April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  Whenever he passed me in his mum’s car (a new Alfa), always with a sharp, cheeky toot and a wave of a leather-gloved hand, I would intone softly, my eyes directed upwards through the tinted windshield, “Please God, don’t ever make him successful enough to own a Ferrari.”

  BOOK TWO

  Learning to Love the Needle.

  Eleven

  Celeste

  Loving a Boy with a Burt Reynolds Complex.

  Celeste Swaps the Ray-Ban Kids.

  I met Damon through Toby a few months after I’d left school. Toby was my first real experience of a proper boy, someone who lived in a real home with a mum who did mum things and a dad who went to work. Toby, like Damon, was a Cranbrook boy, which was pretty suspect for someone like me, but he was nice and played the electric guitar.

  I mean he was a really gifted rock ‘n’ roll player. I liked the idea of going out with a musician, even though he was at university and didn’t play professionally or even pretend to. At the Cross, where I lived, lots of guys tried to play guitar and act like they were pros in a group, but you knew they were would-be-if-they-could-bes. Toby, who was really good, didn’t want to play as a professional and I found this pretty amazing.

  In my mind I equated rock ‘n’ roll music with a time well past midnight. Davo, my inherited, sometime actor and only other boyfriend experience, who was always a bit drunk, would wake me by tapping on my window and I’d get out of bed and we’d go to the Piccolo Bar. So rock ‘n’ roll for me was speckled brown froth at the bottom of a chocolate-coloured cappuccino cup, the acrid smell of dope in a smoke-filled room and bourbon fumes on Davo’s breath. It certainly wasn’t a polite, private school boy with calm hazel eyes.

  I should really tell you about Davo, who was what passed for a boyfriend before I met Toby and, shortly after that, Damon. Davo was the sort of boyfriend you have when you’re not really having a boyfriend, because I kind of inherited him from my sister by mistake when I was fifteen. She went away and Davo kept coming around and tapping on the window and I was the only female person whose window you could tap on at our boarding house.

  Davo was in his mid-twenties, an addict and, I suppose, an alcoholic. He was supposed to be an actor and could have been before his brain sort of gave up on him and he couldn’t learn his lines any more. He’d be good one moment and the next they’d scramble, the words would come out but they’d be out of sequence. It was amazing. I’ll tell you more about him later.

  Now here was Toby, a young guy with pink one-shave-a-week cheeks, curly blond hair and serious hazel eyes, who, I was pretty sure, was still a virgin, and played electric guitar like he was permanently spaced out, although I felt sure he didn’t even take aspirin.

  Anyway, Toby’s music acted as the bridge I needed to cross into his nice, neat world. His guitar made him acceptable as a boyfriend. Although that’s a bit funny coming from me; I was terribly shy and I wasn’t exactly doing the choosing around the place. But if I was going to have a proper boyfriend, one more or less my own age but from the cleaner side of life, then Toby was acceptable because he was a rock ‘n’ roll musician.

  I forgot to say that, after leaving school and before I met Toby, Muzzie, my grandmother who was terribly important in my life, suggested I take a modelling course with June Dally-Watkins. This was only a three-week course and I guess the closest a kid from Kings Cross gets to a finishing school. We learned how to sit and walk and do a bit about modelling clothes as well as how to look after your nails, hair and make-up. It was really sort of intended to turn you, after the ubiquitous typing course, into (wait for it), a secretary with a future!

  On the strength of my June Dally-Watkins training I was accepted by a model agency. They must have seen something in me which I was quite unaware of, for I thought of myself as quite ugly. But only about one in a thousand girls made it into a model agency, so I was supposed to be very lucky to make it and this too gave me a bit of confidence. My main job at the time was as check-out chick at Harris Farm Markets and I also worked at Miss Chapman’s bookshop and I now found myself doing a bit of modelling as well.

  But I’ve got to say, the modelling was nothing big deal, the usual in-store catwalk stuff, mostly out in the western suburbs. You’d travel two hours in the train and then some totally apathetic shopping mall manager would show you the clothes you were going to wear, which were usually to be found hanging in a tiny box room which had to act as dressing room. Usually the toilets and washroom were at the other end of the complex and so you did your make-up in your compact mirror.

