The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  ‘Did I tell you how it ended with Blaine?’ he said. ‘Did I tell you that?’ He hadn’t. He knew he hadn’t. ‘We had a friend – she’s still a friend – and she asked us ... she asked if Blaine would give her his sperm. She and her partner decided they’d rather do that than go to a lesbo-friendly sperm bank. They said they would have asked me but, you know, heart disease and cancer, what can you do? Dud family history.’

  ‘They’d be smarter genes than Blaine’s.’

  ‘I like the catty stuff, you know?’ he said, mock-seriously, pointing at me with his fork. ‘I like the catty stuff from you about that dumb arsehole with a family history of long life, long tedious life. Anyway, I thought he should do it. Worse than that, way worse, I made the mistake of saying, “It’d be great to have a child in our lives”.’ He measured it out word by word as though it was the most categorically stupid thing he could have said. He made his non-fork hand into a pistol, held it to his head, and fired. ‘Well, didn’t that open up a can of worms? A lot of ridiculous dog and fence talk, and the screech of commitment-phobic tyres as Blaine and his worldly goods left the scene.’ He took a pause, to allow the image to settle. ‘All right, it wasn’t quite that quick. But you get my point.’ Patrick with a child in his life – I had never contemplated the possibility, never thought he had either. The child would have been well dressed at least, or expensively dressed anyway. ‘I read that you heard by email. From Jess. I mean, I know we talked at the time, but I didn’t know that. That can’t be a good way.’

  ‘I heard it got some coverage. I didn’t look. I don’t think anyone, any outlet, had the actual email though.’ He didn’t contradict me. ‘There was an email. So the story might have had some truth to it. But it wasn’t one email. Nothing’s ever that simple.’ It didn’t make a lot more sense to me now than it had on that kerb in Louisville, looking down at the gravel and the bottle tops in the gutter, reading her half-dozen hurried sentences properly for the first time. ‘I think it was just ... a necessary thing for Jess to do. Someone had to make a move, a clear move. It was the right thing for both of us. I wasn’t really doing my bit. I got married in the wrong state of mind. Dad had just died and...’ Nothing was certain then. Nothing. That fucking clown stole my watch and put it in a balloon. ‘We got married in a stupid wedding chapel in Nevada.’

  ‘I would have liked to have been there.’ It came out sounding oddly formal, like a written RSVP in the negative from someone who, try as they might, couldn’t make the date work. It was his way of sounding less angry than he was, or had been.

  ‘Yeah. And if it happens again, you will be. I’ll need some style advice. It was sorely lacking on the day. We got married after the soundcheck. Jess lodged the papers while we were doing the show. Derek announced it to the audience, naturally.’ To a perplexed silence, then cheering. I had to take a bow. ‘When I came back here, a month ago or whatever, I flew in via Sydney. I had one of those annoying transfers where you have to pick up your bags and re-check. So I changed to a later flight and I caught a cab to Balmain and I stood outside her door. But I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I left. I went back to the airport. She was probably there, in her house. It was early.’ It was a terrace house, about a hundred years old. All the curtains were closed. It had a Brunswick green fence with a matching mailbox. We had bought furniture together in Brisbane but not a house, though we had talked about it. Whenever Jess pushed the idea, it was never the right time. So she rented some storage space, let her job go and joined the band on the road. ‘I didn’t really have a plan. We just hadn’t had contact for a while. Most of the sorting out had been by email, and it had all been very decent, but...’

  ‘But you’d know she’s getting married again. You would have heard that from her.’

  I felt like I was falling, a long way and into something dark. It was hard to breathe. Married again. He had really said that. ‘No. No, I haven’t heard from her for a while.’ I was looking at the table, at an ant that was crawling across the glass. Even my own voice seemed like it was coming from far away.

  ‘Oh. She sent out a group email, but I figured she’d talked to you separately. That was a couple of months ago. I don’t know the details. I think they met through touch football, right after she moved to Sydney.’ He was talking quickly, shoving information in front of me in case it helped. ‘He had one of those names like Jason, or something like that. I’ve probably still got the email.’

