The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  The band finished their set. I wondered if I was supposed to buy another round of beers. Patrick straightened in his seat and moved his near-empty Beck’s stubbie around in the ring of condensation on the table.

  ‘Did you know he was signed up to internet dating sites?’ he said, watching his hands peel the corner of the label away from the bottle. ‘We might have been just a few emails away from a Russian step-mother, Chubs.’ He laughed, and the label started to tear.

  I laughed too, at the implausibility of it, and with relief that it hadn’t happened. ‘I don’t think internet dating necessarily means a Russian bride. I think people do end up with people in their own town as well. I was under the impression the Russian bride thing worked a bit differently.’

  ‘Just imagine it. There’d be three of us here now. You, me...’ He pointed to the space beside me where a third chair might go. ‘Svetlana. Younger than both of us, big hair like a blonde helmet, buxom as buggery, a stash of cheap cigarettes in her bag, full of complaints. And people say I’m high-maintenance.’

  ‘Is that last bit rhetorical or...’

  ‘Rhetorical. Not even a question. It was Svetlana I was talking about.’

  I wondered if there had been a Svetlana – clichéd or otherwise – or if this was merely the name Patrick had given her during months of contemplation about his discovery, about the strange shape our family might have taken, but didn’t. No, there may have been Catherines and Elizabeths and Yvonnes – there might well have been emails that could make us both blush as my father fumbled his cack-handed version of romance over the internet – but I couldn’t see a Svetlana at the end of it. I wouldn’t let myself, couldn’t see the two of us sitting here adding a baffled young Russian to the mix.

  ‘I think he may have been working on an opera,’ Patrick said. ‘I’ve found some notes.’

  ‘Notes for an opera. I’d like to see them.’

  ‘Sure. They’re just notes though.’ Someone had turned up the recorded music and it was harder to hear him. ‘But sure.’

  He pointed to my beer, and his, indicating their near-emptiness, and he pointed to the bar. This was his signal that he was buying. I nodded.

  Notes for an opera. Was this the same extrapolation as a Russian bride from a few emails, or were there really notes for an opera? Patrick stood at the bar, and quickly got attention from a bartender who had lightning bolts shaved into the close-cropped hair over his temples. The guy with the pork-pie hat and my autograph in his shirt pocket was at the bar again too, but with his back to Patrick and a twenty-dollar note in his hand. He didn’t seem to be a high priority for the staff. I tried to remember his name, but couldn’t.

  Patrick steered his way back through the crowd with two beers and took his seat before sliding my stubbie to me across the table. The music volume dropped by half, then came up a little. We might get to talk more after all.

  ‘Do you know how many times people ask me why your band broke up?’ he said. ‘How many times clients, when they work out or find out who my brother is, say “Why don’t we get Still Water?” or some other Butterfish song to sell their fucking car parts? Or kit homes, or cheese?’

  ‘Let’s go for the cheese,’ I told him. ‘As long as they pay us in cheese.’

  By the end of my second beer, and Patrick’s third, another band was setting up. I knew I didn’t have the staying power. I offered him a lift home, and he accepted.

  The crowds in the mall spilled over onto Ann Street and cabs tried to nudge their way through without much luck. There were long lines outside the Press Club and the Sun Bar, shaven-headed bouncers in black making skinny girls wait and turning away men with the wrong look. They had once, famously, rejected Powderfinger when the band was well on its way to being the biggest in the country. Or maybe that was apocryphal. Those stories often were.

  On the other side of the street, I pushed through the crowd, head down, past a busy kebab shop and pizzas being sold by the slice, past Ultrasuite and Mayocchi, with their window mannequins lean and wan and lightless, catching the style of the time but by-passed at this late hour. The traffic was snarled and people were crossing the road wherever they wanted, stopping to talk through open windows. Someone from a dark Monaro shouted an order for four slices of supreme.

  Within two blocks, the crowds were gone. We turned down a side street.

