April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  Damon had given Celeste a single antique pearl suspended on a silver chain which Benita had found for him; it wasn’t very expensive but quite lovely, a sort of engagement ring when you’re not having an engagement, and Celeste loved it and it was seldom to leave her neck. Damon had actually managed the deposit, promising to pay the remainder at some future time when he was less strapped for funds. We all knew that would probably be never, though one never doubted Damon; his intention and even his conviction, was always totally genuine. It was the first big birthday party Celeste had ever had and with all her friends, some of them from all the way back to Woollahra Primary School and others from her architecture class at uni, as well as all Damon’s friends, Toby, Christopher, Bardy, Paul and Tillo, the party raged all night and was a simply splendid affair. Later Celeste declared it to be one of the happiest days and nights in her life.

  Now, a year later, she lay weeping in her bed just after dawn, with the flash of the light from South Head lighthouse sweeping the pale dawn out of the early morning bedroom every five or so seconds.

  Celeste wept quietly, not wishing to wake Damon who slept beside her. She had never despaired of him getting well again, of finally beating AIDS – but she couldn’t believe that he’d forget her birthday. Damon, even in the most terrible pain, would always think of something comforting to say to her when she was distressed. She now told herself that her best birthday present would simply be his remembering it, that this would be a sure sign that things were going to be all right.

  At breakfast Damon ate nothing and, apart from a brief initial greeting, he sat slumped over the table staring into his cup of coffee while Celeste tried to make casual chat, fussing over him and being nice. Finally he looked up and gave her a small part of his old grin. Her heart began to race, he hadn’t forgotten after all.

  “I haven’t got you a birthday present, babe. I’m truly sorry.” His eyes welled and he sniffed and, using both hands, he knuckled away the tears. “I think I’ve had enough. Will you help me to kill myself?” he said quietly.

  Celeste talked to him for several hours, afraid to leave him on his own. While Damon’s despair was palpable, he was not the melodramatic sort. No matter how he felt he would not have wanted to create a fuss. He hated a fuss. He didn’t want undue attention, quite the opposite. He was much too depressed to want to impress or make any sort of dramatic gesture. Damon overcame the urge to kill himself, because he was too great a lover of life to want to end it. If he had thought that he was making life unbearable for Celeste he might have done something drastic. Now she let him know that she couldn’t be without him, that she loved him beyond her own life. Nevertheless, depression is not something we control with our willpower alone and he continued to sink lower and lower.

  In a desperate effort to do something to better his condition, I suggested that Benita take him with Celeste to the tropical island of Vanuatu, where I’d not long before bought a small house with the advance from my first book. The idea was that we would spend part of our retirement there in about five years’ time and I would do some writing. Now I made the excuse that the house needed repairs and Benita should visit the agent and set these in motion. In fact, all we hoped for was that the promise of sunshine, a relaxed atmosphere and the cheerful ways of the staff at the local hotel might snap Damon out of his depression.

  The trip proved to be a dismal failure. Damon tried his best but, as Brent Waters explained, depression of this sort is seldom something you can snap out of. This sort of depression is an illness and even with careful treatment the person takes time to recover. He agreed that the trip might start this period of recovery and was worth a try. But I think privately he realised that it was more important for us to seem to be doing something and that Damon would come to less harm in a changed environment than he might if he stayed at home, where he was more likely to have the courage to act in a drastic and desperate manner.

  In Celeste’s words: “Damon was in his shell, it was like he’d gone somewhere. Damon wasn’t in, he wasn’t inside his own skin. It was a terribly sad time, an awful time. I still cry when I think about it.”

  Celeste had also talked to me about the changing relationship between them. How their respective roles had reversed. I recall how she spoke quietly, almost as though she was reluctant to accept the new role forced upon her by Damon’s illness but, at the same time, she would do anything required to keep their relationship intact. This is how she put it:

  “When we first met, I was very quiet and introspective, because all the time as I grew up I was to learn that the best way to cope was to be the one who didn’t say anything, to be quiet. So I’d just sit there in a shell. At school I was really very quiet because if I piped up and made a sound then people would ask questions about me, where I lived, and things like that, things I was ashamed of. And so I was very quiet when I met Damon.”

  She looked up and smiled indulgently. “Damon was a big mouth, he could talk, he became my ego. It was like that for a long time. Damon was my ego, I didn’t need to say much. But as he became more and more incapable of looking after us both I had to take on a far more masculine role. I had to maintain the feminine side of course, but I had to, well, I also had to make all the decisions. I was making lots and lots of decisions about his health, about me, about money, about my university, things like that. So suddenly I had to become more aggressive and I came out of this new role a totally different person. I felt like I was Damon inside me, the old Damon; I had to take on his personality, his certainty about everything.”

  Celeste looked somewhat bemused. “I mean it was really quite weird. For instance Damon was a great ban-terer, he’d sit down and have a conversation with friends and it would be full of clever wit and I’d be the one who just sat with him and his quick mind was enough for both of us.

