April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  “Dad, you’ve got to write a book to tell people not to be frightened, not to run away, not to be ashamed. It’s just a thing you get. You have to tell them that.”

  It was the longest conversation Damon had sustained for at least a month. Apart from the great difficulty he had concentrating, with a body no longer able to resist any sort of infection, thrush, the yellow fungus, had attacked the tissue of his mouth and spread down his throat and into the lining of his stomach and large intestine, so that it made each word actually painful to pronounce. It must have been like having a huge, spongy, suppurating sore spread on the inner lining of his food tract. After we’d talked he was completely exhausted and I thought he might actually die. Almost immediately he fell into a deep sleep, his breathing alternately soft and then suddenly furious and struggling, then so soft again it couldn’t be heard and I’d put my ear to his heart, not able to hear his for the beating of my own.

  Damon slept frighteningly, his eyes, pussed and swollen, were half-open, staring up at the ceiling in the manner of the dead. My beautiful son was alive and dead at the same time.

  This had been the last conversation. We’d started talking together so long ago at the time of his purple head. We’d talked and talked, through nights when the moon was full or the rain beat darkly against the window panes and the wind howled outside. We talked through the traffic swish of rainy streets with red and green light caught in the slicked road. Through hot nights or with blankets wrapped around us as we waited in emergency for Dr Gett, the needle man, to arrive. We talked the seasons away, winter and summer, old Damon and I; we’d seen a thousand mornings arrive, seen them sneak up on our conversation unannounced, the window grown suddenly and surprisingly light. We’d talked through the hours and days, the months and years. We’d chased pain away with chat a hundred times at least. We’d built word castles in the air so powerful with rhetoric and laughter that they’d been known to banish the pain of bad bleeds in their tracks.

  Now the mighty Damon could talk no more. This was the last time for the duo who’d slain the great dragon Splutter Grunt and so liberated the butterfly needle.

  These were the final hours coming up.

  Damon knew that he’d come home to die. He’d asked that Adam return from London and Brett from Kuala Lumpur and that all his friends come to say goodbye. His request for this book was the last piece of tidying up he had to do with his short, sweet life.

  I’m certain he didn’t think of this book as his epitaph. Damon never borrowed gratuitously from anything in his life. I’m not saying he wasn’t an opportunist; he knew how to get what he wanted and he wasn’t above the odd scam. But any glory going had to be of his own making. The idea of a book which would act as a memorial to his own pain and struggle would have been abhorrent to him.

  The book he wanted written was about being in love with life, about love and understanding and about not being afraid when you were dealt the joker in the pack, or at the least, facing your fears despite your fear. His final, but four, words to me were about Celeste. “Promise me, Dad, that you’ll always look after Celeste, whom I love much, much more than my own dumb life.”

  Afterwards I found several attempts he’d made to write his own story on his Apple Macintosh. I’d like to say they were especially good words, a literary talent lost to the world, but Damon, though always articulate, was an ordinary maker of prose. He dealt too often in the reality of pain to be much good with hyperbole. From the very first sentence he feels the need to explain, to minimise, to make a small deal of what was truly a very big one.

  As a writer he can be said to have lacked, completely, the sense of his own drama. His words are written as if he has gathered a few people around him for an informal lecture on the causes and effects of being a haemophiliac or on what it means to have AIDS. They contain no hint of self-pity and his pain remains private, not open to discussion, even by himself. To the very last Damon was supernormal.

  Well, I suppose his writing wasn’t really best-seller material, but it’s the stuff from which Damon was well and truly made. Damon was an explainer, a natural seeker after the truth. He wanted to leave behind something which someone else could use without seeking to earn any sympathy or glory for himself, though, of course, he would have wanted his book to be a bestseller; in Damon’s mind there wouldn’t be any point in writing a book if the whole world wasn’t going to read it.

