April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  Although Rubensohn, in the five years I worked for him, never once paid me the slightest compliment, my career continued to blossom, my salary was increased and I was made a director of the agency which, at that time, was considered a pretty big deal.

  But I’d had enough and one morning during the five a.m. phone call I told Rubensohn to get stuffed and I resigned. This time I slammed the phone down. The phone rang every five minutes for the next two hours and finally in exasperation Benita, who’d been awakened by the continual calls and had been told of my decision, picked it up and, before Sim could say anything, shouted down the phone, “He’s not coming back! You hear. He’s not bloody coming back. Ever!”

  She hung on just a fraction too long and Rubensohn shot back at her, “If Bryce will stay for the next federal election, I’ll see that the law is changed and you can do your son’s blood transfusions at home!” Game, set and match! The perfidious political master had once again demonstrated the Holy Trinity of Politics. I know something about you. I need something from you. I have something for you.

  But it wasn’t quite as easy as that. The nation’s health came under the Federal Government, where the Labor Party was in opposition and where the Liberal minister for health at the time was one of Sim’s more particular enemies.

  When I arrived at work on the morning of my resignation there was a message from Sim’s ageing and long-suffering secretary, Miss Gorman, to come up and see him immediately. I walked up the two flights of stairs from the creative department to Sim’s outrageously large office. “You’d better go in,” Miss Gorman said, not glancing up, her voice as usual flat, without emotion. Working with Sim Rubensohn had set her face in a permanent deadpan, her expression neither hopeless nor hopeful, the best that could be said for it being that it was permanently neutral. Miss Gorman was the only person in the world who had Sim completely foxed.

  I entered, taking large steps over the very expensive kilims, thinking obsequiously to save them needless wear and tear, and came to a stop opposite Sim’s huge, ornate, Louis Quinze desk behind which he sat in a huge, slightly raised chair of the same period. He didn’t look up from the folder he was reading, though when he spoke his voice was surprisingly friendly. “Sit, Bryce.” I moved to sit in one of the chairs which appeared to have shorter than usual legs, so that Sim, seated behind the desk, actually towered above me.

  I had learned with Rubensohn, that short of becoming totally impervious, like Miss Gorman, attack was the best way to approach him. “You can’t do anything for my son, Mr Rubensohn, the law allowing only doctors to do transfusions is a federal one.” But my heart was beating rapidly. Sim Rubensohn always kept his promises, maybe he’d worked something out? Perhaps he knew someone in the Libs? He’d once worked for the Liberal Party until he’d had a fallout with Bob Menzies. You never knew with Sim.

  Rubensohn looked up, “That’s just the point isn’t it? We’ve got a federal election coming up next year. Labor could win this one, the country’s sick of the Libs.”

  “Not sick enough to vote Labor in.”

  “You’re wrong!” Rubensohn shouted, becoming his natural self again. He shouted loudest when he was least certain of himself. “Dead wrong! That’s your problem, Bryce, you have absolutely no political judgment. Government’s are voted out! The people want the Libs out! After nineteen years people have had enough of them!”

  “See me through this one last election, Bryce.” Sim’s voice lowered a tone and he once again sounded quite human, almost pleading. “This is the one I’ve worked for all these years. This one’s ours!” He brought his fist down on the desktop. “Labor will make it this time and the first thing, the very first piece of legislation they pass, will be to allow blood transfusions to be done in the home.” He looked up and must have seen the uncertainty in my face. “I’ll give it to you in writing. We’ll win the next federal election and you’ll get your blood transfusions.” He leaned forward and took a piece of his personal note paper from a small wooden box on his desk and removed the cap from his gold pen.

  “Labor can’t win, Mr Rubensohn,” I said softly, half-ashamed of myself for the disloyalty I was showing.

  “Eh? Bullshit, Bryce! You’re not listening! Don’t you ever listen? Abloody chimpanzee could win the next election from the Libs. People are fed up, they’re going to vote them out!” He paused momentarily, “Not Labor in! The Libs out! Don’t you understand anything?”

  He was silent as he wrote, then he handed me the paper. “Here, it’s a personal promise. When Labor win the next election you get what you want if you help me to fight it.”

  The promise wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, but I took it anyway, too weak to tell him where to shove it. I resigned shortly afterwards to take up a position with J. Walter Thompson, another international advertising agency, who had offered to treble my salary.

  Labor lost the next election. I’d been right; Sim’s note wasn’t worth a busted fart.

  In 1972, Labor finally swept into power in the federal election. But, of course, it was much too late for me. I comforted myself with the thought that, if I’d remained for the next four years with Sim Rub-ensohn, my life and my family would have been totally wrecked. I sent a note of congratulation to the old bastard but received no reply. I expected none, Sim wasn’t a forgiving man.

  My final parting from Sim Rubensohn had been pretty acrimonious. He admitted, though very reluctantly, that I was to be his protégé. Of course, with Sim you never knew, this admission might simply have been a last desperate ploy to keep me. He told me I was ruining my life, that if I stayed with him I would one day take his place as chairman of McCann and have the same sort of influence at the state and federal level of politics. “You will be very rich, Bryce.”

