April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  One night, I managed the almost impossible and stopped Daddy in mid-bead to ask him, “If the Blessed Virgin Mary is the Mother of Jesus, then who is his father?” Daddy explained curtly that Jesus didn’t have a real father, that God was his father and that Jesus’ was an immaculate conception; whereupon he continued with his beads.

  Naturally I found this a bit confusing. The Virgin Mary was God’s mother and God was Jesus’ father through an immaculate conception, whatever that was. The following morning I cornered my sister. “If Jesus didn’t have a real father and was born anyway and we don’t have a father and were born, what does that make us?” I asked.

  She didn’t know and we agreed to ask my mum, even though she wasn’t to be relied on for most things. But as she was about to have David and was hugely pregnant without there being any sign of a father around, we agreed that on this one subject she must definitely know something, having done it two times before and about to again.

  My mother, confronted with the question of who our father was, seemed quite calm. “You were both immaculate conceptions,” she said, looking us straight in the eye. Then she poked at her distended tummy and sighed, “He is also an immaculate conception.” She was always certain that my brother David would turn out to be a boy. “He is the most immaculate conception of all!’ she added, pleased with herself.

  We waited for more but that was it. My sister and I and brother-to-be were immaculate conceptions.

  I asked my sister, who was eight, what an immaculate conception was. “It’s like the Holy Virgin. Like baby Jesus. You don’t have a father, you’re just born with a mother.”

  This more or less confirmed what Daddy had said and so this seemed to be okay. I knew all about the Virgin from the clicking of the rosary beads, so I was forced to change my opinion of my mother, whom I now thought must be smarter than I’d previously supposed.

  As I grew older it fitted in nicely with everything. I already knew I didn’t like men. They had yellow teeth and groping fingers and usually smelt of cheap sherry. Most of the other kids around the Cross who had a father were shit-scared of them. So I was dead lucky, being an immaculate conception. I felt that you couldn’t get much luckier than that!

  But I soon learned you couldn’t go around claiming you were an immaculate conception. When I went to kindergarten in Double Bay with mostly rich kids from proper families and later to Woollahra Demonstration, which was a partly selective state school for very bright children, I realised that the other kids demanded that you have a father or at least a plausible explanation if you didn’t. A virgin birth, I was smart enough to realise, wasn’t something you talked about too openly.

  I accepted the immaculate conception theory completely. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind, even though I suppose I should have known better. I didn’t equate birth with sex. I was a kid who grew up on the streets of Kings Cross and sex was something women with lots of make-up on and high-heeled shoes and short skirts did for money on the street corners to American soldiers and sailors and lonely migrant men and hoons from the western suburbs in tricked-up Holdens. So I lied when people asked me about my father. I simply told them he was dead. I used to quite like the look of sympathy on their faces while at the same time being glad I didn’t have one, not even a dead one.

  So you can see I had a rather different background from most kids with my education. I started to tell Toby about it one day and saw a look of doubt cross his face. I don’t think he believed me. It was so completely outside his personal experience that he seemed quite shocked that I would even pretend to know about some of the things I seemed to know about. When I saw Davo once or twice and told him about Toby, he seemed shocked too. “Why are you playing with little boys?” he asked seriously. He said it in the same way that one might chastise a child abuser.

  I was not yet eighteen but, around the Cross, seventeen can be a lifetime and you don’t measure lives by years.

  That was the last time I ever talked to Davo. I know he’s still alive. Until recently I was quite prepared to think he must be dead; he was always sharing needles and he must be HIV positive by now. But I saw him again not so long ago. I was driving through the Cross and he crossed the road in front of me; he looked completely spaced out and didn’t even look up when I blew the horn. I couldn’t stop or I would have. Or maybe I wouldn’t have? I don’t know. Anyway, I couldn’t stop so that’s that with Davo, I suppose.

