by Nick Earls
Minutes after I arrived, the watch was slipped from my wrist by a balloon-twisting clown and then given back to me in the belly of a purple poodle before I knew it was gone. I still hadn’t got the time zone right in my head and the moment felt hazy and surreal – the clown and his red nose, his unfriendly mouth set in the middle of a fat lurid smile, the people clustered around us working it out one by one and all before I did. And I was holding my balloon poodle, thanking the clown for it since it seemed to be a gift, then seeing a watch inside through the translucent purple, marvelling that the clown too might have a watch like that and then, far too late, realising I’d been had.
I pulled my sleeve up and saw my bare wrist, and that my watch, my one tangible link with my father, could have been lost so easily. The fragility of that connection was more than I could bear. I thought I would cry. I took the first jerky breath and then stopped myself. People laughed, so I made an effort to turn my lurch of breath into a laugh as well. The clown, still flat-mouthed inside his smile, was studying me closely. He went to speak, but then thought better of it. Someone popped the balloon and handed me the watch, and I put it in my pocket. I was holding a drink, so I couldn’t put it on my wrist again, and I wanted it out of sight. I wanted no one but me to touch it.
‘He did me earlier,’ one of the music company executives said, putting his hand on my arm and giving it a squeeze. ‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ He started to steer me round to face another direction and said, ‘There are some people I’d like you to meet, over by the fountain.’
My hand kept going to my pocket, checking and checking, for the rest of the night.
Patrick had been in Butterfish, in the early days. He was in the Butterfish that played friends’ parties till the cops were called, that hired the cheapest rehearsal spaces in the Valley or, better still, borrowed them. The Butterfish that stuck together because the best of the music wasn’t awful and the beer was free. Derek was always the exception to that, coming out of a hot afternoon’s practice wired, the daylight and shoppers and the mall’s benign ambling drunks unready for him. He walked as if the fans were already circling, and the rest of us just couldn’t see them. LSD – lead singer’s disease. It had its hooks in him even then.
Derek always used disabled toilets because he preferred the extra room. I told him it was for the wheels and he said, ‘Sure, but, you know...’ meaning he had an entitlement that couldn’t be put into words, or didn’t need them. The people with wheels could wait their turn.
It was Patrick who gave the band its name. ‘I had a friend who went to South Africa,’ he said. We were sitting with a hundred bad band names scrawled across sheets of paper. ‘He ate this fish and it’s called a butterfish because it’s so oily you shit butter after you eat it. Seriously.’
Websites about fish don’t quite support this assertion, but we liked the name and the job was done. Shitting butter. That was all we needed to know. The decision was made then and there in the Cosmopolitan Café, a minute’s walk down the mall from the traffic I was stuck in now. Ahead I could see that a truck had lost some of its load on the way into Chinatown, and four lanes of vehicles were being painstakingly merged into two.
Patrick had been a driving force when the band started, so it was no surprise one of his names came through. He had plenty of names rejected too though. He was a great reader, or in fact mis-reader, of The Great Gatsby, and one of the band names he suggested was The Eyes of Dr TJ Eckleburg, from an advertising billboard the narrator regularly passes on his way home from the city to West Egg. His justification was that a band had just called themselves The Boo Radleys, and that name came from another twentieth-century American classic novel, though not one as sharp and wise – by his reckoning – as The Great Gatsby.
‘Moving on...’ Derek said cautiously, after a respectful silence, running his pen down to the next name on the list.
Try as he might, Patrick was a square peg in a room full of round holes. And he was my brother, and that didn’t make it easy. His main instrument was clarinet – not one we really had much call for – his self-taught guitar playing was always marginal and, in the end, it was up to me to take him aside and point it out.
‘He’s got to go,’ Derek said. ‘Really.’
I met Patrick at his house. In the car I’d practised what I hoped was a diplomatic way of putting it, but it crumbled into something cowardly and ineffectual. I looked at the floor and talked vaguely about a new direction. I said the rest of us weren’t sure about a few things.