  At first you think you’ll be smart and do your makeup before you leave home, but you soon learn to stop that. The yobbos on the trains pick-up on you and hassle you and they can get really nasty. So you dress ugly and wear no make-up to a job, which can be difficult when you get there and find no change room facilities.

  When you arrived you’d pick through the gear, hoping to find something that suited you. I was always running late and the other girls would have grabbed all the reasonable looking stuff, which didn’t enhance my modelling career a whole lot as I was the one who was always being pinned at the back. Models are all supposed to be a size ten, but the variations in the rag trade on a size ten are astonishing and naturally the girls left the stuff that was too big. I became an expert with a safety pin, or walking on to the catwalk with my hand clutching a bunch of material pulled in at the waist and at the same time trying to look natural.

  You’d do the best you could then they called your name and you walked towards the catwalk, going through the June Dally-Watkins litany in your head: “Watch the step, pause at the top, step forward, swing your bottom, pause at the centre of the catwalk, look left, smile, look right, smile, continue (Bottom! Swing your bottom!), walk to the end, pivot, hold, smile, turn, throw head back slightly, walk to the centre, pivot, smile left, smile right, walk to the end, mind step, disappear!”

  You’d do all this trying not to throw up on to the heads of gross looking housewives in pink tracksuits and sheepskin ugg boots eating chips and yelling at toddlers in strollers who were painting their noses and foreheads with ice-cream cones. I don’t know why, but they always seemed to give their kids green ice cream! It was quite awful and I hated it from the very first day and it never got any better. I can still sometimes hear it in my dreams.

  “Now we have Celeste in a charming black and tan, naturally the colours for this autumn, romper suit, in beautiful wash ‘n’ wear lycra. Show the ladies the baggy cut around the hips, Celeste. The cut is generous for those of us with…er, just a little more breadth around the thighs. (Wait for the laugh, grin yourself.) Under her lovely autumn romper suit by Delvita of Melbourne, Celeste is wearing a pumpkin Merribelle American cotton T-shirt! Pumpkin is also this season’s big colour. This divine T-shirt is not quite winter weight, but lovely for this time of the year, don’t you think, ladies?”

  I much preferred to work as a check-out chick at Harris Farm Markets. There at least the Italian growers would come in and they’d sing and muck around, fall on their knees in supplication, exaggerating their dismay when you refused them a kiss in return for them promising to be your devoted slave for life. One old man, who was known as Papa and always had three or four days’ grey stubble on his chin, would touch a large peach or some other exotic fruit to his lips. “Tomorrow this’a peach is’a gonna be ripe and my kiss gonna taste-a beautifool in your mouth, signorina Celeste!”

  It was comic book Italian-English, but that’s how he really spoke. I always took the peach home, washed it and gave it to David, my brother, who was unaware that he was being kissed by a fat, ageing Italian in a sweaty navy singlet.

  I wasn’t much good at faking things and maybe I wasn’t grateful enough to the model agency so, by the time I met Toby, my in-store parades were getting few and far between and I was virtually a model in name only. The occasional photography job came along when an art director in an advertising agency picked my mug shot from the model directory. I
t was just enough to enable me to claim a career in modelling without telling a bare-faced lie.

  I think Toby quite liked taking out someone who was a model, just as I liked being with someone who played good electric guitar. He was so talented and if he’d known how rotten I was at modelling he’d probably have found someone else.

  I hadn’t entirely outgrown my childhood neurosis with boys but it was nice having someone really intelligent to like. Even though I’d grown up in somewhat different circumstances to most of the girls at my school, my family are all rather a brainy lot; my sister got brilliant marks in medicine, my mum had taken a law degree just for the sake of it, Daddy (my grandfather) was pretty strange but brilliant, Muzzie, too, and I’d done pretty okay myself in school. I wanted to be intellectually stimulated and to share my mind with someone else, but the kind of boys around the Cross were either street kids or as good as. They played rough and thought of girls as good for only one thing. Growing up without a father and with only the men in our boarding house had made me pretty wary of men. The young ones were all stupid or drugged out and, since I’d been a small child, I knew to watch the roving hands of the old men around me.

