The True Story of Butterfish (14 page)

On Saturday morning I wrote an email to Jess, then several emails to Jess, then trashed them all. The last address I had for her was gmail, and I didn't know if it was still active.

I couldn't describe the part of her I missed, or the part I had lost long ago, or adequately wish her well. I couldn't edit out enough apology to get the balance right. Some things run their course. That was what had happened to us.

There were days when I could have given her more thought, more time. Regret. Here was another one perhaps finally starting to take its proper shape, and that was fine by me. I was ready to put a name to it.

But Jess getting married – I wasn't sure I was ready for that. It kept coming back like a new idea and I pictured the day, and me erased from her history. She would have a service in a garden with her sisters as attendants. She would make her parents happy. Jason's best man would tell the story of his friend talking about this new player at touch football, and how quickly she had captivated them all. The bride would beam, sit there and beam in the way she had always wanted to, shelving for the evening her own regrets about a few wasted years. Jason would give her a ring that would fit her finger.

There was a knock at the door just after ten. I was deep in a patch of wallowing and first thought it was Jess, come with a forgiving version of home truths and a wish to tell me face-to-face where her life was heading. But it was Mark.

He was wearing a crumpled non-black Westside Walk volunteer's T-shirt with the sleeves torn off. He had a sizeable new acne cyst over his right eyebrow. ‘Mum said you wanted the lawn done again.' He said it as if the idea caused him wry amusement. On all sides the grass was straw-coloured and quietly struggling not to die. Growth was not a priority. There were a few new stalks, but they were mostly weeds.

‘It's more to do with the trees around the back,' I told him, realising this was Kate sending him my way for the talk I'd agreed to have. ‘All the bark and dead leaves on the ground that could be a fire hazard. I'd like to get that all raked up in case there's a bush fire.'

‘No problem. Where do you want it to go?'

I had no idea. I was making it all up on the spot. ‘I thought I might get your input on that.'

‘Really?' He made a noise that might have been a laugh, or a nervous tic of the type invented by journalists in the interests of painting a better word picture. ‘Well, you could put it with the grass clippings for now, but you probably need a plan for all of it, since it's still a fire hazard sitting there.' He looked over towards the previous week's pile of dried grass. A bush turkey had scratched through it for bugs and one side of it was strewn across the nearby ground. ‘Are you up to composting it, do you reckon? That'd take a bit of effort.' The delivery was deadpan but the cracked smile was back. This was the rapport Kate thought we had.

‘Enough effort to pile it up in something, then walk away and leave nature to take its course? Yeah, it's a bit much.' I was working on keeping the rapport up near the high-water mark. ‘It's probably something I'd outsource. Is it within your areas of expertise?'

‘I wouldn't say that, but the landscaping guy down the road'd probably sell you one of those green plastic things they do it in and he could tell you how to do it. After that, you know me, I'm a gun for hire.' Also said with a delivery as dry as the grass.

A warm gust of wind blew in, sending leaves cart-wheeling along the rutted driveway and flapping the stretched front of Mark's shirt.

‘So where does all this money go to? This money you earn as a gun for hire.' It was his mother's question, jammed into the conversation at a point where it didn't quite fit. I told her I'd try, and this was it. ‘It doesn't look like it all goes on T-shirts.'

He looked down at his shirt front. ‘Hey, I had to work for this. I had to rattle a tin. I had to shake loose change out of people for all these charities. It got my class out of school for an hour. Or in my case the whole morning.' He was implying there was a story there, of him wheed ling his way around the system again.

‘So what do you do with it? The money?'

He looked me in the eye, as if I wasn't to be trusted. ‘What are you? A spy for my mother? Most of it goes on bourbon and hookers, the rest of it I waste.'

Googling ‘Bourbon', ‘Hookers' and ‘waste' gave me lots of John Lee Hooker references, but failed to reveal the original author of the line. I was sure I'd heard it, or something like it, somewhere before. But, whatever its origins, there was no going back to the money question a third time, so I wasn't turning out to be much of a spy. I would pass on Mark's bourbon and hookers line to Kate when the chance arose.

