The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  I stood on the verandah and listened. There was a young male voice inside, asking something in a detached tone, an older female voice giving a short reply. That was all. No panel. A rack clattered into an oven and the oven door thumped shut.

  Annaliese opened the front door.

  ‘I hadn’t even knocked,’ I said, my free hand in the air about to do just that. She was in a brown, patterned dress with spaghetti straps. She was barefoot.

  ‘That’s my bedroom just there,’ she said, tilting her head to the right. ‘The light comes in my window when something triggers it. Plus, I heard you on the stairs. Why didn’t you knock? Were you checking it was the right house?’

  ‘No, just checking I was the right person,’ I said. It was supposed to be a joke. The idea had a different shape to it in my head, and it went wrong somehow on the way out.

  ‘I don’t really know what that means,’ she said, with a look that suggested she already had the better of me, at not even seven thirty-one, not yet a full minute into the evening.

  ‘Could we settle on it being enigmatic rather than weird?’

  ‘Sure. You always were the enigmatic one.’ It sounded as if we went back years. It sounded nostalgic. Then I realised it was the band’s press coverage again. ‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Come and meet the family. You be enigmatic, they’ll be weird.’ She turned to lead me down the hallway. Over her shoulder she said, ‘Mum wanted to invite you but figured you might be a bit of a privacy freak. I said you’d be fine with it.’

  The sharp edges of her shoulder blades stood out under her skin. She was wearing gold hoop earrings that swung as she walked. I hadn’t seen her with earrings before, but both brief times I’d met her she had been in school uniform.

  The hallway opened out into a loungeroom with two well-worn sofas, crammed bookshelves, magazines spread on the floor, a rubber plant with its lush green leaves going brown at the edges and four large, black high-top Converse shoes looking as though someone had thrown them in there with their eyes shut. The corner of the old red Persian rug was curled over onto itself and a glass of Coke, a quarter full, sat near the TV remote. It was a white body outline short of looking like a crime scene. Or three students and some milk crates short of looking like the last house I’d lived in.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ a woman’s voice said with an unhappiness that was supposed to be private, and the oven door thumped shut again.

  The wall between the loungeroom and the kitchen had been renovated away, and a counter stood there now, piled with papers and phones and two lunch boxes.

  ‘He’s here,’ Annaliese called out sternly.

  Kate Winter appeared in oven mitts and a floral print dress. She had freckly shoulders and was curvy in a way that’s sometimes unfashionable and sometimes as good as it gets. She looked fit. She wasn’t one of those women you’d see lounging around in a Rubens with time on her hands. She had out-of-control blonde hair that was ineffectively clamped behind her head with combs, with wild strands breaking free and sprouting out from her head.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, and waved a mitt, which was blue and had ducks on it. ‘Welcome. I’m Kate.’

  ‘I’m Curtis,’ I said. ‘Thanks for inviting me.’

  ‘Sorry, I was just swearing at the meal when you came in.’

  ‘As long as it didn’t swear back, I think we’re okay.’

  ‘You’ll never hear it with the oven door shut,’ she said, and smiled.

  ‘Mum,’ Annaliese said in a corrective tone. She turned to me. ‘I’ll put all this in the fridge, shall I?’

  ‘Or maybe I’ll drink one of the beers,’ I said. ‘If that’s all right.’

  Kate took one too and gave the top a twist with her oven mitt. It stayed put and she looked at it closely. Annaliese handed her a bottle opener and shook her head.

  ‘A bit too deluxe for you, Mum?’ she said.

  ‘Even wine comes with a screw top these days.’ Kate flipped the bottle top into the sink, then did the same with mine. Behind her, attached by magnets to the fridge, I noticed a picture of a younger Annaliese, beaming and holding a tiny puppy. Kate turned towards the wall and shouted out, ‘Mark, our guest is here.’

  There was a grunt of acknowledgement.

  ‘That means you come out.’

  This time the grunt was polysyllabic, but no clearer. There was a jangling cascade of computer noises, and the trundle of castors across a wooden floor. The bedroom door opened.