  So when I met Toby and started to see him I was still incredibly shy and a bit suspicious, much more so than I had been with Davo because it was a totally different fear. With Davo I wasn’t surprised at where or how he lived or that he didn’t have a job, or that he was a friend of the Bourke Street pros and that he had a drug habit. I wasn’t surprised by any of that stuff and it didn’t shock me; whereas going into a normal boy’s life, that was exhilarating but also far more confusing for me.

  Meeting Toby’s family and being in a normal house and eating their food at a table, it was all very lovely, but also frightening. The first thing you do in those circumstances is not say anything. So I didn’t. I was shy and out of place and awkward, I watched and observed until I felt happy enough with what was happening around me to be able to fit in. But secretly, I didn’t really feel as though I fitted in at all and routines such as meals confused me a lot. All my life I seemed to be an onlooker and not a participant.

  I was quite proud of my background. What I mean is I didn’t feel the need to apologise for what I knew. Most people my age didn’t have any idea of Davo’s sort of life. My sort, too, I suppose. Though even in this I was an onlooker, a kid who understood the culture but was not essentially a creature of the Cross.

  My grandmother, Muzzie, ran a boarding house for single men. “Male Guests Only” was what the sign on our dilapidated front fence was supposed to say. But the white painted background on the tin sign had long since cracked and scabbed in the sun and bits of it were peeling off, taking some of the black letters with it, so that the notice actually read:

  M le Gues s ly

  Daddy, who wasn’t my dad at all but my grandfather, was Belgian. He spoke French to Muzzie, my grandmother, and English to me and he told me, when I was about five or six, that the sign stood for “Maison le Guessly” which was the name of the house they had in Paris before the war.

  It was the only joke Daddy ever made and I didn’t even know it was a joke and after a while it wasn’t anyway and, to this day, the house in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, is known as Maison le Guessly. If you asked her, I know my mum would swear on a stack of bibles that the house is named after the one Muzzie and Daddy had in Paris, even though she lived with them in Paris until she was eleven.

  We weren’t very good at the boarding-house business, so there were no rules. I don’t mean no strict rules, just no rules. There were never any rules for us and no rules for the boarders, except that they had to pay their rent. They came and went, drunk, sober, sick, dying, crying, crazy or drugged, it simply didn’t matter. One old man died and it was a week before anyone discovered him. Surprisingly, there were seldom any fights, I think mostly because the men who stayed with us knew that the police would never be called, no matter what, and so they were safe.

  Maison le Guessly sort of ran by osmosis. It was dirty, it stank, sunlight never entered the broken shades, taps leaked, bathrooms had the damp and peculiar smell of old men; but it wasn’t a flop house and the people in it were mostly beaten up by life, not dead-beats. Some even had jobs, but no families, and they came and went; some stayed for years and lived and died and hardly ever spoke.

  Nobody told me to be suspicious of men, I just knew. I always just knew that I mustn’t get too close to them. I learned very early, before I was five, that they liked to put their hands in all sorts of places and that I mustn’t accept presents from them. By the time I was eight I was a real hard case and, if they came too close or smiled with their yellow teeth, I’d give them a burst of bad language and they’d always back off. By now you must be thinking that I was a disadvantaged child, which wasn’t true at all. Nobody ever beat me, I can’t ever remember being hungry and I always had clothes.

  My mother was somewhat eccentric so Muzzie was just about everything for us. She looked after us in an unconventional way, but made up for this by being a fabulous person. She trusted me; even at the age of four she’d never tell me what to do, she just sort of guided me. Muzzie always treated me as an equal, even when I was a small child, and she made me feel as though she and I were running Maison le Guessly and doing a pretty good job. I loved her fiercely and she became the force in my life, who made all the big decisions concerning me and who, right from the beginning, was interested in my mind.

