We Are Not The Same Anymore

by Chris Somerville

  ‘Between you and me, I think Franklin’s been having an affair.’

  ‘What?’ Lillian said. She paused and then felt like that wasn’t enough. To make up for this she added, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Hannah said, keeping her voice quiet. ‘I was shocked at first. In fact I felt physically ill. Of course I couldn’t tell Franklin that. I had to pretend I had a stomach bug.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘I’ve suspected it for a while, but I’m pretty sure she’s the one who broke into our house.’

  Lillian looked out at the front veranda. James and Franklin were talking and she could hear the low murmur of their voices. James blew out a puff of cigarette smoke and it hovered above them.

  ‘How do you know? Does Franklin think it was her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Pretty much all that was taken was some of our pictures, a few ornaments, some, but not all, of my jewellery, and Franklin’s golf clubs. He loved those clubs too. It’s hard to explain but it felt personal.’

  Lillian spooned coffee into the pot, twisted it back together, then put it on the stove and lit the burner beneath it. She said, ‘That sounds so awful.’

  ‘And Franklin didn’t mention it exactly, but whoever did it spray-painted Screw yourself faggot on our bedroom wall.’

  Lillian nearly confessed, right there in the kitchen, that she’d been sleeping with someone else, but whenever she’d thought about leaving James, or even gone to the extent of packing things into a suitcase, she’d pictured James in the house without her, sitting on their sofa and staring blankly at the walls. James going around and staring at each empty room.

  She’d been with Tim only a few days ago, and he’d told her about the last time he’d flown a plane, about ejecting from it and shooting straight up into the air while his jet had tumbled down to the earth below him. He’d told her how he parachuted down and it gave him time to reflect on things.

  He’d said, ‘I’m not sure if I crashed that plane on purpose.’

  ‘I’ve been having the time of my life in this apartment,’ Lillian had said.

  Now she wasn’t so sure it was true, but she wanted to say the word ‘fucking’ to Hannah. She was fucking someone else.

  Instead she said nothing and they stood next to each other in the kitchen. Franklin and James came back inside and Lillian felt a slight touch of cold air. The coffee pot started to boil out up into the spout. Lillian put four cups on a tray, along with teaspoons, a bowl of sugar and a small white jug of milk. Hannah lifted the coffee pot.

  ‘Ah hell,’ she said. ‘Who says I’m right about any of it anyway?’

  ‘It could be nothing,’ Lillian said.

  They both walked into the living room and sat at the table. Lillian looked at Franklin closely, then realised she was staring and looked away. James sat close to her and smelled of cigarette smoke. While they all drank coffee and talked a little more she had trouble looking Franklin directly in the eye and she was relieved, ten minutes later, when he pushed his chair back and said that it was probably about time he and Hannah headed home.

  Once their neighbours had left James started washing dishes again. Lillian felt like going to bed, but didn’t want to leave him in the kitchen by himself. She sat up on the kitchen bench, which was less comfortable than she’d anticipated, but she still didn’t slip back down onto the floor. James kept washing and stacked plates, with suds rolling off them, into the drying rack. Lillian looked at him as he worked. She thought, as she did regularly, that his last girlfriend hadn’t loved him as much as he’d deserved.

  ‘That went okay,’ Lillian said.

  ‘Yeah,’ James said. ‘They’re good people. Are you feeling better?’

  Lillian took a moment to consider how she felt and then the power went out. In the darkness she hesitated to move, and James didn’t say anything for the longest time. She could hear water trickling from the sink into the drain. They’d needed a new plug for a while now. She thought about mentioning Tim to James right then, while she had the cover of darkness, and then she could easily slip away. She breathed in.

  ‘Don’t move,’ James said, and she jumped in surprise because he was much closer to her than she thought. She could feel his breath on her now. ‘Is there anything around you could burn yourself on?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said.

  Her eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. She could make out James’s dark shape in front of her. She felt his hand then, on her thigh. He leaned into her and she put her arm around him and held on tightly. Their mouths were on each other and then she heard the metallic chime of his belt buckle. Lillian lifted herself up to remove her jeans and underwear.

  The whole thing lasted a little longer than a minute and afterwards they were both out of breath. James leaned into her and he smelled strongly of himself. He cleared his throat. The power was still off and they stayed together like that for a moment.

  ‘Is it just us, or is it the whole street?’ Lillian said eventually.

