The True Story of Butterfish (23 page)

There were pool noises when I opened the car door on Sunday – girls shrieking, a bomb dive. They were happy noises this time though. I could hear Annaliese's voice, but not the words. Then laughter, Annaliese and another girl laughing.

In my hand I had the CD I'd burned, but I put it back in the glove box. If there were friends over, it wasn't the time. I'd had it mapped out, most of the conversation anyway. I would walk in with the CD on show, Annaliese would clear the room to listen in privacy and we would have five minutes for me to tell her what I needed to. She would dismiss me with a ‘whatever', I would tough it out and make her look me in the eye, and we would talk our way through Monday, put some kind of patch on the hole it had left in how she felt about herself.

And then I would play her the song, The Light that Guides You Home. I wanted her to hear it, and I wanted to be there when she heard it for the first time. I had run through that part of the conversation too in my mind as I'd driven next door, and now I wouldn't be having it either. Not yet.

More pool noise came from behind the house – big splashy freestyle strokes, another shriek.

Kate was at the open front door, and she waved when I looked up. She came over to the verandah railing as I got close to the steps and she said, ‘He's just about ready. They haven't been home long.'

She leaned forward with both her hands on the railing. Her dress had thin straps that crossed her collarbones, but otherwise her shoulders were bare. I wanted Mark not to hurry, to go through his entire black T-shirt collection until he was satisfied he'd chosen just the right one.

‘How was the packing?'

She wasn't dressed for packing. She looked as if she was about to go somewhere, or had just been somewhere. ‘Pointless. My involvement anyway. I got fed every five minutes and they wouldn't throw away a thing.'

I reached the top of the steps, and stood facing her. She folded her arms and leaned against the railing with her hip.

‘So, it's all in boxes,' she said. ‘About a thousand boxes. Nostalgia rules.'

‘Nothing wrong with that. I've been looking through some of my father's junk lately. He was writing an opera. And I had no idea. Do talk to your parents about their operas, if you get the chance.'

She nodded. ‘You were teaching that lesson to Derek all week, yeah?'

‘Yeah.' And roughing him up occasionally, and discovering he'd slept with the person I was married to. Not all secrets are operas. ‘He's not an especially quick learner though. But there are people who might say I require some patience myself, so I'm sticking with the task.'

‘So, now that he's gone, how does
your
life work from here? Derek still seems to be flitting around LA, but what about you?'

‘I can't say exactly. But maybe I don't need to know
exactly.
I'm learning that it can be nice to discover a few things along the way, instead of living it like a tour itinerary. I've never been a flitter though. I'm not Derek.'

‘Hey.' It was Mark, standing in the doorway, his hair slick and wet. He was wearing a shirt with a collar, a crumpled paisley-style mustard-and-black shirt. One end of the collar was bent up as if it had sat for months with weight on it.

Behind him, down the hallway and through the house, came more shouting from the pool. The music volume jumped, and I could hear Annaliese and another girl singing along.

‘Lucky the neighbours are out for the next few hours,' Kate said, meaning me. ‘That's Siobhan. The friend from school who lives down the road. She's here for dinner, since Mark's having a night out.'

‘Just make sure you don't do mocktails,' Mark said, his sarcasm as unleavened as ever. ‘I couldn't bear to miss that.'

‘It's all I've been hearing about since they got back. Mocktails.' Kate glanced Mark's way, gave him a parental once-over to see that he had shoes on both feet, clothes fit for the public. ‘I think it was the brandy-essence Alexander that was your favourite, wasn't it?'

‘It was right up there. It was the one that was most like melted ice cream. And it's not like we've only been talking mocktails. You've been doing all that running around getting ready for Curtis to come over. Scrubbing the news print off your elbows, putting on your party dress.'

‘Ha,' she said, with a look of horror crossing her face. ‘There's no party dress. And if there was it wouldn't be this old thing.' She fixed her smile back on. ‘Well, I think I have pizza to make.'

‘Sure,' Mark said, giving us each a sly look, as if the three of us shared a secret.

He walked behind me down the steps, and I could feel a conversation brewing, a conversation I wasn't ready to have yet. We got into the car. He pulled his seatbelt around and clicked it into place. Kate raised a hand to wave as we backed away.

‘Pizza to make,' Mark said dismissively. ‘Everyone knows you
buy
pizza.'

‘So, um...' I wanted to talk first, to steer the conversation away from Kate. ‘So thanks for that article. The one that you left me with the fish instructions. It was...' Despite having two days to do better, all I could come out with was ... ‘nice prose.'

‘Thanks,' he said, in a downplayed way that sounded close to sincere. ‘I can send you a few more, if you like.'

‘Sure.'

We turned right onto Gap Creek Road and headed for town. He fidgeted awkwardly, as if he had more legs than my car had room for. He pulled the seatbelt in and out a few times as though it wasn't quite right, whatever he did.

I asked him how his weekend was and he said, ‘He's got cable. There was a Family Guy marathon. I haven't slept since Friday.' He gave a bear-sized yawn, as if proof was needed. ‘It's quite cynical, that show. The dad has a butt for a chin.'

He pulled one of his boots off and looked in it for something. A rank smell, like a cheese gone wrong, drifted over my way, and I may have flinched. He reached down and hooked the boot around his toe and pulled it back on. He stamped on the floor to drive his foot in properly, and he held his fist up to his mouth to stifle a burp. His cheeks puffed up and the gas slid out of his mouth with a hiss. I assumed a good depth-charge of a fart would be next.

‘Do you reckon it's true that if you get no sleep for two weeks you die?' he said. ‘That's what I heard.'

‘I don't know. I don't know who'd stay awake for two weeks.' It had the neatness of an urban myth about it. ‘You'd get pretty scrambled though.'