I paused, and Patrick took my useless pause and said, curtly, ‘Should we wait for your balls to drop before we have this conversation? Look, let me make it easy. I’ve been offered a big job in advertising, and I’m going to take it. There’ll be no time for band meetings, or any of the time-wasting crap that goes on. So tell the others that. Tell them it doesn’t work for me any more.’
In a life that had been characterised by false starts, accepting that job was a sure and decisive move, and ultimately a successful one. As a comedian, Patrick had been more acerbic than funny (he had always been unable to distinguish between the two). As a model his good looks had proven too straightforward. As a fashion buyer he had lasted a day and a half before realising the prospect of making a decision would paralyse him and any risk would be too much to bear. ‘What if I’m the last person ever to buy low-riders?’ he said. ‘And what if I bought a million pairs?’ Low-riders had years left to run, but he couldn’t have known it.
A while before his big break in advertising, we had set up a business to record cheap jingles and on-hold information. ‘Your call is important to us, and did you know we can...?’ Insure your home contents, provide party novelties, come to your place to shampoo your dog. All of that and more.
We even got business cards printed, in a deep green that came off on your hands. Neither of us could bear to go back to complain. Patrick said we should get around it by laminating them – that could be our ‘look’. I think I just put the box down on the desk and walked around the room holding my green fingers away from anything important, hoping the cards would be gone by the time I had found some way to get clean.
I stuck with Butterfish, and our lives became different. I chose sharehouses filled with guitars, and with milk crates for furniture. He bought a compact but stylish studio apartment at Teneriffe. I drove an old car then, a grime-speckled Laser from the eighties that leaked oil slowly from a site no mechanic could locate. Any time I went to Patrick’s place, he would meet me at visitor parking with a sheet of cardboard at the ready.
The first post-Patrick incarnation of Butterfish held together for another year before crumbling under the weight of its non-success. I headed south out of Brisbane then. After a few weeks of running down my savings faster than I’d hoped and speaking to almost no one, I looked at a jobs board outside the shops at Jindabyne and ended up washing dishes in a Thredbo ski-lodge restaurant out of season.
The restaurant had square white plates and heavy cutlery that was shapely in a modern kind of way but, with its airport carpet and breakfast bar featuring a battery of plastic cereal dispensers and an industrial toaster, it still managed only a low-ceilinged budget before-and-après ski vibe. On Tuesday nights it hosted an informal inter-lodge darts comp, with other itinerant dishwashers and painters and cleaners drifting in to play for teams they didn’t care about, and to smoke and steal drinks from behind the bar.
I played because we all played. Each time I would face down the triple twenty – the tiny, distant triple twenty – and tell myself to aim, and to try, and I would walk away with the darts splayed randomly across the board and a few points scored. And I would watch as the people who had made this their lives for twenty years bitched, drank, smoked and used whatever they could to send themselves numb.
I couldn’t bear the thought of Christmas there as it approached. I swallowed whatever pride was called for, and I phoned Derek. We restarted the band with a new line-up, and I also got back with Jess,
my ex-girlfriend, and thought my course was set. Which it was, for a few years at least.
We were a better band the second time around. We weren’t eighteen or twenty and haggling over a name. Then, just as we seemed to find a new plateau a little higher than before, Butterfish became a different beast entirely. We played to the right people, lost track of the last of our old bad luck and picked up some good luck instead and, in 2000, in op-shop suits we had brought from home, we put our names to the kind of American contract that made the pen shake in your hand.
‘It looks like we’ve got something over here,’ I told Patrick when I emailed from LA.
He told me in his email back to be wary of the crazy promises they would make.
They kept them, for the most part.
