The True Story of Butterfish (19 page)

‘What am I supposed to do? Hire a stripper? I'm struggling for options here.' It would be time away from Campbell and Annaliese and his festering room, at least. A pressure valve. A chance away from the dramas to eat at someone else's expense, evade homework, deride whoever he needed to. Not that I could honestly say it was entirely about Mark. From where Kate stood, I could easily look like nothing more than a lesser version of Derek, rolling in with a thoughtless kind of harm on offer. I didn't want that. ‘If Rammstein's ever in town, maybe I could take him along, but there's nothing like that coming up. Not that I can see. And aside from the metal, his main interest seems to be online war games. And, confidentially, fish. Tropical fish.'

What's confidential about fish?'

‘He's a complicated boy.' Mark needed to be experienced, rather than explained.

Patrick emptied the last of the water from the carafe into our glasses. ‘Sounds fascinating. Sounds well on the way to being thoroughly fucked up. Let's do it. Let's show him the most manly night the Caloundra Powerboat Club has to offer.' He laughed, at the prospect of Mark watching the two of us drink mid-strength beers while old people went mad for keno. ‘I can't imagine you helping out the neighbours like this. No offence, but I'm not used to you as the “neighbourhood guy” yet.'

‘I don't think anyone is. I'm not. If there's ever an official ceremony as part of it, I'll let you know.'

‘Well, in the meantime I'll make do with a good look around the Powerboat Club.' He settled back in his chair and ignored the water he had just poured. ‘I should have seen him more, you know. Dad, I mean. I was in the same town. There shouldn't be all these mysteries, even if they're nothing.'

‘We've all got stuff we keep to ourselves,' I told him. ‘It's all right. You could have seen him every week and there'd still be things you didn't know.'

‘Yes, but somehow it brings out the Miss Marple in me.'

Our meals arrived from the kitchen then, his salad with the dressing on the side, my gnocchi gamberi with sage butter. Maybe there would be something of our father to find, maybe there wouldn't. If there was, I wanted to know it, and Patrick seemed to need to know it. It was a gap in
him,
rather than just a gap in our father's history. That's how it looked. He lifted his fork and picked through his salad. ‘Oh god,' he said, rather dramatically. ‘I think I'm over rocket, all of a sudden.'

I saw Kate drive in from work while I was in the kitchen making coffee. I was waiting for Derek to arrive or call from the Wesley.

I wanted to listen again to the vocals Annaliese had recorded for my unfinished verse and chorus, but I couldn't have Derek walking in on that. He would have nothing to say that I wanted to hear.

Annaliese and Mark were in their pool and fighting in the usual way when I went down the back steps. She was shouting loud enough for her voice to carry. ‘You could break my back, dickhead.' His reply was a bomb dive.

I shut the studio door behind me, put my coffee down on the Space Invaders console and called Kate.

‘I'm going to the coast – the Sunshine Coast – on Sunday for dinner with my brother,' I told her. ‘And I thought maybe we could take Mark. I know it's not a classic guy thing, but...'

‘All the better,' she said right away. ‘He'd sneer all over a classic guy thing. So, you know, if you and your brother took him to the footy and tried to talk about chicks, I think we'd all be in trouble.'

‘Fortunately, none of that's likely.' I didn't mention the cake, the surprise Patrick had offered to hold back for Mark's eighteenth.

‘He's with his father from tomorrow to Sunday afternoon. Hang on. Let me just do the right thing and run it by him – Mark, I mean, not Campbell. I'm sure he'll think it's a great idea. Not that he'll tell you in a conventional way, of course. But you know that.'

Through the phone, I could hear their back screen door open, and then slap shut as she went outside. She was saying something, but not to me. The pool gate clanged as it swung shut on its safety hinges.

‘Why are you taking me to dinner?' It was Mark's voice, close to the receiver and loud, sounding rude but doing it as a game that would annoy his mother.

‘It's a front,' I told him. ‘I'm actually going to harvest your organs for sale on the black market.'

There was a pause. ‘Okay. Dinner's a bit of a bonus then, I guess. I thought you were just supposed to get me wasted and leave me in an ice bath with a note telling me to get to dialysis right away.'

‘You were wasted the other day and I missed my chance.'

