The True Story of Butterfish (15 page)

On Tuesday morning, for the first time in weeks, I turned on my mobile. Messages pinged through during the early part of the drive to the airport, and then stopped. With the near complete absence of traffic – since it was 5.30a.m. – I was ahead of time, so I pulled over and worked my way through them. Patrick, our manager in London, Derek – most people who had tried the phone had then resorted to email. There were journalists wanting comments for articles that had long ago been written and filed. I was listening for Jess, I realised, but she wasn't there. And then I thought of Annaliese, who didn't have the number, didn't even know about the mobile that had spent the whole time I had known her in a drawer. There would be no message from her, nothing to fix the mess of the day before.

As I had turned out of the driveway, heading right, I had looked left and seen Kate in the distance, settled into her stride, running away from me and towards the Mount Coot-tha bush. Her day was starting in its usual way. There had been no revelations next door. Not yet.

It was up to me to deal, somehow, with what had happened. That wasn't Annaliese's job.

I had stopped on the verge of the Western Freeway, just near the Botanic Gardens and the cemetery. The sun was still low enough that the tall eucalypts on the far side of the road cast shade across my car. Two taxis sped by, probably on their way to the airport with passengers bound for Sydney or Melbourne on commuter flights. I pulled out and moved in behind them, and we passed through the roundabouts and onto Milton Road. Annaliese was still in bed, still asleep, with my robe somewhere in her room. I turned the radio on. Someone was interviewing Evan Dando, who had put together a new Lemonheads line-up after a long hiatus. There was a new album on the way. He was talking about the Reading Festival in 1997, when he broke the band up on stage without anyone expecting it, and then kept the name on the shelf for nine years.

‘I think I just did it for shock effect and I was high, you know,' he said. ‘The band didn't know anything about it either. Everyone looked at me and went “Huh?”'

He had toured hard during the mid-nineties, melted down famously on a number of occasions that had caught the media's eye, and had decided to take his life offstage for a while.

I drove along Milton Road, right into the glare of the rising sun. There were enough cars now to amount to traffic. Steam gushed from a tall chimney at the brewery.

I had begged for a break before Written in Sand, Written in Sea.

‘What would one year off cost us?' I said to the execs at the meeting in New York. Our manager looked across the table, like someone trying to show his open mind all over his face. Derek swivelled in his chair and kept his eyes on the floor. He wasn't on my side that day. Down whichever avenue was in front of us, and through the haze, the sun glinted from the top of the Chrysler Building. It looked like a fender on a fifties car.

‘Momentum,' one of the execs said. ‘Someone once had this same conversation with Axl Rose about Chinese Democracy.'

One way or another, they all pushed. It was done openly and it was done subtly. A new album would be for the best. One more album before the break. So I should pull my frayed ends together and get up and do the job.

‘We'll send you somewhere nice,' they said, but we ended up in LA.

And then the album tanked and there was no resistance to calling it quits. The company, in fact, embraced the idea. Our dumping hadn't been made public, and a band break-up was an easier way out. As soon as our manager told them, they had us cancelling the German tour and on a flight to New York. Just Derek and me. The others had already stopped being part of the story. We left them in Düsseldorf, working out where they wanted to go. ‘They'll get tickets,' the person on the phone said. ‘To wherever.'

By the time we were picked up from JFK, the company had switched fully to executive out-placement mode, drafted the media releases, booked in the interviews. Vice President Karl – who had flown out to LA, eaten doughnuts and squeezed my hand hard at the end of the day and said, ‘Remember, it's a big company, and in it I'm your champion' – was nowhere to be seen. He was being someone else's champion that day. The PR team worked through our answers with both of us, answers that were without blame or malice or reference to the collapse of the sales figures. The decision was mutual. It was time. All the best brush-off statements came out, lined up and said their own versions of next to nothing.

Then, after holding firm for a full two days or so, Derek took the wrong tablet at the wrong time, or was struck by a fit of the malice we'd been keeping at bay, and he stuck it to me in a print interview that got syndicated and quoted and changed the story.

‘I never said...' he said, and they told us they had quoted him verbatim and kept the recording.

‘It was all true anyway,' he said. ‘You
did
break the band up, you arsehole. We
did
have creative differences that made me fucking want to slap you. You spent a whole year sulking. Everyone wanted to slap you.'

