April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  Even so, Celeste has since changed her mind about drugs. “We didn’t realise at the time that speed was addictive and, thank God, it never became so for us. But it’s a bad drug, like heroin, if you get hooked. Now I realise that drugs are wrong, not only because of what they can do to you physically, but also because they’re an illusion. Acid can be a big trap. It makes you think you’re something you’re not. You see colours in the sunset and you think, ‘Wow! This is great!’ and that’s a good trip. But the colours are all there if you learn to look for them; you don’t need acid, you just need to be sensitive to what’s around you. Then you can take acid and have a bad trip, a very bad experience, when you sense how much everything is decaying around you, you have an acute sense of death and you’re part of that decay. You get sucked into this line of thought and you can’t get away from it. It lasts for hours and hours and it’s quite horrible. When we had both had a bad trip, we stopped. But of course at that time we didn’t see that drugs could be bad, they seemed so clean, so harmless, so anti our parents.”

  And so I have had to come to accept that Damon was using drugs on occasion. Damon, who would end his life with a daily cocktail of palliative drugs that would make a pusher think he’d passed out and woken in a drug-induced fantasy land, had found that chemical substances helped alleviate the pain and let him have a good time at a party. He smoked marijuana and on occasions he took pills. Or as Celeste would put it, perhaps kindly for my sake, “I’ve got to say this, Bryce. I think there has to be a huge generation gap here. Drugs in my generation, they’re just like, well, for most people, they’re just a part of life.”

  But Tom couldn’t stop there. He was well past the recreational or curiosity stage and he was beginning to look more and more woebegone. He wouldn’t eat at all, his face looked increasingly gaunt and the haunted look in his eyes was becoming more obvious. They’d dart about, going from one face to another, bright pinpoints, like a small arboreal animal looking, but not seeing, his whole body tense as a drawn bow.

  Damon came upon Tom upstairs one evening using one of his transfusion syringes to give himself a fix.

  “Christ, Tom! How long have you been doing this?”

  Tom, unabashed, continued to push the plunger home, then, as he felt the “rush” in his bloodstream, he looked up at Damon and grinned. “Want some?”

  Damon shook his head, clearly very upset. “Tom, how long?”

  Tom put the syringe down and released the tourniquet from his upper arm; now his hands hung loose at his side and he gave his hips and shoulders a little jiggle and his hands flapped at the wrists, as though he were trying to shake an invisible garment from his thin body. When he spoke his voice was casual. “Two years. I thought you knew…”

  “Pills are one thing, mate. But this is heavy shit! You could die!”

  Tom looked at Damon steadily, then shrugged. “That makes two of us.”

  Sudden tears welled up in Damon’s eyes. Even to himself he’d never admitted the possibility of dying. When the terminal aspect of AIDS was mentioned at the one time he’d attended the HIV clinic he’d comforted himself with the thought that he’d be the one exception, The Mighty Damon.

  The Mighty Damon was the name I’d given him as a small child to boost his sometimes frail ego and it had persisted for so long that it was now a part of his psyche. The spectre of approaching death, coming like this from Tom, snuck under his guard and hit home hard. For a moment he saw it all clearly: the Mighty Damon was going to die.

  “I didn’t create my situation,” Damon said in a voice hardly above a whisper.

  Tom shrugged. “What the fuck, life sucks anyway!”

  It was almost as though now that his heroin addiction was in the open Tom felt that he’d been reclassified in the eyes of his friend. That he was alienated, that something had snapped between them, a childhood trust grown too brittle perhaps? A trust that had previously included the milder addictions, but now had been splintered by the greater demands of his heroin habit.

  Though Damon told no one of Tom’s heroin addiction, not even Celeste, it became evident that Tom believed that he had. In his paranoid state it was clear to him they now all saw him differently at Talfourd Street. Things started to go missing. Half Damon’s record collection went first, a few days later it was the VCR, then Celeste’s camera and finally some money. All these robberies took place over a period of two weeks. Nobody suspected Tom, who still called around regularly. They speculated that it was someone, probably a drug addict, who’d found a key and so Paul changed the locks. When the robberies continued they finally became suspicious and confronted Tom, who protested, then seemed to lose his temper and finally stormed out. The robberies promptly stopped.

