The True Story of Butterfish

by Nick Earls

  ‘It was right up there. It was the one that was most like melted ice cream. And it’s not like we’ve only been talking mocktails. You’ve been doing all that running around getting ready for Curtis to come over. Scrubbing the news print off your elbows, putting on your party dress.’

  ‘Ha,’ she said, with a look of horror crossing her face. ‘There’s no party dress. And if there was it wouldn’t be this old thing.’ She fixed her smile back on. ‘Well, I think I have pizza to make.’

  ‘Sure,’ Mark said, giving us each a sly look, as if the three of us shared a secret.

  He walked behind me down the steps, and I could feel a conversation brewing, a conversation I wasn’t ready to have yet. We got into the car. He pulled his seatbelt around and clicked it into place. Kate raised a hand to wave as we backed away.

  ‘Pizza to make,’ Mark said dismissively. ‘Everyone knows you buy pizza.’

  ‘So, um...’ I wanted to talk first, to steer the conversation away from Kate. ‘So thanks for that article. The one that you left me with the fish instructions. It was...’ Despite having two days to do better, all I could come out with was ... ‘nice prose.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, in a downplayed way that sounded close to sincere. ‘I can send you a few more, if you like.’

  ‘Sure.’

  We turned right onto Gap Creek Road and headed for town. He fidgeted awkwardly, as if he had more legs than my car had room for. He pulled the seatbelt in and out a few times as though it wasn’t quite right, whatever he did.

  I asked him how his weekend was and he said, ‘He’s got cable. There was a Family Guy marathon. I haven’t slept since Friday.’ He gave a bear-sized yawn, as if proof was needed. ‘It’s quite cynical, that show. The dad has a butt for a chin.’

  He pulled one of his boots off and looked in it for something. A rank smell, like a cheese gone wrong, drifted over my way, and I may have flinched. He reached down and hooked the boot around his toe and pulled it back on. He stamped on the floor to drive his foot in properly, and he held his fist up to his mouth to stifle a burp. His cheeks puffed up and the gas slid out of his mouth with a hiss. I assumed a good depth-charge of a fart would be next.

  ‘Do you reckon it’s true that if you get no sleep for two weeks you die?’ he said. ‘That’s what I heard.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know who’d stay awake for two weeks.’ It had the neatness of an urban myth about it. ‘You’d get pretty scrambled though.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, you would.’ He seemed to find that an appealing prospect. ‘I’m going to try a week, maybe ten days. I should be pretty fried by then.’ He leaned forward, fiddled with the car stereo. ‘Hey, you got your iPod hooked up to this?’

  ‘No. I haven’t got around to having an iPod. I used to be married to someone with an iPod, so I had iPod visiting rights.’

  ‘You could buy your own,’ he said. ‘That happens.’ It was a welcome, uncomplicated answer. ‘So that’s, like, fully over now?’ He kept his eyes on the traffic in front of us, and asked it as if it wasn’t much of a question.

  ‘Fully. Courtesy of her impending marriage to another guy, from what I hear.’ The traffic lights ahead went orange, and then red. We coasted to a stop. ‘But that’s a positive, I now realise.’

  ‘Closure,’ he said, in a Doctor Phil-style American accent, and he gave a big sniff that sent snot rattling around his sinuses.

  ‘That’s right. I was thinking I’d throw a mocktail party to celebrate my progress, but now I’m not so sure it’s the thing.’

  He gave a mucousy laugh. ‘Well, I’m in, obviously.’

  He was horribly sleep-deprived, and all secretions and stumbling pheromones and truncated half-sentences, but we had a thing going that was starting to look genuinely like rapport, and I didn’t mind it at all. We drove through the city and the Valley, then down James Street past Harveys and Luxe and the Cru Bar, where crowds hung around looking beautiful and moody and sharp, next to blackboards with chalk descriptions of wines by the glass, the words spelled somewhere between phonetic and dictionary standard. Mark took it all in, and I wondered if he saw himself there in five or ten years, or saw himself somewhere very different.

