by Nick Earls
He was looking at me, as if he had tacked on his final point for my benefit. I hoped it was just his version of the message I’d got from Kate in the pool. He didn’t mention the robe, the studio.
He coughed into his hand and gazed past me and towards the poker machines with a blank look on his face. There was no revelation coming.
‘We’ve got to do something for this boy,’ Patrick said as Mark shambled off in the direction of the gents. ‘Oh my god, it’s all for his mum. You’d just hug him if he wasn’t so ... sebaceous. And then there’s that...’ He waved his hand around near his ear. ‘Carpentry accident.’
‘It’s silver, I think. The nail. It’s not real. Jewellery for the oppositionally defiant. It’s all about keeping your parents afraid of what you might do next. But, you know, don’t judge a kid by his ear nail, as he’s just demonstrated to us.’
Our meals arrived, plates loaded with roast beef and gravy, pumpkin and potatoes, with cutlery rolled tightly in thin white serviettes. Mark clumped his way back from the toilets, the poker machines pinged and rang raucously, the PA system kept the seventies rock coming. A zit on Mark’s neck flared red from his unsuccessful attempt to squeeze it in front of the bathroom mirror.
‘Hey, classic nanna style,’ he said as he saw the food and fitted himself back down into his chair. ‘Cool.’ He picked up a piece of pumpkin with his fork, smeared it with gravy and shoved it into his mouth.
‘Okay, I’ve got bigger things in my life than knitting,’ Patrick said, his own knife and fork in his hands and hovering above his plate. ‘Not so long ago my partner, Blaine, left me, and he had this...’
Mark coughed and gagged, swallowed hard, tried to stay cool. He put his cutlery down and blinked.
‘Are you all right there?’ Patrick said. ‘Do we need to call for a Heimlich, or anything?’ He was looking around, as if a Heimlich was genuinely something you called for.
‘No, no. A bit of pumpkin went the wrong way. It’s just...’ He cleared his throat forcefully, moved some mucus around in his sinuses, drank a mouthful of his Coke. ‘It’s all okay now. Blaine. You don’t get a lot of Blaines.’ He said it, I was sure, because it sounded like an adult line. Patrick’s sexuality had somehow taken him by surprise. He was young after all in some ways, plenty of ways.
‘And that’s a good thing, if you ask me,’ Patrick said. ‘If they’re all like my ex. What can I tell you that’s nice about Blaine, so that I don’t seem like a complete bitch? He sequesters a few kilos of carbon, I suppose. Anyway, he used to work from home. He used the second bedroom as an office. And he smoked. Not in the rest of the flat since I wouldn’t let him, but he smoked in there. I made him shut the door and open the window, but the room’s ruined, of course. I can steam-clean the carpet, but the walls need painting and the quote I’ve got’s twelve hundred dollars.’
‘They sound like expensive painters.’ I could see where he was heading.
‘Is there any other kind?’ He glanced my way before focusing his attention again on Mark, who was manoeuvring another implausibly large load onto his fork. ‘I don’t know if you do painting, but you can have the job if you can match the quote.’
Mark’s eyes threatened to leave their sockets at the thought of so much money, and he nodded and made a frantic mmm noise through his mouthful of food.
‘I’ll buy the paint,’ Patrick said, ‘since I can’t expect you to undercut the professionals on paint price and, besides, I’m likely to be very picky.’
Mark swallowed, driving the large bolus of food down towards his stomach with nowhere near enough chewing. His eyes bulged again. It was as if the deal might be off the table in seconds if he didn’t grab it. He took a breath, and put on his most business-like face. ‘I’d say all we’d have to do is sort out the transport, and I’d be in.’
There remained no trace of our father at the Powerboat Club, no sign that he’d ever been there. Some mysteries stay that way.
