April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  Unimpressed was a mild word for what I felt about Toby’s best friend and I remember hoping that our future relationship didn’t include too much best friend. Some part of me must have reacted, because a few days later I looked in the Herald entertainment page and found a movie which starred Burt Reynolds and took myself off to see him.

  In fact Damon did look a little bit like him, though not a lot, a bit, if you squinched your eyes. He also seemed to have adopted the same smart-arse mannerisms and both of them wore Ray-Ban aviators, another affectation I guessed Damon had taken from the movie star. Toby also wore them, assuring me in his defence that they were the world’s best sunglasses and cut out one hundred per cent of the infra-red and ultra-violet rays.

  To my regret Toby, it seemed, came with friend and Damon seemed to be with us quite often as a threesome. Toby and Damon matched intellects all the time and carried on like a couple of schoolboys, though I must admit, fairly intelligent schoolboys. They were both at university and a bit up themselves. In fact, it was all a big wank.

  But they were so far removed from Davo and his milieu that I couldn’t help but enjoy myself. They seemed happy enough for me to join into their arguments, although this wasn’t always easy. They understood each other very well and talked a sort of shorthand, something I’d noticed and admired in people who’ve been friends for a long time. I’d always hoped that one day I would have such a friend, so totally on the same wave-length that you almost don’t have to talk at all and when you do, it’s practically epigrammatic.

  I was always a very quiet person, so whenever I went out with them they’d dominate the conversation and I’d mostly listen. I was really interested in their talk. It was not the sort of conversation I’d ever listened to before. It was schoolboys discussing deep, dark and mysterious philosophy. I knew I was their equal in intellect, I’d had an education every bit as good and I think I’d read as many books as Damon. I’d started reading very young to try to drown out Maison le Guessly and what was happening around me. Later Damon and I would discover that we’d read much too grown-up books at around the same age.

  I soon realised that Damon wasn’t really so full of himself but simply someone who was positive about everything he set out to do. I had no idea he was hiding something, as Toby had never mentioned this. The first time I noticed his difference, I mean his physical difference, we’d been out and it was fairly late and I said, “Let’s go and have a coffee at the Cross?”

  So we went to have coffee at one of the places we used to have coffee. Not Deans, I only introduced them to Deans later, maybe it was Teazers. We were out in Damon’s father’s car and Damon had gone to park it while we waited for him on the pavement outside. I remember seeing him walking towards us with a limp. I thought nothing of it. Perhaps he’d knocked and hurt his leg or something. What I did notice was that he walked with his arms wide and slightly bent. I turned to Toby and laughed, “Damon really thinks he’s incredibly macho, doesn’t he?”

  Toby looked at me quizzically. “Damon’s a haemophiliac. One arm’s permanently bent, one leg too, from bleeding into the joints. He does that with his arms so people won’t notice the bent one.” He smiled, “Better to be thought macho than deformed, heh?”

  I had very little idea what a haemophiliac was. I could sort of work it out from biology but, like everyone else, I thought if you cut yourself you bled to death. I had never associated it with joints or physical handicap. Of course, I’d never even thought about it at all. I began to realise that there was more to Damon than met the eye.

  We’d been out several times and I was an artist who prided myself on my observation, yet only now did I discover that Damon had huge physical problems. He had such a strong personal presence, such enormous confidence, that I realised that I hadn’t really looked at him at all, I simply felt him being there. It was always like that. Later, when we were together, Damon might have a very bad bleed and his pain would be almost unbearable for a couple of days. But he never talked about being sick, he never associated himself with sickness, so he wasn’t. You just thought of Damon needing someone to do his fetching and carrying and to look after him for a little while. You never thought you were caring for a sick person, just that Damon needed you. That was all it was. Damon needing a little help for a little while.

