The True Story of Butterfish (20 page)

She led us inside. Derek's father was still nowhere to be seen. The balcony doors were open and the city lights stood in a clear row in the distance, behind West End. The bone-coloured curtains lifted a little in the breeze and flapped down again. Other than a few signs of human habitation – a newspaper, a ball of wool with two knitting needles lancing through it and making an X – it looked like a magazine photo. It was all taupe and bone and beige, with subdued downlights, and the TV was in a Balinese teak hutch, with shutters.

She took us into the kitchen and said, as if it were an instruction, ‘This island bench – it's beautiful, but not for food.' It was a big polished slab of grey stone, with flecks of white and cream and pale yellow. ‘It's Persian limestone, so acid does it no good. But there's a lot of space on the other benches. Enough anyway.'

They were stainless steel, and she steered us over to an area she had prepared next to the cooktop. There were chopping boards and a knife block, and more downlights set unobtrusively into the underside of the cupboard above.

‘I'll go and see what Bill's up to,' she said. ‘He was having a bit of a lie down.'

Derek put the soup on the Miele cooktop and lifted the lid. Three sizeable chicken breasts bobbed around in the brown stock. Further down the bench sat an elderly toaster oven, a jar of instant coffee and a container with old spoons and ladles jammed into it, like too many flowers in a vase.

‘Jesus,' Derek said quietly. ‘It's not like I didn't try.'

He leaned over and lifted a roll-up screen that concealed a built-in plush-matt-steel Gaggia coffee machine that showed no signs of use. I realised that all the new appliances I could see were designer brands. At the far end of the kitchen even the dishwasher was Miele, though near it a pair of pink rubber gloves hung over a sleek European mixer tap at the sink, with a bottle of cheap green detergent sitting behind them. I took the lid off the Tupperware box.

There were noises from down the hallway, voices and a door shutting. ‘Here he comes,' Derek's mother's voice said, coaxing us all to feel upbeat about it.

I thought I heard Derek say ‘Fuck' as he breathed out, but I couldn't be sure.

His mother led the battered Bill Frick into the kitchen, and he went with my whole name as well. ‘Curtis Holland,' he said, a little louder than he needed to. He reached both his hands out and made his way forward carefully so that they could take my hand and shake it. They were bony, veiny hands, cool and dry. He was smiling, in a wizened but genuinely happy way. His head was gripped by the white gauze that wrapped around it, holding wads of dressing in place and sticking up above his shaved scalp like a Christmas-cracker crown. It didn't quite hide the purple lines marking out the upper margins of the radiation fields. The striking feature, though, was his jet-black glimmering eye patch. ‘How do you like the new gear? Pretty flash, isn't it? Carmel made it. Said she'd make me a parrot to put on my shoulder to go with it.'

‘Jesus, Dad,' Derek said before I could reply. ‘Don't people usually wear hats or something? It's all a bit on show.'

‘I'm inside. Why would I wear a hat inside?' His one rheumy eye turned towards his son, who had nothing more to say. ‘And now, me hearties,' he went on, in a voice that had gone all pirate on us, ‘who be the designated driver? There be drinks to be had by all as can have 'em.'

Carmel laughed. ‘He's no Johnny Depp. But at least he's not that one with tentacles on his face either.'

‘I'd better get to the next phase of dinner,' Derek said. ‘Curtis, shall we?'

I let him tear the chicken breasts into pieces, while I tipped the other ingredients into the soup and brought it back to a simmer. He worked on the chicken slowly, then stood stirring the soup with an old wooden spoon.

All the credit for it came his way when it was served, and he didn't even notice. Bill sat opposite him, repeatedly losing pieces of chicken from his spoon. Derek looked past him, at a bad watercolour painting of flowers that I knew his parents had won as third prize in a raffle years before.

Carmel offered to help and Bill said, ‘Oops, splashdown,' as a chunk of celery landed back in his soup. ‘I'll soldier on,' he said to her, ‘as long as you're okay with a bit of mess.'

She looked sad, brittle for a moment. She made herself smile. ‘It'll all come out in the wash.'

She glanced across to Derek, who was blinking, holding his spoon halfway to his mouth.

‘Fuck,' he said, but not loudly. ‘Stop being so falsely cheery. Not everything...' It came out of him as though it was on a spring, and then it just hung there.

‘No,' she said. ‘I know that.' She put it firmly and clearly, as if she'd known it for a while. She stared him down.

‘That's star anise, isn't it?' Derek said, his eyes back on his bowl of soup. ‘I'm sure I can taste it.'

‘Beats me,' his father said, his good eye turned Derek's way. ‘But it's great. It's delicious. And I'd better make the most of it. I'll lose my sense of smell with the radium, more than likely, and that knocks out most of your taste.'

Derek stirred his soup with his spoon, as if looking for something quite specific and hard to find.

‘Right,' he said.

