The True Story of Butterfish (6 page)

On Friday I played a fierce half-hour of Space Invaders and then worked on a Splades song that I had been ignoring. I added bits, and then subtracted twice as much. D-verb, a Hammond-organ kind of keyboards sound. I had pulled off enough of the bells and whistles by late morning that I found myself recording an acoustic guitar track for its rawness rather than any other contribution it might make. I imagined a bar in a backwoods town, the drummer working the snare with brushes, and a guitar that had been carried across the country without much care. I recorded it to pick up every squeak of the fingering, and then wondered what Reason or Sample Tank might have for me when I went looking for the drums. I wanted leathery-faced old-guy brushwork that came with a battered hat and no teeth, and a sense of unshakeable rhythm that got built into the hands in the thirties.

No, wrong sound. Clever but wrong. My mind was on my father's old blues records – very old blues records – and that wasn't the way to take this. There was an element of it in the song, but just an element, and it was lurking in the background and meant to stay there. I threw most of Gunnar and Øivind's work back in, but tried to be selective about it. They had a sound, and I should go with that.

‘What do you want? What do you want?' How many times had I asked them that in Svolvær? Plenty. We needed an album they could live with until the last interview in the last country. We needed a couple of potential hits to keep the music-company people in London happy, but we needed to avoid quirkiness, since there's no maths quite as certain as quirky plus Scandin avian equals one-hit wonder. We needed to keep their sound intact but bring it across towards the international mainstream.

I was enjoying the puzzle that presented me, and not minding at all being the grizzled veteran of the business, the one who had been through the mill and had all his excitement worked out of him, only to see it replaced by anecdotes he no longer had the grace to tell. And I didn't let Gunnar and Øivind know it, but they would eventually look on this as the best time – the last time they made a record almost for its own sake, full of promise and without the weight of expectations. Expectations existed, of course, but they had been calibrated in London and kept out of the heads of the Splades for now.

I brought up Øivind's guitar part, which played all over my half-baked work of the morning.

Then movement caught my eye next door, through the bushes. I realised it was mid-afternoon and school was over for the week. I heard the sound of a body entering the pool in a clean dive, and some strokes being swum. Annaliese got out at the end near me, topless. She picked up a towel and patted herself dry. She was almost facing me, but she seemed to be looking off into the trees behind my studio, though not at anything in particular. She was wearing only a black bikini bottom, and standing in the one place where she would be almost completely visible. Then she spread the towel out across a banana lounge – I could just see the end of it – and she disappeared from view. All but her feet and calves, as she lay face down in the baking sun. The rest of her was gone.

The green lines marking the volume of Øivind's guitar had tipped up into orange and then fallen away. The track had ended, and the only sound came from the airconditioning unit in the wall behind me. I told myself I couldn't have seen what I had just seen, couldn't have watched.

I wondered if it would be best to re-record the bass, once everything else was right.

‘It's a big yard,' Mark said as he looked it over. We both knew it was a big yard, but now it had to be put into words, with an appropriate sense of the burden it was about to place on him.

Despite the heat, he was wearing black shorts and a black T-shirt again, though the design had mostly flaked off this shirt, which hung like a sack. It might have once said Slayer or Stryker or something else that was almost certainly heavy metal, in a gothic font and inappropriately umlauted. He was leaning like an old hand on the mower he had clattered along the street from his house. He was wearing a black cap on which someone had had the word ‘dude' embroidered, in black. The sun glinted from his ear nail.

‘Could be fifty bucks, I reckon,' he said, with the gravitas of the large-animal vet who's telling you the whole herd has to go. It's hard news, but he knows you're man enough to take it on the chin. ‘Plus ten for providing the mower and the petrol. So, sixty.'

I nodded, and tried to appear as though I was giving it the right amount of thought. I looked around, appraising the furthest mowable parts of the block.

‘And the price stays fixed regardless of fluctuations in the price of fuel, and you rake the grass once you've mowed it?' I nearly mentioned the ten-day rolling-average oil price out of Singapore, but I would have laughed then. I already had to look away from the dude cap as it was.

‘All part of the service,' he said, still cheerless.

He reached out a pale sweaty hand for me to shake, and the deal was done. I went back inside, and heard the mower squeak and rattle its way to a corner of the block near the road. With a couple of pulls of the cord, he had it started.

I was taking a day off, determined to take a full day off. I'd been squinting at the screen and hunched over like a monk for too many hours of the preceding few days, and I knew I wasn't hearing anything the way I needed to.

So, I had read three newspapers in their entirety, slept through lunch and was starting on a slow-simmering curry while drinking the day's first ice-cold Stella. The curry was a lamb rogan josh, with bay leaves and a stick of cinnamon and whole cardamom pods and cloves, and it worked out best with two hours or more on a low heat.