  Damon was deeply hurt. Tom may have been a bad guy, but that’s not how he’d ever seen him. Tom had been his friend for years, often sitting up with him all night when he’d had a bad bleed. He felt sure that he could have helped him and that, regardless, he should stand by him. But Celeste was firm and put Damon straight in no uncertain way. “Don’t waste your time, Damon. I know what we’re dealing with here. When you discovered Tom was on smack it was all over. You are no longer his friend, you are now his victim. If you have him back he’ll only steal from us again.”

  Behind Celeste’s gentleness there was also a realist. This was a part of her past. With Davo she’d seen addicts before. He was one himself and she would later tell me how pleased she was that Tom had gone out of Damon’s life.

  Life went on, each day not a great deal different. Damon was becoming less and less mobile, less and less inclined to be with people. The house at Talfourd Street was too full of life, there was too much energy generated between its walls. Damon, who believed so very much in his will to win though, found it harder and harder to act as though nothing was wrong with him that hadn’t always been wrong. He still firmly believed that his HIV status hadn’t deteriorated, that it was the haemophilia and the constant bleeding into his bad knee that was creating the extra burden. For years he’d been told to expect the onset of arthritis and he knew it would get progressively worse. Publicly, he put his malaise down to this. Privately, who knows what he thought? But Damon wasn’t going to give up easily, he wasn’t that sort of person and he wasn’t going to spell out his deeper anxiety to anyone, not even his beloved Celeste.

  At that time, AIDS doctors were still allowing that not all HIV positive people would develop further. The statistics Damon would quote, repeated from his doctor, were that of every hundred people who tested HIV positive eighty would go on to stage two, but only forty-eight per cent of these would move on to the third stage and develop full-blown AIDS. I’m not sure whether this is still the case. These figures were seductive. It wasn’t too hard to convince yourself that you would be one of the exceptions. Damon, with his positive attitude, saw himself as a prime candidate for exclusion from the dead and the damned. He’d spent his life in the business of beating the odds and he felt certain that he would be a natural not to proceed on to stage two of his HIV infection.

  He was having some trouble with his wisdom teeth, which had grown too big, causing them to become impacted. Impacted wisdom teeth were potentially very painful and our family dentist suggested they be removed. The problem was simple enough – too many teeth were trying to fit into the same mouth – but, in Damon’s case, it wasn’t quite as easy as this. He went to see the dental surgeon at the Haemophilia Centre who agreed that they would need to operate at some time. Just “when” was the immediate dilemma; ideally, the operation should take place over several months, one impacted tooth coming out at a time.

  Tooth extraction, particularly a wisdom tooth, is a bleeding opportunity which is problematic with haemophiliacs. The tearing of the roots from the gum sets up a certain and deep bleed which is very difficult to stop. It becomes a question of “how bad?” Damon’s potential to bleed was such that this single tooth extraction could, if an emergency were to occur, require the entire month’s suppl
y of blood from the state Blood Bank. This was an almost impossible request and it might be months before the Haemophilia Centre could actually “save” enough blood for the operation. This they would do by collecting as much extra blood as they could by over-ordering from the Blood Bank and asking for any excess which might occur. To collect sufficient blood product for four separate extractions over a period short of two years was simply not practical. Quite why this was so we were never told. Blood product does not noticeably deteriorate, there isn’t a “use by” date specified. Damon’s impacted wisdom teeth were not urgently required to come out. Benita and I queried the wisdom of an operation before it was strictly necessary.

  Of course, there wasn’t any precaution we could have taken against impacted wisdom teeth. But we were apprehensive about removing them before it was absolutely necessary, especially as the surgeon, in conjunction with Damon’s own doctor, the haematologist at the Haemophilia Centre, had finally come to the conclusion that removing all four teeth at the same time would not require greatly more emergency blood than would a single tooth.

  I recall questioning Damon’s doctor about this. “Why do something now which isn’t entirely necessary, doctor? Isn’t it rather a big operation, four teeth at once?”

