April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  Towards the end of the first term of university Damon came to see me. He begged to be allowed to leave university and to get a job. He told me about the bleeding and the increased pain from arthritis and, with his considerable powers of persuasion, almost led me to believe that the bleeds were a psychological reaction to university. He also managed to get Benita on his side and this time I capitulated. We were learning more and more about AIDS and his latest tests had shown a slight decrease in his T-cell count. T-cells are the cells in our blood which normally fight infection. Without them, we have a deficient immune system; the point being that AIDS does not cause death, but requires over-use of the T-cell supply to fight it, thus allowing opportunistic infections to attack our systems and finally destroy us.

  I had a sense of foreboding that the serious part of “The Virus” was about to begin, so I agreed that Damon could leave university and find a job – though not before cautioning him that interesting jobs that paid young people well and which required very little physical effort were not that easy to find, no matter how clever one was.

  “I’ll find one, Dad,” he assured me excitedly, Damon the optimist instantly back into full stride. “With my first pay check we’re going to move out to a quieter place where there are no cement trucks or Roger the Lodger and we’re going to buy a big, new double bed to sleep in!”

  True to form Damon landed precisely the job he wanted. It was with a company which dealt with the money market, where he was to learn to manipulate currencies on the foreign exchange. It was precisely the way he’d imagined himself, buying and selling money, his nerve on the line, his brain now on active duty and his performance in front of his peers so awesomely impressive that his name was soon known in every international money market, where the really big boys spoke of him with growing respect.

  The only problem was that while he was an expert at Chinese noodles he made a lousy cup of tea. As the tea boy, as well as working in the mail room and cleaning the computer screens and keyboards, he wasn’t too impressive at all. Damon was in the real world at last and had come down to earth with a terrible bump.

  Seventeen

  Italian Genes, Fat Tyres and Slim Pickings.

  Damon started to make money and it was a big income too. Big when you put it against the money he and Celeste had been living on. He had so much he wanted to do and all of what he wanted seemed to involve money. It was really important for him to have a Ferrari and to get into what he called “fast living". He needed it for himself, for although he showed not the slightest sign of an inferiority complex, I think, in his mind, he’d postponed the active part of his childhood for when he was grown up. The games he could never play and the excursions he’d had to miss and the special treats, all would translate into doing grown-up kid things, fast cars, concerts, beautiful women, posh places and he’d have all the yuppie toys to go with these things.

  He’d explain to Celeste, “It’s got to be perfect. You’ll see, it will be. We’ll have everything, I’ll give you everything, we’ll do everything!” Although he repeatedly stated that he believed his HIV positive status would never progress into full-blown AIDS, insisting that his “mind power” would simply never allow it, he was aware that arthritis was slowly wearing away at his joints, silting them up, causing increasing immobility. I think he wanted to do as much living as he could while he could still get around in a fairly normal manner, before the aches and pains become too prolonged and turned him prematurely into a cripple.

  He came home to visit us, terribly excited after the first week at work and clutching an extravagantly large bunch of red roses for his mother. “Look, Mum, long-stemmed and perfect, every one is perfect. I’m on my way!” He turned to me, “It’s made for me, Dad, I mean the job.” He paused to take a breath. “It’s about money!”

  I laughed. Damon had inherited his attitude to money from his mother, which was, simply, that money was a commodity that should never be allowed to stay in one spot for very long before it was converted into something more exciting than a small rectangular-shaped piece of paper. If their lives had depended on it, neither would have been able to identify the historical face or any of the motifs and hieroglyphics on the face of any given Australian note; the colour was all that counted, it told them everything they needed to know.

  “Try and save some of it when you get it,” I said lamely.

  Damon either didn’t hear me, or perhaps the idea was so alien it simply didn’t register, instead he continued excitedly, “When I went for the interview I sat in the foyer and there was this screen, Dad.” He pointed to a spot on the wall a couple of feet above my head. “Flashing on to it were the various currencies, yen, pounds sterling, Deutschmarks, Swiss francs and greenbacks.” He paused to explain, “Greenbacks, that’s U.S. dollars, Dad. I just sat and studied it and I knew I could do it.

