The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  ‘It takes a lot to get an opera up and running.’

  ‘Yeah. Opera. Why would you try it? And Sturt, Captain Sturt’s Whaler. It sounds like a book that would win the Miles Franklin but that only about ten people would read. Why couldn’t he have just got a few friends together and written some songs? He knew people, whiskery old jazz drummers, and all that. They could have played the Story Bridge Hotel on Sunday afternoons, surely.’

  I could see them, veteran music teachers on their afternoon out, playing for beers and loving every second of it. But instead he’d shut himself in with a cocked-hat captain and the fantasy of an inland sea.

  ‘He dreamed big,’ I said, ‘and I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.’ And then, inside his zipped-up chest, a scruffed-up old artery tore and blocked and his dream was boxed and put away.

  ‘So, how’s Derek?’ Patrick said. ‘How’s all that going? Has he disgraced himself yet? How are the two of you?’

  He knew there would be something to tell. Derek left stories in his wake wherever he travelled.

  ‘He’s fine. He’s not coping at all with his father’s brain thing which, from the little I know of it, seems like a big deal. He’s at the Wesley now, or maybe at his parents’ place since his father’s getting discharged today. He’s...’ I was going to ramble and say something safe, drop in a few of Derek’s LA stories, but I stopped myself. ‘Did you know he slept with Jess? A couple of days before we broke up, before she left? That’s been the big piece of news.’

  His phone buzzed in his pocket again. He looked at me as if he was half a step behind and just catching up. His mouth was open. ‘No. No. My god.’ His phone stopped buzzing and, after a pause, a message came through. He honestly didn’t know. I was more relieved than I’d expected to be.

  ‘And then last night he made it sound like I made it happen. I’m a shit communicator, apparently.’

  ‘Wow. I didn’t think we said that. Not that directly anyway.’ He was fully caught up now, and ready to be himself again. ‘But, really, how does that lure the dick out of the man’s pants and on its way to his best friend’s girl? I think there’s a bit of responsibility to be accepted by a couple of other parties here, regardless of how you happened to be communicating.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I showed him a thing or two about communicating last night. I sort of knocked him over onto the road. So that was sophisticated.’

  ‘You knocked him onto the road? He’s lucky he didn’t steal your marbles or you might have stuck his head in the toilet or emptied his lunch box into the bin.’ He pushed back in his chair and laughed. Behind him, our waiter served salads in high white bowls to the two women at the next table. ‘But, really, I can’t believe he and Jess did that. And then he puts it back on you and your communication skills when, to be honest, it’s just that you’re like Dad. And I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. Things stay in your head and you don’t even know it. You don’t know that people haven’t heard them while you’ve been thinking them. I did eighty percent of the talking in that house when we were growing up. Sometimes I talked just so there’d be noise other than Deutsche Grammophon.’

  He was being straight with me, nothing more. I had spent much of my childhood wishing he had kept more in his head, without having any idea of how the silences were nagging at him. He enjoyed the clamour of advertising, the lunches, the pitches, the incessant talk. I had always thought they’d be the worst parts of his job, all of them competing for air and pulling him away from the quiet times when ideas come. Not for him. He had put a name to this difference between us, and I had never seen it for what it was. Maybe that’s what happens when you come along second. You don’t notice those things. Perhaps he was like our mother. I wanted to ask.

  He topped up my water, and then his own. The glass door swung open and a new group of people came in from the heat. They were led to a nearby reserved table for six. Four of them looked like ad agency people – funky frames to their glasses, spiky hair, shirts by industrie or someone similar – the other two were steely-haired middle-aged men in matching chambray shirts. Perhaps they sold cars or made nails or had a timberyard that had traditionally shot its ads on a handycam and featured a big-chested average-looking girl in a bikini getting memorably worked up about a pallet of four-by-two.

  ‘Come back to me,’ Patrick said, waving a hand in front of my face. ‘Give me a bit more than twenty percent. Even if you’re pissed off with me.’