  It may seem natural enough that Damon would urge his readers to cherish their health. But there was more to it than a simple injunction not to take a wonderful gift for granted. Damon was always fascinated by energy. He loved to see people use it. The fact that he himself was always physically incapacitated to some degree, and often completely, made him crave action. It is hardly surprising therefore that the automobile provided the perfect answer. Had his knees been any better it might well have been a motor cycle. So we were lucky, I suppose. The idea of the mighty Damon on a Honda 1000 is the ultimate nightmare.

  Damon could barely wait to turn seventeen so that he could obtain his provisional driving licence. I think it was the only thing he really studied for in his life and he was uncharacteristically in tears when, having achieved one hundred per cent in theory, he made some error or other in judgment during his road test and he was failed.

  It didn’t console him to be told that both Brett and Adam had failed the first time, in fact, that everyone failed the first time, that it was virtually compulsory to fail the first time, that the system quite definitely required it. Damon simply couldn’t conceive that the automobile wasn’t specifically designed for him and the failure was like being rejected by a lover for whom you are prepared to lay down your life.

  We shared long faces and did all the appropriate tut-tutting but, I must say, we were rather pleased at the time. Damon talked and dreamed speed and the idea of arthritic-stiffened arms and legs, none able to react as fast as normal limbs, behind the wheels and pedals of his mother’s Alfa Sud, had all the ingredients of the usual nightmare. It wasn’t difficult to predict that Damon was going to use a motor car to make up for a whole heap of physical and psychological hangups and perceived lost opportunities. The automobile was going to make Damon as normal as anyone else; it would be at once the leveller and the opportunity to demonstrate his daring and his skill.

  Unfortunately he passed his test the second time around with a perfect performance; as far as I’m concerned it was the last time he ever drove a car with any sort of commonsense. No fighter pilot ever received his wings with more excitement. Damon was free to fly at last.

  While waiting for fortune to present him with a red Ferrari he had to make do with his mother’s Alfa Sud. At least it was Italian and had some pedigree, which was important. After all the successor to Fangio shouldn’t be seen driving a Datsun Bluebird station wagon, my car at the time.

  Sealed into what was little more than a neat, little, Italian bubble of metal and glass, Damon could dream of winning at Le Mans with laurel wreath from neck to knees, squirting a jeroboam of Bollinger over his pit crew and on to the adoring, mostly (beautiful) female, crowd.

  His mother’s constant nagging and my pedantic lectures didn’t help; he drove the little Sud hard and fast and with no knowledge of what made the underside of the bonnet work. He was keen enough to be shown how to brake a car first by using its engine as well as some of the other niceties of driving an automobile intelligently. But I’m sure he saw me as someone who simply didn’t understand that he was naturally gifted, the embodiment of a Fangio, Berger or Prost, or nearer to home, the retired, three-times-world-champion, Jack Brabham. The gift of a pair of English pigskin driving gloves and a new pair of Ray-Ban aviator, mirror lens sunglasses for his eighteenth birthday earned us the accolade of: “Probably the best parents in the history of the civilised world.”

  There wasn’t much we could do. Damon behind the wheel of his mother’s little Italian car was happier than we’d ever seen him. The knowledge that one half-serious accident
which, in someone else, might only mean lacerations and bruising, would almost certainly kill him was difficult to overcome. The night Damon got his driving licence I woke suddenly, the old instinct in me still intact; someone was crying! It was Benita in bed beside me. “What’s the matter, darling? Why are you crying?” She turned her back on me and buried her head in her pillow, trying to stifle her sobs.

  I pulled her towards me and held her in my arms. “Shhh, stop now, whatever it is, I’m sure it’s something we can fix.”

  This brought a fresh wail. “No, it isn’t!”

  I pulled her into my chest and held her tightly. “C’mon now, tell me. I’m sure there’s something I can do.”

