The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  ‘No. No, it didn’t fit me properly. I don’t think it ever fitted me. We were recording and I told her the story about it...’

  ‘Ah, yes, the hotel story. So that was true.’

  ‘Yeah. All true. And I’m over that story now, so ... So I gave it to her.’ I let it finish there. It wasn’t much of an explanation, but I could do no better. My heart rate dropped back to a brisk, harried walk.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I guess that beats a lot of the alternative scenarios. I’ve got to admit I panicked when I saw it. I wondered if it was Derek’s work, and it doesn’t take you long to join the dots there.’

  There was still water in my eyes. I could feel the grip of the chlorine. I blinked and then rubbed them to make it go away. And the complicated people who were her children both perplexed me and drew me in in ways, different ways, that defied easy definition. They weren’t children to me, and not quite adults either, and I couldn’t explain even that. Their lives were full of negotiations and power shifts and forced trips across town, and hormones and wild ideas. Everything was to be tested – themselves, the inconsistencies the world offered to them every day.

  ‘She would never have touched Derek,’ Kate said. ‘She’s got too much, I don’t know ... class.’

  She lifted her left hand from the water and pushed a strand of fallen wet hair away from the corner of my eye. Her fingers stayed on my cheek, gently, and then she let her hand fall quickly to the water again, throwing up a splash. A drop of water landed on my lower lip. Her hand bumped against mine under the surface, and our fingers interlocked.

  I felt dumb, in the true wordless sense. Shit communicator. What were the words I needed? If this were a song, what would the words be? I held her hand.

  My phone rang, on the far side of the pool. It broke the moment, let the world in. Her hand slipped away from mine.

  ‘You should get that, if you have to,’ she said. Her hand drifted away through the water.

  ‘No, I’ll...’ It was Derek. That was my first thought. Derek, who needed three publicists to be able to get on a plane without distraction. Derek, who had got bad news from St Lucia before boarding, whose father had been found on the floor. ‘I’d better get it. It might be important.’

  I pushed off from the side, feeling like someone who had just failed a simple test. I hit the steps with my knee. I couldn’t look back at Kate. I missed the call. I stood on the edge of the pool, water thundering out of my shorts, looking down at the phone. A voicemail message came through.

  There was no crisis. And it wasn’t Derek. It was Mark, checking on the fish. ‘Dee Dee had some stress stripes this morning.’ There was wind in the background, whipping a harsh sound over his voice, which was mumbling. ‘And Lemmy wasn’t himself.’

  ‘Mark,’ I told Kate. She nodded noncommittally and drank a mouthful of her beer. ‘I thought something had gone wrong with...’ I stopped. I was ready for her to say something that would let me off the hook, but she didn’t. ‘I thought there were problems with Derek’s father. He just had a brain tumour biopsied. That’s what he was in hospital for. I was worried something was wrong.’

  Her expression changed. I was less of a disappointment for caring about the call. ‘Well, I’m glad it wasn’t that. It sounds bad. I didn’t know. Mark and his fish – great timing, my boy.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The last of the pool water was still running down my legs and across the pebbledash. Kate hooked her elbows over the edge of the pool and let her legs drift up in front of her.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Make his day, if you want to. Call him back. Or call him back if there’s urgent fish business, obviously. Or don’t, if you don’t have to.’

  Dee Dee Ramone, Lemmy from Motorhead. I had no idea his fish had names, but of course they had the names of the gods of punk and metal, of the big players in the black T-shirt bands. The phone rang again. Mark was killing a mood he didn’t even know about. I took the call.

  ‘Yo,’ he said. ‘How are they?’

  ‘They seemed fine to me.’ Was that enough? Enough to count as a conversation? Could this be over now?

  ‘So, fine? Everyone?’

