The True Story of Butterfish (18 page)

‘It's got a comma,' he said. ‘Right in the middle of the title. So that's elegant, at least.'

‘They don't even Alphabetise their CDs,' he said as we bumped our stone-cold-sober way through the night, heading back to my house.

‘It's not all about you, Derek.' He had been looking for the Bs. He always did, and never discreetly enough.

‘I bet they don't have Written in Sand, Written in Sea. Arseholes.' He stopped, as if listening for something. The night was close to silent. He shook his fists at the sky in mock fury. ‘Why didn't anyone keep the faith?'

But there was no faith. We were just a band. A band that panicked and fought and overcomplicated its third album. Somewhere up the road, through the trees, someone's front verandah light went on. Derek didn't see it.

‘There were people who loved that album,' he said, tripping over his own feet in the dark. ‘People who got it and thought it was brilliant.'

‘And by now you've probably slept with both of them.'

‘Oh, probably.' He said it as if it was wearily self-evident. It was a performance that straddled the fine line between parody and his vast but precarious ego-driven notion of himself, as usual. ‘Hey, how about those neighbours? I totally get it now. I totally get why you'd be saying yes to dinner. I think I've got a mother–daughter thing going on. If that's the kind of crazy wrong thought that crosses your mind in the clean world, I should have brought some pills.'

‘You mean, you and the two of them in some romp situation?'

‘That's the one.' He was pitching it as if it was a great idea, one that amused him and maybe stirred him a little at the same time.

‘I don't think that's how it works even at the Playboy Mansion. It's not the same as twins, Derek. Or miscellaneous busty faux-lesbians drenching each other in Cristal. Frankly, I think it's problematic with the twins as well but, you know ... unless the mother and daughter thing is just about one of them holding the hose in your arse while the other one turns the tap and gives you the wash out?'

‘Man,' he said unflappably, ‘I worked out my colon's not a sexual place. Nothing that far in is. It just doesn't have the right receptors.' He stayed somewhere off in the thought for a while. It sounded wise, the way he put it, but it wasn't. He was irritating me with the way he was dragging my neighbourhood into his glibness. ‘Are you, you know, with the teen, in any respect? Surreptitiously showing the schoolie some adult life?'

Anger surged in me, biologically. My heart jumped into my throat at a gallop and his head looked like a small but easy target. I wanted the dumb provocative look off his face. I could make it out in the moonlight, but also from memory.

‘Look, just...' I got stuck there. I wanted to tell him to grow up. I wanted to tell him his father might be dying, and it was not an event to miss. I wanted him to stop drilling down to the thin seam of story that concerned the glitch in my relationship with Annaliese earlier in the week. ‘Just stop being Derek Frick for a second, will you?'

‘Hey, I was only checking to see that the way was clear. Didn't want to step on any toes. Who doesn't love a chick in uniform?'

Derek Frick was back in my life and trampling all over it. I'd had years of his smug pronouncements from his patch of amoral high ground, the harm he caused with a bleary feckless smile across his face. He stumbled on a rock and I grabbed him by the collar, pushed him back hard and our feet tangled and we crashed to the road. I landed on him and my head hit his face. His mouth opened and shut like the mouth of a fish. He gripped my shirt front but he couldn't breathe. I pushed myself up from the bitumen, and he lay there winded.

‘How long before you fucked my wife did you stop being my friend?'

He blinked up at me, and gasped. He slapped the road with one hand and, finally, the air rushed in. He took big heaving breaths, and then pushed himself onto his side and up into a crouching position. He steadied himself with both hands and his breathing settled. He coughed, and spat onto the road.

‘You wouldn't even know.' He said it quietly, still looking down at the road, but I heard it. ‘You're such a shit communicator, you wouldn't even know.' He stood up slowly, and turned to face me. ‘Is that blood?' He opened his mouth to give me a look. ‘I think it's blood.'

‘It's just spit.'

‘It tastes like blood.'

‘It's not blood.'

‘Did we just have a fight? Did we just have a two-second piss-weak version of a man-on-man fight out here on the road? I think we did.' He laughed, and I thought I saw some blood run between his teeth.

‘It's the picture all the magazines wanted. They just weren't here at the right time.' I was less angry. My heart was still flying along, but my muscles were spent. One lunge and a fall was all they had in them. There was an apology I owed him, I thought, but it was stuck in my throat waiting for an uncounted number that he owed me.