  ‘Don’t send it.’

  I realised I didn’t want to be with Jess, that the best of our relationship was long gone, and had been in a different part of our lives. That was the time I missed, and it was years ago. We both married out of desperation, out of fear that we had lost our moment but had a last chance to grab at it by the Nevada roadside. I think she had been waiting for years, and I hadn’t been noticing. She had set herself to outlast my ambivalence, to ride with the band for as long as it took for the wheels to stop and for me to see a long uncomplicated future with her. She settled for an impulse instead.

  ‘Let’s have a big party when we get home,’ she said, her mind all the time on the wedding she wasn’t getting.

  We bought matching platinum rings from the first store we went into. Hers didn’t fit, so she wore it on a chain. I was dashing her hopes with every step we took, and putting it down to spontaneity.

  So, now she was getting married again. She would be planning this one, getting it right. She would speak at the reception about marrying me, because no one else would, and because they would all know. She would say something funny that would take all its power away, pull the fuse right out of it. ‘Honestly, that whole being on tour thing ... we had to get married, just so we had a bit of paper to tell us where we’d been. It’s all quite disorientating.’

  I hoped for Jason’s sake that was the Jess he was ending up with. Not the one with the migraines, who was usually unhappy. I knew both of the Jesses pretty well, one from long ago, one more recently. I didn’t know why she hadn’t told me she was getting married.

  In Patrick’s garage, in the space previously occupied by Blaine’s car, there was now a lot of our father’s junk. The notes and drafts of Captain Sturt’s Whaler were in two unmarked boxes.

  ‘There’s another one you should take as well,’ Patrick said as we were loading them into my boot. He went back inside for it.

  It was a collection of media articles about Butterfish, and me.

  I opened it in the kitchen when I got back to my house. I couldn’t remember my father talking about any articles, after the first one or two back when we had no record deal and our only coverage was the occasional gig plug from Ritchie Yorke in the Sunday Mail.

  ‘Any time you’re in the paper,’ my father said as he sat with the Sunday Mail open in front of him, the first ever reference to Butterfish there in a column running down the right-hand side of the page, ‘you should cut the article out of one copy and buy another whole paper, so you’ve got the context when you look back on it later.’

  I don’t know where that rule came from, but it was clear neither of us had stuck to it. Ever since, he had been clipping articles from a diverse range of sources without me knowing. From the way it appeared, he had even gone looking for them. Some of the magazines he had were international. There were pages printed from websites, and photocopies people had sent him. And he had Curtis Holland Regrets.

  I opened a Stella and sat down in front of the TV, and I read it for the first time. It was late and every commercial channel was plagued by cheap ads for dating services.

  The article opened with the journalist’s recollection of his question, ‘So, Curtis Holland, do you have any regrets?’ It had apparently come up deep into an otherwise unremarkable interview. In fact, he had me down as sluggish before then. I took to the question as if I’d been waiting for it all day, and lost in a torpor of talk about success. I came across as chronically shitty about interviews in which people said they had no regrets. Have they learned nothin
g? My hands became expressive at that point. Regret was normal, human, inevitable. Without regret, how would we ensure that we made each of our worst mistakes only once? On I went, into a riff on the subject, practically a lecture. And the journalist had his title and his article, and whatever else we spoke of barely rated a mention. Well before the end, I was tried and convicted and put away as intriguingly deranged on the strength of his minute observations – twitches, tics, a narrowing of the eyes, a long-lost gaze.

  I have no recollection of the twitches and jerks, or the interview, or the journalist, or even the city. The photo gave me nothing. I was up against a stone wall. It could have been a city hall or a museum or a cathedral. It added some weightiness to my load of regret.

  And despite my lack of memory of the whole event, the article seemed to have me quoting my much more recent conversation with Annaliese, reciting the same catechism.

  I took a look at the date, and went back to the box in the kitchen. It appeared to be the last article my father had clipped, and the interview must have happened early in the tour for Supernature.