  Damon’s doctor, a haematologist and one of a series who’d been at the Haemophilia Centre but was fairly new to us, was a slightly built man with a nervous manner, which didn’t inspire confidence. He’d always seemed awkward with me, although perhaps he was with everyone. To cover his nerves he was very precise, almost didactic, so that he appeared to be giving a series of instructions.

  “Mr Courtenay, I’m going to do it now while Damon is still quite strong.” He was tapping the point of his biro on the desk pad in front of him making a precise circle of tiny dots. I thought it curious that the desk pad should be fitted with blotting paper in this day and age and that he seemed to use a ballpoint pen for the purpose of tapping only, for he carried an expensive fountain pen clipped to the breast pocket of his white coat. He stopped tapping the biro and glanced up at me. “You do understand what I mean, don’t you?”

  “No, I’m not sure I do.”

  “Well, in two years’ time, Damon may not be strong enough to have the operation.”

  “I see.” It was all I could think to say.

  “His T-cells are normal at the moment, well…almost normal. This may not be the case further down the line.”

  “T-cells?” I hadn’t heard the term before.

  He made no attempt to explain. “We want to operate while Damon’s T-cell count is normal.” His glance fell from mine back to the desk blotter and he started to stab at it with the ballpoint again.

  What I hated most about him was his assumption that Damon’s HIV status would inevitably change. “It may remain normal, doctor. I mean this T-cell thing, it could remain the same as it is. His HIV positive status may not advance.”

  Damon’s doctor looked up at me again. “And it may and they may not.” He gave me a tiny grin, like someone who’d just made a clever chess move. “Do you really want to take that chance?”

  There was very little more to say. At the Haemophilia Centre at Prince Alfred they began to hoard blood. Damon was convinced that he could contain the bleeding the surgeon feared with hypnosis. He argued that the spontaneous nature of his internal bleeds was not the same thing as a bleed sustained deliberately.

  “I can’t anticipate an internal bleed, I mean I can’t prepare for it, it just happens out of the blue,” he explained to the surgeon. “But this will be different, I can go into deep hypnosis if you’ll simply give me a local anaesthetic and I’ll control the bleeding while I’m under hypnosis.”

  The doctor wouldn’t hear of it. “This is a huge operation, Damon. You’re going to need a general anaesthetic. I wouldn’t be prepared to operate otherwise. We’re only going to get one crack at getting them out.”

  Damon had long since lost his respect for the medical profession and he persisted, despite what seemed like an intelligent prognosis from the surgeon. He’d read a great deal about the technique of medical hypnosis and was certain he could accomplish it. The surgeon, quite understandably, was not prepared to take his word for it. He wanted sufficient blood to cope with a massive bleed, should it occur, and he refused to give his blessing for Damon to attempt to use hypnosis. It was a stalemate and Damon wanted me to back him up and to insist that the surgeon allow him to proceed with hypnosis.

  Naturally we were all terribly concerned, that is, all of us except Celeste. I found myself in an invidious position. I’d taught Damon how to control his pain through hypnosis as a small child and he’d developed great skills and confidence in his ability. My encouragement in the past meant that he now quite naturally expected my support against the wishes of the surgeon.

  Benita, Brett and Adam were, of course, violently against hypnosis. Adam, ever the pragmatist, the man who dealt with facts, rushed for the textbooks in an attempt to prove how foolish the idea was. Despite some pretty convincing case histories, he remained far from convinced that his little brother had mastered hypnosis to the extent that it could inhibit his blood flow. In fact there was sufficient contrary evidence to leave him pretty sceptical about the possibility of hypnosis ever being able to achieve the task of inhibiting blood flow in severe situations, such as Damon might experience.

  But Damon was adamant and he wouldn’t budge. We comforted ourselves privately that there was quite a lot of time needed to collect sufficient blood and that, as the day of the operation drew closer, he would change his mind.

  We should have known otherwise. I think in the end it became very important to Damon that the surgery take place under self-hypnosis. It was a kind of a test. If he pulled it off then he was in charge of his destiny, not only of his bleeding, but of the other thing as well. The other thing that wasn’t going to happen to him because he had the inner strength, the power to put himself on the positive side of the HIV statistics.