He didn't hear me. There was more talk in the background. His hand muffled the phone as he snapped at Kate. Then he was back with me, all his usual atypical ironic charm in his voice. ‘Just Mum,' he said. ‘Worried about the kidneys. If you could leave me with one, that'd be cool.'

‘Sounds like a fair deal. One kidney should more than cover the meal for all of us.'

‘Hey, one other thing,' he said, his tone completely different. For the next few seconds all I could hear was his breathing, and a question of Kate's receding in the background. I looked through the studio window, but all that was visible through the gap between the bushes was the end of the pool and the banana lounge, which had been tipped on its side. ‘For some reason I've got to go to Dad's for two nights, not the usual one. Friday and Saturday. Could you pea the fish for me?'

‘Pee? That sounds kind of wrong.'

‘No, remember what I told you? You give them the inside of a pea, one each.' He was almost whispering. ‘I'll write it all down. I'll stick it in your mailbox. Okay?'

Annaliese pushed herself up onto the edge of the pool then, lifting her upper body out of the water. She looked right at me – through the gap – and I stared back her way, her brother's voice in my ear. Then she dropped from view again and, through the phone, I could just hear the steady rhythm of her freestyle strokes as she swam away.

‘It'll be in your mailbox,' Mark was saying. ‘Did you get that?'

Deark was hovering near the bust of John Wesley, as we'd arranged. He had his sunglasses on and he was looking down at his phone as though a very important text message needed his attention. I pulled up next to him, and he flipped the phone shut and got into the car.

‘Thanks for coming to get me,' he said, and he swung the sun visor down and studied himself in the mirror that was on the back of it. He rearranged his hair, but it didn't seem to go where he wanted it to.

‘So, how's it all gone in there? Should we be giving your parents a lift home?'

‘No, they've got a bit to do yet.' He pushed his hand through his hair one more time, then flipped the visor up. ‘Appointments to make. And they've got to mark him up for radiotherapy. That's how they hit the same spot each time.'

He was looking straight ahead, keeping his sunglasses on.

‘So, what is it exactly? What did you find out?'

He opened his phone and glanced at it, then shut it again. ‘It's not the best but it's not the worst. It's a big word ending in oma, but isn't that usually the way?' He said it as if he was trying to remember the name of a song or a cheese or a beer, something he had tried and moved on from, without much to report.

‘And how are your parents about it?'

‘Oh, you know.' He exhaled – it was almost a sigh, but not quite – and he shook his head. I sensed that some serious truths were circulating in there. ‘They're just planning the next step. Irritating each other with slightly different understandings about what every bit of it means. So what are we making them? What's the dinner plan?'

I turned the car left onto Milton Road and joined the westbound traffic.

‘Soup. A recipe I got from a TV show.'

‘Soup is good. Not a big ask when it comes to the vision, and all that.' He leaned forward and started pressing buttons on the stereo. ‘What have you been listening to? What stations have you got it tuned to?'

We drove up and over the hill, and put the Wesley behind us. We talked about music, but briefly and only out of habit. I told Derek in some detail about the soup because I knew he couldn't take one more mention of his father. It was Antonin Carême's, or my take on one of Antonin Carême's – a soup he had devised for the Regency banquet of 1817 to celebrate the visit to England of a Russian Grand Duke. I told it like a fable, like Scheherazade, keeping a death at bay. I remembered every fragment of the story that I could manage – Carême inventing the chef's toque, the absence of garlic since it hadn't yet arrived in France, the gold leaf on the edible sugar model of the Arc de Triomphe or some other triumphal arch, one hundred and forty different meals all laid out at once.

Derek even asked questions, took flight from his life, all the way to the shops at Kenmore. He remembered the time when we had been friends with backpacks and had made it to St Petersburg, and the moment of stillness on a grand staircase in Peter's palace when the guide had pointed out a feature on the huge stained-glass window and, into the hushed appreciation, a British tourist – who we didn't much like – let slip a far-from-silent fart.

‘The look on his face was the best bit.' He was still laughing, just imagining it. ‘It was like he was somehow
near
the fart, but not responsible.'

The band was on hiatus then. We had an EP behind us that had done pretty well, and Derek and I had been working on the demos that would ultimately be the nucleus of The True Story of Butterfish. My relationship with Jess was on one of its hiatuses too. Outside the palace, Derek bought a medal from an old, bent Russian woman who looked like ET in a scarf. It cost him five US dollars. He wore it most days and called it an Order of Lenin. We answered to no one back then. No one took photos of us or looked at us twice. Three years later, he wanted to wear the medal at a photoshoot in Boston. He had found it on a trip home. ‘I can give you fifty reasons why that won't be happening,' the publicist said, as she steered him away from the photographer and took the medal for safe-keeping.