  ‘I’m not. I just hadn’t seen it that way. I’m not pissed off with you. I don’t even think you’re wrong.’

  I couldn’t see our mother’s features in his face, though I had only a few photos of her to go on. He was already older, I realised, than she had ever been. That was a new thought, and my breath stuck in my chest. I looked away from him, to the lengthy description of Harveys’ version of osso bucco written in white on the pane of glass to his right.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘someone should have pushed Derek into the dirt years ago. It would have been character building.’ He reached out to his water glass, holding it with the tips of his fingers and thumb and rotating it like someone trying to crack a safe. It was a habit and I’d seen it before. It was nothing to do with drinking, and he was probably unaware of it. ‘And very wise of you to do it deep in the anonymity of Kenmore. It would have been the wrong look entirely if you’d done it in midtown Manhattan when the band was breaking up.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly. They hardly gave me a chance to anyway. They had us in adjacent rooms with two different publicists, drafting statements which they then swapped – the publicists actually met in the corridor to swap them – and we each took the red pen to whatever the other had written. I could see his back through the frosted glass. He always leans back in his chair. Sometimes I could see his shoulders pressed against the glass.’

  ‘So, decking him in your own street I’d call a kind of progress. You know what I think?’ It was rhetorical. He was going to tell me. He was winding up to tell me in a big brotherly way. I was up for it, up for some brothering. ‘I think plenty of people’s lives come unstuck. Weirdly, Chubs, yours came unstuck in a rockstar kind of way, and we all got to read about it, not that what was published was necessarily the true story. And in the end, it’s not that much of a rockstar story anyway. It wasn’t about drugs or any of that, any of the Derek shit. It was about Dad, and Jess, and the ride of a lifetime going off the tracks. So, suddenly there’s this vacuum. A lot of people hit that vacuum, get a bit lost – a lot of people who are thirty-something. I tell you this as someone who has months of thirty-something left.’ He put on a face that was meant to look wry and wise. He would be forty soon. ‘This is just your mid-life crisis, Chubs. Everyone’s entitled to one. Even you. Even the poster boy for dag rock. And, like Dad, you just put your head down and try to push through. Unobtrusively, no histrionics, with the exception of decking Derek. I’m assuming you haven’t been dating Russians or writing operas...’

  ‘No.’ After talking about myself in thousands of interviews, I had finished every one knowing I’d be reconstructed paper-thin in the article. That was all I had given them – a paper-thin version of me – all I had let them notice. Occasionally a crack had opened up but that was the extent of it. Yet Patrick, my brother, knew me to my magma after all, knew some deeper hidden strata. And we were still here, still talking, and what he saw looked okay to him. The strongest part of what I felt was relief. ‘No Russians, no operas.’ I was thirsty, I needed water. I drank half a glassful. ‘But I am getting my cabin cruiser refitted with a mighty pair of twin outboards ... Actually, there was something I wanted to talk to you about, on the subject of cabin cruisers. Sort of.’ I could hardly have made the link sound less natural if I’d tried. ‘The young guy next door, Mark. He’s fourteen and sarcastic in a clever way, and deafening himself with metal, and somehow I ended up telling his mother I’d do some kind of men’s thing with him.’

  ‘And you’re calling on me because that’s not wha
t you’re into?’ He laughed. ‘I don’t think I do fourteen. I think there are laws about that. And I don’t think I even do it in international waters, if that’s where the cabin cruiser comes in.’

  ‘I don’t think it was that kind of men’s thing she was thinking of. Though I’m sure she’d be fine if, one day, etcetera etcetera...’

  He laughed till his head rocked back and he slapped the table with his hand. ‘Excellent. Bake a big cake for his eighteenth birthday and leave room for me to pop out of it.’

  The older of the two chambray-shirted men looked up from the laptop the agency people were showing him. He stared at Patrick, looking over his glasses and frowning as if he couldn’t quite bring him into focus.

