The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  ‘Well, maybe you get a slightly different version of him. He thinks he has some kind of rapport with you. He’s not exactly chatty around the house. And that’s just the start of it. I can’t have alcohol anywhere visible because he drinks it. He pierced his own ear with an ice cube and a needle, and then he got that pretend nail to go through the hole.’ She seemed compelled to make her case. ‘He calls his father Fletch, to his face. His name’s Campbell Fletcher, and there’s nothing about him that ever gets abbreviated. No Cam, no Cambo. And Mark calls him Fletch, and not in a nice way.’ She tried not to smile, but failed. Mark had no smartarse name for her. ‘I bet Campbell hates it.’

  Our lunch arrived, a sandwich each on Turkish bread. She picked hers up, put it down again.

  ‘He’s pretty much opted out of parenting, though. Campbell, I mean. There’s no consistency from him. He likes to think he’s still a parent, when it’s convenient. Annaliese was his biggest champion until she was about twelve. Then he just forgot one thing too many. Forgot to pick her up from school, forgot about turning up to a musical she was in, turned his attention somewhere else, yet again. Some new girlfriend. When he turns on the charm, you feel like the most important person in the world. When he turns it on someone else, you know where you stand. Did Annaliese tell you how she got her iPod? She did some filing for him, for about an hour. That’s not parenting.’

  ‘It can’t be easy,’ I said, and it came out sounding stupid and trite.

  I started eating my sandwich. Kate looked at hers. I thought she was going to tell me to try a bit harder.

  ‘I don’t know her sometimes,’ she said. ‘Sixteen-year-old girls now? They’re predators. More than one person has said that to me. Predators. I was at this party – parents were there too that time – and one of the fathers started talking about them fucking in the bedrooms. He actually said the word, and he said it twice, as though, suddenly, that was all fine and it was just what happened. And apparently they see oral sex as not sex – just a step on the way. That’s what I’ve got to deal with.’

  ‘Right.’

  Did she know I had seen Annaliese topless by the pool? Had she seen her hand on my arm in the studio?

  ‘With Mark that stuff is fine, or at least it used to be. He used to talk about everything. Once he said he was worried about waking up with erections, so I told him the main lesson from that was that he should never fall asleep at school.’ She laughed, and finally took a bite of her sandwich. It didn’t stop her talking though. ‘With Annaliese there was no easy way. I left books in her room and she stormed out and slammed them down on the table and we had the whole “how dare you” thing. You’ve seen how that goes.’ She swallowed the last of the mouthful, drank some of her water. ‘I’m sorry, I’m ranting like a mad woman.’

  ‘Well, I’m a couple of bites ahead of you, but...’

  ‘Annaliese isn’t like that. All those things people say kids do. I’m sure that’s not her.’ She fiddled with an alfalfa sprig. ‘But she’s sixteen. She doesn’t want me to know everything. That’s how sixteen works, isn’t it?’

  ‘Always has been.’ I remembered the life I had lived in my head, the things no one knew, the need to shut my door and have a place that was just mine. She was waiting for me to say more, to reassure her that Annaliese wasn’t dragging boys off to bedrooms. Or dropping into studios, telling stories, playing a cool kind of twenty-five and an unfinished kind of sixteen, both at the same time. I couldn’t talk about Annaliese and boys, what might happen at parties, or might not. ‘So what do you want to do with your life?’

  She had taken a second bite of her sandwich and she stopped, mid-chew, as if she’d heard the question wrongly. She finished chewing, and swallowed. ‘What do I want to do with my life? I’m living it now. I want to get these kids through school.’ She smiled, and shook her head. ‘I unload about my possibly psychopathic son and the sex-crazed world that’s ready to suck up my daughter, and you want me to unload about my life as well? You’re a brave man.’

  ‘I think I can take it.’ Most of my time was spent moving a cursor around a screen, clicking to make ever-smaller changes to the same songs, contemplating the next meal. I could listen to someone talking, listen to Kate and her stories of this life I hadn’t come close to living. If I hadn’t been in a band, if I had instead studied music and taught it, would Jess be working somewhere across town, telling someone about my disregard for the kids and my misspent charm? Could I have been the other half of this life, the sad, despised man who pinned his virility on his car?