  ‘It’s just us,’ James said. ‘Everyone else on the street still has their lights on. I should go and check the fuse box.’

  Lillian nodded and said, ‘Okay.’ She felt James move away and heard him pull his pants back on. She watched his shape leave the kitchen. She waited to hear him bump into something, but he quietly glided through the room. It surprised her that the only sound he made was when he opened the front door. She looked around herself, at the benches and the cupboards, which were no more than dark shapes in a dark room. She got down off the kitchen counter and stepped heavily, to keep her balance, when she pulled her pants back on.

  She looked around herself. ‘James?’ she said. The room felt cold now. She waited for the lights to come back on.

  Drowning man

  We all watched the drowning man from the side of the lake. Someone said that one of us should swim out and save him, but we were apprehensive. The drowning man, in his panic, could pull us down with him. We all knew the drowning man but none of us really liked him and he had no desire to be liked. Did that still mean he deserved to drown? We discussed it among ourselves on the side of the lake.

  Brom had an excellent idea for retrieving the body: we could all tie our boats together and then sink hooks into the water and trawl the bottom of the lake. The problem with this idea was that the drowning man was still drowning and not yet a drowned body ready to be recovered. We waited on the side of the lake.

  I tell my students that we waited, but they seem neither impressed nor horrified. They yawn and draw pictures on their desks, which won’t last. The drawings will be wiped away by the cleaning staff. I don’t view it as a means of artistic expression; these are not Buddhists who destroy their artwork to show us the fleeting importance of the world. All the students in my class are just vandals.

  I don’t believe they hate me, it just seems that whatever it is they need to learn, I am not the one to teach them. It doesn’t bother me much. My mind is elsewhere when I talk to them, or when I write on the blackboard in chalk. I can’t stand the feeling of that, though, so I try to avoid it. There’ll be lots of dictation and hand-outs until the faculty gives me a whiteboard and some felt pens.

  I don’t know how drowning feels, though it could hardly be pleasant. I was once pulled out into the ocean and for a second I panicked and felt the cool rush of water over my head and a knotting in my chest. I managed to swim out of danger, but for a while it was terrifying. I’d sat on the sand and coughed and above me the sky had been light grey and unmoving.

  When we pulled the drowning man’s body from the water we all stared down at him. He looked dead. His mouth was turned downwards in a horrible way. I thought that maybe I should say a few words, but nothing came to mind. Someone bent down on one knee, close to the drowning man, to see if he was still breathing. Satisfied that he
was dead, they relieved him of his wristwatch. They held it to their ear to see if it was still ticking.

  Water spills under the classroom door. I first notice it when I drop a stick of chalk on the ground and it lands in a puddle. When I pick it up it leaves behind a white cloud that holds the chalk’s shape for a second before floating apart. I look at the water coming in from under the door. I sigh and tell everyone that perhaps going home would be the best idea.

  ‘Should I call your parents?’ I say.

  ‘We are too old for that kind of thing,’ my class says.

  Outside there is too much water. It fills the car park and comes down the corridors in small waves, each no more than a golden line moving across the linoleum. I think it’s strange because it isn’t raining. The water seems to be rising gradually.

  ‘Well, it looks like none of us are going anywhere,’ I tell my students and they all groan together like a goddamned choir.

  I knew the drowning man’s wife; I was sleeping with her. I turned up at her house to tell her the bad news and also, maybe, to sleep with her. She was more upset than I’d expected, even though no one had really liked her husband, including her. Whenever we were together she would lie against me and complain about him, her head rising up and down on my chest as I breathed.

  I was holding a bouquet of flowers. When I held them too close to my face, the smell made me a little light-headed. The drowning man’s wife asked me if I had anything to do with it.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I said in my best hurt voice, but I could tell it wasn’t enough.

  In class my students call me ‘Teach’ or ‘Teacher’ or ‘Sir’, but never by my name, which is Richard. None of them has ever brought an apple to class and placed it on my desk. The other teachers in the staff lounge are well liked. Between classes they are usually eating apples.

  Water falls from the ceiling. I tell my class that we need to get to higher ground, and they scrape their chairs across the floor and fill their backpacks with their notebooks and pens. Outside it begins to rain, but the flooding preceded it, I’m sure. I make a mental note of it because that kind of thing seems important.

  I lead my students up the stairs, which has become a gentle stream, towards the roof. I tell them that the elevator, in this kind of situation, would be unsafe. It seems like the wrong idea, I know, to head towards the roof if water is cascading down from there, but my students need leadership and there isn’t really anywhere else to go.

