Damon wasn’t afraid of dying, but only of not being able to cope. Finally, in the last week in September, his anxiety seemed to lift; no new catastrophe had occurred for over a month and I think he felt a little more secure. He told me that he definitely wanted to go on the trip.
“Damon, you can come back at any time. If you don’t like it you can catch the plane home from the city that’s the nearest.”
“Thanks, Dad, but you don’t have to worry, I’m going to like it. I’m going to like it a lot. I’ll stay well, too, you’ll see.”
On 8 October 1990, they left by British Airways for London. On board with them went a large bag of the drugs Damon would need on the trip, enough morphine to last him three months and a chemist-shop-full of other stuff. In addition, he carried a fairly large Esky containing dry ice and dozens of bottles of AHF, the Factor VIII compound needed for his bleeds. In a small separate briefcase, Benita carried documents and letters from Phil Jones and Brent Waters, calculated to get them through customs at any of the borders they would be crossing and spelling out Damon’s medical history and drug regime, plus letters of referral to doctors in London, Paris and the several places they would be visiting in Italy.
You will have read Benita’s description of the part of the trip she shared with Damon. Adam now takes up the story as he meets their plane at Heathrow on a cool, London, October morning:
“I was pretty excited and had caught the tube to London Airport before dawn. I think it must have been the first tube out that day from Bayswater where I lived at the time. Damon’s plane came in at six o’clock in the morning and, though I knew they wouldn’t be through customs before at least six-thirty, I couldn’t take a chance. I remember arriving at Heathrow just after five.
“About ten past six, I saw Damon walking through customs. He was the first person out and, although he was wearing a bulky sweater, he looked very thin in the face and I was shocked, but not as shocked as I expected to be. You know, the media shows you all these pictures and I didn’t know quite what to expect. He’d lost probably two stone since I’d seen him almost a year ago, which is a lot on a person like Damon. But, I don’t know, he was still Damon.
“’Hi, Adam, I’ve missed you a lot, I hope you’re ready to show me everything.’ He grinned, his arms spread wide to accept me.
“I hugged him and, under his heavy sweater, I realised there was nothing much left of him; as I brought my hand down his side it was like feeling a skeleton through a woollen jumper. I could feel all his ribs and his pelvic bone. Later, I learned that he’d been in a wheelchair coming off the plane, but that he’d insisted on walking out to meet me. That was typical of Damon; he always tried to spare my feelings, even when we were kids.
“I remember when I was in my mid to late teens I suffered from an inane depression which forced me indoors to contemplate my navel for hours on end. The depression, which began over an unfulfilled love affair, overtook my entire consciousness and forced me inwards. Damon never contemplated the meaning of depression as a child. Pain ruled his life but not his thoughts. I know for sure now that he badly coveted the things I took for granted. Did I ever think of him when I was surfing? We’d talk a lot about my surfing, but did I ever wonder if somehow or another I should try to teach him how to surf, so he could feel the freedom of the waves which I accepted so easily? He gave me hints without saying anything. He played cricket with a soft ball. He played table tennis with his stiff arm and often he beat me. He made up for his body’s disability with immaculate timing and a good eye. His timing was second to none, even when his body was slow to react. Put simply, Damon was a natural sportsplayer trapped inside an inadequate body.
“If it is at all possible to compare like to unlike then picture two brothers, each the benign inversion of the other. The one with moderately good physical ability, often crippled by self-doubt, and the other, unable to move dextrously, who never thought about anything except the next opportunity to compete or get on to the field. I’m sure he felt the irony, but his natural goodness knew that, if he were to point it out, I would have another navel-gazing attack and feel guilty, probably forever; he was far too sensitive and intelligent.
“Now, as I look back, the irony seems so clear but, of course, a kid in my self-preoccupied condition was incapable of perceiving it. So he let me know how he felt without getting too personal. Damon had an uncanny sense of another person’s space and he never invaded it. But I know he loved me a lot and, I now realise, worried about me.
“Now, after a long and uncomfortable plane journey from Australia when all his joints would have been stiff and very painful from arthritis, he insisted on walking through the customs area to meet me. Damon, still on his feet, still basically in charge, still the younger, wiser brother.