  ‘His dad’s a bit of a non-performer. His parents split up a few years ago. So Kate – his mother – wants some kind of positive male influence in his life. So far, Derek’s got him stupidly drunk and – surprise, surprise – turned out not to be it. And I’ve got him over a couple of times to work on the garden, but that doesn’t count for much. So I thought about manly things, like climbing a mountain, and then I realised that he’d hate it and I’m about half a lifetime undertrained. So how about the Powerboat club?’ It sounded like a bad idea as soon as I heard myself say it. ‘You’ve wanted to take a look at it since you found Dad’s membership card. I think we both do. You, me, Mark, a drive to the coast and dinner at the Powerboat club. He’s with his father this weekend, but they get back on Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘The Powerboat Club? This Sunday?’ he said, not immediately telling me I should just get myself less fat and kick a football with the kid instead. ‘Is anyone...’ He chose his next word carefully. ‘Expecting this idea? I mean, I’m up for it – you know I am – but what about him? And anyone else. What’s this actually about?’

  ‘What am I supposed to do? Hire a stripper? I’m struggling for options here.’ It would be time away from Campbell and Annaliese and his festering room, at least. A pressure valve. A chance away from the dramas to eat at someone else’s expense, evade homework, deride whoever he needed to. Not that I could honestly say it was entirely about Mark. From where Kate stood, I could easily look like nothing more than a lesser version of Derek, rolling in with a thoughtless kind of harm on offer. I didn’t want that. ‘If Rammstein’s ever in town, maybe I could take him along, but there’s nothing like that coming up. Not that I can see. And aside from the metal, his main interest seems to be online war games. And, confidentially, fish. Tropical fish.’

  What’s confidential about fish?’

  ‘He’s a complicated boy.’ Mark needed to be experienced, rather than explained.

  Patrick emptied the last of the water from the carafe into our glasses. ‘Sounds fascinating. Sounds well on the way to being thoroughly fucked up. Let’s do it. Let’s show him the most manly night the Caloundra Powerboat Club has to offer.’ He laughed, at the prospect of Mark watching the two of us drink mid-strength beers while old people went mad for keno. ‘I can’t imagine you helping out the neighbours like this. No offence, but I’m not used to you as the “neighbourhood guy” yet.’

  ‘I don’t think anyone is. I’m not. If there’s ever an official ceremony as part of it, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Well, in the meantime I’ll make do with a good look around the Powerboat Club.’ He settled back in his chair and ignored the water he had just poured. ‘I should have seen him more, you know. Dad, I mean. I was in the same town. There shouldn’t be all these mysteries, even if they’re nothing.’

  ‘We’ve all got stuff we keep to ourselves,’ I told him. ‘It’s all right. You could have seen him every week and there’d still be things you didn’t know.’

  ‘Yes, but somehow it brings out the Miss Marple in me.’

  Our meals arrived from the kitchen then, his salad with the dressing on the side, my gnocchi gamberi with sage butter. Maybe there would be something of our father to find, maybe there wouldn’t. If there was, I wanted to know it, and Patrick seemed to need to know it. It was a gap in him, rather than just a gap in our father’s history. That’s how it looked. He lifted his fork and picked through his salad. ‘Oh god,’ he said, rather dramatically. ‘I think I’m over rocket, all of a sudden.’

  I saw Kate drive in from work while I was in the kitchen making coffee. I was waiting for Derek to arrive or call from the Wesley.

  I wanted to listen again to the vocals Annaliese had recorded for my unfinished verse and chorus, but I couldn’t have Derek walking in on that. He would have nothing to say that I wanted to hear.

  Annaliese and Mark were in their pool and fighting in the usual way when I went down the back steps. She was shouting loud enough for her voice to carry. ‘You could break my back, dickhead.’ His reply was a bomb dive.

  I shut the studio door behind me, put my coffee down on the Space Invaders console and called Kate.

  ‘I’m going to the coast – the Sunshine Coast – on Sunday for dinner with my brother,’ I told her. ‘And I thought maybe we could take Mark. I know it’s not a classic guy thing, but...’