  Before Toby realised I was intelligent, I don’t think he really understood where I was coming from. I was quiet and shy. He was a new, unknown experience to come to terms with. Still I think he was a bit arrogant to think that because I was a model I was dumb. Admittedly, most of the girls doing modelling are pretty dumb. I’m almost convinced that you need to be pretty unimaginative to get through the jobs and the routines on the catwalk. Either that or you have to be incredibly ambitious, although I doubt if even that is entirely right. You also have to be the right age. The girls who were getting the top fashion magazine work were mostly around fifteen. If you hadn’t cracked television by the time you got to eighteen you were on the scrap heap in terms of modelling. Eighteen is pretty old for a photographic model these days, so I suppose Toby was quite lucky having a seventeen-year-old, semi-working model to go with his electric guitar.

  Not that I looked seventeen; my breasts were still as flat as a pancake and I was still pretty gangly, though my bottom had filled out a bit. With makeup I could fake it and look my real age if ever I went into The Sheaf, the trendy Eastern Suburbs pub all the yuppie kids went to. It was in a pub that I met Toby. On the morning the Higher School Certificate results came out in the paper all the Eastern Suburbs kids would congregate at the Watson’s Bay Hotel, a huge old pub with a beer garden that spilled down on to a small Harbour beach. It was a tradition so even I felt compelled to do so, knowing all the girls from final year at school would be there. Even though I was somewhat of a loner, some things you have to do and going to Watto Bay pub when the HSC results came out was one of them. It was the place you went to celebrate if you did well and get drunk if you’d done badly.

  I’d started high school at Sydney Girls High and, even though I’d done well, I’d hated it. I was out of step with the other kids. I asked Muzzie if I could go to Kambala where my sister had gone after being expelled from Sydney Girls High. Muzzie agreed. The point was that we were not poor. I think Muzzie had quite a lot of money, but she wouldn’t have thought about sending me to an exclusive private girls’ school unless I asked. At Kambala I was known as “The Strange One” and there, too, I was essentially an onlooker. Although I was one of the clever kids and did very well in most things, especially in art, I was never really accepted. I felt like an intruder and I suppose in a way I was. I had absolutely nothing in common with anyone at that school. I never spoke about boys or going to parties and in the last few months of my final year a rumour spread that I was a lesbian. Never speaking about boys, having a punk haircut and a reputation for pretty weird drawings in art class probably all contributed to the rumour. I was into semi-anatomical drawings and painting and I’d paint a woman’s torso and one breast would show the skin removed and all the veins and arteries showing. All my women looked vaguely like Morticia in The Addams Family and I suppose it led to me being thought a lesbian in some minds. I did nothing to deny this. I mean, how do you even go about denying you’re a lesbian?

  To be perfectly honest, it hurt a bit, a lot really, but it was also very convenient. I lived in constant dread that some of the girls would call on me at Maison le Guessly and discover the dump. Some of them lived in mansions and certainly all of them in well-ordered, upper-bracket homes. I know they thought that my living in the Cross with all that evil going on was very exotic, but I also knew that the discovery of how I lived in the Cross would lead to my ultimate destruction. Strangeness and being exotic was one thing, but lack of hygiene and plain dirt was quite another. At the time, Mummy and I were fighting a lot about cleaning up the boa
rding house. Though I did want it cleaned up, I now realise I really desperately wanted it clean not because of any sensibility, but rather out of a terror of discovery. The so-called “exotic” me would soon disappear under an onslaught of rancid cooking fat, dirt, rotting vegetables, cockroaches and smelly bed linen.

  I now had my own room which you could enter without going through the house. It was painted, pretty, spotless and bright, the only clean room in the house. But just getting to it was a trip in itself: a wading through weeds, old junk, broken drainpipes, dirty windows, damp and rotten wood. Even the most casual glance at the house told all.

  So, being thought of as a lesbian, though hurtful, was also quite useful. It meant no kid from school, seeking gratuitous thrills and high adventure by coming to the Cross, was about to come visiting.

  But, being accused of being a lesbian did have one sad consequence. Eva, who’d been my friend since day one at Kambala, cracked under the pressure. She came from a straight family and the idea of being called a lesbian was too much for her. She began avoiding me, making it obvious in front of others that she didn’t want me around. I lost my only real friend. I was incredibly hurt that she would listen to that sort of gossip and respond by destroying our friendship. We’d never even held hands! Davo said she must have been a shit of a friend to split for something as dumb as being a lesbian. It was okay in the end; we all grew up and we became friends again after school, which was very good, because I like her a lot.

