The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  He finally released her hand, and then encouraged his hair to fall forwards over his eyes so that he could brush it slowly aside in a gesture that a cheap body-language paperback had told him was particularly alluring. I knew his playbook, and I knew it all too well. Most of his moves were as sophisticated as a chicken scratching around in a barnyard, but they worked far more often than they should have.

  ‘Curtis has told me so much about you,’ Kate said, her eyes still drawn to Derek. It was my turn to feel like the speedbump. Then, like a boat righting itself in a storm, the better Kate, the real Kate, was back. ‘But it’s okay – I’m sure at least half of it’s not true. With the exception of you making this impressionable young boy ill yesterday.’ She was smiling, making something of a joke of it, while at the same time not letting him off the hook.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Derek said, on the back foot, pheromones evaporated without good effect. ‘Yes, sorry about that.’

  She laughed, and asked him how he was enjoying being back.

  Annaliese turned to me, and in a tough whisper said, ‘What have you told him?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing.’

  She looked into my eyes, angry with me anyway, even if I had truly said nothing. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘No, not whatever.’

  ‘Drink?’ Kate said, looking my way.

  My mind was blank, but she held up a bottle of mineral water and I said, ‘Great. Thanks.’

  She filled a glass and set it on the counter for me. She pressed a button on the microwave and said, ‘Right, now we’re in action.’

  An electric wok was sitting on the bench top. Next to it were boards piled with chopped chicken and capsicum and shallots. Kate twisted a dial and a red light came on, and she picked up a bottle of oil. I noticed she had a Band-Aid around the tip of her left index finger. Her new knife was in the sink.

  She glanced back my way and said, ‘Someone’s going to get a fingertip, and that’s just how it is.’ She held her hand over the wok to check the heat. ‘Any suggestions, Curtis?’

  ‘Get it really hot. Hot and quick is the way to go.’

  ‘I’m still at the fingertip part,’ Derek said.

  Annaliese stepped in. ‘Curtis bought Mum a knife. A really sharp one. So this was kind of inevitable.’

  Kate slid the chicken from the board and it hit the wok with a hiss. She recoiled, then started moving it around with the spoon. Mark went to the fridge and kept his back to us while he drank Coke Zero from the bottle. He opened the freezer door and did a ripping gassy burp into it before shutting it – his own private comedy, hanging out on the other side of the kitchen freezing his burps.

  ‘So...’ Kate said, her eyes down on the wok as she skidded the chicken around on the hot black surface. The end of the fob-watch chain she was wearing as a bracelet kept clinking against the edge but she maintained her focus on the contents. ‘Do you wok much, Curtis?’

  We talked through it, step by step. I resisted the urge to ask for the spoon. Derek leaned against the counter with his mineral water, watching us as if he’d walked in on the second episode of a TV series and was trying to work out what had happened in the first. I hadn’t mentioned the knife to him, or the salmon recipe tutorial. I hadn’t prepared him for Annaliese at all.

  ‘Call me when it’s ready,’ she said, and made a move towards her room.

  ‘Liesie, I was hoping you could serve the rice.’ Kate glanced up from the wok only briefly, but her look held every maternal hope for peace, decorum and a reasonable night.

  Annaliese sighed and pushed past me to the drawer, where she found a large spoon. She stood watching the numbers on the microwave fall and the rice cooker turning on the plate. Mark muffled another burp with his hand, and then sorted through the letters magneted to the fridge until he found a second D and could spell the word ‘DILDO’.

  Kate scraped the vegetables into the wok. The microwave pinged and Annaliese swore as the steam billowed around her when she opened the lid of the rice cooker. Kate added soy sauce and set her face into a look somewhere between uncertain and fraught as the cooking reached its climax. Mark rearranged his groin in his large shorts. It took both hands. Derek had a look of restrained glee, as if I had taken him from celeb world and the world of brain biopsies and gifted him a peephole into some kind of mad house – a place where nothing was false and every petty, scratchy thought was instantly ventilated.

  The meal was served, and we took our plates to the table. Someone had set a fork at each place, rolled in a coloured serviette.

  ‘Now, I’m a bit uncertain about all this,’ Kate said. The rest of us were poised to eat. ‘I got the wok as a present a while ago, but I haven’t used it much.’

