The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  ‘What? Who are Space Invaders and what space are they invading?’

  ‘Don’t do this.’

  ‘Ha,’ she said, and smirked, looking down at the smudgy surface and, yes, coffee rings. ‘I was just kidding. Maybe. It’s a toy from the twentieth century, right?’

  If I had come back to Brisbane to stop being a rockstar, Annaliese was determined to get me there as quickly as possible. I wanted to be much cooler than the ageing flabby man I felt I was at that moment, the gormless stack of a creature showing the young girl his old grubby toy.

  ‘I think I’m missing all those people I used to pay to give me self-esteem.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s a good toy, Curtis,’ she said, without a hint of esteem-support in her tone. ‘Hey, in the language of your time, I dig you, man. I dig you like a fossil.’

  ‘That’s so not my time.’ Fossil. Excellent. Dig you, man. Also excellent.

  ‘Fifties, eighties, whatever – it’s all history.’

  ‘You can’t say that. There’s a generation difference. You can’t just dismiss it as being all the same.’ But she could, and she had. ‘The fifties is my father, and he was this old high-panted guy who didn’t think there had been any real music since the war. By which he would have meant World War Two.’

  ‘Every guy over thirty looks high-panted to me.’ Dismissed again. ‘So, can I hear something?’ She was looking towards the Mac and the keyboard.

  ‘Yeah, good idea. It’d be nice to have a chance to show you this isn’t just the junk room.’

  ‘Well, yeah. I guess you didn’t know that you’d be having a visitor.’

  Behind her and through the window, I could see Kate step into the gap between the bushes at the back of their house. She had a pool scoop in her hands and was lifting out leaves. Annaliese followed my eyes, and turned to see her mother.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, filling a space in the conversation before it seemed like a space.

  I wasn’t sure if I saw her smiling before she looked down at the keyboard and said, ‘So show me. Show me how it all works.’

  I thought of her, in that same gap between the bushes the day before. And now here in her midriff top and her short skirt. I wanted to open the window and call out to Kate, let her know Annaliese was here for the studio tour. I was sweating. The airconditioning was blowing cold air at my head, but the room was still full of trapped heat.

  I woke up the Mac and the track I’d been working on was sitting there, laid out on the screen.

  ‘Wow,’ Annaliese said, as if my job had turned real in that instant.

  I opened a new file, and set up master, midi and two audio tracks. I fed the keyboards in through the M box and assumed that a few bars of something I could work with would just find their way to my fingers. Annaliese was beside me, close by my right shoulder. Her eyes were on my hands, which were sitting neutrally on the keys. Her own hands were held as if they were ready to follow any move I made.

  ‘Actually, why don’t you?’ I pushed the chair back from the keyboard. ‘Why don’t you play something and then I’ll do some work on it?’ I stood up.

  ‘What?’ The self-assured Annaliese of the fossil remark was momentarily absent and she seemed, for just a second, fragile. ‘All right. All right, I will. I’ll give it a try.’ She sat, manoeuvred herself in the chair, touched the keyboard with the tips of the fingers of her right hand. ‘Anything?’

  ‘Anything. Just let me get it started.’ I reached for the mouse. ‘As soon as I set you up with a click track, you’re right to go. This’ll give you a rhythm to work with. If you put the headphones on, you should hear it coming through.’

  ‘So it’s like a metronome,’ she said, correctly.

  ‘Yeah. A metronome’s kind of like a click track for old people. Mozart, people like that.’

  ‘Bastard,’ she said, and laughed. ‘I just happen to be classically trained.’

  ‘So, I should expect a lot then.’ I set the rate to a hundred beats per minute. ‘Something modern might be nice, if you’ve got it. Something from your own non-high-panted time. Unless classical’s all you do.’

  ‘Non-high-panted. Right. So, tragically, Asia’s Heat of the Moment is out...’ she said, pretending to give her song selection serious thought.

  ‘That was one second of weakness.’ And yet, somehow, another small victory for Annaliese over the fossil. ‘Now, put the cans on and play me something.’

