The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  I flew out of Svolvær to find Christmas already in the shops in Brisbane, a drought set in for years and a partially furnished house waiting for me, its studio not quite what I’d imagined – a combined bedroom/loungeroom, an ensuite bathroom, a kitchenette, and cheap brown carpet on the living room floor with the footprints of absent furniture stamped in it. It was like a real-estate agent’s on-site office at a new development, brought in, dropped on its twelve footings and turned into a granny flat. It was, in studio terms, best seen as a blank canvas. The only shot of it on the virtual tour had been of the outside, from the back verandah of the house, and in that it had looked generically quaint. In real life it was just generic.

  The horn-section idea was definitely wrong for the track I was working on. I clicked on it, paused to be absolutely sure, and then deleted it. After years of sitting at keyboards and the occasional grand piano, I needed to have it in me to think about horns, strings and any other conceivable source of useful sounds if I was going to produce, but I wasn’t proving myself by faking a horn section where it didn’t fit.

  It was starting to get dark outside, and I looked next door, through the trees and the parched hedge. There were lights on. A girl’s raised voice – Annaliese’s voice, I was sure – said something tough, and a door slammed.

  I had been thinking about who might live there, and I’d had only a few clues to work with. Music and fights about music. The occasional shrieking of girls in the pool. The glow of a lit cigarette on the back verandah some nights, a spot of orange light in the distance, lifting up to mouth height and down again.

  I had arrived at the house a few weeks before to find the mailbox stuffed with yellowing suburban newspapers. I took them in and read them, though they were already baked by the sun until they were almost brittle. Reading the August papers felt like opening the Dead Sea scrolls. Water restrictions were stuck on level six. A school roof that ran the risk of flaking asbestos was being replaced. Locals debated the surfacing of the last remaining gravel section of Gap Creek Road, with some saying bitumen would lead to more traffic and others saying it was long overdue. And a sleepy python had been found with a dog in its belly, and moved away into the bush.

  I was still unpacking when Annaliese Winter visited that first time. The house allowed me a once-in-anepoch bringing together of junk – boxes of things I had mailed to my brother to look after, miscellaneous furniture I kept at a storage place at Indooroopilly, and the thirty kilos or so of bare essentials I’d taken every where with me, my snail’s shell, my port-a-home. This included a folder of my best recipes, utensils, my souped-up MacBook Pro, my external hard drive now half-full of Splades songs, the shakers and sticks and mandolin and other eclectic noise makers I might need at a moment’s notice. I had ended up with less of the miscellaneous furniture than I had expected, but it was too late to complain about that now. Plus, I had the dead guy’s furniture, old Mr Novak’s. All that silky oak with its sombre stain and its sense of permanence. And there was just me in the house, so my furniture needs were finite and the occasional empty room could be filled when the right objects came along. For now, those rooms had boxes instead, and that was better than buying off the plan and kitting them out like a hotel, just for the sake of it.

  The studio too was a work in progress, with powerboards and extension cords and a look that still said I’d just arrived. But it had airconditioning and on a couple of hot nights I’d put up with the noise of it and slept in there, waking up with a dry mouth and condensation on the windows.

  There was not much but light and heat holding me to regular hours. I soon found myself watching TV well into the night, looking at the Channel Ten newsreader on the late news and saying aloud ‘you are so hot’ across the rise of my bare abdomen as the blue light flickered across it. Wars, drug trials, an execution pending in another country – all that went on in the background as I slumped there taken with the way she used her mouth with a mild asymmetry. Then at nine a.m. one of the Here’s Humphrey presenters had me going with her rendition of Five Little Ducks. For days I had it stuck in my head, and it did me no good. And, yes, I looked for her name in the credits and I googled her, but that was as far as I took it.

  The day after annaliese came to my door for the first time, I met my brother Patrick for lunch at Harveys at New Farm.

