The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  I told her the piano parts were sometimes the easiest bits for me, since I knew piano better than anything. That was partly true, but it often wasn’t easy to find some new melody that worked, that took a song forward and helped it find its place. I told her I’d grown up wanting to be Billy Joel but, importantly, the Billy Joel of the seventies. Specifically the early seventies. He had become a big star towards the end of the decade with The Stranger and The Piano Man, but I had really wanted to be the Billy Joel of Cold Spring Harbour.

  ‘I’ve had fights before about that album,’ I told her. ‘So don’t pick one now based on your smug post-millenium perspective of Billy Joel.’

  She laughed, and I played her She’s Got a Way. Cold Spring Harbour was an album less played and less remembered than it should have been. It was a cluster of small songs, melancholy and warm and often optimistic, and most able to be perfectly rendered with just piano, vocals and, importantly, no fuss at all. I played and sang, and the song was as true as ever, and still a map that showed where melody came from, and no less a song to aspire to than it had been when I was ten or twelve, in the early eighties. I was hopelessly nostalgic about it, and had no inclination to be otherwise. It had been my map. It had been part of turning me to music.

  By the third time through the chorus, I caught her humming a harmony – not the melody, but a harmony that had just cropped up in her head – and I made her sing it. Then I made her sing the song while I played, feeding her the words line by line and playing through.

  ‘Yeah, you’ve got it, easily.’ It was in my mind, but I found myself saying it. ‘You’ve really got a voice there.’

  She half-shrugged, and looked awkward. ‘It’s just singing. Everyone can sing, can’t they?’ She knew I was right though. ‘My father wants me to do law. Business or law. But he would, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘And what do you want to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I think I still want to be the Billy Joel of the early seventies, but you can’t tell anyone that. The dagginess coefficient is just too high for anyone who doesn’t know specifically what I’m talking about. I want to get a grand piano in here. I think there’s room.’ I knew where it would go. There was a corner in which unsorted junk sat on an area of two-tone brown carpet where the previous resident’s lounge suite had spared patches of it from the light. ‘My father was a piano teacher, so there were always people coming round to our house taking lessons. The piano was our only expensive piece of furniture.’ Another memory had surfaced. I didn’t know why. He had once thought of selling the piano to pay school fees. ‘Sorry, that sounded like one of those fake-humble statements rich people make, or politicians.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘Back in the days when life was simple and before fame came along and complicated everything. Would you do it any differently, if you had the chance?’

  Definitely yes, definitely no. ‘That’s the kind of chance no one ever gets. I don’t have any regrets about doing it though.’

  ‘You have plenty of regrets.’ She was sure of it. She poured water from the carafe into her glass. ‘I’ve read that article – it was in some magazine in America, and the title of the article was Curtis Holland Regrets. I saw it online.’

  ‘Will you please stop googling me? It puts me at a distinct disadvantage. I wasn’t always myself in those interviews.’

  ‘I think you were completely yourself. Maybe not everyone else was.’ She was back sitting on the edge of the desk again, one leg crossed over the other at the ankles, short white socks showing just above the tops of her black school shoes.

  ‘Okay, but the main thing is that you stop googling me. I don’t want to shock you, but it’s not entirely reliable. I’m the definitive source. Come to me. And, anyway, who’s lived and regrets nothing? What kind of psychopath, really? I’m sick of this “I’ve got no regrets” thing that people keep coming out with.’ I was sure it only sounded as though I’d just contradicted myself. I knew what I meant. ‘Why do we have the word regret if we all decide not to have any? There are things I regret. I could write you a list. I was on tour when my father died. I regret that. I can’t change it and I couldn’t change it at the time, but I can still regret it.’

  I was on tour when it ended with Jess. I was on tour looking out through the tinted windows as my life passed in a whir, in a blur. The US Midwest, pale flat roads six or eight lanes wide sliding through cornfields and forests and over rivers with names I would never know, white barns and siloes, endless lines of Buicks and Plymouths and Dodges humming along at the speed limit. Down in those cars, the lives looked more real. I felt minuscule there, in the face of all that traffic. And lost, in a way.