  The traffic slowed and stopped as a car pulled out in front of us and another backed into its parking spot. Two women who had been looking at the Cru Bar blackboards caught up with us and walked by. They both had short black hair and fringes as blunt as wide paint brushes. One of them pushed a red Bugaboo stroller, the other carried two brown paper bags of organic groceries. My London friends had a Bugaboo, given to them by one set of parents. They told me, jokingly, that anyone who was anyone had a Bugaboo or, if not that, a Maclaren. Celebrity stroller envy, and two brand names, was all I knew about children. When Kate had mentioned children in the pool, I hadn’t known what to do, what to think. What got me most, though, was that I hadn’t grown up enough to give the issue any thought. I was a blank page, without even the question on it until then.

  Patrick was on the street outside his apartment block when we pulled up. He was wearing a snug-fitting semi-see-through white T-shirt and jeans so tight it was clear he dressed to the left. And was uncircumcised. Or maybe that’s just how I saw it, or how the light fell. He had a jacket in his hand. It had a cut that might have been nautical. I imagined anchors on the buttons. He waved, noticed Mark in the passenger seat and signalled that he would get in the back.

  ‘The wardrobe’s great,’ I said as he opened the door. ‘But you do realise it’ll be kind of daggy.’

  ‘It’s a club,’ he said indignantly. ‘There’ll be a dress code.’

  ‘Yeah, like shoes after six. Men to wear shirts.’

  He made a harrumphing noise and got in. Mark moved his seat forward a couple of notches, which brought his knees up to the dashboard.

  ‘Men to wear shirts?’ Patrick said. ‘What kind of a club is that? I mean, why bother waxing?’

  Mark looked straight ahead, giving nothing away. Patrick, whose performance was for him, reached forward, tapped him on the shoulder and introduced himself.

  I did a U-turn and took us through Teneriffe, past the long solid buildings that had been woolstores but were now apartments, past old Queenslander houses with giant stooped Moreton Bay figs in their yards, past the site where the gasworks had been pulled down and which a few thousand more people might soon call home. We followed the river towards the bay, then took the Gateway Arterial north through the industrial buildings clustered near the airport, and the golf course and the wetlands, where wader birds bent down from their high legs to pick around in the shallows. Mark’s mucus and gas eruptions settled down into more of an equilibrium. Patrick badgered him with school questions he didn’t much like but that Patrick rarely had the chance to ask anybody. Instead of giving much in the way of answers, Mark came out with a marginally relevant story or two about his father, caricaturing his pomposity and self-absorption. In that style, the three of us travelled north as the sun sank down into the heat haze and settled into the low peaks of the D’Aguilar Range.

  ‘Hey, Chubs, remember when Dad wanted to take us climbing?’ Patrick said as the Glasshouse Mountains came into view. He had grabbed the back of Mark’s chair and was leaning forward. ‘And then he worked out we might need a rope, so it never happened.’

  ‘Yeah. Where did he get that idea?’ I could vaguely recall it. It was after dinner one night and we were watching TV. Not a show about mountains though. ‘He wouldn’t even climb stairs if he could avoid it.’

  ‘We were slothful, or something. That’s what it would have been. Some initiative to stop us slothing around.’

  ‘What?’ Mark said sluggishly, blinking hard as he pulled out of a nose-dive into weariness. ‘I thought your generation was all about playing backyard cricket and stuff. I thought we were the sloths.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re extremely slothful,’ Patrick said supportively. ‘But we were sloth pioneers. You wouldn’t know how to sloth if Gen X hadn
’t gone there first.’

  We took the Caloundra turn off, and Patrick looked up the Powerboat Club on the map. We turned right off the main road into town, and passed a caravan park and blocks of holiday units. Then we were on the seafront, with the waters of Pumicestone Passage and Bribie Island to our left. With the very last of the daylight faded and gone, families were packing up, stuffing towels into bags, bunching fishing rods for carrying to their cars. Pelicans hung around in the hope of scoring leftover bait or the last fish of the day, walking like drunks, eyeing off children who might, from nowhere, drop a bream or a flathead to the ground through simple clumsiness. But the cars were filling and hope was exhausted, so one by one all but the most optimistic of the birds were casting off into the night and flying like boats that skimmed just above the surface of the water, cruising back to wherever they slept.

  ‘There it is,’ Patrick said, pointing and staring out the window into the darkness.