  I was five minutes late, he was five minutes later and came in flapping a mobile phone and some papers. I was sure it was just for effect. He was an important man in advertising, and people were hounding him with A4, phone calls, text messages. He was wearing a see-through camouflage mesh sleeveless top and three-quarter pants, and his jet black hair was gelled like a soft-serve ice-cream. He had no need to flap to catch my eye.

  He saw me sizing him up and he scowled, or at least let a well-managed wrinkle or two cross his brow. His next look would be disdain – something he could communicate by instinct in a range of media – and it would coincide with a cursory scan of my inadequate dress sense, and lumbering body habitus.

  ‘I’m sorry, is it casual Friday at your work, or nipple Friday?’ I said as he sat down. Always beat your brother to the punch.

  ‘Chubs,’ he said, feigning hurt. It was his special name for me – I had never liked it and it had never been more true. ‘You can’t see them, can you?’ He pressed his shirt flat against his chest and looked down, his face now all mock-horror at his tanned brown nipples.

  ‘Well, you appear to have two nipple-sized, nipple-coloured things in the places where nipples might be, but feel free to seek a second opinion. Nice abs. That’s what I meant to say. Obviously.’

  He picked up the laminated menu and tapped it on the glass table top. ‘Hey, I do a lot of crunches. These abs come at a price, and the price is extreme tedium. But they are nice abs. You’re right. Might as well share them with the team on casual Friday.’

  He had said to me once that he had voted against casual Friday at the management meeting. He had told them there was no casual Friday in advertising. He had told them casual Friday was on the way out all over town. He had waved his arms around dramatically but not persuasively, forecast industry-wide ridicule if not doom. But the admin staff had asked for it specially, and it would cost nothing. So Fridays turned casual, and disdain found its wardrobe. Casual Friday would, for Patrick, become parody Friday, and he would buy clothes for it that would see no wear on the week’s other six days.

  ‘Well, I’m sure the team appreciates the effort,’ I said. ‘Those abs’d break rocks. That’s a lot of work you’ve put in with mardi gras still months away.’

  He gave a flat, resigned smile and a sigh. ‘I don’t do mardi gras any more.’

  He told me there came a time for us all when we realised we were past the mardi gras life, and it typically came around dawn as you staggered home through mascara-streaked drag queens tottering on crazy heels and the last of their chemicals, and shirtless hairless boys with plenty of gas in the tank, and you were dreaming of hours of good sleep somewhere clean and comfortable. You were old and uncool, in an instant, but it was what you were and you had no choice but to embrace it. Buy small dogs, stick to home, keep hours more like those of the styleless other world you’d spent your life backing away from. The world where your brother Chubs lived – that was his thought taken to its logical conclusion.

  I was no rockstar to this man, not even a rockstar on hiatus. I was a slob who had once had a band, who had trespassed upon a cooler place, interviewed reluctantly and not well and always remained happier behind the scenes. He knew that about me. He knew I was not cool, and posters in their tens of thousands would never change that. And that was fine by me. I wasn’t cool. I had a liking for music, and it had taken me places.

  Patrick was the creative director at the agency, and just back from shooting a clothing ad in Finland. They were not clothes he would ever deign to buy, but I was sure he had given them a good-looking ad.

  One of the staff came over to take our order. She gave me a shaky smi
le, tidied a strand of red-dyed hair and said, in a rush, ‘Hi. Are you guys ready? I should get you some water.’ She stopped to renegotiate her breathing and her cheeks started to flush. ‘Assuming you’d like water.’

  Patrick rolled his eyes. I started to tell her water would be great, but in the same moment Patrick let his menu hit the table with a slap and then he said, ‘I don’t know why I’m even looking. I practically live here. I know what I want.’

  He ordered a salad without dressing. I ordered a pear and walnut salad with blue cheese dressing. And then I ordered sandcrab lasagna as well.

  ‘It’ll be my main meal of the day,’ I told him, and he gave me a look that spelled out that I wasn’t the only one who knew it to be a lie.

  ‘Great,’ the girl taking our order said, her voice gone a little squeaky. She cleared her throat, touched it with her hand and opened her eyes wider. ‘And drinks? Or just the water?’

