The professional demands on me, as I saw them, were not only for hard work. I had progressed very quickly in my advertising career and had been appointed creative director of a large agency just five years after starting in the advertising business. I was a young executive launched on a spectacular career path and I was prepared to pay my dues. If this meant late nights and less time for the kids, it was a price I was prepared to pay. The Western world was booming, the consumer society was upon us, the steaks were thick and tender and pink in the middle, the geese were laying golden eggs and opportunities in the Lucky Country for a young bloke with no formal training and some talent for words were spectacular. All it was going to take was drive and ambition, two words which should have been appropriated and sandwiched between my Christian and my surname – Bryce “Drive & Ambition” Courtenay. It fitted perfectly. I was learning to tap dance and I was to become very good at it, the Fred Astaire of the local propaganda industry.
The decade and a half from the early sixties to the mid seventies in Sydney advertising were hard-drinking years. As Australia’s youngest creative director, running a big reputation creative department, I suppose I was under a fair amount of pressure to perform. A few drinks after finishing work at seven or eight was easy to justify as part of the job, part of my career, part of being a good bloke and, though I would have had trouble admitting it, also a part of my ability to cope.
I should add that nobody is easier to convince himself than I am. I tell myself lies and soon I believe them. I had a hot team of creative people and I convinced myself that the task of sharing their after-hours life was included among my professional responsibilities.
It wasn’t too hard for my inflated ego to reach this conclusion and I don’t remember needing any outside persuasion. The pub was fun, a nice warm cocoon, a great place to hide. How easily it all rolls off the tongue and how bloody arrogant and pompous it now seems. Increasingly, I found myself driving home late at night, half – no three-quarters – smashed, to wake up the following morning with a sore head and a yellow, furry, nicotine-coated tongue.
But somehow I always got the boys up early. Brett and Adam and, later, Damon also, that is, if he hadn’t been up most of the night with a bleed and wouldn’t be going to school as usual. I’d make their breakfast and we’d have a bit of a play or we’d talk or discuss their homework. In the summer we’d even occasionally go fishing in the bay or kick a ball around. This was almost entirely out of guilt. While I think I did have the makings of a very good father, I didn’t give the task the priority it demands in life. As a father I was all smoke and mirrors, a nice guy who was never around at night but who always came to breakfast.
The shoot I was on the day Damon’s head exploded finished late. After the director called a wrap we all retired to a pub up the road. It was the place where all the northside ad men, film people, musos, jingle merchants, production people, freelance artists, illustrators and the like, did their drinking. The beer was always fresh and suitably cold and the girls from the local agencies who dropped in after five usually started pretty and drank prettier and prettier as the evening wore on.
Australia had very few dedicated young artists at that time and the older, well-known ones had all escaped overseas. We were the commercials – the young talent who had opted for money rather than a damp basement lodging and eventual recognition.
This pub was across the Bridge from McCann Erick-son, my own agency. Sometime during the evening a bloke named Singo from a local agency, who’d had too much to drink and took exception either to me, or my intrusion into his territory, invited me into the lane at the back of the pub.
The pub emptied to accompany us and, soon after squaring up, Singo tore my collar and I biffed him a couple of times and spilled a bit of blood. I could box a little and blood on a white shirt is always a quick way to stop a meaningless fight. This was a trick I’d learned in the copper mines in Central Africa at a much earlier stage in my life and it has subsequently saved me from any real damage to my physical person on a dozen different occasions.
At the sight of a generous splash of nose blood down Singo’s shirt-front we were immediately parted by several of the more sober of the spectators. Ten minutes later Singo and I, arms around each other’s shoulders, were singing a rugby song together and feeling absolutely no pain.
I drove home that night thinking the yellow line down the centre of the road was specially placed there to guide me. That is, as long as I was careful to straddle it with the front wheels of General Motors’ finest, my light brown (Northern Territory Gold) Holden Special. I followed it conscientiously and home is precisely where it led.