  ‘Mark, Curtis. Curtis, Mark,’ Annaliese said efficiently, looking at neither of us, as if it was a moment we simply had to get through.

  Mark stood there, peach fuzz and acne and every memory I had about being fourteen or fifteen. His hair looked well slept in and the oily fringe fell down almost to his eyes. He leaned against the door frame, round-shouldered and wearing huge low-slung black shorts and a black Ramones T-shirt that had gone slack at the front. A piece of metal that looked like a nail passed through his left ear lobe.

  ‘So, do I get a beer?’ he said to Kate.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Special occasion.’

  ‘Not that special.’

  He shrugged, as if he hadn’t cared anyway. He would have hated Butterfish on principle, I knew it. We had been way too close to pop, insufficiently evil. Fourteen-year-old black-clad boys with nails through their ears had taken it upon themselves to be our natural enemies. We should have anticipated it, but we never did. They blogged us savagely, from rooms just like Mark’s, all over the world but most savagely close to home.

  ‘So do you like the Ramones or is that just a shirt?’ I said to him, figuring we were already well past hello.

  ‘I like the Ramones.’ So far he had said everything in the same lifeless monotone and this was no exception, but his mouth was a different shape at the end of it. It was subtle, but it was there. It was like a crack in a window, and I realised it was his version of a smile. ‘Specially the early stuff. Classic.’

  ‘It’s my T-shirt though,’ Kate said, and laughed. ‘He doesn’t tell anyone that. He just says it’s vintage.’

  He glared at her, but even the glare had a kind of disengagement to it, as though he could just be bothered. He cleared his throat, sniffed. Something mucoid rattled in his sinuses. ‘I don’t have a lot of conversations about T-shirts.’ Or a lot of conversations, perhaps. And I guessed that the word vintage didn’t come up much.

  ‘You certainly don’t tell anyone it’s mine though.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘I can’t believe it’s not cool to wear your mum’s clothes these days,’ I said, for Kate’s sake more than anything. ‘What’s up with you young people?’

  Annaliese went ‘ha’. Mark took his scowl a level deeper and in a voice as flat as ever said, ‘I’m gunna change.’ He half-turned towards his room, then turned back and said, ‘Mum wrecked this shirt anyway. It’s all stretched at the front.’

  ‘What?’ Kate scowled at him. ‘That’s because you sit with your knees stuck up it.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s about the boobs, lady. Now, do I get one of those beers? Special occasion?’ Kate stood there with her mouth open and her arms folded protectively across her front. Mark turned to me again. ‘How many albums did you sell? The band?’

  ‘Twenty million,’ I told him. ‘Ish.’

  Kate sighed. ‘All right. You can have half of mine. But just half. And it’s a special occasion because Curtis is our new neighbour, not because of his album sales.’

  ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘As long as the clause kicks in.’ He looked back towards me, and made his scratchy halfsmile again. ‘Welcome to the neighbourhood, Curtis.’

  Kate poured the beer into a glass, as close to exactly half as she could manage. Mark took it, held it up to the light, and then reached out and clinked it against the neck of my stubbie.

  We sat at the dining table, the four of us. There were bowls of green olives and pistachios, and a circle of rice crackers around a tub of pesto.

&nb
sp; ‘So, what brought you back here?’ Kate said. ‘Are you working on anything?’

  ‘Yeah, an album,’ I told her. ‘With a bunch of Norwegian guys. I’m sort of producing. We did some work over there to kick it off, but the stage we’re at now could be done anywhere.’

  Annaliese ate a rice cracker. Mark worked the pistachios like a machine, making a neat pile of shells on the table. They sat opposite me, with their backs to the loungeroom and the managed chaos of a family home. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen standard teenage mess. I got a sense of three lives densely packed, hitting each other at angles, but also sometimes fitting, or making space for one another, making allowances, teaming up. Even Mark, despite himself, gave off a hint of that. This was home and he knew every millimetre. Here he could be who he was, someone with a few more shades of grey to him than the person he obviously was, the classic teenager at war with his own surging adolescence, with all the surliness and misshapen clothes and the mind you know is always ticking, ticking, like a clock or like a bomb, one or the other.