  Damon had a thing about cars which I’m sure deep down had something to do with his inability to do physical things. The car gave him a sense of physical control. Damon needed to feel in control of the world about him and a car was something he felt he could control. The rest of the world outside cars and his other love, stereos and music, was too uncontrollable. It’s not an original thought, I know, but he really saw cars differently from most people. They were alive to him, really beautiful, and speed was something they had to express their beauty. We’d come across a Ferrari in the street and he’d walk around it almost in tears and I’d notice that his hands trembled. Cars were a physical extension of Damon, making up for the parts of him that didn’t work very well.

  This was the first time in my life that I started to be driven around in cars. Daddy’s 1956 Peugeot 203 had exploded when I was still quite young and had joined the junk in the front yard and, besides, excursions in it were sufficiently rare not to qualify as regular driving around. So the whole idea of a motor car as casual transport was really new. Damon driving his father’s beautiful Alfa GTV Sports wasn’t a status symbol to be enjoyed, it was just like a surprise, “Wow! These people can drive and look at their cars! Oh my God!”

  I mean it didn’t affect the way I thought or anything. But going out with Daddy in the Peugeot 203, though a seldom enough childhood experience, had always meant the family together, a rare and important occurrence. So a car had some sort of “togetherness” significance for me. Driving around with Toby and Damon was a nice experience. Nice and warm and together.

  The sleek black Alfa with its grained leather seats was a beautiful car and I started to look at the design of cars from a purely aesthetic point of view. So Damon’s love of cars was to be my bridge to him, just as Toby’s electric guitar had been my crossing-over point with him.

  Increasingly I was drawn to Damon. He was such an assured person and compared to him I felt very weak and uncertain of myself. Toby and I had been going out for some months but we hadn’t done anything. I’ve never been the sort of person who jumps into bed with somebody the first time I meet them, I’ve never been like that and I never will be. I tend to regard it as, well you know, almost sacred. Not holy, but not something you throw away either. It’s something you enjoy far more if you really know the person you’re sleeping with. I’d been around sex indirectly all my life; it wasn’t something I was ambivalent about.

  Toby and I stopped seeing each other. I was pretty upset, tears and drama and that sort of thing. He’d admitted to me that he really loved a girl called Rebecca. Although we’d only been seeing each other for a very short time, Toby felt that it wasn’t working the way it should be. I couldn’t deny this. I had no real idea of the way it should be. For me it was wonderful and I was terribly hurt and upset and my old insecurity with men came rushing back. I was later to meet Rebecca; she was so lovely that when I saw her I didn’t blame Toby for having her as his ideal.

  I’d never been a jealous person. I don’t think I had the self-esteem to be properly jealous, so I accepted Toby’s right to love someone else, though of course I was upset.

  Damon and I started seeing each other without Toby. Gina Bloom seemed to have disappeared or at least he didn’t ever mention her. I must explain going out with Damon without Toby wasn’t a guilty thing. Toby and Damon used to work nights for a locksmith in Vaucluse who had an all-night service for people who lost their keys. Toby had started the job and been trained while he was still at school and he, in turn, had trained Damon. They’d been doing it for about two years at school during the weekends and now they were doing it at uni too, but more often. It was good money for them both.

&nb
sp; It was all pretty simple. The locksmith had taught them how to change locks in an emergency. Mostly they just manned the telephone in the small flat above the locksmith’s and waited for calls from people who’d locked themselves out. Friday and Saturday night were the big nights when people got drunk and lost their keys. Toby or Damon, whoever was on night shift, radioed the addresses through to a mobile van, logged the call and that was about it. Often with Toby I’d spend the night at the locksmiths and Damon would come by and we’d play music or just talk all night. It was wonderful.

  In fact the six months or so with Toby was to become my whole adolescence, the most marvellous time between being a child and an adult. I was still just seventeen and, although I knew all about drugs and prostitutes and how to chill-out in a sleazy cafe all night, I knew none of the things normal seventeen-year-olds took for granted.

