Four metres was even taller than the twelve feet Dad said. That was the trouble with dad facts, sometimes they turned out not to be dad facts at all. And then there were the dad facts you knew in your heart were dad facts but you couldn’t prove it. They were the kind that drove Adam crazy. Like the story of The Great Cockroach Regatta when, using bits of bacon, miners trained blind albino cockroaches underground in the copper mines in Africa to race in paper boats along the water canals and gambled thousands on the results.
Now that was one of my dad’s greatest unprovable dad facts which, no matter how much Adam cross-examined him, he couldn’t fault. But the worst part for Adam was when my dad would sum up a dad fact with a sort of moral. It was as though my dad was using an untruth to announce a truth.
Brett, on the other hand, would love these moral summaries, always insisting on one after a dad fact. He needed them because when he got to school he would begin with this end bit, with the moral summary of the dad fact. For instance, he’d begin by saying casually:
“In this cruel world it’s the blind leading the blind in a case of sink or swim, where it’s roach eat roach, and where big gobbles up small; in life there is no such thing as plain sailing and if you want to bring home the bacon you must be prepared to do things differently and never ever give up.”
Everyone would immediately know that a gi-normous dad fact was coming on and they’d gather around to be suitably confounded. They used to like to have Adam present so that afterwards he could try to prove to them how the latest dad fact couldn’t possibly be true.
Unfortunately there wasn’t such a thing as an Encyclopaedia Cockroachi at home or in the school library, so Adam couldn’t check the great blind albino cockroach probability and so this particular dad fact remains, even today, the greatest of them all.
But I bet one day when Adam is a famous journalist or foreign correspondent he’ll go to Africa, to those very same copper mines in Zambia, and he’ll go underground and see if the cockroaches are white and blind and can swim and then he’ll check in the British Museum or some place like that to see if cockroaches can become cannibals.
That’s how Adam is; where facts are concerned he’s the one who never gives up.
Nine
The Lover with a Limp and a Red Ferrari.
With children who cannot physically do the things other children take for granted, secrecy becomes a matter of self-protection. In a sense, they are abused children, though not in the generally accepted meaning. The world of little boys is largely physical and being unable to be a part of it is a mental trauma which must have significant effects on a small child. Damon would have gone to great lengths to protect a frail ego.
Though I told myself that I understood how Damon must feel about his inability to play with other kids, to wield a cricket bat, kick a soccer or rugby ball, run a race or simply join in the rough and tumble of growing up, I clearly didn’t. While I was able to intellectualise his anxiety and even sometimes keenly feel his disappointment, I never fully understood his emotional pain.
The truth was that he became so skilled at covering up, at concealing his setbacks, that we all simply forgot how he must feel when he saw Adam and Brett with surfboards under their arms happily heading for the beach. Or watched at the edge of the playground as the other kids had a rollicking good time, chasing around, crashing into each other, grabbing and falling about in the way of small boys.
The big trouble with Damon was that he never complained. Not even as a small child. He simply watched and then got on with something else. He would sit and listen and laugh as Adam talked of cracking a big wave, hugging himself as Adam told us how frightened he was but how, when he finally stood up on his board, he felt like every good thing that could possibly happen had just happened to him.
Damon would make Adam tell the story in every detail, his eyes shining at his brother’s triumph, and he’d ask questions so that he soon knew all the surfing jargon and the meanings of the various board manoeuvres and the ways of the cantankerous waves. He knew the reef break on South Bondi almost as well as Adam and they soon spoke a surfing jargon I was unable to comprehend. Adam often quite forgot that Damon didn’t ride a board and they would discuss technique and mistakes and chances taken and missed, the state of the waves and the effect on the surfing when the king tides ran.
Nielsen Park is a small harbour beach where for the most part the waves are too flat to earn the respect of even beginner board riders; but a couple of times a year, for reasons no one seemed to be able to explain, the waves would run at Nielsen. This would usually happen around midnight or even later, but when they ran, the northern end of this tiny beach featured a board ride which was legendary. It was fast, tricky and required great skill; in return it gave up one of the best right-hand breaks in the surfing business.
