April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  Celeste looked up at me, her pretty face creased into a frown. “She’s proud of us, but not like you’re proud of Damon or Brett and Adam – she’s proud because we come from her. She sees us as springing from her and everything we’ve done, my sister’s achievements and my brother’s achievements and my own, belongs to her, because she is so brilliant. To see me leave, me, a part of her personal property, leaving her, was just too much. It was as though I was stealing myself from her. So when I got back she was over the moon.”

  Celeste stopped and looked behind her, almost as though she were checking to see whether her mother was within earshot. “I couldn’t tell her I planned to move out as soon as I possibly could. I lived at home for six weeks and they were probably the six worst weeks of my life. Apart from the fact that I was separated from Damon, I was back into dirt and chaos. My whole life seemed to fall apart in a matter of hours. I hated every moment, every second of being back.”

  Celeste was coming to be more and more loved by our family and we were beginning to realise that they were both better off together. Besides, there was simply no way we could legally or otherwise justify keeping them apart and now we no longer thought to do so. They seemed to need each other, to fit, as though each supplied the emotional parts missing in the other.

  Damon, who’d had a secure and happy home life, was outwardly confident and assured; inwardly, and despite his outward nonchalance, his insecurity over his somewhat misshapen body craved reassurance. Celeste seemed genuinely not to notice or care about those physical aspects over which he felt most troubled. She regarded Damon as perfect just the way he was.

  For his part, Damon gave Celeste a sense of being wanted and loved and of being a part of himself and of his family. There was a calmness about them and they would seldom quarrel. It is a paradox that Celeste’s first adult source of love and security should come from such a tenuous and dangerous liaison.

  Before he ever asked me if he could leave home again, Damon and Celeste had secretly been looking for a place to stay. The process opened their eyes to the real world and they were becoming increasingly dismayed as it got closer to the university term. Damon thought he could get a small living allowance from me and Celeste had qualified for Austudy, the away-from-home student living allowance of eighty-five dollars a week. Even the flea-pits and cockroach-infested bed sits in Redfern were more than they could afford and, finally, they knew they would have to share with at least two other students if they wanted even their own bedroom.

  The turn-of-the-century worker’s cottage they finally discovered had absolutely no outward charm but it was freshly painted and clean. It opened directly on to a street in Pyrmont, near Sydney University, and was located on an island sandwiched between two major freeways and a bypass. Once a part of a regular neighbourhood, together with half a dozen other cottages, a small iron foundry and a large tin shed which undertook motor repairs, it had become stranded in the spaghetti of the Western Freeway, trapped in a dusty pocket of land surrounded by concrete arteries leading to the inner city.

  However, the rent the landlord was asking for it would be possible only if they shared it with two other people. Their new home contained two bedrooms on the ground floor and a tiny attic room. By six o’clock every morning the house trembled and shook so much from the heavy trucks thundering past that it became necessary to shout to be heard from one room to another. But it had a decent sort of a kitchen, a workable bathroom, a tree in the tiny backyard for Mothra and a patch of sun for Sam. In fact, had the house been situated anywhere beyond the cacophony of the heavy-duty dawn traffic, it would have been priced beyond their capacity to pay. The only member of the family who wasn’t pleased with the new place was Mothra. He waited until dark and went over the back fence heading for the bright lights of Chinatown half a kilometre away. Sam, of course, stayed.

  Simon Bartlett, “Bardy", who was studying music at the Conservatorium, moved into the attic room in which there was barely space enough for a tiny desk and bed and in which he couldn’t fully stand. He was large and easy-going, absolutely guaranteed trouble-free and useful around the place to boot. He could even cook in a manner of speaking with a single special dish named “Ki Si Bardy", a concoction they had at least once a week made from half a kilo of mince, a packet of instant Chinese noodles, rice and cabbage. While it was always met with loud groans, it was filling and really quite delicious, though the flatulence it caused lasted for two days.

