The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  ‘I had to do something to calm his mother down.’

  ‘Oh really? And calming mothers is a thing you do now?’ He pushed the coffee cup across the table away from himself and then slouched back in the chair. ‘It sounds like you’ve got yourself a great substitute for a life here. I wish I could be you. It was just a few beers. He’s got to learn how to drink a few beers.’ He stared blankly, dumbly, at the wall. ‘My father, he was fucking cross-eyed. And no one told me.’

  I turned the French toast. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to backtrack. I was stuck at ‘I wish I could be you’, but nothing could be said about that now. There was a fine line between glib and contemptuous, and I told myself he had meant to be glib.

  ‘It’s the way it’s pressing on his brain. The tumour.’ He said it Schwarzenegger-style, more like ‘too-ma’, and he made himself smile. It was a forlorn attempt to consign it to fiction, to make it as powerless as a sub-plot in a movie, over which the action hero would invariably triumph. If you could say it Arnie-style, it couldn’t be entirely real. It couldn’t be that serious. ‘One eye is kind of stuck looking down and in. It’s like he’s got a bug on his nose and he can’t stop watching it.’ His chair scraped back as he stood up. ‘Okay, I’ll come. Tonight. It’s not as if I have plans. And it sounds excellent.’ He said it as if it was the biggest burden imaginable. ‘Hey, don’t burn that. I’ve waited months for this French toast.’

  I slid it onto the plate just in time. I sliced a banana over the top and put the bacon on the side. His father was propped up in a bed at the Wesley, two pictures of the world coming in and not fitting over each other – two bed ends, two views of the garden – as the mass in I put the plate in front of Derek and he said, ‘And the maple syrup would be...’

  I fetched it from the pantry. He took a close look at the label.

  ‘Genuine article. You are living well.’ He poured it zigzag across the French toast and a slick of it collected near the bacon. ‘So, they do the thing today. The biopsy.’ He was cutting the toast, loading up his fork. ‘The hole in the head. After that it’s probably radiotherapy. It’s not an easy area to poke around.’ His voice had started to go shaky, and he put the fork down. ‘Some more of that coffee would be good. I can make it if you tell me how the machine works.’

  I took his cup and said, ‘No, that’s fine. Eat the French toast while it’s hot.’ I took the coffee from the freezer and emptied the old coffee grounds into the bin. ‘So how was it yesterday, seeing him there? How was he?’

  ‘Oh, he was in and out. In and out of the room, I mean. He had tests. He can’t read properly. That shits him. But, you know, when the tumour size comes down that’ll hopefully be different.’ He pushed the first corner of French toast into his mouth, chewed mechanically. ‘It’s, you know, weird. He’s better with buttons if he closes his eyes, or the bad eye at least. He’s got an eye patch, but he won’t wear it. It’s this flesh-toned plastic thing. And this is my father, right? Never needed help in his life. He’s got these really ugly pyjamas. He never wears pyjamas. And my mother’s fussing around, annoying him any chance she gets.’

  I scooped new coffee into the metal cup, tamped it and locked it into the machine. ‘It must have been a long day.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, it was. Sorry I drank all the Stella.’

  ‘Hey, it’s for drinking. I hadn’t quite anticipated it’d all go in an afternoon, but I hear they’ve made some more.’

  I sat down opposite him. He was crunching bacon, and blinking. He rubbed his eyes. He cut another large piece of French toast and ate it. He made an mmm noise and pointed approvingly at the plate. He chewed and chewed, and sniffed, and looked like he couldn’t swallow. Then it was down.

  ‘Man, good,’ he said. ‘I think I made you do the third album for the food.’

  ‘I knew there had to be a reason.’

  ‘Hey, that was a good record. A really good record. You know it was.’

  ‘It was.’

  He snapped a bacon rasher with his knife and pushed a piece onto the next mouthful of toast. He liked his bacon crispy.

  It was as if I was watching a tour breakfast, any one of dozens of tour breakfasts on a methodical city-by-city advance through the US Midwest.

