The True Story of Butterfish

Nick Earls is the author of thirteen books, including bestselling novels such as
Zigzag Street, Bachelor Kisses
and
Perfect Skin.
His work has been published internationally in English and in translation.

Zigzag Street
won a Betty Trask Award in the UK in 1998, and
Perfect Skin
was the only novel nominated for an Australian Comedy Award in 2003.
48 Shades of Brown
was awarded Book of the Year (older readers) by the Children's Book Council of Australia in 2000, and in the US it was a
Kirkus Reviews
selection in its books of the year for 2004.

48 Shades of Brown
and
Perfect Skin
have been adapted into feature films, with
Solo un Padre,
the film adapted from the Italian edition of
Perfect Skin,
a top-ten box-office hit in Italy in 2008.
After January, 48 Shades of Brown, Zigzag Street
and
Perfect Skin
have all been successfully adapted for theatre, and the
Zigzag Street
play toured nationally in 2005.
The True Story of Butterfish
is his first work simultaneously written as both a novel and a play.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian
Copyright Act 1968
), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

I was still on my guard back then, when Annaliese Winter came up my driveway in her school uniform with questions to ask about her missing dog. I had stopped work for the day, or for a few hours at least, and I stood in the dark of my loungeroom with a beer I didn't need, watching her through the screen door. A tall stalk of grass was growing between the wheel ruts and she swiped at it with her right hand. I could just make out its head of seeds bobbing in her wake as she came closer.

She had ribbons in her hair, but not in a prissy way. I was sure there was some name for it, for the style. Madonna or Cyndi Lauper had done it that way in the eighties. She was in her school uniform and it was a day in the middle of the week.

Her shoes, heavy black school shoes, clunked on the wooden steps and then on the boards of the verandah. She lifted her hand to knock and saw me inside, or saw something and pressed her face against the screen, using her hands to shield her eyes from the light.

‘Hello,' she said. ‘Is there someone there?'

I put the beer down and said, ‘Yeah,' and didn't know what to say next. ‘Yeah, hello.'

She seemed to hover, silhouetted against the bright dry grass behind her and the harsh afternoon light. She was the first person who had come to the door.

‘Sorry. Come in, come in,' I said, moving to the door and opening it.

She dropped her hands and stepped back and seemed to smirk.

‘I was just working,' I said, though it wasn't true. ‘Just doing a couple of things.' She nodded. It was definitely a smirk. She was one of the cool girls at school, she had to be. ‘Even though you think I was hiding in the dark like some paranoid old lady watching you come to the door.'

‘Clutching a rolling pin in case I was about to attack?' she said, and then she went ‘ha' in a cool-girl this-is-allthe-laugh-I'm-giving-you kind of laugh. ‘I'm not about to attack.'

She smirked with one side of her mouth and looked up at me through the black spray of her fringe. Her eyes were dark and already she was playing some kind of game with me, or that's how it seemed. Her voice was a little deeper and huskier than I might have expected, so her last line had come out with a hint of something that might have been menace or even seductiveness or just a pitch at adult banter. Whatever it was, it stuck with me and it punctuated the moment and it didn't feel quite right for a conversation with a schoolgirl on my doorstep.

‘Well, that's good,' I said. ‘That's a relief. I'm Curtis, by the way.'

‘Yeah,' she said. ‘I'm Annaliese.'

After a half pause she stuck out a hand for me to shake, and she did it with too much force, overplaying confidence, like someone who wasn't actually confident but was in fact in her school uniform talking to an adult she didn't know. This – this confounding mixture – was Annaliese all over, I would realise soon enough. Maybe it's a lot of sixteen-year-old girls – an adult and someone younger both in the one body, the one complex assortment of looks and mannerisms and patterns of speech.

I shook her hand, and then leaned against the verandah rail. Inside didn't seem smart – I'd worked that out. When girls come to your door in school uniform and you're a thirty-five-year-old male in the house alone, you don't take them inside.

‘Annaliese Winter,' she said. ‘I live next door. I'm looking for my dog.'

‘I don't think I've seen a dog,' I told her, and it seemed well short of enough. ‘What's it like? What kind of dog?'