It was after midnight when I pulled up outside our cottage, where I was confronted at the door by a raging, screaming, tearful, berserk, biting, scratching, delicious-looking wife with heaving breasts, whom I could only think of as stunning. Someone whom I would have dearly loved to sleep with but who alas wasn’t going to let me.
I awoke the next morning feeling very second-hand and scratched about the face and arms from Benita’s welcome the previous night. I woke Brett and Adam for breakfast, fresh orange juice for vitamin C, cornflakes and toast soldiers for dipping into the small, oval, calcium-encased Vesuvius in their egg cups, which erupted every time they pushed toast fingers into its disgusting yellow goo.
At breakfast six-year-old Brett told me how Damon’s head had grown bigger and bigger until they all thought it was going to pop. “We waited for you, Daddy, but then Mummy had to take him to the hospital. It’s probably popped by now! Will he still be alive?”
Benita, who wasn’t talking to me, did at least say Damon was okay. I called the hospital when I got to work and asked how he was. “He’s had two transfusions and seems quite cheerful,” the ward sister told me.
“May I visit him at about eleven?” I asked.
There was a pause. “Sorry Mr Courtenay, but you’ll have to wait until Dr Robertson comes in. He’s instructed no visitors, but he may be prepared to make an exception for the child’s parents. Can you call back in an hour?”
An hour later I called to be told that I was allowed to see Damon, but that Benita was not permitted to do so. “Why, sister?” I asked fearfully.
There was a pause on the phone. “I think I’d better put you through to Dr Robertson,” she said.
After she connected me I could hear the extension ringing for quite some time; finally the receiver lifted, “Robertson!”
“Doctor, it’s Bryce Courtenay, Damon’s father.”
“Oh, yes, Mr Courtenay?”
“Sister tells me my wife may not visit him.”
“Ah yes, a matter of judgment. You see your son has a very bad haematoma. To be perfectly frank, we’ve never seen anything quite like it. The cranium is grossly swollen and is very unsightly. I’m afraid your wife may react badly if we allowed her to see him in his present condition. Why did you wait so long to bring him in?”
I couldn’t tell him about my being drunk or that Benita was a new driver and afraid to drive through the city traffic. “You instructed us always to wait a few hours, to make sure it was a bleed,” I said, knowing that this was true but taking his instructions to the extreme. Knowing how long to wait was always a problem, Benita is apt to panic too quickly and I remain calm too long.
“I think you took my instructions to the extreme, don’t you?”
I remained silent, not knowing what to say and angry that he wanted me to admit my mistake like a schoolboy confronted by his housemaster.
“Well, be that as it may, I don’t want your wife visiting the child,” he said.
What a fucking nerve! Who the fuck does he think he is? Whose fucking baby is it, anyway? I was filled with righteous indignation, but when the time came to speak all I could manage was, “That’s considerate of you, doctor, but she is his mother, I think she’ll be more upset if she’s not permitted to see him.”
I was taking Robertson on for the first time. My head started
to pound and, with the sudden rush of blood, my hangover hurt like hell. I wanted to throw up, the mixture of anxiety and the previous night’s drinking not a good one. I could taste the sour, raspy burn of sudden sick in the back of my throat.
There was a lengthy silence on the other end of the phone; at last Robertson answered, his voice controlled, “Nevertheless, that is my decision, Mr Courtenay.”
My head roared and I couldn’t hear myself think: I’ll insist! No I won’t, I’ll back off. Christ, no, not this time! This time I’ll make a stand!
“I see, er, yes, very well doctor, I’ll tell her.”
“Thank you, Mr Courtenay, I’m sure it’s for the best.” The phone went dead.
I arrived at the Children’s Hospital half an hour later not knowing what to expect, fearful of what I might see. What I saw as I entered Damon’s room was so vastly in excess of my imagination that I immediately went into shock.
That day in early Autumn, in the tiny private room in the Children’s Hospital with the walls painted with a mural of pixies, fairies and mushrooms, was to be the worst day of my life, that is, until April Fool’s Day twenty-three years later.
