The True Story of Butterfish (17 page)

‘Well, she came to the bar. It was just to talk. She drank scotch. Way too much. I already had some pills on board. She started crying, and then my arms were round her, and then I guess I just kissed her, or she kissed me...'

‘For fuck's sake – you think I want to hear this?' I wanted him to stop. He was on his knees, mopping milk, rushing through this story that was cutting into me. ‘You think it's not enough that you slept with her? Do I have to hear every goddamn detail?'

‘It was ... She was...' Milk ran over his hand and down the cupboard door.

‘I know what she was. I know how shit things had become between us. We could hardly talk. She didn't exactly mention in her last email that she'd fucked you but, from the spelling, it was clearly written in a hurry and it wasn't meant to be comprehensive.'

‘It was like a video. It wasn't like it was really happening. It just kept going. From the bar, to my room...'

I pulled the tea towel from his hands and threw it into the sink, hard. It was sodden with milk and it hit with a clang.

‘Could you at least have the decency...' I was shouting down at him. He was crouched on the floor and I was shouting. I could hear myself, but the words and the force of them felt like they came from somewhere else. He recoiled against the low cupboard. I made myself take a breath. ‘The decency to stop squirming around trying to tell me that you aren't responsible at all?'

He steadied himself with his hands. I stepped back, and he stood up slowly.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘It was just that one time.'

He went back to his cold French toast. He sat there, but he didn't eat it. I poured more milk into the jug, and then just stared at it. St Louis. There had been no change there, no signal, nothing I could recall that stood out on any part of that day. Nothing other than Jess and me peeling away from each other, and I already knew about that. We had got our relationship down to terse loveless conversations about the practicalities. She read books, listened to her iPod, retreated. I focused on business and factored her in nowhere. Derek had warned me, he had even warned me. Earlier in the tour he had pointed it out to me, said she seemed lost.

I didn't know it, but she was talking to him then. Emailing home, running up phone bills, testing out the idea of leaving. Of course she was. There was nothing out of the blue about what happened in Louisville.

The shock of it was through me, I thought. I couldn't put the scene out of my head, couldn't stop myself picturing it, but it was landing on a dead spot now.

‘I'd better take you to the Wesley,' I told him, as civilly as I could manage.

‘You don't have to. I can get a cab.' He looked wary.

‘They're not quick out here. So stop looking at me as if I'm Ivan Milat and I just asked you for a shovel. I'm doing this for your parents. You should be there. And right now you shouldn't be here.'

I told him he might want to put some shoes on, and I went to find my keys.

I couldn't find and name the one point where it had gone wrong with Jess. I couldn't grasp the point when it had been right, though I knew there had been one. I wanted to show him his actions were not as powerful as he thought, that I wouldn't be hurt so greatly by what he had told me, or by what he had done. I wanted him to sit in silence, guilty silence, as we drove to the hospital. I wanted to be better than him. And at the very same time I wasn't, since his father's skull was about to have a hole put in it and a piece of tumour taken out, and my intentions were all about punishing Derek for stepping in when Jess was vulnerable and lost and our relationship had already faded till it had no colour left in it.

There was no suggestion of remorse remaining by the time he got back from the hospital. I had wasted a day staring at the walls. I had driven down the road to the Gap Creek Reserve carpark and tried a walk in the dry bush, but it had been too hot and I had lost the stamina for hills long ago.

Derek came back in a cab, and walked through the door saying, ‘I should have got wine for dinner. I forgot about dinner.' I reminded him about the substance-free theme of the evening and he said, ‘Oh, yeah,' without really listening. He was already walking past me, on his way to the kitchen.

He stood at the coffee machine, trying to work out how to use it. I told him to sit down and I would make it for him. He sat in the chair where he had eaten breakfast. I frothed his milk, and there were no revelations this time. The earlier conversation wasn't mentioned. I had a picture in my head of him leading Jess to his room, his VingCard in his hand, ready to unlock the door. That stupid drug look on his face, Jess's eyes down.

‘His head was shaved,' he said. ‘They had to do half his head but he made them do it all. He was gone on the Valium when I got there. Just ten milligrams and he was wasted. I guess it's lack of practice. Then we just sat there for two hours once they took him away. My mother does sudoku. I didn't know that. I didn't really know what sudoku was.'

I put his coffee and the sugar in front of him and concentrated on finding him a spoon.