  ‘All the better,’ she said right away. ‘He’d sneer all over a classic guy thing. So, you know, if you and your brother took him to the footy and tried to talk about chicks, I think we’d all be in trouble.’

  ‘Fortunately, none of that’s likely.’ I didn’t mention the cake, the surprise Patrick had offered to hold back for Mark’s eighteenth.

  ‘He’s with his father from tomorrow to Sunday afternoon. Hang on. Let me just do the right thing and run it by him – Mark, I mean, not Campbell. I’m sure he’ll think it’s a great idea. Not that he’ll tell you in a conventional way, of course. But you know that.’

  Through the phone, I could hear their back screen door open, and then slap shut as she went outside. She was saying something, but not to me. The pool gate clanged as it swung shut on its safety hinges.

  ‘Why are you taking me to dinner?’ It was Mark’s voice, close to the receiver and loud, sounding rude but doing it as a game that would annoy his mother.

  ‘It’s a front,’ I told him. ‘I’m actually going to harvest your organs for sale on the black market.’

  There was a pause. ‘Okay. Dinner’s a bit of a bonus then, I guess. I thought you were just supposed to get me wasted and leave me in an ice bath with a note telling me to get to dialysis right away.’

  ‘You were wasted the other day and I missed my chance.’

  He didn’t hear me. There was more talk in the background. His hand muffled the phone as he snapped at Kate. Then he was back with me, all his usual atypical ironic charm in his voice. ‘Just Mum,’ he said. ‘Worried about the kidneys. If you could leave me with one, that’d be cool.’

  ‘Sounds like a fair deal. One kidney should more than cover the meal for all of us.’

  ‘Hey, one other thing,’ he said, his tone completely different. For the next few seconds all I could hear was his breathing, and a question of Kate’s receding in the background. I looked through the studio window, but all that was visible through the gap between the bushes was the end of the pool and the banana lounge, which had been tipped on its side. ‘For some reason I’ve got to go to Dad’s for two nights, not the usual one. Friday and Saturday. Could you pea the fish for me?’

  ‘Pee? That sounds kind of wrong.’

  ‘No, remember what I told you? You give them the inside of a pea, one each.’ He was almost whispering. ‘I’ll write it all down. I’ll stick it in your mailbox. Okay?’

  Annaliese pushed herself up onto the edge of the pool then, lifting her upper body out of the water. She looked right at me – through the gap – and I stared back her way, her brother’s voice in my ear. Then she dropped from view again and, through the phone, I could just hear the steady rhythm of her freestyle strokes as she swam away.

  ‘It’ll be in your mailbox,’ Mark was saying. ‘Did you get that?’

  Deark was hovering near the bust of John Wesley, as we’d arranged. He had hi
s sunglasses on and he was looking down at his phone as though a very important text message needed his attention. I pulled up next to him, and he flipped the phone shut and got into the car.

  ‘Thanks for coming to get me,’ he said, and he swung the sun visor down and studied himself in the mirror that was on the back of it. He rearranged his hair, but it didn’t seem to go where he wanted it to.

  ‘So, how’s it all gone in there? Should we be giving your parents a lift home?’

  ‘No, they’ve got a bit to do yet.’ He pushed his hand through his hair one more time, then flipped the visor up. ‘Appointments to make. And they’ve got to mark him up for radiotherapy. That’s how they hit the same spot each time.’

  He was looking straight ahead, keeping his sunglasses on.

  ‘So, what is it exactly? What did you find out?’

  He opened his phone and glanced at it, then shut it again. ‘It’s not the best but it’s not the worst. It’s a big word ending in oma, but isn’t that usually the way?’ He said it as if he was trying to remember the name of a song or a cheese or a beer, something he had tried and moved on from, without much to report.

  ‘And how are your parents about it?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’ He exhaled – it was almost a sigh, but not quite – and he shook his head. I sensed that some serious truths were circulating in there. ‘They’re just planning the next step. Irritating each other with slightly different understandings about what every bit of it means. So what are we making them? What’s the dinner plan?’