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

laugh I’d heard from Annaliese and she said, ‘That’s very flattering, to think it might be a cuisine.’
    It wasn’t a cuisine. The meat was tough and the potatoes falling apart, and there wasn’t much flavour to the liquid they were swimming in. The recipe was her mother’s, she told me, and her father wasn’t good with strong flavours and was particularly bad with garlic, which gave him a fierce pungent smell from every pore for about a day.
    Annaliese pushed a piece of meat around with her fork unenthusiastically, and caught my eye. She gave me a look that said, undoubtedly, ‘This is my life.’
    Mark asked if there were any more pistachios, Annaliese asked what I thought of the casserole and Kate said, ‘How about some cracked pepper?’, all of them speaking at the same time.
    So I said, ‘I think some pepper would go very nicely with it, thanks.’
    Kate made another trip to the kitchen and came back with a pepper grinder. She held it over my plate and was about to twist it when she changed her mind and said, ‘No, you’d better do it, so you get the right amount.’
    â€˜There’s a reason all those shop-a-dockets are on the fridge,’ Annaliese said, as if we’d already been talking about them. ‘And the reason is pizza.’
    â€˜Surely nobody pays full price for a pizza,’ Kate said, missing her point and defending the wad of curling dockets that I could see magneted to the fridge door. ‘They’re always trying to outdo each other with deals.’
    Annaliese reached out and took the pepper once I’d finished. She ground some onto her plate. ‘You cook, don’t you, Curtis?’ she said. ‘Like, properly cook.’
    â€˜Well, semi-properly. I’ve learned a few things over the years, I guess.’ I ate another mouthful of the watery, and now peppery, casserole. The meat needed more time and the potatoes less. Kate was giving me a look that said she badly needed it to be okay.
    â€˜You’re going to have to show her,’ Annaliese said, sparing her mother nothing.
    â€˜Has Annaliese told you she sings?’ Kate said. ‘I bet she hasn’t.’
    Annaliese glared at her. ‘So annoying,’ she said.
    Mark laughed through a mouthful of dinner. ‘Go on, Liese. Let’s hear it. How about Boys of Summer, Rock Eisteddfod style?’
    Annaliese’s glare turned to something more like horror. I didn’t know if Mark had ever been stabbed with a fork before, but I could see it happening now.
    â€˜I remember when that was a Don Henley song,’ Kate said, steering us around the impending sibling conflict. ‘Do you remember that?’ The question was for me – it could have been for no one else. Then, before I could answer, she said, ‘Your hair’s different now.’
    â€˜It was different before,’ I told her. Annaliese had put her cutlery down. ‘Different when I was in the band. This is it – the real thing.’
    My dyed hair started with a publicist, but not in a calculated way. She used the colour herself and, one day in a hotel room, between phone interviews, when we were both verging on stir crazy, she used it on me. She called housekeeping and ordered the oldest towel they had and told them why. She said they’d have to send a new one – which they did – but no one could complain since she had effectively told them she would be trashing the towel. Somehow we splashed dye on the wall as well, on the textured regency-print wallpaper. I read in a magazine once that my change of hair colour was part of an image makeover, but there was actually nothing contrived about it. The bonus was that it sometimes worked as a disguise, now that I’d stopped dyeing it.
    I told them I’d bumped into Steve Irwin once, in a recording studio where he was doing voiceovers for his TV show, and he’d said to me that that