  So, my approach to regrets preceded my father’s death and my precipitous marriage. I never saw the article in the press-clipping file after the tour, and I couldn’t say I was surprised at that.

  I opened the lid of one of the boxes containing Captain Sturt’s Whaler. A silverfish ran away from the light. On top, there was a scrap of paper on which my father had written ‘this for bassoon at reveal’, with notes dotted in on five hand-drawn lines below. I closed the lid again, and settled for the TV.

  I could see him, in his car, having this small brand new idea, grabbing the paper and pen from the glove box at a traffic light. How long had this opera been in his head? Perhaps for years of music lessons and clumsy student assaults on Für Elise, perhaps all the time he listened to his Deutsche Grammophon records in the seventies. He had dozens of them, works for symphony orchestras along with half a shelf of operas and operettas, some jazz and some carefully selected pre-war blues, which he viewed as modern music. My mother’s records had gone to a cousin of hers, with the exception of an original cast recording of the songs from the musical Hair, which had been misfiled among the operas and operettas and didn’t surface for a year or two. Patrick played it often. Our father never did.

  When the cast sang about the dawning of the age of Aquarius, I confused it with Atlantis and imagined a lush tropical island rising out of the sea, with our mother on it, young and well and in a big hat. I thought we might go there some day, and then I knew we couldn’t.

  Our father’s musical tastes got no closer to contemporary than a white-haired Arthur Fiedler coaxing a breezy Tiger Rag out of the Boston Pops. ‘Brilliant,’ he said, enthralled as the venerable conductor worked his orchestra and kept the tune skating along. It was from the twenties, from the sound of it, and for two of us in the room it might as well have been musak from the ark. By the late seventies, punk had taken hold in the UK, Abba had toured Australia in triumph and Countdown had claimed our house every Saturday and Sunday evening.

  Patrick made a list of preferred gifts for his twelfth birthday and put Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours at the top. Lindsey Buckingham was probably his first crush, though it was never put that way. He talked incessantly about how great he was, how talented. He stared at the photos on the sleeve, but never at the album’s front cover, which featured Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood but not Lindsey. Some of it rubbed off on me. I wanted to be Lindsey Buckingham. If he was so great that he had such a hold on my big brother, I wanted to be him. I wanted to pose for black-and-white band photos and pout and wear a guitar rakishly and date the chaotically glamorous Stevie Nicks. I wanted to be that comprehensively famous.

  Then one of my friends at school wanted to be a neuro surgeon, and I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. I didn’t know what a neurosurgeon was.

  It was a few years until I listened to the album properly. I think Patrick wanted Phil Oakey from Human League by then. Lindsey was, by the early eighties, someone he had once had a thing for, but they had managed an amicable separation. I was twelve and Patrick was sixteen. I was learning piano and playing his early Billy Joel records. He put Rumours back on one day and told me to listen to Songbird, closely, and he said, ‘You could play that.’ He told me it didn’t matter that it was sung by a girl. And although part of me still wanted to be Lindsey Buckingham even then – the Lindsey Buckingham who, implausibly, could find himself in a position to write a song about being dumped, like Second Hand News, and then could make it brilliant and complicated – Christine McVie singing Songbird was the track I needed to listen to. There it was, recorded live in an empty auditorium, a brilliant choice. The rest of the album was recorded in a studio, but Songbird was entirely without fuss – grand piano and vocals and little else, with a big big space for the sound to swell in. I could imagine the room. It felt almost dark, as though one small light had been left on for the song to be played, and the notes rang across the polished mahogany floor of the stage and off into the air. A song sung for the sake of singing, for a personal truth it might contain, not for an audience.

  I played it on the old upright in our loungeroom, gave it everything and sold it short as the carpet and the close walls sucked it up. Years later, whenever Butterfish turned up at a two-thousand seater with a grand on stage, I’d play a few bars of Songbird before the roadies wheeled the piano away and set us up.