  I got the click track started, she nodded her head a few times to settle into the rhythm, and she played. The song she picked was Missy Higgins’s Scar, or something improvised from it, and my keyboard setting wasn’t right for that, but I could change the sound once we had it down.

  She played maybe ten bars and said, ‘How much?’ She was taking it somewhere new by then. I’d been right to think that she could play.

  ‘That’ll be fine. Let’s work with it.’ I pulled another chair over and she moved along. ‘I should have set it to “grand” before you started, but we can fancy it up a bit.’

  She watched everything, every move as I lushed it up, went for D-verb, pushed it up to one hundred percent wet and clicked on ‘large plate’. I went into Reason and tested some drum loops, and then had to admit we should have gone there first. I was doing it all out of order.

  ‘Okay, I’m going to try some fake bass now. It’s not my best thing, so bear with me.’

  I listened to her piece twice more and thought I had enough of it in my head. I played it again and recorded a painting-by-numbers bass line using the keyboard. There was nothing clever about it, but it would do to make the point.

  Annaliese took the mouse from my hand, and played my bass track back. ‘Let’s see,’ she said, bringing up the screen box that looked like a mixing desk. She twiddled knobs, pulled and pushed, compressing it mercilessly. She listened and said, ‘Oh crap,’ and pulled it back the other way. ‘Show me how to make it real. Then let’s add some horns.’

  Kate was gone from the pool by then, I noticed as I looked past Annaliese and out the window. I heard a rake outside, Mark scratching up the cut dry stalks of grass beside my house. And I remembered I had a curry inside, simmering.

  I couldn’t Deny Annaliese was on my mind as I drove across town to meet Patrick in the Valley that night. I wondered if any sixteen-year-old boy in the city understood her at all. I could see them at parties, sneaking in rum, trying to get her drunk. But I also pictured them in eighties clothes and I remembered the parties instead of imagining them, and the sixteen-year-old boy who looked like me – dressed like me, was me – threw up the rum and felt the Coke fizz through his nose as it washed back out and the girls didn’t seem greatly attracted to that.

  I couldn’t graft Annaliese onto a memory of a party from the eighties and see how she would fare. She was right. It was all history. My version of sixteen seemed truly old for the first time.

  I parked miles away, and Patrick was already at the Troubador when I arrived.

  ‘You’re crap without a publicist, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not that late.’

  ‘You can buy me a beer.’ He was wearing a paisley shirt that, in daylight, might or might not have been salmon in colour. The Beck’s on the coaster in front of him was almost empty. ‘Another one of these,’ he said, holding it up, ‘to thank me for fighting off the hordes who wanted this discreet dimly lit corner table.’

  It was early for the Troubador. There were not yet hordes present, not that it took much of a horde to fill the place. The entire venue was as wide as a loungeroom and about three times as long, and decorated in the mustards, chocolates and burnt oranges of the seventies, with sagging vintage furniture and a large print of junks in Hong Kong harbour at sunset. It was all history, as Annaliese had said, and all history sat in op shops across the city ready to be plundered with whatever sense of irony could be mustered. Patrick had moved into a house that had looked just like this when I was still at school, but there had been nothing chic about
it then. I was sixteen, he was twenty. That was where I came temporarily into possession of quite a volume of rum and Coke, before I lost it over the verandah railing and was sent to bed. He told me the next day it wouldn’t have counted as a house-warming party if no one had done that.

  It was my first and last experience with rum. I couldn’t really remember if there had been girls there that night or not.

  I waited my turn at the bar and shouted out my order for two Beck’s as soon as I got the look from the guy serving.

  ‘Hey. Curtis Holland.’ Next to me stood a teenager in a pork-pie hat and his first straggly attempt at a goatee. He was the height of my shoulder and gripping his beer as if it was a handweight. He was the kind of person who, I was sure, blogged regularly about what a talentless arsehole I was. Or maybe I had disappeared sufficiently from view that there wasn’t as much of that now. Surely those people are always cruising for new targets. Surely the target isn’t really what it’s about. He reached across and clinked his beer against both of mine. ‘Man. Curtis Holland.’

