April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  However he must have finally sensed that something was wrong because he stopped in mid sentence. “You are a nurse, aren’t you?” he asked Celeste.

  Celeste explained that she was Damon’s girlfriend and he seemed somewhat taken aback, but made no attempt to apologise, adding instead, “Well, I suppose it’s just as well you all know.”

  We’d travelled the full twenty-four-year circle beginning with Sir Splutter Grunt; it seemed as though nothing had really changed for Damon – he was still a thing, a curiosity.

  Adam and Celeste arrived very early the next day to bring Damon home on the Thursday, two days before the Easter weekend.

  On Friday, Irwin Light arrived. He explained that he was taking his family down to Forster, a drive of some two hundred and fifty miles, where they had a weekender; he would be away for the day but would return the following morning to make sure Damon was all right over the weekend or in case he had a bleed and needed a transfusion.

  Damon became very distressed and insisted that Irwin not come back. Irwin grew alarmed that Damon might die, but Damon persisted, until Irwin promised solemnly to spend the weekend with his family. “I’ll look in on you first thing Tuesday, Damon. Try not to have a bleed, will you?”

  Damon, for the first time ever shook Irwin’s hand. He was exhausted from talking and his voice could barely be heard. “Irwin, thank you, thank you for everything.” He paused and smiled weakly. “You’re the best needle man ever, the best. Goodbye, mate.”

  Damon, as you may have noticed, has an unfortunate knack of getting ill on holidays and on the Saturday he was in such pain the liquid morphine was not sufficient to mask it. His palliative carer, the doctor with the death sentence, was away and so we couldn’t get the hospital to authorise sub-cutaneous morphine. That is morphine delivered directly into his veins.

  Lindsay, who’d spent most of the weekend helping Celeste, called Mark her fiancé who was a doctor and Mark obtained the morphine and put a permanent butterfly needle into Damon’s chest which allowed Celeste to administer morphine whenever he needed it.

  We then got on the phone and started to call his friends. Those people who had been close to Damon all his life. They came each on his own. Bardy came up from Orange, a country town about 180 kilometres away where he taught music at a college. Paul came, big, lovely always laughing Paul Green. Andrew followed and then Sam, dear, sweet Samantha who’d finally triumphed against Damon at chess. On Sunday Christopher Molnar came, beautiful quiet Christopher who cared so much for Damon and finally on Sunday afternoon, Toby. Toby who had first found Celeste, Toby of the Ray-Ban Club, Toby who had been such a part of Damon’s young life, Toby whom Damon loved so very much. Toby came to say goodbye. Damon always had such good taste in friends. All had been through school with him and now each said his own quiet goodbye.

  On Easter Monday I woke very early and went for a run along the coastline. I stood on the rocks above Bondi and watched the false sunrise, the saffron dawn created by the reflection of the sun setting on the light side of the world from the clouds of volcanic dust the great Philippines volcano had spread across the stratosphere.

  “On this last day Damon will have two sunrises and no sunset,” I thought, trying to grin through my tears. “That’s just like him, all start and no finish!” I tried to knuckle back my tears but I could barely see the narrow path along the cliff face as I started to run towards Tamarama Beach. I ran hard, until I felt my lungs would burst, and then I turned and came back to Bondi in the smooth, cold dawn. If I could run hard enough, maybe the dead feeling in my chest would go.

  I got home just before sunrise and sat on the terrace and wept and wept as a beautiful Sydney autumn day arrived blazing over the Harbour. Then I put on the coffee and phoned Brett and woke Benita with the words, “We must go down to Damon.”

  We all had time to say goodbye, Brett and Adam and Ann and his mother, whom he loved so very much. I leaned close to him and kissed him and he stretched out and took my hand. “Thanks, Dad, thanks for everything.” Then in a voice hardly above a whisper, he added, “Please write my book.”

  Damon was with Celeste when he died half an hour later of a massive and sudden heart attack. The mighty Damon in Celeste’s arms. This time she had to let him go.

  Trust Damon to die on April Fool’s Day. It was so typical of him, trying to tell us he wasn’t really dead, that he’d just gone away for a while, that it was all an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke.

  “Look, babe, I’m cured. It’s all a matter of training the mind. I told you I could do it!”

  POSTSCRIPT

  Life after Damon.

  It is November 4th, 1993. Today, Damon would have turned 26. I call days like today “remembering days”, days when it is impossible not to be washed over with vivid recollection, provoking laughter that comes out of the blue, or grief which grips my heart and my belly and pushes me into deep, dark holes which are sometimes difficult to climb out of. Of course, Damon touches me every day, it’s just that remembering days sometimes beat me around a bit.

  Damon’s birthday is the right sort of day to remember what has happened in my life since he died. So I’m trying to put words to events past and emotions present. I call myself an artist, so usually I draw or I paint the images in my head, despatching my grief with wild brushstrokes or stabbing, scratching pencil lines. I cry a lot and get angry but I feel a whole lot better—lighter and clearer—when it’s out there scrawled on a piece of paper in front of me. Mostly I burn these drawings, symbolically torching my sadness to let the goodness and love in my heart have a little more room to wiggle its toes.

  It took me a while to start truly feeling the loss when Damon died. When Lindsay and I washed his body, the final loving we could provide, I didn’t feel like I was quite there. It was dreamlike and unreal, as if I was looking at everything from a great distance and I couldn’t really be sure that what I was seeing had actually happened. The man I held, lifeless and limp, couldn’t really be Damon. It was like Damon had just got up and left the house, gone on a jaunt of his own or maybe a little holiday. He’ll come through the front door soon, smiling and healthy again, with his eyes brimming with love and his head full of schemes.