  Mark dug in and, through his first mouthful, said, ‘Hey, it’s not bad. It’s really not bad.’ He speared another piece of chicken with his fork.

  The tension that had hung in the air in the kitchen seemed to abate. With the meal made and signs all around of some success, Kate relaxed. I caught Annaliese’s eye, quite by accident, and she almost smiled before she remembered I wasn’t a candidate for any of that. Derek was answering a question of Kate’s and found himself in a well-worn anecdote, but he didn’t seem to mind. At the end he slipped into a story about a Berlin hotel we’d stayed in, which had set out so seriously to be cool that it, as he put it, ‘lost its head up its own post-modernism’ and was so oddly designed that we had each separately locked ourselves out of our rooms, semi-naked, when trying to find our bathrooms in the early hours of the morning. He had been standing in the bright light of the corridor, wondering what to do, when I had walked out of my own room six doors down.

  He was warming to his preferred task of being the centre of attention when Kate asked him why he was home. It threw him for a second, since he’d slipped into performance mode and had forgotten his real life might be a topic here.

  ‘Well, I hadn’t seen...’ he started, and then corrected himself. ‘My father’s having some medical tests. That’s it mainly. But he’ll be out of hospital tomorrow, so it looks like I’ll be going back to LA on Friday.’

  ‘So, does that mean the tests have gone well, or...’ Kate stopped before offering the alternative. ‘Sorry, it’s not my business.’

  ‘No, no it’s fine. We still don’t really know. We’ll find out tomorrow.’ He picked up his fork and rounded up some of the stray grains of rice on his plate.

  LA on Friday. It was news to me.

  The CD that was playing came to the end of its final track. It was Wilco’s Summerteeth. It had come out the year before The True Story of Butterfish. I had played it a lot then, and I’d wanted to be half that clever. These were pop songs with wryness and wit, and stories that sounded like they came from real broken hearts, but they never gave up being pop songs. I could remember a conversation in a hotel bar with a journalist who had loved it as much. It was morning, the lights were up and a cleaner was flicking stray peanuts into a pan with a brush. The bar was closed, but that made it quiet and perfect for an interview. The smell of the previous night’s drinks, beer and bourbon, leached from the carpet and upholstery.

  We were on the rise then. Jess was on holidays from uni and along for the ride, my father was in deceptively good health.

  And now Derek was going back to LA in just two days. There was his father, biopsied and bandaged and lopsided as his almost-certain tumour pushed his brain around, and Derek had his exit plans made.

  ‘Why don’t you pick the next one?’ Kate said to him, and he ducked under my gaze and headed for the stereo.

  He chose Billy Joel’s Songs In the Attic, which was surely an old CD of Kate’s from the eighties. ‘This one’s for my good buddy Curtis,’ he said in an old-time American radio DJ voice, ‘a big fan of the Joelster who regrets only that you don’t have his earlier work more comprehensively represented. As far as I can tell.’

  Annaliese smirked and looked down at her dinner. Derek came back to the table and we proceeded to argue about the
merits, or otherwise, of Summer, Highland Falls. I was for the merits.

  ‘It’s got a comma,’ he said. ‘Right in the middle of the title. So that’s elegant, at least.’

  ‘They don’t even Alphabetise their CDs,’ he said as we bumped our stone-cold-sober way through the night, heading back to my house.

  ‘It’s not all about you, Derek.’ He had been looking for the Bs. He always did, and never discreetly enough.

  ‘I bet they don’t have Written in Sand, Written in Sea. Arseholes.’ He stopped, as if listening for something. The night was close to silent. He shook his fists at the sky in mock fury. ‘Why didn’t anyone keep the faith?’

  But there was no faith. We were just a band. A band that panicked and fought and overcomplicated its third album. Somewhere up the road, through the trees, someone’s front verandah light went on. Derek didn’t see it.

  ‘There were people who loved that album,’ he said, tripping over his own feet in the dark. ‘People who got it and thought it was brilliant.’

  ‘And by now you’ve probably slept with both of them.’