  Benita stopped crying and pulled away from my embrace. “Do you know someone at the police who can make him lose his licence?” She was right, there was nothing we could do and I felt like bawling myself. I called the Government Insurance Office and asked what the accident statistics were for young male drivers. They told me that males average five accidents before they reach the age of twenty-five, one of which would be serious. I didn’t share this knowledge with Benita but signed Damon up for an advanced driver’s course with the police driving school.

  This proved to be the worst thing I could have done. All the talk about safe handling and caution on the road went completely over Damon’s head; the ability to make a car do extraordinary things at high speed was all Damon cared about.

  I had hoped, even expected, that the police instructors would discover the damage to his joints which made his reactions too slow for this type of driving, that they would emphasise that he wasn’t Fangio material and, with his physical handicaps, should be extra careful, even under normal circumstances, when handling a car. Coming from them he might respond. I explained all this to a very doubtful Benita, who thought I’d taken leave of my senses. I remember concluding my argument with: “I’m telling you, it’s dead cunning. It may not be good for his ego but it will make him understand he’s not God’s gift to the automobile.”

  But Adam was right when he’d claimed that Damon, but for his haemophilia, was a natural athlete and the speed of his reactions, first observed when he played ping-pong, now showed as he drove a car. They were fast enough to fool the police instructors into passing him the first time. The Advanced Driver certificate he received was framed and placed on the wall next to the huge, framed picture of a red Ferrari Dino. Damon was now superqualified to do stupid things with a motor car. With the national accident statistics stacked against him I was pretty certain it was only a matter of time before he rewrote the book of needless risks taken in the quest to make a small Italian sports sedan go faster than its factory specifications.

  About nine p.m. one Saturday evening several months after he’d obtained his licence, the phone rang in the hall and I answered it. It was Damon. “Dad, I’ve had an accident.’

  I had been prepared for this moment for some time and all the scenarios I’d mentally conjured up now came rushing to the fore. The fact that it was Damon himself speaking on the other end entirely escaped my panicked mind. “Are you hurt? Have they called the ambulance? What hospital? I’m coming over directly. Are you in Emergency? Do they know you’re a haemophiliac? Has someone contacted the Blood Bank?” It all tumbled out, the perfectly rehearsed sequence I’d mentally been through perhaps a hundred times without consciously being aware of what I was doing.

  “Dad, it’s me. It’s Damon you’re talking to! I’m all right, nothing wrong.”

  “Bruises! Shit! They’re going to need ice, lots of ice. Have they been told? You must be packed in ice immediately. What hospital? I forget what hospital you said!” I cried.

  “Dad! I haven’t got a scratch.”

  Benita must have heard me on the phone and came running. “What? What is it? Damon? Is he all right?”

  “He’s had an accident.” I was not conscious of how I said this and my own anxiety carried enough meaning for her to panic as well.

  She went pale and began to shake and then sob. Clutching me on the shoulder she screamed down the phone, “Where is he? Where have you taken him?”

  Benita’s reaction brought me out of my own panic and, as though it was a delayed soundtrack, I now heard Damon’s voice replay the past minute or so, assuring me that he was unhurt.

  “It’s all right. He’s okay, apparently unhurt.” I clasped Benita’s shoulders with my free arm and pulled her to me, the phone still cupped to my ear.

  “Dad? You there, Dad?” Damon yelled down the phone.

  This incident, Damon’s first accident, served to make me aware of how tension is built up over the years. I had always been able to meet each crisis with Damon as it came, my mind so finely tuned to his condition that nothing, I told myself, could faze me. Never show any emotion. Never complain when you have to take him to hospital. Smile. Make light of things. Give comfort. Never admit you’re tired. Never show how distraught you are. Never think of the consequences. Just act. You must be like a rock. In fact, I used the analogy of a rock to myself. I imagined myself as a nice, warm, sunny rock, sheltered from the bitterly cold wind, a sort of private place to which Damon could always come. I admit, this sounds pretty melodramatic, but the rock symbol was obviously a metaphor which gave me strength.