  Damon and Celeste shared the second-best room, and a ring-in by the name of Roger, who’d responded to an advertisement placed on the Arts Faculty notice board, was the fourth they needed. The rent was apportioned according to the size of the room and as Roger, or as he predictably became known “Roger the Lodger", was prepared to pay the largest rent, he got the front room where he lived a more or less separate life, sharing very little with the others.

  As always happens, they drew up a set of house rules. Everyone put twenty dollars in the kitty for food. They would share the chores and take turns to cook. But it soon became apparent that this didn’t work with Roger the Lodger. His upbringing was quite different from that of the other three members of the tiny household. Doting parents supplied him with a colour TV, a tape player and an inexhaustible supply of good things to eat. These all stayed in his room where he played the TV and his rock tapes at full blast, as well as a guitar which, in his hands, gave this beautiful instrument a very bad name. Sometimes he would play all three together.

  Damon would find his own music constantly disrupted by the cacophony blasting from Roger the Lodger’s room and Bardy, who played a lovely trombone, was forced into the backyard to practise for his studies for the Conservatorium.

  Celeste, after her early cottage experience, had emerged as a cook and knew all about keeping house and feeding hungry men so, in the eternal manner of three men and a woman, she became the major cook and, because of her obsession with tidiness, the proverbial house slave. She shopped at the nearby fish market and they ate standard things which involved curries and mince-type things and vegetables. If Roger the Lodger didn’t like the fare, which happened often enough, he’d prepare his own from his home-supplied hoard, never sharing a crumb with any of the others.

  Damon, who could cook curry and spaghetti bolog-nese, make vegemite toast and boil water to make instant Chinese chicken-flavoured noodles from sachets, purchased incredibly cheaply in lots of a dozen from a shop in nearby Chinatown, acted as emergency cook when Celeste got the shits and refused to feed them. But it’s difficult when a couple share a house with others. Inevitably they demand higher standards than the rest and become very bossy. Celeste wanted her home kept clean and this often made her angry.

  Basically they weren’t really untidy, but Celeste, after her bout of housekeeping at Woollahra and her memories of Maison le Guessly, wasn’t ever going to allow a mess about her again. She wanted to impose her law on the house and she was just a pain in the arse. They called her “Queen Celeste” when she’d get on her high horse if things weren’t working properly, which in terms of domestic chores was most of the time.

  Roger the Lodger appeared to have received no domestic training whatsoever and was practically incapable of turning on the kitchen tap. Even by the dispiriting standards of modern youth, he was disconcertingly useless around the place.

  Before they decided to leave most of the cooking to Queen Celeste, on the first occasion it was Roger the Lodger’s turn to cook the evening meal, he left early that morning for the supermarket where he bought a number sixteen frozen chicken practically the size of a turkey. He popped it, plastic stretch-wrap and all, into the oven, turned it up to high and left for the day to attend lectures.

  Had it not been for Damon, who had been forced to return home from university with a bleed, a disaster might have occurred. He arrived to find a house billowing with smoke and the frantic miaows of Sam, who’d been mistakenly locked in by Roger the Lodger. When the windows had been opened and the house was
cleared of smoke, Roger the Lodger’s size sixteen chicken had been reduced to a lump of charcoal no bigger than a poulette and Sam’s eyes watered permanently forever afterwards, causing him to wheeze, sneeze, sniff, drip, weep and to be loved all the more. Celeste was heartbroken when two weeks later he mistook a patch of sun on the freeway for the pavement outside Maison le Guessly and wore a rear set of heavy duty Mack truck tyres to his grave. Mothra didn’t even bother to turn up for the funeral or even send a bunch of catnip. He had no time for losers.

  Roger the Lodger, apart from being annoyingly there, had very little impact on their daily lives, though one amusing incident occurred on the first day they were together which caused Celeste to sometimes refer to him as “Bloody Roger".

  The process of moving into the house had caused Damon to have a bad bleed in his knee. The house was a mess and the only space reasonably clear of clutter and suitable for a transfusion was the kitchen table. It had been a long hard day and Damon, hurting and somewhat irritable, was anxious to get the needle in and to get the transfusion completed with as little fuss as possible.