  All this took place in a private room at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital where he was to undergo an emergency kidney operation. Sim Rubensohn knew a good bedside scene when he saw one. He was, or he pretended to be, in considerable pain as we spoke, so that he could hardly shout at all, which meant he could barely communicate. But he still had enough venom left in him to tell me to go to hell when he saw I wasn’t going to change my mind.

  “Life gives us all only one chance, my boy, one chance, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. You’ve had yours and you’ll never get another. You, my boy, have settled for too little! You could have been anything!” He said all this in a hoarse, raspy voice, every once in a while wincing at the pain I was causing him. Finally he dismissed me with a backward flip of his hand, “Go to hell! I’m finished with you!” Sim Rub-ensohn was an extremely poor loser.

  Two years after I’d sent him the congratulatory note on Labor’s historic win, I received a return note from Sim Rubensohn. It was his first contact with me since I had been summarily dismissed from his hospital bed. The note was short and written in his usual large, impetuous scrawl in the centre of the page.

  Bryce,

  I have spoken to

  Gough Whitlam

  about your son.

  Sim Rubensohn.

  * * *

  Six months later, just before Damon’s ninth birthday, a law was passed allowing parents and hospital-registered patients in need of routine blood transfusions to perform these in their own homes.

  This single act transformed Damon’s life. It was just how I imagined it would be; the needle was easy to master and in no time I was an expert. At nine Damon was transfusing himself, becoming a great deal more expert than I was and using me only when his hand was bruised and he couldn’t grip the wings of the butterfly needle.

  However, all this came in a sense too late for Damon; by the age of seven his little body was pretty badly beaten up. His left leg was shorter than the right, badly atrophied and permanently damaged with the knee almost completely fused so that it gave him only very limited movement. His left arm was the same, permanently locked at the elbow into a slightly bent position and so thin that you could join your thumb and forefinger aroun
d the top of his biceps. From constant bleeding, all his joints were damaged and arthritis was beginning to set in, bringing him a great deal of additional pain.

  Some of this, of course, was a direct consequence of being a haemophiliac. We had seen haemophiliacs in other countries as badly afflicted as Damon, but who’d received home transfusions from the very beginning. The physical difference was quite profound and for us, desperately sad. We felt as though, as Australians, we had somehow contrived to mutilate our beloved little boy.

  While medical practice is markedly better today, stupidity of the Sir Splutter Grunt kind continues and, in the treatment of AIDS, we were to experience a new level of incompetence and plain, old-fashioned ignorance.

  The making of a Sir Splutter Grunt begins very early in the medical system and, even today, when doctors thankfully have much less clout and status in the community, they are generally socially inept, inclined to be superior, careless in their human relations and, finally, are tied down by a bureaucratic and reactionary hospital system which gives them very little room to exercise initiative.

  Damon, and others like him, are the victims of stubborn old men who wield enormous and unreasonable power in a system which largely still continues today.

  Doing the transfusions at home was enormously beneficial to Damon’s emotional wellbeing and general health. The time from the onset of a bleed to the actual transfusion was now less than three-quarters of an hour. We soon discovered that the earlier you treat a bleed the quicker it stops and, often, he would have some relief within a couple of hours of receiving Factor VIII. This meant his ongoing pain, as the bruise began to heal, and total discomfort were greatly reduced and, more importantly, less permanent damage was done to his joints from sustained bleeding.

  Compare this to going to the hospital for his transfusions. The entire process, including travel for both the doctor and ourselves and the transfusion, would often take three hours just to turn around and it might be another three or four hours before the clotting factor became effective and the bleeding began to diminish. With Damon’s average of three bleeds a week, the hospital treatment effectively produced about three times as much bleeding as a home transfusion. Or put in a different way, it had the equivalent effect on Damon’s body of having a four-hour bleed every day of his life!

  It was becoming harder and harder not to see ourselves as victims of an uncaring system.

  Seven

  Damon

  This letter was written on Good Friday, 1979, when Damon was twelve and just before his grandmother was due to visit us from South Africa.

  Dear Nana,

  I hope you are very well. Mum, Dad, Brett and Adam are all very well, although Adam has had a very bad cold. I have just come out of hospital, and have had a small operation on my right knee. But don’t worry, it was such a small operation that it took only ten minutes. All they did was stick a needle into my knee and draw back some fluid out of my knee joint, so as I won’t have any trouble with that knee again. I was only in hospital for two days, so I didn’t miss much school.

  We are on holidays for one week because of our Easter break, and it is Good Friday today. Dad is at home till Tuesday, but then he has to go back to work. He has just come back from New Zealand, he was there for four days on business. We are all getting a real New Zealand wool jumper from Dad, but we won’t get them till May because they haven’t been knitted yet!

