April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  “No, I wouldn’t say that, they have great skills; they have to think of ideas to make them into ads for the paper or radio and TV commercials. Then they have to find the right place to put these ideas, the right magazines or TV programs to make people buy products.” I had to admit to myself, it didn’t sound too intellectually challenging put in this way and Damon was quick to respond.

  “They sell ideas? Is that what you do being the creative director, Dad?”

  I agreed that this was pretty well it. “I think of ideas and my company gets paid a commission for putting these ideas into the media in the form of television or radio commercials or print ads,” I repeated.

  I could see a light go on in Damon’s eyes. “You don’t really work do you? You just sit there and have ideas and people pay you commissions?” He glanced up, “How much? How much do they pay you, Dad?”

  “Well, it’s not quite as easy as that!” I said a little defensively. “Having ideas isn’t all that easy you know! I mean, if a client is going to spend a million dollars he wants a pretty good idea!”

  “A million dollars! How much of that do you get being a commission agent?”

  I could sense that I was in trouble, that my days as the hero who went forth each day to slay the commercial dragon and bring home the family bread were about to end. “Well, the client pays you seven and a half per cent and the media gives you ten per cent, that’s…”

  “Seventeen and a half per cent! A commission agent gets seventeen and a half per cent of a million dollars?” He was clearly blown away.

  “Shhh! You’ll wake everyone up. It’s three o’clock in the morning,” I hissed, hoping to bring the subject of commission agents to an abrupt end.

  But Damon had already reached for the calculator which he kept beside his bed. Holding it between his knees, he tapped out the calculation.

  “It’s near enough to one hundred and seventy thousand in a million dollars, you don’t need a calculator to work that out,” I said scornfully. But Damon was the first generation to be raised on the calculator and he used it as a matter of course, just as my generation had turned on the radio to hear news we’d already read in the morning paper.

  He whistled in amazement, “One hundred and seventy-five thousand!” The jerk of his body as he reacted to this surprising figure stopped the flow of the drip.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” I said annoyed. “Hold still.” I gently wiggled the needle hoping to get the drip flowing into the vein again. “Yeah, one hundred and seventy thousand odd, that’s what I already said. But it’s not as easy as that, you know!” Fortunately the drip started again; had it not I would have had to find a new vein and put the remainder of the cryoprecipitate through it.

  “Just for having ideas.” Damon said this as though to himself and I knew I’d lost him and, in his head, he’d found the way to his first fortune.

  Damon’s various business enterprises never lasted too long; they were all based on himself as the negotiator and middleman with a dozen or so of his friends actually doing the work. In the environment I had grown up in he would have made a fortune, but the kids around where we lived had trouble enough attending to their own swimming pools, let alone the three each they were allocated to clean over the weekend. Damon brought in lots of business but his employees always let him down. He was always out making good some enterprise or other by doing the job himself. He’d clean four pools and come home with a massive bleed, or deliver messages till mid evening and come home with a bleed, or have to work all day cleaning and detailing a couple of Mercedes because his team was out surfing or at camp or away with their parents for the weekend or just plain lazy and, of course, he returned home with a bleed. His most successful business was a Sunday morning croissant door-to-door delivery service. This was basic bicycle work and physically not too demanding, so that when his workers didn’t get up at five a.m. to collect their croissants from the baker at Rose Bay, Damon could usually get Adam and sometimes even Brett to help him deliver. But this too failed after a year or so, when people increasingly forgot to put out their croissant money and Damon found himself out of pocket.

  Damon’s modus operandi was twenty-five per cent of the take in return for which he negotiated the business, collected the money and maintained the quality control. Though the “human factor", which was what he called the basic indolence of his friends, destroyed each of his business enterprises, he still managed to create enough income to buy a hi-fidelity record and tape unit with two speakers, which would have sufficed for a major concert at the Sydney Opera House and which he valued at five thousand dollars, and a record and tape collection which he assured me was worth at least two thousand.

  Under his mother’s guidance he’d learned all about classical music and his collection was impressive, but the ebullient Damon discovered hard and then acid rock and the music coming from his room would change from the Brahms violin concerto to a couple of hard rock numbers and back again to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in the time it took to play these in sequence.

  Damon, as usual, knew all about the music he played and every detail of the equipment on which he played it. Fed up with hired labour, he put a proposition to the hi-fi shop whose equipment and integrity he respected the most that they should pay him commission only, in fact seventeen and a half per cent, on sales of equipment he sold to customers he himself brought in.

  The shop owner could hardly believe his ears, the bargain was struck and Damon, with work at last that didn’t tax his body or depend on his mates, started to clean up. Working his Cranbrook contacts, mostly the kids whom he’d so disastrously employed in the past, he soon had their parents’ homes installed with the latest and the best hi-fidelity gear. Damon, of course, spent everything he earned, most of it in fact going directly back to the owner of the hi-fi shop, as Damon’s audio equipment started to compare with that of a small, high-tech FM radio station. We were discovering that there was no such thing as perfection in sound, but that the urge to try to create it was obsessive and was akin to throwing money into a bottomless pit. Damon’s headphones alone cost more than the Toshiba equipment the rest of the family used to play its tapes and records.

