulled on the pair of washing-up gloves that were folded over the neck of the tap. They were bright pink. Lillian started slicing the potatoes.

  ‘What does he do again?’ James said.

  She’d paused, not entirely sure for a second who he was actually talking about. ‘A consultant, I think,’ she said. ‘Something to do with computers.’

  ‘I should stop thinking about what we’re going to talk about. If I do that I’ll obsess over it and then my mind will go blank.’

  ‘You shouldn’t worry about it,’ she said, adding the potatoes to the pan and stirring them quickly.

  ‘It’s lucky Hannah doesn’t work,’ James said. ‘I can remember that one easy.’

  With the potatoes fried Lillian emptied the pan into a casserole dish and then slid it into the oven, next to the lamb. She stood up straight. James was still washing up; he had his back to her and she could smell the artificial pine of the dishwashing liquid. It made her feel slightly sick.

  ‘Maybe we could tell them that we’ve heard them having sex,’ she said.

  ‘That should be our opener,’ he
said, pulling the gloves off and hanging them back over the tap. He turned to face her. ‘Are you okay? You don’t look so good.’

  She lifted her wineglass and drank from it. She pictured herself biting down on the glass until it broke, and then the glass in her mouth, which she hated the thought of, but when she was distressed it was usually the kind of thing that came to mind.

  She said, ‘I think I’m getting a cold.’

  ‘You should take some zinc,’ James said. ‘I think we have tablets somewhere.’

  They kept all their medicine on a shelf near the stove. James looked through the boxes of pills, accidentally knocking a box of Panadol onto the floor.

  ‘It’s not looking good,’ he said. ‘I can go out if you want.’

  ‘No, don’t worry about it,’ she said.

  She put her glass down on the counter and went to the bathroom. She closed the door and locked it. She took her glasses off, turned the tap on and washed her face, then sat on the toilet with the lid down and waited for three whole minutes.

  For almost two months now she had been unemployed, after the arts organisation she worked for had lost a large part of its funding. On her last day her workmates had presented her with a cake with a sad-looking whale on it, drawn in blue icing. It was either crying or asleep, she couldn’t tell and didn’t ask. Now she was spending most of her time inside the house and making sure never to walk to check the letterbox at the same time as any of their neighbours.

  If James ever asked her why she was acting differently she’d blame it on her being fired, but he never asked. She washed her face again, patted it dry with a towel, replaced her glasses and left the bathroom.

  James was still in the kitchen. He usually stood around and talked to her while she cooked. This is where we spend the bulk of our time together, Lillian thought. James was standing completely motionless. He sometimes reminded her of a dog her grandfather had owned, which would follow him into town and wait patiently at the door of the supermarket while he shopped.

  Because, right then, she hated this small part of him, Lillian walked over and kissed him on the cheek and squeezed his arm a little harder than she meant to.

  ‘Is everything ready?’ he said.

  ‘I was going to put cheese out, but I forgot.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ James said, moving to the cupboard. ‘We’ll have chips or something.’

  ‘I was going to let it soften,’ she said.

  Lillian opened the oven to check on the lamb. She turned the heat down. James was still looking through the cupboard, lifting containers to see what was in them.

  ‘What’s their surname again?’ he said.

  ‘I was trying to remember it before, but I can’t.’

  ‘It’s been too long now, we can’t ask them.’

  Lillian shrugged. The fan in the oven was loud.

  ‘We don’t have any chips and the biscuits are stale,’ James said. ‘But I probably don’t have time to go out.’

  ‘They’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Do you think we should avoid mentioning that they were broken into?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  James folded the cupboard door closed and walked over to her and kissed her on the top of her head. Sometimes she forgot how tall he was.

  Hannah and Franklin arrived exactly on time. They all greeted each other at the front door. James and Franklin shook hands and Hannah and Lillian hugged and kissed each other. They’d brought a bottle of wine with them. It was a cold night and they smiled in the doorway. They looked pale. Lillian imagined them as survivors of some kind of huge trauma, then had to remind herself that she didn’t know them very well.

  ‘Let me get you a drink,’ Lillian said.

  ‘Sounds good,’ Franklin said.

  ‘It’s a good thing we didn’t have to drive,’ Hannah said. ‘Remember when we went to Alice’s? Frank got so drunk he couldn’t drive. We had to catch a bus.’

  ‘We waited for a cab,’ Franklin explained. ‘But it never showed, so we went to the bus stop instead.’

  Hannah said, ‘My God, I was plastered.’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad. The way Hannah goes on about it, it’s like she had to lug me home on her back. She just doesn’t like public transport, she’s spoiled that way.’

