The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  I showed her how to crush garlic the way I had seen Nigella Lawson do it on TV, and we tossed it into the plastic bag with the salmon, along with some mirin and soy sauce.

  ‘And that’s pretty much it,’ I told her. ‘You let it marinate for a while, maybe an hour, and the only other things you have to do before frying it are chop the oyster mushrooms and put the rice on.’

  ‘It can’t be that easy,’ she said. ‘Anyway, there was all that chopping of the garlic. I never seem to get that right, and it takes ages.’ She looked down at the chopping board and the knife. It still had flecks of garlic on it. ‘Chefs on TV chop like machines.’

  ‘That’s because they have sharp knives and they chop a lot. They also have arthritis in their hands by the time they’re twenty-five. You need a real knife. I think this one’s just bending the garlic.’ I picked it up and tapped its edge against the palm of my hand. It didn’t come close to breaking the skin. ‘The reason you have issues with chopping is that, in some circus somewhere, there’s a sad clown with a tear painted on his cheek because you stole his comedy knife.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. I thought I was just a crap cook. I think I’m the bad carpenter who, by coincidence, also has bad tools.’ She was leaning against the bench with her arms folded, turning her head to look at me and her enemy the knife through a spray of uncontrolled blonde hair. ‘Marinating,’ she said. ‘That takes time. So I should open some wine. I have some expertise there.’ She pushed herself away from the bench and went to the fridge.

  ‘I’m not sure you’re really connecting with the cooking task.’

  ‘How would a sauv blanc be? That’s what I’ve got cold.’ She lifted the bottle from a shelf in the fridge door and showed it to me.

  ‘There’s no way you’re getting out of doing the oyster mushrooms.’

  She cracked open the bottle cap and went looking for clean glasses. I sliced one mushroom to demonstrate, then handed her the knife. She chased her first mushroom across the board with the knife edge, then trapped it and cut it.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know it should be thinner.’ Her hands were neat and compact, and made the knife appear large. She had a ring on the fourth finger of her right hand. It looked like it was made of jade.

  ‘It’s fine. There’s no rule.’ I had the hands of a giant, big ungainly hands in comparison.

  She sliced another mushroom, still hesitantly, as if it was working against her and would make her do a bad job.

  ‘Annaliese misses her dog, you know,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Oscar. You never met Oscar. She went round to your place looking for him. There was a ceremony. We had a wake.’ The photo was still on the fridge, Annaliese with a bug-eyed baby Oscar cupped in her hands. It was fixed squarely in the middle of the freezer door, at eye level. ‘I think you’re some kind of replacement.’ She half-smiled and stopped chopping. ‘It’s really nice of you to get her to record something.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it just to be nice. I mean, I am nice – of course I’m nice, I’m a hell of a guy – but I like her voice. And I need to hear the idea I’ve had. I don’t know if that makes me a great replacement for a dog...’

  ‘I was never a big fan of the dog.’ It came out sounding more weighty than it was probably supposed to, and her cheeks started to go red. She blew stray hair from her face, put down the knife and picked up her wine. ‘How much is Mark charging you for the lawn mowing? I bet he’s overcharging you.’

  ‘Am I supposed to tell you how much he’s charging me?’

  ‘Now I know he’s overcharging you.’

  ‘Well, part of it’s to cover the fuel and the equipment.’

  ‘And do you think any of that’s coming back to me, the owner of the mower and purchaser of the fuel? Oh, that boy...’ She shook her head, and laughed. She lifted her wine glass up to drink, but then stopped. The ring she was wearing tapped against it. ‘Back at our old place, he used to charge the kids next door to use the trampoline. That’s a pretty embarrassing thing to hear about over the fence.’ She took a sip of the wine, put the glass down.

  ‘I’m not a big trampoliner myself, so...’ I had no idea what I should be paying Mark to mow my lawn, no idea of the price of a lot of things. I had never had a lawn before.