  However, Roger had never seen anything like this before and huddled over Damon, his elbows on the table, hands cupped under his chin, chatting and asking irritating questions. Damon, annoyed at his intrusion and upset by his clumsy questions, though too polite to send him packing, worked to get going as quickly as possible.

  “Did you know that some people faint at the sight of blood?” Roger said flippantly to Damon.

  “Yes, I suppose,” Damon replied, weary of Roger’s vicarious interest in the transfusion. Ready at last and with the tourniquet in place and his veins pumped, he picked up the butterfly needle and inserted it skilfully into a vein in the crease of his right arm. A thin line of dark blood shot up the tube and Roger fainted, his head hitting the surface of the table with a clunk.

  Roger the Lodger may have been the odd man out in the foursome, but it must be remembered that, unlike Bardy, he didn’t arrive into the group as an old and beloved friend and, besides, he always paid his rent on time. Anyway, he was by no means the worst disruption in their lives. Celeste’s mum took to phoning her at six in the morning to abuse her and become hysterical on the phone. “I know you’re sleeping with all the boys in that house. You’re a slut!” she’d scream, then she’d go on about Damon using Celeste’s blood to stay alive. At the sound of her mother’s voice on the phone Celeste became defenceless, a small child unable to withstand this verbal onslaught from her mother. She would tearfully deny the accusations, pleading with her mother to stop, somehow unable to retaliate, mesmerised by her mum’s cruel, screaming voice, until she was so choked that her sobs would cause Damon to wake up.

  Damon would grab the phone from Celeste and slam it down and then leave it off the hook.

  “He’d take me in his arms and rock me and tell me how he loved me, until I felt better and I’d stopped weeping,” Celeste once told me. “’What you need is a mug of my special memory-erasing Chinese noodles,’ he’d say. Damon would struggle out of bed and hobble into the kitchen. He was always terribly stiff from arthritis in the early morning and walked with great difficulty. I’d hear him ouching and aahing as he put the kettle on, as though he were walking across a lawn full of bindi-eyes. Sometimes he’d be walking so lopsided and bent over that he’d spill half the noodles from the mug on the way back to the bedroom. He’d hand me the mug and always say the same thing, ‘Here, babe, this is special Chinese forgetting medicine. Drink it and you won’t remember your mother even called and today can be perfect again."’

  Celeste looked up at me, her eyes brimming. “When I miss him terribly and it becomes unbearable to think of him gone, I make myself a mug of Damon’s special forgetting Chinese noodles and go and sit in a corner and cry for a bit. Even now, Damon’s noodles help a lot to stop the sadness.”

  Celeste’s mum only visited once, arriving unexpectedly to confiscate Celeste’s art books. The books were much loved by Celeste and besides, they were important references for her architectural studies but, on the principle that anything from Maison le Guessly belonged to her mother, they were taken away. She also took Adelaide.

  Adelaide was a marble statue Celeste had discovered in the house as a small child and which she had kept ever since as her friend. Adelaide was perfect; in Celeste’s imagination she lived in a beautiful Victorian house with yellow climbing roses growing under the eaves, she had the nicest clothes, bathed twice a day and always smelled of 4711 cologne and, when Celeste grew up, she wanted to be just like her. She’d been forced to leave Adelaide at home when she’d moved into the original cottage with Damon, but she’d missed having her around. Apart from the art books and personal clothes, Adelaide was the only other thing Celeste had taken from her room when she left home for the second time to be with Damon.

  “They are all my things. The books and that statue, they belong to me!” Celeste’s mother announced. “How dare you steal them? I’ve come to take them back!”

