by Nick Earls
‘It was probably something else. Just something I saw at night when I first got back. It mightn’t have even been up here at all.’
‘Oh, it was though.’ She had worked it out. ‘But you wouldn’t have seen it for about two weeks and five days, I’m guessing.’ She made a hmm noise and took a mouthful of beer. ‘That was a guy I was seeing. And now I’m not.’
‘Sorry, I...’
‘Nothing to be sorry about. He could cook, but that was about the only thing he had in his favour. And it was mostly pasta with heavy sauces. Carbs, fat, all wrong. He had to go.’ The Stella was on its way to her mouth again, but it jerked to a stop. ‘Oh, shit, I hope you don’t think...’ she said, and then she stopped to get it right. ‘When I asked you to show me how to cook something, that was just me wanting to know how to cook something.’
‘Sure.’
But she’d snapped a brake cable and her explanation was now a runaway vehicle bucking its way down a hillside. ‘This isn’t a set up. I don’t want you thinking that. That’s partly why I didn’t invite anyone else.’ Heading for a big fat rock at high speed. ‘I can’t let my friends meet you, since they’d all be wanting me to sleep with you.’
Boom.
‘Which would be a fate worse than death, obviously,’ I said, offloading as calmly as I could into the inevitable awkward silence.
She moved her beer up towards the kind of grin only tetanus makes and said, in a small voice, ‘Oh god.’ The moment, despite her fervent desires, was refusing to open up and swallow her whole.
‘Shall I, um, put on a new CD?’
I didn’t wait for an answer. We could hit the pause button on the conversation and fix this, I figured. I was out of my chair and heading inside before she could speak. The loungeroom seemed brighter now. I wondered if Annaliese and Mark could have heard us talking, but the dull thud of artillery came through Mark’s wall and it was clearly game on in there. With the war and the heavy metal, Kate would be okay.
There were three shelves of CDs, and I kept telling myself not to look for Butterfish, not to even think of Butterfish. People’s CD racks always had me thinking that way, and I couldn’t seem to stop it. I didn’t want us to be there. I didn’t want us not to be there. Any CD shelf anywhere was some kind of judgement about the past decade of my life. I saw Jeff Buckley’s Grace and grabbed it. Fine late-night music, sensitive, no pulsating Barry White hot-lovin’ agendas.
‘Good,’ Kate said when I stepped back out into the semi-dark of the verandah. ‘That’s good. About before...’
‘There’s no need to do an “about before”.’
‘My friends ... I’m some kind of sport to them.’ She was committed to the ‘about before’. ‘They’ve got themselves all set and from time to time I provide the entertainment. Mostly they’re from a previous life.’
‘Like, when you were an Egyptian princess?’
She laughed. ‘No, slightly more recent. Slightly. They’re from a time when I was married. And not selling cheap jewellery at Indooroopilly. But that sounds like you and washing one plate. It’s not a sad situation.’ She drank some beer. Her face had settled back into a more usual smile. ‘Anyway, life gets complicated in ways like that. I don’t think anyone can get to this end of their thirties – the middle end – without a few rough landings. Anyone, with the possible exception of a couple of my friends, who seem to lead a life that’s somewhere between Stepford and actually perfect. Damn them. I had a work Christmas party last year, just drinks at the Pig ’n’ Whistle, and there was a live band. Someone took a photo of me from about knee-high while I was dancing. I told one of my friends about it, and I told her I looked hideously drunk and haggard. And do you know what she said? She said, “I’m sure you weren’t hideously drunk.” So, there you go. Haggard and just regular drunk. That’s where she’d put me. That’s the kind of back-up you want when you’re thirty-seven – thirty-six then – and working hard to keep all the balls in the air.’
‘I’ve just got a brother with six-pack abs who calls me Chubs. He doesn’t let up though.’
‘Six-pack abs. Does he realise how nineties he is?’
I couldn’t imagine a better thing she could have said.
Inside, a door opened. Heavy feet came our way, and Mark’s broad unshaped shadow cast itself onto the verandah.