  I could read the screen and calculate the fractions of a percentage point. It was like it was an instinct, it just happened inside my head without me having to think.” Damon’s eyes were shining. “Then a guy called Mr Cooper interviewed me. He’s the boss. After a while I could see he knew I knew because he asked me where I’d learned about currencies. ‘From sitting in the foyer for an hour, sir’ I said and he laughed and just said, ‘Well then, you’d better start next Monday. I like people who like to be on time."’

  We all laughed. Damon, who lacked discipline, had no sense of time whatsoever and could just as easily have arrived an hour late as early.

  It was very important to him that I approve of his first real job. He spoke of conquering the commercial world and then going back to university when he had something behind him. This wasn’t simply to console me, I am certain that he meant it. Damon always meant everything he said, it was just that he was a lousy imple-menter of his intentions.

  “Celeste tells me your bleeds have been very bad lately. How will you cope with the job?” I wanted to share in his enthusiasm and indeed I was pleased for him, but if he couldn’t manage university because of the bleeds I didn’t share his optimism about working full time. I guess I wanted to prepare him for the disappointment if he failed, if his body let him down as it had done so often before. I must have seemed a bit of a wet blanket, but Damon often needed to be dampen-ed down a bit; all his life his character and enthusiasm and his personal charisma had kept his temporary jobs open for him when he failed to turn up because of another bleed. People were always willing to forgive Damon, not only because they understood his physical problems, but also because they found him a nice part of their lives. His personal charm enchanted all who knew him and Damon wasn’t at all above exploiting this state of affairs.

  But I knew that being unable to do the deliveries at Bernie Carlisle’s chemist shop, or not turning up at Woollahra Electronics where he sold only on commission, or even arranging for the ever-obliging Toby to take his shift at Vaucluse Locksmiths was one thing. Holding down a high pressure job dealing with international currencies was certain to be quite another.

  “Dad, it’s nothing. My bleeds are because of the futon! We’ve got this futon on the floor with only the floorboards under it and so it gives me bleeds. It’s okay now, we’re going to buy a proper bed. Celeste and I are going to Harvey Norman Discounts tomorrow. They’ve got this sale with two months before you have to pay and we’re going to buy one with the right kind of mattress.”

  I was appalled, though I had no right to be. I’d been so concerned with the fact that they were sharing a bed that I’d simply never asked, or even thought to ask, about the kind of bed they were sleeping in. “Your bed has been giving you bleeds? Jesus, Damon, why didn’t you tell me?”

  Damon looked down at his shoes. “Dad, we couldn’t ask you to buy us a double bed, you know, well after…all…the fuss.” He looked up at me appealingly, not wishing to spoil the moment and, I could see, anxious to change the subject in case it should lead to an argument. “Dad, my gear, it isn’t the best. I’m going to need some of your proper silk ties and s
ome shirts and maybe some of your other stuff? I’ve got to look successful. It’s part of the job. Clients come in and things.”

  Ashamed of myself for not thinking about the bed they slept in, I took him into the bedroom and opened my wardrobe. He helped himself, taking an expensive double-breasted blazer and two pairs of hand-tailored grey flannels, along with several business shirts, a pair of Italian shoes and several silk ties. The ties were carefully picked by his mother so they wouldn’t seem too old for him. Damon was ready for the corporate world and he was going to start the way he intended to finish, looking like the youngest Chairman of the Board in the history of international finance.

  Damon, who knew with a certainty that he was born to juggle numbers in his head, to buy and sell in fractions, wasn’t born to make tea and run errands and be the dogsbody around the place.

