‘I’m not much of a cook,’ Kate said as she came back to the table holding something that was probably a casserole. And she was right.

She lowered it onto the trivet with the duck mitts, one of which I now noticed had an old scorch mark, and she went back to the kitchen.

‘Brace yourself,’ Annaliese said quietly.

Kate rattled cutlery around in a drawer. ‘I might be a bad cook, but I’m not a deaf bad cook.’

She returned with a bread knife, which she handed to me, and a ladle. I cut some slices from the fresh loaf of bread while she served the casserole, handing plates to the others and placing one in front of me. There were lumps of meat, quartered onions, potatoes and mushrooms, with an oily steam rising from each plate.

I asked her if it was French and she gave the one-syllable ‘ha’ 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.’

‘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.’

‘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.’

‘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.

‘You’re going to have to show her,’ Annaliese said, sparing her mother nothing.

‘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.

‘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.’

‘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 was the beauty of his khaki shirt. False teeth, a trucker’s cap and a red-and-black flanno shirt gave him all the cover he could hope for. There was footage of him in the crowd at Australia Zoo, taking in a show dressed just like that, with no one around him giving him a second glance.

So, I went back to my natural hair after the band broke up, and got a bit fat. Everyone around the table was decent enough not to mention the second strategy.

Straight after dinner, Mark asked if he could be excused – the language for the request was semi-formal and clearly negotiated long ago – and he went to his room.

‘Two choices now, Liesie,’ Kate said. ‘Dishes or homework.’

A big sigh, some eye rolling. The world, for sixteenyears-olds was a deeply, resolutely unfair place. ‘What about conversation? Isn’t that important as well?’

Kate just looked at her. There was a hint of an eyebrow lifting.

‘I could do the dishes,’ I said, and Kate said, ‘Looks like it’s homework.’

Annaliese threw her hands in the air, and gave me a look that said it was all my fault. ‘So now I don’t even get to choose.’

‘You’d have to do the homework anyway.’ I was standing my ground.

‘Technically, yes,’ she said, the dramatics in check for a moment. She gave a smile that was supposed to look begrudging. ‘Okay, so you’re not such a bad guy after all.’

Kate gave a shake of her head once Annaliese’s door was shut, and said, ‘Too much TV. Where does she get this...’ She flailed her arms around. ‘Not from me. Not from anyone I know.’ She laughed. ‘Endlessly entertaining. It’s all melodrama around here.’

She drank the last mouthful of her Stella and then turned the stubbie around to take her first proper look at the label.

There was something close to silence for the first time since I’d arrived. The distant pounding of heavy metal, perhaps, from the headphones that were surely clamped to Mark’s head as he sat in his room war gaming or cruising websites, but other than that, nothing. The CD had finished and the night was close and still.

‘You don’t have to do the dishes,’ Kate said.

‘I’d be happy to. Most nights I just clean one plate.’ She almost said something, then didn’t. She rearranged her cutlery so that her knife and fork lined up. ‘That sounded a lot sadder than it was supposed to.’

‘It didn’t sound sad,’ she said, too quickly. ‘Well, it did. But I don’t think it was meant to be sad. Okay, dig me out of this any time.’

‘Let’s wash the dishes.’

I washed, she handled the wiping and putting away. She asked me what I cooked, and then if I would show her something.

‘But it’s got to be simple,’ she said. ‘Something simple.’

I wondered if the decent thing would have been to compliment the casserole, but I didn’t know where to start. So I said, ‘Sure, recipes are for sharing.’

She picked up wet cutlery by the handful and rubbed it dry, shutting the drawer with her hip when the last forks went in. She fetched more beers from the fridge while I worked on the casserole dish. She watched as the baked black rim of gunge refused to be scoured away and she said, ‘I know where the dynamite is, if you need it.’ And she rolled her eyes, Annaliese-style, at the harm she could wreak on her utensils for a meal no one would love.

She wore a locket on a silver chain, and more of her hair was free now and falling to her neck in fine loose coils. Droplets of sweat were gathering above her upper lip and a strand or two of hair was stuck to her temples. She was perspiring like a Jane Austen heroine, I was hosing it out like a beast in a field. Sweat, ox sweat, spread darkly across my shirt, breaking out like a rash over my stomach.