“We all returned to Draycott House, the serviced apartments where my parents always stay when in London and where my mum had arranged a ground-floor flat. I remember that soon after we arrived Damon announced that he was hungry. Celeste seemed delighted; he’d eaten almost nothing on the trip coming over. ‘I’d like three slices of Coon cheese, please,’ Damon announced.
“He could have asked for a couple of ounces of fresh truffles and they’d have been easier to find. Coon cheese is almost as Australian as Vegemite and not to be found in London. It’s a pliable cheese that comes in thin, tasteless slices, the exact size of a slice of bread, no doubt designed for school lunches. The unavailability of Coon cheese seemed to me, a born worrier, a not very propitious start to our Grand Tour. We expected him to be exhausted, to sleep the day through and perhaps even the night, but he seemed very excited, though in an understated kind of a way I was not familiar with. Damon’s excitement was always contagious, it made you enjoy things more. After a short rest, he wanted to be up and about.
“London was all a bit weird to him but it was obvious he was trying very hard; occasionally I’d catch him gritting his teeth from some sudden pain, but mostly he showed nothing outwardly, his self-discipline quite remarkable. The first thing that really hit me, I suppose, was the slowness with which he walked. We walked through Hyde Park. It was so slow, but he just kept on going and going. That first day we must have covered two or three kilometres. I was quite amazed, knowing that he spent a lot of time in a wheelchair and that his legs and the soles of his feet were covered in painful herpes blisters. It was obvious he was making a big effort because his face was expressionless, not pained, rather his eyes were fixed – though he asked questions all the time. Damon always asked questions all the time. He was the most naturally curious person I’ve ever known.
“He was pretty good in London that first week. We went to the War Museum and to the Victoria and Albert and to the British Museum. Each day, we managed to do something nice and he was able to keep up, though of course at snail’s pace, and when we got to the galleries and museums we always hired a wheelchair for him. Being me, I’d been enormously worried that I wouldn’t be able to cope when we were together in Europe. Now, I felt pretty confident Celeste and I would manage when we left the following Monday for France.
“Damon decided to keep a journal of his trip, a task, as it turned out, which was well beyond his physical energy, but he managed to write a few pages. It begins in London.”
11 October 1990
We arrived in London three days ago. It has for me at least, been simply time to get over jet lag and all that nonsense. We are staying in a rather lovely apartment in Chelsea. Tomorrow we leave for Paris and that is going to be exciting, frightening but above all, completely different to anything I have experienced before.
London was a gentle landing – the language is the same, the traffic works in much the same way and the people seem friendly and helpful. Of course, when I visited the V&A and the Tate it helps a lot to be in a wheelchair! But my real experience begins tomorrow, when we arrive in Paris. I wish myself luck, and am extremely grateful that I will be with Adam, who speaks fluent French. I’ll speak to you from Paris tomorrow!
“But when we got to Paris Damon seemed to lose a lot of energy. It was as though the week in London had used up all his reserves. We seldom got going before eleven a.m. and, by three o’clock, he was exhausted and we’d return to the hotel, where he’d sleep until about eight o’clock, when we’d go out for dinner somewhere. By eleven he was ready for bed again.
“I remember one evening, it was a typical early autumn evening, a balmy night with no hint of the chill to come. Paris was at its most benign and we went out with friends of mine, Sylvie and Patrice Dana, to a restaurant named Roulette de Mere, near where I used to live in 1985 in St Germaine. Damon ate quite well of the typical French fare, a splendid boeuf Bourguignon. Sylvie and Patrice seemed to like him and he was amusing and asked the usual heap of Damon-type questions, wanting to know all about Paris in two and a half seconds. Towards the end of the meal he excused himself to go to the toilet, which was upstairs. I wanted to help him but Celeste cut in. ‘It’s not the going up,’ Celeste said, ‘it’s coming down, he’ll have trouble coming down.’
“I waited a few moments and went upstairs and waited outside the toilet door. I could hear Damon retching and then suddenly vomiting up his dinner. ‘You okay, Damon?’ I said in alarm and knocked frantically on the door of the toilet.