  Speaking of May, I don’t think I can wait to see you! Only another three weeks till you are here!!! I’ve been looking forward to seeing you for years and years and years!!!! It was a shame that you couldn’t have come this month because down here we have an Easter Show, which is on from the sixth of April to the seventeenth of April, and we could have taken you there because it has a lot of fun things, such as big fruit and vegetable displays, electronic displays, all sorts of horse riding and displays of animals. There is also an arts and crafts centre. You can always buy show bags, or sample bags, which contain all sorts of sweets and toys and books and lots of other things.

  Yesterday I went to see a movie about a plot to assassinate a Greek president! It was called The Thirty-Nine Steps, and was great. The plan was that when the Greek President was addressing the British Houses of Parliament, a bomb would explode and kill him. Two Prussian agents had planted a bomb in the Houses of Parliament, and it was attached to Big Ben, and when Big Ben struck 11.45, the bomb would explode. The hero climbed out onto Big Ben and held onto the minute hand to stop it reaching 11.45. I went with a friend and had a really good time.

  I have some very big tests coming up at school. They are maths and science.

  Maths will be easy, but science will be hard because it was based on a week away from school when most of the class went to the bush for a week and camped to study the wild life around Canberra. I couldn’t go because of my Haemophilia, but I shall still have to do the test by studying all the worksheets that were given out.

  Anyway, I must go now, and I’ll wait till after I see you to write again. Just think, I’ll really see you! So till May, send my love to Aunty Rosemary and everyone else.

  Yours with love

  Damon

  xxxxxxxx

  P.S. Everyone over here sends their love!

  Eight

  Damon

  This is a compilation of various conversations Damon had with his friends and myself. I have tried to capture his essential “voice” although, of course, the continuity is my own.

  I can’t really remember when my dad wasn’t telling me stories because he was just always telling them.

  With my mum it was books. Books seemed to be everywhere in my life. They lay in stacks beside my bed, I’m sure she must have tucked them up with me in my cot. I don’t even remember learning to read. I could certainly read before I went to kindergarten and I can remember being astonished to discover that reading wasn’t something everyone could do, like breathing. I just thought human beings could always read.

  Books are very important to me because they often took away my pain. Not the very severe pain, but the early pain and the last of the pain when a bleed is coming on or beginning to lessen. My mum would sit me on her lap when I had a bleed and read to me. “One day you just started to read the words aloud,” she claimed, as though one minute I wasn’t reading and the next there I was pronouncing the words out loud.

  Loving books isn’t just about reading. When I was small and until I was about five when the last little bit wore out, I used to have a small blue blanket which I used to hold against my cheek while I sucked my thumb. You see lots of small kids doing it, but “Blanky” was very important to me and I don’t think I could have been able to cope as well without it. Books are a bit the same. They bring back the times when I felt safe and secure. My mum used to read with me nestled on her lap. The warmth and intimacy of her lap and her special smell and reassuring voice as she read to me and the story itself, they all became, in a sense, what books meant, really a tremendous comfort. I can still just pick one up and run my hands over it and immediately I start to feel better.

  I remember once at Sydney University when I got a bad bleed but I had to stay all day; I don’t remember why. When the pain was getting really bad I went into the library and took out three books and just sat for a while with them in my lap, touching them. I know it seems dumb, but it helped a lot.

  I also loved the stories my dad told me. They were mostly about Africa and things that happened to him, fantastic things that you believed when you were little and then had some doubts about when you got a little older and when we called them “dad facts". He always told them as though they were true, even if we begged him to say they weren’t. But it didn’t really matter, because you wanted to hear the story anyway.

  Like once we were in the Botanic Gardens and Mum pointed to a funny looking plant with its name on a little plaque. “Oh look, a lobelia, I’ve always wondered what a lobelia looked like,” she said.

  “In the Mountains of the Moon
in the Congo, high above the rainforest where the gorillas live and just above the snowline, where it’s always misty and wet, the lobelias grow to be twelve feet tall,” Dad said.

  We were looking at this funny little plant about thirty centimetres high and I saw Adam looking upwards along a tree trunk to gauge how high twelve foot was. Shortly afterwards I could see his lips silently saying, “Ah bull!”

  When we got home Adam went straight to the Encyclopaedia Botanica and came and sat down in my room and we looked up lobelia. Lobelia alata was only half a metre high, Lobelia erinus, a native of South Africa was a mere 0.15 metre. A native of South Africa? Kapow! Gotcha! Rat-tat-tat-tat! We had Dad squasherated, exactly where we wanted him!

  All the taller lobelia grew in Australia and they weren’t anything like three and a half metres high which was what Dad said in his dad fact! The one in South Africa was a dwarf, the smallest of them all, not even twenty-five centimetres!

  Adam was very happy at this win for truth and justice. He was about to march off to challenge Dad with this undeniable lobelia truth, when we both saw it right at the bottom of the page:

  Lobelia deckenii, a native of Mount Kilimanjaro, Kenya, a frost-resistant evergreen shrub which grows to a height of 4 metres. Also found on the slopes of the Mountains of the Moon in Zaire.