‘Our place is so hot it’s totally disgusting,’ Annaliese said when I opened the studio door. ‘Can I please pleeeze sit in your airconditioning for a while?’ She groaned, and hung out her tongue like an overheated dog.

It was Monday afternoon and she was in her school uniform. Her tie was half undone. She was already inside before I could say anything.

‘Ah, much better, much better.’ She threw her hat like a frisbee onto the Space Invaders console and stood with her face in front of the airconditioning unit.

I’d had the headphones on when she tapped on the glass, and at first I thought it was an artifact on the recording. I was working, but that seemed inconsequential.

Annaliese groaned again. ‘Why can’t we have airconditioning at home? Why can’t we kill the planet just a little bit, the way you do?’ She turned to let the air blow on her back. Her cheeks were radiating heat. ‘My mother likes trees. That’s why we live out here.’

‘And you don’t like trees?’

‘I have no position on trees. I’m fine with trees, but they could share the planet with some airconditioning.’ I offered her a drink, water or tea, and she said, ‘Water or tea? You rock, man. I thought you were supposed to be doing lines of coke off the top of your dinosaur Play Station by now.’

‘Rude, even when overheating and begging for the mercy of my airconditioning...’

‘Water. Please.’ She rolled her eyes, as if I’d just told a five-year-old to show some manners.

I went over to the kitchenette, which was almost as empty as it had been when I moved in. When the granny flat properly morphed into a studio there might one day be a lot more to it – to the kitchenette and the rest – though maybe not coke on the Space Invaders machine, the playstationosaurus. The bar fridge held only two carafes of cold water and a carton of milk which, I noticed, was two days past its best. I poured her a glass of water, and brought the carafe over as well.

I noticed that it said ‘A WINTER’ in black marker pen along the band inside her upturned hat.

‘So you’re Winter and your mother’s Winter as well? She kept your father’s name after their marriage broke up?’

Annaliese held the glass but didn’t drink. ‘No, actually. I decided to be Winter.’

‘Decided? You can just do that?’

She shrugged. ‘I did. They had to sign off on it to make it official. I got this talk about being eighteen, waiting till then. But that sucked, obviously.’ Another shrug. ‘Marky’s still a Fletcher for now. But don’t think he’s totally on Dad’s side or anything. Dad bought this car...’ Her tone swung up on ‘car’. There was a story to be told. ‘It’s a yellow sports car, canary yellow. He drives it to work some mornings, even though he could walk. It’s about ten minutes away. Admiralty Towers to Waterfront Place, lawyer central. How lazy is that? Anyway, he drove it to work when he bought it, and he took all his staff down to the car park and made them stare at it. Most of them had never even seen the car park before. These people catch the train in twenty stops from Thornlands or wherever, and bring their own lunch in a box, and here he is making them ogle his new toy.’

Twenty stops from Thornlands, or wherever – where had it come from, this fierce and detailed deconstruction of the callous lord among his serfs?

‘I’m so glad you don’t have a dick-swinging car.’ She stopped to drink some of the water, finally. ‘So Mark had to write this story for school. The topic was “revenge”, or something, and in it this guy is so angry with his dickhead boss for dragging them down to the basement and making them walk laps of his new car that, when the boss tells him to go off and get it detailed, he pays four guys to smoke in it and then gives one of them twenty bucks extra to shit on the passenger seat.’ She laughed. ‘The boss had always been an arsehole and the car thing was just the last straw. They called Mum in to school to talk about that one, since they knew Dad had the same car. The teacher said it was good writing, actually, but that the guy wouldn’t have done it since the boss would have got him back.’

‘So that’s the only reason no one’s dumped in your dad’s car? Consequences?’

‘Probably.’ She sat on the edge of the one desk that wasn’t cluttered with equipment. Her cheeks were less red now. She pulled her tie off and dropped it into her hat. ‘If you were up for it, I’d get you the keys.’

She told me more about her father, whose name was Campbell Fletcher. It almost went without saying that he was a partner in a big law firm. When friends came over – which didn’t happen often – they were always people he wanted something from and his best conversation topic was how to minimise tax. He could only cook bachelor food – I assumed the expression had come from Kate – and called in caterers for his rare dinner parties, even when there were only six people. He and Mark butted heads regularly. He had a vein that popped out on his scalp at times like that. He had had a series of relationships with younger women, a number of whom may have been junior solicitors. Kate, Annaliese and Mark had taken to referring to them as his PTGs, or pony-tailed girlfriends.