  ‘I’m not much of a cook,’ Kate said as she came back to the table holding something that was probably a casserole. And she was right.

  She lowered it onto the trivet with the duck mitts, one of which I now noticed had an old scorch mark, and she went back to the kitchen.

  ‘Brace yourself,’ Annaliese said quietly.

  Kate rattled cutlery around in a drawer. ‘I might be a bad cook, but I’m not a deaf bad cook.’

  She returned with a bread knife, which she handed to me, and a ladle. I cut some slices from the fresh loaf of bread while she served the casserole, handing plates to the others and placing one in front of me. There were lumps of meat, quartered onions, potatoes and mushrooms, with an oily steam rising from each plate.

  I asked her if it was French and she gave the one-syllable ‘ha’ laugh I’d heard from Annaliese and she said, ‘That’s very flattering, to think it might be a cuisine.’

  It wasn’t a cuisine. The meat was tough and the potatoes falling apart, and there wasn’t much flavour to the liquid they were swimming in. The recipe was her mother’s, she told me, and her father wasn’t good with strong flavours and was particularly bad with garlic, which gave him a fierce pungent smell from every pore for about a day.

  Annaliese pushed a piece of meat around with her fork unenthusiastically, and caught my eye. She gave me a look that said, undoubtedly, ‘This is my life.’

  Mark asked if there were any more pistachios, Annaliese asked what I thought of the casserole and Kate said, ‘How about some cracked pepper?’, all of them speaking at the same time.

  So I said, ‘I think some pepper would go very nicely with it, thanks.’

  Kate made another trip to the kitchen and came back with a pepper grinder. She held it over my plate and was about to twist it when she changed her mind and said, ‘No, you’d better do it, so you get the right amount.’

  ‘There’s a reason all those shop-a-dockets are on the fridge,’ Annaliese said, as if we’d already been talking about them. ‘And the reason is pizza.’

  ‘Surely nobody pays full price for a pizza,’ Kate said, missing her point and defending the wad of curling dockets that I could see magneted to the fridge door. ‘They’re always trying to outdo each other with deals.’

  Annaliese reached out and took the pepper once I’d finished. She ground some onto her plate. ‘You cook, don’t you, Curtis?’ she said. ‘Like, properly cook.’

  ‘Well, semi-properly. I’ve learned a few things over the years, I guess.’ I ate another mouthful of the watery, and now peppery, casserole. The meat needed more time and the potatoes less. Kate was giving me a look that said she badly needed it to be okay.

  ‘You’re going to have to show her,’ Annaliese said, sparing her mother nothing.

  ‘Has Annaliese told you she sings?’ Kate said. ‘I bet she hasn’t.’

  Annaliese glared at her. ‘So annoying,’ she said.

  Mark laughed through a mouthful of dinner. ‘Go on, Liese. Let’s hear it. How about Boys of Summer, Rock Eisteddfod style?’

  Annaliese’s glare turned to something more like horror. I didn’t know if Mark had ever been stabbed with a fork before, but I could see it happening now.

  ‘I remember when that was a Don Henley song,’ Kate said, steering us around the impending sibling conflict. ‘Do you remember that?’ The question was for me – it could have been for no one else. Then, before I could answer, she said, ‘Your hair’s different now.’

  ‘It was different before,’ I told her. Annaliese had put her cutlery down. ‘Different when I was in the band. This is it – the real thing.’

  My dyed hair started with a publicist, but not in a calculated way. She used the colour herself and, one day in a hotel room, between phone interviews, when we were both verging on stir crazy, she used it on me. She called housekeeping and ordered the oldest towel they had and told them why. She said they’d have to send a new one – which they did – but no one could complain since she had effectively told them she would be trashing the towel. Somehow we splashed dye on the wall as well, on the textured regency-print wallpaper. I read in a magazine once that my change of hair colour was part of an image makeover, but there was actually nothing contrived about it. The bonus was that it sometimes worked as a disguise, now that I’d stopped dyeing it.