  ‘Well, they all seemed pretty lively. Nothing to worry about as far as I could see.’ I couldn’t guess who was Dee Dee, who was Lemmy. They were all just wispy bright fish to me. Mark seemed to be remembering a conversation we had never had, perhaps misremem bering our conversation in his room after Derek had filled him with beer. There were random fish facts then, but no names. ‘Do you want me to check on them tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah, actually.’ Another rush of air scraped across his voice. I thought I could hear traffic too, in the background. ‘That’d be good. Hang on a sec.’ The phone clunked and I heard him, far away, saying something strident. Across the pool, Kate drank a mouthful of beer. Then Mark was back with me. ‘Sorry about that. I’m on the balcony. But they’re waving at me in there. Hannah is. She’s made mocktails. I mean, what the fuck?’

  I left him to be prised from the balcony and presented with his mocktail, as Hannah tried and failed and another Friday evening in Admiralty Towers turned quietly to crap.

  I set the phone down, dropped into the water, and pushed out across the pool again.

  ‘My boy and his far-from-simple life,’ Kate said ruefully, as much about a moment that didn’t involve her boy, but that had now ebbed away. ‘There’s something brilliant about watching your babies become people, and then starting to have their own lives. I hope you get that, if it’s something you want. It’s great when they’re three or four and they decide to begin every sentence with “actually”, or when you hear your logic coming back at you but with their own spin on it.’

  ‘Yeah, records don’t do that. I could easily look like someone who forgot to have a life. I know that.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘No, but it is what I meant.’ I dunked my head under, and the coolness of the water shocked my face. I opened my eyes and saw my big hazy legs, like sunken tree trunks. I had made false starts on a life, but stumbled. I knew that. At least Jess was free now for the real thing. She had wasted years with me, on and off. I shook my head and pulled it out of the water. ‘I’ve had some great luck along the way, but you can ride it too long sometimes. It’s what everyone wants you to do. So you do it. And they all make it seem like such a big deal to kill a band. It’s not, really. Not if it’s a relief.’

  ‘I’m in danger of kissing you,’ she said. ‘But it would be for the wrong reasons.’

  ‘I didn’t know there were a lot of wrong reasons for that kind of thing.’ Sympathy – was that the wrong reason? Proximity? No, there was more to this than that.

  ‘This is so much better than having old man Novak next door,’ she said. ‘He barely moved.’

  ‘Didn’t kiss him much?’

  ‘Not much. Cats have better breath than old man Novak.’ She deadpanned it, then gave me a hint of a smile.

  Old man Novak – I had thought it was Mark’s name for him. And maybe it was, borrowed by this version of Kate who could turn unkind remarks about a dead man’s breath into something beguiling. I wanted our moment back. I gave half a beat of a kick and drifted closer to her.

  ‘I’d invite you to stay,’ she said, ‘for dinner, but I’ve got a hens’ night to go to. And I’m a shit cook, as you know. I’d better make a move. The hens’ night’s one of the girls from the shop. Mother hen at a hens’ night...’ She shook her head at the thought of it.

  ‘Well, tomorrow I have to take a look in on the fish so, you know, I’d be happy to take my chances with the cooking then. Or maybe I could make something for you?’

  She groaned. ‘I’ve got family duties. Booked in a while back knowing the kids’d be away. My parents are downsizing. They live at the coast. I’ll be there till Sunday helping them pack. I’m the junk nazi.’

  Inside the house, the phone rang.

  ‘Bugger,’ she said. ‘I’ve really got to get mo
ving or I’ll be late for the other hens. Come inside and I’ll give you a key so you can check on the fish.’

  It finished on that business-like note, with the key pressed into my hand as I stood in my damp shorts on the back verandah. I didn’t make it inside.

  ‘I’ll see you on Sunday evening, I guess,’ she said, meaning the Powerboat Club dinner I had planned for Mark. ‘And thanks again for doing that.’ She seemed to hover then, as if she might kiss me but, just as I edged forward, she clapped me on the arm with the hand that had given me the key and she said, ‘Bloody hens’ nights.’

  She let go, and stepped back, and then I was on my way next door, through the hedge with the sun setting into the trees and the day ending and my shirt in my hand.

  I showered the pool chlorine away and, when I got out, I caught myself in the mirror, flabby and shapeless. I imagined myself on the edge of the pool, beefy and bright white in the sun, water running off me and pounding the pebbledash. But she had almost kissed me. That had happened too. And I wasn’t certain how to read it. How I felt.

