We Are Not the Same Anymore

by Chris Somerville

Overview

We are Not the Same Anymore is a collection of short fiction about people trying to connect with each other and the difficulties of finding intimacy. These stories play out the small catastrophes of everyday life. A man turns up at his daughter's birthday party with a goldfish in an ice-cream container. On the way to collect firewood, a woman and her teenaged neighbor crash in a snowstorm. An unwilling son helps his sister and father put up posters for a missing dog named Michael. Familiar and endearing, Chris Somerville's characters are consumed with their own neuroses, and through their eyes, the landscape of the domestic becomes surreal and dully terrifying. Suffused with a dark humor, their struggles for intimacy are recreated on the page with a deft and affectionate touch.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780702250934
Publisher:	University of Queensland Press
Publication date:	04/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	204
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Chris Somerville was shortlisted as an Emerging Author in the Queensland Premiers Literary Awards in 2009. His short fiction has appeared in several literary journals, including Voiceworks and Paper Radio. He has taught creative writing at Griffith University and the University of Queensland.

Read an Excerpt

We Are Not the Same Anymore

---

By Chris Somerville

University of Queensland Press

Copyright © 2013 Chris Somerville
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-5093-4

---

CHAPTER 1

Earthquake

He says being in an earthquake is a hard thing to forget. He says other things too: that fluoride in tap water will eventually give you cancer, that he's been bumping into things too often, that he's forgotten the dimensions of his body. The truth is that my father, even as a young man, has never been in the best of health. Before he retired he was convinced that the ventilation in his office was making him sick. He'd come home in the evening accidentally spilling tissues from his jacket like he was afraid he'd lose his way back to work. He was always squinting and biting at his bottom lip with worry.

Now his problem is that his dog has run off. My sister and I drive him down to the print shop to have some flyers made. She really likes the dog. She told me, when we were driving over to my father's place, that the last time she visited he cleaned her windshield. He did such a poor job of it she was blinded by soap streaks as soon as the car faced into the sun. She insisted on driving us to the printer's. I didn't think there was that much need for concern over our father.

Picture both my parents when they were younger. Whenever they walked together my mother was always a few steps in front; my father always followed her, sometimes kicking his shoes by accident, squinting and biting his lip and looking around at everything like he was afraid a bird might swoop him from any direction. This was how they always walked together. I like to think that in his old age he's kind of mellowed out.

In the car park, standing beside the car, my father says, 'Can you believe how many pockets these shorts have?' and I look down at them. They're grey cargo shorts.

'Are they new?' my sister says.

'I didn't notice when I bought them,' he says. 'I've never owned anything with so many pockets, what am I supposed to do with them all? I don't own enough stuff to fill them.'

My sister and I bought the dog for my father after our mother died. It's a dog from the pound, tan coloured and mostly muscle. It has a sharp little tail that whips against everything and my father loves it more than any of his friends and certain family members. It's always been pretty energetic but this is the first time in three years that it's run off.

'You can keep gum in there, Dad,' my sister says. 'Or keys.'

The printer's in a shopping centre down the hill from my father's apartment. There's a teenager on the footpath out front drinking water from a large plastic bottle made for orange juice. As we walk past he pours some of it over his head, then shakes his head around.

'Get a load of that,' my father says.

The flyer my father typed out on his computer has a picture of his dog on it, sitting upright on his sofa. He called the dog Michael, which I have never thought as a good name for a dog, and I feel a bit stupid about it while the girl behind the counter prints the flyers out, and all the time she's seeing over and over at least fifty times, Missing dog, Michael along with my father's phone number. He's put down a reward of one hundred dollars, but he thinks that once someone turns up and sees how old he is, he can talk them down to at least half of that.

My father is saying to my sister that some cats will jump out of the windows of high-rise apartments because of boredom. He says he had a friend whose dog hung itself while leashed to a bed frame. There was an elephant on a train once, in the early nineteen hundreds, which was put on a carriage as a spectacle and it managed to break free and jump from the moving train. The elephant had the forethought to do this as the train crossed a river, so it survived. He says that dogs are very perceptive, that they never trust any kind of criminal, that they can tell if earthquakes are coming, or cyclones. We were in another country when the earthquake struck us, but still.

My sister says that he shouldn't be so morbid.

The last thing we need to do is stick the flyers up around the neighbourhood. I'm taping one to a telephone pole and my father winds down his window and calls out to me to put it up higher. I'm not getting it at eye level. We've stopped in front of a community centre and I can hear someone playing a piano. When we drive on to the next place, down near a service station, my father asks me to hand him the sticky tape and a flyer.

'I'm not criticising you,' he says, taking them from me. 'I just think I should be the one doing this from now on.'

He gets out of the car. There's still a large stack of flyers on the back seat beside me. I can see now that we printed far too many – there aren't enough poles around – and I wonder if my father will be hurt if we end up dumping them in a bin. Probably he'll keep them, especially if Michael never comes back. It's bright outside and airless. Cars are both pulling in to the service station and driving out, and my father is struggling with the sticky tape in wild gestures, like a person who's walked into a spiderweb. I'm watching him do this and my sister is watching him too and neither of us is saying or doing anything.