  The big event of our final year at school, as with most private schools, was the senior formal. For weeks it took up all the gossip and occupied every available thinking moment. Girls talked of dresses that cost thousands and the top beauty parlours and hairdressers in Double Bay were booked out. Nails were grown forbiddingly long, for once ignored by teachers until after the big night. Male partners were the Who’s Who of Sydney’s private schools, with Cranbrook, Scots and Grammar the biggest suppliers of male hunk.

  Taking Davo my surrogate boyfriend was of course out of the question. Even at two o’clock in the morning in the pink neon flush of Deans Coffee House he looked a highly unsavoury character; besides, male earrings and needle marks were definitely not in vogue at Kambala Private Girls School.

  I elected to go alone, something which had evidently never in living memory occurred before. But, as usual, I was oblivious of this. I wanted to go to the formal, it was the way you said goodbye to the school and I didn’t want to miss it for anything.

  I designed a stunning Elizabethan dress with a collar that went up my neck and ended in a ruff under my chin. Muzzie gave me the money for it and I went into town and bought six metres of grey taffeta which I took to Maria, the Portuguese dressmaker, who worked in a tiny shop next to the dry cleaners. While she mostly did alterations and repairs, she was an exquisite dressmaker and she was thrilled with the idea of making my prom dress, finishing it entirely by hand.

  I had never thought of myself as good looking, just the opposite, although Davo often said I was beautiful, but coming from Davo this wasn’t exactly a confirmation from the editor of Vogue International. I must say, though, standing in front of Maria’s mirror while she knelt beside me with her mouth filled with pins, I felt that at least I wasn’t ugly. I have a long white neck and with the high collar and ruff it looked amazing! I bought the highest heels I could find; they let me down a bit because they were cheap, but the hem of the dress mostly covered them.

  I arrived at the formal by taxi, my wide taffeta skirt swishing and rustling as I entered the ballroom. I felt as though every eye in the place was on me and I suddenly felt incredibly nervous. Amazingly, I hadn’t thought about the lesbian thing in connection with going alone to the formal but now, suddenly, it occurred to me. My being alone was positive confirmation of the fact and I could feel myself beginning to shake all over. At that moment I heard a voice behind me and turned to see Mrs Crompton, who taught English. “Why, Celeste, what a fabulous gown!” she exclaimed. Then, taking a moment to look me over, she said, “You’re quite the prettiest girl here tonight.”

  I knew quite suddenly that I looked really great! If I was forced into being thought a lesbian, I was going to be the most glamorous lesbian at the Kambala formal. An Elizabethan lesbian in a grey taffeta gown with a high ruff neck, imperious and super-aloof and oh-so-very-sophisticated.

  For a lesbian, I sure got a lot of dancing done and none of it with girls. For the first time in my life I sensed that I wasn’t ugly or awkward.

  But I was a little like Cinderella after her ball; the Kambala formal had exhausted my capacity to be a femme fatale. After that night I hung up my grey taffeta dress for good and retired back into being a loner.

  So when Toby happened it was rather nice. He didn’t make any huge demands on me and I didn’t encourage much groping – a bit of hand-holding and light kissing with my head on his shoulder in his father’s car after we’d been somewhere. I liked all this enormously. It was suddenly like growing up properly without any fears. It was just having a good time and talking about things that were pretty serious, a big change from the usual drug culture with people staring at you with red, unfocused, dilated pupils and saying nothing that made sense. Toby talked about lots of things and it was nice just going on about normal things, like how we could change the world and stop people cutting down trees. We definitely wouldn’t eat hamburgers because, just to grow beef, McDonald’s were destroying the Amazon Basin at a rate of two miles an hour, twenty-four hours a day, every day, seven days a week!

