The True Story of Butterfish (25 page)

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.'

‘Sounds like you'd better have a listen to the new song then, and let me know what you think.'

‘You've got a deal,' she said. She looked past me, towards her house, and flapped some more air across her face with her hat. Stray tendrils of hair wafted and settled. ‘I'd better get home. I don't imagine you'll be inviting me in for a cold drink, since I'm probably on some kind of probation at your place in case I jump you.'

She laughed at her own joke and, before I could work out a thing to say, she took a step towards me and gave me a kiss that pressed firmly into my cheek and lingered for a moment more than it should have, her hand on my shirt front. And then she stepped away, still laughing at me privately, having claimed back any power she needed to. And she set off down the road, waving as she went, her bag a misshapen graffitied jumble of books on her back, her heavy clumpy black school shoes light on the gravel.

I had music in my head, and words, the start of another verse perhaps. I took my letters and I walked to the house wondering if it might be a bigger song after all, if there might be more than two minutes to The Light that Guides You Home.

The more I got to know Curtis Holland, the more I realised I had to have a better grasp of what he did in the studio. I'm very grateful to Adele Pickvance for taking me on a tour of the gizmos she uses to make, record and shape music. I'm particularly grateful for her going beyond the studio tour and working with me to write the song ‘The Light that Guides You Home'.

Without the enormous success of Savage Garden, I'm not sure that I would have credited Butterfish with the sales I did. Savage Garden showed that it was possible to come from here and shift twenty-million units over two albums. It remains a huge accomplishment. And the only thing the two bands have in common. This novel is not, in any way, the story of Savage Garden.

I'd like to thank Dana the stripper, who souvenired my shopping list in Coles (for Loretta) at exactly the time when I was wondering what Curtis's life might be like when he left the house. I would not like to thank the guy who pissed on my shoes at around the same time, or the clown who took my watch.

I'm very appreciative of the support and wisdom I've received from the team I'm now working with at Random House Australia, particularly Meredith Curnow, Sophie Ambrose and Judy Jamieson-Green. I'm also grateful for the trouble-shooting and wise counsel of my agent, Pippa Masson, at Curtis Brown in Sydney, and to Leslie, Jill, Euan and Jennifer, who look after my interests in the other hemisphere.

The True Story of Butterfish
is the first time I've written a story, in parallel, as a novel and a play. Each has fed into and lifted the other. I'd like to thank Sean Mee, Andrew Ross and Sarah Neal for pushing me to explore my characters further, and in new ways, and for provoking me to write new scenes and conversations that have then slipped into the novel as if they'd been there all along.

And as always, I'd like to thank Sarah for putting up with the hours of toil and the angst – and the late meals and lost weekends – that seem to be part of this process.