I want you to imagine an alien creature with a small baby’s torso, fat and chubby and pink, but on its shoulders a huge, deep purple, oval head about three times the size of a normal head, soft and mushy-looking like an overripe plum, with the skin stretched so tightly that it created a totally smooth surface with no features. Where you looked for eyes, there were only tiny slits and where there ought to have been a mouth, there was a small aperture that looked like a deformed belly button. And where there might be ears, there was nothing, except two dents in the side of the great, oval sack of purple blood.
My beautiful baby son with his large, bright, happy eyes and soft sticky-up hair had been turned into a monster. He stood holding on to the side of the cot rocking back and forth, tiny bubbles coming from the twisted, navel-like aperture that should have been his soft little rosebud mouth.
I stood, unable to comprehend. Nothing had prepared me for this. In Africa, in the mines, I had once seen a black man’s skull split like a ripe tsamma melon by a fall of rocks, brains and blood leaking from its shell. All I could do was light a cigarette and put it in his mouth; and when he’d smoked it he said quietly, “Thank you, Bwana.” Then he died. Once, I had been present when a shooter I was with shot a male baboon in the stomach and I’d observed it tear its own guts out, pulling out its entrails as it screamed in agony on a dark mottled rock against a blue African sky. I took the rifle from the man who’d made the shot and who now stood watching, his eyes agate-sharp with cruel glee. I worked the bolt, bringing a fresh bullet into the chamber and shot the almost human ape at point-blank range through the head. The bastard had shaved the nose of the .303 cartridges he was using, turning them into dumdums. The head of the baboon exploded as the bullet struck, leaving the great ape without a head on its torso; but with its hands still buried in its bloody guts.
And now my son’s head. My son’s head filled with blood and pain by the failure of a tiny chromosome trigger, a certain Factor VIII gone missing in his otherwise perfectly ordinary blood. The ingredient that turned off the tap for other babies wasn’t there and my son’s head filled and filled with blood until it looked as though it might explode. Explode like the head of the baboon, leaving a perfectly normal baby torso standing headless against a mural of red, floppy-capped pixies, gossamer fairies and pink-gilled toadstools.
I knew the nightmare of heads. I’d seen how vulnerable heads could be. The quiet death of the black man deep inside the dark, flinted earth of a copper mine and the raging death in the afternoon of a baboon with no head, its blackness and agony silhouetted against a flawless African sky. Now this new nightmare – the head of my son filled with the blood of his unstoppable bleeding.
There is some pain which is too great for a spontaneous outcry, too awful for the sobs that so nicely soak our agony in tears. It is a pain that comes from deep inside and so completely fills you that you become motionless, noiseless, without tears, just one or two that squeeze out and run across your chin like thin, carelessly spooned soup.
I didn’t hear Sir Seymour Plutta and his entourage as they entered. Perhaps I heard him talking, but it was as though in a dwaal, a dream, in which a black and white fox terrier, balancing an open umbrella on its nose, dances on its hind legs in a circle made by strange, elongated, grinning men in white coats.
“Extraordinary! Gentlemen, you will spend your entire medical careers and never see anything like this again. Mr…er, the photographer here, will record it for a case study I intend to write. What’s the umbrella for? I see…lighting, bounces light back into the subject. Ah-ha, I see, a reflector, a photographer’s reflector. Will you use flash? We want all the details. You must shoot every angle, we may never get another chance. See how perfect, gentlemen. See here, you can poke your finger into the cranium. It’s all blood, a massive, quite outstanding haematoma. Here, come on gentlemen, touch it. What do you think is the cause? Anyone like to hazard a guess?”
The flash bulb on the photographer’s camera brought me back. White-jacketed interns were lined up in front of my son, each prodding a finger into the huge, purple, blood-filled balloon. An animal wail came from the back of my throat, perhaps like the baboon on the mottled rock, I don’t know. Then I hit the blurred face nearest me. It went down. It was a lousy, mistimed punch; the bastard should have stayed down but, instead, Sir Seymour Plutta hit the floor and then sat up astonished, his hand clamped over his bloody nose, unable to comprehend what had happened.
