by Nick Earls
‘Sounds like you’d better have a listen to the new song then, and let me know what you think.’
‘You’ve got a deal,’ she said. She looked past me, towards her house, and flapped some more air across her face with her hat. Stray tendrils of hair wafted and settled. ‘I’d better get home. I don’t imagine you’ll be inviting me in for a cold drink, since I’m probably on some kind of probation at your place in case I jump you.’
She laughed at her own joke and, before I could work out a thing to say, she took a step towards me and gave me a kiss that pressed firmly into my cheek and lingered for a moment more than it should have, her hand on my shirt front. And then she stepped away, still laughing at me privately, having claimed back any power she needed to. And she set off down the road, waving as she went, her bag a misshapen graffitied jumble of books on her back, her heavy clumpy black school shoes light on the gravel.
I had music in my head, and words, the start of another verse perhaps. I took my letters and I walked to the house wondering if it might be a bigger song after all, if there might be more than two minutes to The Light that Guides You Home.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The more I got to know Curtis Holland, the more I realised I had to have a better grasp of what he did in the studio. I’m very grateful to Adele Pickvance for taking me on a tour of the gizmos she uses to make, record and shape music. I’m particularly grateful for her going beyond the studio tour and working with me to write the song ‘The Light that Guides You Home’.
Without the enormous success of Savage Garden, I’m not sure that I would have credited Butterfish with the sales I did. Savage Garden showed that it was possible to come from here and shift twenty-million units over two albums. It remains a huge accomplishment. And the only thing the two bands have in common. This novel is not, in any way, the story of Savage Garden.
I’d like to thank Dana the stripper, who souvenired my shopping list in Coles (for Loretta) at exactly the time when I was wondering what Curtis’s life might be like when he left the house. I would not like to thank the guy who pissed on my shoes at around the same time, or the clown who took my watch.
I’m very appreciative of the support and wisdom I’ve received from the team I’m now working with at Random House Australia, particularly Meredith Curnow, Sophie Ambrose and Judy Jamieson-Green. I’m also grateful for the trouble-shooting and wise counsel of my agent, Pippa Masson, at Curtis Brown in Sydney, and to Leslie, Jill, Euan and Jennifer, who look after my interests in the other hemisphere.
The True Story of Butterfish is the first time I’ve written a story, in parallel, as a novel and a play. Each has fed into and lifted the other. I’d like to thank Sean Mee, Andrew Ross and Sarah Neal for pushing me to explore my characters further, and in new ways, and for provoking me to write new scenes and conversations that have then slipped into the novel as if they’d been there all along.
And as always, I’d like to thank Sarah for putting up with the hours of toil and the angst – and the late meals and lost weekends – that seem to be part of this process.