  ‘Have you heard from Jess lately?’ I wanted Derek not to know about her engagement, to be as in the dark as I had been. I had to ask.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Once or twice.’ He stopped eating. ‘So you know then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The coffee machine hissed, and as coffee started to drip into his cup I poured some milk into a jug and went to froth it. Out the window, I could see washing on the line next door.

  ‘You know I wouldn’t have slept with her in St Louis if it hadn’t been over, right?’ he said behind me, through a mouthful of food. ‘And she’d had a lot to drink. An awful lot. And I was kind of wasted, of course.’

  Milk was spilling all over the counter before I could take the words in.

  ‘You didn’t know. Oh, fuck, you didn’t know.’ He was out of his chair, coming forward. ‘She said she’d tell you. She told me she’d...’

  Milk was running from the edge of the counter. He grabbed a tea towel and I said, ‘Not a tea towel. There’s a cloth in the sink...’

  ‘It was just one time,’ he said, tea towel clamped to the edge of the counter, sopping up milk. ‘You’ve got to understand that.’ He was looking panicky. The milk was beating him. ‘In St Louis, two days before she left the tour in Louisville. She was upset. It was just ... it just happened. We met in the bar, before the show.’

  ‘No, she went for a walk before the show.’ I was back there, working hard on every memory I had of that particular day, looking for clues, looking for it to be untrue. ‘I told her to be careful. She said she always was.’

  ‘Well, she came to the bar. It was just to talk. She drank scotch. Way too much. I already had some pills on board. She started crying, and then my arms were round her, and then I guess I just kissed her, or she kissed me...’

  ‘For fuck’s sake – you think I want to hear this?’ I wanted him to stop. He was on his knees, mopping milk, rushing through this story that was cutting into me. ‘You think it’s not enough that you slept with her? Do I have to hear every goddamn detail?’

  ‘It was ... She was...’ Milk ran over his hand and down the cupboard door.

  ‘I know what she was. I know how shit things had become between us. We could hardly talk. She didn’t exactly mention in her last email that she’d fucked you but, from the spelling, it was clearly written in a hurry and it wasn’t meant to be comprehensive.’

  ‘It was like a video. It wasn’t like it was really happening. It just kept going. From the bar, to my room...’

  I pulled the tea towel from his hands and threw it into the sink, hard. It was sodden with milk and it hit with a clang.

  ‘Could you at least have the decency...’ I was shouting down at him. He was crouched on the floor and I was shouting. I could hear myself, but the words and the force of them felt like they came from somewhere else. He recoiled against the low cupboard. I made myself take a breath. ‘The decency to stop squirming around trying to tell me that you aren’t responsible at all?’

  He steadied himself with his hands. I stepped back, and he stood up slowly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was just that one time.’

  He went back to his cold French toast. He sat there, but he didn’t eat it. I poured more milk into the jug, and then just stared at it. St Louis. There had been no change there, no signal, nothing I could recall that stood out on any part of that day. Nothing other than Jess and me peeling away from each other, and I already knew about that. We had got our relationship down to terse loveless conversations about the practicalities. She read books, listened to her iPod, retreated. I focused on business and factored her in nowhere. Derek had warned me, he had even warned me. Earlier in the tour he had pointed it out to me, said she see
med lost.

  I didn’t know it, but she was talking to him then. Emailing home, running up phone bills, testing out the idea of leaving. Of course she was. There was nothing out of the blue about what happened in Louisville.

  The shock of it was through me, I thought. I couldn’t put the scene out of my head, couldn’t stop myself picturing it, but it was landing on a dead spot now.

  ‘I’d better take you to the Wesley,’ I told him, as civilly as I could manage.

  ‘You don’t have to. I can get a cab.’ He looked wary.

  ‘They’re not quick out here. So stop looking at me as if I’m Ivan Milat and I just asked you for a shovel. I’m doing this for your parents. You should be there. And right now you shouldn’t be here.’

  I told him he might want to put some shoes on, and I went to find my keys.