  “But as he got sicker and sicker and before his friends really realised how far he’d gone and that he was no longer capable or had the strength to keep up his end, to win against them as he’d mostly done before, I’d filled in, I’d suddenly be the one doing the bantering. So suddenly his characteristics came out in me.” She laughed. “You know, it was quite a long time before anyone noticed.”

  Celeste has a charming way of tossing her head so that her hair flips to one side and then she fingers it back again like a little girl. “But what was really scary is that being both caring and ‘feminine’ and also ‘masculine’ assertive was really tough. I found it really hard. But when I had to do it I realised that Damon had taught me how. I’d watched how he did things and I was able to bring this out in me. Now he was so depressed that he required me to make almost all the decisions, even to help him when he decided to kill himself.”

  She brushed away a tear, her voice down to a whisper. “He was even dependent on me for that!”

  After she’d spent most of her birthday quietly talking to Damon, trying to build his courage and lessen his despair, Celeste called Brent Waters. Damon liked Brent who, like Roger Cole, was without medical pretension.

  Damon had always been careful with his health, questioning doctors’ opinions and the medication they prescribed for him. But now, perhaps understandably, he had become obsessed with his health. AIDS is such a contradictory disease that he’d become quite confused; whereas he’d always had an opinion about his condition, now he didn’t know what to expect. Brent talked to him at great length, explaining his depression, not flinching from telling him where it might lead and always discussing what he was giving him in the form of drug therapy and why he thought it might work.

  The problem for Brent was that he wasn’t simply treating a serious case of depression, there were medical multiples which were being treated with drugs that might affect the ones he was prescribing. In fact, the drugs themselves might have been causing the depression. Furthermore, the depression might have been an early sign of HIV infection of the brain itself which, in turn, was causing early signs of dementia and depression. While he worked closely with
Roger Cole, they were often in No Man’s Land, in new and unknown territory, hoping to hell they’d got it right.

  His bowel problems continued, first severe constipation and then overflow diarrhoea. Overflow diarrhoea occurs when the faeces grows harder and harder until they are very nearly the hardness of cement and completely clog the bowel. Codeine, the major ingredient in most effective pain-killers, is the prime cause of this and an effective way to cure it is to go off pain-killers for a sufficiently prolonged period, so that the waste matter in the bowel can soften enough to pass through. In Damon’s case this was not practical. He needed strong pain-killers simply to survive and, when the faeces were so hard that he hadn’t passed any waste for ten days or more, the pressure on the internal walls of the bowel would become so great that liquid, unable to penetrate the faecal matter, would force itself between the rock-hard waste and the wall of the bowel. This overflow diarrhoea is extremely painful. It is also very unpredictable so that Damon made sure he was never very far away from a toilet. And even then he’d sometimes have an accident. Life was becoming daily more miserable, undignified and dependent and Damon, who had always been in control, was now severely depressed. His control over his personal circumstances was so limited that he didn’t even know when he was going to shit his pants.

  Slowly and with a great deal of patience from Brent Waters, his depression evened out. One Sunday morning, while Brent and I were on a run along the coast from Bondi to Coogee beach he explained to me that Damon, battling to cope with the immediate circumstances of his life, had lost his sense of continuity.

  “You mean he can’t see the wood for the trees?” I replied.

  “Well, yes. His fear has become greater than his hopes. Somehow, we must redress the balance, help him see a little beyond his immediate problems. We have to try to help him set goals or even a single goal beyond simply surviving each day.”

  “Have you explained this to Damon?”

  “Well, I’ve tried, but he can’t see beyond his hopelessness and the belief that he is just a burden to everyone, especially Celeste.”

  “Is there any specific reason why we shouldn’t push it? I mean at least help him set some goals?”

  “None whatsoever, but he will be the last one to see the obvious, to understand this imbalance or lack of perspective. It is something you will have to work at. Help plant the notion of a future beyond the immediate, with care and tact, so that he can readily grasp and act on it.”

  “So, it’s worth a try?”

  “Bryce, Damon is severely depressed. I will do my thing with the antidepressant drugs and you will need to help him find things worth living for.”

  Whether we in fact succeeded in giving Damon back a sense of the future or a more immediate and positive goal, I’m not sure. Certainly Damon’s depression seemed to lift a little, until one day he told Benita that he wanted a house, a proper home, which he and Celeste would own with a garden and a dog and Mr Schmoo, of course.

  Damon was completely possessed with this idea. He had a goal again and, as usual, he had a grand plan to go with it. He wanted the house to be his ultimate gift to Celeste so that if something happened to her she’d be safe and secure. In fact he would sometimes stop in mid sentence and look at me and say, “Dad, you will look after Celeste always, promise me.” He now felt that he really could write a book, a book about what it was like to have AIDS. Naturally, he expected it to be a best-seller which would pay for the house. But the book was more than this and I recall him talking to me about it.

  “Dad, can’t you see? Before, when I wanted to write a book, I didn’t really have anything to write about, now I have. Can’t you see, I have to write this book to tell people, ordinary people like John Baker’s parents, about AIDS. It will be a positive book and will tell people how to deal with their illness. It’s a very important book to write and I know it will sell lots.” He paused, breathless. “It will be easy to pay you back for our house.”