‘I was just wondering...’ he said when he appeared. ‘Annaliese said you might need someone to mow your lawn. And if you did, I’d probably be available for hire. And I’d happily undercut most commercial contractors.’ Politeness felt wrong from a black-clad teenager with hair like a nest and a nail in his ear, but for Mark it seemed to be a tool that he could put to work whenever it might be useful. The tone was even coy, reserved.
‘ Most commercial contractors?’ Kate said, picking a hole in the way a parent can. ‘Do you have the overheads of any commercial contractors? I assume you’re just planning to use our mower.’
‘I’m in the neighbourhood,’ he said, more to me than to her. ‘And I pretty much guarantee a quick response time.’ The cracked glass smile was back. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be persuasive, or if he was just enjoying his politician’s non-answer to his mother’s questioning. I wondered if the smile was being pulled into its shape partly by the hot lumps of acne swelling near his mouth.
‘That sounds good to me,’ I told him. My grass really needed cutting, and I had no inclination to get out there myself. ‘Of course I’d have to be indemnified against snake bite. Some of that grass is pretty long.’
The smile persisted. ‘Well, we could talk some kind of danger money,’ he said. ‘Some kind of loading.’
‘What?’ Kate was weighing in again. ‘Are you crazy? How good’s an extra few dollars going to feel if a taipan bites you?’
‘That won’t be happening,’ he said dismissively. ‘You think snakes’ll hang around when the mower starts? This is just a commercial arrangement.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘And if the worst comes to the worst I’ve still got Liesie to look after me in my old age.’
He gave a phlegmy unpractised laugh and said, ‘Thanks, Mum. Looks like we’re good to go, Curtis.’ I was sensing that, while giving as little away as possible, he had loved this game, that they both had.
‘Okay, it’s a deal,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay you whatever’s reasonable. Come and get started as soon as you’re ready to.’
‘Cool,’ he said, obviously fantasising about just how much he might be able to rip me off.
He went back to his room, his shadow swaying and following him. His door closed, and again I heard the muffled sound of loud music being compressed into willing, scheming teenage skull.
‘You’ve clearly never done a deal with Mark before,’ Kate said.
‘I don’t imagine the “special occasion” beer concept came out of nowhere. It sounds pretty heavily negotiated.’ It wasn’t the time to say that the money would be no issue, that I didn’t have to think that way.
‘Everything’s heavily negotiated with Mark,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my limits though, and he knows it. Most of the time I’ve got a fair idea of where I’m going to draw the line. It’s guess work to some extent, but you get a few dozen guesses a day so some of them have to work out. No, it’s better than that, really. You know them, so your instincts put the lines close enough to the right place. And Mark’s been a negotiator since he was about two. I’ve had plenty of practice. He should be drinking no beer. I know that. But I think this way he drinks less. I’m just lucky that Annaliese doesn’t like the taste, or I’d be getting it in stereo. I only floss my teeth to make them floss theirs. Otherwise you get the whole “but you don’t...” thing. So, I’ve flossed for years now, even though I hate it and I’d use a mouthwash even if it isn’t as good. I have a friend who subscribes to Choice who told me that. Or maybe that was just her view.’
‘Whereas, in the world of the single plate, I just know where the food gets stuck between my teeth and I use a pencil.
I click the lead out a couple of notches and push it through.’
I could feel my face going red, though the colour wouldn’t show out here. Kate laughed, which was better than Kate not laughing.
‘You were obviously brought up right,’ she said. ‘I think Choice really rated that.’ She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs at the ankles and looked out at nothing in particular. ‘It’s different being a kid now,’ she said. ‘Different to the way it was for us. More pressures, more things to do, more to keep up with. They live in a different world. But maybe you know all that. They buy your music, don’t they? Teenage people. Among others. I’m old enough to remember when TV ran out of shows at night and went to a test pattern. The first time I told the kids about that they wouldn’t believe me. They wouldn’t believe that TV ever stopped.’
I realised I should be going – that Kate was easy company, good company, but the last of my beer was as warm as the evening and it was better to leave before the conversation ran out and left us stranded, two awkward people on a back verandah in the dark.
‘I see the light in the granny flat some nights,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe you had someone staying there, but Annaliese tells me it’s your studio.’