Derek had bought the unit for his parents a few years ago, when they had been on the brink of retirement. His father had owned a service station, but had been done over by the multinational that put petrol in his tanks. He had hoped to sell it and live off the proceeds, but instead it had ended up surrounded by cyclone fencing and covered in graffiti, with the remediation of the land set to cost almost as much as the block was worth.

They wouldn't take money so Derek, without saying a thing, bought them a unit on the river at St Lucia. Three or four bedrooms, city views from a long balcony, secure basement parking – I saw the flyer in his hotel room when he was lining it up, though he didn't tell me then why he was buying it. He got a designer in and had the place made over, and on a brief trip home he drove his parents there and handed them the keys. It was a gift, and their old house had become their superannuation.

We were on our way to St Lucia, with me in the driver's seat and Derek nursing a half-made soup on his lap, whole chicken breasts floating around in Antonin Carême's fragrant broth, or my version of it at least. The cooking pot sat on a folded towel, and Derek complained about the heat radiating through to his thighs.

The soup had required an hour of simmering, which Derek had said had to be done at my house. I had imagined a few hours with his parents, and making the soup there from scratch, but Derek had insisted the visit couldn't be long. He told me a nurse had made that clear at the Wesley, although I had my doubts. So I had chopped and fried the onion and garlic, added the spices and the chicken and the stock and set it all simmering, while Derek paced around my kitchen, drank three Stellas and asked me if I had any scotch.

‘It's one of these,' he said, peering out into the dark and up at the tall buildings as we drove slowly along Macquarie Street. ‘They all look the same at night. I think it's on this block anyway.'

Beside the road, people walked in pairs on a pavement tilted by the roots of drought-stressed poincianas. A Malaysian or Indonesian couple, probably students, pushed a baby in a stroller. A group of joggers streamed by, flicking sweat. Most but not all of the buildings were big functional yellow-brick edifices from the seventies, and it was in front of one of them that Derek stopped us.

‘Yeah,' he said, still staring out the window. ‘This is it. Be ready for them to be a bit ... off. Okay? Be ready for that.'

‘It's been a big few days. I'd be a bit off too.'

He went ‘Hmm,' but said nothing. He sat, gripping the pot by both its handles even though the car was safely parked.

‘So let's go then. Let's feed these people.'

He led the way past the yellow-brick bank of mailboxes and along the concrete path, carrying the soup while I brought the Tupperware box with basmati rice, coriander and chopped celery. He buzzed on the intercom, then buzzed again when there was no reply. On the other side of the building, the long bass note of a CityCat engine passed, heading downstream.

‘I'm going to have to call them,' he said. ‘My phone's in my pocket.'

He was about to hand me the soup when the intercom crackled and his mother's voice came through saying, ‘Hello.' She sounded positive and strong, but it was just one word.

‘It's me,' he said.

‘Hello Me,' she said back to him. ‘I'll just check if we're letting in people by that name.'

‘We have soup. But you can only have it if you're not going to be embarrassing.'

‘I can't promise that,' she said, keeping up the sprightly tone. ‘But come on in.'

The door lock clicked and buzzed, and we pushed our way through.

‘Bloody parents,' Derek said, half to me and half to himself.

The foyer was bright and clad in a light polished stone. Three fake grass trees stood in pots in a bed of smooth white pebbles. Derek walked over to the lifts and pressed the up button with his elbow. It had slipped his mind for now that I had no bloody parents.

The lift took us to the eighth floor. His mother already had their front door open.

‘Curtis Holland,' she said. ‘Let me see you.' She was smaller than I remembered, and her hair was wispier and whiter. She was wearing a blue dress with a hibiscus pattern – the kind of dress you never saw advertised but that older women never had trouble finding. She faced me and put a hand on each of my biceps and scrutinised me as if I were a hat stand or a tall appliance and she was a customer willing to be persuaded. The Tupperware lunch box was stuck between us like an inauspicious offering. ‘Well,' she said, and left it there, because no one knows the decent way to say you've stacked on the kilos and started to sag.