  Through the grief, shock and disbelief, the truth suddenly kicked me in the stomach. And with it, a lucid sense of relief and release. Damon’s suffering was over. I know we all had that feeling, however hard it was to let him go. We coped together like a family, in a private sort of way.

  The Courtenays always will be part of my family, for we share experiences that have become stronger than blood ties. Bryce buried himself in April Fool’s Day, an outpouring of words as much as it embodied an unburdening of soul. Benita and I spent time together, talking, crying and getting angry, and crying some more. We each held close our own personal, beloved Damon.

  Despite the weight of all evidence, AIDS was never going to kill Damon. That’s what I always thought, even to the minute he breathed his last. It was that conviction, along with massive amounts of love, pure and simple, which kept me going. Now I see that I may have been described by those in the know as being “in denial". Being in denial means lying to oneself—denying what is happening because it is too painful, or too inconceivable to deal with. Thinking that I may have been in denial about Damon’s illness makes me angry—as though living with hope is somehow not natural. Without my hope and my dreams of a continuing happy life with Damon, I could never have had the strength to keep going.

  Sometimes I feel really, really angry at Damon. Why the hell did he have to go and die? After all the time and the energy we spent battling AIDS, he goes and quits life. So we lose and the walls come tumbling down and now I’m all alone and sad and I’M PISSED OFF. How could you give up? I didn’t give up on you, so how could you give up on us? Where are you when I really need you, eh? You can’t just go and shoot through when the going gets a bit hot. I’m still here, you know, and just to show you how tough I was I never gave up. And I never w
ill give up, either.

  I know that sort of thought process sounds irrational, considering the love we had. But maybe the anger is just a way to come to terms with my grief.

  The death of my beloved Muzzie about four weeks after Damon’s struck further pain into my heart. Damon had been the most important person in my adult life, but my grandmother had been the role-model of my childhood, the story-teller and the great matriarch. She had been sick for some time and, while I loved her dearly, I had trouble finding the energy to help care for her as well as Damon, something I felt quite guilty about. Yet I am sure she would have understood. Her final gift to me was the money to pay my half of the little cottage in Bondi that Bryce and Benita had bought for Damon and me. That inheritance came also through my mother’s generosity, and was in part offered in reparation for the misunderstanding and anger between us. I hope that one day all the little hurts between me and my mother will be finally resolved. Quoting a favourite saying of Muzzie, I guess that “time is the greatest healer".

  After Damon died I didn’t know what to do with myself. Suddenly my life had become totally and utterly different—unbearably empty. I had been dedicated to one person for a long time and I knew that I now needed to spend time dedicated to me and my life. I had to evaluate who exactly Celeste minus Damon was. Conversely, I needed to fill up my life with meaningful activity so that all the navel-gazing didn’t get me too depressed. While Bryce and Benita were always there if I needed them, I knew it was time to be independent. I felt too fragile to go and get a job in a conventional way. Yet I was filled with the desire to work hard and to start afresh. What I wanted to do was to work with something I loved, and that was ceramics.

  Celestial Ceramics had its humble beginnings at the Balmain markets, where I shared a stall with my friend Yvonne. I mainly work with handpainted tiles—they are the “bread and butter” of my cottage industry. When I’m not decorating and designing tiles I concentrate on my own artwork, although these days we are so busy with tiles it has become difficult to do anything else. The little studio in the back room of the house is busy with activity from early in the morning till late at night. Celestial Ceramics is a small creation with which I am justifiably pleased. I’m only sad that Damon hasn’t shared it with me, for I would like him to be proud of me, too.

  However, I do have someone else whom I love and who loves me, and who I know is proud of me. Soon after I made the ridiculous decision not to share my life with another man for a very long time, Stephen and I met and we fell in love. There followed a slow, scary sort of courtship. We took our time, cautiously getting to know each other. Stephen began to get to know who Damon was, and I am sure they would have been great friends.

  Stephen has been my greatest support through the grief of losing Damon, something I know must be hard for him sometimes. We live together now, sharing the same house Damon and I shared, filling the rooms where there was once sickness, pain and death with a new love and happiness. Stephen is also an artist and a film-maker, and between film projects he works with me on tiles—a perfect partnership.

  Most of the time, I am extremely happy. I feel as though I have received a beautiful blessing, something that will last all my life. Sometimes, however, I still deeply long for the physical Damon, even though I feel him close to me all the time. He and I engage in a constant silent dialogue, a dialogue of thoughts and feelings rather than of words and touches. Some days I feel hopelessly old and a bit too wise for my years. I feel marked by the weight of my experience, rather than uplifted by my learning and love. And then Damon will rush into my thoughts and I will smile and lose my seriousness and be just like anybody else again. The lovely smiling image I have of Damon will remind me that love is an energy—it can neither be created nor destroyed. It just is and always will be, giving meaning to life and direction to goodness. Our love will never die.

  Celeste

  THE PERSIMMON TREE

  In the heartwood of the sacred persimmon tree is ebony, the hardest, most beautiful of all woods. This is a symbol of life, a heartwood that will outlast everything man can make, a core within that, come what may, cannot be broken and represents our inner strength and divine spirit.

  It is 1942 in the Dutch East Indies, and Nick Duncan is a young Australian butterfly collector in search of a single exotic butterfly. With invading Japanese forces coming closer by the day, Nick falls in love with the beguiling Anna Van Heerden.

  Yet their time together is brief, as both are forced into separate, dangerous escapes. They plan to reunite and marry in Australia but it is several years before their paths cross again, scarred forever by the dark events of a long, cruel war.

  Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Pacific during the Second World War, Bryce Courtenay gives us a story of love and friendship born of war, and the power of each in survival.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  DEDICATION

  APRIL FOOL’S DAY

  BOOK ONE

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  BOOK TWO

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  BOOK THREE

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  POSTSCRIPT