The earthquake came in the middle of the night. We were staying in a cabin in a small town in California. It was the off-season, so most of the other cabins were empty. I don't remember much of it, except waking to the sound of plates rattling and my father calling out for us to stay calm. He made each of us – me, my sister, my mother – stand in a doorway. There were enough leading into the living room for each of us and we all stood there, looking at each other across the room with our hands on the doorframes. My mother looked terrified, but my father looked oddly serene. He had his jaw clenched and was breathing steadily, staring at the light bulb hanging from the ceiling while it swung back and forth.

CHAPTER 2

Aquarium

What had happened was that I had saved a man named George Avery from drowning. He was in his fifties and had grey hair. We'd sat together on the shoreline afterwards, each of us out of breath, but him more so than me. He wasn't in the best of health. The waves had been shaping the sand around our bodies. I'd had water running down my face from my hair and occasionally a drop would find the corner of my mouth. Avery had put his hand on my shoulder and I'd just nodded back at him. My sneakers had been a little way up the beach, towards the softer sand, but my socks, which I'd kicked off closer to the water, were long gone. I regretted this. They were one of the few good pairs I owned.

Avery had called an ambulance from the beach and they'd turned up and checked him out. I had been told to wait around. I hadn't really wanted to make a big deal of things. I had a blanket draped over my shoulders, which I'd worried made me look helpless. A news team had turned up to interview us. I hadn't wanted to be interviewed and in the end I'd told the reporter that anyone else would have done the same thing.

Avery hadn't let me leave until he'd gotten my phone number and embraced me in front of everyone.

The day after this had all hit the news I'd received a lot of phone calls from my friends and family. They'd all congratulated me and told me what a good job I'd done. It'd felt like my birthday and that had made me uneasy. I'd really just been waiting for my ex-wife Violet to call me. I'd been restless. I'd had trouble even reading a magazine.

After a few days of waiting I gave in one morning and called her, while the sun shone big and bright against the white wall of my neighbour's house and reflected into my kitchen. I was thankful that she answered instead of Bill Casey, her lover, because I felt bad for ringing her so frequently.

'Did you see the news the other day?' I said.

'What?' she said.

'Did you see the news the other day? I stopped a man from drowning.'

'Could this maybe wait? I'm trying to get Claudia to eat cereal.' She pronounced 'Claudia' in a stiff tone because she'd never wanted to name her after my grandmother. Mostly we called her Claud. 'You know the mornings are always a hectic time for us.'

'Put Claud on then. So I can tell her what her daddy did.'

'No, I don't want to have to explain to her what drowning is, we're late.'

'It'll only take a minute.'

'Call back later. I can't hold the phone and a spoon while also trying to get Claud to eat cornflakes.'

'But Violet, come on. I saved somebody's life.'

'Good, I'm glad,' Violet said. 'It sounds like a very noble thing to do.'

I considered hanging up on her, but I knew this wouldn't be helpful. Instead I went quiet and looked out of my kitchen window. My neighbour had a vine creeping into his foundations, which I would probably have told him about if I'd known him better. I hadn't been his neighbour for very long.

'I was thinking I might come over,' I said. 'We can celebrate.'

'Not tonight,' my ex-wife said. 'If you're still coming to Claud's birthday we can see you then.'

'Of course.'

'Good. Look I have to go,' Violet said, and hung up before I could say anything else.

I stood with the phone next to my ear, listening to the quiet on the phone line. After I'd left my wife she'd taken up with my friend Bill Casey. I still got on with Bill okay; it seemed us being friends was a hard thing to forget, even if he did things that I'd always found opposite to my own character, like taking wheat supplements instead of paracetamol and using recipes printed on the labels of food cans.

He usually had his eyes half-open when he spoke to you and I had always considered him to be a bit of a moron, but I guess he sure showed me.

I put the phone back in its receiver and went and brushed my teeth, which I do sometimes when I'm agitated. I painted houses for a living. I'd gone to university for about a year and a half, doing design studies, but that hadn't really offered me much and now I painted houses. I'd even started to paint my own house, the one Violet and I had lived in together, and I'd managed to get a pretty good base coat done before I'd left.

When we were married Violet and I hadn't really fought much and some of our friends, both mine and hers, had told us that this was a problem, as it would lead to a lot of unresolved anger. I wasn't so sure about that. The best way I could ever explain it was that we'd lived together for a while and married and had a daughter and then we'd both moved on to something else. For me I just wasn't too clear what that was.

George Avery had been calling my house ever since I'd saved him. At first I just let the calls go to my machine, but he rang pretty frequently and I kept picturing him when we were sitting on the shoreline out of breath. He'd had these big wet eyes like a sick dog. My house was big enough, but it was close to an airport and when I finally called him back I was sitting on my veranda drinking beer and watching the white undersides of 747s descending and coming so low to my roof that the windows rattled.

When he answered I said my whole name, formally.

'I was hoping you'd call,' he said. 'I took the week off work and I thought I might have called you too much.'

'It's fine, George,' I said.

'I'm glad you think so.'

'It's good to hear that you're okay.'