  Before the war, Muzzie had been a nearly famous concert pianist in Paris and so naturally knew nothing about a boarding house or children or cooking. She seldom cooked and we just ate things out of the fridge when we were hungry. As I said before, there wasn’t any routine. Not even washing the dishes. We just didn’t wash dishes or clean up or clean anything. Muzzie was interested in our minds, not our manners.

  I learned pretty early to fend for myself and, at seven, I was taking my clothes to the laundrette at the top of the street and doing my own laundry.

  Sometimes the woman there would iron my school clothes. “You’re a real little ragamuffin and so pretty, I wish you were mine,” she’d always say. But I didn’t wish I was hers. It was always hot and puffy in the laundrette and her hands were red and swollen and so was her face. A wisp of damp hair always stuck to her forehead and it didn’t look like much of a life to me.

  So we just lived in Maison le Guessly like everyone else. Nobody ever shouted at us or screamed the way mothers do at their kids. In fact nobody said very much at all. I even had to learn basic hygiene from watching the other kids at the pre-school to which I took myself at Woolloomooloo at the age of three. Later, I learned more at kindergarten and, when I was older, of course, I taught what I’d learned to David, my baby brother, who was four years younger than me. I suppose my sister, who was four years older than me, must have learned from someone but she didn’t bother to show me; we were not very close at the time.

  Growing up at the Cross I was aware of what it meant to be a disadvantaged child and I knew that I wasn’t one, because I knew Mummy and Muzzie loved me which wasn’t the case with the other kids. I can’t recall when I didn’t know what a drunk or a prostitute was, but it was just a part of life. I was a street kid, in the sense that I played on the street in an environment where the street was a pretty tough place and you just knew these things.

  All around me were the really disadvantaged children, the kids of prostitutes and addicts and alcoholics, children with black eyes and teeth missing and bruises all over them and cigarette burns on the inside of their arms and on their legs. There were kids my age, six and seven, who were abused hideously and who smoked habitually, holding a cigarette clamped between forefinger and thumb and doing the drag-back absent-mindedly, without posing, like an adult. They almost never went to school and were drop-outs before they’d even dropped in.

  Maison le Guessly was ruled by a matriarchal society, that is, Muzzie and sometimes my mum. They were the only grown-up women there except for
Mrs Brown, who was an alcoholic who wouldn’t leave and refused to be thrown out. The rest were “male guests". Even Daddy, Muzzie’s husband and my grandfather, had no discernible influence around the place.

  My grandfather was like a pale shadow and a most amazing contrast to the rest of the place. He was always immaculately dressed in a neatly pressed, three-piece, blue serge suit with knife creases in the trousers and with a watch chain across the front of his waistcoat. He looked like something out of another time altogether. Daddy was small and dapper with a clipped moustache. He had eyes so pale that the blue in them looked as though it had drained away over the years, maybe from seeing too much. He was an engineer once and he made the money to buy Maison le Guessly by working on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme in the fifties where, according to Muzzie, “he suffered incredible hardship for a man of his sensitive nature".

  Daddy spent all day, like a mad scientist, in a room at the very top of Maison le Guessly where things bubbled and where he pored over plans and washed strips of film in a darkroom with a red bulb in the ceiling. He fancied himself as a photographer and took life behind the camera very seriously, only his photographs never came out properly. Heads and pieces of people were always missing. I think there must have been something wrong with his drained-out eyes, though he refused to wear his rather thick glasses when he was taking photographs.

  But he was a real dab hand at rosary beads. Daddy was a devout Catholic, though the only one in the family, Muzzie being sort of Church of England and we, of course, being nothing. When I was small I was made to live in Daddy’s room, for some sort of protection, I suppose. I’d lie in bed at night trying to outlast the clicking beads as he said his prayers to the Blessed Virgin, Mother of God. In the process I’d picked up a fair amount about her and Jesus, her son, how she was his mother and obviously quite a person, being the mother of someone like that as well as God’s mum.