‘And it wasn't about me stopping being your friend or being anything,' he said. ‘The business side of it swamped the fun side of it. I found new ways to have fun, you stopped having fun. You didn't even tell Jess you'd stopped. You didn't tell her anything. The rest of us didn't know what to do when you got married. It was such a crazy bad decision. You know what I regret? More than the St Louis incident? Which I do regret, by the way, contrary to what you might think of me. I regret that I didn't stop you that stupid day beside the road on the outskirts of Reno when the two of you got married and she ran around getting the paperwork right while you went on with the job as though it hadn't happened. “Best day of my life” – that's what you should be saying about your wedding day. And you went through it like a fucking zombie.'

‘Yeah. I'm not exactly proud of that myself.'

‘I should have had the balls to stop you. That was the day I should have been your friend, but I was just another guy in the band.'

In the distance, an engine hummed. Ahead of us down the road, the air filled with a diffuse light and a car came over the crest of the hill. The pool of its headlights fell closer to it as it tilted down the slope and came towards us. We stepped off the bitumen. It picked up speed and caught us, fleetingly, in its lights as it drove by. Derek was wiping blood from his chin.

We both turned to watch it go, as though it was something to marvel at, something rare and not often seen, a four-wheel-drive like all the others, its red taillights heading towards the forest.

‘My parents want us both to go over there for dinner tomorrow night,' Derek said, as if a new start could be made to the conversation. ‘They told me they hadn't seen you for ages. Didn't even know you were back. I said we'd cook. Which means you, obviously.'

With the camber of the road, he was standing a little below me and looked smaller than he was. There was none of his smugness now.

‘Obviously,' I said. ‘Well, I think I'm free. And the poor guy deserves something other than a plate of your nachos on his first night out of hospital.'

He laughed. ‘Hey, how well is this visit going? I thought we might get to fix a few things if I stayed with you. That was seriously part of my plan.' He shook his head, wiped his chin again with the back of his hand. ‘Let's get back to your place. I want to see where all this spit's coming from.'

‘So, you lined this up to tell me you've finished the opera?' Patrick said when he came into Harveys and found me at a corner table. There was a cautionary tone to his voice.

‘No. That didn't seem like such a good idea.' I folded the newspaper and put it down beside me.

He sat and picked up the laminated menu, glancing at it without reading. He turned it over in his hands a couple of times and tapped its edge against the glass table top, as if he was straightening a handful of loose pages. ‘I'm sorry about that. For the strange reaction. I just ... It had been in my garage and suddenly it was like it had slipped away from me, this crucial piece of Dad. And then it was becoming something else. He was gone but you were working on it together. You'd blown back into town and managed to find a way to him that I didn't have.' He stopped, and smiled. ‘That sounds like I've been in therapy ever since. Which isn't the case – I have far too much self-belief for that. But my shitty reaction was about me, not about you. That's my point.'

‘Thank you. And I'm not working on it, just so you know. There's a few bars I could play you if you ever wanted, but that's it.'

One of the staff came up with a notepad and we put our orders in. Patrick put on a glum face when I went for a plate full of fat and carbs, but this time he kept his thoughts to himself.

‘So, the opera,' he said, leaning forward in his seat. ‘What's it like? Is it any good?'

He was frowning, as if his expectations were low. Which meant he wanted it to be good, better than good. He wanted our father to have left us a great surprise that we could take out to an awe-struck world.

‘It has its moments,' I told him.

The waiter arrived with a carafe of water and two glasses. Patrick didn't look up.

‘It's bad, isn't it?' he said. ‘That's what that means.'

‘No, it's not bad. And I'm no real expert when it comes to the genre. Opera in general, not just the outback explorer sub-genre. There are some good ideas there, but I don't know. No hits. Maybe that's what I'm saying. And maybe that's not the way to think about opera. I've had too many conversations about music with the wrong people.'

He put his hand on his thigh. His phone was buzzing in his pocket. He pulled it out, looked at the number and said with a weary dismissiveness, ‘Of course it's you. I'm going to have to take it.' He flipped the phone open and held it to his head. ‘Miranda, what's happening?' His tone was breezy now, fake but convincingly so. ‘Well, if you don't like it in orange we can try it in something else ... If it's the shade that's bothering you we can go more tangeriney ... Look, I'll be back in the office soon and I'll call you from there. This'll be easy to sort out. Really.' With Miranda duly placated for now, he finished the call and closed the phone. ‘Bloody clients. I thought it was going to be a real issue.' He pushed the phone back into the pocket of his tight-fitting pants, and glared at the counter as if our meals were intolerably late. ‘So, no hits,' he said. ‘And there were all those letters from people who didn't want to help him.'