  I once conducted a study on drowning. This was after the drowning man’s wife had decided never to see me again. I went around with a tape recorder and interviewed people who had come close to drowning. I put an ad in the newspaper.

  One man told me that after a near drowning he decided to join a popular religion. A lot of people, after they had almost drowned, had made life decisions of varying importance. The decisions ranged from asking people to marry them, to simply changing the carpet in their living room.

  I wrote about how being that close to death makes you more decisive. Logically it wasn’t that big a leap. I’ve never been the deepest of thinkers. Still, I did experiments on myself, in the bathtub with a brick on my chest, because I figured my life could do with some changes. I had water stuck in my ears for a week.

  The drowning study was for a regional university. Afterwards people began to offer me teaching jobs, because of the success of the study.

  The door to the roof is locked. I try to kick it down, but that sort of thing is much harder than it looks. My legs hurt and I have no other plan. I sit down on the stairs, water streaming gently past me. I prop up my head with my hands. I can feel the seat of my pants getting wet and it starts to become uncomfortable.

  A lot of the students start to make jokes, mean jokes, about me. I can’t hear the jokes specifically, but I can tell enough about them by the way the students are laughing and by the way they look at me. One student pats me on the shoulder in a possibly unkind way. I suppress the urge to cry, and tell them all to go back down to the classroom.

  My drowning study won an award and for a while people were interested in it. It became a bit much. I got sick of being interviewed about drowning. I am well versed on many other subjects. I can pull apart a car engine and then put it back together. I used to be pretty good with a pottery wheel. I can whistle a tune almost to the note, though even I don’t really see the value in this.

  I spoke on a panel, to a half-filled auditorium. The other members of the panel were all experts on drowning. What a gloomy bunch. I slouched in my chair and didn’t offer much. One man, who was bald and wore glasses, was the most outspoken of us. He said usually the people who drowned were the ones who had the least to live for. The others nodded in agreement. Ten minutes after the panel finished I called one of the universities from a public phone and accepted a teaching job.

  In the classroom we wade through water that’s waist deep. The desks have all floated together in a group to the east wall. I open the door outside and more water rushes in. It rises to just below our armpits and then continues to rise gradually. I tell my students to find anything that floats and leave the building. They stay still and I try to think of anything in the classroom that could be safely used as a flotation device. I tell the students to swim for it.

  Outside the world is mostly water. Benches and fence posts and picnic tables float past. I tell my students to find something that floats and never let go. I’m thinking, Watch out for undercurrents, they can suck you down like a straw, but I figure my students don’t need to be more worried than they are. This will have to be where we all go our separate ways. I tell my students it will all be okay, that if we can get through this then some big changes may be coming for all of us. I climb on top of a blackboard and manage to catch my breath. It’s a relief to find that water is no longer filling my mouth.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you Krissy Kneen, Kristina Olsson, Robyn Sheahan-Bright, John Hunter, Julia Stiles and Madonna Duffy, for helping this become a book.

  And to Chris Currie, Fiona Stager, Benjamin Law, Kristina Schulz, Anthony Mullins, Bryan Whalen and Belinda Jeffery for their friendship and support, along with Angela Meyer, Favel Parrett, Ira McGuire, Chris Bowman, Alan Vaarwerk and Samantha Mee, for reading this collection in its very early stages.

  To Ronnie Scott, Tom Doig, Ryan Paine, Katia Pase and Sam Cooney for helping me work on some of these stories over the years, and to Stuart Glover, Jason Nelson, Nigel Krauth and Steve Stockwell for their teaching and guidance.

  Thanks to my mother, Adele Somerville, and my brother, Jack Somerville, and the rest of my family. Thanks to Bronte Coates for her love and support.

  First published 2013 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  www.uqp.com.au

  © 2013 Chris Somerville

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,

  criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,

  no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

  or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior

  written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover design by Design by Committee

  Cover photograph by Jozsef Scheer

  Typeset in 12/16 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data is available at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  We Are Not the Same Anymore / Chris Somerville

  ISBN: 978 0 7022 4965 5 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978 0 7022 5092 7 (pdf)

  ISBN: 978 0 7022 5093 4 (epub)

  ISBN: 978 0 7022 5094 1 (kindle)

  University of Quee
nsland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.