I resisted putting my own name into Google to see how I was faring. In the early days of Butterfish I ego-surfed regularly but, by the time The True Story of Butterfish had yielded two hit singles and some good sales, too many scabby youths with time on their hands were happy to take a swing at us and it stopped being fun. There were fan sites too, and fights in chat rooms, and plenty of lies and exaggerations. There was simply too much being said. I had heard that some Chinese college students had posted something hilarious on YouTube featuring lip-synching, Still Water and a beaker containing a liquid that may have been urine, but I hadn't seen it.

I was sure we had been thoroughly done over throughout the blogosphere following the release of Written in Sand, Written in Sea. Derek would know and, in two days' time, he would probably drag me through every detail he could recall. I checked QF176 on the Qantas website. I had been assuming he would come via Sydney and arrive mid-morning, but it was LA–Brisbane direct and getting in at 6.05a.m., a detail he had conveniently omitted to mention in his email.

I got off line, and went back to Captain Sturt's Whaler. My father had made extensive notes about the plot and the music. Even his notes had gone through drafts. Key points were underlined, and in the margins he had written ‘YES!!' or ‘clumsy – fix this' or ‘needs to be more forceful?' as he had gone through and edited himself. He had made some rough sketches of the set, and of costumes, with notes about colours. He had photocopied lithographs of Sturt and soldiers of the time, but his costumes looked more frankly operatic, more stagey. They were costumes that would be worn by people who you would expect to sing, not uniforms battered and grimed by the desert. There was a chorus of convicts in stiff yellow suits with arrows on them. He had made notes outlining his concerns about chain drag, and the impact of the noise as the convicts moved about the stage. He thought he might settle for manacles and dispense with leg irons.

At one time he had written letters to possible librettists, and he had kept copies and all replies. All had declined, some after what seemed to be genuine consideration. He had been turned down by established librettists and playwrights, and then by novelists and poets, then by a music journalist, an academic and someone who had once taught with him at a school and who had gone on to edit an obscure journal about calligraphy. After that he had pressed on regardless. There was a zeal to his mission. If the obstacles preventing him staging this opera were immovable, he would be the irresistible force to counter them.

He wrote his own libretto. He knew Sturt like a brother by then, and had taken a three-day bus tour out of Alice Springs to see what salt pans and endless parched red dirt looked like. He had a voice from Sturt's correspondence and he could use that, and he also had copies of his reports. He tried to turn report extracts into song – Sturt writing them by candlelight in his tent – which may not have been such a good idea. As a librettist, Sturt made a great explorer.

In later drafts my father reworked the lines, and they were more song-like though never exactly magical. The convicts sang about their lot – about how they had stolen a pound of lead from a church roof or a loaf of bread and ended up with seven years' hard labour. ‘Hard labour, hard labour, hard labour' the chorus went, with different voices taking different parts and each line to be delivered in a decrescendo. There was a corroboree scene which, in all but the most gifted hands, risked ending up looking rather distasteful, or at the very least patronising in a ‘noble savage' kind of way.

The two whaler boys were from Liverpool and missed the girls they had left behind. In most versions they were clean cut and close to identical but, in some, one of them was older, a drunkard and a thief. He had a livid scar across his face from a tavern brawl and he spoke more like a pirate. ‘Contrast,' my father wrote in the margin, ‘contrast'. He looked like he was one draft away from giving him a hook for a hand, and an eye patch. Then he abandoned contrast and reverted to the fresh-faced youth he had started with. He always had Sturt – ambitious, determined, enigmatic, misunderstood Sturt – for colour and movement.

I looked at the music, and found myself humming it, then singing a line or two. At its best it wasn't bad, but it was never memorable. That's what I had to accept. Here was my father's last big adventure, and it would have ended up with nowhere to go. Captain Sturt's Whaler could have turned from two boxes of notes and drafts into three boxes, or four, and into fully developed scores, but still it wouldn't have ended up on a stage.

My father was a quiet man who kept to himself – what was he doing writing an opera? There could hardly be a bigger dream. It was for the music, clearly. The music and the story. I'm sure it wasn't about glory. Or fame.