As we drove south on the highway, past pine plantations and mountains hidden by the dark, I pictured him in a commodore’s cap in one of those photos from the seventies, and then as the skipper on the Minnow, the boat on Gilligan’s Island. I saw him pulling up at the pier that ran from the deck of the Powerboat Club and stepping ashore, ruddy cheeked and windblown and ready for a beer. But that wasn’t him. He had more the dark hangdog looks of Thurston Howell the third, the useless millionaire. No boat, no beer, not our father.
‘Well, thanks for giving it a go,’ Patrick said. He had been off in his own thoughts and gazing straight ahead at the glowing white lines on the road. ‘I needed to do that, but I couldn’t seem to do it by myself. I think I needed you to be there in case anything freaky turned up. Now I guess we hunt down the Russian bride and stage a really bad amateur production of the opera, and we’re done.’
Mark, his transient caffeine high long gone, was asleep in the back and had been for much of the trip, his head lolling towards the middle of the car or bumping on the window. The wheel hummed in my hands as we cruised along the bitumen at a hundred and ten.
‘I’ve been meaning to thank you.’ As I started to speak, a semi-trailer surged past us over the speed limit, buffeting us with its wake. ‘For organising the funeral, and all of that. Or, worse, I didn’t mean to thank you because I didn’t even think of it then. I was a bit of a wreck, but I was well propped up by a lot of people with vested interests. I should still have thanked you though. And done more. I’ve been meaning to say that.’
‘I was fine to do it.’ There was no rancour in his voice at all. ‘Sometimes it’s better being the one who has things to do at a time like that. I had to deal with it. With him being gone, I mean. You had people who looked like they were helping you, but they were all about you not dealing with it. All about being supportive as hell and making sure you were back on the tour in a few days. I had a strong big-brotherly urge to kick their arses.’ It was one of the best things he had said to me, I thought. ‘Anyway, now’s your chance to turn yourself into a decent human being, Chubs. You’ve fought your way off the golden treadmill, and here you are.’
There was more traffic as we approached the city and swept left onto the Gateway Arterial. Still Water came on the radio, and I changed stations. I couldn’t listen to it, didn’t want to hear the snide back-announce that might come after. Or might not. Even if it was complimentary, it was better not to think that my Butterfish job went on and on in radio stations around the world.
‘You know I was shitty with you for years for dropping me from that band,’ Patrick said. ‘And now I’m not. As of lunch last week.’ He kept looking straight ahead, at the brake lights of the cars in front of us, as if he wasn’t saying much. ‘So, you and Dad and the opera – it was kind of like being dropped again.’ I went to speak, but he held up his hand. ‘No, let me finish.’ He looked around into the back. Mark’s chin was still on his chest, his head nodding with the bumps in the road. ‘I know it wasn’t like that, but I don’t think you could guess how many times my nose has been rubbed in your success. Butterfish, Butterfish, Butterfish. I’ve had years of people not shutting up about Butterfish. And I even came up with the name. Did you remember that?’
‘Yeah.’ It felt like a moment of reckoning that was coming at us from a long way off, deep in the past. I was right back in Patrick’s old sharehouse. I was twentytwo, he was twenty-six, I was dumping him from the band and I had nothing good to say.
‘But, you know, all those times I got my nose rubbed in it, there was one thing I failed to notice. It was never you doing the rubbing. I just kept thinking back to you squirming around, trying to drop me, and then off you went to that crazy level of success in the end. But I could never have played in that band, the band that Butterfish became. Whatever talents I’ve got, they’re not musical. You did the right thing. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘And I realised I don’t actually want to be you, always bracing yourself for the next autograph, or hassle, or whateve
r. I don’t want people to know a hundred things about me before I meet them. It’s got to get in the way.’
‘It does. More than I ... Yeah, it gets in the way.’ More than I wanted it to, more than I might have guessed. ‘But I can get past it. That’s what I’m thinking now. That’s my plan.’ I was full of things to tell him about Kate, all of a sudden. ‘Thank you,’ I said to him. It had been more of a weight on me than I had known. ‘There was a lot I didn’t get right with the band, and that was just the start of it.’