  The carpark was half-full and light spilled from the open foyer of the Powerboat Club. Patrick was looking for signs, for traces of our father, as we drove in. The air was warm and salty and full of mangroves when I opened the car door. I got out and stood on the bitumen and took a deep breath. Patrick was already out and scouting around.

  ‘Hey, Sunday roast,’ he said, as though it was quite a find. ‘I knew it. How could you go past that?’

  He was at a noticeboard just next to the entrance, with Mark ambling up behind him. Next to the menu and the special orange flyer promoting the Sunday roast were a page of dress requirements and a poster advertising an appearance in the coming weeks by some remnant combination from the legendary local eighties showband Wickety Wak. Our father had known someone who had played in their brass section back then, but that was surely a chance association, not any kind of link to the Powerboat Club. I thought of telling Patrick, but knew it would send him off on some unhelpful tangent that would end only with us googling people who were better left ungoogled.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how this works for us.’

  Like a magician revealing the final card in a trick, he pulled our father’s membership card from his wallet, and led the way inside. The foyer was brightly lit, with a display of promotional merchandise – club T-shirts, stubbie holders, sun visors – at the far end of the counter. A couple aged about seventy were signing in. The jangle of poker machines rang from a doorway to the right, and directly ahead of us was the bar and dining area. Patrick was studying the black-and-white pictures of past commodores and the boards of office bearers’ names. There was no one we knew.

  He stepped up to the counter when the couple moved away, and the laminated card made a snapping noise when he placed it confidently down.

  ‘Great, Ted,’ the staff member said. She wore a name tag with ‘Shanae’ on it. Her blonde hair was bunched behind her head and scraggy at the ends. She must have been about twenty-five. She glanced at Patrick and put on a smile. No recognition, no curiosity, none at all. Ted Holland was a name on a card to her. ‘And you’ll be signing these two guests in then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Patrick said. ‘Where do I do that? It’s been a while since I was here.’

  She slid the book along the counter. ‘No worries.’ She looked across to Mark and me. ‘Now you guys just have to carry these passes with you, right?’ She was indicating some slips of paper attached to the book. ‘But make sure any food or drinks go on Ted’s tab and you get the member’s price.’

  ‘So there’s a tab?’ Patrick thought he was onto something. ‘Members get to run a tab?’

  ‘Yeah. Like at the bar, and that. You can settle up at the end of the night. I think they’ve had that system for a while.’ She tore our passes along their perforated lines and handed them to us. ‘Youse all have a great evening, okay?’

  Patrick thanked her and scanned the walls one final time for clues before leading the way into the dinin-groom. A family celebrating something had lined up three of the square laminated tables and were well into their burgers or fisherman’s baskets or Sunday roast. Three men stood near the far wall with tickets in their hands watching a greyhound race on the wall-mounted TV screen. The couple who had come in ahead of us were down at the bain marie, giving their dinner options some serious thought.

  ‘This is so not Dad,’ Patrick said to me as he took it all in.

  The dogs raced frantically but in silence. ‘Ah, died in the arse,’ one of the punters said as they crossed the line. ‘Could have paid for my tea if he’d got up.’

  ‘Well, Sunday roast, I think,’ I said to Patrick, who was stuck where he was standing. ‘That’s got to be the way to go.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Mark said, taking in the food smells and seeing nothing else in the room worth a second thought. He stretched his arms out, and yawned.

  ‘And a brandy-essence Alexander with that?’

  ‘Coke’d be fine, thanks.’ He glanced around in case someone had heard, but no one was looking our way. ‘Whatever one they have that’s got the most caffeine. It hardly touches me any more, and this is day three of my awakeness marathon, remember?’

  We ordered our meals, then went to the bar for drinks. Both times the Ted Holland card came out, both times the service was friendly and blank. We took our number to a table on the deck outside.

  ‘So what do you reckon?’ Patrick said. ‘Mystery? Complete mystery?’

  On the TV inside, the dogs were about to be released for the next race. A sea breeze came in and flapped the plastic screens that were pulled down around the edges of the deck. Juice Newton’s Angel of the Morning played from a speaker above my head. I noticed Patrick scrutinising Mark’s ear-wear properly for the first time, working out that it was a faux nail rather than a stud, with the flat scored head of the nail in front of the lobe and the bent tail hanging out the back.