‘Spaniel. Not so bright.' She smiled, and looked past my shoulder, in the direction of the house that turned out to be hers. ‘I haven't seen him since yesterday morning. His name's Oscar, but he's never really got that. I could walk all over the place shouting “Oscar”...' She shrugged, and let it go at that.

I fetched a torch from the kitchen. We both figured Oscar had been killed by a snake, but there was no reason to say it. My long grass could have harboured anything – our houses backed onto rainforest and in this drought-stricken dry-baked late spring snakes were turning up in water tanks and cisterns. Already one dog owner had come home to a sleepy python stretched out across the dusty concrete of the garage floor with a kelpie-sized bulge in its belly. That had been in the suburban paper. And the council had been called, and relocated the snake to the nearby bush where its digestive enzymes could do their quiet work.

Usually, though, the issue was venom. So we walked around my house, shining the torchlight through the slats at the bare dust, looking for a spaniel curled up and sick, and we checked around the studio and Annaliese called his name from my back door because he might at least know the sound of her voice. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called out towards the rainforest, and we listened for any sound of him but heard only the breeze and distant cars.

Some strands of her fringe were stuck to her forehead by then, and sweat ran down her neck and into her collar. I thought of offering her a drink.

‘Does anyone know you're here?' I said instead.

She rolled her eyes and gave a version of her ‘ha' laugh, but with her mouth closed. A ‘Hmm', but with a mocking edge to it. ‘Yep.' She stepped back into the shade, and looked at me. I felt fat – old and fat and failing to measure up. ‘So, what's it like being back here? You've been away a while, yeah?'

‘Yeah.' Sweat was ballooning from my armpits and neck across my blue T-shirt and the wind was hot as it skated in from the west and along the verandah. ‘How do you know I've been away a while?'

‘It's hardly a secret.'

But I was all about secrets, about privacy, about hiding out on the edge of the bush with no one knowing I was even in the country. She had me wondering if I shouldn't have come back. America would be worse though. Derek had stayed in America after the band broke up, and he was leading a mad life. I read about it often enough. Dating starlets, hoovering coke, crashing cars, all in the name of working on his first solo album. He'd taken out a big mortgage on the whole rockstar cliché, if you believed the magazines, and in his case I mostly did. I also knew that the flat styleless moments in between would be killing him first, crushing him slowly as his own chaotic amines mingled with whatever he could buy to turn him into a mess that was still miles away from happy.

I wanted Annaliese to go, and I wanted my beer, which would now be annoyingly warm and wasted and putting a ring of condensation on my sideboard. I was someone with a sideboard now. Who this side of Dickens truly needed a sideboard?

That's what I was thinking when Annaliese said, ‘The being away part. That was hardly a secret. But if this is supposed to be – you being back, I mean – I can keep it. One of my friends at school, her mother's the real estate agent who sold you the house. She only told me because I live next door and she knew I'd find out.'

‘So is there a dog called Oscar?'

‘You bastard,' she said, surprised and laughing at the same time. ‘My poor dog is dead somewhere on your snake-infested land – which, by the way, I'm sure my money-grubbing little brother would be happy to mow for a fee – and this is how you respond?'

She threw her hands in the air in a gesture borrowed from television, from someone's exasperated parents on Seinfeld or perhaps something more recent.

‘I'm sorry.' I laughed too, which seemed wrong. ‘Though I don't think we saw any snakes when we were out patrolling.'

‘No live dogs either,' she said sternly. ‘You add it up, my friend.'

‘I'm sorry about Oscar.' I was still stuck smiling. ‘I hope he's okay. And he might be. The moment he shows up you'll be the first to know.'

Now I wanted Annaliese to stay and be some safe age, and I wanted to go to my fridge for two fresh cold Stellas. I wanted conversation, instead of rattling around the house all day, ambling from the kitchen up the garden to the studio, tinkering, tinkering, stumbling numbly between ideas and not achieving much. That had been my day, my week, more.

But this conversation was drawing to a close. Oscar would not be found, and Annaliese had a life to be getting on with in the next house down the road.

‘Thanks,' she said, with next to nothing to thank me for. ‘Thanks for looking anyway. Back when you believed there was a dog, at least.'