‘Mum started that,’ she said. ‘That was years ago, with her friends. I probably wasn’t supposed to hear. I used to think it was because he played squash with them a lot. That’s why they had the ponytails. Not that they all do, of course. It’s how he’d introduce them to us, the squash. “This is Caitlin. We play squash together sometimes.” Which of course ended up with Mark using it as a verb and not a noun. “Dad, are you squashing Caitlin?” He couldn’t even fit us in his yellow car. It’s a fucking sports car. It really only has two seats.’

Enough room in the back for two racquets and a small black ball, but not for your adolescent offspring who would not forgive you for much, and who would dog your every move with their harsh reading of your motives. I couldn’t guess what Campbell Fletcher was really like, or entirely like, but he wasn’t shaping up well in Annaliese’s portrait.

‘We’re at his place tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘That’s a regular thing, Tuesdays and every second weekend. Hannah’s usually there, but she doesn’t live there. She’s the current PTG. She’s nice. She cooks. That’s good.’ She sighed, and looked out the window. The air conditioning blew through her hair and its school-coloured ribbons, maroon and white. ‘Sorry,’ she said, turning back my way. ‘You’re working, aren’t you? I didn’t mean to distract you.’

I could see the green and orange sonic hills and valleys on the screen to her left, twenty seconds of sound drawn out for editing and realigning. I had been going well, but I needed a break. I needed to clear my head and come back later with fresh ears and a few new ideas.

‘I can remember my father and his attempts with women.’ It was the start of an answer, or at least a thought put in my head by the mention of Hannah and her status as the current PTG. ‘My mother died when I was young. There’s nothing worse than listening to your father work his cheesy lines.’

‘Oh god,’ Annaliese said. ‘Nothing worse.’

My father’s lines were straight out of history, lines that fitted with his Cary Grant shoes and old black-and-white movies. He had the moves to go with them too, but he never quite delivered them. He would circle halfway around the table to pull out a chair for them, and then slink back as if he’d done the wrong thing. He worked through gestures like that that we never saw at other times, and each one looked like a rehearsal the director had called a halt to halfway through. They weren’t natural, they weren’t ever quite right. And the women were rarely at ease, facing us, the two boys who, if the cards fell a certain way, would be sons of a kind to them. More than that, though, on their first visit to our house they had to face down the ghost of our long-gone mother in the faded photos that stayed forever all over the loungeroom.

‘Do you want to hear what I’ve been working on?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’ She slid off the desk and turned to face the screen. ‘This is those Norwegian guys, right?’

I unplugged the headphones and sent the song through the big speakers. It sounded better now, after a gap and with my head in a less critical place.

‘Wow,’ she said when we were through the chorus for the first time. ‘This is good.’

I had a new idea for the piano part, and I stopped the song and played it before it slipped my mind. I opened a new track and recorded a few bars, which was all I had. I could do more with it later. I played it back. There was something there. Annaliese said ‘Wow’ again. I hoped it didn’t look like some kind of showy trick.

I told her the piano parts were sometimes the easiest bits for me, since I knew piano better than anything. That was partly true, but it often wasn’t easy to find some new melody that worked, that took a song forward and helped it find its place. I told her I’d grown up wanting to be Billy Joel but, importantly, the Billy Joel of the seventies. Specifically the early seventies. He had become a big star towards the end of the decade with The Stranger and The Piano Man, but I had really wanted to be the Billy Joel of Cold Spring Harbour.

‘I’ve had fights before about that album,’ I told her. ‘So don’t pick one now based on your smug post-millenium perspective of Billy Joel.’

She laughed, and I played her She’s Got a Way. Cold Spring Harbour was an album less played and less remembered than it should have been. It was a cluster of small songs, melancholy and warm and often optimistic, and most able to be perfectly rendered with just piano, vocals and, importantly, no fuss at all. I played and sang, and the song was as true as ever, and still a map that showed where melody came from, and no less a song to aspire to than it had been when I was ten or twelve, in the early eighties. I was hopelessly nostalgic about it, and had no inclination to be otherwise. It had been my map. It had been part of turning me to music.

By the third time through the chorus, I caught her humming a harmony – not the melody, but a harmony that had just cropped up in her head – and I made her sing it. Then I made her sing the song while I played, feeding her the words line by line and playing through.

‘Yeah, you’ve got it, easily.’ It was in my mind, but I found myself saying it. ‘You’ve really got a voice there.’

She half-shrugged, and looked awkward. ‘It’s just singing. Everyone can sing, can’t they?’ She knew I was right though. ‘My father wants me to do law. Business or law. But he would, wouldn’t he?’