  Damon started taking me out after Toby and I had split up and I found myself holding hands with him. Not really even thinking about it. We’d go out when Toby was working and we’d find ourselves holding hands. One night, after Toby and I had parted, Damon was working at the locksmiths and I was with him. Toby dropped in to see Damon and found us together and he was incredibly upset seeing us together like that.

  But it wasn’t really like that! We weren’t doing anything. We all loved each other and were very good friends. But it was Toby’s shitty at seeing us together that made me realise that I felt differently about Damon than I ever had about Toby. I suddenly badly wanted Toby to understand that I was now Damon’s girlfriend and loved him in a different sort of way. Differently than I had ever felt about anyone before.

  For a while Toby was hurt, hurt quite a lot. But I doubt if he was really humiliated. After all, he’d wanted the separation, Damon and he loved each other much too much for me to get in the way and he knew that we weren’t going to split the threesome.

  So Damon and I started our relationship. It was built firmly on a friendship, so it was easy. Damon was the sort of person who made everything easy.

  Two months later we were living together.

  Damon was also working part time at Woollahra Electronics selling the best hi-fi gear and he met a photographer named Colin Beard who owned ten thousand classical LP recordings and was a nut about having perfect sound. Damon was equally fanatical in the search for the perfect tonal quality and they soon became hi-fidelity friends. One day Colin told him he had to go overseas on a six-month assignment and wanted to rent his tiny house in Woollahra but that he was terrified for his record collection which couldn’t be moved, as it covered every available bit of wall space in the only room downstairs. At a rent of fifty dollars a week he’d found his man and woman.

  Damon didn’t exactly ask me to live with him. I stayed one night and then again a few days later, then I just stayed. The most magical time of my life was about to begin.

  The house consisted of a front room, then a sort of fibro lean-to kitchen, that led into a make-shift toilet and bathroom which took up the remainder of the ground floor. An almost perpendicular staircase led up to an attic bedroom with a dormer window in the roof. The backyard was overgrown and roughly the size of a pocket handkerchief with an inward-leaning, rusted corrugated-iron fence over which a morning glory creeper draped itself. The purple trumpets spilled over the side of the fence to cover an ancient motor cycle before starting their invasion of the backyard, finally climbing the opposite iron fence and becoming someone else’s morning glory. It was as though we had a whole backyard filled with purple flowers. A sort of hallelujah chorus of blooms trumpeting away as hard as they could to welcome us to our first home.

  The bedroom in the attic had been painted white a long time ago and now the peeling paint was the colour of skimmed milk and lifted from the walls in hundreds of curiously shaped scallops. In the morning the sun would come streaming through the dormer window and bounce off the walls, the flaking paint making patterns that were lovely to look at. It was the most enchanting room you could possibly imagine and I’d wake up and just lie on my back and smile and wish I could die without anything else better happening to me.

  Quite suddenly and out of the blue I had everything I ever wanted. A home of my own which I could keep clean, space I could regard as my own which was invasion- and dirt-free and so quiet it was like the inside of a chapel.

  Leaving home had been difficult. Mum had thrown a monstrous, snot-nosed tantrum, claiming I was deserting an ailing Muzzie and leaving her to cope. In a sense this was true. Muzzie wasn’t well. It was strange, but she’d always been young and bouncy and you never thought of her as an old woman. Then she turned seventy-seven and on the very morning of her birthday she turned old and frail and lost her will to fight my mum. She never again mentioned her plans to clean up and get Maison le Guessly going again.

  So things were pretty ghastly. My mum now had the upper hand and the place was now at the point where it was a major health hazard even for us, who were immune to everything. I just had to get out and Muzzie understood when I asked her permission.

  “Is it a man, darling?” she asked. I didn’t quite know how to reply. I mean it was and it wasn’t. I was now in love with Damon, but we still hadn’t consummated our love and what we were giving each other made a statement like that seem inappropriate. I wasn’t leaving because I had found a man. I was leaving because suddenly my life was happy and living with Damon was a part of that happiness. I’d found Damon and he’d found me, Celeste Laetitia Gabrielle of the immaculate conception.