  ‘Neither am I. They come with all kinds of safety gear now, and where’s the fun in that? What’s trampolining without those moments of horror when you’re way up in the air looking straight down at the springs?’ She sorted through the punnet of mushrooms, separating some that were clumped together. ‘You’re surprisingly down to earth, you know.’

  With that, my job was back in play. I had wanted to be a neighbour with some ideas about salmon. I was okay with being a dog replacement. ‘I’ve never been much for applause,’ I told her, and left it at that.

  She gave me a look, as if there would be more, must be more. The end of my sentence drifted out like an ellipsis, and the ellipsis would take all but the most casual listener straight to Derek, who was much for applause, for the grand-scale loveless love of a big crowd out in front of him in the dark. He would make them clap overhead, sing choruses. He would shout ‘Hello Cleveland’ and they would roar. Hello Louisville, goodbye Jess, goodbye.

  Kate picked up the knife again and straightened a mushroom out on the board. ‘Is it true that you and Derek don’t get on?’

  ‘It’s not quite that simple. But nothing ever is, really, is it?’

  She pressed the knife down on the mushroom, but the dull blade squished rather than cut it. She had another go, and the mushroom skidded away from her.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘No, I guess it’s not.’

  ‘The problem’s with the knife.’

  ‘The clown knife, yes. So I should cook with a big red nose on, and crazy oversized boots?’ She tried again, this time with more of a slicing action, and more success. ‘Has the salmon marinated enough yet?’

  The email from Derek arrived the following morning. It said:

  Fat Boy,

  Do you ever turn your phone on? My father has to go in for a brain op next week, so I’ll be home on Tuesday. My mother will drive me insane if I stay with her and the secret’ll be out if I book into a hotel, so I was thinking your place – how about it? Room for a guest? It should only be for a few days. I think they only need to make a small hole. I’ll be on QF 176, so maybe you could let Andrea at the Chairman’s Lounge know I’m coming?

  D

  My phone – the mobile for which Derek had the number – was in a drawer. It had been there, turned off, for about two weeks.

  So, they were about to put a small hole in Derek’s father’s head, but a big enough hole that Derek would let the hedonism slip for a few days and fly back here, to a room he assumed I was keeping for guests. It was typical Derek – sketchy details, a favour, a snarky remark in the opening line. Thanks very much. But the code behind it said to me that his father might be quite ill, and we both knew I was his best choice. So I would say yes, I would take him in, and I would ask a decent minimum number of questions about what was going on. That was where our history put us.

  I wanted to tell him to stop being a fool, to stay for far more than a few days. I wanted to tell him that you don’t get forever with these people. I wanted to poke a small hole in his own skull and shove in a few lessons about the obvious. But we both knew I wouldn’t. Not yet, not today, not sober and months after our last proper conversation.

  D,

  You should get over your big ideas about yourself and celebrity arrivals. I’ll pick you up. No Chairman’s Lounge to hide you, no orange plastic crash barriers to keep the crowds at bay. Just me and my average car, doing it the way the little people do. You’ll be surprised how well it’ll work. I’ll even turn my phone on so you can let me know when you’re on the way through. And, yes, stay at my place. The last thing your dad needs is you being spotted in hotel foyers, and questions being asked about why you’re here. Though be aware that my new life doesn’t int
o the country and befriend a sniffer dog in customs, your best call from the watch house would be to a solicitor from the Yellow Pages, since it won’t be my problem. Stay clean and mi casa es su casa, for as long as it needs to be. I’m sorry to hear that about your father. I hope all works out okay there.

  C

  That would do for now. I wasn’t at all ready for Derek to come crashing into my new neighbourhood, with the sarcasm and reopened wounds and badly managed anguish that would entail. But at the same time there was a better side to how it all felt. It might even have been nostalgia for the times, years before, when he had ended up on my floor in whatever house I was sharing, back when he seemed to the world like a grandiose pretender, but I knew he had what it took.