“’Yeah, Adam, I’m okay,’ I could hear him spitting and then the toilet flushing. “’What’s wrong, can I help?""No, it’s all right, I’ll be out in a sec."’When he came out I handed him a paper towel, which I’d wet at the basin, and held a dry one for him, ‘Thanks, Adam.’ He grinned, wiping his mouth. ‘I’m not used to the rich food.’ Then taking the dry towel from my hands, he added, ‘But it was really delicious.’
“I didn’t know what to say. ‘I’m sorry, I should have thought of that. They use a lot of red wine and garlic and I think they cook in pig fat here.’
“He immediately dismissed the subject. ‘I like your friends Sylvie and Patrice, I like them a lot.’
“I helped him down the stairs and we left soon afterwards and, when we got to our hotel, Damon, who shared a room with Celeste, went straight to bed. Later downstairs, over a coffee with Celeste, I apologised for taking him to the restaurant with such rich food. She looked surprised, ‘But why? He loved it! He really liked your friends.’
“I explained to her about Damon throwing up in the toilet. Celeste laughed and stretched over and put a hand on my shoulder, ‘Adam, Damon throws up, not after every meal, but quite a lot. That’s why I get so excited when he eats something, anything, and it stays down.’ She grinned, ‘Coon cheese stays down, I don’t know why, it probably sticks to something down there, but it stays down.’
“But there is no doubt, Damon enjoyed Paris. His eyes were popping out of his head and he wanted to walk wherever he could. I’d now seen the shingles on his feet and I didn’t know how he could possibly do so, I mean, walk. We’d stop for coffee at sidewalk cafes, which he especially liked. I think Damon really liked the idea of Paris. It was his sort of place – Paris, a red Ferrari, Celeste and a beautiful apartment in the 11th Arrondissement.
“We stayed four nights and on the fifth day we drove south to the chateau country. Our car, a little Ford Capri, was loaded to the max and we were armed to the teeth with forms, letters in French and Italian and enough drugs, liquid morphine in particular, to land us in jail for a lifetime. The curious thing was that we were never stopped, not once; we sailed through every customs on the entire journey without a question being asked. Funny how that is! When you’ve got all the answers, nobody asks you the questions.
“We had just on a month to get from Paris to Rome before I had to be back at work at the Financial Times. We continued south and stayed in the Loire valley for a few nights and went on to several of the chateaux.
“Despite the fact that we’d taken it easy coming down south, Damon seemed tired and we stopped at Giens where I had two dear friends Laurence and Stephan, who’d booked us into a marvellous hotel situated on a point looking over the Mediterranean, where Damon rested for four days. Damon simply loved it. Every morning began with coffee and fresh croissants on the balcony overlooking the sparkling sea.
“Damon’s health was only just bearing up and he would have been better had we allowed him to recover a little longer. We left Giens and travelled along the French Riviera all that afternoon and crossed the border into Italy in the early evening, stopping at a small, seaside resort hotel for the night. We were suddenly in Italy, where everything changed, and Damon went all funny again at being in Italy at last, after all the stories Benita had filled his head with since he’d been a child. But basically, I think he hoped to see a lot of Ferraris.
“The next day we drove to Florence and we arrived at sunset just after a rainstorm and, as we drove into Florence, Celeste started to weep and be hysterical pointing to the clouds. ‘Look Damon, the fingers of God!’ she wept, and Damon grew the most excited he’d been for ages. They were looking at the sun stabbing its rays through the clouds and right on to the city and, I must say, it was pretty beautiful. It’s a nice name for it, too, ‘the fingers of God’.
“We stayed in Florence for a couple of days and went to the Pitti Palace and the Uffizi and saw everything Mum had told us we must see on pain of death, though I think we were all a bit glazed-eyed after a couple of days. If you’re not Benita, you can take only so much of that stuff.
“Instead, we watched the lunchtime oarsmen in their single sculls on the river Arno as we looked down from the Ponte Vecchio and ate heaps of the world’s best ice cream, which was something Damon could eat heaps of without throwing up.