  Damon’s matriculation year, 1983, came and went more or less the same as all the others. He was still only managing three days at school a week and he seemed never to study. He had a spurt of growing between fifteen and seventeen when his bleeds were worse than ever, but nothing else seemed untoward, until he sat his final school examination. Midway through his Higher School Certificate examination we received a call from the Haemophilia Centre asking us to make an appointment to see the head haematologist. Benita nominated a day two days hence when Damon wasn’t sitting for an exam and when I could take a couple of hours off work.

  We arrived at the Haemophilia Centre not particularly anxious; from time to time we’d been in to hear a progress report on Damon’s general health and Denise, the sister-in-charge, hadn’t indicated that this visit was anything very special.

  For a while the doctor talked about Damon’s bad knee. We heard of an operation which was being performed overseas to cut away the calcium deposits inside the kneecap that were fusing the knee and causing arthritis. His opinion was that the operation was difficult and problematic and we shouldn’t attempt to do anything and now he was once again stating his objection.

  Finally he came to the point, “Damon has developed a blood condition, a viral condition known as HIV positive.”

  Benita looked anxious, “What does that mean, doctor?”

  “Well we’re not absolutely certain, he probably got it from a blood transfusion.”

  “Well, what happens? What can we expect?”

  The haematologist shrugged, “We don’t precisely know; we think it has a very long incubation period and, in fact, it might never develop into anything at all.”

  I looked at Benita and we both relaxed. Damon had been through so much, a seemingly benign virus in his blood wasn’t the end of th
e world.

  The doctor tapped his biro on the blotter in front of him. “I wouldn’t worry too much; haemophilia is always going to be his major worry in life.” He looked up and smiled. “Almost half our haemophiliacs have contracted this virus, which seems to have shown no overall effect.”

  “I’ve read about HIV. Isn’t it something happening to homosexuals in America?”

  The doctor looked up quickly. “Yes, well, that’s where they isolated it in the blood. Too little is known to be exact. As I said, there isn’t any cause for alarm.”

  Of course, with our past experience of the medical profession, we should have become panic stricken immediately, but once again we listened and accepted an opinion which, as it transpired, was based on less research and reading than we’d done ourselves. We promptly forgot about Damon’s new HIV-positive state.

  Of course we took him in to have a T-cell count every month, but he always returned a count well within the safety margin. We were much more concerned about his arthritis and the ever-recurring left knee bleed. The old leg-iron knee caused him as much pain as the rest of his body put together and now the right knee was giving him trouble, bleeding more frequently than it had done previously. Damon looked like becoming a cripple and all our energies were spent on trying to prevent this from happening.

  We’d found a good surgeon who would aspirate his knees, that is, open them up to remove the old, coagulated blood and permanent pus and gore around each knee. While this wouldn’t do a great deal for the damaged knees, it was thought that it might stop some of the bleeding and, in this way, prevent further damage. The operation, though simple, required a great deal of blood product. We would often have to wait several weeks for blood to become available. Operating on a haemophiliac was a tricky business and very few surgeons would even attempt it. Because of the potential use of so much blood, the hospital did not encourage surgery on haemophiliacs and Dr MacDonald, the surgeon prepared to operate, was at constant loggerheads with the department head and the hospital board.

  MacDonald wasn’t an easy man to like. He was very outspoken, aware that his fellow surgeons were simply too afraid to operate on a haemophiliac. But he was a good man and cared a great deal about Damon and, indeed, all the other haemophiliacs who had to rely solely on his surgical skills. He spent half his professional life trying to get permission to perform even the most simple operations on haemophiliacs who badly needed his attention. Even a tooth extraction is a major event with a haemophiliac, where the bleeding from having a wisdom tooth extracted is a highly dangerous procedure which, if it goes wrong, can cause the patient to die. The hospital simply couldn’t be bothered with the complex procedures involved. As usual, the haemophiliac supporters were only a handful of families with no political clout or influence and they were, it seemed, more trouble than they were worth. Moreover, they were represented by a surgeon who observed almost no medical decorum and constantly overstepped his authority. It was ironical that, for once, we had a doctor on our side and he was being rendered almost ineffectual by his peers and the hospital system.

  MacDonald was a highly skilled surgeon who kept abreast of the latest surgical techniques in haemophiliac procedure. Although the aspiration was a small help, Damon’s knees were not responding well and needed to be opened up and scraped. The constant bleeding had formed calcium deposits in the joints which acted like rust. The elbow and knee joints were fused and the idea was to try to cut away the sharp calcium deposits which caused much of the bleeding and to attempt to restore some movement to his knees. Similar operations had been successful overseas and MacDonald was hopeful that the same results could be achieved here.

  He was an impetuous man by nature, but a careful surgeon, and had studied the procedure carefully. Despite the objection of the head haematologist, he became convinced that it was a feasible operation for Damon with a good chance for a positive result.