  ‘So, what about the band?’ Annaliese said. ‘What about Butterfish?’ She was on her way out the door by then, hydrated and cooled down. I had my one new idea to get back to, though I had lost the spirit for it temporarily.

  I walked with her around the side of the house. The afternoon was still hot, and the heat felt like it was there to stay. The air was thick and static, but the sky was cloudless and again there would be no storm coming through.

  ‘It’s really Derek you’re asking about, I guess. Derek and the end of the band. And that’s the question I’ve been pretty good at not answering.’ It was always Derek who people asked about, and there was always more that I could have said about him than the others. I regretted yanking Ben away from a relatively normal life and dumping him into the band’s mad final year, but that regret was a simple matter, and he had survived it and made some money. I had said almost nothing about Derek after the band had broken up, since it was hard to talk about him without shitting on him, wilfully and at length. ‘Derek needed a break from it as much as me, I think, really. There was a certain amount of unravelling on that last tour. Derek was James Dean and John Belushi, but still alive. And if you don’t know who those people are, you should google them. But continue to be sceptical about what it gives you. There are lots of innocent non-facts out there, not to mention stories made up to sell magazines.’

  So, even then I was guarded, cagey in the way I put it. However much I told myself this was a straight honest conversation with a person who was literally the girl next door, I could also see the words travelling home in Annaliese’s head and scrolling out across the internet, on a blog first and then worse. If I maligned Derek, it would be no secret and it would come back my way. It would hunt me down, all the way west out of town, along Gap Creek Road to my hidden dry block of land, and I would have to answer for it.

  ‘Maybe I meant the whole thing,’ she said. She half turned towards me, and the sun caught the side of her face. ‘The whole Butterfish thing.’

  ‘That’s a more interesting question.’ A better question, a smarter question. ‘People don’t ask that one. And I don’t think I regret the whole thing. No. It’s too much of my life.’ I couldn’t separate myself from it. I couldn’t picture my life without those years. ‘There was a reason for doing it, for trying it in the first place. And when it was good it could be great.’

  As I watched her walk along the road towards her house, sticking to the shade wherever there was any, I knew she wouldn’t be blogging about me, or the band. She wouldn’t even tell her friends, and I had a new regret about my instincts and the way they had leapt up to protect me when, surely, I hadn’t needed protecting at all.

  Jess sent me an email from a Louisville internet café after a fight that I couldn’t distinguish from any other, and then she went to the airport and flew out. By the time I picked it up, her phone was switched to voice mail and she was boarding, or perhaps even in the air. We had been together on and off since I was twenty or so, and been married less than a year.

  I saw the email backstage after a soundcheck. I printed it and put it in my pocket and walked outside with it. I sat under a tree at the edge of the car park, reading it, not reading it. She had left me. She kept it brief and clear, and said we had grown apart and knew each other les
s now than we had years ago. ‘I know this is the right thing FOR BOTH OF US,’ she said. Actually, she said it was the ‘5ight thing’, with the keying error going uncorrected. I had left her with a migraine in our hotel room, and now she was gone, with this email equivalent of a scrawled note the last piece I had of her as she left town.

  I saw the others coming out of the venue, their hands in their jacket pockets as the wind blustered around them and rain started to spit from the cold steely sky. They were heading for the bus and assuming I was on it already. I folded the email and put it back in my pocket, and I told them later that Jess’s migraine wasn’t letting up so she would be staying in the room that night. Halfway through our set, I realised in one ugly moment that that wasn’t right, that she was in fact gone, that I had lulled myself into keeping the migraine story at the front of my mind, and that the truth was a sad, demoralising secret that I would have to own up to the following morning as we got ready to drive on to the next city.