The phone would ring, often at two in the morning, and Damon would answer. “Nielsen’s running!” a voice would shout down the phone and hang up. Nobody ever knew who was the first to know this. A tiny beach which started to pump in the small hours of the morning, how would a kid know that? But someone always did.
Damon would get Adam and Brett up and send them running, surfboards under their arms, for Nielsen which wasn’t much more than a kilometre from home. When, some hours later, I rose, Damon would usually be up and dressed and we’d jump into the car and race for Nielsen to watch the boys do the last of their surfing in the dawn light. We’d watch from the sandstone cliff top looking down, anxiously trying to find Brett and Adam among the heads dotting the water and pushing surfboards into the swell.
Damon would get terribly excited when Brett or Adam caught a wave and groan with disappointment when they missed. The waves at Nielsen broke to the right or, in surfing parlance, it was a right-hand break, and, when the harbour swell was huge, would cover a series of tall pylons which stood fixed into the sand as supports for the shark net which turned a part of the far right side of the beach into a safe swimming area in the summer. Riding the pylons meant taking the wave over them and not dropping short; this took a great deal of courage. Adam was a goofy footer, which meant he surfed with his right foot forward which, again, meant he had his back to the breaking wave and therefore couldn’t see the pylons so easily as the waves ahead dropped to reveal them. Damon would have his heart in his mouth as Adam moved backwards towards the giant kauri posts, knowing that his brother’s skill depended on his choosing a wave that wouldn’t die moments before arriving at the pylons and send him crashing disastrously into one of them. He’d yell with delight, victory shining in his eyes, when Adam gassed his board over the dangerous stumps, riding it imperiously into the beach, his back to the wave. I’m sure, from seeing the look on his face, that Damon felt nearly the same rush of triumph and sudden charge of adrenalin as his older brother.
Years later Adam was to admit to me that he only attempted the pylons when Damon was on the cliff. “I came to believe that I needed the extra courage he gave me. He’d stand up there on the cliff top with his leg-iron and his arms raised and I’d feel that, if Damon wanted it, I could do it.”
We’d return home about seven, the two brothers red-eyed and happy from the salt and exhaustion and from having being dumped ten times for every wave they caught. These were bacon and egg mornings, with thick slices of tomato fried in with the bacon and sometimes, if we were lucky, we’d even have sausages in the fridge. Nielsen-running was a sort of annual celebration, like the coming of the sardines in Portugal.
Quite how the two boys got through school that day I was never game to ask, although half the class would probably have been asleep with them. It was a sort of tacit understanding, negotiated in the first instance by Damon, that when Nielsen was running the boys could go, even though it was mostly well past midnight.
Damon was never to feel the surge of a wave as it lifted the board nor the sweet, hard, exquisite pain of his arms working like pistons tearing at the swell to get set on to the lip of the thundering water, then
to rise and ride the tiny, waxed plank cutting a streak of side-foam along the green, glassed edge of a wave riding it all the way into the fizzing white water on the shoreline.
Yet Damon was, or at least pretended to be, as enthusiastic and expert on the subject of surfing as his brothers and he would listen for hours as they discussed the vagaries of Nielsen, Bondi (North and South), Tamarama and Coogee, the more or less accepted surfing boundaries for the Eastern Suburbs kids. He also knew his cricket and his rugby and discussed them at great length with Adam in particular, for Brett wasn’t interested in these two team sports. Brett liked his combat man-on-man or alone, so he chose tennis and surfing as his sports or fishing off Watson’s Bay Gap with his mate, Gary. The two of them were like goats on the high, vertical sandstone cliffs and I constantly expected a knock on the door to tell me something bad had happened. But you’ve got to let kids be intrepid. With Damon denied the freedom and exhilaration of a strong, resourceful body, I could hardly be over-protective of his brothers. Brett often came home bleeding, but he never broke anything. As an adult he still fishes off The Gap and can be counted on to bring back a brace of fat bream or leatherjacket.