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay. Primary teaching. If you really want to know. That’s what I’d do with my life if I could do exactly what I wanted. But it’s complicated. I’d have to do an exam to qualify for anything, and the only way to do it externally – the degree – would be to do another degree first.’ So, she had looked into it. ‘I’d like to work on literacy with disadvantaged kids. But I don’t know. I don’t see it happening.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not? A million reasons why not. Because those degrees don’t fall conveniently out of cereal boxes. Because in the real world I have to have a job. I’ve got two kids with a lot to deal with. Two kids who have been fucked up to varying degrees by the way the divorce panned out, frankly.’ Her own bluntness stopped her in her tracks. She glanced over to the counter, where milk was being frothed noisily at the coffee machine. ‘Or just by being fourteen and sixteen.’

  ‘Well, I hope the chance comes along. I think it’s something you could be really good at.’ I was so out of practice with real conversations that I had no idea trite was my strong suit. I meant every word of it, even if I had no artful way to say it. It would have to stand as it was.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘But that’s not likely.’ She picked her sandwich up again. ‘And that’s life in the suburbs. It’s not like being in a band. Not like spending your thirties flying around having a wild time, getting to be Peter Pan and...’ She stalled there, but I’d caught the thread of her logic.

  ‘Go on, finish. Peter Pan and what? One of his Lost Boys? I think that’s where that goes, assuming Derek’s Peter Pan. And assuming you’re not casting me as Wendy.’

  ‘No. I hadn’t thought...’ She stopped, corrected. ‘It’s not what I meant.’ Her look said it was exactly what she meant.

  ‘It’s okay. You just weren’t supposed to know me that well yet.’ I pitched it as a joke, however true it felt. I couldn’t keep all my secrets from her, I realised. Didn’t want to.

  ‘Hmm.’ She smiled, looked at her sandwich and put it down. ‘So, what made you come back here, Lost Boy, when the obvious place to keep working with a bunch of Norwegians might be, say, Norway?’

  ‘It was time.’ My brother. We had no father, no parents. I had no anchor if I didn’t have my brother. Was it as clear as that? Some secrets were still mine, still being worked out. ‘I’d been on tour forever and I needed to sit down.’

  ‘So, is Derek sitting down too?’

  ‘Only for lap dances, I’d imagine. Derek bought himself a West Hollywood apartment with a spa for three, and then upgraded to a spa for five. He showed me the catalogue. Romance Two, it was called. It’s his own mini Playboy Mansion. Derek buys Hef’s fantasies off the rack.’

  She laughed. ‘And what about you? I can’t see you hanging around in that granny flat forever. What are you looking for from life, if it’s not Hef’s fantasies?’

  ‘I haven’t worked that out yet.’ I’d had Derek stories ready, but the focus was back on me. ‘This is a chance for me to think about it, I guess. No playmates though, probably no stripper spa parties, and no lounging around in silk smoking jackets with bunny logos. Maybe it’s time for me to embrace my inner Kenmore and see how it works for me.’

  ‘Hey, don’t sell Kenmore short,’ she said. ‘I’m sure there are spas all over this suburb happy to swing like it’s the seventies at Hef’s place.’ Her expression changed. ‘We used to have a spa.’ She shook her h
ead, as if it couldn’t have been true. ‘Back at the old place. Back in the old life. We had this house at Indooroopilly. It was ... competitive. It was a statement house. If you drove up the driveway and parked at the front and got out, chances are it’d stop you and you’d gaze up at it and you’d think, “They’re richer than me.” That was the look it had. It’s not me to be in that house. I don’t know why it ever was. Annaliese had a friend out where we are now, and it was different, and I had only half the money I’d had before, so...’ She shrugged, as though she’d been backed into the house she was in now. ‘It’s better though. Campbell can have Admiralty Towers. I’m happy.’ She nodded, still testing it in her own mind to see if she believed it. ‘We never had the chance to work out that we liked different things.’