  All those years of being in a band, and during them I’d racked up a grand total of zero scenes like that, where you look back thinking ‘Does she?’, ‘Doesn’t she?’ and taking it minutely apart like a teenager, bit by bit learning the outline of your own heart.

  It felt as if I had turned sixteen some time in my mid-twenties, and by then Butterfish had come along and scooped me up.

  I found Derek’s unopened second bottle of wine in the pantry, eight standard drinks worth. I left it there, lying down, and went to the studio. I opened the folder labelled The Light that Guides You Home. Annaliese’s voice came out of both speakers, clear and strong. There were sounds on there that the song didn’t need, but none of them were hers. I had added and added, and now it was time to subtract. I pulled it back, right back, to piano and vocals. I split the verse in two, repeated the chorus. A bridge appeared, and looked like it had always been there. It lifted from the second verse as if on a current of air and then picked up a thread of melody that led to the chorus again. I played the whole thing through from start to finish and it played like a song, a two-minute song.

  I picked the best grand piano sound I could find and closed my eyes and gave it all I had, seeing hammers on taut wires, sparks of dust caught by the light and humming in a vast empty space. Then I brought Annaliese’s voice in and put the space in it too, drew it out until it rang off the hardwood boards and played to every empty seat. A song for two thousand people who weren’t yet in the room, a song for the sake of the song. A song that felt thirty years old already, and that might have missed its time or might not.

  It was done, in a way that it hadn’t been before. It was a ballad after all, and a simple one. It was old-fashioned, and that was okay too.

  I wanted to play it to Annaliese, and to my father. It felt like a song I owed them both.

  Outside the studio, the night was still. Clouds had come in and I stood looking up at them, my head full of sound. Derek was almost back in LA. Kate’s kitchen light was on. Perhaps she had left it that way when she went out.

  Late on Saturday afternoon, I went next door to check the fish. I walked down the hall and through the loungeroom and the kitchen, and saw how full of signs of life the place was. As deep as the grain of its timber, it carried the marks of the three people who lived in it, people who had filled it not with clutter, but with detail.

  There were dead flowers in a vase, unexplained, scuff marks along the skirting board at the counter that separated the kitchen from the loungeroom, an eclectic array of cushions pushed to one end of the sofa. On the counter, next to the start of a shopping list, there was a basket of assorted junk – empty CD cases, mobilephone rechargers, expired batteries and rubber bands. The fridge had vouchers and art and notes, and Mark’s cryptic messages to no one. Vertically, along the very back edge of the visible side of the fridge, he had spelled out ‘traces of peanut’ in alphabet tiles.

  I had the Mark line of logic ready for that. It was a time when one look at packaging would tell you that everything might contain traces of peanut, and now the fridge had traces of peanut too. It would be something like that.

  The picture of Annaliese and Oscar the dog was gone, I realised. The note from school that I’d seen on the freezer door the day before was hanging askew in its place.

  The TV guide was on the counter and opened to Friday, and a single wine glass stood in the kitchen sink with water in it.

  I went to Mark’s room, and visited the fish. I sat the wrong way round on his study chair, with my elbows leaning on the back of it, and I watched his girl fish lapping and dodging and hiding out under weed. There were more plastic tank toys than I’d realised – the pirate chest loaded with doubloons, the dry-suit diver in his helmet, the ruined castle. If I’d thought about it, though, I would have known they’d be there. Mark couldn’t own fish without a sly joke about people who own fish.

  I looked for Dee Dee and Lemmy in the boys’ barracks, but not one fish there looked particularly like a Ramone or a hard-rocking seventies English bass player.

  I sent him a text message that said, ‘All good with the fish,’ and I tucked his chair back under his desk.

  Kate’s bedroom door was partly open. I noticed it as I passed, and I found myself standing there, the finger tips of one hand on it, as if willing it to open further but knowing I couldn’t push. I could see one corner of her bed, the single sheet turned back, two pillows, one on top of the other. A fat white paperback novel was splayed open and lying face-down on the bedside table. I knew there would be a ceiling fan, and I imagined myself looking up at it on a hot night. The fan turning, turning, swaying and clicking, warm air pushing over me.