  I couldn’t find and name the one point where it had gone wrong with Jess. I couldn’t grasp the point when it had been right, though I knew there had been one. I wanted to show him his actions were not as powerful as he thought, that I wouldn’t be hurt so greatly by what he had told me, or by what he had done. I wanted him to sit in silence, guilty silence, as we drove to the hospital. I wanted to be better than him. And at the very same time I wasn’t, since his father’s skull was about to have a hole put in it and a piece of tumour taken out, and my intentions were all about punishing Derek for stepping in when Jess was vulnerable and lost and our relationship had already faded till it had no colour left in it.

  There was no suggestion of remorse remaining by the time he got back from the hospital. I had wasted a day staring at the walls. I had driven down the road to the Gap Creek Reserve carpark and tried a walk in the dry bush, but it had been too hot and I had lost the stamina for hills long ago.

  Derek came back in a cab, and walked through the door saying, ‘I should have got wine for dinner. I forgot about dinner.’ I reminded him about the substance-free theme of the evening and he said, ‘Oh, yeah,’ without really listening. He was already walking past me, on his way to the kitchen.

  He stood at the coffee machine, trying to work out how to use it. I told him to sit down and I would make it for him. He sat in the chair where he had eaten breakfast. I frothed his milk, and there were no revelations this time. The earlier conversation wasn’t mentioned. I had a picture in my head of him leading Jess to his room, his VingCard in his hand, ready to unlock the door. That stupid drug look on his face, Jess’s eyes down.

  ‘His head was shaved,’ he said. ‘They had to do half his head but he made them do it all. He was gone on the Valium when I got there. Just ten milligrams and he was wasted. I guess it’s lack of practice. Then we just sat there for two hours once they took him away. My mother does sudoku. I didn’t know that. I didn’t really know what sudoku was.’

  I put his coffee and the sugar in front of him and concentrated on finding him a spoon.

  ‘And he came back and his mouth was hanging open and he was really pale, with this big bandage round his head. He was sleeping it off. They brought his lunch in and took it away again. I thought they’d knocked one of his teeth out with the tubes, but apparently it’s been gone for years. A canine one, or something, one of those ones on the way to the molars.’

  ‘And the biopsy? How did that go?’

  He was talking around the margins, telling me nothing, skirting around it himself perhaps. I didn’t need to know about his father’s teeth, or his mother’s sudoku habit.

  ‘Oh, we’ll know more tomorrow. It’s a tumour of some kind. They’re pretty sure of that, but they need to know the type. So, that’s it for now.’ He shrugged, putting distance between himself and the bad news that could turn horrible, and he finished stirring his coffee. ‘We’ll know more tomorrow, maybe.’ He tapped the spoon on the side of the cup, then looked around for somewhere to put it. I took it from him. ‘And he should be out tomorrow too. It wasn’t a big hole. So, tonight, should I go and get wine?’

  ‘Same answer as before. Let’s skip the wine.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Right.’

  And Jess? What about Jess? What about St Louis? For much of the day I’d rehearsed our next conversation, but his head was still at the Wesley and it wasn’t the time for it.

  He went to check his email while I watched the news on TV. I expected him to come back in from the studio with more big-noting stories name-dropping new famous friends who had emailed him, but then I heard him in the shower. He came out in a towel with his hair standing on end and nothing to report. He went to the fridge and poured himself a glass of water. He had a top-heavy body, more so than the previous time I’d seen him, gym arms and pecs and spindly legs.

  I imagined him padding around hotel rooms, light on the balls of his feet, striking poses in the mini-bar mirror, loving his own bulky shape among Pringle tubs and mini-Scotches. Behind him the hotel bed, sheet turned back. St Louis. In my head, it was still St Louis.

  The sun was behind the hill when we set out for next door. Its light still caught the treetops and the top of Mount Coot-tha, but down at ground level the cicadas were switching on.

  ‘This is great,’ Derek said. ‘Going to the neighbour’s place for dinner. It’s so ... neighbourly. I don’t know who I live next door to in LA.’

  ‘Could be LA, could be you – who’s to say?’