  ‘I can’t see him here. I can’t imagine it.’ Our father on this deck, our father putting a few dollars on the dogs, our father wining and dining his internet date at the edge of the dark Pumicestone Passage. ‘We’re going to be stuck with some mysteries, and this looks like being one of them. So you have to tell me everything about you. In case you get hit by a bus or whatever. I don’t want to find out about weird life memberships or your thing for the Russians once you’re gone.’

  He laughed, and leaned back in his chair. He took another look over his shoulder, back into the dining room. ‘I thought when we came in that I’d look up and there he’d be in a commodore’s cap in one of those photos. An old sea dog with a briar pipe. But that’s not going to happen. Okay, me. Something about me. Something that would be mysterious if I got hit by a bus.’ He gave it some thought. ‘Okay. In my flat you would find a couple of knitting needles and a pattern for a scarf. I have a friend who knits and he tells me it’s very therapeutic.’

  Mark laughed in a way I hadn’t heard him laugh before, a big open – maybe even non-cynical – laugh that he didn’t try to damp down. ‘So this is our men’s session? We get the Sunday roast and we talk about knitting? I don’t think this is what my mother’s expecting. Hilarious. When she goes out with her friends, they drink too much and talk about guys.’

  ‘Well, obviously that’s my life most of the time,’ Patrick said, feigning offence, ‘but I was trying to go a bit deeper. Okay, Chubs. Your turn. What’s hiding in your cupboards that’d have me baffled?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Annaliese’s clothes. Annaliese’s clothes balled up, stuffed in a jumper and sealed in a bag. I’d answered too quickly, too twitchily. ‘A story of Mark’s. It could be interpreted as pornographic.’

  ‘Jeez, it’d better be,’ Mark said. ‘If that’s not porn, I’m taking money under false pretences.’

  Our drinks arrived, two beers and a Coke.

  Patrick waved his hands around. ‘Back up a second. Porn? You write porn, and Curtis buys it from you? I thought you mowed his lawn.’

  ‘No,’ Mark said, as if Patrick wasn’t too bright. ‘ Magazines buy it fro
m me. I just gave it to Curtis. One artist to another, you know?’

  ‘All I’m saying is – ’it was my turn to clarify – ‘it would be an unexplained item in my house if I got hit by a bus. There being no other porn in the house.’

  ‘Sure. That’s what they all say. “It was just that one time...”’ Patrick, his brush with the world of knitting now out in the open, was enjoying the game. ‘Which leaves us with...’ He turned dramatically to Mark. ‘You. What’s lurking in your room, waiting to be discovered?’

  ‘Well...’ Mark looked around the dining area, his crumpled collar buckling as he turned his head. ‘There might be some fish.’

  ‘Fish?’ Patrick said, doing his best to sound inquisitorial. ‘And what would be so confidential about fish?’

  ‘Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it?’ He took a large swig of his Coke, then battled to keep the gas down his oesophagus. He looked at me, then at Patrick again. ‘You can’t tell anyone this, right? No one else knows. And it’s a bit bigger than knitting.’

  ‘Secret men’s business,’ Patrick said, in a tone that sounded completely serious.

  ‘My mother – I heard her talking to her friends. There’s this uni course she wants to do. It’s a teaching thing. And I think she’d be really good at that. But she can’t do it while she’s still got two lots of school fees to pay.’ He paused, as if the next part wasn’t easy to word.

  ‘What about your father?’ Patrick said. ‘What about his contribution to your school fees? Doesn’t that make a difference?’

  ‘Yeah, well, that’s not his thing. It’s not how he wanted to allocate his resources. So, I have a couple of business ventures. There’s the articles, which you now know about. And I’m about to breed Siamese fighting fish. So, that’ll bring the money in big-time if it works out, and I can maybe pay one lot of school fees. Then she can study. That’s the plan.’ He drank more Coke, and cleared his throat. It was clear we weren’t to make too much of it. ‘And Annaliese doesn’t know, okay? She’s got enough to deal with. She’s the clean-cut high flyer and that’s a full-time job, I reckon. I’ve got that whole oppositional defiant disorder thing working for me. It takes a lot of pressure off. Also, she likes to come across as worldly and experienced, but she’s not.’