  “I was panic-stricken,” Celeste recalls. “I suppose it must seem silly, but Adelaide was so beautiful. She was made of white marble and wore a diaphanous gown with one perfect breast showing and she wore a garland of tiny, perfectly carved roses in her hair. She’d been with me since I was very little and she’d always stood on the window sill beside my bed. Every night of my life I’d talk to Adelaide and tell her all my secrets. She knew everything there was to know about me. Now, with my books gone and Adelaide taken from me, I felt violated. They were the only things I owned in the world and, suddenly, I didn’t own them any more, they belonged to my mum. I pleaded with her to let me keep Adelaide. ‘You can only have her if you come back,’ she spat. ‘The statue belongs to me like everything else. Even you!’

  “I remember Damon coming up and putting his arm around me. ‘Let her take them, you don’t need them. We only need each other.’ He said this directly to my mother and I expected her to go wild and accuse him of drinking my blood. My mum’s a big woman and when she becomes hysterical she can be really formidable. She would have made mincemeat out of Damon. She tried to stare Damon down but couldn’t, so she threw all my precious books into a big canvas bag she’d brought and put Adelaide under her arm and walked out of the house, leaving the front door open. That’s when Sam walked on to the freeway and died. But we only discovered that later that afternoon when Roger the Lodger came in and said, ‘There’s a dead cat on the road. You should see how flat it is from being run over by trucks all day.’

  “For a long time after my mother had left I could feel Damon’s anger trembling as he held me, but he never said anything against her, he just held me and told me over and over again, ‘It’s all right, babe. Nothing matters, it’s all right. You’ll see. The only thing that matters is the two of us, you and me.’ He’d keep saying this and then he’d get up and put on a really nice piece of music, Mozart or Vivaldi or something like that, and I’d suddenly feel terribly loved and protected.”

  The room Damon and Celeste shared was quite large and Celeste worked to make it as much like the attic in the cottage in Woollahra as possible. Damon set up his sound system and Celeste painted it white, so that it reminded them of their previous home as they lay in bed.

  But it was the new bed that proved to be a major problem for Damon. A friend had lent them a futon and Damon, who was normally achy and stiff in the morning, now found he would wake up in the most awful pain from sleeping on the futon, which lay on bare floorboards. Even without the pain, waking up was a special kind of purgatory. Darling Harbour, the massive civic recreation complex, was being constructed less than half a kilometre down the road opposite Chinatown and, every morning at six, the cement trucks would begin the day shift, roaring past the front door.

  Damon would wake up groaning, the floor he lay on would be vibrating and the house filled with the whine of passing trucks. He’d be stiff as a board with arthritis, exacerbated by lying on the hard futon. More and more he was cutting lec
tures as it became harder and harder for him to get started when, on top of the pain from his arthritis, the morning would often enough commence with a bad bleed which required a transfusion.

  Celeste put his larger number of bleeds than normal down to the unforgiving futon, though it never occurred to either of them to ask us for a double bed. The subject of sleeping together had resulted in a sort of mutually agreed stand-off, and this might have made them hesitate to ask us for help in the sleeping department. I was unaware of Damon’s sleep discomfort, for, while they came home to see us perhaps once a week, we respected their privacy and I’d only briefly visited their new home on one occasion when they’d invited me to do so. On that single visit, I am ashamed to admit, their need for a comfortable bed did not occur to me.

  I think the need to be independent was very important to them, especially to Celeste, and they didn’t want to ask me for anything they felt they could manage without. I’d paid the bond and the first month’s rent and that was as far as they were prepared to go. I’m sure they feared, above all else, the prospect of having to come home again with their tails between their legs.

  While I paid Damon a small allowance and Celeste received Austudy, it must have been difficult to make ends meet, but they were managing to eat quite well and have fun together and I know they were both rather proud of this achievement. Celeste also did four-hour phone shifts twice weekly at a research company and regular Saturday mornings at shopping malls asking questions. The company, Rhapshott International, became known as Ratshit International and she loathed the work, which meant making up to two hundred phone calls a night to get ten or so people to agree to co-operate and answer a questionnaire. It was boring and unrewarding work, but it earned eight dollars an hour or thirty-two dollars a shift and doubled Celeste’s weekly income. Most people lasted about two months but Celeste lasted a year and did more than her share to keep the wolf from the door.