Derek, like a teenager in detention, then had to sit down with the PR people and craft the next media release, the one that took back what he had said and most of the truth in it, and that stated unambiguously that he wished me nothing but the best. We were still friends, he said, on the day in our lives when we both thought friendship was furthest from a possibility.

And I sat down and did my homework too, and the next round of interviews. I said I needed a break. I was ready to spend some time doing other things, behind the scenes.

Our radio play numbers flared, there was a brief spike in sales of our first two albums but not the third, I slipped quietly away and Derek set up camp in LA, showing the world his B-grade bad-boy side.

So, that was it. Months ago. And no contact since, until the email that began ‘Fat Boy, do you ever turn your phone on?' as if we were walking along a street and mid-conversation and it was the old days.

I was on Airport Drive when a new text message came through. I didn't need to look at it to know that Derek had landed.

I hit the roundabout at the Kingsford-Smith memorial and swung right, and up the ramp marked ‘Departures'. This was my plan to get him out of there quickly, and I'd sent the text suggesting it before I left the house. On my way up the ramp, another message came through. I pulled into the two-minute parking area and picked up my phone. The message read ‘I patted a beagle.'

There was almost no one around, since 6.30a.m. wasn't a big time for international departures. Some backpackers were clambering out of a van, looking dusty and sounding Nordic. A middle-aged couple stood near a Landcruiser, running through an unwritten checklist a final time before hugging their daughter and choking up as she headed off on an adventure. Her father turned away, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Behind him, way in the distance, the city skyline was stamped on the hard blue edge of the sky, like a barcode.

Derek strode through the doors in a black leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, with a backpack over one shoulder. He waved, and headed my way. He walked like he was shooting a video, or as if his balls were too big. He looked immaculately shabby.

I got out and opened the boot, and he slung his bag in. I saw myself reflected in his glasses, squat, Shrek-like. Shrek after a season of banquets.

‘So, you got through the baying crowds unscathed.'

‘I've changed my hair,' he said. ‘Surely that's obvious.' If there was anything self-mocking about it, it was running too deep for me. His eyes and a third of his head were mirrored out by the sunglasses, so that probably wasn't helping. ‘You're looking well nourished.'

‘You know me, every year waiting for the call for the Twenty-Five Most Beautiful People shoot.' I walked around to the driver's door, and he got in on the passenger side. ‘Actually, I'm holding out for Most Intriguing. I think they always had me down as the intriguing one.' He wasn't listening. He was fiddling with his seatbelt and making it look as though it was something other people usually did for him. ‘And I know you're shitty that they don't have an edition for the Twenty-Five People Most Likely to Accidentally Marry a Porn Star.'

‘I haven't, have I?' He lifted the glasses to look at me, and I saw his eyes for the first time. ‘No, I'd remember. Or there'd be paperwork at least.'

I pulled out from the kerb and drove down the ramp towards the road.

‘So, how was your flight? That's the first thing I'm supposed to ask, isn't it?'

‘Yeah, that's good. Very civil. I had a bed, so I slept.' The glasses were back in place, and he had turned his attention to the seat adjustor. ‘We're going to the Wesley, yeah? I told my mother I'd go straight there.'

‘We'll be there about seven if we go right now. Is that...' Early. Surely it was well before hospitals like seeing visitors.

‘I said I'd go straight there.' He was still adjusting himself in the seat, and he cleared his throat. ‘This jacket's going to be too hot, way too hot. I don't know why I wore it.'

‘Leave it with me. I'll take it back to my place. With your bag.'

‘Yeah. Good. Thanks.' He looked out the window, in the direction of the new factory-outlet stores and the building work that was going on.

‘I'm sure they'll be glad to see you. Your parents.' This was not the time for French toast, I could tell.

‘Yeah, well. It won't be the biggest thing on their minds.' We swung onto the Gateway Arterial, and merged between two semi-trailers. To our left was the car auction yard with hundreds of clean cars in rows, and then the road rose and the factories and warehouses were below us. ‘Hey, I've made a start on the solo record.'

‘Yeah? I thought that was just a rumour.'

‘It's mostly a rumour. But I've got some ideas down. I don't want to rush it though. Plus, there's a few dis tractions.'

He was back on a better topic, away from illness and back to business and to his hazardous life. He had stories to tell. A party at the Playboy Mansion, where people sat around the grotto and the game room and anticipated lewdness but nothing much happened. Lollipop-bodied girls he had met who were so hungry they had stopped making sense. His first, and last, colonic at the instigation of one such girl.