  Annaliese was due to come over to record at five that afternoon. I heard nothing from Derek after my reply to his email, though the day had passed into night in California, where I assumed he was, and he was unlikely to be sitting at a keyboard. I wanted to keep him from my neighbours. I wanted to stop him spoiling them.

  Once the mushrooms had been dealt with, the salmon with Kate had gone well. She was only a sharp knife away from recreating it with ease. The green zigzag of wasabi sauce on the top at the end was the clincher, the trick that turned it into a dinner party meal. I had left with half a bottle of sauv blanc in me, knowing I’d be next to useless for the afternoon. But I could afford to lose those few hours, and nothing about the day felt wasted. I would buy Kate a knife, I thought. It was an idea half-full of wine, perhaps – the two of us, shopping for a knife – but bits of our lunch-making conversation were still in my mind. She had left me feeling less inclined towards silence, and for years I’d craved it. I walked up my front steps with the idea of calling her, just to keep talking to someone, but she would have been back into her day already and I was supposed to be getting back into mine.

  The next afternoon, with a clear head, I was in the studio at four-thirty. I was gazing out the window, across to the trees next door, when Annaliese stepped out again between the bushes at the end of their pool. Again she was topless. She arranged her towel on the banana lounge and I couldn’t be sure if, for a moment, she had glanced my way before turning and diving into the water.

  At exactly five, she came to the studio door and tapped on the glass.

  I let her in and she said, ‘Aircon. Beautiful.’

  ‘It’s hot out there.’ It was redundant, but I said it anyway.

  ‘I’ve just been for a swim,’ she said. ‘You could come over and swim any time it’s hot. When you’re not working.’ Her hair was still wet. ‘It’s very private.’

  So, she had seen me. I hadn’t stared, but I had looked and she had seen me. That’s what she was saying, surely. It was the gap in the hedge – one drought-dead bush – that stopped it being completely private, and the only view in came from right here. She sat on the edge of the desk under the airconditioning unit, and shivered as the cool air hit her. She ran her fingers through her hair. Her nipples pushed out against her T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  ‘So...’ she said.

  ‘Okay.’ I kept my eyes at face level. ‘Let me play you a few things. Take a seat.’

  I went to the Mac, and she moved to the other chair and rolled over my way, clunking the plastic arm of her chair into mine.

  ‘Sorry.’ She turned so that the arms were parallel. ‘So, play.’ She was wearing a short skirt and she sat back and stretched her long brown legs out under the desk.

  ‘This is Thomas Dybdahl.’ I already had the CD in, and I clicked play. ‘This guy is big in Norway, and the album’s all in English. This is the kind of thing people might be expecting Gunnar and Øivind to do, if they weren’t looking at doing something different. Something a bit poppier, but not disposable Europop, if you get what I mean. Thomas Dybdahl is sort of where they are now, or where they would be if they’d been recording in English.’

  I played her the first track with Thomas Dybdahl’s melancholy reedy voice singing over melodic lap-steel guitar and measured brush work on the drums, his own backing vocals swelling and lifting the sound of some lines in the chorus. It had a rawness, a lack of fussiness, that I liked. It felt like a bunch of people in a room making music.

  Then we moved on to my iTunes library and tracks that were much more overtly produced, first the Cardigan’s Love Fool as an example of what the music company might be expecting, something Nordic and quirky. Even though it held together musically, and stuck in your head because of a real melody, it would be a mistake to try to squeeze something like that out of the Splades.

  ‘Now, for comparison, Alphaville’s Forever Young.’ I clicked on the track and it started to play. ‘This is the trance mix. There’s something a little unreal about the vocal sound, a little electronic.’ That’s what I wanted Annaliese to listen for. ‘Whereas with the Cardigans it’s straighter, other than the accent. The Alphaville sound is really crafted, but in practice one is probably just a few Pro-Tools tricks away from the other. I want to make the backing vocals sound more like Alphaville, but to get there we’ll try it with you delivering it pretty straight and me putting the work in after that.’