Mark pushed his way up and down one side of the house. I gave the spices a couple of minutes in ghee before adding the onion, then the garlic and ginger.

‘I'll do yours if you'll make that curry,' Derek had said to me more than once when we'd been handed our updated interview schedules on the Supernature tour. And I'd hang out in my suite's kitchenette, giving the pot an occasional stir while he served up identical anecdotes in interview after interview. Then someone labelled me enigmatic, and we got to do that a lot less. I was becoming a candidate for the ‘so how does it feel to be the quiet-but-fucked-up guy in the band?' interview, and that's best dealt with by cooking quicker meals and pulling your weight.

Mark methodically worked his way around without a break until all the grass was mown. I went out onto the back verandah to find him leaning on the rake under the shade of a tree near the studio.

I offered him a drink, and he said, ‘A beer'd be good.' He was bright red in the face and his shirt was drenched with sweat and flecked with grass clippings. The dude cap was pushed back and wavy strands of hair were stuck across his forehead.

‘I'm not having that “special occasion” debate with you,' I told him. ‘I was thinking of your hydration. Water, you know.'

‘I'm aware of it. Water, yeah.' He put on some kind of smile then. ‘Water'd be good.'

I went inside, saw my own beer on the counter and felt like he'd brought out the mean old man in me. But, no, I couldn't go giving out beers to fourteen-year-olds to avoid feeling old. I put the stubbie in the fridge and took out a jug of cold water.

Annaliese was walking around the side of the house as I opened the screen door. She saw me and stopped.

‘Hey, Curtis,' she said. She was wearing oversized round sunglasses of the style favoured by people like Paris Hilton and Mischa Barton. They were almost half the size of her face. ‘Mark has to go home.' She turned to look at him. ‘Dad's on the phone.'

‘Really?' he said without much interest. ‘Do I have to?'

‘Apparently.'

He gave the ground a scratch with the rake, but didn't move.

‘Some school report,' she said. ‘You're being dysfunctional again.'

‘Oh, that,' he said, as if it was old news. It probably was. He looked up at me. ‘I'll come back and do the raking. If that's okay. This might take a while.'

He leaned the rake against the tree, pulled off the dude cap and pushed his wet mat of hair away from his face. He smiled, as if set to be amused by the interrogation about to come his way, and the deadening monosyllabic replies I was sure he was going to offer.

‘Right, then,' he said, and he walked off across the dry mown grass, in no particular hurry.

Annaliese made no move to follow him. She was dressed in a short skirt and a singlet top, and they didn't quite manage to meet in the middle. I stood there with the jug of cold water and the glass.

‘How about a tour of the studio?' she said.

‘The studio? Sure.' I didn't know what I had expected her to say, but that wasn't it.

I left the jug and glass on the verandah table and walked down the steps. A tour of the studio. She was about to be underwhelmed. I noticed the closed curtains and realised the key was back in the house. I was practically standing at the door by then.

‘Pretend you didn't see this,' I told her, and I reached under the steel beam that ran beneath the front of the studio and found the spare key in its magnetised holder.

‘Who are you?' she said, and laughed. ‘Maxwell Smart? You'll show me the studio, but then you'll have to kill me?'

The studio air felt trapped and stale and warm when I opened the door, so I turned the airconditioning on as I stepped inside. Annaliese pushed the door shut behind her and stood next to me, her sunglasses in her hand.

‘It's um...'

‘It's early days,' I told her. ‘Still halfway between a granny flat and a big studio, massive mixing desk, the remnants of lines of coke on every horizontal surface.' She either played it cool or thought I was serious, or thought the line was too stupid to acknowledge. Whichever way she took it, she said nothing. ‘Or in my case, the rings of forgotten coffee cups on every horizontal surface.' With that I looked like either a wimp or someone with something to hide. Almost certainly the former.

Annaliese took in the array of mute machines and powerboards, and the musty odour that had been locked up here when I first arrived. In her mind, this room had been different. It looked like a bachelor loungeroom prior to its Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makeover. And I was playing the role of the slob with the grey ponytail and the food-spattered shirt who called it his little slice of a shambolic heaven. Then in would come Carson and the gang, and I'd be given a red raw screaming body wax and mocked and prodded into something fit to leave the house, maybe even bring a tear to the eye of my long-long-suffering girlfriend.

‘Right,' Annaliese said. She had expected a place where magic happened, and there was none on offer. ‘What's this?'

She had managed to pick the one frivolous purchase in the room.

