The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  I turned the car left onto Milton Road and joined the westbound traffic.

  ‘Soup. A recipe I got from a TV show.’

  ‘Soup is good. Not a big ask when it comes to the vision, and all that.’ He leaned forward and started pressing buttons on the stereo. ‘What have you been listening to? What stations have you got it tuned to?’

  We drove up and over the hill, and put the Wesley behind us. We talked about music, but briefly and only out of habit. I told Derek in some detail about the soup because I knew he couldn’t take one more mention of his father. It was Antonin Carême’s, or my take on one of Antonin Carême’s – a soup he had devised for the Regency banquet of 1817 to celebrate the visit to England of a Russian Grand Duke. I told it like a fable, like Scheherazade, keeping a death at bay. I remembered every fragment of the story that I could manage – Carême inventing the chef’s toque, the absence of garlic since it hadn’t yet arrived in France, the gold leaf on the edible sugar model of the Arc de Triomphe or some other triumphal arch, one hundred and forty different meals all laid out at once.

  Derek even asked questions, took flight from his life, all the way to the shops at Kenmore. He remembered the time when we had been friends with backpacks and had made it to St Petersburg, and the moment of stillness on a grand staircase in Peter’s palace when the guide had pointed out a feature on the huge stained-glass window and, into the hushed appreciation, a British tourist – who we didn’t much like – let slip a far-from-silent fart.

  ‘The look on his face was the best bit.’ He was still laughing, just imagining it. ‘It was like he was somehow near the fart, but not responsible.’

  The band was on hiatus then. We had an EP behind us that had done pretty well, and Derek and I had been working on the demos that would ultimately be the nucleus of The True Story of Butterfish. My relationship with Jess was on one of its hiatuses too. Outside the palace, Derek bought a medal from an old, bent Russian woman who looked like ET in a scarf. It cost him five US dollars. He wore it most days and called it an Order of Lenin. We answered to no one back then. No one took photos of us or looked at us twice. Three years later, he wanted to wear the medal at a photoshoot in Boston. He had found it on a trip home. ‘I can give you fifty reasons why that won’t be happening,’ the publicist said, as she steered him away from the photographer and took the medal for safe-keeping.

  Derek had bought the unit for his parents a few years ago, when they had been on the brink of retirement. His father had owned a service station, but had been done over by the multinational that put petrol in his tanks. He had hoped to sell it and live off the proceeds, but instead it had ended up surrounded by cyclone fencing and covered in graffiti, with the remediation of the land set to cost almost as much as the block was worth.

  They wouldn’t take money so Derek, without saying a thing, bought them a unit on the river at St Lucia. Three or four bedrooms, city views from a long balcony, secure basement parking – I saw the flyer in his hotel room when he was lining it up, though he didn’t tell me then why he was buying it. He got a designer in and had the place made over, and on a brief trip home he drove his parents there and handed them the keys. It was a gift, and their old house had become their superannuation.

  We were on our way to St Lucia, with me in the driver’s seat and Derek nursing a half-made soup on his lap, whole chicken breasts floating around in Antonin Carême’s fragrant broth, or my version of it at least. The cooking pot sat on a folded towel, and Derek complained about the heat radiating through to his thighs.

  The soup had required an hour of simmering, which Derek had said had to be done at my house. I had imagined a few hours with his parents, and making the soup there from scratch, but Derek had insisted the visit couldn’t be long. He told me a nurse had made that clear at the Wesley, although I had my doubts. So I had chopped and fried the onion and garlic, added the spices and the chicken and the stock and set it all simmering, while Derek paced around my kitchen, drank three Stellas and asked me if I had any scotch.

  ‘It’s one of these,’ he said, peering out into the dark and up at the tall buildings as we drove slowly along Macquarie Street. ‘They all look the same at night. I think it’s on this block anyway.’

  Beside the road, people walked in pairs on a pavement tilted by the roots of drought-stressed poincianas. A Malaysian or Indonesian couple, probably students, pushed a baby in a stroller. A group of joggers streamed by, flicking sweat. Most but not all of the buildings were big functional yellow-brick edifices from the seventies, and it was in front of one of them that Derek stopped us.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, still staring out the window. ‘This is it. Be ready for them to be a bit ... off. Okay? Be ready for that.’