‘It’s too hot for this,’ she said. ‘Let that soak. Let’s drink these outside. It’s got to be cooler there.’

We sat on the back verandah in director’s chairs, with the dark of the swimming pool below us and the bush beyond. Through the trees behind Kate I could see the light on in my kitchen. I remembered looking up this way when I first arrived, and seeing the glow of a cigarette in the dark.

‘Who smokes here?’ I’d seen no sign of smoking all night, and the question was out of me before I’d thought of Mark and Annaliese and the trouble I might be making for one of them.

‘Who smokes?’ Kate said. ‘No one smokes. I hope no one smokes. What makes you...’

‘It was probably something else. Just something I saw at night when I first got back. It mightn’t have even been up here at all.’

‘Oh, it was though.’ She had worked it out. ‘But you wouldn’t have seen it for about two weeks and five days, I’m guessing.’ She made a hmm noise and took a mouthful of beer. ‘That was a guy I was seeing. And now I’m not.’

‘Sorry, I...’

‘Nothing to be sorry about. He could cook, but that was about the only thing he had in his favour. And it was mostly pasta with heavy sauces. Carbs, fat, all wrong. He had to go.’ The Stella was on its way to her mouth again, but it jerked to a stop. ‘Oh, shit, I hope you don’t think...’ she said, and then she stopped to get it right. ‘When I asked you to show me how to cook something, that was just me wanting to know how to cook something.’

‘Sure.’

But she’d snapped a brake cable and her explanation was now a runaway vehicle bucking its way down a hillside. ‘This isn’t a set up. I don’t want you thinking that. That’s partly why I didn’t invite anyone else.’ Heading for a big fat rock at high speed. ‘I can’t let my friends meet you, since they’d all be wanting me to sleep with you.’

Boom.

‘Which would be a fate worse than death, obviously,’ I said, offloading as calmly as I could into the inevitable awkward silence.

She moved her beer up towards the kind of grin only tetanus makes and said, in a small voice, ‘Oh god.’ The moment, despite her fervent desires, was refusing to open up and swallow her whole.

‘Shall I, um, put on a new CD?’

I didn’t wait for an answer. We could hit the pause button on the conversation and fix this, I figured. I was out of my chair and heading inside before she could speak. The loungeroom seemed brighter now. I wondered if Annaliese and Mark could have heard us talking, but the dull thud of artillery came through Mark’s wall and it was clearly game on in there. With the war and the heavy metal, Kate would be okay.

There were three shelves of CDs, and I kept telling myself not to look for Butterfish, not to even think of Butterfish. People’s CD racks always had me thinking that way, and I couldn’t seem to stop it. I didn’t want us to be there. I didn’t want us not to be there. Any CD shelf anywhere was some kind of judgement about the past decade of my life. I saw Jeff Buckley’s Grace and grabbed it. Fine late-night music, sensitive, no pulsating Barry White hot-lovin’ agendas.

‘Good,’ Kate said when I stepped back out into the semi-dark of the verandah. ‘That’s good. About before...’

‘There’s no need to do an “about before”.’

‘My friends ... I’m some kind of sport to them.’ She was committed to the ‘about before’. ‘They’ve got themselves all set and from time to time I provide the entertainment. Mostly they’re from a previous life.’

‘Like, when you were an Egyptian princess?’

She laughed. ‘No, slightly more recent. Slightly. They’re from a time when I was married. And not selling cheap jewellery at Indooroopilly. But that sounds like you and washing one plate. It’s not a sad situation.’ She drank some beer. Her face had settled back into a more usual smile. ‘Anyway, life gets complicated in ways like that. I don’t think anyone can get to this end of their thirties – the middle end – without a few rough landings. Anyone, with the possible exception of a couple of my friends, who seem to lead a life that’s somewhere between Stepford and actually perfect. Damn them. I had a work Christmas party last year, just drinks at the Pig ’n’ Whistle, and there was a live band. Someone took a photo of me from about knee-high while I was dancing. I told one of my friends about it, and I told her I looked hideously drunk and haggard. And do you know what she said? She said, “I’m sure you weren’t hideously drunk.” So, there you go. Haggard and just regular drunk. That’s where she’d put me. That’s the kind of back-up you want when you’re thirty-seven – thirty-six then – and working hard to keep all the balls in the air.’