‘Space Invaders,' I told her. Or, to be more precise, an original circa 1978 Space Invaders console, refurbished and in full working order, sitting there low and sleek and black with its red knob and glass top. The perfect antidote for overthinking or boredom, or the times when every sound seemed like a big mistake.

‘What? Who are Space Invaders and what space are they invading?'

‘Don't do this.'

‘Ha,' she said, and smirked, looking down at the smudgy surface and, yes, coffee rings. ‘I was just kidding. Maybe. It's a toy from the twentieth century, right?'

If I had come back to Brisbane to stop being a rockstar, Annaliese was determined to get me there as quickly as possible. I wanted to be much cooler than the ageing flabby man I felt I was at that moment, the gormless stack of a creature showing the young girl his old grubby toy.

‘I think I'm missing all those people I used to pay to give me self-esteem.'

‘I'm sure it's a good toy, Curtis,' she said, without a hint of esteem-support in her tone. ‘Hey, in the language of your time, I dig you, man. I dig you like a fossil.'

‘That's so not my time.' Fossil. Excellent. Dig you, man. Also excellent.

‘Fifties, eighties, whatever – it's all history.'

‘You can't say that. There's a generation difference. You can't just dismiss it as being all the same.' But she could, and she had. ‘The fifties is my father, and he was this old high-panted guy who didn't think there had been any real music since the war. By which he would have meant World War Two.'

‘Every guy over thirty looks high-panted to me.' Dismissed again. ‘So, can I hear something?' She was looking towards the Mac and the keyboard.

‘Yeah, good idea. It'd be nice to have a chance to show you this isn't just the junk room.'

‘Well, yeah. I guess you didn't know that you'd be having a visitor.'

Behind her and through the window, I could see Kate step into the gap between the bushes at the back of their house. She had a pool scoop in her hands and was lifting out leaves. Annaliese followed my eyes, and turned to see her mother.

‘Okay,' I said, filling a space in the conversation before it seemed like a space.

I wasn't sure if I saw her smiling before she looked down at the keyboard and said, ‘So show me. Show me how it all works.'

I thought of her, in that same gap between the bushes the day before. And now here in her midriff top and her short skirt. I wanted to open the window and call out to Kate, let her know Annaliese was here for the studio tour. I was sweating. The airconditioning was blowing cold air at my head, but the room was still full of trapped heat.

I woke up the Mac and the track I'd been working on was sitting there, laid out on the screen.

‘Wow,' Annaliese said, as if my job had turned real in that instant.

I opened a new file, and set up master, midi and two audio tracks. I fed the keyboards in through the M box and assumed that a few bars of something I could work with would just find their way to my fingers. Annaliese was beside me, close by my right shoulder. Her eyes were on my hands, which were sitting neutrally on the keys. Her own hands were held as if they were ready to follow any move I made.

‘Actually, why don't you?' I pushed the chair back from the keyboard. ‘Why don't you play something and then I'll do some work on it?' I stood up.

‘What?' The self-assured Annaliese of the fossil remark was momentarily absent and she seemed, for just a second, fragile. ‘All right. All right, I will. I'll give it a try.' She sat, manoeuvred herself in the chair, touched the keyboard with the tips of the fingers of her right hand. ‘Anything?'

‘Anything. Just let me get it started.' I reached for the mouse. ‘As soon as I set you up with a click track, you're right to go. This'll give you a rhythm to work with. If you put the headphones on, you should hear it coming through.'

‘So it's like a metronome,' she said, correctly.

‘Yeah. A metronome's kind of like a click track for old people. Mozart, people like that.'

‘Bastard,' she said, and laughed. ‘I just happen to be classically trained.'

‘So, I should expect a lot then.' I set the rate to a hundred beats per minute. ‘Something modern might be nice, if you've got it. Something from your own non-high-panted time. Unless classical's all you do.'

‘Non-high-panted. Right. So, tragically, Asia's Heat of the Moment is out...' she said, pretending to give her song selection serious thought.

‘That was one second of weakness.' And yet, somehow, another small victory for Annaliese over the fossil. ‘Now, put the cans on and play me something.'

I got the click track started, she nodded her head a few times to settle into the rhythm, and she played. The song she picked was Missy Higgins's Scar, or something improvised from it, and my keyboard setting wasn't right for that, but I could change the sound once we had it down.

She played maybe ten bars and said, ‘How much?' She was taking it somewhere new by then. I'd been right to think that she could play.

‘That'll be fine. Let's work with it.' I pulled another chair over and she moved along. ‘I should have set it to “grand” before you started, but we can fancy it up a bit.'

She watched everything, every move as I lushed it up, went for D-verb, pushed it up to one hundred percent wet and clicked on ‘large plate'. I went into Reason and tested some drum loops, and then had to admit we should have gone there first. I was doing it all out of order.