  There was still a lot of junk in Patrick’s garage. I might have borrowed the opera and taken the clippings, but there were boxfuls of relics left behind. He had shunted them somewhere when our father died, then brought them to his flat once the second car space had no more car to go in it. Patrick made all the arrangements for the funeral, sorted out everything that needed it, tied up our father’s loose ends. Months after, he told me he was still getting mail, our father’s mail, and I hadn’t thought about that. He had a redirection organised, since people don’t automatically know. Your place in the world isn’t instantly and entirely surrendered. Tracks lead back to where you once were, and still the mail comes, for a while at least.

  It didn’t need to be said that I should have been more involved. Patrick had taken it on without complaint, but I had sensed a couple of times that he resented my disengagement with the details. I turned up, but I didn’t do a lot more.

  I put the article back in the box, and I imagined our father’s hands over the years scissoring the edges of the clippings, finding and cutting and filing. Reading, and seeing what I had made of myself. The media’s version of it anyway. The first surge of sales in America, the ride we went on. Derek’s embrace of it all, my turn as the recluse from the parallel universe, better off shut up in a room, tinkering away. Each of us made the other look like a freak, Derek desperate for applause, me desperate for peace.

  There were no articles, though, about getting married and divorced, about the walls falling in with Written in Sand, Written in Sea. Perversely, I wanted my father to have read about those too, and to be around when I came out the other side of it, crept out the other side, away from the light, and found whatever turned out to be next. But Curtis Holland Regrets was the last he saw, and I wasn’t happy that he had seen me face regret like a twisted sideshow oddity. I had hoped my approach was more subtle and reasoned, more real and less of a carnival, than the journalist had made it out to be.

  I wanted to let my father know I would be okay.

  On Saturday morning I wrote an email to Jess, then several emails to Jess, then trashed them all. The last address I had for her was gmail, and I didn’t know if it was still active.

  I couldn’t describe the part of her I missed, or the part I had lost long ago, or adequately wish her well. I couldn’t edit out enough apology to get the balance right. Some things run their course. That was what had happened to us.

  There were days when I could have given her more thought, more time. Regret. Here was another one perhaps finally starting to take its proper shape, and that w
as fine by me. I was ready to put a name to it.

  But Jess getting married – I wasn’t sure I was ready for that. It kept coming back like a new idea and I pictured the day, and me erased from her history. She would have a service in a garden with her sisters as attendants. She would make her parents happy. Jason’s best man would tell the story of his friend talking about this new player at touch football, and how quickly she had captivated them all. The bride would beam, sit there and beam in the way she had always wanted to, shelving for the evening her own regrets about a few wasted years. Jason would give her a ring that would fit her finger.

  There was a knock at the door just after ten. I was deep in a patch of wallowing and first thought it was Jess, come with a forgiving version of home truths and a wish to tell me face-to-face where her life was heading. But it was Mark.

  He was wearing a crumpled non-black Westside Walk volunteer’s T-shirt with the sleeves torn off. He had a sizeable new acne cyst over his right eyebrow. ‘Mum said you wanted the lawn done again.’ He said it as if the idea caused him wry amusement. On all sides the grass was straw-coloured and quietly struggling not to die. Growth was not a priority. There were a few new stalks, but they were mostly weeds.

  ‘It’s more to do with the trees around the back,’ I told him, realising this was Kate sending him my way for the talk I’d agreed to have. ‘All the bark and dead leaves on the ground that could be a fire hazard. I’d like to get that all raked up in case there’s a bush fire.’

  ‘No problem. Where do you want it to go?’

  I had no idea. I was making it all up on the spot. ‘I thought I might get your input on that.’

  ‘Really?’ He made a noise that might have been a laugh, or a nervous tic of the type invented by journalists in the interests of painting a better word picture. ‘Well, you could put it with the grass clippings for now, but you probably need a plan for all of it, since it’s still a fire hazard sitting there.’ He looked over towards the previous week’s pile of dried grass. A bush turkey had scratched through it for bugs and one side of it was strewn across the nearby ground. ‘Are you up to composting it, do you reckon? That’d take a bit of effort.’ The delivery was deadpan but the cracked smile was back. This was the rapport Kate thought we had.