  I told them over breakfast, and they said almost nothing. ‘She’s gone home,’ is how I put it. ‘This really wasn’t working out for her, all the travelling.’ I was telling a stupid story, and we all knew it. ‘It’s probably for the best. We can take a look at it all after the tour.’ And there the fiction tailed off into nothing, and the others let it sit that way.

  ‘Fresh flapjacks,’ Derek said. ‘They’re just coming out from the kitchen. Let me go get you some.’ They were, he knew, my favourite part of the American hotel breakfast. Comfort food.

  When I last spoke to Jess, months after that, it was amicable enough but she came across like a stranger with whom I shared a history by chance – someone who had, freakishly, been in the same places and at the same times, but lived a rather different life there to the one I thought we had both been living. She was in Sydney working as a physio, living in a mortgage-free house paid for by songwriting royalties. And fair enough, since she was tossed around on that ride as much as the rest of us.

  Derek knew best that it was over. I was in the habit of under-rating his instincts with people, but he knew me and he knew Jess. For several days he set aside any differences we had, and replaced them with stilted conversations on the bus about how I was going. I could be staring at a novel and all of a sudden he would slip into the opposite side of the caravan seat with a new cup of coffee for me. He would have made us both cappuccinos – forgetting that I’d never drunk cappuccinos – and dusted the foam with chocolate.

  He wasn’t James Dean, or John Belushi. He was riven by self-doubt and the fear that he might be only a tryhard, promoted to fame by a world that no longer had the attention span to judge a person properly.

  Some of the very worst contestants on American Idol had become famously bad and worked the same talk show circuit we did, singing flat and proud and backing it up with the dance moves of a Ken doll. At a chance greenroom meeting at a TV studio, one of them said he was practically our biggest fan anywhere and pressed a copy of his CD into Derek’s hands. Derek stared at it as if the badness might seep through his skin and do him harm.

  ‘Get that kryptonite off this bus,’ he shouted from his bunk the next day when the rest of us decided to give it a play. He made the driver stop and he flung the CD like a frisbee into a Pennsylvania field, and threw the case after it. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘It’s fucking karaoke. People can get famous with karaoke now.’

  Derek had launched himself at fame looking for vindication. Twenty million album sales were supposed to tell him he had some kind of talent, but people bought indiscriminately, impulsively, and sometimes they bought karaoke. There was a real risk that, if he questioned it too closely, fame might not be able to tell him he was okay.

  With the third album now behind us and the band wound up, Derek seemed to need to put his fame to the test just about every day. He was living the life, the ‘live fast, die young’ version of life that keeps magazines hovering, waiting for the best fresh pictures of the wreckage. But most people like that survive, I suppose. They give their organs a pounding, but they end up growing old despite themselves. They end up white-haired and living in a big house at the edge of things with a movie not-quite-starlet who is on the brink of middle age and trying to hold it at bay with some breast work, and who might have been killed in the opening sequences of a few schlocky horror films and who spends her days trying out unsuccessfully for infomercials and her evenings mixing his scotch and whatever, and listening to his grand embellished stories of an erstwhile better life.

  Derek at sixty, high in the Hollywood Hills, might then be well placed to offer something on regret. At thirty-five, close to thirty-six, he was definitely one of the ‘no regrets’ crowd and, of them all, he was of course the one who shat me most. I didn’t know if every famous ‘bad boy’ was just selfish at heart, but it’s where I put Derek. He would try anything, trample anyone, in the hope that not one possible life experience would pass him by. He never looked sideways, never saw collateral damage. If I delivered some diatribe on regret to a poor unsuspecting American journalist, it was no doubt because Derek had done something that day to rile me more than usual. It was a coded message to him as he scrutinised the press coverage, and one that he would never heed.

  Together, we had moved to bump Patrick from the band and, whatever he said at the time about his ad agency job offer, it had ended up looking as if it was all my work. Another regret of mine.

  It was our father who had thought, perhaps even decided, that we should each learn an instrument. My first choice was guitar, but I was happy to settle for piano instead. Patrick picked saxophone, but ended up with a second-hand clarinet because saxophones cost a lot more. He had a fight with our father in which our father said he doubted that he had the application to justify the investment.