  It may sound unduly indulgent that we should have entertained the idea of buying a home for Damon and Celeste, when they’d done nothing to earn it and had no way of helping to pay for it. But we were clutching at straws and the idea that a home and dog of their own might bring Damon back to us, allow him to come completely out of the severe and dangerous depression, which over the months, we felt, was slowly killing him, wasn’t a straw to be ignored. We grabbed it with both hands. In fact I didn’t even think about it. I delighted in the fact that the old Damon had returned and the surest sign of this was that he had put together one of his phantasmagorical plans which would allow him, in his mind anyway, to borrow the money for a home with an absolutely clear conscience.

  Celeste once perfectly summed up the way Damon thought. “He always looked for an answer. He’d think of something, a golden thing in the air, and he’d hold it and say, ‘This is it! This is going to make me a million dollars!’ or ‘This is going to make me well again!"’

  It was what Brent had talked about, a focus for Damon beyond the tyranny of his illness. As far as Benita and I were concerned, if, by owning a home of his own, he was finally able to slough off his depression, it would be the biggest bargain of our lives. Just to see my son’s eyes filled with hope, enthusiasm and anticipation, just to have the mighty Damon back with us, was worth a king’s ransom.

  Our new house in Vaucluse had finally been sold without our ever spending a single night under its beautiful Belgian slate roof. It had been Benita’s dream, a perfect Mediterranean house, cool and shady in summer and cunningly trapping the sun in winter. The ceilings were high and the rooms spacious and welcoming with the garden coming in from almost anywhere you stood. But by the time it was completed it was lost to us, it had become a dream which an incompetent builder had managed to snatch away from us. It had become the nightmare house we no longer wished to call our own or ever desired to live in. How fortunate this turned out to be. We paid the bank the money we owed on it and we paid cash for a small terrace house in Woollahra for ourselves. There was still sufficient money over to put a deposit on a home for Damon and Celeste. If we’d stayed in our big, new house with far too many rooms in it anyway, we might not have been in a position to help them.

  I think also that in wanting a home of his own Damon might have been trying to recapture the time when he and Celeste had lived in the cottage in Wool-lahra with Sam and Mothra, their cats of ill fame. It had been an especially happy time for them both when life had seemed endless and every moment was sweetened with their love for each other.

  Now, as they set about looking for a place, Damon seemed to change for the better, to improve a little more each day. He was still taking the antidepressants Brent had prescribed but now they seemed to be effective. He even put on a few pounds in weight. The whole “home of our own” thing was turning out to be a miracle.

  One afternoon they drove into a small side street in Bondi and Damon became immediately enthusiastic. “This is the sort of street, babe!” He wound down the window of the Mazda and sniffed. “What a nice street, lots of trees and, look!” He pointed, “Small kids!” He turned to Celeste, “We could live here, babe!”

  The house they’d come to see was a semi-detached cottage, old and run-down and Damon loved it immediately. Celeste recalls the moment. “We walked into this silly, little, semi-detached house which I thought, ‘Oh no, it’s dark and old’, you know. It didn’t do anything to me. It smelled a little like Maison le Guessly, old carpet, damp rot, mice poop and cats’ wee. I was in third-year architecture and was supposed to be able to see potential in a place and I thought, “This is hopeless!” It was so drab, so yucky. But Damon said, “No, this is it. I love this house!” It was the first real decision he’d made in months and it was the old Damon speaking and I became very excited. Suddenly I loved the house too – it was the house that was going to make Damon better!”

  It was amazing; as soon as they moved in and settled, Damon became his old self again, he got all his power back. He was
still in a lot of pain and his T-cell count remained at zero, his bowels still blocked or overflowed and the Candida was here to stay, but now he thought in terms of waiting for the new ddI drug to come out; his single daily health aim was to keep himself well in his own limited terms until it did. After that, it would be all the way to a complete recovery. Damon’s personality was so infectious that I felt a surge of hope. I wanted so badly to believe that he’d live, and, now, I felt that he was back in control of his life and I told myself that anything was possible.

  It was wonderful. He and Celeste loved the new place and it was almost a repeat of their first love in the Woollahra cottage. Celeste scrubbed and cleaned and polished, disinfected, painted, cooked and invited friends over. They had an ancient enamel bathtub in the bathroom, just like the Woollahra cottage, with a shower over it fitted with a copper shower nozzle, which Celeste burnished until it shone like the sun itself.

  They played music all day and Celeste seemed to be constantly singing. She was so alive and pretty and Damon was such a mess, but they only had eyes for each other and Celeste saw Damon simply as the handsomest and most clever person in the world.

  Brent Waters pronounced Damon’s depression well and truly over and soon after took him off antidepres-sants; he didn’t need them any more. The mighty Damon was back to normal, he’d regained his mightiness as well as a twelve-week-old doberman puppy named Lucy.

  Twenty-five

  Damon

  Book Attempt No 7.

  I have started writing this book about six times. I never seem to get past about page four before things seem to peter out. They reckon that seven is a lucky number. Let’s find out.