  In the meantime, the stay in Talfourd Street came to an end. In preparation for third year architecture Celeste wanted to go on a study tour to Italy. At first this seemed impossible as they were stony broke, but Damon badly wanted her to do it.

  Benita and I were rebuilding our home in Vaucluse and living in a very pleasant though quite modest apartment in nearby Rose Bay. The apartment had two very small extra bedrooms which contained, stacked from floor to ceiling, all the extra stuff from our old home. I was using one tiny corner of one of them to write my first book, a space no more than four or five feet square, walled in to a height of six feet by cardboard packing cases. We offered to put some stuff into storage to allow Celeste and Damon to live with us, but Damon refused. I didn’t blame him. It probably wouldn’t have worked very well; they were used to their independence and personal freedom and returning to anxious and somewhat neurotic parents wasn’t the world’s best idea.

  Neurotic may seem a strange word to use about oneself, but while I had my work during the day and the prospect of writing a book to keep me occupied in my spare time, Benita had the daily job of supervising the construction of our new home. This task was bringing Benita closer to a nervous breakdown every day. We were fighting constantly as things went from bad to worse. The house was costing nearly twice as much as we’d borrowed and the bank was asking difficult questions and wanting guarantees we couldn’t give them. It was beginning to look as though we’d be forced to sell our family home when it was finally completed just to pay the bank the extra money we owed for its construction! The builder had gone bust and, besides, had proved himself incompetent and we’d been obliged to fire him and subcontract the remaining work to be done. Every day we’d be faced with subcontractors who’d not been paid by the deposed builder, even though we’d already paid him for the job they’d done. As I was away at work, Benita had the impossible job of trying to cope with a world falling apart around us. Every day brought more threats from irate tradesmen and she was emotionally and
physically exhausted.

  Somehow, with the somewhat dubious help of our architect, we’d reached a lock-up stage, the taps carried running hot and cold water and the showers worked. Damon suggested that they squat on the building site, that is, move in and act as caretakers. In this way, he explained, they would prevent any pilfering. Celeste could get a job during the long university vacation which commenced in November and, without rent to pay, he would be able to save up her airfare and the expenses required for her trip which she’d planned for late January.

  Benita got Celeste a job at the Dinky Di Pies in Rose Bay North. The shop opened at 7.30 a.m. and closed at 6 p.m. and paid eight dollars an hour; Celeste offered to work through her lunch hour to gain the extra eight dollars a day; an extra fifty-six dollars a week was not to be sneezed at. The work was hard, for she not only served behind the counter but carried heavy trays of cakes all day, worked at the ovens, made salads and helped with the constant job of cleaning up and preparing several smaller bakes which took place during the day.

  The customers liked Celeste, and Xavier, the temperamental French pastry-cook-owner, who was notorious for his short temper and the even shorter tenures of his hired help, liked her too. Soon he raised her salary to ten dollars an hour and Celeste was in clover. Cathy and Jenny, Xavier’s wife and sister-in-law, were very kind to Celeste and ensured that she always ate at the shop and took food home, so that with no rent and most of their food supplied Celeste was able to save furiously.

  Damon’s desktop publishing business was chugging, rather than roaring, along but he earned sufficient for their very small housekeeping needs. By mid-January, Celeste had her return plane ticket to Rome and enough to live on for eight weeks if she was very careful. Which wouldn’t be too hard. Celeste was an expert at being very careful with money.

  Damon went into hospital just before Celeste was due to leave for Italy. The Haemophilia Centre at Prince Alfred called to say that they had collected sufficient blood and that the operation should take place immediately as both the theatre and the surgeon were available. The business of hypnosis was never really resolved. The hospital flatly refused to do the operation without a general anaesthetic and I eventually persuaded Damon that he must capitulate. We had already discussed the problem when the deadline was presented to us. Damon was pretty upset; he felt that once again the medical profession had ignored his wishes and had gone ahead in their usual high-handed manner.