  Patrick stuck with the clarinet, and became good enough that he could play a version of the sax solo from Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street on it, and resent every woody, reedy note. Around then I heard Cold Spring Harbour for the first time, and I saw how a person might write a song. I saw the music and the words and how you could make something of them, just you and a span of black and white keys. And I worked at a melody in my head until I had to make written notes, and then had to sneak in some time at the piano in the loungeroom when Patrick and my father were out of the house, and I wrote my first song. I was twelve.

  Back in the studio, I played my few new bars of piano again and fleshed it out a little. How far could I take it down this track? What else did it need? I knew it might be the worst idea I could have, but I called next door. Annaliese answered the phone.

  ‘There’s an experiment I’d like to try,’ I told her. ‘Just an experiment.’

  ‘Yes...’ Her voice was all mock wariness, like the voice the sensible person uses in a sitcom when the hapless fool is about to pitch a hare-brained scheme.

  ‘I’d like to try some backing vocals with the track I played you earlier, the track from the Norwegian guys. But I think it needs a female voice. I want to give it a go, but there’s no guarantee it’ll work. So I can either junk the idea, or face the logistical nightmare of getting someone in somewhere to do it, or you could drop over sometime and in about five minutes we could work out whether or not the idea has any prospects.’ There was silence. I heard Kate’s voice shout something out in the background. ‘We could maybe record it and see how it sounds.’

  ‘So,’ Annaliese said, sounding disappointed, if anything. ‘Are you bullshitting me and, if so, why?’

  ‘No. No, not at all. I’d really like to try it. If you’re fine with it, and your mother’s fine with it, and...’

  ‘My mother? Jesus. She’s fine with it. As fine as she needs to be. I’ll tell her.’

  ‘It’s just an experiment.’

  ‘Sure. I thought it might have been some joke of Mark’s. But if you really think I can do it.’

  ‘Yeah, I do. Your voice’ll be right, I think.’

  ‘Wow.’ She put her hand over the mouthpiec
e for a few seconds and then came back. ‘All right then. I’ll get my people to talk to your people. But, yeah, for sure. I’m in. Thanks. And I think Mum wants to talk to you about something now anyway.’

  There were some more muffled noises as the phone was handed over.

  ‘Annaliese’s people here,’ Kate’s voice said. ‘I’ve actually got a food question, but first...’

  In the distance, Annaliese’s voice shouted, ‘Oh my god,’ very theatrically, and she let out a big squeal. Mark bellowed, ‘Shut the door,’ as though for the thousandth time.

  ‘First, you’re recording something with Annaliese?’

  ‘Yeah, I’d like to. If that’s okay with you. I want to try adding female backing vocals to one of the tracks I’m working on.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said slowly, processing the truth of it. ‘Okay, that’s what she told me. Well, I can’t see why not. Just, if it doesn’t work...’ Her voice was quieter now, her hand perhaps cupped around the phone.

  ‘If it doesn’t work, it won’t be about her, and I’ll make sure she knows it.’

  ‘All right. All right then. Well, the two of you have fun.’ She laughed. ‘I’m glad I played that DVD. It was worth the lecture I got in the end. Now, something much more mundane. Salmon. What can you do with fresh salmon? Something simple. Make that foolproof. I’ve got a friend who bought some in bulk and she’s given me some of it. I’ll need to go back to her with a story of the great, or at least passable, meal that I made from it.’

  ‘Is it steaks or cutlets?’

  ‘It’s salmon. That’s all I can tell you. Pieces of salmon. Kind of rectangular.’

  So, the next day at lunchtime, I cooked salmon with Kate Winter. It was her day off, a mid-week reward for rostering herself on with the casuals on the preceding Saturday. The store was part of a chain and that was policy for managers, but she said it gave her ‘me time’ during the week, and this Wednesday’s me time was to be her learn-to-cook-salmon lesson.