April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  Damon nodded and they followed him to the car. Bob Glover opened the door and slid in behind the wheel leaving the door open. “Give her a bit of a pump and half an inch of choke,” he pointed to the choke, pulling it gently, then he turned the ignition key. But nothing happened. He pushed the choke back in and grinned disarmingly. “Wog cars, they’ve all got their own little ways.” He patted the dashboard. “Come on now, behave yourself.” He pulled the choke out again slowly, as though he was measuring an exact dose of petrol into the carburettor, then he pumped the accelerator and turned the ignition key. The 124 coughed, hesitated for a moment, then caught and roared into life.

  A slight smell of petrol perfumed the air. It was a heady mixture which brought Damon close to swooning. As he squeezed Celeste’s hand he was instantly and profoundly in love. It wasn’t a Ferrari but it was exactly the antecedent they were looking for. For six thousand dollars it was a truly remarkable buy. Only one small problem remained – between them they had sixty-two dollars and next week’s pay coming in two days.

  Bob Glover agreed to take fifty bucks as a holding deposit and, after a little hesitation, agreed that they could pay him a thousand dollars by the weekend, at which time they could take the car and he’d give them five months to pay off the remainder.

  Damon presented the merits of the car carefully to me. He explained that a fully imported Fiat of this marque was a very rare find and one in this sort of condition practically impossible to obtain. He claimed that just from the sound of the engine it was obvious it had been lovingly owned and never stressed. I wasn’t inclined to take this piece of lyrical description too seriously; it was Friday night and he needed the one thousand dollars to secure the car by nine o’clock the next morning. He was putting on the pressure.

  “Damon, you know nothing about cars, I mean engines. Before you pay this guy, you must have it inspected by the NRMA. It could look great and be a heap of crap. Some people put bananas in the diff to make a problem car run smoothly.” Like every male who’s ever lived, I’d heard this piece of conventional wisdom and lost no time passing it on.

  Damon’s face clouded. “Dad, it isn’t a bomb! It’s in terrific shape. If I ask him for an NRMA inspection he’ll sell it to someone else.” His expression was pleading. “A car like that isn’t hard to sell. He said he’d keep it only until tomorrow morning!”

  “I don’t know, Damon, you’re buying it from some bloke in a backyard. You know nothing about him or the car’s history and he’s pressuring you.

  “Dad! You’re wrong. This guy, Bob, he works with disabled people, he’s a really nice guy who has an MG he wants to fix; he doesn’t make a lot of money and he needs the money to fix the MG. Dad, you can come out and see the car for yourself; it’s got fat tyres, even you know they don’t put fat tyres on a crap car!”

  I looked at Damon steadily. “Come on, be sensible. Tell him you want an NRMA assessment. You’ll have it by Monday or Tuesday and if the car’s okay I’ll go to the bank and get him cash.” I smiled to encourage him. Damon burst into tears. “Dad, I want it. I want it more than anything! I know everything will be okay, I just know!” He sniffed, “I’ll pay you back, Dad…It’s…it’s only a loan.”

  Damon was a bit spoilt, but he didn’t bawl easily. In fact it was out of character that he would allow himself to be reduced to tears over anything. Ashamed, he crossed the room with his face averted and walked quickly into the garden.

  Benita, who must have been listening, walked slowly in from the kitchen. “He said he’ll pay you back. ‘It’s only a loan. If he makes a mistake that’s his problem.”

  I snapped at Benita, “Ha! He pays back the way you pay back. Never!”

  Benita pulled back, her lip curling. “Hey! Don’t pick on me because you’re feeling like a bastard!”

  I sighed, trying not to sound angry, “Ferchrissake! I want to make sure the bloody car he buys is safe!”

  “He’s not stupid, he wouldn’t buy an unsafe car!”

  “Oh, yeah? He knows bugger-all about cars!”

  “He wants that car. If he loses it because you want him to get a thing from the NRMA he’ll never forgive you.”

  “Fuck it, Benita! When are we going to stop indulging the child?”

  Benita looked at me, her face scornful. “I don’t believe I heard that. Indulged! Jesus, what do you mean indulged?”

  “I’m going crazy,” I said, shaking my head, but I knew I’d lost. When it came to the crunch I was piss-weak.