‘I believe there's a dog,' I told her, and I walked her around the outside of the house to the driveway, still thinking of beer, and talk, and the cooler patch of shade going to waste on my front verandah.

She took another swipe at the same tall grass stalk on her way out. I was sure it was the same one, and again with her right hand. It occurred to me that I had last spoken face-to-face to a human more than two days before, and that had been to buy groceries. It didn't mean, though, that every last detail of the first visit to my house needed to be logged and accounted for, down to the idle battering of a slender strand of weed.

The sideboard came with the house. It was there in the pictures on the real estate website when, on a wet London day at the start of the northern autumn, I caught my first strong instinct for trying a life back here again. The house was listed as a deceased estate, so I wondered if there were plans for the furniture. The sideboard looked simple and old but not antique, at home where it stood. If there wasn't too much sentiment attached I figured it was headed for storage or a quick sale. I told the agent I'd pay a fair price for any pieces that weren't wanted, so I ended up with the sideboard in dark-stained silky oak, a similarly dark dining table with eight chairs (one with a loose leg), some unravelling cane verandah furniture for which I appeared to have paid an unfair price, and the bed the old man died in. I didn't know that part of its history for certain, but something body-sized had oozed into the mattress – not an item I'd realised I was purchasing – and the bed became the spare bed from the moment I arrived. Even with a new mattress on it, I'd kept my distance.

The hall mirror was part of the package as well. It caught me on my way into the house after Annaliese had left. It was a big mirror, but I made it look like a thin one. It was perfect for its spot on the wall – too slim for me, picking up me without the handles. I had become big on handles.

I bypassed the beer and headed straight for the studio, where I sat in the airconditioning trying to recall a dog that I was sure I'd never seen. An hour or two before, I had been playing around with adding a horn section to the track I was working on, but that now looked like a bad idea. A bad idea begat by idleness, a night of poor sleep, mistimed Stellas and one or two too many of them, and a lot of games of Space Invaders on the authentic turn-of-the-eighties machine that waited each day not more than a metre from my keyboard to lure me from my mission, my semi-serious producing debut.

Producing, I had already decided, was best not done by someone who had allowed endless tracts of time for it, as I had, but by a genius under stress facing two weeks of tension headaches and production deadlines calling for heroic feats of the kind that later became war stories. Sleepless nights, skin turned sallow, the juggernaut of failure bearing down and belching smoke.

I also knew, though, that I wouldn't end up much of a producer if that was the only way to do it. And I'd already been sallow, by my reckoning, for about two years. Others might have said longer.

We had management in London, among other places, and that was where I'd signed the deal to produce the Splades' first English-language album. I stayed with a film-director friend at Hampstead and met his new baby for the first time. It was good to be in a house people had settled into, made their mark on – a house cluttered with toys and books and pictures of holidays, and with a family of raincoats hanging on the pegs in the cloakroom just inside the front door.

I started cruising real estate websites while I was there. I skim-read my way through New York brownstones I could just afford but couldn't dare myself to buy, run-down farmhouses in France and flats in Hampstead itself, but my compass drew me south and east and back to Brisbane. From long range, from a London wrapped up in low wet cloud as the days thinned out at the end of another ambivalent summer, the images of hard blue skies and steel-and-glass million-dollar apartments on the river looked almost mythical.

I didn't buy an apartment, but I bought the sky. It was sky still as nature had made it, not a milky big-city sky fuzzed out by petrochemicals. Blue sky and a wooden house from the 1930s with a studio out the back and bush beyond – Brisbane Forest Park, acres of it. A place to hide, to think, to live quietly, to work, to start picking away at the Gordian knot I had made of my life. A foot on the earth. A foot like a brake, slowing it down, bringing some stillness. I emailed the Brisbane real estate agent then and there, and took the virtual tour.

I finished my house purchase between recording sessions with the Splades, by phone and email and fax in the office of the Vestfjord Hotel, Svolvær, three hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle off the coast of northern Norway. The band joined me to celebrate with a few beers around a wooden table on the dock outside, with long high racks for the drying of fish set up on the concrete nearby and floatplanes angling in from the sea to the glassy water of the harbour.