Sure, I could say to him. Don't we all have that kind of life? Why, I had a wet near-naked sixteen-year-old's tongue in my mouth just yesterday. But that story had layers and Derek's, in my experience, didn't. He followed the line his body chemistry took him on, and he got a result or he didn't.

We hit Coronation Drive and he went quiet again. As we drove along the river bank towards the Wesley Hospital, I almost pointed the rowers out, just to break the silence, but I had nothing to say about them. It would have come out sounding like a line to a child. Look at the bird – what noise do birds make?

At the hospital entrance I gave him a key to the house. ‘Call me if you want me to pick you up.'

‘I can get a cab.' He undid his seatbelt and opened the door. ‘But thanks.'

‘You don't know where I live.'

‘Okay, you've got me with that.' He looked out through the windscreen, at the neatly clipped bushes and the red brick walls and the bust of John Wesley. ‘I actually have no idea, do I?'

‘That's right. So I'll text you, and that way you'll have it on your phone.'

‘I'm jet-lagged,' he said. ‘I'm not into the time zone yet.' He looked up at the building in front of us and the floors of windows that might be wards or operating theatres or administration. His father was in there, somewhere. In one of these buildings, with a hole about to be made into his skull. ‘Shit.'

‘It's good you're here,' I said, but he wasn't listening. His mind was already off in the hospital corridors, on its way to whatever was about to show itself, his moment of reckoning with his father's disease. ‘I hope it's okay.'

I took Derek's backpack to my house and spent the morning working. I kept my mobile in my pocket, but there were no calls. I hoped that was a good sign, but I knew it was no sign at all.

In the afternoon I went out to buy a new portable hard drive, and I came back to find Derek and Mark drinking my Stella on the verandah. It had not gone well at the Wesley.

Derek had lost any composure he had managed in the morning, and jetlag and fear and beer were all taking a swipe at him. ‘How long do you stay at hospitals?' he said. ‘I've got no idea. I don't do hospitals. I had sandwiches wrapped in plastic for lunch, egg and lettuce. Everyone just hangs around. All day. I left while my Dad was having an X-ray. I wrote him a note.'

He looked ragged and his tan had turned sallow. There were half-a-dozen empty stubbies next to him, one on its side. I couldn't remember how many I had put in the fridge. Mark was slumped back in his chair with a stubbie cradled on his lap, and a cap pulled down casting a deep shadow over his eyes.

‘I met your friend,' he said. ‘He has a more ... liberated attitude to alcoholic beverages.' He smiled a smile with a lazy bend in it, and took a mouthful.

I looked Derek's way and he said, ‘Hey, just beer. It's just beer. I'm living by that email.'

‘Sniffer dogs. Ha.' Mark laughed, in a derisive kind of way.

‘Glad I gave you something to bond over.' I could imagine Derek starting to tell stories a couple of beers in, and they wouldn't have flattered me. I set the hard drive down on the table and took a seat.

Derek said, ‘Hey,' and stuck his hand in his pocket. He pulled out a lip balm. ‘I got this at a garage sale at Tori Spelling's place. For a buck. I was high, obviously.'

‘Shit, are you serious?' Mark sat up, pushed his cap back and reached out for it. He pulled the top off and rolled the end out. ‘So, the last lips to touch this were Tori Spelling's?'

‘Well, no,' Derek said, as if his story was already losing air. ‘I've used it. But it was definitely from her garage sale. I turned up with a few guys and we all went looking for the best thing we could get for a dollar.' He went to drink more beer and nearly missed his mouth. It was more important to invent this pointless story than to get his aim right with his stubbie. ‘This was the best thing.' Could there have been any doubt?

‘It's still killer material. I can use this.' Mark continued to scrutinise the lip balm closely, as though a few molecules of Tori Spelling might remain.

‘Yeah,' Derek said. ‘Yeah.'

‘Use it for what?' I still wasn't moving at the right speed for this conversation. I'd stepped in too late and too sober.