'Well I'm not sure if I'm completely okay. I wake up every morning and it's like I'm a newborn. Sometimes it feels like I'm learning how to walk again.'

I sipped my beer. It was getting to the dark half of the afternoon. Mosquitoes were out and I tried to shake them off my legs and arms, which didn't do much. My hands were taken up by the beer bottle and the phone.

'Maybe you should talk to someone about that,' I said.

'I'm talking to you about it right now.'

'I mean someone professional.'

'My wife's been saying the same thing. She worries too much. If it's not this then it's the environment or the war or our son being in a different city. There's always something worrying her.'

'Maybe she's right on this one,' I said.

'Yeah,' George Avery said, in a way that meant he didn't agree.

A plane flew overhead and the house shook. The cups rattled in the kitchen. I looked up at its dark shape, the blinking lights on the ends of the wings. Whenever I pictured the total annihilation of my life, I sometimes thought of an aeroplane flying into my house like a dart and wiping me out. George Avery was speaking to me.

'I'm sorry, can you say that again?' I said. 'I'm under a flight path.'

'I was talking about when we can get you over here for dinner. My wife is really itching to meet you,' he said, and then gave me his address, which wasn't too far from my house.

'Soon, soon. I'll have dinner with you soon George,' I said, though I had no intention of ever seeing him again. 'You're definitely in my thoughts.'

'She wants to make you roast lamb,' George Avery said. 'She's looking to give you the royal treatment, don't you worry about that.'

The year Claud was born I would still obsess over some of the men Violet had been with before me. We stayed up in bed one night, listing our previous lovers. I'd been with a few women before her, not many, but one of them had ripped the wipers off my Ford during an argument and Violet and I laughed about that. Then she told me about hers, and we were both about the same number, but then she said that one of them was currently in jail and I didn't find it that funny anymore.

'What for?' I said.

'Assault. He beat up his boss once, in a car park.'

'What?' I said. 'When is he getting out?'

'I'm not sure,' Violet said. 'I guess it wasn't really his boss at the time, because he'd been fired. So he beat him up a couple of days after that. He was waiting for the guy after he got off work.'

I was concerned that Violet was saying this like it wasn't a big deal. She just looked at me and shrugged.

I said, 'How did you even meet him?'

'He was my high-school boyfriend. He was a few years older than me. I don't see why you're worried about it. He was in jail by the time I'd graduated and I haven't seen him since.'

I made a noise, a kind of hum, to try and show Violet that I was okay with it. Then, after she'd fallen asleep, I went into Claud's bedroom and watched her sleeping peacefully in her crib.

Violet had grown up on a farm and I always thought that this had produced a coldness in her, which I occasionally brushed up against. When she was a teenager her daddy would take her out in a helicopter and she killed wild pigs with a shotgun while standing on the landing skids. From all accounts she was a pretty crack shot.

I'd only ever been out to see her folks once.

Still, for a time our life together was a pleasurable one. Most nights in bed we'd go at each other pretty good. Even when things weren't so great, once we hit the bedroom it was like we were both suddenly awake. I'd stroke her body and pull at things and bite them. Violet would be into it too. In these instances I could see how she'd ended up with some of the men she had, as we moved around each other's bodies, like one of us was a planet and the other a sun.

The morning of Claud's birthday I drove over to Violet's house with a goldfish in a clear plastic ice-cream container. The container was filled with water. I tried to drive carefully. The goldfish was bright orange and swam around in circles and sometimes stayed motionless when I took corners. The water shifted around it instead. The man at the pet store had told me it was a female.

I'd made a birthday card for Claud. On the front of it I'd drawn myself down on one knee, holding out the goldfish in the ice-cream container to Claud. She was smiling. I'd drawn in Violet and Bill too, to show that I was okay with things, though I couldn't bring myself to draw them touching each other. They were standing in the background, looking at us and smiling, and I had maybe slimmed my waistline a bit. Everything else I felt to be accurate.

There were a few cars out in front of the house. I hadn't thought that there'd be other people here. I parked down the street and walked to the house, carrying the goldfish in one hand and the card in the other. Balloons had been tied with ribbon to the letterbox. They weren't helium-filled and they were hanging limply against the letterbox or slid across the ground in the breeze as far as their tethers would allow.

The front door was open. I noticed that the outside of the house had finished being painted and it was a pretty good job, except on the trimmings where, when you came close, you could still make out the brushstrokes. I walked through the TV room to the kitchen, where a couple was standing. I'd never met them before. They were eating olives from a small white bowl on the kitchen counter.

'Hello,' the man said. 'Tony, right?'

'Yes,' I said, stupidly, since my name wasn't Tony.

'There's been a bit of an accident,' the woman said. 'One of the kids knocked the aquarium over in the other room. Violet's in there now cleaning up.'

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from We Are Not the Same Anymore by Chris Somerville. Copyright © 2013 Chris Somerville. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Earthquake,
Aquarium,
Snow on the mountain,
Parachute,
The Chinese student,
Trouble,
Loss,
Hinterland,
Room,
Giraffe,
Travelling through the air,
Athletics,
Sleeping with the light on,
Drowning man,
Acknowledgments,