  Muzzie’s question really hurt me. Now that I think about it I don’t know why. After all, it was a sensible enough question to ask. But my grandmother was very important to me and the way she thought of me was important. We’d sort of been in partnership at Maison le Guessly and I expected her to trust me.

  “I have to go, Muzzie, that’s all. Do I have your permission?”

  She nodded, “I know, darling, it happens to all of us.”

  “Muzzie, it’s not how you think it is!” I insisted.

  Muzzie suddenly looked sad and wistful. “I should never have married Daddy,” she whispered. Then she looked at me and smiled and I knew she loved me very much. “Be nice to him, darling.” She hesitated a fraction. “But be careful. Use those things you can get from the chemist.”

  I went into my room to take a few things I loved with me, mostly books and pictures. My mum was waiting for me. “You take nothing! Nothing! You hear? It all belongs to me. It’s only yours if you live here!”

  “Why?” I asked. I was suddenly terribly upset.

  “I gave you these things when you were my daughter. Now you are no longer my daughter, so they don’t belong to you any more!”

  I arrived at our new house in Woollahra with two white plastic shopping bags which contained my street clothes. Even the grey taffeta Elizabethan dress was forbidden because Muzzie had paid for it. My mother claimed it belonged to the house, to the family, to the daughter I no longer was. Books I’d loved all my life, my very best friends, had to stay behind in shitty old Maison le Guessly with no one to love them.

  But none of this mattered as I opened the rickety gate in the one-metre-wide front yard of the tiny cottage. The front wall had developed a large crack which zigzagged from the dormer window to the ground just missing the front door. The crack traced its way through a passionfruit vine which seemed to be collaborating with a pink climbing rose to prevent it from separating any further and so causing the wall to collapse altogether.

  It was the nicest house in the entire world and inside it was Damon, determined to work his way systematically through ten thousand classical records and wondering how he was going to fit them all into six months.

  “Hi,” I said coming in and putting my two plastic shopping bags down on the worn carpet. Damon looked at the bags and then up at me. “One day I’ll buy you a house and everything in the whole world you could possibly want, even your own Dino Ferrari!”

  “I don’t want a Ferrari, I just wa
nt you!” I hugged him and started to sob, the effects of leaving Maison le Guessly suddenly overpowering me. Damon held me tightly and shushed my tears until I was okay again and I drew away from him. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m not really the crying type.” He’d shaved his beard and he was the handsomest thing you could possibly want. I put my arms around him again and kissed him, drinking him in and loving him terribly and wanting to cry and laugh and never die.

  “Listen to this,” he said, pushing me gently from him. “It’s Brahms’ Violin Concerto, my dad’s favourite, mine too, I think.’

  One record down, nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine to go. The opening strains of the violin concerto mixed with the sunshine, the bright clean air, the solitude and private niceness of being in love. Wow! Talk about immaculate conceptions, this was one all right!

  Twelve

  Celeste

  Madam Butterfly Needle starring in The Love Transfusion.

  I know this is going to sound silly but the very first magical thing that happened between Damon and me happened with our hands. The hand holding in the car started to get more and more sensual. We both had this great feeling within our hands. We’d hold hands and it was a very serious thing. I know it sounds dumb and naive and even silly after what I’ve told you I knew about life and things, but Damon and I were aware of making love while we were holding hands; it was safe but it was also not safe and it all happened with our hands. I mean, believe it or not, it was several weeks before we actually kissed and there wasn’t any other touching or anything.

  I suppose people will think that we were just a couple of innocent kids, but that wasn’t true. Damon wasn’t shy and he certainly didn’t have any terror of girls and there were hardly any surprises for me; I’d seen it all second-hand, almost since I’d been a child. Sex held no unknowns for me and I didn’t get the feeling Damon was, you know, panting to conquer me.