“Get up, you shit, I’m going to fucking kill you!” That’s what a medico I met years later told me I’d growled, though I don’t recall saying anything at all and no official report of the incident was ever made. I was grabbed and held by a number of the interns as I bent to pull Sir Seymour to his feet by the lapels of his jacket. He continued to sit bewildered on the floor with his back against the photographer’s lightbox, his head directly under the lighting umbrella. I saw a terrified little man in a white shirt and blue serge suit who reminded me of a fox terrier with blood coming from its nose. But at least the fox terrier was no longer yapping.
The long nightmare of the bleeding had begun.
Four
The Art of Dreaming.
I‘m not at all sure I was a good father. I often think that I messed up the task of being a parent. Though I try to tell myself parenthood is still too close to me and, certainly, I feel unable to write a chronological account of our family life. The time we are given for parenting is so short, passes so quickly and is jumbled up with so many other priorities and disruptions that, in the end, we come to doubt that we used it in the best interests of our children.
There is so much which, in retrospect, I feel might have been added. I feel most guilty about letting my children’s childhood pass without sufficient play. I was too preoccupied with myself, my career and, I told myself, Damon’s haemophilia. Before I was fully aware of it, their childhood was over and I was talking to young adults whose voices had suddenly become a couple of octaves lower.
At thirty-one, Brett still recalls with some chagrin that every year I promised we’d go camping and that we never did. I promised to go fishing with him at The Gap and I never did. Partly because I’d once watched in terror as he scampered, like a mountain goat, across the cliff face, but mostly because I was otherwise occupied. Damon wanted to learn to skin dive, but we never got around to it; again, I told myself, because I was afraid he might be hurt, but mostly it was because I couldn’t find the time. Adam wanted badly to teach me how to ride a surfboard, but this too never came about.
Now, as I try to write about Damon’s childhood, to recreate a time when his small life was crowded with events, these are hopelessly confused in my own memory.
For instance, Brett and Adam achieved quite a lot in their not unusual childhood. At school and in sport, both achieved most of the academic and s
undry accolades, the badges and the prizes and the leadership roles which institutions invent as the character-building trivia of which school life is composed. As a consequence they often made us feel proud of them. But now, barely a decade later, few of these formal pictures remain in my mind.
Instead, I carry around a bagful of emotional clutter among which is a picture of Brett at ten handing me his end-of-term school report. While he’d done well enough overall, his English mark was a C. Language in our family has always been important; I sternly demanded an explanation. He looked up at me and bringing his hand up to his head he scratched it, bemused, “I dunno how it happened, Dad, I thought I done good!”
Another is of an eight-year-old Adam, whose room had acquired a peculiar smell, which he seemed not to notice. One evening, quite late, I walked into it to tell him it was bedtime. Sitting happily on his bed chewing an apple was a wide-eyed and totally relaxed possum. “Dad, this is Willy,” Adam said casually, not looking up from his homework. It turned out he’d spent months enticing the small arboreal creature into making visits into his room from the bush reserve abutting our garden.
Of Damon there is yet another, a sliver of emotional memory which, like those of Brett and Adam, carries no significance and no importance and exists, some might say, at the saccharine end of memory. Damon, perhaps five years old, woke me early one summer morning shaking my shoulder with both hands. “Wake up, wake up, Daddy, it’s the world’s best day and guess what?” He leapt on to me. “Hooray! We’re in it!”
I find that the person I am or even have become is, in a large part, formed from this same sort of trivia.
It was perhaps my African background that allowed me to see Damon as a temporary gift. The fact that he had been born with a chronic condition and that his life couldn’t be taken for granted, that a really bad fall or a relatively minor motor accident or some other cause of severe internal bleeding could take him away from us, meant that he was special. While we were not really well off at this time, we were on our way and, certainly, we could afford to give our children many privileges. It could be possible to conclude that Damon was advantaged by his family’s wealth. But it is important, I think, to understand neither wealth nor privilege eases the pain, nor can they finally prevent death. Both pain and death are as difficult to bear in a privileged child as in one less so. In the end, money cannot and does not help.
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