April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  We saw her as very young and pretty, though milky pale, as though she might suffer from anaemia. I brought the subject up on the second occasion she came to dinner. With a sharp, nervous little laugh and a toss of her head, she countered my suggestion that she see our family doctor. “I’m just pale and I don’t expose myself to the sun and never have. You think I’m pale because I’ve never had a tan.” It was the longest sentence she’d ever completed in our presence and it wasn’t of course why I thought she was pale. I have to confess that if she’d agreed to a test for anaemia I was planning to ask Irwin Light, our family doctor, to persuade her to have an HIV test at the same time.

  We were terribly worried, though Damon continued to assure us that they always took the right precautions. The very fact that they were sleeping together was of sufficient concern and I’d read somewhere that condoms have about a fifteen per cent failure factor. While legally of age to make their own decisions about sex, in our eyes they were still babies and I felt sure had both been virgins before coming together. Although we didn’t admit it, even to each other, Benita and I hoped that this forced separation would mean the end of Damon’s affair with Celeste. While he openly professed to love Celeste very dearly, it is in the nature of parents not to take the first great loves of their children too seriously. We were confident that a break away from each other would force them apart and keep Damon where he belonged, which was, of course, with us.

  Later, when I realised how deeply in love they were, I would be ashamed of my lack of sensitivity. In time we would come to see Celeste as a most wonderful gift to our son, almost as if she were a divine inspiration, a final and benign gift from a merciful God. They would be together until the very end and no other love I have witnessed could have endured what transpired between them and still remain intact.

  But at the time, I was not taken in by my youngest son’s protestation of an enduring love; their affair was simply an attempt by Damon to assert his independence with a very pretty young girl in tow. Damon loved to do things with style and here was a perfect example of his need to show off and to compensate for lots of other things.

  His need to leave us, I told myself, was perfectly natural. Damon had been beholden to his parents in a way that must have been very difficult as he grew older. Parents are not consciously aware of how much time their teenage children spend away from their home environment, at school, excursions, camps, holidays and during their own leisure time. This was not true for Damon; he could almost never truly escape from his home, even for twenty-four hours, so it was understandable that he should now want to assert himself and claim his independence. His emotional need was one thing but the practical reality was another. His dependence on his home environment was implicit; we could best look after him and we knew what was best for him. Benita and I comforted ourselves with the assurance that we’d been more than generous and understanding for the six months we’d allowed him to be away from us and, in return, he’d abused his freedom by cutting university lectures.

  We were not pleased and, although we were terribly worried about Celeste, we also secretly thought that she was probably responsible for Damon’s neglect of his studies. The longer the two of them were together the more likely that something would happen and the less happy the final result for everybody.

  We felt personally guilty that she had been placed in an environment where an opportunistic infection could come about from a simple accident. Over the years we’d all accidentally pricked ourselves with one of Damon’s needles on several occasions. We’d indulged Damon enough, the adventure was over; in our eyes the experiment was not a success, it was time for him to come home and for his girlfriend to go away. In retrospect we were short-sighted and over-protective and even patronising. We had no real idea of what lay ahead for Damon. He seemed well enough, that is if you discounted the effects of his haemophilia and the growing agony of arthritis that years of bleeding was causing in his prematurely ageing joints and, unconsciously (though now I think perhaps it was consciously), we made no attempt to learn more about AIDS.

  When Benita would bring up the subject of Damon’s HIV status, I’d immediately muffle her concern with a counter that nothing had happened as yet. It was pointless worrying because too little was clinically known about the disease. There was no proof that everyone who became HIV positive matured into a full-blown AIDS patient. Other viruses, smallpox for instance, could lie dormant in the bloodstream of some people all their lives, why not this one? We were reverting to our accustomed roles: Benita over-concerned and I under-concerned. And so, mostly at my insistence, we did nothing to learn more about AIDS in the hope that some day we’d wake up to find it had all been a bad dream.

  We would talk about Damon’s problems as “The Virus” as though its kinship with other viruses, such as the ones that caused influenza, somehow made it more benign, not as dangerous. Benita and I were used to coping with chronic illness. We were veterans of the daily disaster. The sword of Damocles had been poised over Damon’s head all his life. We were experts at taking things one day at a time. Haemophilia was something against which no precautions could be taken and, it seemed, this new thing we called The Virus was the same. In a sense we were true professionals. We were firemen sitting around in our singlets smoking and playing cards, completely relaxed when the symptoms were at rest, but ready to pull on our brass-buttoned jackets and spring into organised alert at the first sound of an alarm.

  It always did with haemophilia. Both of us secretly knew that the crisis would come, that was our experience, confirmed a thousand times with Damon’s bleeds. The idea that this pallid, frail-looking, little girl would be able to cope when it did come was, of course, nonsense. Damon needed our kind of nerve, our kind of calm, our expertise. So we wanted him back where he belonged, where he could get the proper care he needed for his arthritis, his bleeds and anything else he was going to have to face with this new thing we so casually called The Virus.