  I nodded, and reached over and clinked both my beers against his.

  ‘So, what have you been doing?’ he said. ‘Could I get you to sign something? Anything?’ He was patting down his pockets for pens. He saw one behind the bar, next to some spiked receipts, and he leaned over and picked it up. ‘A coaster? How about a coaster?’

  ‘Are you bullshitting me, or...?’

  No, he was playing it straight. ‘What?’ He was too drunk to carry it off if it was an act, too drunk to whip the coaster scornfully out from under the pen or to walk away shaking his head and saying ‘As if...’ and leaving me signing for no one. Curtis Holland thought I actually wanted his autograph. Hilarious. ‘No, seriously. It’s for Josh. That’s me.’ He slid the coaster along the bar, with the pen on top. ‘J O S H.’

  I wrote: ‘Josh, If you drink too many of these, they’ll come out your nose.’ And I signed it, though the pen hit a soft damp spot near the edge of the coaster so the D in Holland was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Wow, excellent,’ he said, as he struggled to read what I’d written in the dim bar light. He put the coaster in his shirt pocket and clinked his beer against both of mine again. It seemed as good a sign as any that the interaction was done.

  When I turned around, I could see that Patrick had watched the whole thing. He looked away, towards the empty stage at the far end of the room, and drank the last mouthful of his first beer. I moved away from the bar, head down and with a beer in each hand. Two people slid by me to claim my spot and order drinks.

  In my second week back, I had been buying groceries and had slowed down to test the ripeness of the avocadoes when someone called out my name. ‘Hey, Curtis Holland.’ Just like the guy at the bar. Her name was Dana and she was a stripper, tattooed and lithe, but with firm biceps from pole dancing. She showed me the biceps, made me feel them. She said she had finished work around three that morning but a friend had dropped over and they had all had a few bourbons, otherwise she wouldn’t have come up to me. Once she’d mentioned it, I could smell it on her breath.

  She was a fan, she said, but her friend Loretta, another stripper and one of the drinking buddies awaiting her return with food, was an even bigger fan. She asked me to sign something, anything. She had a pen in her bag, but no paper. I offered to sign my shopping list, since I could keep the last few items in my head.

  I checked the piece of paper for somewhere to write and noticed the word Cointreau on the list. It was part of a recipe. I circled it and wrote: ‘Loretta, Trust me, this is not an everyday purchase.’

  ‘Oh my god,’ Dana said, completely sincerely, when I gave it to her. ‘This is such a regular shopping list.’

  I handed Patrick his beer and sat down. A yowl of feedback came from the speakers as the band started to set up. A girl with a guitar and long blonde hair was leaning over, adjusting her amp.

  ‘You know what I found when I was clearing out Dad’s wardrobe?’ Patrick said. It was clearly rhetorical. ‘I found two pairs of identical shoes. New shoes. Not new, but never worn. Still in their boxes.’ He took a mouthful of his beer and leaned closer towards me. ‘You know what I think it means? I think it means there was some time, from the look of it in the eighties, when he thought he’d found the perfect shoe, so he took a guess at his life expectancy and bought up big.’ There was an intensity to his expression that I hadn’t anticipated tonight. He had given the shoes some thought, and now was his time to share it. ‘He overestimated it by two pairs. But most of us would, I guess.’

  ‘Maybe the pairs he got to wear just lasted a really long time.’ A better brother might have answered differently, might have kept the metaphor of the unworn shoes intact. ‘Or maybe they were on sale because they were so out of date.’

  He frowned. He looked as if he was going to say something. On stage, the bass drum gave a couple of practice thumps.

  ‘You have the same size feet as him,’ he said, ‘which I don’t, but I don’t think you’d wear them.’

  ‘No.’ I wouldn’t wear them. I knew I wouldn’t. They couldn’t, for either of us, ever play the simple role of shoes, whatever they looked like. And they wouldn’t look right, not my father’s shoes. They had been bought to go with high pants and cardigans and a different time.