  McDonald’s and the Amazon was one subject Toby shared with Davo. Davo too was very concerned about what he called, “The McDonald’s Conspiracy". It was about the only thing Toby and Davo had in common that I could share with both of them. Davo would say, “We have to blow up McDonald’s. Every fuckin’ McDonald’s in Australia…in the whole fuckin’ world! Those hamburger hoods must be brought to justice! We must eliminate them before they eliminate us from the face of the earth. No more Green Peace, Green fucking War!” The Hamburger Conspiracy was Davo’s most profound thought. When he started to declaim, I learned that this was the signal that he was about to switch to straight bourbon or go out on to the street and find some yobbo from the western suburbs who was hassling one of the girls, and beat him up or get beaten up.

  More than stirring my teenage conscience, going out with Toby made me feel suddenly and entirely normal, a condition which I had begun to think of as unachievable. This was a wonderful new feeling. Boys were turning out to be pretty nice after all and I was learning my way around them in the shape of a blond, soft-eyed rock ‘n’ roll guitarist with a willingness to discuss just about anything that really mattered. Toby was, and still is, a very nice guy whom I love very much. Then Toby introduced me to his best friend, an overwhelming walking ego, named Damon Courtenay.

  “This is my friend, Damon,” Toby said. We’d gone to The Sheaf one Saturday afternoon, a rare visit, for Toby was aware I wasn’t too fond of pubs. Damon ran his eyes slowly over me and they didn’t seem overly impressed. “Who do you think I look like?” he asked suddenly, looking directly into my eyes.

  He was sort of darkish with a short beard, which I thought of immediately as an affectation. First-year uni students with a beard really were a joke! He had large hazel eyes and a roundish face. You wouldn’t call him handsome, but again he wasn’t ugly either. It was an uncommon sort of face but nothing to write home about and much too immature to wear a beard. I hadn’t a clue who he was supposed to look like and was not a little surprised at such a direct and egocentric question.

  “I don’t know. Who do you look like?” I raised one eyebrow a fraction and smiled, trying to look terribly cool and sophisticated, hoping the nervous me wasn’t showing through Mr Revlon’s carefully applied makeup mask. Damon looked at Toby and Toby smiled sheepishly, not liking the way things were going. He’d talked an awful lot about Damon and I know he wanted me to like him and now I could see he was concerned about this unpropitious st
art to our friendship.

  “A movie star. Think. A movie star,” Toby said hopefully.

  Damon waited, a small, superior smile playing at the corners of his mouth. The upsetting part was that he was not even a tiny bit embarrassed. How could anyone be such a prick?

  I shrugged, “I don’t know too many movie stars.”

  Damon gave a short laugh. Now he took a pair of Ray-Ban aviators from his leather jacket and put them on. He grinned, “One last try?”

  He had an attractive grin, warm and open and one which didn’t seem to go with the arsehole who was confronting me. “Marlon Brando?” I said, though without too much conviction, then added, “In The Wild One?” At least I had the black leather jacket and sunglasses right. Marlon Brando in The Wild One was a cult movie every kid around the Cross had seen four or five times and it was Davo’s all-time favourite movie, speeches from which he could recite without the words ever scrambling.

  Toby sighed and nervously lit a cigarette. “Jesus, Damon, forget it, will you?” He turned to me, squinting through his cigarette smoke. “It’s Burt Reynolds. He thinks he looks like Burt Reynolds.”

  I wasn’t sure who Burt Reynolds was and I tried to conjure up a picture in my mind, but nothing concrete came. I smiled. “You do, you know. You look just like Burt Reynolds,” I said flatly, my eyebrow more than slightly arched, hoping my sarcasm would register. “Whoever he is!” My heart was pounding. This wasn’t a bit like me. Toby was so nice! I’d been lulled into a trap. This guy, Damon Courtenay, Toby’s best friend, was everything bad I felt about private school boys. What a shit!

  It was a very unimpressive beginning for both of us. What I didn’t know at the time was that Damon was totally in love with Gina Bloom, a girl who was one of the coolest of the cool, with a blue aura around her you could practically see. At school she was known as brilliant; she didn’t have a special name, she was simply Gina, the brilliant, Jewish and beautiful one. Later I was to learn that Damon was going to marry Gina Bloom; she was in his scheme of things.