  ‘I’m now officially halfway home,’ Patrick said. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

  ‘It’ll do you good,’ I told him. ‘It can’t be all about the abs, you know.’ The abs that didn’t rate in my part of town, but Kate’s remark would stay my secret for now. There were cars parked in every available spot, warehouse apartments on both sides of the road. I could see a lit cigarette on a balcony three floors up and make out the sounds of conversation against the receding Valley hum. ‘I’m going to have to come round to your flat some time. I’ve been back for weeks and I’ve never been there. And I haven’t seen Blaine for ages. I guess I assumed he’d be coming along tonight. Maybe the Troubador’s not his kind of venue?’ Blaine’s nights out definitely operated at 180 beats per minute.

  ‘Yes, well,’ Patrick said. ‘Where did you park?’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground. ‘You probably won’t be seeing Blaine.’

  ‘So...’

  ‘So, it’s no more. His choice, not mine. A couple of months ago. Actually three months ago. I’ve stopped counting. Good sign.’ It wasn’t coming out sounding good. ‘He said he wasn’t ready for two dogs and a white picket fence.’

  ‘When did you ever...’

  ‘Exactly.’ He waved a hand around for emphasis. ‘Exactly. I said to him at the time, “Do I look like someone who copes well with dog hair?”’ Even now, recounted three months later in a Valley side street, it came out sounding histrionic, like something that should come with a sitcom laugh track. It was a good line though. I was glad he hadn’t let Blaine dictate the terms. ‘And I told him I was perfectly happy anyway with a New Farm apartment with practically nothing in the fridge but vodka and strawberries. He said it was just a metaphor and he couldn’t imagine either of us with dogs, but that wasn’t really the point. So I told him to stop being such a coward, hiding behind metaphors ... and I don’t have to tell you where it headed from there.’

  ‘Is this where I tell you I never really liked him, and that I always thought he was a slimy narcissist and you deserved better, and then you get back together, etcetera etcetera?’

  ‘Oh god,’ he said, and laughed. ‘He had so little to be narcissistic about. And yet he managed, against such odds. He won’t be back. I’m free. Sad, but free.’

  ‘And you have much more to be narcissistic about than he does.’

  ‘I’ve always thought that,’ he said, conspiratorially, as though it couldn’t be owned up to until now.

  I unlocked the car and its lights flashed at us. Did he have friends around to see him through the break-up? I wasn’t sure. They had been together three years, or four, which meant I didn’t know Blaine well. Before our father’s funeral, I might have met him only half-a-dozen times.

  ‘I’m about to leave town on another shoot,’ Patrick said as he got into the car. ‘But you should come over when I get back. I can cook some things now. The fridge is still mainly vodka and strawberries, but not entirely.’

  He was an expert buyer of food, but I hadn’t known him to cook much. He would know not just where to get haloumi and quince paste, but where to get the best haloumi and the best quince paste. He once told me that, when it came to making food rather than merely acquiring it, he maxed out at canapés, and meals would have to wait until later in life. That time had come while I had been on the road. And he might have lost Blaine along the way, but I realised that, over the years, he had been finding himself bit by bit. He was not the wayward student in the house with milk-crate furniture and too much rum. He was a long way from that. Vodka and strawberries, and beyond. And I’d racked up an awful lot of frequent-flyer points
, but wasn’t sure I’d come as far.

  ‘I cooked a hell of a curry tonight,’ I told him. ‘I should make it for you some time. It’s from scratch, leaves and seeds and a lot of simmering, no jars.’

  ‘Ah, those boys in that band. How do they eat now that it’s all over?’ He fiddled with the radio, clicked between stations. ‘I can show you the opera notes,’ he said. ‘When you come round. I think they’re opera notes. You can take them away if you want. Have a proper look at them.’

  I turned right onto James Street, heading for the river.

  Patrick organised our father’s funeral. He kept calling to run details by me while I waited for my flight back to Australia, but I couldn’t cope with the speed of it. I couldn’t talk to him about flowers and hymns and who should say what. I told him he was always better with those things, and he should choose whatever he wanted and I’d be happy to pay. We had a fight at O’Hare about that. I was at O’Hare, in the American Airlines Admirals Club next to a huge bowl of pretzels, Patrick was at a funeral home somewhere in the suburbs of Brisbane.