  She told me she had started uni after finishing school, but that it didn’t go so well. She began an Arts degree and met no one. Every class was a room full of hundreds of people, and they all seemed to talk to each other but not to her. One day, she caught the bus home, and left her textbooks on the seat, knowing she wouldn’t be back. For weeks she left the house in the morning, pretending. She went to daytime sessions of movies and came home in the early afternoon and watched soaps. She ended up as a legal secretary, met Campbell. Annaliese came along quicker than they had planned. They hadn’t planned, in fact.

  ‘It’s just like they say it is.’ She was up to the other end of the relationship again. ‘The only people who get rich out of ugly divorces are lawyers. Divorce is a chance to show that it’s possible to divide something in two and both walk away convinced you’ve got less than half.’ She was off in the thought for a moment, then suddenly back, looking at me, stuck for the next thing to say, as if she had stepped somewhere she shouldn’t have.

  I was divorced too, and far more recently. She knew about that. She had read it in papers and magazines, earlier in the year. We had crossed over to my story again. Even in this conversation, I was preceded by the two-dimensional more difficult, more fascinating version of myself.

  ‘I’m sure it’s different with kids,’ I said as our way out. ‘I’m sure there’s more to it.’

  ‘My mother likes trsss,’ Annaliese had said to me. ‘That’s why we live out here.’

  Maybe Kate did like trees. I knew that she ran on the bush tracks on the back of Mount Coot-tha early in the morning. I couldn’t picture her in the statement house, or the life that went with it, even if she had downsized unwillingly to get where she was. Annaliese had a better version of the story. I could see Kate saying it, however many years ago, as they drove along Gap Creek Road, past caramel-coloured cows and landscape gardeners, high eucalypts and dense bush, signs advertising horse poo for two dollars a bag. Maybe it was a dollar back then.

  ‘Look at the trees, look at the trees, and we’re still close to everything.’

  She was finding the best way through for all three of them.

  She phoned me later in the afternoon. ‘I’m on the back verandah,’ she said, in what sounded like a harsh whisper. ‘It’s cordless. The phone.’

  I rolled my chair forward and looked up through the studio window, but couldn’t see her through the bushes.

  ‘I’m in the studio,’ I whispered back. ‘Phone with a cord. Old school.’

  She laughed, and said, ‘All right. What I meant was ... I was just about to put some laundry on and I found a bank slip in Mark’s pocket. I’ve just seen how much money he’s got.’ So she was outside, hiding from him to make the call. ‘I don’t know where it’s coming from and I don’t know what he’s going to do with it.’

  ‘Well, unless it’s a middling two-figure sum, it’s not all from me.’ I stood up, and walked as far as the cord would let me. My back was stiff from sitting.

  ‘No, I figured that. But thanks for confirming. It’s not a two-figure sum. More like a four-figure sum. We all know he’s ripping you off, but he’s not ripping you off that much.’

  ‘All? Who’s all?’

  ‘No one. It’s ... I can’t ask him. I haven’t even been into his bedroom this year. I just demand his sheets fortnightly. And don’t think I didn’t try for weekly. I assume he puts the clean ones on when I give them to him. I’ve got no idea how he could have so much money.’

  ‘So, you want me to go undercover and find out?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do. That’d be great.’

  It had been a joke, and then suddenly it wasn’t one. It was a straw, and she was clutching at it. ‘I’m not sure that I do undercover.’

  There was nothing from Kate in reply. Nothing. Maybe a small ‘Oh’.

  ‘But maybe I could have a word with him.’ And what would that word be? I had no idea, but every other thing I could think of to say next – every way out – failed me, didn’t form itself into anything I could decently say. ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  I heard her breathe out, and then she said, ‘Good. Thank you. Don’t feel you have to though. Only if it comes up. I was just a bit surprised by the amount of money he’s got. Don’t go thinking I’m totally crazy.’

  ‘Not totally.’

  She laughed. ‘Thanks. That’s about the best I could hope for, I guess. If you need any help with the undercover thing, call me. I’ve got years of costume parties behind me, remember.’

