April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  The severely mentally ill, we are told, experience awesome loneliness and, certainly, each person in the room seemed trapped in a world of their own. The thought that this might happen to Damon filled me with trepidation. His deep depression earlier in the year had caused him to be withdrawn and silent for long periods. These moods were sad enough, but the look in the eyes of the people in this room told of a deeper, more lonely withdrawal, a nightmare world in which they were permanently trapped. It seemed unlikely that these people would ever return to the world of laughter. Somehow I must get Damon away from this place fast; insanity is not infectious but, nonetheless, human beings are conditioned by their environment and Damon was just manic enough to be influenced by his. Whatever it was going to take, I determined not to rest until I had him safely away.

  There were no outsiders present in the recreational centre other than myself. I’d phoned to ask if I could come earlier to give Damon a transfusion. Benita and Celeste were to follow later during visiting hours, when we were to have a talk with the psychiatrist on duty.

  Damon seemed in remarkably good spirits and appeared to have forgotten or forgiven the incidents of the night before. I didn’t bring these up and he didn’t mention them; it was almost as though he’d accepted the routine and had decided to co-operate. I imagined he’d been tranquillised, though he didn’t seem unduly zonked and I transfused him quickly, whereupon he offered to show me around.

  I was astonished that he appeared to know everyone in the room. Damon couldn’t have been awake more than three or four hours, yet, after he’d introduced me to the orderly in the room, another large man whose name was Steve, he took me to meet each of the patients, all of whom he seemed to know by their first name.

  The people in the room were, well, different; they had the dishevelled and confused look I’d observed before in the severely mentally ill and almost all had teeth missing. Damon introduced me to each one in turn, “Dad this is Les, my new friend. Les, this is my dad.”

  “Hi, Les,” I’d say, or Jim or Anna or whomever I was meeting. My first attempt to shake hands was met with a blank look, whereupon Les, pulling his top lip under his lower, slowly moved his head from side to side, like a small child.

  Steve, observing, moved quietly over. “We don’t shake hands here, Mr Courtenay, you never know what might happen,” he said sotto voce. But mostly the person to whom I was introduced giggled, or appeared not to see me at all, each eye darting in a different direction; in the case of a lady named Anna, she buried her face in her hands and began to weep in a fearful manner, averting her head as though she was expecting a violent slap.

  “It’s all right, Anna, it’s not your husband, it’s only my dad,” Damon said in a matter-of-fact voice as though he and the woman were old and familiar friends. Anna stopped crying immediately and peeked at us shyly through her fingers, the nails of which, I recall, were painted cobalt blue.

  Damon seemed completely in charge of the situation and, after introducing me to everyone present, ushered me into a small interview room where we sat down. His eyes became excited as he spoke, “Dad, I’ve got good news!”

  My heart skipped a beat. Maybe they’re going to let him come home?

  “Tell me.”

  Damon grinned, “They’re putting me in charge!” He paused, waiting for my congratulations, looking terribly pleased with himself.

  “You mean here?” I pointed out of the doorway into the recreation room beyond.

  “No, no, the whole place! I’m to have my own house in the grounds and a special person just to look after me and they’re going to let me run things.”

  “Does that mean you’re coming out of Ward 4?” I asked, trying not to show my confusion.

  “Sure, Ward 4 is for the real nut cases and people who are violent.” He leaned closer to me and half-whispered, “This is where I’m going to do my work; I’m going to cure people with AIDS from here.” He looked up and smiled broadly. “Don’t you see? This is the hospital they were telling me to come to all the time!”

  He must have noted my bemused look. “It’s true, Dad! This place is half-closed down, more than half, but it’s really a proper hospital. All they have to do is clean it up a bit and put in beds. It’s perfect for what I want!” He continued, “It’s all part of our plan. They’re going to move all the psychiatric patients out and they’re giving it to me to run for people coming in for my AIDS cure!” Then, as though to prove his statement beyond doubt, “This afternoon they’re going to show me my new house. You can come any time to see me, day or night.” He straightened up in his chair, thrusting out his chest like a small boy. “From now on I make the rules.”

