The True Story of Butterfish Read Online Free Page A

a bullet dodged. So the news shocked me when it came.
    Patrick kept himself fastidiously lean, his diet all pulses and other cardioflatulents. I appeared to have made other choices.
    â€˜I can’t believe you live at Kenmore,’ he said through a mulch of rocket and bitter purple leaves. ‘All that money and you live at Kenmore.’
    â€˜I’m on the Brookfield side of the road,’ I told him, though I knew where the suburb line lay and I was still in Kenmore by hundreds of metres.
    â€˜Brookfield is Kenmore with ponies.’ There would be little slack cut for Brookfield.
    â€˜This blue cheese dressing is amazing,’ I said. ‘You really should try some. Live a little.’

I left lunch with Patrick with the usual feeling of incomplete satisfaction. ‘All that money and you live at Kenmore.’ It was very Patrick, that kind of remark. Kenmore was half an hour across town, and he had probably never been there. He lived among the clean lines and post-industrial chic of a loft-style apartment in a building that had once been a sugar refinery. He could walk to work, but tended not to because he would sweat. He had views of New Farm Park, but not really of the river, and the nearby CBD skyline sat squarely in front of his balcony, as though he had put it there, like a ficus in a pot.
    I hit traffic all the way up Ann Street as he took his nipple show back to work. I looked at my watch. It was a reflex response to being stuck – I had nowhere to be and all the time in the world to get there. It was the watch my father had given me for a birthday when I was still at school. I had bought myself a sleek matt-finish German one in Berlin once, but I picked up the old watch when I came back for his funeral. A few days later I returned to the US for a party to celebrate our second album, Supernature, going platinum there, and to launch its second single.
    Minutes after I arrived, the watch was slipped from my wrist by a balloon-twisting clown and then given back to me in the belly of a purple poodle before I knew it was gone. I still hadn’t got the time zone right in my head and the moment felt hazy and surreal – the clown and his red nose, his unfriendly mouth set in the middle of a fat lurid smile, the people clustered around us working it out one by one and all before I did. And I was holding my balloon poodle, thanking the clown for it since it seemed to be a gift, then seeing a watch inside through the translucent purple, marvelling that the clown too might have a watch like that and then, far too late, realising I’d been had.
    I pulled my sleeve up and saw my bare wrist, and that my watch, my one tangible link with my father, could have been lost so easily. The fragility of that connection was more than I could bear. I thought I would cry. I took the first jerky breath and then stopped myself. People laughed, so I made an effort to turn my lurch of breath into a laugh as well. The clown, still flat-mouthed inside his smile, was studying me closely. He went to speak, but then thought better of it. Someone popped the balloon and handed me the watch, and I put it in my pocket. I was holding a drink, so I couldn’t put it on my wrist again, and I wanted it out of sight. I wanted no one but me to touch it.
    â€˜He did me earlier,’ one of the music company executives said, putting his hand on my arm and giving it a squeeze. ‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ He started to steer me round to face another direction and said, ‘There are some people I’d like you to meet, over by the fountain.’
    My hand kept going to my pocket, checking and checking, for the rest of the night.
    Patrick had been in Butterfish, in the early days. He was in the Butterfish that played friends’ parties till the cops were called, that hired the cheapest rehearsal spaces in the Valley or, better still, borrowed them. The Butterfish that stuck together because the best