  Almost at once he began to hate his menial job. The need for him to serve as any sort of general factotum hadn’t entered his head. He expected his cadetship in finance fractions would take a few days at the console and an intelligent prod from a superior every once in a while, but the rest would come as naturally as breathing. At lunchtime and after work he’d grab a computer console and in the evenings he’d learn all about the business of currencies. Very soon he felt he knew as much as the operators who were “making a poultice". He was ready for the big time and was genuinely curious as to the reason why this wasn’t recognised by everyone in the company.

  After three weeks he went to see Mr Cooper, pointing out to him that, while it wasn’t so much a matter of making tea or running errands that distressed him, it was the tremendous waste of a rather special human talent. There was a console to be manned and money to be made and he knew just the man to do it. Mr Cooper who, despite Damon’s precocity, liked him, remained unimpressed. He told him he’d have to wait, that everyone had to do time as the office boy. He added, though not unkindly, that if Damon didn’t start at the bottom he’d never know when he’d reached the top.

  “How dumb is that?” Damon reported to me later.

  “Not as dumb as you think,” I replied, impressed with Cooper. There is a strong streak of puritanism in me which believes things shouldn’t come too easily. Mr Cooper and I obviously shared a not dissimilar view of my youngest son.

  “But, Dad, they’re not very smart, really they’re not. I know I could do it! I could be making them thousands instead of making them tea. It just isn’t logical.”

  Damon’s confidence was partly born of a too-sheltered life, where everyone else’s job seemed easy from the vantage point of his own inexperience in doing almost anything which required a sustained effort. He was widely read because he’d been reading since he was very young, with lots more time than most kids to do so. He’d done well at school, despite a mostly three-day school week, because he was naturally clever and widely read. His brothers had learned to surf by working in the waves for endless hours and days and months. Children learn perseverance not only because they are made to persist by their elders, but naturally, at a young age, when they wish to master skills which interest them. Learning to ride a surf- or skateboard or cricket or tennis is as much a lesson in the dynamics of life as any formal lessons in persistent application. Damon had no such experience in sustained effort. His brain was all he had and it wasn’t practised in tenacity. His bleeds always meant that the sort of continuity of dull work which builds character in all of us was too often cut short for him. He could always walk away from a difficult task with a face-saving excuse. His intelligence was his only way of competing or besting his peers. Where other kids sorted our their differences with a wrestle on the lawn or a punch to the jaw or a race to a given point, Damon did so with his tongue and his mind. As a result, he was apt to judge his peers too quickly and often much too harshly.

  I had no doubt that he’d tried out his contemporaries at work and that he’d found them intellectually inferior to himself. He explained that they smoked three packets of cigarettes a day, pulled their ties down to the second button on their shirts, loosened their collars and ran their hands through their hair, while they allowed cups of black coffee to grow cold. It was Damon’s considered and rather arrogant conclusion that they ought to make a space for someone who was, at the very least, their equal. Damon knew he could feel the numbers screened on to the inside of his eyeballs and hear the fractions that added up to a profit as they danced off the tip of his tongue.

  To show just how extremely bright he was, after a few weeks he too began to smoke. Damon, who had begged both his parents to give up smoking because he feared an untimely tobacco-related death in the family, who’d often lectured his brothers against taking it up, now smoked and pulled his tie away from his collar and affected all the mannerisms he’d so recently despised. He claimed, of course, that personal boredom was the cause. That the standing around making tea and coffee, doing the washing up and fetching cigarettes and sticky buns for the cognoscenti behind the consoles, whom he knew he could lick blindfolded with one intellectual arm behind his back, had started his smoking.

  Damon was sure he’d been side-streamed in his first canoe when he was ready to meet the roaring rapids of life, well able to navigate his craft through the choppy waters of the money market. Being the best-dressed tea-boy in Australia was not the apprenticeship he regarded as suitable to someone who was soon destined to be a mercurial presence in an oak-panelled boardroom.

  Though the frequency of his bleeds didn’t lessen, he somehow made it to work each day, often on crutches or wearing a sling. Damon was quite accustomed to being a bit of a physical spectacle. All his life he’d been known and accepted by everyone as a brain attached to a somewhat wonky and unreliable body which wore leg braces, bandages, slings and used crutches as a natural extension of itself.