  Benita and Celeste arrived shortly before eleven o’clock when we had an appointment with the psychiatrist. The interview took place without Damon, though in the same room as Damon had taken me into earlier. The psychiatrist was young and not a dissimilar type to Dr Springsteen, though taller and with long, dark hair, which she wore braided into a single plait falling over her left breast and tied with a rubber band. She, too, wore a cotton dress and sandals and she, too, was of the school of hirsute legs and armpits. Initially uncommunicative, she looked up briefly when we entered and asked us to sit down. She returned to writing on a clipboard which rested on her lap and on which appeared to be several sheets of paper, perhaps a questionnaire or admission form, as we’d completed no paperwork the previous evening.

  I waited a few moments, allowing her to continue to write, but when this seemed to become an awkwardly long time I cleared my throat and said, “Doctor, this is my wife and this is Celeste. My name is Bryce Courtenay.”

  The young psychiatrist looked up, “Oh, yes,” she said and then added, “I’m Doctor…it.” she mumbled her name which I missed entirely. Assuming the others had heard it (which they hadn’t) I didn’t ask her to repeat it. She crossed her legs and placed her biro in one of those little, silver expandable ring holders you sometimes see fitted to clipboards, then she folded her hands over the board. “Damon came in last night, about ten thirty, is that right?” she looked directly at me.

  “Yes, doctor.” I cleared my throat. “Before we start, I’d like to complain about the way he was treated when he came in.”

  The young woman looked startled. “It was Boxing Day, we’re on skeleton during the holidays!” It was the same familiar refrain and it confirmed, once again, that to need medical attention over the Christmas holidays wasn’t very bright. She asked quickly, “Who was the doctor in charge?”

  “I wasn’t given a name. She was an Asian lady, Indonesian, I was told. It’s about her that I want mostly to complain.”

  The young doctor started to flick through the pages of the clipboard, then stopped and scanned one towards the end and ran the point of the biro down to a scrawled signature, then looked up relieved. “She’s not a psychiatrist!” She didn’t give us the name of the doctor who’d admitted Damon the previous evening. Then she added, “You’ll have to complain to the hospital board.” It was plain that as far as she was concerned she was absolved of any further responsibility, for she concluded quite amicably, “I’m not sure how you do that. Perhaps they can tell you at admissions.” She looked at her watch and then withdrew the biro from the clipboard. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, please,” she said, assuming control again.

  When we got to a section in the questionnaire or admission document or whatever which inquired whether the patient had a past medical history or present illness, I stated that Damon had AIDS and I was about to add haemophilia, when she interrupted me, “Yes, it’s in the police report and also in his ward report.”

  She placed the clipboard down on the floor beside her chair and looked up at us nervously. It was obvious that she was pretty new in the job and that the question of dealing with an issue such as AIDS was going to be difficult for her. She was plainly embarrassed when she said, “We have no facilities here for caring for someone with AIDS.”

  Benita and Celeste
both jumped in, Benita winning the right to speak, “Well, then, doctor, why not release him into our care. We’ll take responsibility for him!”

  “Yes, please!” Celeste interrupted, her voice eager as she appealed to the young doctor not much older than herself. “He’s no worse than he’s been for weeks. We can handle him.”

  The psychiatrist shook her head. “I’m sorry, I can’t. Damon has been scheduled; he has to be thoroughly examined by two psychiatrists who will make their recommendation. Until then he has to remain here.”

  “Doctor,” I said, suddenly angry, “not only does he have AIDS, he is also a haemophiliac. You are not equipped to look after either condition. Just precisely how do you propose to take care of him?”

  She bent down and picked up her clipboard and turned to the back of her notes; then she looked up at me confused. “It’s not stated here he is a haemophiliac?”

  “The bloody doctor who saw him last night didn’t even know what a haemophiliac was!” I exploded.

  The young woman pursed her lips. “I’m sure that’s not true,” she said quickly.