  Once she was out of earshot and he had stopped rolling his eyes again, Patrick leaned over the table to me and said, ‘And would you like a paper bag with that? Or would you just prefer to keep hyperventilating? There’ll be autographs before we leave this place, I just know it. All those bloody little girlie fans of yours.’

  Disdain, disdain. Disdain for us all.

  I was never going to persuade him that it was just my life, and not a life I’d chosen. I was in his world now – he was the Harveys regular, he should have been at least recognised and preferably fawned over. James Street was his street, all steel and glass and topiary, designer knickknacks, six kinds of bok choy and twelve of fish roe, sleek boxy Danish furniture, bars where people sat on authentic upturned wooden packing crates and chose from cellars of three hundred wines. I supposed there had been houses here once, wooden worker’s cottages, or light industry. But none of us knew, as the old James Street had made no mark on us.

  The transformation, I could only assume, had been dramatic as it had passed from the calloused hands of sheet-metal workers and panel-beaters to a generation they could never have imagined. To Patrick and his partner, Blaine, to people whose sunglasses lasted a season and cost a grand, who loved to be the first to buy a new exotic ingredient, but tortured themselves over the food miles. Not that I thought Blaine would ever do that. Blaine had never been one to reflect enough, to care enough, to torture himself.

  Blaine was square-jawed and difficult, and he tended to pick his opinions up flat-pack and erect them in a hurry, without much duty owed to the facts. Which was fine when he wanted to be the loudest person disparaging some new pinot gris, or grigio – I could recall that he thought he hated one and loved the other – but there had been one or two times when I had been more inclined to pick a fight.

  Another staff member arrived with a bottle of water. At the table next to us, a woman with a dark bob and frameless glasses scanned some floor plans while the man she was sitting with leaned his forearms on his notes and thumbed his Blackberry. Behind him were chrome racks with bags of hand-made pasta, sachets of dukka, pots of tapenade.

  Patrick’s phone jiggled on the table and he looked at it and said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to take this.’ He then browbeat the caller mildly and with some charm, and told them he’d be back in less than an hour – more than thirty minutes but less than an hour. ‘Showing me at three would be okay,’ he said, ‘if you think it’ll take you till three.’

  He ended the call, pressed a button and watched his phone turn off, and put it in his pocket.

  I asked him how his trip had been and he said, ‘Fine. We cut a hole in the ice. You know how it goes. Cheesy but effective.’ Then he shook off a little of his sardonic tone. ‘Actually it was good. We had a great time. We’ve got some good pictures and we stayed up till all hours sampling the Finlandia vodka range and then ran bare-arsed in the snow. So, maybe I should reserve the right to a mardi gras comeback at some stage.’

  I didn’t know if he had truly run bare-arsed in the snow, and I wasn’t going to ask. I wasn’t going to enquire about the possible birching of his bare buttocks either, though it seemed like the next logical place to take it. He would assure me the night had gone there, and that it was just the thing for stimulating the circulation. We had enough decades behind us for me to know the trajectory of most of our conversations, even if there hadn’t been as many in recent years.

  We swapped notes on our visits to Scandinavia, and the work we were doing. He told me he had ‘clients up to the wazoo’ and I said I assumed he was wearing mesh so that people could get a good look at his crammed wazoo and not approach him with new business. He said he was not wearing mesh there, but maybe next casual Friday he should give it some thought.

  Our meals arrived, his a plate of leaves weighed down with a few spindly low-GI roast veges, mine a sizeable slab of gourmet lasagna and a well-dressed salad, competing and mingling savoury fragrances rising from it and making my salivary glands spasm.

  He looked at my plate as though it was evidence of an entry-level war crime.

  ‘I don’t know how you can eat that with no dressing,’ I said, mustering some kind of pre-emptive strike. ‘I assume you shit little rabbity pellets.’

  ‘I have a family history of heart disease,’ he said, and I hated him for it in a brotherly way and wanted to throw his leaves in his face. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Stupid remark. I just wish ... I want you around, Chubs.’