  ‘We’ve lived next door for years and this is the first time we’ve eaten together,’ Hannah said. ‘Isn’t that funny?’

  ‘It is,’ James said.

  Lillian smiled and walked into the kitchen with the bottle of wine, while Hannah and Franklin started to shrug out of their coats. The bottle was surprisingly cold. Lillian imagined them pulling it from their fridge at the very last second before heading over. She opened it and poured two glasses. She could hear James laughing in the living room. For a moment she felt like locking herself in the bathroom again and she stood still, waiting for the feeling to pass.

  When she walked into the living room they were all sitting at the table. She handed them their drinks and then sat down next to James, who put his hand on her knee. He’d put the stereo on and turned the volume down so the music was barely audible.

  ‘I hope you guys don’t mind eating right away,’ she said.

  ‘I’m starving,’ Franklin said.

  ‘It smells wonderful,’ Hannah said.

  Lillian nodded thanks. James started talking about his work. He was a lawyer at a real estate firm. He wrote up contracts. Most of his anecdotes from work had a hint of the in-joke to them. Usually when he talked about work to Lillian he would finish, look at her face for a second, and then say, ‘I guess maybe you had to be there.’

  When he finished speaking both Hannah and Franklin smiled. Hannah lifted her glass and drank.

  ‘So you guys were burgled?’ James said.

  ‘What an ordeal,’ Franklin said. ‘There were so many reports to fill in. I really hate doing paperwork.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be able to stand knowing that some stranger had been in my house,’ Lillian said.

  ‘I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since it happened,’ Hannah said. ‘I never used to dream much before all this happened.’

  ‘You should see her, sometimes she’ll sit bolt upright in bed. I swear when I try to calm her down she doesn’t even recognise me half the time.’

  ‘It’s been very traumatic,’ Hannah said.

  ‘All I’m saying is that it’s a good thing we don’t have a gun in the house.’

  Hannah smiled and made her hand into a gun and pointed it at Franklin’s head.

  ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’ Franklin said. ‘That right there is a kill shot.’

  Lillian excused herself to the kitchen again, drank a glass of tap water, and then came back out into the living room with the potatoes. She went back to the kitchen and returned with the lamb and then did the same with the rice. She served everyone then sat down.

  ‘This all looks so good,’ Hannah said. ‘Thank you so much.’

  Towards the end of the meal, while their plates and glasses were almost empty but they were still eating and drinking intermittently, James said, ‘Was much taken?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Franklin said. ‘They mostly just broke things.’

  ‘And vandalised the place,’ Hannah said.

  ‘And vandalised the place, yeah. They spray-painted our bedroom wall, threw our clothes around and tore them. They threw all my shoes and a couple of suits into the bathtub and filled it with water. They were expensive shoes and they didn’t even take them. What kind of a person does a thing like that?’

  ‘A few things were stolen,’ Hannah said.

  Franklin looked at his wife and then down at the plate in front of him. He lifted his glass from the table and glanced into it.

  ‘A few things were
taken, yeah,’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’ James said.

  ‘Just a few small things,’ Hannah said. ‘Nothing really that valuable. Nothing that would really matter.’

  ‘At least you two weren’t home when it happened,’ James said. ‘So I suppose that’s something we can be thankful for.’

  Lillian half-expected him to raise his glass in a toast, but instead he tried to spear a single grain of rice on his plate with his fork. He missed and tried again and again. She looked away and attempted to unblock her ears by moving her jaw while still keeping her mouth closed.

  James had lit candles, the flames of which bent and flickered now and then by some imperceptible breeze. The candles hadn’t made it bright enough to see what they were eating, so James had turned on the lamp in the corner of the room, which shot a full moon of light straight up onto the ceiling.

  ‘Would anyone like a coffee?’ Lillian said, standing.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Hannah said. ‘It was such wonderful food.’

  ‘It was no trouble,’ Lillian said.

  They cleared the plates from the table and took them back to the kitchen. Hannah put them on the counter and then looked around the room, her head tilted as if she was only interested in the highest shelves. The front door opened and closed. Lillian looked out the kitchen window, to the veranda. Franklin was handing James a cigarette, and then lit his own and offered the light to James, who leaned forward. There was a light above them, and then beyond that the streetlight in front of their house, and then just the darkness.

  ‘Is Frank smoking?’ Hannah said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Lillian said.

  ‘He was going to quit, he does quit actually, but then he’s so agitated for weeks. The smallest things set him off. I go around the house like I’m the intruder, trying not to disrupt anything. He’ll die from stress before he dies of lung cancer.’

  Lillian opened the coffee pot and started to fill it with water. Hannah was leaning against the kitchen bench, looking out towards the front veranda.

  ‘His work’s been hard?’ Lillian said.