Annaliese’s hands were playing piano as she walked along the road verge on Monday afternoon listening to her iPod. I was down at the mailbox, and I saw her before she saw me. She was in her school uniform, an over-stuffed pack on her back, her socks down, her hat tilted to keep the western sun out of her eyes. The road was otherwise empty and she was concentrating, playing precise notes. Not with great feeling, but marking them out neatly as if she might come back later and put more into it.
Then she noticed me, and her fingers sprung back from the keys and her hands turned into two fists that dropped to her sides. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. She was holding onto the very slender hope that I had seen none of it.
‘Air keyboards,’ I said, because I couldn’t help myself. ‘Cool.’
‘Don’t tell me you’ve never...’ she started to say, and then let it go. The air keyboard player can only surrender. There is no other choice.
She looked at the mail I was holding. There was a bill for broadband installation and a bank statement – nothing to help her muster a comeback. She reached up and took her iPod ear pieces from her ears and began wrapping the white flexes around one hand.
I asked her what she was listening to, and she started to answer and then stopped and smirked. ‘Asia’s The Heat of the Moment,’ she said.
It had been years since I’d heard the song, I was sure. I could recall a vague embarrassing liking for it, but not of the kind you could ever own up to.
‘It’s an interesting choice.’ I was proceeding with caution.
‘It’s one of your favourite songs.’ The tables had turned. I didn’t know how, but they had.
‘That’s crazy.’
‘Hey, I googled you,’ she said, as if my credibility had been despatched and she could play an entire air orchestra in front of me with impunity. ‘It’s there. There’s an interview. It’s online.’
She was right. There was a hazy grey recollection somewhere that told me resistance was futile. ‘There was a context,’ I said, because I had nothing else.
‘Sure there was.’
‘You know there was.’
She was laughing at me now. We both knew I’d be following up my context line with something comparably pathetic.
‘It was, you know, Ten Stupid Questions. One of those pieces they do. If you were a dog, what breed would you be? That kind of thing. Big-hair rock that you secretly love. And I’d heard it on the plane on the way in. Wherever it was.’
‘Secretly love,’ she said, in a playground teasing kind of way. ‘You secretly love Asia’s Heat of the Moment.’ She gave it a second, to let victory settle in. ‘Anyway, maybe I’m listening to something much less disgraceful and I just made that up. What are you listening to at the moment?’
‘You trying to reassert yourself after the masterful air keyboards demo.’ I couldn’t understand why I needed to try to be mean to a sixteen-year-old, other than that I sensed she was ready for it – almost that I was respecting her by doing it. Still, a fully-fledged reasonable adult might have just respected her by answering the question.
‘I think the score’s about one-all,’ she said. The sun was getting under her hat now, and she lifted her hand up to shade her face. Some distance behind her, a dark blue four-wheel-drive nosed out of a lane, and its driver glanced our way before turning left and heading towards the city, leaving a drift of dust behind it.
‘Asia’s Heat of the Moment ... I think you might be slightly ahead.’ It was hot in the sun, and I knew I should be getting back inside. I had a call to make to Norway in a few hours, and there was some work to do before then. ‘You actually play piano, don’t you? That wasn’t just ... nothing.’
‘Well, I learned for a few years,’ she said, looking away from me and further down the road. ‘I haven’t had a lesson for a while, but my dad’s got a piano and I was at his place on the weekend.’
I wanted to tell her she looked like she knew what she was doing, but I didn’t because it could have sounded patronising, even though it was true. You don’t need the keyboard to be there to have at least some idea. My father would talk through fingering on the edge of the dining room table if a piece of music came up over dinner. Annaliese had small hands, which wouldn’t help her, but I thought someone had drummed technique into her a while ago.
‘So what are you listening to, when you get the chance?’ she said. ‘I mean, I’d love it if it was Asia, but I’m assuming not.’
‘Not, sadly. Mostly the Shins’ Wincing the Night Away. Rolling Stone gave it three-and-a-half stars online. Then the fans weighed in giving it five each and laying into the reviewer. And three and a half’s not bad really.’