  ‘It’s been a big few days. I’d be a bit off too.’

  He went ‘Hmm,’ but said nothing. He sat, gripping the pot by both its handles even though the car was safely parked.

  ‘So let’s go then. Let’s feed these people.’

  He led the way past the yellow-brick bank of mailboxes and along the concrete path, carrying the soup while I brought the Tupperware box with basmati rice, coriander and chopped celery. He buzzed on the intercom, then buzzed again when there was no reply. On the other side of the building, the long bass note of a CityCat engine passed, heading downstream.

  ‘I’m going to have to call them,’ he said. ‘My phone’s in my pocket.’

  He was about to hand me the soup when the intercom crackled and his mother’s voice came through saying, ‘Hello.’ She sounded positive and strong, but it was just one word.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said.

  ‘Hello Me,’ she said back to him. ‘I’ll just check if we’re letting in people by that name.’

  ‘We have soup. But you can only have it if you’re not going to be embarrassing.’

  ‘I can’t promise that,’ she said, keeping up the sprightly tone. ‘But come on in.’

  The door lock clicked and buzzed, and we pushed our way through.

  ‘Bloody parents,’ Derek said, half to me and half to himself.

  The foyer was bright and clad in a light polished stone. Three fake grass trees stood in pots in a bed of smooth white pebbles. Derek walked over to the lifts and pressed the up button with his elbow. It had slipped his mind for now that I had no bloody parents.

  The lift took us to the eighth floor. His mother already had their front door open.

  ‘Curtis Holland,’ she said. ‘Let me see you.’ She was smaller than I remembered, and her hair was wispier and whiter. She was wearing a blue dress with a hibiscus pattern – the kind of dress you never saw advertised but that older women never had trouble finding. She faced me and put a hand on each of my biceps and scrutinised me as if I were a hat stand or a tall appliance and she was a customer willing to be persuaded. The Tupperware lunch box was stuck between us like an inauspicious offering. ‘Well,’ she said, and left it there, because no one knows the decent way to say you’ve stacked on the kilos and started to sag.

  She led us inside. Derek’s father was still nowhere to be seen. The balcony doors were open and the city lights stood in a clear row in the distance, behind West End. The bone-coloured curtains lifted a little in the breeze and flapped down again. Other than a few signs of human habitation – a newspaper, a ball of wool with two knitting needles lancing through it and making an X – it looked like a magazine photo. It was all taupe and bone and beige, with subdued downlights, and the TV was in a Balinese teak hutch, with shutters.

  She took us into the kitchen and said, as if it were an instruction, ‘This island bench – it’s beautiful, but not for food.’ It was a big polished slab of grey stone, with flecks of white and cream and pale yellow. ‘It’s Persian limestone, so acid does it no good. But there’s a lot of space on the other benches. Enough anyway.’

  They were stainless steel, and she steered us over to an area she had prepared next to the cooktop. There were chopping boards and a knife block, and more downli
ghts set unobtrusively into the underside of the cupboard above.

  ‘I’ll go and see what Bill’s up to,’ she said. ‘He was having a bit of a lie down.’

  Derek put the soup on the Miele cooktop and lifted the lid. Three sizeable chicken breasts bobbed around in the brown stock. Further down the bench sat an elderly toaster oven, a jar of instant coffee and a container with old spoons and ladles jammed into it, like too many flowers in a vase.

  ‘Jesus,’ Derek said quietly. ‘It’s not like I didn’t try.’

  He leaned over and lifted a roll-up screen that concealed a built-in plush-matt-steel Gaggia coffee machine that showed no signs of use. I realised that all the new appliances I could see were designer brands. At the far end of the kitchen even the dishwasher was Miele, though near it a pair of pink rubber gloves hung over a sleek European mixer tap at the sink, with a bottle of cheap green detergent sitting behind them. I took the lid off the Tupperware box.