Mark put the top back on. ‘You don't think I just mow lawns, do you?' He gave the lip balm back to Derek, and they clinked stubbies to toast the triumph of owning an intimate Tori Spelling cast-off for a dollar. ‘I write things. For money. I could write about that. I do pig-killing stories for Bacon Busters. I do a fair bit of porn. Picture pays twenty bucks for a joke, and you can get them from the internet. Twenty bucks for a hot website as well. Too easy. Fifty bucks for a True Confession. That's good. FHM just said they'd give you free stuff, but the only time they specified it was for best chick's confession and you got a dildo, so...' He shrugged. He was in it for the cash, not for dildoes. ‘S'pose it could do for a birthday present for Mum. She hooks up with dildoes often enough. She might as well have one she could rely on.' He laughed, then pulled his cap back down so that his eyes were again out of the light. ‘It's the True Confessions I like. You can write in as a mobile phone salesman who goes to the chick's door. I've done one as a dishwasher repair guy, one as a seal-a-fridge guy. Anything other than a pool cleaner's still fair game.' He cleared his throat, like someone about to recite verse. ‘I saw her for the first time in years when she was waiting tables at a restaurant in the Cross and the first thing she said to me was, “You wanted to fuck me since the day we met at art school.” Etcetera, etcetera. And he's now a panel beater but that's okay, and they go back to her place and she likes it dirtier than he's ever dreamed of.'

So now I had my fourteen-year-old neighbour drunk on my verandah adlibbing porn, exactly a day after I had kissed his sister in the studio behind the house. This was not the impact I had meant to have on the neighbourhood.

‘I've got a plan, you know,' Mark said as Derek's eyelids sagged and closed, jerked open, then closed again. ‘I'm not just about the writing. My father, when he was, like, ten, was in London at a zoo, and he saw these piran has, two in a tank, with a thick glass wall between them, facing off. Did you know piranhas can strip a two-hundred kilo capybara to the bone in minutes?'

‘What's a capybara?' Derek struggled for a moment out of the deep hammock of jetlag and ethanol and perhaps other chemicals that had made it past his beagle friend, then relented and slumped again. Gravity had called all hands on deck, and he was defeated.

Mark looked at him, at the struggle now lost. The capybara question hung there like someone's famous last words. ‘I don't know. I got it from the internet. I did a talk on piranhas years ago at school, and that was one of the facts.'

Did people learn anything any more? Take on facts in a context and make anything of them? Were we all just caught in a drift of internet factoids?

‘I think it's like a cow-sized guinea pig. Or at least the big end of dog-sized.'

He turned to me, twitchily, as if I was some kind of oracle. I had redeemed my tedious sobriety and latecomer-to-the-party status with a perfectly shaped factoid. ‘Cool,' he said, looking closer by the minute to following Derek down the hatch of drunkenness. ‘Why don't we have those here?'

‘Well, we do, but they're just wombats.'

‘Oh.' That was obviously much less exciting. ‘Well I couldn't just write what I know.' We seemed to have dismounted from the piranha tangent and found ourselves back on the topic of writing. ‘Everyone says “write what you know”, so what would I write about? “There's this guy whose sister gives him the shits. Meanwhile grass grows in their backyard. Sometimes he is sent to mow it. For a pittance.”' He shrugged as if, with those few words, his whole life story had been despatched.

‘Good. See, it came together for me at “pittance”. There's feeling there, something at stake. Clearly that part doesn't apply to my yard though.'

He nodded, smiled knowingly, as if I was a third party and we were talking about his other dumb rich neighbour who threw money his way for next to no work. He raised his stubbie in a one-sided toast.

‘But it's not just about the writing anyway.' His eyes were on Derek again, though Derek was lost to us.

‘It might be time to be getting you home, I think. And we'll see if we can make this slightly less bad before your mother arrives.'

‘She's on a late. She'll be hours. Nine something. That's half a day away, practically.' If it was an argument for more drinking, it petered out pretty quickly. He blinked hard, and refocused on me. ‘Ah, fuck it. I'm guessing that's it for the beers.'

‘Good guess.'

He set his near-empty stubbie carefully on the ground and clambered out of his chair. It was Annaliese who was on my mind as we walked across the grass to the hole in the hedge, Annaliese who would be somewhere next door right now, not expecting to face me. In my head I cycled through things I might say, and each one of them felt fake and forced and wrong in its own way.

Mark was telling me about a plan, though not coherently. It involved fish, Siamese fighting fish. His shirt snagged on the hedge as he went through, and he stopped to disentangle himself, leaving me standing next to the banana lounge on which I had seen Annaliese lying topless.

‘Well, I might be heading back,' I said. ‘I might see if I can get some coffee into Derek to keep him awake for a while. Get him over the jetlag.'