  Only two problems existed, permission to save sufficient blood product for the operation and a particular piece of equipment needed to perform the operation. The German equipment was long overdue and useful in a great many other surgical applications, but the head of department and then the hospital board vetoed the request to purchase it. They had greater needs than this particular equipment and it was made perfectly clear to MacDonald that these “greater needs” would continue to exist for a long time to come. MacDonald was becoming more and more frustrated, but he was only an “honorary” and, as such, making much too much of a nuisance of himself.

  I managed to raise the thirty-three thousand dollars for the equipment through a generous donation from the trust fund of a leading financial organisation, who happened to be one of my clients; as well, we managed to scrape together a bit ourselves. MacDonald went back and requested permission to operate, acquainting the hospital board with the good news of the donation of the very latest equipment to the hospital surgical department.

  He was promptly told that blood product wasn’t available through the Red Cross for such an operation and that he couldn’t, in the foreseeable future, expect that supplies would be forthcoming. MacDonald, after three years of this kind of frustration, had had enough and he resigned his position as an honorary. His resignation was accepted, we have been told, with alacrity by his department head. This man later coldly explained to one of the sisters at the Haemophilia Centre that his area had rather greater priorities than the surgical task of restoring the knees of a haemophiliac from a privileged background just so that he could gallivant around a tennis court. Game, set and match to the doctors in the surgical department of The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.

  Almost ten years later, no haemophiliac has undergone such an operation to his knee, though it is commonplace overseas. Several of those haemophiliacs who might have benefited from such an operation are still alive but are permanently confined to wheelchairs. Also, it is now known that the amount of blood for this particular operation is reasonably easy to obtain, given a few weeks’ notice. The system had caught up with us again and Damon, it seemed, was well on his way to becoming a permanent cripple. The sexy little limp was becoming a bit of a hobble and, as far as we knew, Mr Enzo Ferrari hadn’t yet designed the world’s fastest fire-engine red wheelchair.

  But, of course, Damon didn’t become a cripple. Two new events came into his life; one of them was bad and came in the form of a peculiar nocturnal condition known as “night sweats” and the other was simply divine and came in the shape of a leggy, seventeen-year-old, blue-eyed blonde, named Celeste.

  Ten

  Of Books and Dings and Other Things.

  When someone we love dies there appears to be some sort of healing mechanism triggered in our minds which effectively binds up our hurt. After the initial overwhelming onslaught, the hurt visits us in small, just bearable portions, slowly leaching out our grief so that we may eventually resume our former lives. These sudden inoculating jabs of grief intended to build up our resistance, are thankfully soon over and we can cope until the next one strikes and we feel again the paralysis of loss.

  Alas, this natural process is not designed to cope with writing a book where the pain is deliberately made to linger so that it can, in some part, be trapped for the page. I started to write just two weeks after Damon’s death, knowing that if I delayed I might not be able to keep my promise to him. Damon’s last but a few words to me were to ask me to write this book. His voice was tediously slow and his eyes glazed from the effects of the massive doses of morphine he took to shield what had become almost incomprehensible pain, yet his mind seemed surprisingly clear.

  Our conversation, which here appears so precise and organised, took almost forty minutes with long pauses, some extended to five minutes, as he fought for clarity, choosing carefully these almost last of his words to me through the miasma of drugs, the combination of pills and brightly coloured capsules Celeste called his drug cocktail.

  The simple text I’ve put down here involved a gigantic effort at concentration on Damo
n’s part and was a supreme example of sheer willpower. Towards the end, the task of concentrating for more than twenty or so seconds at a time became almost impossible for him. I would sit beside him on his bed as he spoke to me in a low rasp; I had to strain to hear him, my ear as close to his mouth as I could get. “Dad, I was too young and, in the end, too weak to write about all this.” He waved his hand feebly in front of his face, the gesture intended to take in what his life had become. “But people must be told about AIDS. Ordinary people must understand it’s just something that happens. That it’s not wicked or a punishment and that it needs a lot of love.”

  Here came one of his long pauses and I could see he was upset, but his concentration was so fierce that I dared not attempt to comfort him for fear that his fragile mind might collapse. At last he continued, “Some of the people in hospital, the gay guys, their parents come to visit them at the last moment – for the first time – when they are going to die.” Damon started to weep and all I could do was to hold his hand. “Rick calls them,” he said through his tears, “You know Rick? Rick Osborne your friend. He calls them…and gets heavy.” Damon sniffed and I wiped the mucus from his nose and upper lip. “Rick gets really shitty on the phone and demands they come. And they come…and they’re scared and you can see they’re ashamed…and afraid.” Damon’s eyes filled again with tears. “They don’t understand, Dad, they think they’re being punished. That God is punishing them! They don’t know what to say, how to behave, it’s all new stuff. Some stay only a few minutes, ordinary working people who look down at their hands and around the room, but they don’t, can’t look at their own son! And then they leave, confused and frightened.” Damon lay panting, his hand still in mine. The effort to get all this out was enormous. He looked up at me, his eyes red with conjunctivitis. Somewhere along the way his long, beautiful eyelashes had fallen out; one morning he just didn’t have them. It was such a little thing in all the other things that we hardly noticed.