  There were noises from down the hallway, voices and a door shutting. ‘Here he comes,’ Derek’s mother’s voice said, coaxing us all to feel upbeat about it.

  I thought I heard Derek say ‘Fuck’ as he breathed out, but I couldn’t be sure.

  His mother led the battered Bill Frick into the kitchen, and he went with my whole name as well. ‘Curtis Holland,’ he said, a little louder than he needed to. He reached both his hands out and made his way forward carefully so that they could take my hand and shake it. They were bony, veiny hands, cool and dry. He was smiling, in a wizened but genuinely happy way. His head was gripped by the white gauze that wrapped around it, holding wads of dressing in place and sticking up above his shaved scalp like a Christmas-cracker crown. It didn’t quite hide the purple lines marking out the upper margins of the radiation fields. The striking feature, though, was his jet-black glimmering eye patch. ‘How do you like the new gear? Pretty flash, isn’t it? Carmel made it. Said she’d make me a parrot to put on my shoulder to go with it.’

  ‘Jesus, Dad,’ Derek said before I could reply. ‘Don’t people usually wear hats or something? It’s all a bit on show.’

  ‘I’m inside. Why would I wear a hat inside?’ His one rheumy eye turned towards his son, who had nothing more to say. ‘And now, me hearties,’ he went on, in a voice that had gone all pirate on us, ‘who be the designated driver? There be drinks to be had by all as can have ’em.’

  Carmel laughed. ‘He’s no Johnny Depp. But at least he’s not that one with tentacles on his face either.’

  ‘I’d better get to the next phase of dinner,’ Derek said. ‘Curtis, shall we?’

  I let him tear the chicken breasts into pieces, while I tipped the other ingredients into the soup and brought it back to a simmer. He worked on the chicken slowly, then stood stirring the soup with an old wooden spoon.

  All the credit for it came his way when it was served, and he didn’t even notice. Bill sat opposite him, repeatedly losing pieces of chicken from his spoon. Derek looked past him, at a bad watercolour painting of flowers that I knew his parents had won as third prize in a raffle years before.

  Carmel offered to help and Bill said, ‘Oops, splashdown,’ as a chunk of celery landed back in his soup. ‘I’ll soldier on,’ he said to her, ‘as long as you’re okay with a bit of mess.’

  She looked sad, brittle for a moment. She made herself smile. ‘It’ll all come out in the wash.’

  She glanced across to Derek, who was blinking, holding his spoon halfway to his mouth.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, but not loudly. ‘Stop being so falsely cheery. Not everything...’ It came out of him as though it was on a spring, and then it just hung there.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I know that.’ She put it firmly and clearly, as if she’d known it for a while. She stared him down.

  ‘That’s star anise, isn’t it?’ Derek said, his eyes back on his bowl of soup. ‘I’m sure I can taste it.’

  ‘Beats me,’ his father said, his good eye turned Derek’s way. ‘But it’s great. It’s delicious. And I’d better make the most of it. I’ll lose my sense of smell with the radium, more than likely, and that knocks out most of your taste.’

  Derek stirred his soup with his spoon, as if looking for something quite specific and hard to find.

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  He bought two bottles of red wine on the way back to my house, and he sat in the passenger seat with them clunking against each other on his lap as we turned onto Gap Creek Road.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘Pirates. Mad old people.’ He stared straight ahead and held each bottle by the neck, as if he was steering something. ‘See what it’s like? I’ve had days of that.’

  Days of not quite engaging, days of gazing at the bad art set just beyond the ugly life in front of him. Days of thinking that a real world was waiting for him an ocean away. His parents had taken real life as far as pantomime to make him see it, and he had kept on fighting them. And he would be gone in under twelve hours.

  ‘It’s probably just that they’re not strong enough to take you by the collar and wrestle you onto the road when you shit them,’ I said, in a way that I hoped sounded friendly.

  He laughed. ‘We’re not going to have to do that again tonight, are we?’

  We passed the landscape gardeners and the paddock where the two caramel cattle spent their days. The moon was ahead of us, above the trees. Derek reached forward and flicked between radio stations, dismissing each one on its first burst of music or word of conversation.