‘I’ve just got a brother with six-pack abs who calls me Chubs. He doesn’t let up though.’

‘Six-pack abs. Does he realise how nineties he is?’

I couldn’t imagine a better thing she could have said.

Inside, a door opened. Heavy feet came our way, and Mark’s broad unshaped shadow cast itself onto the verandah.

‘I was just wondering...’ he said when he appeared. ‘Annaliese said you might need someone to mow your lawn. And if you did, I’d probably be available for hire. And I’d happily undercut most commercial contractors.’ Politeness felt wrong from a black-clad teenager with hair like a nest and a nail in his ear, but for Mark it seemed to be a tool that he could put to work whenever it might be useful. The tone was even coy, reserved.

‘ Most commercial contractors?’ Kate said, picking a hole in the way a parent can. ‘Do you have the overheads of any commercial contractors? I assume you’re just planning to use our mower.’

‘I’m in the neighbourhood,’ he said, more to me than to her. ‘And I pretty much guarantee a quick response time.’ The cracked glass smile was back. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be persuasive, or if he was just enjoying his politician’s non-answer to his mother’s questioning. I wondered if the smile was being pulled into its shape partly by the hot lumps of acne swelling near his mouth.

‘That sounds good to me,’ I told him. My grass really needed cutting, and I had no inclination to get out there myself. ‘Of course I’d have to be indemnified against snake bite. Some of that grass is pretty long.’

The smile persisted. ‘Well, we could talk some kind of danger money,’ he said. ‘Some kind of loading.’

‘What?’ Kate was weighing in again. ‘Are you crazy? How good’s an extra few dollars going to feel if a taipan bites you?’

‘That won’t be happening,’ he said dismissively. ‘You think snakes’ll hang around when the mower starts? This is just a commercial arrangement.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘And if the worst comes to the worst I’ve still got Liesie to look after me in my old age.’

He gave a phlegmy unpractised laugh and said, ‘Thanks, Mum. Looks like we’re good to go, Curtis.’ I was sensing that, while giving as little away as possible, he had loved this game, that they both had.

‘Okay, it’s a deal,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay you whatever’s reasonable. Come and get started as soon as you’re ready to.’

‘Cool,’ he said, obviously fantasising about just how much he might be able to rip me off.

He went back to his room, his shadow swaying and following him. His door closed, and again I heard the muffled sound of loud music being compressed into willing, scheming teenage skull.

‘You’ve clearly never done a deal with Mark before,’ Kate said.

‘I don’t imagine the “special occasion” beer concept came out of nowhere. It sounds pretty heavily negotiated.’ It wasn’t the time to say that the money would be no issue, that I didn’t have to think that way.

‘Everything’s heavily negotiated with Mark,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my limits though, and he knows it. Most of the time I’ve got a fair idea of where I’m going to draw the line. It’s guess work to some extent, but you get a few dozen guesses a day so some of them have to work out. No, it’s better than that, really. You know them, so your instincts put the lines close enough to the right place. And Mark’s been a negotiator since he was about two. I’ve had plenty of practice. He should be drinking no beer. I know that. But I think this way he drinks less. I’m just lucky that Annaliese doesn’t like the taste, or I’d be getting it in stereo. I only floss my teeth to make them floss theirs. Otherwise you get the whole “but you don’t...” thing. So, I’ve flossed for years now, even though I hate it and I’d use a mouthwash even if it isn’t as good. I have a friend who subscribes to Choice who told me that. Or maybe that was just her view.’

‘Whereas, in the world of the single plate, I just know where the food gets stuck between my teeth and I use a pencil. I click the lead out a couple of notches and push it through.’

I could feel my face going red, though the colour wouldn’t show out here. Kate laughed, which was better than Kate not laughing.

‘You were obviously brought up right,’ she said. ‘I think Choice really rated that.’ She sat back in her chair and crossed her legs at the ankles and looked out at nothing in particular. ‘It’s different being a kid now,’ she said. ‘Different to the way it was for us. More pressures, more things to do, more to keep up with. They live in a different world. But maybe you know all that. They buy your music, don’t they? Teenage people. Among others. I’m old enough to remember when TV ran out of shows at night and went to a test pattern. The first time I told the kids about that they wouldn’t believe me. They wouldn’t believe that TV ever stopped.’