‘Yeah, it said studio in the ad,’ I told her. ‘I got slightly the wrong idea. But a studio with a kitchenette and a bathroom – that’s not a bad thing. I’m working on a record with a Norwegian band. I might have said that before. I’m producing. We just laid down some tracks in Norway, so now I’m ... doing what producers do.’
‘You say that as if it’s selling shoes.’
‘It’s my version of selling shoes. I mean, it’s great, but it’s what I do.’ That wasn’t quite correct. ‘It’s what I’m trying to do. The chance came along, so I took it. I met the two main guys in the band, Gunnar and Øivind, at a festival a couple of years ago. Roskilde, I think. In Denmark. There was Tuborg involved, so it was probably Denmark. We got on well, and I watched their set and liked what I heard. And Gunnar was starting to write some really strong material with English lyrics. I think every band in Norway feels a need to break out of Norway. It’s not unlike here.’
That’s what I remembered of Roskilde. Our set – the Butterfish set – on the main stage in the falling light of the late summer evening was lost somewhere. Too many festivals, too many nights of Derek Frick morphing from tour-bus weasel into rock god, strutting and posturing, calling up all the love in the town. It didn’t so much matter which festival, or which town – it was the same show, the same long shapeless memory.
The Splades signed with management in London. A deal came along. Not the kind of deal that would have them browsing the castles-r-us websites, but healthy numbers nonetheless. They tracked me down just as the future fell out of my diary, and they sent a charming funny email that lured me without a sign of struggle to Svolvær, and my producing debut. ‘In Svolvær there will be peace and beer, and more dried cod than you have ever dreamed.’
‘Annaliese is quite a singer, you know,’ Kate said, but I’d lost track of what was connecting the threads of the conversation. Maybe it was a new thought entirely. ‘We’ve got her singing on DVD. Let me show you.’
‘Would she be okay with that?’
‘Thousands of people saw her. Why wouldn’t she be okay?’ She was already moving.
I followed her inside, and she sorted through the pile of DVDs under the TV. She pulled one out of its box and pushed it into the player. There was a VCR wired in there as well, and a machine I didn’t recognise. I wondered if Mark had gone to work on it all. He had probably charged her a fee.
‘It’s supposed to operate from one remote,’ she said. ‘This DVD is just Annaliese’s segment of the show. If I can get it to...’
The screen burst into life, but on an analogue TV channel. Kate worked the volume down with her thumb, made an assortment of mistakes with the remote, swore under her breath. Then footage of a stage staggered onto the screen. Annaliese was standing alone in the back of a red convertible, with dancers around her. She was singing DJ Sammy’s version of Boys of Summer, with the backing track ticking along at the requisite high BPM, and her only mistake was that she had too much voice to offer it. The original – the new original, anyway – was a dance track, and the voice deliberately pulled back to sound light on, but Annaliese was going for it, and she could really sing.
‘She’s great,’ I was saying, honestly, when her door swung open.
‘That’s supposed to stay in my room,’ she said to Kate angrily, ignoring me completely.
‘But you were really good.’ I was trying to defuse the situation, but also meaning it. I was feeling tired, feeling the beer in my head, wanting to be back at my own house.
‘You’re just trying to cover my mother’s fat arse.’ Still looking at Kate. Spleen was set to be vented here, and I could be collateral damage if I wanted to be.
‘Did you really need to say fat?’ These were Kate’s first words, and I wasn’t sure they would help.
‘Okay, everyone,’ I said, finding a peacemaker tone from somewhere. ‘Great singing, great arse.’
‘It was just an expression,’ Annaliese said. ‘And I’d like the DVD now.’
The verandah light clicked off when I was halfway to the road from their front door. The darkness felt almost total, and I had to stop. Then I saw there were stars, plenty of them. No moon though. I looked up, half-expecting to see the constellations mapped out, the clear lines of an archer, a plough, across the sky. But I couldn’t name one thing up there.
Cities are awash with light. Light surges through them, with a pulse that’s almost arterial. But there are no stars. Cities coast along without respite. The big ones anyway, blanking out starlight with the light blasting from Seven Elevens, traffic, office buildings.