  ‘Oh, probably.’ He said it as if it was wearily self-evident. It was a performance that straddled the fine line between parody and his vast but precarious ego-driven notion of himself, as usual. ‘Hey, how about those neighbours? I totally get it now. I totally get why you’d be saying yes to dinner. I think I’ve got a mother–daughter thing going on. If that’s the kind of crazy wrong thought that crosses your mind in the clean world, I should have brought some pills.’

  ‘You mean, you and the two of them in some romp situation?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ He was pitching it as if it was a great idea, one that amused him and maybe stirred him a little at the same time.

  ‘I don’t think that’s how it works even at the Playboy Mansion. It’s not the same as twins, Derek. Or miscellaneous busty faux-lesbians drenching each other in Cristal. Frankly, I think it’s problematic with the twins as well but, you know ... unless the mother and daughter thing is just about one of them holding the hose in your arse while the other one turns the tap and gives you the wash out?’

  ‘Man,’ he said unflappably, ‘I worked out my colon’s not a sexual place. Nothing that far in is. It just doesn’t have the right receptors.’ He stayed somewhere off in the thought for a while. It sounded wise, the way he put it, but it wasn’t. He was irritating me with the way he was dragging my neighbourhood into his glibness. ‘Are you, you know, with the teen, in any respect? Surreptitiously showing the schoolie some adult life?’

  Anger surged in me, biologically. My heart jumped into my throat at a gallop and his head looked like a small but easy target. I wanted the dumb provocative look off his face. I could make it out in the moonlight, but also from memory.

  ‘Look, just...’ I got stuck there. I wanted to tell him to grow up. I wanted to tell him his father might be dying, and it was not an event to miss. I wanted him to stop drilling down to the thin seam of story that concerned the glitch in my relationship with Annaliese earlier in the week. ‘Just stop being Derek Frick for a second, will you?’

  ‘Hey, I was only checking to see that the way was clear. Didn’t want to step on any toes. Who doesn’t love a chick in uniform?’

  Derek Frick was back in my life and trampling all over it. I’d had years of his smug pronouncements from his patch of amoral high ground, the harm he caused with a bleary feckless smile across his face. He stumbled on a rock and I grabbed him by the collar, pushed him back hard and our feet tangled and we crashed to the road. I landed on him and my head hit his face. His mouth opened and shut like the mouth of a fish. He gripped my shirt front but he couldn’t breathe. I pushed myself up from the bitumen, and he lay there winded.

  ‘How long before you fucked my wife did you stop being my friend?’

  He blinked up at me, and gasped. He slapped the road with one hand and, finally, the air rushed in. He took big heaving breaths, and then pushed himself onto his side and up into a crouching position. He steadied himself with both hands and his breathing settled. He coughed, and spat onto the road.

  ‘You wouldn’t even know.’ He said it quietly, still looking down at the road, but I heard it. ‘You’re such a shit communicator, you wouldn’t even know.’ He stood up slowly, and turned to face me. ‘Is that blood?’ He opened his mouth to give me a look. ‘I think it’s blood.’

  ‘It’s just spit.’

  ‘It tastes like blood.’

  ‘It’s not blood.’

  ‘Did we just have a fight? Did we just have a two-second piss-weak version of a man-on-man fight out here on the road? I think we did.’ He laughed, and I thought I saw some blood run between his teeth.

  ‘It’s the picture all the magazines wanted. They just weren’t here at the right time.’ I was less angry. My heart was still flying along, but my muscles were spent. One lunge and a fall was all they had in them. There was an apology I owed him, I thought, but it was stuck in my throat waiting for an uncounted number that he owed me.

  ‘And it wasn’t about me stopping being your friend or being anything,’ he said. ‘The business side of it swamped the fun side of it. I found new ways to have fun, you stopped having fun. You didn’t even tell Jess you’d stopped. You didn’t tell her anything. The rest of us didn’t know what to do when you got married. It was such a crazy bad decision. You know what I regret? More than the St Louis incident? Which I do regret, by the way, contrary to what you might think of me. I regret that I didn’t stop you that stupid day beside the road on the outskirts of Reno when the two of you got married and she ran around getting the paperwork right while you went on with the job as though it hadn’t happened. “Best day of my life” – that’s what you should be saying about your wedding day. And you went through it like a fucking zombie.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m not exactly proud of that myself.’

