The True Story of Butterfish (11 page)

I waved him in. I noticed it was getting dark outside.

He smiled his bent ironic smile and he looked only at Annaliese. ‘Mum thought you might want to do some homework before dinner.'

Later that night I sent the two versions of It's Not What You Think to Gunnar and Øivind. I spent another half-hour listening to them first, and wondered if I had found the sound of the Splades or not. But it was time to let the boys in on what I'd been doing. I told them I'd taken a chance and added some female backing vocals. I said that Annaliese Winter was a fairly big name here, but not one they'd know.

Annaliese Winter, who had gone home to do homework before dinner.

I turned off the airconditioning in the studio and opened the sliding door, and the warm air came in with its smell of the sclerophyll forest and the dry baked ground and, somewhere that I couldn't see, small flowers blooming despite the drought.

Annaliese's chair was turned at the angle she had left it when she went round to the mike to try out the chorus of The Light That Guides You Home. I straightened it up.

If she had been twenty-five and not taken away for homework, would I have handled the day differently? Probably. If she had been eighteen? That was just two years away. There was no answer for eighteen. And she wasn't eighteen.

I turned the light out, and locked the door. In the dark I nearly tripped on the stairs on the way up to the back verandah. I had stayed in the studio hours longer than I needed to, sometimes with music in my head, sometimes Annaliese.

The next morning there was an email from Norway waiting:

In the give and take of producing, this was a good result. I picked up the track they had sent, and I played it. Gunnar could stretch himself to Annaliese's harmonies, though his voice was thin where hers had been husky and rich. This was the beginning of the new sound of The Splades, the sound that would take them to the UK and beyond. They had gone with my ideas, with everything, except Annaliese's vocals. I wasn't certain it was the ‘guy track' they thought, but it was theirs, and Gunnar's vocals worked.

I couldn't see, though, how I'd get it across to Annaliese that this was any kind of good news. That quality work gets cut all the time because someone chooses a different direction. That she had ended up singing guide vocals for Gunnar's backing vocals and not something anyone but us would ever hear. I hoped I'd got her ready for it, but I wasn't sure I had. Maybe I had let the moment get the better of me.

I listened again to her singing the chorus of The Light that Guides You Home, and I wished it was a whole song. I wished I could give her that.

‘God, so much for the hair being a disguise. Do you realise how many people look at you?' Kate said as we manoeuvred past strollers and loiterers and a man struggling under the weight of a boxed plasma-screen TV. She was on her lunch break at Indooroopilly and we were on our way to King of Knives.

‘I try not to notice.' It was the first time I had been there for years. It was different to buying groceries at Kenmore at ten in the morning. This was hundreds of shops, a city's worth of people. To see people looking would mean eye contact, and the plan was – always was – to keep moving forward with speed and a sense of purpose and no eye contact. In the absence of Steve Irwin's teeth and trucker's cap, it was the best tactic I had. ‘I hear them though. I try not to listen, but you hear your own name. They say it surprisingly loud. It's almost as if you aren't real.'

‘What will they think, seeing the two of us together?' She was in her uniform – a burgundy skirt with a white top and two badges. One said ‘Kate', the other ‘Manager'. The manager badge hung at a slight angle, as if she'd put it on in a hurry, or been distracted.

‘The harsh reality is they probably won't see you.' We passed a bookstore, a stand selling watches, a shop selling art supplies. There were escalators ahead, more people. ‘It's a strange phenomenon. Publicists, girlfriends, anyone else – in the case of Butterfish even the guys in the band other than Derek and me – all invisible. So if we get stuck and you get snubbed or stepped on, it's not about you. If they wanted to talk to me, or wanted an autograph, you would be a speedbump. That's the official term for it.'

It was Jess's term. Jess, who had taken an elbow in the ribs, a knock to the head, a shove into the gutter, all entirely by accident. Jess, who had been introduced to some industry people by name ten times, and each time they had had no idea they had met her before. When ‘favourite superhero power' turned up on one interviewer's emailed list of questions, it was Jess who told me not to put invisibility, since it was altogether too demeaning.

‘I'll bear that in mind,' Kate said. ‘I think I'd be happy to leave the autographs to you anyway.' We passed Kmart and a shop where a vacuum cleaner kept a ball bobbing in the air. ‘King of Knives – what kind of a name is that? I'm surprised they even let them register it.'

‘It was probably a few years ago. There was probably even a time when you could have King of Guns, but those days are long gone.'

‘I think it used to be on the second floor, King of Guns. Just down from Queen of Semtex.' She stopped, and gave an appalled kind of laugh. ‘I think I just made a terrorist joke. That's probably very bad.'

‘We'll have to get you an orange jumpsuit and put you in a cage.'

‘Orange is
so
not my colour.' She rolled her eyes, Annaliese-style, and laughed again. Or maybe the eye rolling had been Kate's style all along, and Annaliese had taken it on.

King of Knives, it turned out, was very businesslike, very culinary. A middle-aged man with big glasses was running a knife through a sharpener and talking to a customer about the technicalities of the edge.

‘Probably not the place for your Queen of Semtex material, I'd be guessing,' I said quietly to Kate as we stood at a glass cabinet.

‘Don't,' she said, trying not to laugh. She punched me in the arm as she said it, then pulled her hand away and pretended it had been somewhere else. She cleared her throat, and stared straight ahead, through the glass at two rows of Victorinox knives. ‘So, what should I be looking at?'

