Free The True Story of Butterfish by Nick Earls Page B

couldn’t go giving out beers to fourteen-year-olds to avoid feeling old. I put the stubbie in the fridge and took out a jug of cold water.
    Annaliese was walking around the side of the house as I opened the screen door. She saw me and stopped.
    â€˜Hey, Curtis,’ she said. She was wearing oversized round sunglasses of the style favoured by people like Paris Hilton and Mischa Barton. They were almost half the size of her face. ‘Mark has to go home.’ She turned to look at him. ‘Dad’s on the phone.’
    â€˜Really?’ he said without much interest. ‘Do I have to?’
    â€˜Apparently.’
    He gave the ground a scratch with the rake, but didn’t move.
    â€˜Some school report,’ she said. ‘You’re being dysfunctional again.’
    â€˜Oh, that,’ he said, as if it was old news. It probably was. He looked up at me. ‘I’ll come back and do the raking. If that’s okay. This might take a while.’
    He leaned the rake against the tree, pulled off the dude cap and pushed his wet mat of hair away from his face. He smiled, as if set to be amused by the interrogation about to come his way, and the deadening monosyllabic replies I was sure he was going to offer.
    â€˜Right, then,’ he said, and he walked off across the dry mown grass, in no particular hurry.
    Annaliese made no move to follow him. She was dressed in a short skirt and a singlet top, and they didn’t quite manage to meet in the middle. I stood there with the jug of cold water and the glass.
    â€˜How about a tour of the studio?’ she said.
    â€˜The studio? Sure.’ I didn’t know what I had expected her to say, but that wasn’t it.
    I left the jug and glass on the verandah table and walked down the steps. A tour of the studio. She was about to be underwhelmed. I noticed the closed curtains and realised the key was back in the house. I was practically standing at the door by then.
    â€˜Pretend you didn’t see this,’ I told her, and I reached under the steel beam that ran beneath the front of the studio and found the spare key in its magnetised holder.
    â€˜Who are you?’ she said, and laughed. ‘Maxwell Smart? You’ll show me the studio, but then you’ll have to kill me?’
    The studio air felt trapped and stale and warm when I opened the door, so I turned the airconditioning on as I stepped inside. Annaliese pushed the door shut behind her and stood next to me, her sunglasses in her hand.
    â€˜It’s um...’
    â€˜It’s early days,’ I told her. ‘Still halfway between a granny flat and a big studio, massive mixing desk, the remnants of lines of coke on every horizontal surface.’ She either played it cool or thought I was serious, or thought the line was too stupid to acknowledge. Whichever way she took it, she said nothing. ‘Or in my case, the rings of forgotten coffee cups on every horizontal surface.’ With that I looked like either a wimp or someone with something to hide. Almost certainly the former.
    Annaliese took in the array of mute machines and powerboards, and the musty odour that had been locked up here when I first arrived. In her mind, this room had been different. It looked like a bachelor loungeroom prior to its Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makeover. And I was playing the role of the slob with the grey ponytail and the food-spattered shirt who called it his little slice of a shambolic heaven. Then in would come Carson and the gang, and I’d be given a red raw screaming body wax and mocked and prodded into something fit to leave the house, maybe even bring a tear to the eye of my long-long-suffering girlfriend.
    â€˜Right,’ Annaliese said. She had expected a place where magic happened, and there was none on offer. ‘What’s this?’
    She had managed to pick the one frivolous purchase in the room.
    â€˜Space Invaders,’ I told her. Or, to be more