‘Well, if you ever have a track that’s begging for a clarinet solo, I’m your man. Actually, I’m not. I’m so out of practice, I’d hardly know which end of it to blow into now.’ He laughed. ‘As the actress said to the bishop. I’m out of practice with plenty of things. Bloody Blaine. I’m glad he’s gone. I know I’ve said it before, but this time I really am. And who knows what’s ahead?’ I noticed he had something in his hands. He turned it over and a streetlight, for a fraction of a second, caught its laminated surface. It was our father’s Powerboat Club membership card. ‘I think I’ll put this away somewhere. I can’t see myself – I can’t see either of us – going back there.’ He took his wallet from his pocket and slipped the card into it. ‘Baby steps, Chubs,’ he said. ‘Baby steps towards the big mysterious future.’
‘You and me both.’
The questions – most of them – about the past had been about the future after all. And I realised it was Kate who was on my mind, not Jess, or the band, or even Patrick and the few tame secrets our father had managed to keep his own. Kate and that moment in the pool, and some parts of my big mysterious future that had been neglected in the years when the present had been every thing, coming at me from everywhere, and I made mistakes and didn’t fix them.
Mark half woke when we pulled up at Patrick’s flat at New Farm. He didn’t stir enough to think about moving into the front seat. Patrick clicked the door shut as quietly as he could, waved through the window and headed for the gate, his unworn and possibly nautical jacket folded over his arm. Mark was asleep and dreaming as we merged with the Ann Street traffic. The lights of the Valley and the city towered above us and he saw none of it, nor the curve we took that put us on Coronation Drive, nor the CityCats sidling along, up and down the black water of the river.
Lives went on, packed into traffic, stacked high in the Auchenflower apartment blocks that faced the city and on the wrought-iron balconies of the Regatta Hotel, where I had been a student once, back when beer had been cheap and the pub had been a scruffy, crowded, simple, well-loved place. The city buzzed this Sunday night, at exactly its usual wattage. Its citizens drank wine by the glass and debated the merits of one pinot over another, or ordered in pizza and made their night’s choices from the TV guide, or saw a febrile child through a passing crisis, or drove a cab all night long, ferrying the drunk and the sad and the simply weary to their places of sleep.
Lives unpicked and restitched themselves, with wonder and hope and regret, or just with the calm banal rhythms that see us through and let us deal with existences in which we aren’t all heroes every minute and aren’t all in the midst of the love they make movies out of, and songs. I had written some of those songs, and I had not done it from life or memory, not enough anyway. I had done it from other songs, cribbed the hearts out of them, because I knew what songs were and how you made them.
It was not too late though. Never too late.
I took the CD from its case and slipped it into the slot. With the volume down, I listened to the Splades’ Lost in Time. It was a fine song, a song that would catch people and hold them, with any luck. This was the single, no doubt. Their ride was about to begin.
I turned down Gap Creek Road as The Light that Guides You Home came on. Mark stirred at the sound of his sister’s voice.
‘Hey,’ he said, still not fully awake. ‘That’s kind of wussy, but really not bad. Really.’
He was asleep again as the car crested the last hill and the lights of his house appeared in the distance through the trees.
‘We’re nearly there,’ I told him.
On Monday the mail arrived later than usual. I was pulling it out of the box when I saw Annaliese on the road, walking towards me. She was on her way home from school, her heavy maroon pack on her back and her hat in her hand.
I closed the lid of the box and I stood with my two letters. My hands wanted to shuffle them like cards, like a pair of cards, just to be doing something. I looked at the envelopes as if I needed to. I read my address on each of them. A ute drove past with two mountain bikes on the back. There was a snatch of Led Zeppelin from the open driver’s side window, warped by the doppler effect as the sound stretched out.
Next door, Mark chopped at a tree root with an axe. I could hear the axe head pounding without rhythm into the embedded root and Mark swearing at it, though the words didn’t carry. He had made me drop him at the end of their driveway the night before to avoid waking Kate and Annaliese, and I had stayed with my headlights on him as he walked towards the house. He had tripped on the tree root that he was now obliterating, and ended up face first in the dirt.