  I didn’t stay long, so the funeral is stuck in my memory now like some strange thing, not like a funeral. Three days of warm steamy autumn before flying back to the US, to a spring that had yet to arrive. The service was in a brick building I’d never seen before. It was hexagonal or octagonal, and I noticed its roof line sweeping up to a white cross as we drove up. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It sat in a garden of well-mown grass and rose beds and poincianas, like a reception venue or a corner of New Farm Park.

  I came back from an absent moment during the service to find Jess holding my hand. We got married shortly after. We broke up not that long after that.

  ‘Our place is so hot it’s totally disgusting,’ Annaliese said when I opened the studio door. ‘Can I please pleeeze sit in your airconditioning for a while?’ She groaned, and hung out her tongue like an overheated dog.

  It was Monday afternoon and she was in her school uniform. Her tie was half undone. She was already inside before I could say anything.

  ‘Ah, much better, much better.’ She threw her hat like a frisbee onto the Space Invaders console and stood with her face in front of the airconditioning unit.

  I’d had the headphones on when she tapped on the glass, and at first I thought it was an artifact on the recording. I was working, but that seemed inconsequential.

  Annaliese groaned again. ‘Why can’t we have airconditioning at home? Why can’t we kill the planet just a little bit, the way you do?’ She turned to let the air blow on her back. Her cheeks were radiating heat. ‘My mother likes trees. That’s why we live out here.’

  ‘And you don’t like trees?’

  ‘I have no position on trees. I’m fine with trees, but they could share the planet with some airconditioning.’ I offered her a drink, water or tea, and she said, ‘Water or tea? You rock, man. I thought you were supposed to be doing lines of coke off the top of your dinosaur Play Station by now.’

  ‘Rude, even when overheating and begging for the mercy of my airconditioning...’

  ‘Water. Please.’ She rolled her eyes, as if I’d just told a five-year-old to show some manners.

  I went over to the kitchenette, which was almost as empty as it had been when I moved in. When the granny flat properly morphed into a studio there might one day be a lot more to it – to the kitchenette and the rest – though maybe not coke on the Space Invaders machine, the playstationosaurus. The bar fridge held only two carafes of cold water and a carton of milk which, I noticed, was two days past its best. I poured her a glass of water, and brought the carafe over as well.

  I noticed that it said ‘A WINTER’ in black marker pen along the band inside her upturned hat.

  ‘So you’re Winter and your mother’s Winter as well? She kept your father’s name after their marriage broke up?’

  Annaliese held the glass but didn’t drink. ‘No, actually. I decided to be Winter.’

  ‘Decided? You can just do that?’

  She shrugged. ‘I did. They had to sign off on it to make it official. I got this talk about being eighteen, waiting till then. But that sucked, obviously.’ Another shrug. ‘Marky’s still a Fletcher for now. But don’t think he’s totally on Dad’s side or anything. Dad bought this car...’ Her tone swung up on ‘car’. There was a story to be told. ‘It’s a yellow sports car, canary yellow. He drives it to work some mornings, even though he could walk. It’s about ten minutes away. Admiralty Towers to Waterfront Place, lawyer central. How lazy is that? Anyway, he drove it to work when he bought it, and he took all his staff down to the car park and made them stare at it. Most of them had never even seen the car park before. These people catch the train in twenty stops from Thornlands or wherever, and bring their own lunch in a box, and here he is making them ogle his new toy.’

  Twenty stops from Thornlands, or wherever – where had it come from, this fierce and detailed deconstruction of the callous lord among his serfs?

  ‘I’m so glad you don’t have a dick-swinging car.’ She stopped to drink some of the water, finally. ‘So Mark had to write this story for school. The topic was “revenge”, or something, and in it this guy is so angry with his dickhead boss for dragging them down to the basement and making them walk laps of his new car that, when the boss tells him to go off and get it detailed, he pays four guys to smoke in it and then gives one of them twenty bucks extra to shit on the passenger seat.’ She laughed. ‘The boss had always been an arsehole and the car thing was just the last straw. They called Mum in to school to talk about that one, since they knew Dad had the same car. The teacher said it was good writing, actually, but that the guy wouldn’t have done it since the boss would have got him back.’