He bought two bottles of red wine on the way back to my house, and he sat in the passenger seat with them clunking against each other on his lap as we turned onto Gap Creek Road.

‘Jesus,' he said. ‘Pirates. Mad old people.' He stared straight ahead and held each bottle by the neck, as if he was steering something. ‘See what it's like? I've had days of that.'

Days of not quite engaging, days of gazing at the bad art set just beyond the ugly life in front of him. Days of thinking that a real world was waiting for him an ocean away. His parents had taken real life as far as pantomime to make him see it, and he had kept on fighting them. And he would be gone in under twelve hours.

‘It's probably just that they're not strong enough to take you by the collar and wrestle you onto the road when you shit them,' I said, in a way that I hoped sounded friendly.

He laughed. ‘We're not going to have to do that again tonight, are we?'

We passed the landscape gardeners and the paddock where the two caramel cattle spent their days. The moon was ahead of us, above the trees. Derek reached forward and flicked between radio stations, dismissing each one on its first burst of music or word of conversation.

‘You should rig your iPod up in here,' he said. His other arm stayed around his wine, cradling it.

I turned the car into the driveway and the front of the house glowed brightly in the headlights. I didn't have an iPod, never had had one. Most of his conversational repertoire relied on shots in the dark, and the goodwill of the listener.

Derek carried the wine up the steps and I followed with the empty cooking pot and Tupperware box.

‘Now, I want to get properly drunk,' he said as I worked through my keys to find the right one for the front door. ‘There's a total of fifteen point three standard drinks in these two bottles.'

He found a corkscrew and two glasses and we sat on the verandah with moths batting their soft wings against the light. Night settled in all around us. He inhaled the wine as I sat nursing a glass of it, and he fidgeted as if death might be in the next shadow and set to tap him on the shoulder.

‘Jesus, wildlife,' he said, looking up at the light and all the bugs it had called in. ‘Wildlife just getting on with it.'

A gecko jumped forward and took a small moth by the head, pulling it back into its mouth in jerks, crunching on the slender struts of its wings. Pieces of wing fluttered to the floorboards.

‘I think, when my father died, I didn't really process it,' I told him. ‘It was too big and too ugly. And I ran away from it and got back into work.'

‘Hey, I took your interviews for a week when you went to the funeral.' He had been about to pour the last of the first bottle of wine into his glass, but he stopped. ‘We divided up your interviews for a week and I took most of them.'

‘Yeah, I know. I know. And that was really helpful. This is about me. I didn't fix anything. Beneath the surface nothing got dealt with. That's my point.'

There was a movie-style confrontation that I was avoiding, one in which I would accuse him straight out of doing the same, of dealing with nothing, though in his own spectacularly bad way. A way that involved rarely having sex with a person enough times to know their full name, and using whatever substance came to hand to obliterate any connection to the dangerous real world, where consequences abound, and good luck and bad luck do too, both of them needing dealing with. Then he would take offence and we would square off in the dust at the foot of the steps where the light ran out and throw a few witless punches at each other, his mouth would bleed again and nothing would be fixed.

‘And that made a mess of a whole lot of things.' I was keeping it about me, for now. ‘Or contributed to it. Plus, you have to factor in that issue about being a shit communicator and keeping everything in my head. That, I realise, didn't help.'

He studied me carefully to get a proper reading of how I was saying it and, when he realised he was supposed to, he gave a small laugh. He noticed the bottle was still in his hand, and he emptied it into his glass.

‘Yeah, look about that...' he said as he put the bottle down on the table.

‘It's true enough.'

‘I'm glad it's over too, you know. The band. I had a year there when I thought my head might literally explode. I'd be walking behind you thinking if this gets any worse, Curtis'll be wearing brain on his back. It may have affected me a bit.' He stopped, and thought about it. ‘Okay, understatement. I may have been an arsehole from time to time.
Was
an arsehole from time to time.'

He put on a tired wine-stained smile, and shrugged. St Louis, Jess. None of it needed to be put into words.

‘So what have you got in LA, aside from girls who take you for colonics, and Mitchell Froom's biscuits?' He shrugged again when I said it, and he kept the smile as it was. It was just sort of stuck there now though, adrift from the thought that had started it. ‘You won't have these people forever, okay? Your parents, I mean. Your father has a brain tumour. This shit is in your life now. So don't be a dick and work it out too late. That's all I'll say.'

He dragged another chair closer to him with his toe and put his feet up on it, crossed at the ankles. He wasn't going to make a contest of it.

‘I can't stay here,' he said, as if it was a fact he couldn't dispute, and was resigned to. ‘I'll go crazy if I stay here. I have to find whatever's next. I don't fit in here any more. I don't know what to do here. I don't totally know what to do in LA either, but it's LA. So it doesn't seem to matter. Whereas here? It might work for you, I don't know. I've got to get something happening, so I've got to be somewhere where it can happen.'