  But the high pressure people who worked at shaving fractions of a decimal point from fluctuating international currencies were not the sort to allow for his physical afflictions. Theirs was a world where you either peed or got off the pot, where only the strongest and the most rapacious survived. Greed was good and an inflated ego and selfish disregard for others was the sign of a promising career. This was the greedy eighties and there wasn’t any sympathy or understanding to spare for a superior little Cranbrook boy with a permanent limp, who came to work with his arm in a sling or on crutches and who took twice as long as he ought to make a simple cup of coffee or fetch a pack of cigarettes from the paper shop on the corner. Damon, however, despite no experience in tenacity, hung in and hung on, defending himself well against not infrequent complaints from the operators about the poor standard of the office housekeeping. Always optimistic, he was sure the day would soon come when he was called to the Faith, when he would flex his arthritic wrists and take his rightful place behind a console to begin his meteoric career, where he would immediately confound his contemporaries with a dazzling performance.

  In anticipation of this Damon felt he couldn’t wait any longer to buy his first car. This he knew couldn’t be a Ferrari, but would nevertheless need to have a number of characteristics which would place it in the same genre. He and Celeste discussed the subject endlessly – perhaps an old Alfa Romeo with good lines. It was important that their first car be Italian so that in an aspirational sense it was correct and came with the right European sports car pedigree. He didn’t mind if it was old, even very old, but it must have classic lines and be, he was forced to concede, rather cheap. The fact that any car that fitted these criteria might also occasionally break down never occurred to them.

  They searched the Sydney Morning Herald classifieds every Wednesday and Saturday; but everything that qualified was well beyond their budget, which was more or less nothing, except the promise of a regular income from his new job. Damon, always confident in his formidable powers of persuasion, had as a deposit a father who, he was sure, could be made to part with the first few hundred.

  One morning Celeste found the car they’d been looking for in the local Glebe news
paper:

  Silver grey 1974 Fiat 124 Model CC sports car.

  Immaculate condition, good mileage, needs min. work. Fat tyres, fully imported, original Italian instrumentation.

  $6000 o.n.o. Phone Bob 793 –1800 after 6 p.m.

  At five minutes to five Damon started to dial in order to keep any other hopefuls off the air; finally at a quarter past five someone on the other end picked up the receiver. “The Fiat, the 124. It hasn’t gone, has it?” The voice assured him it hadn’t gone and that he wouldn’t sell until Damon arrived from work at 6 p.m.

  When Damon and Celeste arrived they couldn’t believe their eyes: a silver grey Fiat 124 stood in the driveway of a suburban house and at first glance it looked practically new. It stood low to the ground, surprisingly low, and was equipped with high performance fat tyres. A glance into the interior showed it had leather upholstery which, though somewhat worn with a long tear in one of the seams of the driver’s bucket seat where a dirty strip of sponge rubber popped through, was still very presentable.

  They ignored the faded patches on the dashboard, their eyes deliberately running over them quickly so they wouldn’t see too clearly where the sun had cracked the vinyl and lifted the laminate. “Needs a good cut back to come up like new.” He turned to Celeste. “What a car! Hey, babe!”

  They knocked on the front door and soon a tall, good-looking, young guy with blond hair and blue eyes answered.

  “Hi. You must be Damon?”

  Damon tried his best to look non-committal and businesslike; he was still in his business clothes and hoped he looked older and not the sort to be easily conned. He introduced Celeste. The blond guy extended his hand, shaking both their hands. “Bob…Bob Glover.” He was dressed in a clean pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt. “You’ll look good in the 124, Celeste,” he smiled. Celeste felt a fleeting doubt, but brushed it aside, forcing a smile. Bob Glover stepped out of the doorway and they stepped aside to let him pass. “I suppose you’ll want to give it a burl, eh?”