‘Yeah. Yeah, you would.' He seemed to find that an appealing prospect. ‘I'm going to try a week, maybe ten days. I should be pretty fried by then.' He leaned forward, fiddled with the car stereo. ‘Hey, you got your iPod hooked up to this?'

‘No. I haven't got around to having an iPod. I used to be married to someone with an iPod, so I had iPod visiting rights.'

‘You could buy your own,' he said. ‘That happens.' It was a welcome, uncomplicated answer. ‘So that's, like, fully over now?' He kept his eyes on the traffic in front of us, and asked it as if it wasn't much of a question.

‘Fully. Courtesy of her impending marriage to another guy, from what I hear.' The traffic lights ahead went orange, and then red. We coasted to a stop. ‘But that's a positive, I now realise.'

‘Closure,' he said, in a Doctor Phil-style American accent, and he gave a big sniff that sent snot rattling around his sinuses.

‘That's right. I was thinking I'd throw a mocktail party to celebrate my progress, but now I'm not so sure it's the thing.'

He gave a mucousy laugh. ‘Well, I'm in, obviously.'

He was horribly sleep-deprived, and all secretions and stumbling pheromones and truncated half-sentences, but we had a thing going that was starting to look genuinely like rapport, and I didn't mind it at all. We drove through the city and the Valley, then down James Street past Harveys and Luxe and the Cru Bar, where crowds hung around looking beautiful and moody and sharp, next to blackboards with chalk descriptions of wines by the glass, the words spelled somewhere between phonetic and dictionary standard. Mark took it all in, and I wondered if he saw himself there in five or ten years, or saw himself somewhere very different.

The traffic slowed and stopped as a car pulled out in front of us and another backed into its parking spot. Two women who had been looking at the Cru Bar blackboards caught up with us and walked by. They both had short black hair and fringes as blunt as wide paint brushes. One of them pushed a red Bugaboo stroller, the other carried two brown paper bags of organic groceries. My London friends had a Bugaboo, given to them by one set of parents. They told me, jokingly, that anyone who was anyone had a Bugaboo or, if not that, a Maclaren. Celebrity stroller envy, and two brand names, was all I knew about children. When Kate had mentioned children in the pool, I hadn't known what to do, what to think. What got me most, though, was that I hadn't grown up enough to give the issue any thought. I was a blank page, without even the question on it until then.

Patrick was on the street outside his apartment block when we pulled up. He was wearing a snug-fitting semi-see-through white T-shirt and jeans so tight it was clear he dressed to the left. And was uncircumcised. Or maybe that's just how I saw it, or how the light fell. He had a jacket in his hand. It had a cut that might have been nautical. I imagined anchors on the buttons. He waved, noticed Mark in the passenger seat and signalled that he would get in the back.

‘The wardrobe's great,' I said as he opened the door. ‘But you do realise it'll be kind of daggy.'

‘It's a club,' he said indignantly. ‘There'll be a dress code.'

‘Yeah, like shoes after six. Men to wear shirts.'

He made a harrumphing noise and got in. Mark moved his seat forward a couple of notches, which brought his knees up to the dashboard.

‘Men to wear shirts?' Patrick said. ‘What kind of a club is that? I mean, why bother waxing?'

Mark looked straight ahead, giving nothing away. Patrick, whose performance was for him, reached forward, tapped him on the shoulder and introduced himself.

I did a U-turn and took us through Teneriffe, past the long solid buildings that had been woolstores but were now apartments, past old Queenslander houses with giant stooped Moreton Bay figs in their yards, past the site where the gasworks had been pulled down and which a few thousand more people might soon call home. We followed the river towards the bay, then took the Gateway Arterial north through the industrial buildings clustered near the airport, and the golf course and the wetlands, where wader birds bent down from their high legs to pick around in the shallows. Mark's mucus and gas eruptions settled down into more of an equilibrium. Patrick badgered him with school questions he didn't much like but that Patrick rarely had the chance to ask anybody. Instead of giving much in the way of answers, Mark came out with a marginally relevant story or two about his father, caricaturing his pomposity and self-absorption. In that style, the three of us travelled north as the sun sank down into the heat haze and settled into the low peaks of the D'Aguilar Range.

‘Hey, Chubs, remember when Dad wanted to take us climbing?' Patrick said as the Glasshouse Mountains came into view. He had grabbed the back of Mark's chair and was leaning forward. ‘And then he worked out we might need a rope, so it never happened.'

‘Yeah. Where did he get that idea?' I could vaguely recall it. It was after dinner one night and we were watching TV. Not a show about mountains though. ‘He wouldn't even climb stairs if he could avoid it.'

‘We were slothful, or something. That's what it would have been. Some initiative to stop us slothing around.'

‘What?' Mark said sluggishly, blinking hard as he pulled out of a nose-dive into weariness. ‘I thought your generation was all about playing backyard cricket and stuff. I thought we were the sloths.'

‘I'm sure you're extremely slothful,' Patrick said supportively. ‘But we were sloth pioneers. You wouldn't know how to sloth if Gen X hadn't gone there first.'

We took the Caloundra turn off, and Patrick looked up the Powerboat Club on the map. We turned right off the main road into town, and passed a caravan park and blocks of holiday units. Then we were on the seafront, with the waters of Pumicestone Passage and Bribie Island to our left. With the very last of the daylight faded and gone, families were packing up, stuffing towels into bags, bunching fishing rods for carrying to their cars. Pelicans hung around in the hope of scoring leftover bait or the last fish of the day, walking like drunks, eyeing off children who might, from nowhere, drop a bream or a flathead to the ground through simple clumsiness. But the cars were filling and hope was exhausted, so one by one all but the most optimistic of the birds were casting off into the night and flying like boats that skimmed just above the surface of the water, cruising back to wherever they slept.