When eight-year-old Adam started playing rugby at the Cranbrook Prep. School oval on Saturday mornings, Damon would drag his leg-iron up and down the touchline cheering Adam on and shouting instructions every time he touched the ball.
“G’arn Adam! Tackle! Tackle him! Go low! Low!!” or “Pass! Pass the ball! Ah gee, Adam! (Sigh) Dad, you’ve got to tell him to wait for the gap to open, he thinks it’s always there!”
Afterwards, they would discuss the game and Damon would offer his serious advice as to how Adam had gone wrong, the nature of the opposition, Adam’s tactics and form on the day and how he might improve as a five-eighth.
“Your hands are good, Adam, the best, but you see a gap where there isn’t one and get sucked in every time.”
Adam, who was pretty serious about everything he did, would spend the next game passing the ball to his centres, sometimes ignoring a gap in the opposition line he could have strolled through with his eyes closed. The two of them were very close as brothers, but you got the impression that Damon was the one in charge.
In the summer we would sit under the jacaranda trees and watch Adam playing cricket. Damon, as usual, was both his harshest critic and his biggest fan. Only once did I hear him say, “You know, Dad, I think I could’ve been a really good batsman.” The wistfulness in his voice brought a sudden and unexpected stinging to my eyes and Damon, glancing up, saw my distress and he never again volunteered another “I could’ve been".
In fact he just might have been good at the kind of sport which requires good hand –eye co-ordination; he was an absolute whiz at ping-pong, a game which requires very little movement if your eye is sufficiently fast. But arthritis in his wrists soon took care of even this small sporting triumph.
Because he was so vital and involved and enthusiastic his brothers forgot that he was a haemophiliac. He stopped wearing short pants at the age of eight and so his bruises were usually covered. Besides, Damon never alluded to his bleeds, so that it was easy to think of him as a kid who chose not to play sport, rather than one who was unable to do so.
When, at around ten, he was doing his own blood transfusions, he would get a bleed and quietly prepare the Factor VIII and then close the door to his room and transfuse himself so that his brothers were unaware of the pain. He would simply announce that he was going into his room to read and would prefer not to be interrupted. He’d retire, often for three or four hours, until the worst of the pain was over, then he’d come out as though nothing had happened, same old cheerful Damon.
To help him in all this, most of the bleeds continued to come at night, so that he could keep a great deal of his pain and discomfort to himself and appear to be in pretty good shape by the morning. We dreaded each full moon, Damon always got the worst bleeds when the moon was full. His diary showed this quite clearly, yet when I mentioned it in the notes we prepared with each batch of cryoprecipitate the hospital haematologist laughed derisively. “Does he feel the urge to howl, as well?” he once quipped to the nursing sister.
If Damon was quiet about his physical problems he made up for it with his extroverted nature. Damon had an opinion on everything and demanded that it be heard. He loved to argue and to use his mind and his fast tongue. Because he was so often away from school with a bleed, he learned to read widely under his mother’s direction and he was soon pretty hard to beat in an argument or discussion. For a start he knew more though, surprisingly, he never became a know-all. Adam tended to be a bit of a know-all, or at least a Mr Know-all-the-facts, but not Damon. He must have instinctively known, or discovered somewhere along the way, that the secret to covering up his physical problems was to divert people’s attention to his mind. He was sufficiently acute to realise that this wasn’t simply a matter of being a big mouth who had all the answers, though the temptation to be one must have been enormous. After all, he had nothing else to show off. But he seemed to know when to draw back, satisfied that he’d beaten his opponent without shaming him, prepared to listen as well as talk. In fact, Damon developed into an expert listener.