‘The Shins?’ The name meant something to her, clearly. ‘Weren’t they the band Natalie Portman’s character loved in Garden State?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, they were. Great movie.’ I had seen it on a plane first, then bought the DVD and carried it around with me. It was somewhere in my snail’s shell, my thirty kilos of life-affirming and essential matter that I needed on my back, metaphorically, wherever I went.
‘It’s one of my mother’s favourites,’ she said. ‘She rents it from Blockbuster any time she’s feeling particularly old.’
There was nothing to the line but innocent observation.
As she went off along the dusty road verge she put her earphones back in, but this time she kept her arms by her sides, no air keyboards, letting them swing as she walked the last few metres towards home.
There was a note in the mailbox when I checked it the next day. It read: ‘Hi Curtis. Welcome to the neighbourhood. Annaliese tells me you like Garden State, so that’s a good start. How about coming over to dinner some time? How about tomorrow? (If this is all wrong and you want your privacy, that’s fine too.) Cheers, Kate Winter.’
Kate Winter, custodian of the house of slamming doors and duelling stereos, ex-partner of the piano-owning man who was Annaliese’s father.
I wanted my privacy. Patrick was the exception to that and, in close to a month, I’d seen him only twice, once either side of his trip to Finland.
I’d had years of becoming well used to saying no to things, or having people say no on my behalf, or just ignoring them, but this was no ‘RSVP – acceptances only’ mass mailout about an event. It was a hand-written note, just to me and from the person who happened to be my neighbour, so I decided I should write a note declining. Then I imagined the night – the most normal of all possible nights – a beer, a glass of wine, a conversation about Garden State and great music and the world that went on outside my head. And my note declining the invitation soon read, ‘Dinner sounds great – how about 7.30?’
I slipped it into their mailbox and no reply came, so at 7.25 on Wednesday I walked out of my front door with a six-pack of Stella and a bottle of wine. Too much? Not enough? Not right? All those thoughts were in my head. I had no idea how to be a neighbour, a thirty-something man in the burbs, heading next door for a mid-week meal.
On my last long trip back to Brisbane – three weeks it was, I think – I stayed at my girlfriend Jess’s flat and slept almost the whole time. Butterfish had just toured Europe and I kept waking at three a.m., lurching out of bed thinking I had to be somewhere, and
then spending the three most alert hours of my day on the balcony reading a book and waiting for dawn. Jess had finished her physio degree not long before, and was working in a hospital. Derek and I had demos done for Super nature, and a producer and a studio booked in LA for the real thing. My life was elsewhere at the time, and not entirely like a life.
I had had higher hopes for those three weeks, too high maybe. I had convinced myself they would be a kind of highlights package of the best times Jess and I had had, but with money. We would sleep late, cook together, go to movies during the day and sneak in a perfect parallel life while around us the town went about its business. I had missed her laugh on that tour, more as it went on. I wanted it back in my life. My hopes weren’t so high, really.
Should I take the beer back to my house? The wine? Did this load of booze look like I was ready to settle in for the night? Or should I have brought the beer for now and a better bottle of wine as a ‘thank you for having me’ kind of gift, a keeper? Did Kate Winter drink nothing, to set a good example to her kids? Maybe there would be other people there. I didn’t know. It would have been simpler if there had been no note, none of this.
My toe caught on a rock or tree root in their rutted driveway and I almost fell, which could have ended my wine and beer dilemma then and there. I kept my eyes on the lit windows of the house and, as I got near the dark front steps, a motion-activated light came on. There was music coming from inside, the Modern Lovers. I was convinced that, in some distant interview that would float forever in cyberspace, I had mentioned them. I braced myself for the prospect that the night would be a three-hour interview with a panel of middle-aged women who had all googled their hearts out and put together a play list on which every song could be met by a wry smile of recognition, since I’d mentioned it once to someone somewhere.