  ‘You should rig your iPod up in here,’ he said. His other arm stayed around his wine, cradling it.

  I turned the car into the driveway and the front of the house glowed brightly in the headlights. I didn’t have an iPod, never had had one. Most of his conversational repertoire relied on shots in the dark, and the goodwill of the listener.

  Derek carried the wine up the steps and I followed with the empty cooking pot and Tupperware box.

  ‘Now, I want to get properly drunk,’ he said as I worked through my keys to find the right one for the front door. ‘There’s a total of fifteen point three standard drinks in these two bottles.’

  He found a corkscrew and two glasses and we sat on the verandah with moths batting their soft wings against the light. Night settled in all around us. He inhaled the wine as I sat nursing a glass of it, and he fidgeted as if death might be in the next shadow and set to tap him on the shoulder.

  ‘Jesus, wildlife,’ he said, looking up at the light and all the bugs it had called in. ‘Wildlife just getting on with it.’

  A gecko jumped forward and took a small moth by the head, pulling it back into its mouth in jerks, crunching on the slender struts of its wings. Pieces of wing fluttered to the floorboards.

  ‘I think, when my father died, I didn’t really process it,’ I told him. ‘It was too big and too ugly. And I ran away from it and got back into work.’

  ‘Hey, I took your interviews for a week when you went to the funeral.’ He had been about to pour the last of the first bottle of wine into his glass, but he stopped. ‘We divided up your interviews for a week and I took most of them.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I know. And that was really helpful. This is about me. I didn’t fix anything. Beneath the surface nothing got dealt with. That’s my point.’

  There was a movie-style confrontation that I was avoiding, one in which I would accuse him straight out of doing the same, of dealing with nothing, though in his own spectacularly bad way. A way that involved rarely having sex with a person enough times to know their full name, and using whatever substance came to hand to obliterate any connection to the dangerous real world, where consequences abound, and good luck and bad luck do too, both of them needing dealing with. Then he would take offence and we would square off in the dust at the foot of the steps where the light ran out and throw a few witless punches at each other, his mouth would bleed again and nothing would be fixed.

  ‘And that made a mess of a whole lot of things.’ I was keeping it about me,
for now. ‘Or contributed to it. Plus, you have to factor in that issue about being a shit communicator and keeping everything in my head. That, I realise, didn’t help.’

  He studied me carefully to get a proper reading of how I was saying it and, when he realised he was supposed to, he gave a small laugh. He noticed the bottle was still in his hand, and he emptied it into his glass.

  ‘Yeah, look about that...’ he said as he put the bottle down on the table.

  ‘It’s true enough.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s over too, you know. The band. I had a year there when I thought my head might literally explode. I’d be walking behind you thinking if this gets any worse, Curtis’ll be wearing brain on his back. It may have affected me a bit.’ He stopped, and thought about it. ‘Okay, understatement. I may have been an arsehole from time to time. Was an arsehole from time to time.’

  He put on a tired wine-stained smile, and shrugged. St Louis, Jess. None of it needed to be put into words.

  ‘So what have you got in LA, aside from girls who take you for colonics, and Mitchell Froom’s biscuits?’ He shrugged again when I said it, and he kept the smile as it was. It was just sort of stuck there now though, adrift from the thought that had started it. ‘You won’t have these people forever, okay? Your parents, I mean. Your father has a brain tumour. This shit is in your life now. So don’t be a dick and work it out too late. That’s all I’ll say.’

  He dragged another chair closer to him with his toe and put his feet up on it, crossed at the ankles. He wasn’t going to make a contest of it.

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ he said, as if it was a fact he couldn’t dispute, and was resigned to. ‘I’ll go crazy if I stay here. I have to find whatever’s next. I don’t fit in here any more. I don’t know what to do here. I don’t totally know what to do in LA either, but it’s LA. So it doesn’t seem to matter. Whereas here? It might work for you, I don’t know. I’ve got to get something happening, so I’ve got to be somewhere where it can happen.’