  He laughed, but just enough to acknowledge that the line was a joke. ‘Mark, right? The kid?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He seemed to take pride in remembering, as if I’d sold him short and he had the stuff of neighbour-liness after all. LA – it was all LA that was to blame for the lack of it in his life across the water. He was okay.

  ‘And his mother’s Kate and his sister’s Annaliese,’ I told him, ‘but obviously you won’t be expected to know those just yet. I’m just telling you so you can practise them a few times now and get ahead of the game.’

  ‘Kate, Annaliese, right,’ he said. ‘Test me on them before we get to the door.’

  A car drove past. Dust kicked up and billowed in its wake. Annaliese’s bedroom light was on. Derek kicked at a stone that he could barely see, his Converse sneaker sending it skittering along the road.

  ‘They’re pretty good, the Wesley people,’ he said. ‘Once I’m in Dad’s room, they give us a bit of space. I have to send Mum out for the sandwiches, though. You know how it is. I just can’t do the chat when I’m there.’

  ‘Yeah.’ There was no ego in it. It was just Derek’s reality. He was the lead singer, so there was no peace for him, anywhere. He couldn’t buy a sandwich without someone wanting a turn, wanting their own Butterfish anecdote, of which he had plenty – mostly riotous stories of high living and decadence gone wrong. ‘That’s good. That’s a good thing. It’s not the time for all that.’

  The verandah light came on as we approached the house. I must have slowed down. Derek was ahead of me, and then stopping for me to catch up. I was one conversation short of ready for the night – the straightening-out conversation with Annaliese that I kept not having.

  I wished I had kept her in the studio a few minutes more and found her a better way out. An end to the encounter that she could have walked away from, rather than fleeing. It was as if there was some magic good thing I should have said, but I still hadn’t found it.

  I led the way up the steps and knocked on the door. I could hear a TV on inside, then Kate’s voice and the murmur of Mark’s in reply. A chair rumbled on castors, nearby, and the door swung open. Annaliese was wearing leggings and a loose T-shirt, and her hoop earrings again.

  ‘Hello,’ she said flatly, as if it took more effort than it could possibly be worth. She looked at my chest, and then past me. It was as though my face was pixelated and couldn’t be seen.

  ‘Hi, I’m Derek.’ He stepped forward, around me. ‘You must be Annaliese. Curtis was telling me about you.’

  ‘No I wasn’t.’ The answer snapped out of me, right at Annaliese.

  ‘Okay,’ he said slowly,
with the caution reserved for the dangerously mad. ‘Well, that’s weird.’ He had a coy smile, as if he was onto something. ‘Let me be clear.’ Still the slow careful voice of the hostage negotiator. ‘Curtis has told me nothing about you. Nothing. Just the name. And even that was on the way here.’

  ‘Right,’ Annaliese said. ‘Well, hello.’ She shook her head, as if we were both old fools, but harmless in the end. ‘Come in.’

  We followed her, with Derek mouthing ‘What?’ and signalling confusion, and me trying to wave his gesture away. None of it made sense to him. She was sixteen and she hadn’t fawned. She had played the whole thing tough and given no hint of welcome. And I, of course, had behaved like a freak. Mark was standing near the dining table, and he half-lifted his hand to acknowledge us. He was wearing a black Sepultura T-shirt with a semi-nude Viking-style wench contorting under the band name. Kate stepped out from behind the kitchen counter with a large spoon in her hand.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, taking a good look at Derek, the real Derek Frick, here in her loungeroom. This was more like it, more like what Derek was expecting.

  ‘Mum, Derek. Derek, Kate,’ Annaliese said, dispatching the introductions with efficiency. ‘And I believe you know my brother, Mark.’

  Derek’s gym-built body swaggered forward on his undersized legs. Kate reached out to shake his hand as if he’d just been dipped in pheromones and all her receptors were jangling. I could have done without it. Annaliese glared at her, but Kate wasn’t noticing.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said, with a hint of a nervous flutter in her voice. She cleared her throat. ‘It’s very good to meet you.’

  ‘You too,’ Derek said, shaking her hand and shamelessly looking her up and down. ‘Yeah. Pleasure’s all mine.’