‘Hey,’ Annaliese said when I looked up.
‘The mail was late today.’
She stood facing me, her socks rolled down, her cheeks flushed in the heat. She seemed to smile. I had meant that I hadn’t been standing there for hours on the off chance that she would walk by.
‘I wouldn’t have had sex with you,’ she said. A four-wheel-drive swept past from behind her, blowing her skirt around.
‘No.’ She had put my hand on her breast. I could remember she had taken it that far. It wasn’t for me to say where she might have drawn the line, had I handled it differently. ‘Well that would have been a good idea. Not to.’ I remembered the pull of her arms around my neck, her warm body and the smell of her hair – my shampoo but her hair. And the panic that kicked through me.
‘I’m keeping the robe,’ she said. ‘Mark reckons it’ll go for a lot on eBay.’ She watched me, and then laughed. A dozen different horrors must have passed through my mind and shown themselves. ‘I’m kidding. Mark doesn’t know. Mum saw it, but I covered it. I told her it was the pay-off for some excellent singing. I think she might have been jealous.’ She fanned air across her face with her hat. She was watching me closely. I was supposed to be caught off guard, to give up something about how Kate might feel, or how I might feel.
‘I didn’t know I could have got her in to do the job,’ I said, playing dumb. Some things would get to stay my business for just a little longer. My business and Kate’s, perhaps, with a little luck. ‘I didn’t know she could sing.’
‘She can’t.’ Annaliese was still laughing at me, and I didn’t mind it at all. ‘She sings about as well as she cooks. I’ll come over to get my ... clothes. Sometime.’ She kept her voice low and secret, as though we were breaking the rules right now, right here at the roadside. ‘Some time when Markie’s not hanging around nearby, smashing something. I’ll be ... discreet.’ She had thought about the word, I was sure of it.
‘Good. Discreet would be good.’ She had a way about her. Billy Joel was right. She made ‘discreet’ sound as sensual as it could be. She was messing with me, simply because she knew she could. ‘And the clothes being gone would be good too. But you’re right – now’s probably not the time. Particularly when Mark’s got an axe in his hand. He’s more protective of you than you’d know.’
She laughed, in the one-syllable ‘ha’ kind of way that she had laughed on the day we first met over her missing dog. She half turned and looked in Mark’s direction, though we couldn’t see him clearly from here. The axe thumped down into the ground again.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘He just can’t know I know. Some other time then. At least if I run low on underwear I know who to call.’
‘I got an email from the Splades.’ I wanted to move the conversation on from her underwear. ‘They like your voice. Maybe not for the track I got you to do –
though I still think I was right – but they’ve sent something new that’s actually really promising and they thought you might be good for it.’
‘Oh.’ She moved her school hat from one hand to the other. There was an ink stain on the band, blue run dark into the maroon. ‘Well. That’s positive, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, definitely.’ I hoped we had found ourselves at the start of a normal conversation. ‘And I think it’s time you got to hear something close to a final version of that excellent singing you did too. I’ve burned the two tracks onto a CD and I’ve put the new Splades song on there as well so you can listen to it. See what you think. Then maybe we can work on something with it. Not that I’m saying a big career necessarily follows, and I don’t even know if that’s for you. But if it’s something you’ve ever thought about, maybe this’d at least be a chance to stick your toe in the water.’ She was looking at me, nodding. This was a very different Annaliese from a minute ago. ‘I don’t want to push you into this. If you have any interest in commerce/law.’
‘Business/law. Or business or law. And, no, no real interest. Maybe I want to do this. If you think I can do it, maybe it’s what I want to do.’ There was a sense of resolve when she said it. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while.’
‘You could still do business/law – or business or law – as well and see what happens. It’s a tough industry. And so much of it’s down to luck. The odds are a thousand to one. Or high at least.’
‘I’ll take that. I might be okay at business at school but I do vegie maths, so don’t try to put me off with numbers.’