He had picked up the corkscrew, ready to open the second bottle of wine, but instead he set it back down on the table, its arms folded in to its sides. I wanted to tell him there were spas all over the suburb happy to swing like it was the seventies at Hef's place. I had no idea if it was true, and suspected it wasn't, but I liked the line. It was very Kate, in a way that Derek had no prospect of appreciating. He was welcome to the cleanest colon in LA, the best biscuits and all the strippers he could fit into his Romance Two.

‘I've said my piece,' I told him, just to let him know I was finished and there would be no haranguing. ‘This is me trying to have balls, trying not to be the shit communicator. You will regret this. That's what I'm telling you.'

‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Yeah, okay.'

And he turned away from me and looked out towards the road, following the ducking, weaving path of a large pale moth as it flew away from the light.

I made Derek French toast again for his final breakfast.

He sat with his phone flipped open in his hand saying, ‘Are you seriously telling me there's no one I can phone to get some bacon? In LA I could make a call and there would be bacon.'

‘There would not be bacon. You have never called anyone in LA for bacon.'

He groaned. Mineral water fizzed in the glass in front of him. ‘But I know I
could.
See?'

He seemed to have forgotten that we had lived together in Malibu for months when we were recording the last album, and stayed in perhaps ten LA hotels at other times. I was not some groupie who would be impressed with boasts about dial-up bacon. I whisked the French toast mixture, though it was probably ready to go.

‘Hey, neighbours sometimes have bacon, right?' he said. He pushed his chair back and stood up.

‘This'll be fine without bacon.'

But there was no stopping him. ‘I'm going to go and knock on their door,' he said. ‘In tried and true neighbourly fashion. Then some time they can come to you for sugar, or whatever.' He was already moving, heading towards the driveway.

‘Take the short way,' I told him. ‘Go out the back and through the hole in the hedge. Everyone does at one time or another. If you're going to be neighbourly, you might as well get it right. And time's a-wasting. We've got to start thinking about the airport.'

I put the bowl down and started to make myself a coffee as I watched Derek stride out across the yard, the well-honed beefy triangle of his upper body carried along by his unworked legs. Tight pants, tight T-shirt putting it all on show, in a place where there was no one to appreciate it. He pushed through the hedge at a point where I couldn't see a gap, and I saw him go up the front steps towards the door. He was out of the house again in a minute, and turning towards me with a bacon rasher hanging from each hand, proud as a boy who had just landed two small fish.

I dipped the bread into the mixture, and I oiled the pan.

‘They're good people,' he said as he came in the back door. ‘You know, I think they liked it, the whole neighbour thing.'

It was a performance, still, for him, like everything else. On the table, his phone buzzed as he presented me with the bacon. He picked it up, looked at the number.

‘Hey, it's Pia,' he said. ‘Do you hear from her much?' She was the band's Sydney manager, and he wasn't looking for an answer. He was already taking the call. ‘Hey Pia, what's happening? ... No, no, it's only a brief visit.' I could hear her voice, explaining something to him, but I couldn't make out the words. ‘Okay, yeah. I'll talk to Curtis. I'm at his house. We'll give you a call back in a few minutes.' He flipped the phone shut and put it down on the table. ‘Someone's sent Who a photo of us buying groceries yesterday. They want to give it a run.'

‘Since they don't give groceries anywhere near enough coverage, obviously.' I could have done without it, but it was his last day here and we had only been buying food. That could be public, if they wanted it to be.

‘And, naturally, they want to know if the band's getting back together.'

‘So, what do we say? Only for the purposes of meal preparation?'

‘Yeah, why not?' His hand reached down to the phone again, and he gave it a spin on the table. ‘I'd happily tell them I was missing your French toast.'

‘Good. So, no band. And they'll push a bit harder and we tell them we remain friends and that you just happened to be in town on a flying visit. And, guess what, you've already flown. Nothing parental.'

‘Too easy. Sounds like the dullest thing I've done in ages. Perfect. And why don't I go back to LA and create a diversion? Just to help you settle safely back into suburban obscurity.' He smiled a cocky smile that I had known some women to like. ‘Now, get cooking. I didn't finesse that bacon for you to just stand there with it.'

He left the room, finesse having not entered into his day, and perhaps life, so far. I dropped the bacon into the pan, and swirled the bread once more around in the mixture. He came back with his backpack and set it down on a chair, with his leather jacket folded over the top.

‘Ah, LA,' he said, pretending to be wistful. ‘It's already been far too long since I almost had sex with a D-grade celebrity.' He sat down, picked up his knife and fork and readied himself for the food. ‘I'll come back,' he said. ‘In a month or so. When he's doing the radiotherapy. It'll be shitty, and I'll be calling on you for soup. I'll sort the tickets out today, when I get to the airport. I've decided. So leave the sheets on my bed, okay?'

I turned the bacon, and dropped the first piece of bread into the pan. It hit with a sizzle and steam rose in a cloud.

‘I might even wash them for you. I can do fresh sheets.'