  I told them I’d bumped into Steve Irwin once, in a recording studio where he was doing voiceovers for his TV show, and he’d said to me that that was the beauty of his khaki shirt. False teeth, a trucker’s cap and a red-and-black flanno shirt gave him all the cover he could hope for. There was footage of him in the crowd at Australia Zoo, taking in a show dressed just like that, with no one around him giving him a second glance.

  So, I went back to my natural hair after the band broke up, and got a bit fat. Everyone around the table was decent enough not to mention the second strategy.

  Straight after dinner, Mark asked if he could be excused – the language for the request was semi-formal and clearly negotiated long ago – and he went to his room.

  ‘Two choices now, Liesie,’ Kate said. ‘Dishes or homework.’

  A big sigh, some eye rolling. The world, for sixteenyears-olds was a deeply, resolutely unfair place. ‘What about conversation? Isn’t that important as well?’

  Kate just looked at her. There was a hint of an eyebrow lifting.

  ‘I could do the dishes,’ I said, and Kate said, ‘Looks like it’s homework.’

  Annaliese threw her hands in the air, and gave me a look that said it was all my fault. ‘So now I don’t even get to choose.’

  ‘You’d have to do the homework anyway.’ I was standing my ground.

  ‘Technically, yes,’ she said, the dramatics in check for a moment. She gave a smile that was supposed to look begrudging. ‘Okay, so you’re not such a bad guy after all.’

  Kate gave a shake of her head once Annaliese’s door was shut, and said, ‘Too much TV. Where does she get this...’ She flailed her arms around. ‘Not from me. Not from anyone I know.’ She laughed. ‘Endlessly entertaining. It’s all melodrama around here.’

  She drank the last mouthful of her Stella and then turned the stubbie around to take her first proper look at the label.

  There was something close to silence for the first time since I’d arrived. The distant pounding of heavy metal, perhaps, from the headphones that were surely clamped to Mark’s head as he sat in his room war gaming or cruising websites, but other than that, nothing. The CD had finished and the night was close and still.

  ‘You don’t have to do the dishes,’ Kate said.

  ‘I’d be happy to. Most nights I just clean one plate.’ She almost said something, then didn’t. She rearranged her cutlery so that her knife and fork lined up. ‘That sounded a lot sadder than it was supposed to.’

  ‘It didn’t sound sad,’ she said, too quickly. ‘Well, it did. But I don’t think it was meant to be sad. Okay, dig me out
of this any time.’

  ‘Let’s wash the dishes.’

  I washed, she handled the wiping and putting away. She asked me what I cooked, and then if I would show her something.

  ‘But it’s got to be simple,’ she said. ‘Something simple.’

  I wondered if the decent thing would have been to compliment the casserole, but I didn’t know where to start. So I said, ‘Sure, recipes are for sharing.’

  She picked up wet cutlery by the handful and rubbed it dry, shutting the drawer with her hip when the last forks went in. She fetched more beers from the fridge while I worked on the casserole dish. She watched as the baked black rim of gunge refused to be scoured away and she said, ‘I know where the dynamite is, if you need it.’ And she rolled her eyes, Annaliese-style, at the harm she could wreak on her utensils for a meal no one would love.

  She wore a locket on a silver chain, and more of her hair was free now and falling to her neck in fine loose coils. Droplets of sweat were gathering above her upper lip and a strand or two of hair was stuck to her temples. She was perspiring like a Jane Austen heroine, I was hosing it out like a beast in a field. Sweat, ox sweat, spread darkly across my shirt, breaking out like a rash over my stomach.

  ‘It’s too hot for this,’ she said. ‘Let that soak. Let’s drink these outside. It’s got to be cooler there.’

  We sat on the back verandah in director’s chairs, with the dark of the swimming pool below us and the bush beyond. Through the trees behind Kate I could see the light on in my kitchen. I remembered looking up this way when I first arrived, and seeing the glow of a cigarette in the dark.

  ‘Who smokes here?’ I’d seen no sign of smoking all night, and the question was out of me before I’d thought of Mark and Annaliese and the trouble I might be making for one of them.

  ‘Who smokes?’ Kate said. ‘No one smokes. I hope no one smokes. What makes you...’