  ‘It’s about sturt travelling inland to the desert with a whaling boat and two crew, missing the inland sea by millions of years.’ Patrick had taken a closer look at our father’s opera notes. ‘He’d done quite a bit of work on it. Would you have thought there’d be an opera in it? I guess Voss became one, so there you go. It’s a genre, explorer opera. What possessed Dad to wade in I just don’t know. Did you know Sturt had a whaling boat?’

  ‘No. All that explorer study at school, and no mention of a whaling boat.’ We were on Patrick’s balcony. He was back in town and about to sear trout. ‘How bizarre must that have been, if you were some indigenous person out there, watching this caravan come through the mulga with their cocked hats and their horses and dragging their whaler?’

  The dark mass of the park lay in front of us, with its rose gardens and poinciana canopies and the wide dry lawns where families played on weekends. The buildings of the CBD, most of them still full of lights, stood up over the treetops and seemed closer than they were. A breeze wound around from the river, but sluggishly, heavy with warm, humid, salty air.

  Patrick had put bowls with three kinds of olives on the glass table, and he had opened a riesling because he had suddenly had enough of sauv blancs. I had brought a sauv blanc. He sat back in his chair, the light from the cream-and-beige loungeroom angling across his face. He took an olive stone from his mouth and dropped it into the saucer in front of him.

  ‘Well, exactly,’ he said. ‘That comes up. I don’t know if they did the actual exploring in cocked hats, but the rest of it. It’s all there. He wanted – Dad wanted – them to build an actual boat, full size. It would have been like Fitzcarraldo, Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.’

  ‘I haven’t seen it.’

  He picked up his wine glass, and wiped his hand across the ring of condensation it had left on the table. ‘Well neither have I, but it’s about this guy who takes a big boat over a mountain, I think. It’s one of those stories of grand folly.’

  ‘As far as you’re aware.’

  ‘As far as I’m aware, yes. You’re not telling me you have to have actually seen something to reference it? I’m sure that’s not how it works.’

  ‘So Fitzcarraldo could be a whimsical cartoon musical about a vainglorious yet eccentric mouse who rode in Don Quixote’s saddle bag?’

  ‘Well, it could. But I would have seen that, obviously. You know that’s my genre, the whole rodent-Quixote-musical-cartoon thing. Right up there with outback explorer opera.’ He leaned forward towards the olives, took a large green one from the middle bowl. ‘Where the fuck did you get an idea like that from? Shrek? You must spend a lot of time alone.’

  ‘I do now. And it’s good, mostly. It got
noisy there for a while.’

  ‘Yeah. Come in and I’ll do the trout.’

  He led the way to the kitchen, which was at the far end of the large open-plan living area. The water in the saucepan had come to the boil.

  ‘I just bought these...’ He struggled for the name, then picked up one of the two new bamboo steamer baskets he was referring to. ‘...things. Blaine took his. So I may trash the greens, but you’ll have to bear with me.’

  He picked up the recipe, which he had printed from the internet. His salsa verde was in the blender, his organic veges were cut and in piles. He studied the page as if the recipe were in a tiny font, or another language in which he knew a few phrases but no more.

  ‘Right, trout,’ he said, and went to the fridge.

  He dribbled oil in the frying pan, turned the heat up to high and lowered the two fine-looking pieces of trout in with tongs. He loaded the broccolini, beans and snow peas into the baskets and set them on the boiling water. For more than a minute he was calm, watchful. Then everything happened at once – hot oil spat from the fish, smoke started to rise from the pan, steamed billowed. I moved forward.

  ‘Don’t help me. I need to...’ He waved me away. ‘All right, fuck it, help me. What are you holding back for?’

  I turned the heat down, took the tongs and turned the trout, and I steadied the baskets. ‘Just fine-tuning. That’s all.’ I would be buying him a knife next.

  ‘Oh god,’ he said as he shovelled it dispiritedly onto plates. ‘You don’t realise how dependent you are. Bloody Blaine.’

  He gave me knives and forks and took the plates himself and led the way back out to the semi-darkness of the balcony. Dependent. I hadn’t been dependent. Blaine going was like Patrick having an organ removed. Jess going put me in a haze, but it wasn’t the same. I played that night. I cooked in the next town without catastrophe.

  The salsa verde was great, and I told him so.