The True Story of Butterfish Read Online Free

had ‘clients up to the wazoo’ and I said I assumed he was wearing mesh so that people could get a good look at his crammed wazoo and not approach him with new business. He said he was not wearing mesh there, but maybe next casual Friday he should give it some thought.
    Our meals arrived, his a plate of leaves weighed down with a few spindly low-GI roast veges, mine a sizeable slab of gourmet lasagna and a well-dressed salad, competing and mingling savoury fragrances rising from it and making my salivary glands spasm.
    He looked at my plate as though it was evidence of an entry-level war crime.
    â€˜I don’t know how you can eat that with no dressing,’ I said, mustering some kind of pre-emptive strike. ‘I assume you shit little rabbity pellets.’
    â€˜I have a family history of heart disease,’ he said, and I hated him for it in a brotherly way and wanted to throw his leaves in his face. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Stupid remark. I just wish ... I want you around, Chubs.’
    He lanced some leaves with his fork. I cut a fat corner of lasagna and lifted it to my mouth.
    â€˜I’m around,’ I said before posting it in there.
    It had been a year and five months since our father had died of a heart attack in the early hours of the morning on the way from his bedroom to the bathroom. It was his third, and he had a seam down his chest from bypass surgery. I was fourteen when he had his operation, and fastidious management of his cholesterol and blood pressure had bought him another twenty years.
    Patrick and I had played guessing games about who got which genes from where, as families do. For us it was harder than some. Patrick was inexplicably darker than the rest of us. We had both outgrown any resemblance the two of us had, though I had done so more literally, and we had no mother to measure ourselves against, since she had died when we were young. I was three, Patrick was seven. He went to her funeral but I didn’t, on the advice of a family friend who was a psychologist and said Patrick’s seven-year-old grieving needs would be different to mine.
    I could remember our mother, but mostly I remembered her from photographs. As time passed and the world changed – but the photos didn’t – she became an abstract representation of the seventies to me. The photos stayed out on the coffee table and the bookcases and slowly grew pale, and Patrick touched them sometimes for luck, one after another. He spoke to them, and my father encouraged it.
    She had a bike with a big basket with two flowers on it. That was one of the photos – her on her bike, no helmet, her hair being tossed around. She had flowing dresses, and preferred to go barefoot. She could pick things up with her toes – socks, pencils, Lego. She wore chunky wooden beads and I liked the texture. She sang in tune. I think I remember her singing Scarborough Fair. Like my father, she was a music teacher. She auditioned successfully for the state symphony orchestra as a flautist, and then she became sick. I knew that only from the chronology I’d learned. I couldn’t remember her sick and I couldn’t think of any flute music from my early life.
    My father stayed in the house, a simple unrenovated Queenslander in an unfashionable part of town, and kept it as it was for the next thirty years.
    It was a student and his mother who found him, at five minutes to ten on the first Monday of the school holidays. They had turned up for a private lesson, and saw the distorted shape of his body through the leadlight window glass of the front door. For years the prospect of my father’s death, instant and non-negotiable as it would be, had scared me. I had only one parent, and needed to keep him. But his failure to die for ten years and then fifteen, and the drift of his cardiology visits to six-monthly and then annual, had me complacent. His chest seam was an old scar by then, history, a story of