Read Online The True Story of Butterfish by Nick Earls - Free Book Online Page B

Written in Sea. The five of us sat awkwardly around a small wooden table for four, each of us trying not to take up an entire side and look like the alpha male. Each of us alone with his own complex arrangement of thoughts about what was going on, what might happen next. For Ben, it may have been as simple as wanting to get the hell out and hoping that the cheque would clear.
    We walked along the riverbank where people had been lazing in the evening sun but were now wrapping up against the chill that had blown in, and we bought kebabs from a small white boat called the Istanbul. The others drank late that night and, no doubt, skirted around a morose deconstruction of our grand and soon to be public failure. I couldn’t face it, and I went to my room. It felt as if several years of tiredness had caught me in a rush and tackled me hard.
    I was up early the next morning, and I saw there was a market on the iron bridge. I almost bought a threeeuro belt from a guy with a stall a metre wide that sold only belts, and all for three euros each. I remembered that I had kept the same crappy belt for years, saving money in case my career fell over and, in the moment of reaching for my wallet and then not buying the new belt, I realised that that was what had happened the evening before. My career had fallen over, without a sound, and I had met it with a beer-fuzzed brain and some ambivalence. Anger, relief, a sense of shame. A sense that some of the noise in my head might be about to go.
    There was to be no fourth album, and the band broke up before I finished the song that may one day be known as The Light that Guides You Home. It had a chorus and one long verse, so it felt only halfway to being a song, and its bridge was problematic. Those were its shortcomings in structural terms. I also didn’t really know what it was about, where it was heading. It was entirely true to life, in that sense at least. I walked away from the iron bridge market with the money to buy all the belts in Frankfurt, but I didn’t feel rich, or even safe, and I had no clear idea about how to live a rich person’s life, or any other. I had seen affluent lives and they didn’t feel like me. For a while, nothing did.
    We tore ourselves apart with Written in Sand, Written in Sea. We even argued about the comma in the title. Derek actually called it elegant. I was the one who ended up shouting, ‘No one buys albums with commas in the title.’ I had no evidence for that, of course. Not until we released the album anyway. ‘Tore apart’ is unjustly dramatic. We snapped like perished elastic, tamely and definitively. We wore out. Our best new ideas, our friendships, everything – we wore it all out.
    So, it was over now. Derek was famously out of control and the others were, respectively, in Sydney, on tour with a side-project band, and last heard of back in his old bedroom at his parents’ house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Where, presumably, he woke up every morning, took a look at the wallpaper he knew best and wondered for at least a second or two if his whole Butterfish experience might have been no more than a bad dream with an Australian accent.
    Since all the songs were Frick/Holland, I was still riding high on my share of the royalties. Still Water alone had clocked up US radio airplays in the hundreds of thousands, and had featured in two movies, a TV series and advertisements in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, South Africa and Belgium, mostly promoting still water (no imagination required there). It was a steady earner as an iTunes download, and its chorus was a ringtone for which people around the world regularly handed over money. My grandchildren would thank me, if I ended up being smart with it.
    I tripped on my own front steps in the dark, and wondered why I hadn’t thought to leave a light on. I found the door handle by feel, and the keyhole beneath it. The issue of grandchildren seemed very