And I could see some melody lines running through there that had some strength, and something going for them, even if nothing stood out. His lyrics were rudimentary though, self-conscious drafts that I could see he had laboured over.

Writing operas and dating Russians – when the Ten Stupid Questions interview got around to his favourite things to do with his time, would these have been the answers? But there wouldn't be any interviews. There wouldn't have been any interviews, however much work he might have put into it. Favourite Indulgence, Guilty Secret, Six People Living or Dead You Would Invite to a Dinner Party. All with a publicist going, ‘I know you've done it a million times before, but people read this section...' He would not have been a good fit with that world and, if anyone had put the millions of necessary dollars behind his opera, it's where he might have found himself.

One song was about Sturt's first sighting of the desert pea that came to bear his name. I thought it had one of the stronger melodies, and I took the notes to the studio and played it on the keyboard so that I could hear what it sounded like outside my head. My father had sketched out some string parts, so I found a synth string sound and worked with them too.

I opened a new file on the Mac, and I started to record. I brought in woodwind and brass and percussion, and fleshed out a few bars to an almost orchestral sound. It felt really competent, but not better than that. I still wished he had heard it though, even if it was just a few bars.

I put sheets on the spare bed for Derek on Monday afternoon. I had bought multiple sets of identical sheets online from Svolvær and had them delivered to Patrick's work. I bought a lot on line, actually, until I got the email from him saying, ‘For fuck's sake, I am not a storage system. Some things can actually wait until you arrive. Happy to look after the essentials, but calm the shopping binge or we'll be putting you in therapy.'

I had been imagining settling in, having guests. I wouldn't have expected that Derek would be the first. I didn't want it to be a student house, or some austere minimalist place. I was thinking a mid-scale non-chintzy B & B look. The manly version of that, obviously, where everyone says the place looks okay but no one openly likens it to a B & B. Patrick was right. I should have been buying the essentials, then focusing on the rest once I'd seen the place.

With the bed made, I put away the last of the groceries. The place looked okay, so my plan was on track. Not that Derek would put a lot of time into noticing, and not that I particularly cared about whether he did. But there were no wall hangings with hokey embroidered aphorisms, there were no teddy bears on the beds and none of the furniture was an assemblage of milk crates. The pitch was right.

I had gone out for eggs and bacon and authentic maple syrup. French toast was Derek's breakfast of choice. Many an argument had been fixed over the next morning's French toast. Well, some anyway.

I put the eggs into the fridge, and headed for the studio.

As I walked out the back door of the house, I could hear the hum of the studio airconditioning unit. I assumed I'd left it on inadvertently when I went to the shops. But the door was unlocked as well.

I slid it open, pushed past the curtain, and there was Annaliese.

‘I was hot,' she said. ‘So I had a shower.' She was leaning on the edge of the desk, wearing the white robe we had talked about the previous Thursday. My white robe. Her hair was wet. She stood up, away from the desk. ‘You don't mind, do you?'

She had left the light off, so the room lacked its usual harsh fluoro brightness. Daylight glowed faintly through the cream curtains behind me and the curtains over the window, which she had closed. She took a step towards me.

‘Curtis,' she said, in her husky low voice and in a way no one had said it for a long time. Her tongue touched her lower lip, and she gave a hint of a smile.

She reached out and put her arms around my neck, stood up on her toes and kissed me on the mouth. I lifted my hand, to keep some distance between us, but she took it when it hit her sternum and slid it under the edge of the robe and onto her left breast. She made an mmm noise, and her mouth opened. I could smell my shampoo in her hair.

As her tongue touched mine I pulled my head back and stumbled half a step away from her. My hand slipped from the robe and her soft skin, and back into the cool air. The robe hung open for a moment, and then she gathered it up with one hand and bunched it closed in front of her.

‘What?' she said. ‘I thought you ... we...' She frowned.

‘I really don't think...' I began an explanation without knowing where it went after the beginning. I was about to patronise her, offend her. ‘I'm not going to say, for a second, that there isn't something between us. But it can't be this.'

Behind her, the bathroom door was still open, the light still on. Steam hung around in there and misted the mirror. She was sixteen, in my studio, wearing nothing but my robe.

