Free The True Story of Butterfish by Nick Earls Page A

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‘It’s a big yard,’ Mark said as he looked it over. We both knew it was a big yard, but now it had to be put into words, with an appropriate sense of the burden it was about to place on him.
    Despite the heat, he was wearing black shorts and a black T-shirt again, though the design had mostly flaked off this shirt, which hung like a sack. It might have once said Slayer or Stryker or something else that was almost certainly heavy metal, in a gothic font and inappropriately umlauted. He was leaning like an old hand on the mower he had clattered along the street from his house. He was wearing a black cap on which someone had had the word ‘dude’ embroidered, in black. The sun glinted from his ear nail.
    â€˜Could be fifty bucks, I reckon,’ he said, with the gravitas of the large-animal vet who’s telling you the whole herd has to go. It’s hard news, but he knows you’re man enough to take it on the chin. ‘Plus ten for providing the mower and the petrol. So, sixty.’
    I nodded, and tried to appear as though I was giving it the right amount of thought. I looked around, appraising the furthest mowable parts of the block.
    â€˜And the price stays fixed regardless of fluctuations in the price of fuel, and you rake the grass once you’ve mowed it?’ I nearly mentioned the ten-day rolling-average oil price out of Singapore, but I would have laughed then. I already had to look away from the dude cap as it was.
    â€˜All part of the service,’ he said, still cheerless.
    He reached out a pale sweaty hand for me to shake, and the deal was done. I went back inside, and heard the mower squeak and rattle its way to a corner of the block near the road. With a couple of pulls of the cord, he had it started.
    I was taking a day off, determined to take a full day off. I’d been squinting at the screen and hunched over like a monk for too many hours of the preceding few days, and I knew I wasn’t hearing anything the way I needed to.
    So, I had read three newspapers in their entirety, slept through lunch and was starting on a slow-simmering curry while drinking the day’s first ice-cold Stella. The curry was a lamb rogan josh, with bay leaves and a stick of cinnamon and whole cardamom pods and cloves, and it worked out best with two hours or more on a low heat.
    Mark pushed his way up and down one side of the house. I gave the spices a couple of minutes in ghee before adding the onion, then the garlic and ginger.
    â€˜I’ll do yours if you’ll make that curry,’ Derek had said to me more than once when we’d been handed our updated interview schedules on the Supernature tour. And I’d hang out in my suite’s kitchenette, giving the pot an occasional stir while he served up identical anecdotes in interview after interview. Then someone labelled me enigmatic, and we got to do that a lot less. I was becoming a candidate for the ‘so how does it feel to be the quiet-but-fucked-up guy in the band?’ interview, and that’s best dealt with by cooking quicker meals and pulling your weight.
    Mark methodically worked his way around without a break until all the grass was mown. I went out onto the back verandah to find him leaning on the rake under the shade of a tree near the studio.
    I offered him a drink, and he said, ‘A beer’d be good.’ He was bright red in the face and his shirt was drenched with sweat and flecked with grass clippings. The dude cap was pushed back and wavy strands of hair were stuck across his forehead.
    â€˜I’m not having that “special occasion” debate with you,’ I told him. ‘I was thinking of your hydration. Water, you know.’
    â€˜I’m aware of it. Water, yeah.’ He put on some kind of smile then. ‘Water’d be good.’
    I went inside, saw my own beer on the counter and felt like he’d brought out the mean old man in me. But, no, I