‘It takes a lot to get an opera up and running.'

‘Yeah. Opera. Why would you try it? And Sturt, Captain Sturt's Whaler. It sounds like a book that would win the Miles Franklin but that only about ten people would read. Why couldn't he have just got a few friends together and written some songs? He knew people, whiskery old jazz drummers, and all that. They could have played the Story Bridge Hotel on Sunday afternoons, surely.'

I could see them, veteran music teachers on their afternoon out, playing for beers and loving every second of it. But instead he'd shut himself in with a cocked-hat captain and the fantasy of an inland sea.

‘He dreamed big,' I said, ‘and I guess there's nothing wrong with that.' And then, inside his zipped-up chest, a scruffed-up old artery tore and blocked and his dream was boxed and put away.

‘So, how's Derek?' Patrick said. ‘How's all that going? Has he disgraced himself yet? How are the two of you?'

He knew there would be something to tell. Derek left stories in his wake wherever he travelled.

‘He's fine. He's not coping at all with his father's brain thing which, from the little I know of it, seems like a big deal. He's at the Wesley now, or maybe at his parents' place since his father's getting discharged today. He's...' I was going to ramble and say something safe, drop in a few of Derek's LA stories, but I stopped myself. ‘Did you know he slept with Jess? A couple of days before we broke up, before she left? That's been the big piece of news.'

His phone buzzed in his pocket again. He looked at me as if he was half a step behind and just catching up. His mouth was open. ‘No. No. My god.' His phone stopped buzzing and, after a pause, a message came through. He honestly didn't know. I was more relieved than I'd expected to be.

‘And then last night he made it sound like I made it happen. I'm a shit communicator, apparently.'

‘Wow. I didn't think we said that. Not that directly anyway.' He was fully caught up now, and ready to be himself again. ‘But, really, how does that lure the dick out of the man's pants and on its way to his best friend's girl? I think there's a bit of responsibility to be accepted by a couple of other parties here, regardless of how you happened to be communicating.'

‘Yeah, well, I showed him a thing or two about communicating last night. I sort of knocked him over onto the road. So that was sophisticated.'

‘You knocked him onto the road? He's lucky he didn't steal your marbles or you might have stuck his head in the toilet or emptied his lunch box into the bin.' He pushed back in his chair and laughed. Behind him, our waiter served salads in high white bowls to the two women at the next table. ‘But, really, I can't believe he and Jess did that. And then he puts it back on you and your communication skills when, to be honest, it's just that you're like Dad. And I don't mean that in a bad way at all. Things stay in your head and you don't even know it. You don't know that people haven't heard them while you've been thinking them. I did eighty percent of the talking in that house when we were growing up. Sometimes I talked just so there'd be noise other than Deutsche Grammophon.'

He was being straight with me, nothing more. I had spent much of my childhood wishing he had kept more in his head, without having any idea of how the silences were nagging at him. He enjoyed the clamour of advertising, the lunches, the pitches, the incessant talk. I had always thought they'd be the worst parts of his job, all of them competing for air and pulling him away from the quiet times when ideas come. Not for him. He had put a name to this difference between us, and I had never seen it for what it was. Maybe that's what happens when you come along second. You don't notice those things. Perhaps he was like our mother. I wanted to ask.

He topped up my water, and then his own. The glass door swung open and a new group of people came in from the heat. They were led to a nearby reserved table for six. Four of them looked like ad agency people – funky frames to their glasses, spiky hair, shirts by industrie or someone similar – the other two were steely-haired middle-aged men in matching chambray shirts. Perhaps they sold cars or made nails or had a timberyard that had traditionally shot its ads on a handycam and featured a big-chested average-looking girl in a bikini getting memorably worked up about a pallet of four-by-two.

‘Come back to me,' Patrick said, waving a hand in front of my face. ‘Give me a bit more than twenty percent. Even if you're pissed off with me.'

‘I'm not. I just hadn't seen it that way. I'm not pissed off with you. I don't even think you're wrong.'

I couldn't see our mother's features in his face, though I had only a few photos of her to go on. He was already older, I realised, than she had ever been. That was a new thought, and my breath stuck in my chest. I looked away from him, to the lengthy description of Harveys' version of osso bucco written in white on the pane of glass to his right.