  Damon was talking about quitting university and getting a job where he would start to make his first million before he was twenty-five. I wasn’t at all happy with this idea. He was starting to compromise with his life and that wasn’t the way I’d taught him. We were not quitters: we never gave up, life was about hanging in, the last man clinging to a single thread of rope was the one who won.

  How pompous it now sounds! How often had I told him that life was to be likened to climbing a sheer cliff-face; as you climb you can hear the swish of the bodies falling, the people who have given up, who have lost their grip on the tenuous cracks of their ambition. “Nobody climbs this cliff without preparation as well as determination,” I would say to him. “It’s a combination of know-how and guts. Sometimes you can win by hanging on a split second longer than your opponent and you do this by being better prepared and more courageous.”

  I now see it for the bleak and futile analogy it was, filled with winning and scheming but containing no joy except the satisfaction of triumphing in a pointless conquest. But at the time it seemed like a good way to sober up a young man who thought he’d make his first million by the time he was twenty-five and, moreover, expected to have a great deal of fun in the process.

  Damon believed, with a divine optimism, that owning all the grown-up toys was his absolute prerogative and that, with his good brain, it would be comparatively easy to do so. A penthouse in an exotic watering hole, the dreaded red Ferrari varooming out of an underground garage in the James Bond tradition, beautiful women desiring him, late nights, endless bottles of French champagne, utter sophistication, real power – all this would be brought about, of course, by the personal charm, wit and brilliance of a young man who ignored his considerable physical handicaps (in fact never mentioned them) – when he was only halfway through his twenties.

  I came from the school of hard knocks and I knew with an equally stupid certainty that life wasn’t meant to be easy. I was also slowly beginning to realise that doing things, not having things, is the whol
e point of life. That by the time you finally get all the grown-up toys you’ve largely forgotten how to play with them – the joy must come from what you do, not from what you do with the money you make from what you do.

  This desire for the things that money can buy was a fairly recent part of Damon’s character. As a child he had wanted to be a doctor, then later, in his teens, he decided on a career in science, in medical research where, naturally enough, he would find a cure for everything on the planet, his own condition probably first on the list for purely practical reasons – to be fit enough to push the frontiers of medical science further than they’d ever been taken before. I suppose this kind of glory-dreaming is common to all children, but we believed along with him. Damon was a very clever and imaginative child and his ambition to go into medical research was certainly not beyond his intellect.

  But now he had faltered. He was sounding more like a con man than someone who was about to make a serious attempt to enter adult life. Damon, who had only managed three days at school a week, wasn’t going to find the going easy when he stepped out on to the street to compete. I told myself that it was my job to make him get real, to make sure that he was intellectually equipped for a vocation he was both physically able to do and one which he would enjoy for its own sake before he was permanently crippled with arthritis.

  And so, in my mind, there was simply no room for discussion. I decided he must complete university to put some order and discipline, if not commonsense, into this hopelessly romantic and naive child whom we had brought so tenuously to the brink of manhood. Celeste wasn’t at university. Having been accepted to study architecture, she had postponed her entry for a year so she could play housewife (or that’s how I saw it) and I was quite sure, in the way parents are always quite sure, that her being with Damon was one of the major causes of his not attending lectures.

  It’s always easy to blame other people’s children for the faults of one’s own and I was quick to blame the blue-eyed blonde who had taken over Damon’s life. And so I insisted, with very little tact and in a decidedly peremptory manner, that if he failed he would be forced to return to university to repeat. I delivered this ultimatum shortly after his return home from living in the cottage. I was in Damon’s room helping him with a difficult bleed. It wasn’t a big room and it still carried the scars of his childhood: the navy blue ceiling with stars painted on it, his teddy bear propped up on the top of the small, somewhat rickety wardrobe, the doors of which were decorated by the cut-outs and stickers that marked his progress in childhood. These scissored and pasted memorabilia started with the bunny rabbits, gnomes and cartoon animals we’d used to celebrate his infancy and moved through each stage of his life: motor bikes and surfboard logos, exotic pictures of cars, the ever-present Ferraris in every marque he could find, a surf rider cracking a huge green wave with another beneath that riding a pipeline. There was a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger next to a neatly cut-out bust of Beethoven, the two men representing two separate parts of Damon’s fantasy. There were several girls cut from magazines, though surprisingly none from the usual Penthouse or Playboy pages or even ones taken from conventional calendar pin-ups. Each was of a girl he’d thought of as his ideal at the time and they ranged from sloe-eyed orientals to green-eyed blondes. The doors also contained graffiti, the signatures of his friends, phone numbers, dates with mysterious single words beside them such as, Alfie. Firecrackers. Doomsday. Yuk! and one which was all too obvious, HSC trials! which referred to his final year exams. Also in Damon’s writing, these words which had obviously amused him at some time but now, I realise, may have made a lasting impression:

  “What are you famous for?” she asked.

  “I am simply famous,” he replied.

  Instead of being a place for his clothes, the wardrobe had become a repository for his brief life, each phase carelessly pasted over the last so that now only glimpses of his childhood showed in a fading montage.