‘Something medium-sized and multi-purpose, I reckon. That way you only need one. And I'm buying, remember. And the idea is to get you a good one.'

‘You don't have to...'

‘I know. But we had that fight two days ago, over oyster mushrooms, and you lost. So that's how it is. I'm buying.'

We settled on a thirteen-centimetre Global utility knife, exactly the same as the knife I had in my own kitchen. Mine had been a present, and I hadn't realised until now how well chosen it was. It had been from Jess, whose fingerprints were all over this shopping trip in a way I hadn't expected, and it had spent too long in the storage facility down the road. Jess was still a presence, in incidents and small things said, though that was it, mostly. I realised I had little that was stronger to hold onto, not from the past few years. We had become a succession of small details and then, in Louisville, stopped.

Kate weighed the knife in her hand and I could tell the grip felt right. She nodded. She looked closely at the blade, as if she could see its sharpness.

‘I'm buying you lunch,' she said. ‘If lunch is feasible for you in a place like this.'

‘Feasible? Sure. People might talk to us. Or they might not. They're better when you're eating. It's toilets that are the worst, men's toilets. “Hey, aren't you...”' I mimed the instinctive mid-stream half-turn. ‘And then it's all over your shoes.'

‘Men urinate on you?' She looked horrified, and glanced down towards my shoes, as if the tell-tale splatter marks might still be in evidence.

‘Not with my consent. And not at all now that I stick to the cubicles.' Where, occasionally, you hear them talking about you at the trough. Was that Curtis Holland that I saw in the foyer? Was that that guy from Butterfish? No, that guy's too fat. Etcetera. How shit was their third album? Yeah, how shit were the other two? Ha ha ha. All the while with one hand on it, thrashing urine messily against communal stainless steel, standing in the piss of previous customers.

‘I know a place,' she said. She led the way to a down escalator and into the nearest café at the bottom, past diners and the counter and all the way to a booth at the back. ‘Everyone sits at the tables outside. No one sits here.'

We were next to the kitchen doors and I could hear trays clattering, water pounding into a sink. The doors swung open and a waiter came out with two plates of white-bread sandwiches dressed up with alfalfa sprigs. Outside, a spruiker worked the crowd a few shops down, selling discount shoes.

We put our orders in and I fetched us glasses of water from the water cooler.

‘Annaliese came home buzzing last night.' Kate said it as if it might be good news, or might not. ‘She was singing in her room, probably the song you were working on.'

I thought straight away of the email from Norway. ‘She did a good job. I'm glad you played me that DVD.'

‘I don't think she got a thing done on her history assignment. But there's always the weekend for that.' She was holding her water glass in both hands, like someone about to read tea leaves. ‘I'm glad she got to do it. Could you make a copy for her? Whatever happens?'

‘Sure.' I planned to already. I would burn her a CD. Gunnar and Øivind were missing a chance for something good, but I didn't think I would talk them around. That was a conversation I had to have with Annaliese though, not with Kate, not today. It was Annaliese's singing on there, and she would expect to have it treated as her business. I knew her well enough to know that.

‘Her history assignment's the least of my worries.' Kate was following a train of thought. She reached down into her bag and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. ‘This was in the bin. I'm pretty sure it came from Mark's room.'

She handed it to me to read. The writing was double-spaced Times, and the piece described the brutal killing of a pig using two dogs and a hunting knife. Some notes had been made on it, in small, meticulous, black capitals. ‘Intestines' had been changed to ‘guts'.

‘Maybe the lesson is that I shouldn't go pulling things out of the bin. But what if he's ... what if he's doing this?' She was holding her head in her hands now, looking out from under her hands at me as I read. ‘Okay, he's not doing this. But why is he writing it?'

‘I don't know. Maybe it's for school. Some kind of character monologue.'

‘Yeah,' she said, not impressed with the only guess I had. ‘From that Shakespearean play about the guy and his two pig dogs and the knife. One of those king plays, I'm sure.'

‘King of Knives?'

She laughed, and it surprised her. ‘That is particularly lame.' She was still smiling though. ‘King of Knives...' Her expression changed again. She gave up the smile. ‘He also – and this was for school – he once wrote a story in which someone...' She leaned forward. I knew why. ‘...did a shit in his father's car. A car exactly like his own father's new one.'

‘I'm sure that's metaphorical,' I told her. ‘Unless you know of a shit to the contrary.'

I wasn't certain why I was going into bat for Mark. He seemed at least as likely as anyone else I vaguely knew to do – or procure the doing of – a shit in his father's car. I could imagine him laughing his scratchy laugh long into the night, regardless of the consequences, the grounding for life, the binning of his games software, the loss of access to iTunes or whatever source he had for his preferred bone-shaking metal. I could see him fantasising about it being true, and his father forever approaching his fancy yellow sports car transfixed by the idea of the turd that had once been waiting for him on the passenger seat. So he would buy a new seat, a new car, but still the thought would linger and never again would his staff be trooped to the basement for him to show off.

‘He used to teach himself magic tricks when he was young,' Kate said, re-examining another, long gone, Mark. ‘We still have the book. I found it the other day. It was part of a kit, but most of the bits got lost years ago.' I could see him, his bent little smile as he guessed the card you picked or drew the coin magically from your ear. ‘And now look at him. I think it's a divorce thing. He's seen a therapist, you know. Not recently, but ... He's borderline oppositional defiant disorder.'