  I had talked to Kate about luck, but I didn’t mean luck. You don’t feel luck. Luck is part of the story, or it’s not, but it isn’t one of the living, breathing, beating human parts. There was something about her that made me want to explain myself, and something that made me want to explain nothing. To draw a line, make a start instead.

  There were pool noises when I opened the car door on Sunday – girls shrieking, a bomb dive. They were happy noises this time though. I could hear Annaliese’s voice, but not the words. Then laughter, Annaliese and another girl laughing.

  In my hand I had the CD I’d burned, but I put it back in the glove box. If there were friends over, it wasn’t the time. I’d had it mapped out, most of the conversation anyway. I would walk in with the CD on show, Annaliese would clear the room to listen in privacy and we would have five minutes for me to tell her what I needed to. She would dismiss me with a ‘whatever’, I would tough it out and make her look me in the eye, and we would talk our way through Monday, put some kind of patch on the hole it had left in how she felt about herself.

  And then I would play her the song, The Light that Guides You Home. I wanted her to hear it, and I wanted to be there when she heard it for the first time. I had run through that part of the conversation too in my mind as I’d driven next door, and now I wouldn’t be having it either. Not yet.

  More pool noise came from behind the house – big splashy freestyle strokes, another shriek.

  Kate was at the open front door, and she waved when I looked up. She came over to the verandah railing as I got close to the steps and she said, ‘He’s just about ready. They haven’t been home long.’

  She leaned forward with both her hands on the railing. Her dress had thin straps that crossed her collarbones, but otherwise her shoulders were bare. I wanted Mark not to hurry, to go through his entire black T-shirt collection until he was satisfied he’d chosen just the right one.

  ‘How was the packing?’

  She wasn’t dressed for packing. She looked as if she was about to go somewhere, or had just been somewhere. ‘Pointless. My involvement anyway. I got fed every five minutes and they wouldn’t throw away a thing.’

  I reached the top of the steps, and stood facing her. She folded her arms and leane
d against the railing with her hip.

  ‘So, it’s all in boxes,’ she said. ‘About a thousand boxes. Nostalgia rules.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with that. I’ve been looking through some of my father’s junk lately. He was writing an opera. And I had no idea. Do talk to your parents about their operas, if you get the chance.’

  She nodded. ‘You were teaching that lesson to Derek all week, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’ And roughing him up occasionally, and discovering he’d slept with the person I was married to. Not all secrets are operas. ‘He’s not an especially quick learner though. But there are people who might say I require some patience myself, so I’m sticking with the task.’

  ‘So, now that he’s gone, how does your life work from here? Derek still seems to be flitting around LA, but what about you?’

  ‘I can’t say exactly. But maybe I don’t need to know exactly. I’m learning that it can be nice to discover a few things along the way, instead of living it like a tour itinerary. I’ve never been a flitter though. I’m not Derek.’

  ‘Hey.’ It was Mark, standing in the doorway, his hair slick and wet. He was wearing a shirt with a collar, a crumpled paisley-style mustard-and-black shirt. One end of the collar was bent up as if it had sat for months with weight on it.

  Behind him, down the hallway and through the house, came more shouting from the pool. The music volume jumped, and I could hear Annaliese and another girl singing along.

  ‘Lucky the neighbours are out for the next few hours,’ Kate said, meaning me. ‘That’s Siobhan. The friend from school who lives down the road. She’s here for dinner, since Mark’s having a night out.’

  ‘Just make sure you don’t do mocktails,’ Mark said, his sarcasm as unleavened as ever. ‘I couldn’t bear to miss that.’

  ‘It’s all I’ve been hearing about since they got back. Mocktails.’ Kate glanced Mark’s way, gave him a parental once-over to see that he had shoes on both feet, clothes fit for the public. ‘I think it was the brandy-essence Alexander that was your favourite, wasn’t it?’