‘And he came back and his mouth was hanging open and he was really pale, with this big bandage round his head. He was sleeping it off. They brought his lunch in and took it away again. I thought they'd knocked one of his teeth out with the tubes, but apparently it's been gone for years. A canine one, or something, one of those ones on the way to the molars.'

‘And the biopsy? How did that go?'

He was talking around the margins, telling me nothing, skirting around it himself perhaps. I didn't need to know about his father's teeth, or his mother's sudoku habit.

‘Oh, we'll know more tomorrow. It's a tumour of some kind. They're pretty sure of that, but they need to know the type. So, that's it for now.' He shrugged, putting distance between himself and the bad news that could turn horrible, and he finished stirring his coffee. ‘We'll know more tomorrow, maybe.' He tapped the spoon on the side of the cup, then looked around for somewhere to put it. I took it from him. ‘And he should be out tomorrow too. It wasn't a big hole. So, tonight, should I go and get wine?'

‘Same answer as before. Let's skip the wine.'

‘Good,' he said. ‘Right.'

And Jess? What about Jess? What about St Louis? For much of the day I'd rehearsed our next conversation, but his head was still at the Wesley and it wasn't the time for it.

He went to check his email while I watched the news on TV. I expected him to come back in from the studio with more big-noting stories name-dropping new famous friends who had emailed him, but then I heard him in the shower. He came out in a towel with his hair standing on end and nothing to report. He went to the fridge and poured himself a glass of water. He had a top-heavy body, more so than the previous time I'd seen him, gym arms and pecs and spindly legs.

I imagined him padding around hotel rooms, light on the balls of his feet, striking poses in the mini-bar mirror, loving his own bulky shape among Pringle tubs and mini-Scotches. Behind him the hotel bed, sheet turned back. St Louis. In my head, it was still St Louis.

The sun was behind the hill when we set out for next door. Its light still caught the treetops and the top of Mount Coot-tha, but down at ground level the cicadas were switching on.

‘This is great,' Derek said. ‘Going to the neighbour's place for dinner. It's so ... neighbourly. I don't know who I live next door to in LA.'

‘Could be LA, could be you – who's to say?'

He laughed, but just enough to acknowledge that the line was a joke. ‘Mark, right? The kid?'

‘Yeah.'

He seemed to take pride in remembering, as if I'd sold him short and he had the stuff of neighbour-liness after all. LA – it was all LA that was to blame for the lack of it in his life across the water. He was okay.

‘And his mother's Kate and his sister's Annaliese,' I told him, ‘but obviously you won't be expected to know those just yet. I'm just telling you so you can practise them a few times now and get ahead of the game.'

‘Kate, Annaliese, right,' he said. ‘Test me on them before we get to the door.'

A car drove past. Dust kicked up and billowed in its wake. Annaliese's bedroom light was on. Derek kicked at a stone that he could barely see, his Converse sneaker sending it skittering along the road.

‘They're pretty good, the Wesley people,' he said. ‘Once I'm in Dad's room, they give us a bit of space. I have to send Mum out for the sandwiches, though. You know how it is. I just can't do the chat when I'm there.'

‘Yeah.' There was no ego in it. It was just Derek's reality. He was the lead singer, so there was no peace for him, anywhere. He couldn't buy a sandwich without someone wanting a turn, wanting their own Butterfish anecdote, of which he had plenty – mostly riotous stories of high living and decadence gone wrong. ‘That's good. That's a good thing. It's not the time for all that.'

The verandah light came on as we approached the house. I must have slowed down. Derek was ahead of me, and then stopping for me to catch up. I was one conversation short of ready for the night – the straightening-out conversation with Annaliese that I kept not having.

I wished I had kept her in the studio a few minutes more and found her a better way out. An end to the encounter that she could have walked away from, rather than fleeing. It was as if there was some magic good thing I should have said, but I still hadn't found it.

I led the way up the steps and knocked on the door. I could hear a TV on inside, then Kate's voice and the murmur of Mark's in reply. A chair rumbled on castors, nearby, and the door swung open. Annaliese was wearing leggings and a loose T-shirt, and her hoop earrings again.

‘Hello,' she said flatly, as if it took more effort than it could possibly be worth. She looked at my chest, and then past me. It was as though my face was pixelated and couldn't be seen.

‘Hi, I'm Derek.' He stepped forward, around me. ‘You must be Annaliese. Curtis was telling me about you.'

‘No I wasn't.' The answer snapped out of me, right at Annaliese.