  “Perhaps you can ask her?” Benita snapped. “My husband doesn’t lie!”

  The situation was getting out of hand and it was Celeste who came to the rescue. “Didn’t Prince Henry send over his report?”

  “No, it hasn’t arrived yet,” the young woman answered.

  “Dr Springsteen?” I added.

  She ruffled through her papers. “There’s a note of a telephone conversation at seven o’clock last night,” she studied the writing on the page. “It could be Springsteen.”

  “Well, Damon can do his own transfusions here, or we can come and do them for him. How long does he have to stay here, doctor?” Celeste asked, proving to be the most sensible and even-tempered of the three of us.

  She looked gratefully at Celeste and shrugged, “I don’t know. But I have no authority to release him and there is no one here who can. There won’t be any possibility of his being examined until the new year, when the review board and the senior psychiatrist return from holidays.”

  “Christ, that’s a week away, at least!” I admit, I was annoyed at Celeste for calming things down just when I had the young psychiatrist on the run. It was my turn to nail somebody for a change, even if it was a psychiatric ingenue.

  “Possibly two weeks, if he’s well enough. Damon won’t be the only case for review, we have several before him to process for release.”

  We were all dumbstruck. I’d been pretty sure that I could get him out in a couple of days at the most, that is, once we’d cleared up all the mistakes and misunderstandings of the previous day at Prince Henry.

  “Two weeks!” I protested. “He’s got AIDS! You said yourself you have no way of caring for someone with AIDS.”

  “We’re preparing a cottage in the grounds for him so that he’ll be completely away from the other patients,” she said.

  “Oh I see! You mean the nursing staff have complained?” I was getting very tetchy.

  The young doctor looked as though she was about to burst into tears and I realised that what I’d said was bitchy. It wasn’t her fault that the staff had objected to having Damon; after all, this was no different from the psychiatric ward at Prince Henry.

  “Mr Courtenay, Ward 4 is not a nice place. Your son will be much better off in a cottage on his own. There will be someone with him constantly, someone to look after him.”

  “Does he have to be isolated? Perhaps there is a private room?” Benita suggested.

  “Mrs Courtenay, Damon’s record shows he resisted arrest and threatened two police officers with a dangerous weapon. Under normal circumstances he would remain in a high security ward, in fact in Ward 4.” She turned and looked at me. “This way we can report him as having been placed in isolation, while at the same time he has the run of the grounds. The cottages are really quite nice.”

  “It was a spear gun, unloaded!” The moment I said this I realised how dangerous this must sound to the young doctor. “It was harmless. Damon’s harmless,” I added, my voice trailing.

  She looked at me steadily. “I have no choice, Mr Courtenay.”

  I confess I was inclined to agree. Damon would be safer and better off on his own and I don’t know why I was carrying on like this. Benita and Celeste turned and looked at me and I could see they felt the same way; the idea of Damon spending two weeks with the people we’d met earlier was disheartening to say the least.

  “I have two friends who have AIDS,” the young doctor said quietly, her eyes downcast. “I don’t agree at all with the attitude of the nurses and orderlies, but isolating Damon is the only way of avoiding industrial trouble. I’m sure he’ll be much better off in a cottage on his own.” She looked up and smiled for the first time. It was a nice smile with the good, even white teeth of her fluoridated generation. I wondered why she didn’t smile more often; perhaps working in a place like this made it difficult?

  Damon’s cottage was well away from the wards, set in the grounds among tall, old gum trees, though directly outside his cottage grew a magnificent English oak that must have been at least a hundred years old. It threw a patch of useful, dark shade over the front of the cottage. On one side, the sunny side of the cottage, an overgrown, pale blue plumbago bush sprawled under the kitchen window, giving the small dwelling an old-fashioned country town look.

