The True Story of Butterfish (24 page)

‘There it is,' Patrick said, pointing and staring out the window into the darkness.

The carpark was half-full and light spilled from the open foyer of the Powerboat Club. Patrick was looking for signs, for traces of our father, as we drove in. The air was warm and salty and full of mangroves when I opened the car door. I got out and stood on the bitumen and took a deep breath. Patrick was already out and scouting around.

‘Hey, Sunday roast,' he said, as though it was quite a find. ‘I knew it. How could you go past that?'

He was at a noticeboard just next to the entrance, with Mark ambling up behind him. Next to the menu and the special orange flyer promoting the Sunday roast were a page of dress requirements and a poster advertising an appearance in the coming weeks by some remnant combination from the legendary local eighties showband Wickety Wak. Our father had known someone who had played in their brass section back then, but that was surely a chance association, not any kind of link to the Powerboat Club. I thought of telling Patrick, but knew it would send him off on some unhelpful tangent that would end only with us googling people who were better left ungoogled.

‘All right,' he said. ‘Let's see how this works for us.'

Like a magician revealing the final card in a trick, he pulled our father's membership card from his wallet, and led the way inside. The foyer was brightly lit, with a display of promotional merchandise – club T-shirts, stubbie holders, sun visors – at the far end of the counter. A couple aged about seventy were signing in. The jangle of poker machines rang from a doorway to the right, and directly ahead of us was the bar and dining area. Patrick was studying the black-and-white pictures of past commodores and the boards of office bearers' names. There was no one we knew.

He stepped up to the counter when the couple moved away, and the laminated card made a snapping noise when he placed it confidently down.

‘Great, Ted,' the staff member said. She wore a name tag with ‘Shanae' on it. Her blonde hair was bunched behind her head and scraggy at the ends. She must have been about twenty-five. She glanced at Patrick and put on a smile. No recognition, no curiosity, none at all. Ted Holland was a name on a card to her. ‘And you'll be signing these two guests in then?'

‘Yeah,' Patrick said. ‘Where do I do that? It's been a while since I was here.'

She slid the book along the counter. ‘No worries.' She looked across to Mark and me. ‘Now you guys just have to carry these passes with you, right?' She was indicating some slips of paper attached to the book. ‘But make sure any food or drinks go on Ted's tab and you get the member's price.'

‘So there's a tab?' Patrick thought he was onto something. ‘Members get to run a tab?'

‘Yeah. Like at the bar, and that. You can settle up at the end of the night. I think they've had that system for a while.' She tore our passes along their perforated lines and handed them to us. ‘Youse all have a great evening, okay?'

Patrick thanked her and scanned the walls one final time for clues before leading the way into the dinin-groom. A family celebrating something had lined up three of the square laminated tables and were well into their burgers or fisherman's baskets or Sunday roast. Three men stood near the far wall with tickets in their hands watching a greyhound race on the wall-mounted TV screen. The couple who had come in ahead of us were down at the bain marie, giving their dinner options some serious thought.

‘This is so not Dad,' Patrick said to me as he took it all in.

The dogs raced frantically but in silence. ‘Ah, died in the arse,' one of the punters said as they crossed the line. ‘Could have paid for my tea if he'd got up.'

‘Well, Sunday roast, I think,' I said to Patrick, who was stuck where he was standing. ‘That's got to be the way to go.'

‘Sounds good to me,' Mark said, taking in the food smells and seeing nothing else in the room worth a second thought. He stretched his arms out, and yawned.

‘And a brandy-essence Alexander with that?'

‘Coke'd be fine, thanks.' He glanced around in case someone had heard, but no one was looking our way. ‘Whatever one they have that's got the most caffeine. It hardly touches me any more, and this is day three of my awakeness marathon, remember?'

We ordered our meals, then went to the bar for drinks. Both times the Ted Holland card came out, both times the service was friendly and blank. We took our number to a table on the deck outside.

‘So what do you reckon?' Patrick said. ‘Mystery? Complete mystery?'

On the TV inside, the dogs were about to be released for the next race. A sea breeze came in and flapped the plastic screens that were pulled down around the edges of the deck. Juice Newton's Angel of the Morning played from a speaker above my head. I noticed Patrick scrutinising Mark's ear-wear properly for the first time, working out that it was a faux nail rather than a stud, with the flat scored head of the nail in front of the lobe and the bent tail hanging out the back.

‘I can't see him here. I can't imagine it.' Our father on this deck, our father putting a few dollars on the dogs, our father wining and dining his internet date at the edge of the dark Pumicestone Passage. ‘We're going to be stuck with some mysteries, and this looks like being one of them. So you have to tell me everything about
you.
In case you get hit by a bus or whatever. I don't want to find out about weird life memberships or your thing for the Russians once you're gone.'