  ‘I should have had the balls to stop you. That was the day I should have been your friend, but I was just another guy in the band.’

  In the distance, an engine hummed. Ahead of us down the road, the air filled with a diffuse light and a car came over the crest of the hill. The pool of its headlights fell closer to it as it tilted down the slope and came towards us. We stepped off the bitumen. It picked up speed and caught us, fleetingly, in its lights as it drove by. Derek was wiping blood from his chin.

  We both turned to watch it go, as though it was something to marvel at, something rare and not often seen, a four-wheel-drive like all the others, its red taillights heading towards the forest.

  ‘My parents want us both to go over there for dinner tomorrow night,’ Derek said, as if a new start could be made to the conversation. ‘They told me they hadn’t seen you for ages. Didn’t even know you were back. I said we’d cook. Which means you, obviously.’

  With the camber of the road, he was standing a little below me and looked smaller than he was. There was none of his smugness now.

  ‘Obviously,’ I said. ‘Well, I think I’m free. And the poor guy deserves something other than a plate of your nachos on his first night out of hospital.’

  He laughed. ‘Hey, how well is this visit going? I thought we might get to fix a few things if I stayed with you. That was seriously part of my plan.’ He shook his head, wiped his chin again with the back of his hand. ‘Let’s get back to your place. I want to see where all this spit’s coming from.’

  ‘So, you lined this up to tell me you’ve finished the opera?’ Patrick said when he came into Harveys and found me at a corner table. There was a cautionary tone to his voice.

  ‘No. That didn’t seem like such a good idea.’ I folded the newspaper and put it down beside me.

  He sat and picked up the laminated menu, glancing at it without reading. He turned it over in his hands a couple of times and tapped its edge against the glass table top, as if he was straightening a handful of loose pages. ‘I’m sorry about that. For the strange reaction. I just ... It had been in my garage and sudde
nly it was like it had slipped away from me, this crucial piece of Dad. And then it was becoming something else. He was gone but you were working on it together. You’d blown back into town and managed to find a way to him that I didn’t have.’ He stopped, and smiled. ‘That sounds like I’ve been in therapy ever since. Which isn’t the case – I have far too much self-belief for that. But my shitty reaction was about me, not about you. That’s my point.’

  ‘Thank you. And I’m not working on it, just so you know. There’s a few bars I could play you if you ever wanted, but that’s it.’

  One of the staff came up with a notepad and we put our orders in. Patrick put on a glum face when I went for a plate full of fat and carbs, but this time he kept his thoughts to himself.

  ‘So, the opera,’ he said, leaning forward in his seat. ‘What’s it like? Is it any good?’

  He was frowning, as if his expectations were low. Which meant he wanted it to be good, better than good. He wanted our father to have left us a great surprise that we could take out to an awe-struck world.

  ‘It has its moments,’ I told him.

  The waiter arrived with a carafe of water and two glasses. Patrick didn’t look up.

  ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘That’s what that means.’

  ‘No, it’s not bad. And I’m no real expert when it comes to the genre. Opera in general, not just the outback explorer sub-genre. There are some good ideas there, but I don’t know. No hits. Maybe that’s what I’m saying. And maybe that’s not the way to think about opera. I’ve had too many conversations about music with the wrong people.’

  He put his hand on his thigh. His phone was buzzing in his pocket. He pulled it out, looked at the number and said with a weary dismissiveness, ‘Of course it’s you. I’m going to have to take it.’ He flipped the phone open and held it to his head. ‘Miranda, what’s happening?’ His tone was breezy now, fake but convincingly so. ‘Well, if you don’t like it in orange we can try it in something else ... If it’s the shade that’s bothering you we can go more tangeriney ... Look, I’ll be back in the office soon and I’ll call you from there. This’ll be easy to sort out. Really.’ With Miranda duly placated for now, he finished the call and closed the phone. ‘Bloody clients. I thought it was going to be a real issue.’ He pushed the phone back into the pocket of his tight-fitting pants, and glared at the counter as if our meals were intolerably late. ‘So, no hits,’ he said. ‘And there were all those letters from people who didn’t want to help him.’