I think Damon genuinely liked to listen, to truly listen. He would listen with everything he had, his eyes, his shoulders, his hands and his entire demeanour and then remain silent and consider what he’d heard, ask one or two cogent questions and then finally offer an opinion. This mannerism was charming and so he made his friends seem important and their opinions valuable. Such perspicacity was astonishing in a child so young. Damon, even at an early age, seemed to know the difference between advice and the polite offer of an opinion. Pretty soon other kids, including his brothers, started to seek his advice on the things that troubled them.
The point was that Damon was, or appeared to be, an entirely positive person who could tackle a wide range of the subjects which were of concern to small boys. He was an expert on parents, school teachers, the rules of everything, what was fair and unfair, how to solve problems with older brothers, spiteful sisters and difficult parents. It was plain that many of his schoolmates left for home armed with Damon’s logic to confound their enemies. Even his older brothers, who quarrelled with each other as all kids do, would sometimes be prepared to accept Damon as arbiter.
Damon, unable to go out and mix it with the other kids, had found a way to attract people to him. Adam tells how, in junior and senior school, you could always see a bunch of kids gathered around Damon under a tree. His disposition was such that he was almost never left entirely alone except when the other kids went on excursions and he was left behind. Although we accepted his gregarious nature as a blessing, thinking him always to have friends around him, we were too busy to realise ourselves that the nature of his illness meant that he spent a great deal of time on his own. In a letter sent to his grandmother when Damon was ten years old and which she returned to me knowing I was writing this book, he says, explaining his life to her, “…I don’t really need friends".
Somewhere along the line, and when he was still very young, Damon must have decided to be what Brett later referred to as “supernormal” and to carry his physical disadvantages with so little mention that he feigned surprise when anyone brought the matter up. Being normal, I now realise, was a full-time job for him. To seem like everyone else Damon had to work like hell to cover his considerable pain, his anxiety and above all, never, ever show the slightest sign of self-pity.
Damon soon began to realise that his mind could compensate for his body in other ways as well. The early training in imagination and visualisation was beginning to be helpful as he matured. By his early teens he had developed enormous mental discipline and the kind of concentration that can only come from the practice of self-hypnosis or, to give it a more friendly name, meditation.
Damon could diminish his pain level by becoming so deeply immersed in a book or a discussion that it seemed to mask his trauma. When
it got really bad he would sit quietly, his arms folded in his lap, his eyes closed, his mind deeply in his subconscious controlling the pain. Damon was becoming an expert at self-hypnosis.
The medical staff at Prince Alfred, the hospital to which he transferred when a haematology unit was created, would claim that Damon seemed able to tolerate a great deal more pain than their other haemophilia patients. If this was so, then it was essentially mind power, the value of knowing how to enter his mind at a different level. We never spoke much of this aspect of pain control, though sometimes I’d ask him how a bleed was and he’d grimace. “It needed a trip to Africa,” he’d say. So it seemed Damon must have had his own version of the night country, though he never explained and I didn’t ask.
Damon had a very good mind and his mother was doing all she could to see that it got even better. Intelligence is a great healer and Benita added to his natural precocity by constantly keeping his mind sharp, never allowing it to grow lazy. The dictionary and encyclopaedia were well-thumbed books in our home. Both were used almost exclusively by Adam and Damon. Adam, everlastingly a seeker after truth, used the books to confirm facts; Damon was as constantly in the business of expanding upon them.
Damon used me rather differently. He liked the way I could expand on a subject and think out of the square. “What we need here is some of Dad’s thinking,” he’d sometimes say. This, I was to learn, was not because he regarded my intellect as superior, a final opinion placed on a somewhat higher plane after an argument may have become deadlocked. In fact, I don’t think he had a great deal of respect for the extent of my knowledge at all. Dad’s thinking interested him because I could often reach conclusions that were plausible without necessarily being the most logical or truthful explanation of a situation or event – hence the inglorious dad fact.
While Damon obviously liked discussing things with me, he was also aware of my limitations, often declaring my version of how something might have come about as less likely but more interesting than the cold hard truth. This limitation he perceived in my intelligence was demonstrated to me early one morning when I think he was about seven.
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