  ‘So that’s the only reason no one’s dumped in your dad’s car? Consequences?’

  ‘Probably.’ She sat on the edge of the one desk that wasn’t cluttered with equipment. Her cheeks were less red now. She pulled her tie off and dropped it into her hat. ‘If you were up for it, I’d get you the keys.’

  She told me more about her father, whose name was Campbell Fletcher. It almost went without saying that he was a partner in a big law firm. When friends came over – which didn’t happen often – they were always people he wanted something from and his best conversation topic was how to minimise tax. He could only cook bachelor food – I assumed the expression had come from Kate – and called in caterers for his rare dinner parties, even when there were only six people. He and Mark butted heads regularly. He had a vein that popped out on his scalp at times like that. He had had a series of relationships with younger women, a number of whom may have been junior solicitors. Kate, Annaliese and Mark had taken to referring to them as his PTGs, or pony-tailed girlfriends.

  ‘Mum started that,’ she said. ‘That was years ago, with her friends. I probably wasn’t supposed to hear. I used to think it was because he played squash with them a lot. That’s why they had the ponytails. Not that they all do, of course. It’s how he’d introduce them to us, the squash. “This is Caitlin. We play squash together sometimes.” Which of course ended up with Mark using it as a verb and not a noun. “Dad, are you squashing Caitlin?” He couldn’t even fit us in his yellow car. It’s a fucking sports car. It really only has two seats.’

  Enough room in the back for two racquets and a small black ball, but not for your adolescent offspring who would not forgive you for much, and who would dog your every move with their harsh reading of your motives. I couldn’t guess what Campbell Fletcher was really like, or entirely like, but he wasn’t shaping up well in Annaliese’s portrait.

  ‘We’re at his place tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘That’s a regular thing, Tuesdays and every second weekend. Hannah’s usually there, but she doesn’t live there. She’s the current PTG. She’s nice. She cooks. That’s good.’ She sighed, and looked out the window. The air conditioning blew through her hair and its school-coloured ribbons, maroon and white. ‘Sorry,’ she said, turning back my way
. ‘You’re working, aren’t you? I didn’t mean to distract you.’

  I could see the green and orange sonic hills and valleys on the screen to her left, twenty seconds of sound drawn out for editing and realigning. I had been going well, but I needed a break. I needed to clear my head and come back later with fresh ears and a few new ideas.

  ‘I can remember my father and his attempts with women.’ It was the start of an answer, or at least a thought put in my head by the mention of Hannah and her status as the current PTG. ‘My mother died when I was young. There’s nothing worse than listening to your father work his cheesy lines.’

  ‘Oh god,’ Annaliese said. ‘Nothing worse.’

  My father’s lines were straight out of history, lines that fitted with his Cary Grant shoes and old black-and-white movies. He had the moves to go with them too, but he never quite delivered them. He would circle halfway around the table to pull out a chair for them, and then slink back as if he’d done the wrong thing. He worked through gestures like that that we never saw at other times, and each one looked like a rehearsal the director had called a halt to halfway through. They weren’t natural, they weren’t ever quite right. And the women were rarely at ease, facing us, the two boys who, if the cards fell a certain way, would be sons of a kind to them. More than that, though, on their first visit to our house they had to face down the ghost of our long-gone mother in the faded photos that stayed forever all over the loungeroom.

  ‘Do you want to hear what I’ve been working on?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’ She slid off the desk and turned to face the screen. ‘This is those Norwegian guys, right?’

  I unplugged the headphones and sent the song through the big speakers. It sounded better now, after a gap and with my head in a less critical place.

  ‘Wow,’ she said when we were through the chorus for the first time. ‘This is good.’

  I had a new idea for the piano part, and I stopped the song and played it before it slipped my mind. I opened a new track and recorded a few bars, which was all I had. I could do more with it later. I played it back. There was something there. Annaliese said ‘Wow’ again. I hoped it didn’t look like some kind of showy trick.