The True Story of Butterfish by Nick Earls Page A

the mouse. ‘As soon as I set you up with a click track, you’re right to go. This’ll give you a rhythm to work with. If you put the headphones on, you should hear it coming through.’
    â€˜So it’s like a metronome,’ she said, correctly.
    â€˜Yeah. A metronome’s kind of like a click track for old people. Mozart, people like that.’
    â€˜Bastard,’ she said, and laughed. ‘I just happen to be classically trained.’
    â€˜So, I should expect a lot then.’ I set the rate to a hundred beats per minute. ‘Something modern might be nice, if you’ve got it. Something from your own non-high-panted time. Unless classical’s all you do.’
    â€˜Non-high-panted. Right. So, tragically, Asia’s Heat of the Moment is out...’ she said, pretending to give her song selection serious thought.
    â€˜That was one second of weakness.’ And yet, somehow, another small victory for Annaliese over the fossil. ‘Now, put the cans on and play me something.’
    I got the click track started, she nodded her head a few times to settle into the rhythm, and she played. The song she picked was Missy Higgins’s Scar, or something improvised from it, and my keyboard setting wasn’t right for that, but I could change the sound once we had it down.
    She played maybe ten bars and said, ‘How much?’ She was taking it somewhere new by then. I’d been right to think that she could play.
    â€˜That’ll be fine. Let’s work with it.’ I pulled another chair over and she moved along. ‘I should have set it to “grand” before you started, but we can fancy it up a bit.’
    She watched everything, every move as I lushed it up, went for D-verb, pushed it up to one hundred percent wet and clicked on ‘large plate’. I went into Reason and tested some drum loops, and then had to admit we should have gone there first. I was doing it all out of order.
    â€˜Okay, I’m going to try some fake bass now. It’s not my best thing, so bear with me.’
    I listened to her piece twice more and thought I had enough of it in my head. I played it again and recorded a painting-by-numbers bass line using the keyboard. There was nothing clever about it, but it would do to make the point.
    Annaliese took the mouse from my hand, and played my bass track back. ‘Let’s see,’ she said, bringing up the screen box that looked like a mixing desk. She twiddled knobs, pulled and pushed, compressing it mercilessly. She listened and said, ‘Oh crap,’ and pulled it back the other way. ‘Show me how to make it real. Then let’s add some horns.’
    Kate was gone from the pool by then, I noticed as I looked past Annaliese and out the window. I heard a rake outside, Mark scratching up the cut dry stalks of grass beside my house. And I remembered I had a curry inside, simmering.

I couldn’t Deny Annaliese was on my mind as I drove across town to meet Patrick in the Valley that night. I wondered if any sixteen-year-old boy in the city understood her at all. I could see them at parties, sneaking in rum, trying to get her drunk. But I also pictured them in eighties clothes and I remembered the parties instead of imagining them, and the sixteen-year-old boy who looked like me – dressed like me, was me – threw up the rum and felt the Coke fizz through his nose as it washed back out and the girls didn’t seem greatly attracted to that.
    I couldn’t graft Annaliese onto a memory of a party from the eighties and see how she would fare. She was right. It was all history. My version of sixteen seemed truly old for the first time.
    I parked miles away, and Patrick was already at the Troubador when I arrived.
    â€˜You’re crap without a publicist, aren’t you?’ he said.
    â€˜I’m not that late.’
    â€˜You can buy me a beer.’ He was wearing a paisley shirt that, in