He laughed, and leaned back in his chair. He took another look over his shoulder, back into the dining room. ‘I thought when we came in that I'd look up and there he'd be in a commodore's cap in one of those photos. An old sea dog with a briar pipe. But that's not going to happen. Okay, me. Something about me. Something that would be mysterious if I got hit by a bus.' He gave it some thought. ‘Okay. In my flat you would find a couple of knitting needles and a pattern for a scarf. I have a friend who knits and he tells me it's very therapeutic.'

Mark laughed in a way I hadn't heard him laugh before, a big open – maybe even non-cynical – laugh that he didn't try to damp down. ‘So this is our men's session? We get the Sunday roast and we talk about knitting? I don't think this is what my mother's expecting. Hilarious. When she goes out with her friends, they drink too much and talk about guys.'

‘Well, obviously that's my life most of the time,' Patrick said, feigning offence, ‘but I was trying to go a bit deeper. Okay, Chubs. Your turn. What's hiding in your cupboards that'd have me baffled?'

‘Nothing.' Annaliese's clothes. Annaliese's clothes balled up, stuffed in a jumper and sealed in a bag. I'd answered too quickly, too twitchily. ‘A story of Mark's. It could be interpreted as pornographic.'

‘Jeez, it'd better be,' Mark said. ‘If that's not porn, I'm taking money under false pretences.'

Our drinks arrived, two beers and a Coke.

Patrick waved his hands around. ‘Back up a second. Porn? You write porn, and Curtis buys it from you? I thought you mowed his lawn.'

‘No,' Mark said, as if Patrick wasn't too bright. ‘
Magazines
buy it from me. I just
gave
it to Curtis. One artist to another, you know?'

‘All I'm saying is – 'it was my turn to clarify – ‘it would be an unexplained item in my house if I got hit by a bus. There being no other porn in the house.'

‘Sure. That's what they all say. “It was just that one time...”' Patrick, his brush with the world of knitting now out in the open, was enjoying the game. ‘Which leaves us with...' He turned dramatically to Mark. ‘You. What's lurking in your room, waiting to be discovered?'

‘Well...' Mark looked around the dining area, his crumpled collar buckling as he turned his head. ‘There might be some fish.'

‘Fish?' Patrick said, doing his best to sound inquisitorial. ‘And what would be so confidential about fish?'

‘Well, that's the big question, isn't it?' He took a large swig of his Coke, then battled to keep the gas down his oesophagus. He looked at me, then at Patrick again. ‘You can't tell anyone this, right? No one else knows. And it's a bit bigger than knitting.'

‘Secret men's business,' Patrick said, in a tone that sounded completely serious.

‘My mother – I heard her talking to her friends. There's this uni course she wants to do. It's a teaching thing. And I think she'd be really good at that. But she can't do it while she's still got two lots of school fees to pay.' He paused, as if the next part wasn't easy to word.

‘What about your father?' Patrick said. ‘What about his contribution to your school fees? Doesn't that make a difference?'

‘Yeah, well, that's not his thing. It's not how he wanted to allocate his resources. So, I have a couple of business ventures. There's the articles, which you now know about. And I'm about to breed Siamese fighting fish. So, that'll bring the money in big-time if it works out, and I can maybe pay one lot of school fees. Then she can study. That's the plan.' He drank more Coke, and cleared his throat. It was clear we weren't to make too much of it. ‘And Annaliese doesn't know, okay? She's got enough to deal with. She's the clean-cut high flyer and that's a full-time job, I reckon. I've got that whole oppositional defiant disorder thing working for me. It takes a lot of pressure off. Also, she likes to come across as worldly and experienced, but she's not.'

He was looking at me, as if he had tacked on his final point for my benefit. I hoped it was just his version of the message I'd got from Kate in the pool. He didn't mention the robe, the studio.

He coughed into his hand and gazed past me and towards the poker machines with a blank look on his face. There was no revelation coming.

‘We've got to do something for this boy,' Patrick said as Mark shambled off in the direction of the gents. ‘Oh my god, it's all for his mum. You'd just hug him if he wasn't so ... sebaceous. And then there's that...' He waved his hand around near his ear. ‘Carpentry accident.'

‘It's silver, I think. The nail. It's not real. Jewellery for the oppositionally defiant. It's all about keeping your parents afraid of what you might do next. But, you know, don't judge a kid by his ear nail, as he's just demonstrated to us.'

Our meals arrived, plates loaded with roast beef and gravy, pumpkin and potatoes, with cutlery rolled tightly in thin white serviettes. Mark clumped his way back from the toilets, the poker machines pinged and rang raucously, the PA system kept the seventies rock coming. A zit on Mark's neck flared red from his unsuccessful attempt to squeeze it in front of the bathroom mirror.