  He lanced some leaves with his fork. I cut a fat corner of lasagna and lifted it to my mouth.

  ‘I’m around,’ I said before posting it in there.

  It had been a year and five months since our father had died of a heart attack in the early hours of the morning on the way from his bedroom to the bathroom. It was his third, and he had a seam down his chest from bypass surgery. I was fourteen when he had his operation, and fastidious management of his cholesterol and blood pressure had bought him another twenty years.

  Patrick and I had played guessing games about who got which genes from where, as families do. For us it was harder than some. Patrick was inexplicably darker than the rest of us. We had both outgrown any resemblance the two of us had, though I had done so more literally, and we had no mother to measure ourselves against, since she had died when we were young. I was three, Patrick was seven. He went to her funeral but I didn’t, on the advice of a family friend who was a psychologist and said Patrick’s seven-year-old grieving needs would be different to mine.

  I could remember our mother, but mostly I remembered her from photographs. As time passed and the world changed – but the photos didn’t – she became an abstract representation of the seventies to me. The photos stayed out on the coffee table and the bookcases and slowly grew pale, and Patrick touched them sometimes for luck, one after another. He spoke to them, and my father encouraged it.

  She had a bike with a big basket with two flowers on it. That was one of the photos – her on her bike, no helmet, her hair being tossed around. She had flowing dresses, and preferred to go barefoot. She could pick things up with her toes – socks, pencils, Lego. She wore chunky wooden beads and I liked the texture. She sang in tune. I think I remember her singing Scarborough Fair. Like my father, she was a music teacher. She auditioned successfully for the state symphony orchestra as a flautist, and then she became sick. I knew that only from the chronology I’d learned. I couldn’t remember her sick and I couldn’t think of any flute music from my early life.

  My father stayed in the house, a simple unrenovated Queenslander in an unfashionable part of town, and kept it as it was for the next thirty years.

  It was a student and his mother who found him, at five minutes to ten on the first Monday of the school holidays. They had turned up for a private lesson, and saw the distorted shape of his body through the leadlight window glass of the front door. For years the prospect of my father’s death, instant and non-negotiable as it would be, had scared me. I had only one parent, and needed to keep him. But his failure to die for ten years and then fifteen, and the drift of his cardiolo
gy visits to six-monthly and then annual, had me complacent. His chest seam was an old scar by then, history, a story of a bullet dodged. So the news shocked me when it came.

  Patrick kept himself fastidiously lean, his diet all pulses and other cardioflatulents. I appeared to have made other choices.

  ‘I can’t believe you live at Kenmore,’ he said through a mulch of rocket and bitter purple leaves. ‘All that money and you live at Kenmore.’

  ‘I’m on the Brookfield side of the road,’ I told him, though I knew where the suburb line lay and I was still in Kenmore by hundreds of metres.

  ‘Brookfield is Kenmore with ponies.’ There would be little slack cut for Brookfield.

  ‘This blue cheese dressing is amazing,’ I said. ‘You really should try some. Live a little.’

  I left lunch with Patrick with the usual feeling of incomplete satisfaction. ‘All that money and you live at Kenmore.’ It was very Patrick, that kind of remark. Kenmore was half an hour across town, and he had probably never been there. He lived among the clean lines and post-industrial chic of a loft-style apartment in a building that had once been a sugar refinery. He could walk to work, but tended not to because he would sweat. He had views of New Farm Park, but not really of the river, and the nearby CBD skyline sat squarely in front of his balcony, as though he had put it there, like a ficus in a pot.

  I hit traffic all the way up Ann Street as he took his nipple show back to work. I looked at my watch. It was a reflex response to being stuck – I had nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there. It was the watch my father had given me for a birthday when I was still at school. I had bought myself a sleek matt-finish German one in Berlin once, but I picked up the old watch when I came back for his funeral. A few days later I returned to the US for a party to celebrate our second album, Supernature, going platinum there, and to launch its second single.