Her cheeks went blotchy. She looked at the window. ‘Oh god. I feel so stupid.'

‘No...' My instinct was to reach out for her, but I held back.

‘What an idiot.'

She took a big breath in, then ran for the door, yanking it open with the hand that wasn't holding the robe. Before I could stop her, she was gone. I stepped outside, and watched her run all the way to the hole in the hedge that was near the pool, with the ends of the robe flapping as she ran. She pushed through the gap, bumped the banana lounge with her shin and then I lost sight of her. I heard the back door shut as she went inside. I could still taste her mouth.

I felt exposed. I felt like someone standing at the scene of an unsolved crime, someone who had done the wrong thing, sent reckless signals, kissed the wrong girl. Done something bad and left DNA and fingerprints all over it and stayed fixed to the spot while Kate and the police and the media strode across my dead grass to confront me. But there was just me standing there, and no crime. An incident, but no crime.

I stepped back into the studio. I reached to turn on the light, but then decided not to. I shut the door behind me. There was no sound but the forced breeze of the airconditioning. I followed Annaliese's wet footprints back across the cheap carpet. In the small bathroom, the shower screen was still beaded with water, still warm to touch. The towel was back on the rail. I picked her clothes up from the floor. They were still warm too, as if she'd soaked up the heat of the day and just now slipped out of them. A singlet top, a mini skirt, and practical underwear – a strapless bra, boy-leg pants. She had been waiting for me wearing just my robe, and she had left wearing nothing more.

In the kitchenette, I had some balled-up plastic grocery bags ready to use as bin liners and I put her clothes in one of them, locked the studio and went to the house. I went to my bedroom and I pushed the bag behind some jumpers that were piled on the top shelf in the wardrobe. A longer-term plan would come to me, but not right now.

What was she doing next door? Who else was home, and had they seen her running in wearing the robe, wet from my shower?

The phone rang. Kate was home. Kate was home and had seen Annaliese run in and had just heard a warped version of everything. All hell was about to break loose, Annaliese's underwear was hidden at the back of my wardrobe, and touring a dying third album while my marriage was crumbling was about to look like one of the better times in my life.

The phone kept ringing, three times, four. It went through to voice mail.

‘Chubs.' It was Patrick. ‘Surely you're there. You aren't out having a...' I picked it up just in time to hear him say ‘life.'

‘No. I was...' What was I doing exactly? What worthy respectable thing was I doing? ‘I was just on my way back in from the studio.' I sounded flustered, I knew it. ‘I was taking a look at some of Dad's work.'

‘Oh, great.'

‘I've recorded some of it. Just a few bars. I wrote parts for some other instruments.'

‘You've been working on it?' His tone had changed, and not for the better. ‘You've been writing bits and recording? I really don't know how I feel about that.'

‘No, it's...' I had done another wrong thing.

‘I didn't know that was what you were going to do when you took the boxes.'

‘No, no, it's just ... it's a few bars. So we could both hear it. Rather than just reading it.'

‘Really.' I wasn't forgiven yet. ‘Well, I was calling to say I found that email from Jess, and it's Justin who's the new guy, not Jason. I think I said Jason the other night. And I also wanted to tell you I sent an engagement present, just something small, but I didn't go to the party. I thought you should know that. About the present.'

‘That's good. It's good you sent something. You've known her for years and ... I'm glad you did that. And you could've gone to the party too, if you'd wanted.'

‘Chubs, they looked like very dull people. Not my kind. Not even yours.'

And with that final piece of sibling feedback, the call was over. I sat in silence and watched the phone but it didn't ring again. There was no noise from next door, nothing. I made myself a cup of tea and sat and watched it go cold. I took a chair into my bedroom and I stood on it and pushed the bag all the way to the back of the shelf.

Did anyone, anywhere, know anything? Should I talk to Kate? How would I start it?

And Annaliese, what about her? I should have handled the recording session better. I shouldn't have let it end with thoughts of anything else still lingering. She had a spark, and a way about her, and I had played her the Billy Joel song, the Billy Joel
love song
that sounded as if it was about just such a girl.

But she was older. Billy Joel's girl was older. She was a woman, and it could be different.