  Inside, the cottage was rather rustic, with the permanent dry smell of dust which comes from premises that have been left unlived in for a long time. The pipes growled and chortled before eventually delivering water to the bathroom basin tap and the basin surface directly under the tap showed a deep brown sediment stain which stretched to the plug hole. The floor boards creaked, the mosquito wire on the front verandah needed mending and most of the windows jammed in their frames and wouldn’t open properly, making it difficult to create a cross breeze indoors. On the second day in his official residence, I brought Damon a fan from home, which helped him to sleep through the hot nights. Though it wasn’t exactly the Ritz it wasn’t too bad either; the sheets were changed every second day and the shower ran hottish and skittish, juddering and snorting along the pipes and doing a fair bit of sudden squirting and stopping and squirting again through the rose, until finally it got going properly.

  In recognition that his residence was situated some distance from the hospital kitchens, his dinner, the main meal of the day, always arrived completely cold. This wasn’t a major concern. Damon ate like a bird and had lost his sense of taste and smell, as one of the many side effects of his time on AZT, and it was slow in coming back. Food, due to the severe thrush in his mouth, became a question of rough or smooth. In fact, there was very little they cooked at Rozelle he could eat, except for the odd, ubiquitous, white bread sandwich, so Celeste brought in his meals each day from home.

  His minder was a man in his mid forties named Phil, ex-permanent army, a Vietnam veteran and wedding photographer, who’d only recently taken up a vocation as a medical orderly. He was a pretty basic sort of guy with a manner which suggested that, after leaving the army, he probably hadn’t been a hugely successful photographer.

  Still, Phil was nice to Damon, whom he soon decided was pretty harmless, and so he would happily leave Damon and Celeste alone for hours, while he snoozed on a camp bed on the veranda, with Damon’s fan going full blast, or studied the form for the dogs at Harold Park, seated in an old wicker chair under the English oak. “Horses? Shit no! Too bloody corrupt. Dogs! A punter’s got some sorta chance with them. Forget the bloody ponies. No way, mate!”

  After the second day, Phil allowed “the love birds", which is what he called Damon and Celeste ("Like a pair of bloody budgies, them two!") to walk about the grounds whenever and wherever they pleased, providing they stayed clear of the administration block, where they might be spotted unescorted by him. “Stay clear of the admin, this place is full of gooks!” He meant, of course, the administrative staff and not the inmates.

 
I think Damon rather liked Rozelle; certainly he looked back on the week he spent there without the least resentment. What had been one of the most difficult weeks of my life, our lives, he’d coped with nonchalantly, secure with Celeste at his side and high as a kite, lost within his mania, which made him feel more powerful than God. We’d walk together through the unkempt, but still magnificent, grounds of the huge mental institution and he’d point out the beautiful Georgian and Victorian buildings, most rather badly in need of repair, and he’d talk about their restoration by Celeste who, of course, was to be the architect. He’d discuss with me his grand plans to rid the world of AIDS.

  His was a magnificent obsession and, after a while, we all got so used to it we’d simply let the rhetoric flow. If Damon was going to be temporarily crazy, the illusion that he was doing something significant for the world wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

  Some months later, when he’d finally recovered from his manic condition, he would confide in Celeste that he missed the certainty, the sense of invincibility, of his own strength in mind and body which the mania had given him.

  As Damon grew increasingly frail and incapable in the final year of his life, he would sometimes say wistfully to Celeste, “It was so great, babe! It was the first time in my life I felt completely whole! I was the Mighty Damon. If only I could be well and have that same feeling again!”

  With the help of Dr Roger Cole, his palliative specialist, and Dr Phil Jones, his doctor at Marks Pavilion, and by using a few old political contacts I’d made as a copywriter over some twenty years of doing election advertising, Damon was released on New Year’s Eve, 1989. I must add that his AIDS condition would have played a large part in his early release. The staff at Rozelle were far from happy to have Damon in their midst; handling loonies was one thing, but being in contact with someone with AIDS, who was a bleeder as well, was quite another. The mind boggles at what they must have thought could happen. Anyway, they wanted him out of their care as quickly as possible and would have worked hard to untangle the bureaucratic knots involved in getting him an early release.