‘Hey, classic nanna style,' he said as he saw the food and fitted himself back down into his chair. ‘Cool.' He picked up a piece of pumpkin with his fork, smeared it with gravy and shoved it into his mouth.

‘Okay, I've got bigger things in my life than knitting,' Patrick said, his own knife and fork in his hands and hovering above his plate. ‘Not so long ago my partner, Blaine, left me, and he had this...'

Mark coughed and gagged, swallowed hard, tried to stay cool. He put his cutlery down and blinked.

‘Are you all right there?' Patrick said. ‘Do we need to call for a Heimlich, or anything?' He was looking around, as if a Heimlich was genuinely something you called for.

‘No, no. A bit of pumpkin went the wrong way. It's just...' He cleared his throat forcefully, moved some mucus around in his sinuses, drank a mouthful of his Coke. ‘It's all okay now. Blaine. You don't get a lot of Blaines.' He said it, I was sure, because it sounded like an adult line. Patrick's sexuality had somehow taken him by surprise. He was young after all in some ways, plenty of ways.

‘And that's a good thing, if you ask me,' Patrick said. ‘If they're all like my ex. What can I tell you that's nice about Blaine, so that I don't seem like a complete bitch? He sequesters a few kilos of carbon, I suppose. Anyway, he used to work from home. He used the second bedroom as an office. And he smoked. Not in the rest of the flat since I wouldn't let him, but he smoked in there. I made him shut the door and open the window, but the room's ruined, of course. I can steam-clean the carpet, but the walls need painting and the quote I've got's twelve hundred dollars.'

‘They sound like expensive painters.' I could see where he was heading.

‘Is there any other kind?' He glanced my way before focusing his attention again on Mark, who was manoeuvring another implausibly large load onto his fork. ‘I don't know if you do painting, but you can have the job if you can match the quote.'

Mark's eyes threatened to leave their sockets at the thought of so much money, and he nodded and made a frantic mmm noise through his mouthful of food.

‘I'll buy the paint,' Patrick said, ‘since I can't expect you to undercut the professionals on paint price and, besides, I'm likely to be very picky.'

Mark swallowed, driving the large bolus of food down towards his stomach with nowhere near enough chewing. His eyes bulged again. It was as if the deal might be off the table in seconds if he didn't grab it. He took a breath, and put on his most business-like face. ‘I'd say all we'd have to do is sort out the transport, and I'd be in.'

There remained no trace of our father at the Powerboat Club, no sign that he'd ever been there. Some mysteries stay that way.

As we drove south on the highway, past pine plantations and mountains hidden by the dark, I pictured him in a commodore's cap in one of those photos from the seventies, and then as the skipper on the Minnow, the boat on Gilligan's Island. I saw him pulling up at the pier that ran from the deck of the Powerboat Club and stepping ashore, ruddy cheeked and windblown and ready for a beer. But that wasn't him. He had more the dark hangdog looks of Thurston Howell the third, the useless millionaire. No boat, no beer, not our father.

‘Well, thanks for giving it a go,' Patrick said. He had been off in his own thoughts and gazing straight ahead at the glowing white lines on the road. ‘I needed to do that, but I couldn't seem to do it by myself. I think I needed you to be there in case anything freaky turned up. Now I guess we hunt down the Russian bride and stage a really bad amateur production of the opera, and we're done.'

Mark, his transient caffeine high long gone, was asleep in the back and had been for much of the trip, his head lolling towards the middle of the car or bumping on the window. The wheel hummed in my hands as we cruised along the bitumen at a hundred and ten.

‘I've been meaning to thank you.' As I started to speak, a semi-trailer surged past us over the speed limit, buffeting us with its wake. ‘For organising the funeral, and all of that. Or, worse, I didn't mean to thank you because I didn't even think of it then. I was a bit of a wreck, but I was well propped up by a lot of people with vested interests. I should still have thanked you though. And done more. I've been meaning to say that.'

‘I was fine to do it.' There was no rancour in his voice at all. ‘Sometimes it's better being the one who has things to do at a time like that. I had to
deal
with it. With him being gone, I mean. You had people who looked like they were helping you, but they were all about you
not
dealing with it. All about being supportive as hell and making sure you were back on the tour in a few days. I had a strong big-brotherly urge to kick their arses.' It was one of the best things he had said to me, I thought. ‘Anyway, now's your chance to turn yourself into a decent human being, Chubs. You've fought your way off the golden treadmill, and here you are.'

There was more traffic as we approached the city and swept left onto the Gateway Arterial. Still Water came on the radio, and I changed stations. I couldn't listen to it, didn't want to hear the snide back-announce that might come after. Or might not. Even if it was complimentary, it was better not to think that my Butterfish job went on and on in radio stations around the world.