  ‘I also found his Caloundra Powerboat Club membership card.’ He watched for a response, as if there was a secret I was holding and that I might spill. There wasn’t though. ‘Did you know he had that? He never lived in Caloundra. I never saw him on a boat.’

  ‘No. He never even talked about boats.’

  The idea was wrong for our father, nothing like him. He had never baited a hook or even tied a complicated knot. He had never dragged us along to the Boat Show the way some other people’s fathers did. In fact, the one time I went it was with a friend from school and his father, and they both got worked up over big fat Evinrude outboards and went home to make a case for buying a half-cabin cruiser. My own father didn’t ask a question about the evening, other than to check that I’d had fun. I hadn’t, but said I had.

  ‘I wonder if he had a lady friend who he’d take there for the Sunday roast.’ Patrick’s imagination had gone to work on this artifact as well. ‘I bet they do a good Sunday roast.’

  ‘Don’t even get me started on the lady friends.’

  He laughed. ‘We should go sometime.’

  I laughed then, but my timing was out.

  ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘We should go. I meant that.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘No, don’t bullshit me like that. Don’t say “sure” and not mean it.’ He was irritated with me now, and it seemed to have come out of nowhere. I didn’t think I’d disagreed. ‘I’m trying to work Dad out.’ He said this more slowly, weightily. ‘It matters to me to work Dad out.’

  I nodded, first to pay his measured tone its due, and then because I understood what he meant. There were gaps, things neither of us knew. I had looked away from them – maybe even run away from them, however in advertently – and relied on sideways glances at the bits of our father that I did know. It was hard to bear not knowing him completely, hard to bear that along with everything else.

  There was another yowl of feedback. A girl’s voice, close to the microphone, said, ‘Ah, shit.’ I didn’t look up.

  ‘You just assume things,’ Patrick said. ‘You think things stayed the way they were when you were twelve or something. I can’t believe you don’t want to know more. You weren’t here for years. You weren’t here for the crazy bits.’

  ‘One two three four...’ With a four-count, the band went into action, in an instant blowing us all back in our seats with noise. They were an all-girl thrashy punk outfit, punk in a genuine way and not the new punk that was more about eyeliner. Everything was turned up to ten, if not eleven.

  Patrick leaned back from the table. He shrugged. We couldn’t talk now. He drank his beer.

  What crazy bits? What had I missed
? More than shoes. I could picture the shoes – tan, conservative, Cary Grant-style shoes, or at least the type of shoes I imagined Cary Grant wearing in all those movies from the middle of the century when he had played different kinds of solid citizens. It didn’t matter so much that there were two more pairs, unworn. I didn’t assume and I didn’t think anything had stayed the way it was since I was twelve.

  I thought of my mother then, and the next to nothing I knew about her and the memories I had faked from what I’d been given. They weren’t assumptions either. They were the best I could do.

  Patrick watched the band, or in fact gazed through the band to nowhere in particular, and took another mouthful of beer in an absent-minded way. He had gold cufflinks on, and his salmon paisley shirt had its top few buttons undone, exposing a triangle of his tanned, muscular, hairless chest. Meanwhile I pudged along next to him, showing as little as possible, missing the crazy bits, other bits, a lot. More than I could define.

  We were a family of two, Patrick and me, trying to work out if we were a family at all. This was a series of summit meetings, conducted undercover and un-declared, as we looked for a way forward. Conversations that dwelt on memories only the two of us now shared, and in which the meanest shots needed to and would be taken. I couldn’t be certain where we would be at the end of it, where in the world I would be.

  In the seconds between the third and fourth songs, he leaned over towards me and said, ‘I don’t know what you assume. I’m sorry about that.’ That’s what I thought I heard under the two-sentence intro before the new song came crashing down.

  Did he like this music? I thought he was more a 180-beats per minute kind of guy now. Maybe we were here for me. I realised that we hadn’t talked about music for years, not properly. We had talked around things, not about them, with the occasional sniping assault when the pressure built up. ‘What are you listening to?’ It had tended to be the first question he would ask me when he visited, back when I was sixteen or seventeen and he was dropping in to eat a real meal or use the tumble dryer.