I realised I should be going – that Kate was easy company, good company, but the last of my beer was as warm as the evening and it was better to leave before the conversation ran out and left us stranded, two awkward people on a back verandah in the dark.

‘I see the light in the granny flat some nights,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe you had someone staying there, but Annaliese tells me it’s your studio.’

‘Yeah, it said studio in the ad,’ I told her. ‘I got slightly the wrong idea. But a studio with a kitchenette and a bathroom – that’s not a bad thing. I’m working on a record with a Norwegian band. I might have said that before. I’m producing. We just laid down some tracks in Norway, so now I’m ... doing what producers do.’

‘You say that as if it’s selling shoes.’

‘It’s my version of selling shoes. I mean, it’s great, but it’s what I do.’ That wasn’t quite correct. ‘It’s what I’m trying to do. The chance came along, so I took it. I met the two main guys in the band, Gunnar and Øivind, at a festival a couple of years ago. Roskilde, I think. In Denmark. There was Tuborg involved, so it was probably Denmark. We got on well, and I watched their set and liked what I heard. And Gunnar was starting to write some really strong material with English lyrics. I think every band in Norway feels a need to break out of Norway. It’s not unlike here.’

That’s what I remembered of Roskilde. Our set – the Butterfish set – on the main stage in the falling light of the late summer evening was lost somewhere. Too many festivals, too many nights of Derek Frick morphing from tour-bus weasel into rock god, strutting and posturing, calling up all the love in the town. It didn’t so much matter which festival, or which town – it was the same show, the same long shapeless memory.

The Splades signed with management in London. A deal came along. Not the kind of deal that would have them browsing the castles-r-us websites, but healthy numbers nonetheless. They tracked me down just as the future fell out of my diary, and they sent a charming funny email that lured me without a sign of struggle to Svolvær, and my producing debut. ‘In Svolvær there will be peace and beer, and more dried cod than you have ever dreamed.’

‘Annaliese is quite a singer, you know,’ Kate said, but I’d lost track of what was connecting the threads of the conversation. Maybe it was a new thought entirely. ‘We’ve got her singing on DVD. Let me show you.’

‘Would she be okay with that?’

‘Thousands of people saw her. Why wouldn’t she be okay?’ She was already moving.

I followed her inside, and she sorted through the pile of DVDs under the TV. She pulled one out of its box and pushed it into the player. There was a VCR wired in there as well, and a machine I didn’t recognise. I wondered if Mark had gone to work on it all. He had probably charged her a fee.

‘It’s supposed to operate from one remote,’ she said. ‘This DVD is just Annaliese’s segment of the show. If I can get it to...’

The screen burst into life, but on an analogue TV channel. Kate worked the volume down with her thumb, made an assortment of mistakes with the remote, swore under her breath. Then footage of a stage staggered onto the screen. Annaliese was standing alone in the back of a red convertible, with dancers around her. She was singing DJ Sammy’s version of Boys of Summer, with the backing track ticking along at the requisite high BPM, and her only mistake was that she had too much voice to offer it. The original – the new original, anyway – was a dance track, and the voice deliberately pulled back to sound light on, but Annaliese was going for it, and she could really sing.

‘She’s great,’ I was saying, honestly, when her door swung open.

‘That’s supposed to stay in my room,’ she said to Kate angrily, ignoring me completely.

‘But you were really good.’ I was trying to defuse the situation, but also meaning it. I was feeling tired, feeling the beer in my head, wanting to be back at my own house.

‘You’re just trying to cover my mother’s fat arse.’ Still looking at Kate. Spleen was set to be vented here, and I could be collateral damage if I wanted to be.

‘Did you really need to say fat?’ These were Kate’s first words, and I wasn’t sure they would help.

‘Okay, everyone,’ I said, finding a peacemaker tone from somewhere. ‘Great singing, great arse.’

‘It was just an expression,’ Annaliese said. ‘And I’d like the DVD now.’