‘Okay,' he said slowly, with the caution reserved for the dangerously mad. ‘Well, that's weird.' He had a coy smile, as if he was onto something. ‘Let me be clear.' Still the slow careful voice of the hostage negotiator. ‘Curtis has told me nothing about you. Nothing. Just the name. And even that was on the way here.'

‘Right,' Annaliese said. ‘Well, hello.' She shook her head, as if we were both old fools, but harmless in the end. ‘Come in.'

We followed her, with Derek mouthing ‘What?' and signalling confusion, and me trying to wave his gesture away. None of it made sense to him. She was sixteen and she hadn't fawned. She had played the whole thing tough and given no hint of welcome. And I, of course, had behaved like a freak. Mark was standing near the dining table, and he half-lifted his hand to acknowledge us. He was wearing a black Sepultura T-shirt with a semi-nude Viking-style wench contorting under the band name. Kate stepped out from behind the kitchen counter with a large spoon in her hand.

‘Oh, hello,' she said, taking a good look at Derek, the real Derek Frick, here in her loungeroom. This was more like it, more like what Derek was expecting.

‘Mum, Derek. Derek, Kate,' Annaliese said, dispatching the introductions with efficiency. ‘And I believe you know my brother, Mark.'

Derek's gym-built body swaggered forward on his undersized legs. Kate reached out to shake his hand as if he'd just been dipped in pheromones and all her receptors were jangling. I could have done without it. Annaliese glared at her, but Kate wasn't noticing.

‘Welcome,' she said, with a hint of a nervous flutter in her voice. She cleared her throat. ‘It's very good to meet you.'

‘You too,' Derek said, shaking her hand and shamelessly looking her up and down. ‘Yeah. Pleasure's all mine.'

He finally released her hand, and then encouraged his hair to fall forwards over his eyes so that he could brush it slowly aside in a gesture that a cheap body-language paperback had told him was particularly alluring. I knew his playbook, and I knew it all too well. Most of his moves were as sophisticated as a chicken scratching around in a barnyard, but they worked far more often than they should have.

‘Curtis has told me so much about you,' Kate said, her eyes still drawn to Derek. It was my turn to feel like the speedbump. Then, like a boat righting itself in a storm, the better Kate, the real Kate, was back. ‘But it's okay – I'm sure at least half of it's not true. With the exception of you making this impressionable young boy ill yesterday.' She was smiling, making something of a joke of it, while at the same time not letting him off the hook.

‘Ah, yes,' Derek said, on the back foot, pheromones evaporated without good effect. ‘Yes, sorry about that.'

She laughed, and asked him how he was enjoying being back.

Annaliese turned to me, and in a tough whisper said, ‘What have you told him?'

‘Nothing. Nothing.'

She looked into my eyes, angry with me anyway, even if I had truly said nothing. ‘Whatever.'

‘No, not whatever.'

‘Drink?' Kate said, looking my way.

My mind was blank, but she held up a bottle of mineral water and I said, ‘Great. Thanks.'

She filled a glass and set it on the counter for me. She pressed a button on the microwave and said, ‘Right, now we're in action.'

An electric wok was sitting on the bench top. Next to it were boards piled with chopped chicken and capsicum and shallots. Kate twisted a dial and a red light came on, and she picked up a bottle of oil. I noticed she had a Band-Aid around the tip of her left index finger. Her new knife was in the sink.

She glanced back my way and said, ‘Someone's going to get a fingertip, and that's just how it is.' She held her hand over the wok to check the heat. ‘Any suggestions, Curtis?'

‘Get it really hot. Hot and quick is the way to go.'

‘I'm still at the fingertip part,' Derek said.

Annaliese stepped in. ‘Curtis bought Mum a knife. A really sharp one. So this was kind of inevitable.'

Kate slid the chicken from the board and it hit the wok with a hiss. She recoiled, then started moving it around with the spoon. Mark went to the fridge and kept his back to us while he drank Coke Zero from the bottle. He opened the freezer door and did a ripping gassy burp into it before shutting it – his own private comedy, hanging out on the other side of the kitchen freezing his burps.

‘So...' Kate said, her eyes down on the wok as she skidded the chicken around on the hot black surface. The end of the fob-watch chain she was wearing as a bracelet kept clinking against the edge but she maintained her focus on the contents. ‘Do you wok much, Curtis?'