‘And what do you want to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think I still want to be the Billy Joel of the early seventies, but you can’t tell anyone that. The dagginess coefficient is just too high for anyone who doesn’t know specifically what I’m talking about. I want to get a grand piano in here. I think there’s room.’ I knew where it would go. There was a corner in which unsorted junk sat on an area of two-tone brown carpet where the previous resident’s lounge suite had spared patches of it from the light. ‘My father was a piano teacher, so there were always people coming round to our house taking lessons. The piano was our only expensive piece of furniture.’ Another memory had surfaced. I didn’t know why. He had once thought of selling the piano to pay school fees. ‘Sorry, that sounded like one of those fake-humble statements rich people make, or politicians.’

‘Ah, yes,’ she said. ‘Back in the days when life was simple and before fame came along and complicated everything. Would you do it any differently, if you had the chance?’

Definitely yes, definitely no. ‘That’s the kind of chance no one ever gets. I don’t have any regrets about doing it though.’

‘You have plenty of regrets.’ She was sure of it. She poured water from the carafe into her glass. ‘I’ve read that article – it was in some magazine in America, and the title of the article was Curtis Holland Regrets. I saw it online.’

‘Will you please stop googling me? It puts me at a distinct disadvantage. I wasn’t always myself in those interviews.’

‘I think you were completely yourself. Maybe not everyone else was.’ She was back sitting on the edge of the desk again, one leg crossed over the other at the ankles, short white socks showing just above the tops of her black school shoes.

‘Okay, but the main thing is that you stop googling me. I don’t want to shock you, but it’s not entirely reliable. I’m the definitive source. Come to me. And, anyway, who’s lived and regrets nothing? What kind of psychopath, really? I’m sick of this “I’ve got no regrets” thing that people keep coming out with.’ I was sure it only sounded as though I’d just contradicted myself. I knew what I meant. ‘Why do we have the word regret if we all decide not to have any? There are things I regret. I could write you a list. I was on tour when my father died. I regret that. I can’t change it and I couldn’t change it at the time, but I can still regret it.’

I was on tour when it ended with Jess. I was on tour looking out through the tinted windows as my life passed in a whir, in a blur. The US Midwest, pale flat roads six or eight lanes wide sliding through cornfields and forests and over rivers with names I would never know, white barns and siloes, endless lines of Buicks and Plymouths and Dodges humming along at the speed limit. Down in those cars, the lives looked more real. I felt minuscule there, in the face of all that traffic. And lost, in a way.

‘So, what about the band?’ Annaliese said. ‘What about Butterfish?’ She was on her way out the door by then, hydrated and cooled down. I had my one new idea to get back to, though I had lost the spirit for it temporarily.

I walked with her around the side of the house. The afternoon was still hot, and the heat felt like it was there to stay. The air was thick and static, but the sky was cloudless and again there would be no storm coming through.

‘It’s really Derek you’re asking about, I guess. Derek and the end of the band. And that’s the question I’ve been pretty good at not answering.’ It was always Derek who people asked about, and there was always more that I could have said about him than the others. I regretted yanking Ben away from a relatively normal life and dumping him into the band’s mad final year, but that regret was a simple matter, and he had survived it and made some money. I had said almost nothing about Derek after the band had broken up, since it was hard to talk about him without shitting on him, wilfully and at length. ‘Derek needed a break from it as much as me, I think, really. There was a certain amount of unravelling on that last tour. Derek was James Dean and John Belushi, but still alive. And if you don’t know who those people are, you should google them. But continue to be sceptical about what it gives you. There are lots of innocent non-facts out there, not to mention stories made up to sell magazines.’

So, even then I was guarded, cagey in the way I put it. However much I told myself this was a straight honest conversation with a person who was literally the girl next door, I could also see the words travelling home in Annaliese’s head and scrolling out across the internet, on a blog first and then worse. If I maligned Derek, it would be no secret and it would come back my way. It would hunt me down, all the way west out of town, along Gap Creek Road to my hidden dry block of land, and I would have to answer for it.

‘Maybe I meant the whole thing,’ she said. She half turned towards me, and the sun caught the side of her face. ‘The whole Butterfish thing.’

‘That’s a more interesting question.’ A better question, a smarter question. ‘People don’t ask that one. And I don’t think I regret the whole thing. No. It’s too much of my life.’ I couldn’t separate myself from it. I couldn’t picture my life without those years. ‘There was a reason for doing it, for trying it in the first place. And when it was good it could be great.’

As I watched her walk along the road towards her house, sticking to the shade wherever there was any, I knew she wouldn’t be blogging about me, or the band. She wouldn’t even tell her friends, and I had a new regret about my instincts and the way they had leapt up to protect me when, surely, I hadn’t needed protecting at all.