‘No, come in. I've got to show you. I've told you, now I've got to show you.' He threw a handful of leaves aside and clumped his way up the back steps with me behind him. ‘Hi honey, I'm home,' he bellowed in a friendly drunk way as the screen door clattered open. He clumped down the corridor, towards Annaliese's room. ‘I've brought your friend Curtis.'

Annaliese shrieked and her chair rolled forcefully across the floor. ‘Go away. Go away.' Her door, which had been ajar, slammed shut. ‘Leave me alone. I've got really bad cramps.'

Mark turned, stuck his fingers in his ears and scrunched his eyes shut. ‘Aargh, women's business.' He shrugged, as if women were a mystery not worth the trouble of trying to solve. ‘Come and I'll show you.'

He opened his door and led me into his room. It smelled fetid and closed up. There was junk all over his desk, and Rammstein and Donnie Darko posters on the walls. He had embraced the archetype, with one notable exception. Near the window was a tank full of bright fish, with veiled tails trailing behind them. They looked like the aquatic equivalent of Bratz dolls.

‘Hey girls,' he said, and the fish seemed to flare up, moving skittishly around the tank and taking on more vivid colours. ‘It's you. They don't know you. You might be a threat. And that's just the girls.' We walked further in. ‘You can keep up to ten of them in one tank – the females – as long as you have plenty of weed for the non-dominant ones to hide in. Not the same with the boys though. They go crazy.' The buckled drunken grin told me he liked the prospect of crazy. ‘Fancy goldfish. That's what Mum reckons they are. She thinks I've got about three of them. And over there's what she doesn't know.'

He led me across to the far side of the room. On the floor, on a trolley base that could slip under his bed, were another dozen fish, each in its own small compartment. They whipped around when they saw us, and puffed up and flared.

‘That's the boys. It's a barracks, a betta barracks.' The consonants fell over each other on the way out, and he stopped to steady himself. ‘Betta's the genus name. That's how you keep the males.' It was one large tank, with dividers marking out each fish's territory and keeping them apart. ‘They'd rip each other to bits if you put them all in the one container. Like, totally to bits. There'd be nothing but fin debris.'

He was impressed by the fury pent up in these small bright fish. Facts started coming out of him. He talked about their labyrinth organ, and how it made them halfway to a lung fish and meant they could survive in a small amount of stagnant water, even the water in a water buffalo's hoof print. He told me the males made bubble nests when they were happy, and for breeding. One digression stumbled into another, with varying degrees of coherence. He opened a cupboard and showed me his stores of fish food, freeze-dried bloodworm, brine shrimp and a box labelled Hikari Betta Bio-Gold Bites.

‘Bloodworm,' he said vaguely, squishing it around in the unopened packet. ‘They love their bloodworm.'

I asked him who fed them when he and Annaliese were with their father and he said, ‘Oh, that's never more than two nights, usually one. He's, um, disengaged. I think that's what we call it. I'm oppositional defiant – which covers all kinds of bad shit – and we call him disengaged. Because somehow the word cunt went out of fashion.' He said it in a tough-guy way, but half choked on the big word and started to go red. He cleared his throat and his voice came back scratchy. There he was, a sneaky fish breeder who could barely swear, boasting about his badness and the label someone had given him. ‘I fast them then, when we're with him. You've got to, anyway. Weekly. Give them the inside of a pea – one each – and then fast them. Constipation's death to a betta. That's a quote. I read it somewhere. A website, so, you know...'

I didn't know. The idea got stuck. I asked him what he did when he went on holidays with his father. He was gripping the back of his chair and leaning heavily against it. He stared in the direction of the female tank, but probably past it. His mind was off dwelling on some point connected with fish maintenance or trying to catch it as it drifted away in the boozy haze.

‘Hmm? That's not how he is with holidays. He takes holidays
from
us, not
with
us. Disengaged.' He was mustering up the courage to revisit the word that had made him blush. ‘
We
might go on a holiday though. Mum and Liese and me. That could be a risk. I haven't had them that long though, the bettas. I was hoping we'd get the right kind of new neighbour. Old man Novak wouldn't have remembered, or done it right. Or kept his mouth shut. We go for weekends to my grand parents at the coast sometimes, but I pea the fish on Friday after school and we're home by Sunday and they're good with that.'

In the next room, Annaliese was typing hard. She would be able to hear voices, but not any of the content. I was being enlisted as an accomplice to the secret fish farm.