  I also know precisely where it came from. On the wall beside my mother’s sewing machine was a small, framed print given to her by an American missionary friend. It showed a young maiden clutching a wave-lashed pinnacle of rock which appeared to be positioned way out to sea, for there was no land anywhere visible. The wind tore at her skirts and hair as she gazed heavenward, one arm stretched towards the sombre skies in desperate supplication. Around her, the furious waves swirled at her skirt and it seemed to me it was only a matter of time before they completely engulfed her. But beaming down on her was a single ray of light which pierced the dark, ominous skies, lighting her frightened face. The caption at the bottom read: I am the rock.

  Even as a small child it didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t sure whether it was meant to be an assurance or a threat. Or was the girl about to be saved or doomed by this rock which had some sort of metamorphic property allowing it to trap young maidens who were silly enough to venture fully clothed far out to sea – when it was as plain as the nose on your face that a mighty hurricane was brewing. Later, when I first heard the hymn “Rock of Ages", I wondered if it was the same rock at work again? What the hell did “I am the rock” mean?

  But I must have worked it out somewhere along the way and decided that the rock was on her side, though, of course, my rock for Damon was well away from the swirling waves and the howling wind and always dappled with sunlight. Corny as it must seem, this notion of being a rock held me together over the years. I was prepared to take anything Damon’s illness could dish out and to cope with it, solid as a rock.

  Or so I thought.

  Now I discovered that tension is something you can handle for years, learn to live with so completely, so entirely sublimate, that it never shows on the surface. But it’s there all the same and sooner or later it will overpower you as it now did me on the phone to Damon. My first reaction after my initial panic was to shout. To call Damon every kind of a bloody fool I could think of, as well as a few other words parents seldom use in front of their children. Now these issued from my lips faster than I could think, or care, to halt them.

  I told him that he would never be allowed to drive a car again. “You hear? That’s it! Never again! You can’t be trusted, you’re a bloody irresponsible maniac! You’re practically a bloody cripple, you hear!” It was a threat, which, had I carried it out, would have been tantamount to a death sentence, worse even than the result of an accident. Finally I calmed down and sat down in a corner of the lounge room and started to weep, ashamed at what I’d said. It was also the first time since his purple head in hospital that I’d cried over Damon.

  Two days later I was to inspect Benita’s little Alfa Sud at the garage where it had been to
wed. I arrived and the panel beater, without first warning me, led me to the car. It was a complete wreck. Damon had had a head-on collision pushing the engine past the dashboard and far into the front passenger seat. The roof post and roof itself on the passenger side had collapsed and what was left of the windshield was a large hole surrounded by crazed and buckled glass. Even the steering wheel was snapped into three pieces. But except for this, where the driver would sit was completely undamaged.

  The panel beater looked at me morosely. “You’re lucky, mate, you’re still alive and the insurance company is going to give you a nice new one.” He paused and spat on the ground at his feet. “Some bastards get all the fucking breaks.”

  Damon had survived his first accident; if he was going to measure up to the national average for under twenty-fives, he had four more to go. This time all he had to show for the experience was a week of severe pain and multiple blood transfusions to stop the bleeding in his shoulder sockets where the safety belt had jerked him back into his seat as it harnessed him against the impact of the collision.

  Damon was to transcend, in fact wholly eclipse, the national under twenty-five accident average, believing himself always to be entirely in the right, though almost entirely in the right at considerable speed. He was never indicted for a driving offence but, nevertheless, I am not proud of his record, even though I was told often enough, once by a policeman, that it was his skilful driving which, in some instances, turned what could have been a disaster into a mere accident. I also suspect that Damon’s smooth tongue and ingenuous manner helped enormously at the scene of an accident.

  Damon was not entirely on his own, and he easily out-bingled his brothers. The three boys managed, several times over, to eliminate my twenty years of accident-free, no-fault insurance bonus and place a hefty premium on my annual car insurance which I think I’m still paying.