  The wardrobe was the only untidy-looking part of Damon’s room, which, unlike those of his brothers, he’d always kept surprisingly neat. Squared up on the walls were framed pictures, mostly his own, though some begged from elsewhere in the house. His bedspread was always without a single crease, squared and tucked in over his box frame bed in the manner of the beds in a military barracks. I’d once shown Damon how to make an army barracks bed and he’d done it this way ever since. Next to the bed stood a console which carried his precious stereo, dusted and spotless and, in a neverending search for the perfect sound, always in the process of an update. Even the books in his bookshelf were neatly arranged and ranged from childhood to the present – though his reading, even when he was quite young, was pretty sophisticated and certainly eclectic and the titles probably weren’t quite the usual chronicle of a boy’s life to maturity. Damon painted the wardrobe on his return home with a single, thin coat of paint which failed to fully conceal all the phases of his life that lay beneath it, so that stickers and pictures and cut-out memorabilia gazed through a milky whiteness, like memories returning as the ghosts of his childhood.

  After the cottage and the months spent with Celeste, this room must have seemed small and childish, overfilled with the past, as though he’d been forcibly returned to be chained to memories from which he’d successfully escaped for a few short months. This was the room where he’d spent thousands of hours staring at the painted Southern Cross on the navy ceiling, unable to move from his bed. It had held him captive on countless sunlit days of play. He’d been cloistered in this small, neat room while the rest of the world had places to go and games to play, playful punches to throw, balls to catch and sixes to smash, tries to score and tackles to make, excursions to take and daily adventures to anticipate. He’d been here alone in this small room when all the planned and delicious phantasmagoria of childhood had taken place for his brothers and which, he had learned, mostly never happened to him, because his very excitement at their prospect seemed to bring on yet another bleed.

  But I felt none of this. Damon was home where he belonged and life would resume as it had always done. Celeste too had returned home, no doubt to an equally worried and now happy mother, to a warm and welcoming hearth.

  I hadn’t even thought to paint Damon’s room and so attempt to wash from it some of the ghosts of his childhood. As far as I was concerned, the adventure was over and Damon, as his two brothers had done, must now comply with my need to have him go to university, before he would again be allowed to assume responsibility for his adult life.

  Directly after a bleed is no time for a confrontation; a blood transfusion, no matter how often it is done, is a tricky business and one which requires great concentration. When it’s over there is a sense of a job well done, like an athlete who has worked hard on a training run and has earned the rest that follows. When Damon was younger, this was the time Benita would read to him or we would sit and talk quietly, knowing that the pain was still there and would increase for several hours yet, but that we had at least collaborated with each other at the beginning of its end.

  But this time I was not concerned with the usual sensibilities. I was guilty of allowing him to take the cottage in the first place and now, as a result, he’d caused his mother and myself a great deal of stress and he’d also let us down with his studies. I tidied away the used syringe and bottles, wrapping them neatly in a steri-pad. “Damon, I want to talk to you about university.” It was a direct and aggressive opening.

  Damon, as I had hoped, was taken by surprise. “University?”

  “Yes. I believe you’ve been cutting classes and that you’re unlikely to pass first year.”

  Damon was silent and I could see that he felt that my timing was lousy, that I’d broken the unwritten law between us that quiet and love always followed a blood transfusion. He picked at a piece of lint on his bed cover, not looking at me, then he sighed deeply. Damon was a master sigher and could put his entire disapproval into a single, huge sigh. He looked up at me at last. “Dad! I
’ve just had a bleed!” He was demanding that I return to the unspoken post-bleed routine we’d followed all his life.

  “No! We have to talk, now! You’re back home, hopefully back into a decent routine and that includes university and proper study.”

  Damon looked down again, his fingers teasing the bedspread, looking for another piece of lint to pluck from it. “Dad, I don’t like uni. It’s a waste of time, it really is!” He looked up at me, his eyes pleading. “It’s all bullshit, Dad. You don’t learn a single thing you can use later!”

  “That’s what you think now, but you’ll change your mind later in life. What you learn may not seem useful now, but it will be.”

  “How? An Arts degree? It’s hopeless. Do you really think it’s going to help me in life to know how to parse a sentence?” He paused, “Do you know how to parse a sentence, Dad?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “There you are! You’re the creative director of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies. Not knowing how to parse a sentence hasn’t exactly been a disadvantage, has it?”

  Damon prided himself on his cross-examination technique; he’d take a single point and hammer it until he was sufficiently removed from the subject under discussion for his opponent to begin responding blindly to his questions, no longer sure of the original premise.

  “Parsing a sentence is only a discipline in grammar, like five-finger exercises on the piano. Your degree teaches you to understand and to handle information, to collate, cross-reference and think; in other words to use the known to discover the unknown. That’s the whole point of an education – it takes you up to the wire and gives you some idea of how to negotiate your way across No Man’s Land.” I was pretty pleased with this rather neat summary.