“Florence is a beautiful city but, except for ‘the fingers of God’ on our arrival, it was rainy and a bit cold and Damon wasn’t well, so we did a lot of the actual indoor sightseeing in a wheelchair. Damon didn’t enjoy it as much as Benita might have hoped. It is also one of Celeste’s favourite places in the world and I think she wanted it to be perfect for Damon. C’est la vie. We were learning to take things as they came, it was the only way.
“We left the car in Florence and took the train to Venice. There really isn’t any point in having a car in Venice. We decided to come back to Florence to collect it and then drive to Siena and thereafter to Rome. Damon went ape over Venice. I always knew, and Celeste has since reminded me, that for many, many years Damon had wanted to go to Venice. It had a remarkable effect on him – his energy seemed to return.
“I shall always remember Venice as the place Damon adored, the place he saw and fell in love with through the early morning mist.
“We took the train back to Florence and spent a couple more days there. Damon hardly left our hotel and was really quite sick. I was getting to know his dreadful illness, which makes you repay in suffering every ounce of energy it allows you on a tolerably well day. Venice had been two well days and so the return to Florence for two days and then the two days in Siena were the repayment sick days. Four very sick days for two when he could more or less get about. It didn’t seem fair.
“We arrived in Rome and I think Damon had had about enough and wanted to go back to London. But, we were meeting Benita in Rome and I know he didn’t want to spoil things for her.”
* * *
Benita tells of Damon in Rome alone with her one quiet afternoon. Their hotel was in the Piazza della Rotunda which is the square containing the Pantheon, perhaps the most beautiful and exquisite building in Rome.
“Damon and I walked the few metres from our hotel and entered the awesome place. We found a quiet seat and I held his hand, while we looked above us at the great circle that slices off the very top of the dome and is open to the sky. It was that perfect time of day and, as Agrippa had intended, the sun shining directly down formed a great golden circle of molten light on the marble floor. Together, we sat there drinking in the golden light, our feelings totally bonded by our love for each other.”
Adam concludes, in his gentle way, “We saw the major sights of Rome and threw pen
nies into the various fountains and visited the Tivoli Gardens in the hills outside Rome. I remember when we got to the Trevi Fountain – it was one of our last stops – it was dry and under restoration. The Trevi is the famous fountain where, if you throw a coin into it, you will return to Rome. Being dry was symbol enough for me. I knew my darling brother would never return to Rome.”
Thirty-two
Eight Kilos of Pretend Coon Cheese. Sometimes We find out Things about Ourselves. Irwin the Good Needle Man. Good night, sweet prince, may flights of angels see you to your rest.
The completion of my novel, Tandia, was going badly. I kept thinking I had reached the final chapter, but the end never seemed to come. Big novels with a great many characters are like that though, at the time, I lacked the experience to know this. Characters, some of whom have been sustained for several hundred pages, cannot simply be dismissed, brought to an abrupt end; they are, after all, friends and enemies formed a long way back by the reader and, like real people, their lives must be brought to a logical conclusion. Besides all this, there are seemingly a thousand loose ends which have to be neatly tied together, before one can finally put a book to bed.
In the meantime, my London publisher was getting understandably concerned. The book was required for a March release and here it was, early December, and all they could get from me was a weekly fax stating that I was definitely on the last chapter, cross my heart. Finally, they suggested that I come to London and take an apartment where they could keep an eye on me and where I would do nothing else but write until the book was completed.
I liked the idea. It meant I could be back with Damon for the last part of his Grand Tour and, although I wouldn’t be able to go out much with him, just knowing he was near me would be very comforting. I arrived in London on a Qantas flight on 27 November, determined to knock over the last chapter of my book and have time with Damon and Adam and to enjoy Christmas shopping at Simpsons and Harrods. But it wasn’t to be quite so easy. In London I wrote another six chapters, five weeks’ writing, before the book finally came to an end. My writing day began just before four a.m. and concluded at midnight, with half an hour’s break for breakfast, the same for lunch and two hours for dinner and time to be with Damon.
April Fool's Day Page 52