  ‘Okay.’ She was getting down to business now. She had her arms folded and she was sitting up in the seat. ‘Okay, I get that.’

  ‘We’ll also double you, maybe even more than double you.’ I stopped Alphaville and clicked on 10CC’s I’m Not in Love. ‘Listen for the aaahs behind the chorus. I heard once that there were 246 vocal tracks on this song.’ It was Countdown, Molly Meldrum, I must have been about eight. And the show might have changed the country’s music industry, but it was gone before Annaliese was born. This was dinosaur knowledge, musical palaeontology, however valid the point might be. ‘Listen to how it expands the sound.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Nice to know I don’t have to do all that in one go.’

  Finally I played her my best current version of the Splades’ It’s Not What You Think. I picked out the parts of the chorus where I wanted to try backing vocals, try out her voice, and I played the notes I was looking for on the keyboard.

  She nodded, and said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it,’ and she sang along without any apparent effort, trying it out quietly but hitting every note just the way I needed her to.

  ‘Now I’m going to get you to stand, so you can breathe properly, and get you to make it a bit bigger, and we might try recording a few.’

  I had my vocal mike already set up, and I gave her the headphones. She walked around to the other side of the desk and put them on. She stood close to the mike, then further away, then she reached out and tapped it with her index finger. The sound popped in her ears.

  ‘About this far away.’ I measured the distance with my hand in front of my mouth.

  She nodded.

  The first time through she came in late, half a beat late. Then she heard her own voice and said ‘Yuk,’ and took the headphones off.

  I told her it was like that for everyone. No one was used to hearing their voice that way. ‘Just sing. Pretend no one’s listening.’

  By the third or fourth attempt, she was giving me something worth keeping. I got her to push it a bit more, hold the last note a bit longer, and with that she showed me the sound that had been in my head, the sound I had been wanting for the song for days. About six times I asked her to give me exactly that again, and she did, exactly. I had what I needed.

  ‘That’s it?’ she said when I told her her job was done. ‘I thought it’d be more ... I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s all there. And it is just an experiment but, from my point of view, it’s working.’

  ‘Oh.’ She looked proud of herself for a moment, as if she had been expecting that it would take some kind of magic that she didn’t have.

  She took the headphones off and hung them on the mike stand and went to get herself a glass of water from the kitchenette.

  ‘Hey, you have a whole bathroom here.’ Her voice echoed as she looked around insi
de it. I thought I’d talked to her about the bathroom, and then I realised that had been a conversation with Kate. ‘Nice robe.’ She swung the door open and came out again. ‘It looks like it’s stolen from a hotel.’

  ‘Yeah. There’s a reason for that.’ It was a Derek story, Derek who would soon be on his way here. ‘It’s that bored rockstar thing when you’ve seen one hotel room too many and you can’t stand it any more. The real problem is the TV went out the window in the seventies, Fleetwood Mac herded pigs around their floor in the seventies and anything you do now looks derivative and not quite up to the mark. It’s all been done thirty years ago. Anyway, Derek, who may or may not have been high on something, in the early hours of one morning ransacked his entire room of everything that wasn’t nailed down and recreated a hotel room on the bus. I think they stopped him on his way out with two chairs and the TV on a baggage trolley.’

  ‘Wow.’ She was impressed. I had only told this story a few times and it seemed there was no way to tell it without impressing people, though they hadn’t been there in the morning to see Derek, dazed and confused and hovering behind the tour manager as he negotiated our way out of the building and back on the road.

  ‘The robes stayed on the bus, and ended up on our account. Ninety US dollars each.’

  ‘I never heard about that.’

  ‘That was the idea. We got the hotel to wipe the security tapes, and no one got hurt, so...’

  She took a mouthful of water. ‘So, what do we do now?’ She was standing in front of me by then, just on the other side of the desk. She put her hand down lightly on the top of the Mac, tapped it with her glossy fingernails. ‘You should have more than water in that fridge.’