I could just make out the way ahead, the bare earth between the patches of pale dry grass. I found my way to the road, and turned right. In the distance there were streetlights, the houses of unseen neighbours, the gap in the hedge that would lead me to my bed.
I had made a start on a new song when the band broke up. I had given it the working title ‘The Light that Guides You Home’. I tried bits of it out with Derek, enough that I could sometimes hear him humming or singing a line or two to himself as he gazed out the tour bus window. It wasn’t coming together though. It wasn’t right. I was blaming that on Derek, and I knew that wasn’t right either. But he didn’t get it. Derek could be a blunt instrument more often than he realised, and it wasn’t always smart to set him to work on the finer details.
‘An over-ripe overblown ballad’ Rolling Stone had called Still Water, and given it two stars on its way to becoming our first US number one. It was our big break, the song that put us on planes and talk shows and stopped us seeing Brisbane for about two years. I can hardly remember finishing a conversation all that time.
It’s where Derek would have taken the new song too. Rolling Stone wasn’t entirely wrong about Still Water – it just misjudged the market’s bottomless appetite for over-ripe overblown ballads. And I didn’t want that for The Light that Guides You Home. Night after night Derek would sing Still Water, and each night I’d hate him for it just a little more. By the end, it was as overblown as Elvis when he faced the final fried peanut butter sandwich, and Derek, as far as I was concerned, was the man who overblew it, who turned it into a big pompous bastard of a song that only a stadium could love.
I could do an acoustic version of that song right now – just me and an upright piano – and show the bits people never heard. Strip it back and make it small, make it lean and underdone, and show people the song it might have been. But we added Derek, and charisma, and sold twelve million albums instead. That was The True Story of Butterfish. We followed it up with Supernature, which sold eight million, then came Written in Sand, Written in Sea. One hundred and forty-seven thousand copies sold, last time someone put the unit count into words and I didn’t have my hands over my ears. ‘Rarely can an al
bum be called pretentious and directionless at the same time,’ Rolling Stone said. ‘Where are the effortless hooks from Frick and Holland that we became used to on their first two albums? Could be there’s some turbulence in the still water these days.’
I also saw reviews that said ‘File this somewhere between esoteric and bad’ and ‘It’s either confused or confusing, neither of which is exactly a good thing’. So I stopped looking. Our US publicist told us she’d bundle them up at the end of the tour and send us each a copy. I hadn’t seen mine and I didn’t go chasing it.
We were in Frankfurt, drinking tall glasses of Schoefferhofer beer on a barge on the Main on a bright spring evening when we got the call to say our US label was dumping us.
‘Fuckers. They were never behind us,’ Derek said, holding his phone like a stone that he might throw into the river.
He had a jacket on, since there was a cool breeze coming up the river, and his collar was turned up as if he was in a video. He needed a shave, and some sleep. His eyes were puffy. He had spent days looking as if he’d just woken up. I thought he had taken some pills before we’d taped an interview for MTV Europe earlier in the day, and he was on his way down by the evening. He had been like a sleepwalker with his finger in a power point on the show – jangly energy, scratchy thought processes and somnolence, all in the one body.
The barge was called the Bootshaus Dreyer, and the massive ironwork of the Eisener Steg rose up behind Derek’s head, carrying pedestrians across the Main.
The US tour had not ended well and, from my perspective anyway, there had been a feeling that the dumping was coming. This was our difficult third album and we had outsmarted ourselves. We had never been paid more, never had so much at stake. It was a long way from shopping demos around and hoping someone somewhere might take an interest.
Third time around, we locked ourselves away in Malibu for weeks, months, racking up huge studio bills, hiring and firing session musos. Derek behaved like Nero. Maybe I did too. I had turned up with some songs that were mostly done and a few half there, but Derek – given to grandiose metaphor at the best of times – arrived with a pile of ideas straight from an ugly seventies acid trip. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had turned up one morning with a puffy shirt and a sword, and a Celtic princess he’d befriended the night before. But there were great ideas in there too, and glimpses of a vision that might be too epic to contain.