‘Look,' he said, ‘someone should have pushed Derek into the dirt years ago. It would have been character building.' He reached out to his water glass, holding it with the tips of his fingers and thumb and rotating it like someone trying to crack a safe. It was a habit and I'd seen it before. It was nothing to do with drinking, and he was probably unaware of it. ‘And very wise of you to do it deep in the anonymity of Kenmore. It would have been the wrong look entirely if you'd done it in midtown Manhattan when the band was breaking up.'

‘My thoughts exactly. They hardly gave me a chance to anyway. They had us in adjacent rooms with two different publicists, drafting statements which they then swapped – the publicists actually met in the corridor to swap them – and we each took the red pen to whatever the other had written. I could see his back through the frosted glass. He always leans back in his chair. Sometimes I could see his shoulders pressed against the glass.'

‘So, decking him in your own street I'd call a kind of progress. You know what I think?' It was rhetorical. He was going to tell me. He was winding up to tell me in a big brotherly way. I was up for it, up for some brothering. ‘I think plenty of people's lives come unstuck. Weirdly, Chubs, yours came unstuck in a rockstar kind of way, and we all got to read about it, not that what was published was necessarily the true story. And in the end, it's not that much of a rockstar story anyway. It wasn't about drugs or any of that, any of the Derek shit. It was about Dad, and Jess, and the ride of a lifetime going off the tracks. So, suddenly there's this vacuum. A lot of people hit that vacuum, get a bit lost – a lot of people who are thirty-something. I tell you this as someone who has months of thirty-something left.' He put on a face that was meant to look wry and wise. He would be forty soon. ‘This is just your mid-life crisis, Chubs. Everyone's entitled to one. Even you. Even the poster boy for dag rock. And, like Dad, you just put your head down and try to push through. Unobtrusively, no histrionics, with the exception of decking Derek. I'm assuming you haven't been dating Russians or writing operas...'

‘No.' After talking about myself in thousands of interviews, I had finished every one knowing I'd be reconstructed paper-thin in the article. That was all I had given them – a paper-thin version of me – all I had let them notice. Occasionally a crack had opened up but that was the extent of it. Yet Patrick, my brother, knew me to my magma after all, knew some deeper hidden strata. And we were still here, still talking, and what he saw looked okay to him. The strongest part of what I felt was relief. ‘No Russians, no operas.' I was thirsty, I needed water. I drank half a glassful. ‘But I am getting my cabin cruiser refitted with a mighty pair of twin outboards ... Actually, there was something I wanted to talk to you about, on the subject of cabin cruisers. Sort of.' I could hardly have made the link sound less natural if I'd tried. ‘The young guy next door, Mark. He's fourteen and sarcastic in a clever way, and deafening himself with metal, and somehow I ended up telling his mother I'd do some kind of men's thing with him.'

‘And you're calling on me because that's not what you're into?' He laughed. ‘I don't think I do fourteen. I think there are laws about that. And I don't think I even do it in international waters, if that's where the cabin cruiser comes in.'

‘I don't think it was that kind of men's thing she was thinking of. Though I'm sure she'd be fine if, one day, etcetera etcetera...'

He laughed till his head rocked back and he slapped the table with his hand. ‘Excellent. Bake a big cake for his eighteenth birthday and leave room for me to pop out of it.'

The older of the two chambray-shirted men looked up from the laptop the agency people were showing him. He stared at Patrick, looking over his glasses and frowning as if he couldn't quite bring him into focus.

‘His dad's a bit of a non-performer. His parents split up a few years ago. So Kate – his mother – wants some kind of positive male influence in his life. So far, Derek's got him stupidly drunk and – surprise, surprise – turned out not to be it. And I've got him over a couple of times to work on the garden, but that doesn't count for much. So I thought about manly things, like climbing a mountain, and then I realised that he'd hate it and I'm about half a lifetime undertrained. So how about the Powerboat club?' It sounded like a bad idea as soon as I heard myself say it. ‘You've wanted to take a look at it since you found Dad's membership card. I think we both do. You, me, Mark, a drive to the coast and dinner at the Powerboat club. He's with his father this weekend, but they get back on Sunday afternoon.'

‘The Powerboat Club? This Sunday?' he said, not immediately telling me I should just get myself less fat and kick a football with the kid instead. ‘Is anyone...' He chose his next word carefully. ‘Expecting this idea? I mean, I'm up for it – you know I am – but what about him? And anyone else. What's this actually about?'