‘You know I was shitty with you for years for dropping me from that band,' Patrick said. ‘And now I'm not. As of lunch last week.' He kept looking straight ahead, at the brake lights of the cars in front of us, as if he wasn't saying much. ‘So, you and Dad and the opera – it was kind of like being dropped again.' I went to speak, but he held up his hand. ‘No, let me finish.' He looked around into the back. Mark's chin was still on his chest, his head nodding with the bumps in the road. ‘I know it wasn't like that, but I don't think you could guess how many times my nose has been rubbed in your success. Butterfish, Butterfish, Butterfish. I've had years of people not shutting up about Butterfish. And I even came up with the name. Did you remember that?'

‘Yeah.' It felt like a moment of reckoning that was coming at us from a long way off, deep in the past. I was right back in Patrick's old sharehouse. I was twentytwo, he was twenty-six, I was dumping him from the band and I had nothing good to say.

‘But, you know, all those times I got my nose rubbed in it, there was one thing I failed to notice. It was never you doing the rubbing. I just kept thinking back to you squirming around, trying to drop me, and then off you went to that crazy level of success in the end. But I could never have played in that band, the band that Butterfish became. Whatever talents I've got, they're not musical. You did the right thing. Okay?'

‘Okay.'

‘And I realised I don't actually want to be you, always bracing yourself for the next autograph, or hassle, or whatever. I don't want people to know a hundred things about me before I meet them. It's got to get in the way.'

‘It does. More than I ... Yeah, it gets in the way.' More than I wanted it to, more than I might have guessed. ‘But I can get past it. That's what I'm thinking now. That's my plan.' I was full of things to tell him about Kate, all of a sudden. ‘Thank you,' I said to him. It had been more of a weight on me than I had known. ‘There was a lot I didn't get right with the band, and that was just the start of it.'

‘Well, if you ever have a track that's begging for a clarinet solo, I'm your man. Actually, I'm not. I'm so out of practice, I'd hardly know which end of it to blow into now.' He laughed. ‘As the actress said to the bishop. I'm out of practice with plenty of things. Bloody Blaine. I'm glad he's gone. I know I've said it before, but this time I really am. And who knows what's ahead?' I noticed he had something in his hands. He turned it over and a streetlight, for a fraction of a second, caught its laminated surface. It was our father's Powerboat Club membership card. ‘I think I'll put this away somewhere. I can't see myself – I can't see either of us – going back there.' He took his wallet from his pocket and slipped the card into it. ‘Baby steps, Chubs,' he said. ‘Baby steps towards the big mysterious future.'

‘You and me both.'

The questions – most of them – about the past had been about the future after all. And I realised it was Kate who was on my mind, not Jess, or the band, or even Patrick and the few tame secrets our father had managed to keep his own. Kate and that moment in the pool, and some parts of my big mysterious future that had been neglected in the years when the present had been every thing, coming at me from everywhere, and I made mistakes and didn't fix them.

Mark half woke when we pulled up at Patrick's flat at New Farm. He didn't stir enough to think about moving into the front seat. Patrick clicked the door shut as quietly as he could, waved through the window and headed for the gate, his unworn and possibly nautical jacket folded over his arm. Mark was asleep and dreaming as we merged with the Ann Street traffic. The lights of the Valley and the city towered above us and he saw none of it, nor the curve we took that put us on Coronation Drive, nor the CityCats sidling along, up and down the black water of the river.

Lives went on, packed into traffic, stacked high in the Auchenflower apartment blocks that faced the city and on the wrought-iron balconies of the Regatta Hotel, where I had been a student once, back when beer had been cheap and the pub had been a scruffy, crowded, simple, well-loved place. The city buzzed this Sunday night, at exactly its usual wattage. Its citizens drank wine by the glass and debated the merits of one pinot over another, or ordered in pizza and made their night's choices from the TV guide, or saw a febrile child through a passing crisis, or drove a cab all night long, ferrying the drunk and the sad and the simply weary to their places of sleep.

Lives unpicked and restitched themselves, with wonder and hope and regret, or just with the calm banal rhythms that see us through and let us deal with existences in which we aren't all heroes every minute and aren't all in the midst of the love they make movies out of, and songs. I had written some of those songs, and I had not done it from life or memory, not enough anyway. I had done it from other songs, cribbed the hearts out of them, because I knew what songs were and how you made them.

It was not too late though. Never too late.

I took the CD from its case and slipped it into the slot. With the volume down, I listened to the Splades' Lost in Time. It was a fine song, a song that would catch people and hold them, with any luck. This was the single, no doubt. Their ride was about to begin.

I turned down Gap Creek Road as The Light that Guides You Home came on. Mark stirred at the sound of his sister's voice.

‘Hey,' he said, still not fully awake. ‘That's kind of wussy, but really not bad. Really.'

He was asleep again as the car crested the last hill and the lights of his house appeared in the distance through the trees.

‘We're nearly there,' I told him.