We talked through it, step by step. I resisted the urge to ask for the spoon. Derek leaned against the counter with his mineral water, watching us as if he'd walked in on the second episode of a TV series and was trying to work out what had happened in the first. I hadn't mentioned the knife to him, or the salmon recipe tutorial. I hadn't prepared him for Annaliese at all.

‘Call me when it's ready,' she said, and made a move towards her room.

‘Liesie, I was hoping you could serve the rice.' Kate glanced up from the wok only briefly, but her look held every maternal hope for peace, decorum and a reasonable night.

Annaliese sighed and pushed past me to the drawer, where she found a large spoon. She stood watching the numbers on the microwave fall and the rice cooker turning on the plate. Mark muffled another burp with his hand, and then sorted through the letters magneted to the fridge until he found a second D and could spell the word ‘DILDO'.

Kate scraped the vegetables into the wok. The microwave pinged and Annaliese swore as the steam billowed around her when she opened the lid of the rice cooker. Kate added soy sauce and set her face into a look somewhere between uncertain and fraught as the cooking reached its climax. Mark rearranged his groin in his large shorts. It took both hands. Derek had a look of restrained glee, as if I had taken him from celeb world and the world of brain biopsies and gifted him a peephole into some kind of mad house – a place where nothing was false and every petty, scratchy thought was instantly ventilated.

The meal was served, and we took our plates to the table. Someone had set a fork at each place, rolled in a coloured serviette.

‘Now, I'm a bit uncertain about all this,' Kate said. The rest of us were poised to eat. ‘I got the wok as a present a while ago, but I haven't used it much.'

Mark dug in and, through his first mouthful, said, ‘Hey, it's not bad. It's really not bad.' He speared another piece of chicken with his fork.

The tension that had hung in the air in the kitchen seemed to abate. With the meal made and signs all around of some success, Kate relaxed. I caught Annaliese's eye, quite by accident, and she almost smiled before she remembered I wasn't a candidate for any of that. Derek was answering a question of Kate's and found himself in a well-worn anecdote, but he didn't seem to mind. At the end he slipped into a story about a Berlin hotel we'd stayed in, which had set out so seriously to be cool that it, as he put it, ‘lost its head up its own post-modernism' and was so oddly designed that we had each separately locked ourselves out of our rooms, semi-naked, when trying to find our bathrooms in the early hours of the morning. He had been standing in the bright light of the corridor, wondering what to do, when I had walked out of my own room six doors down.

He was warming to his preferred task of being the centre of attention when Kate asked him why he was home. It threw him for a second, since he'd slipped into performance mode and had forgotten his real life might be a topic here.

‘Well, I hadn't seen...' he started, and then corrected himself. ‘My father's having some medical tests. That's it mainly. But he'll be out of hospital tomorrow, so it looks like I'll be going back to LA on Friday.'

‘So, does that mean the tests have gone well, or...' Kate stopped before offering the alternative. ‘Sorry, it's not my business.'

‘No, no it's fine. We still don't really know. We'll find out tomorrow.' He picked up his fork and rounded up some of the stray grains of rice on his plate.

LA on Friday. It was news to me.

The CD that was playing came to the end of its final track. It was Wilco's Summerteeth. It had come out the year before The True Story of Butterfish. I had played it a lot then, and I'd wanted to be half that clever. These were pop songs with wryness and wit, and stories that sounded like they came from real broken hearts, but they never gave up being pop songs. I could remember a conversation in a hotel bar with a journalist who had loved it as much. It was morning, the lights were up and a cleaner was flicking stray peanuts into a pan with a brush. The bar was closed, but that made it quiet and perfect for an interview. The smell of the previous night's drinks, beer and bourbon, leached from the carpet and upholstery.

We were on the rise then. Jess was on holidays from uni and along for the ride, my father was in deceptively good health.

And now Derek was going back to LA in just two days. There was his father, biopsied and bandaged and lopsided as his almost-certain tumour pushed his brain around, and Derek had his exit plans made.

‘Why don't you pick the next one?' Kate said to him, and he ducked under my gaze and headed for the stereo.

He chose Billy Joel's Songs In the Attic, which was surely an old CD of Kate's from the eighties. ‘This one's for my good buddy Curtis,' he said in an old-time American radio DJ voice, ‘a big fan of the Joelster who regrets only that you don't have his earlier work more comprehensively represented. As far as I can tell.'

Annaliese smirked and looked down at her dinner. Derek came back to the table and we proceeded to argue about the merits, or otherwise, of Summer, Highland Falls. I was for the merits.