  The car, of course, was a disaster. Celeste is fond of talking about it as the single most stupid thing she and Damon ever did together. “It was unbelievable. That car broke down so many times it was dangerously traumatic! But the first fifteen minutes of owning it was marvellous. Suddenly, we owned a beautiful, new, second-hand car. Leaving Bob Glover’s place the car was purring like a kitten and when Damon reached a longish straight bit on the road home he pushed down the accelerator and it roared like some angry beast. It was one of the happiest moments of my life. Damon behind the wheel of his own pedigree Italian Fiat 124 and me beside him. It was wonderful, just, well…wonderful!

  “We drove home and parked in the lane behind the house and I ran in to fetch Bardy. When we returned Damon was still sitting behind the wheel with this grin on his face, he was as happy as I’d ever seen him. The sun was shining and you could hardly see the patches where the paint had faded on the bonnet, it was just a great, great-looking car.

  “’Jeez Damon, it’s great!’ Bardy said, stopping a few paces away and placing his head on his shoulder so that he could sort of squint to take it all in at once. I laughed, happy to be a part of the moment. ‘Get in,’ Damon said, sort of matter-of-factly, frowning slightly so it wouldn’t show how proud he was. I clicked the bucket seat on my side and climbed into the back seat leaving the front seat for Bardy. Damon turned on the ignition and nothing happened.

  “’Wog cars, they’ve all got their own temperament,’ Damon said, then he patted the dashboard, ‘Come on now, behave yourself.’Hepulled the choke out about half an inch and pumped the petrol a couple of times, then switched on the ignition. Nothing happened. We’d had the car fifteen minutes and it had broken down already.

  “There was a moment of terrible silence. ‘It’s the battery, the battery’s flat,’ Bardy said quickly, filling the awful void. ‘My mum’s car does that a lot.’

  “We all climbed out and opened the bonnet and examined where the battery was. There was a lot of white stuff, like white powder, around the two terminals and the battery looked as though it had been in a long time. ‘There, you see, it’s the battery,’ Bardy said convincingly, dabbing at the white stuff with a finger and holding it up for us to see.

  “There was a place where they fixed cars further down the lane, not a proper garage, just a large tin shed where blokes in overalls worked on cars. ‘I’ll see if I can get one of those guys from the garage to help,’ I said quickly. I wasn’t game to look at Damon’s bewildered face, so I began to run down the lane instead.

  “It turned out to be the battery all right. The guy from the garage brought this little meter along with him and he placed it on the two terminals.

  “’It’s rooted, your battery’s rooted. Not just flat, there’s bugger-all life left in it.’ He turned the meter box towards us and pressed the button. The needle in the window didn’t move, even a fraction of a centimetre. ‘See, bugger-all.’ He looked at Damon, ‘Youse gunna have to get a new one, mate.’

  “’Can’t you just charge it so it lasts a few days longer?’ Damon asked.

  “’It’s history, mate. It won’t take a charge.’ He looked into the engine, touching a few wires, tugging at bits and running his forefinger along the engine block until it was covered in oil, then he brought his finger to his nose and smelled it. He said nothing, just grunted, and then he tugged at the radiator hose which came away in his hand. He pushed it back on and tightened the loose bolt on the metal collar around the hose with
his fingers. Finally, he took his head out of the engine and rubbed the top of his greasy hand under his nose. ‘Where’d yer get this heap of I-talian shit?’ he asked.”

  * * *

  Roger the Lodger and the early morning traffic was a combination which was proving too much for Damon. With a little more money at their disposal, they decided to leave the house at Pyrmont and move to a small newly renovated terrace house in Talfourd Street, Glebe, which they could share with two university friends. Glebe was the suburb in which they’d purchased the Fiat 124 and was even closer to university for Celeste, who could now walk to lectures in ten minutes.

  The house was smaller than the one they’d vacated but it was somewhat better designed. Damon had been bringing stuff from home for some months and Saman-tha Lau and Andrew Sully, their new house mates, also had some stuff they’d scavenged from their homes, so they were able to furnish the new place quite nicely. Samantha, known as Sam, and Andrew were pretty easygoing people and more or less allowed Celeste to be the boss. Celeste admits that she was pretty fierce about tidiness. “A bit of a pain, really.” She’d promised herself that she’d never be reminded of the mess in Maison le Guessly. They were soon organised into an efficient and comfortable household. The chaos of most student digs was nowhere apparent. Celeste was making up for her childhood with a vengeance.

  Almost immediately they’d moved in poverty struck again. They were rapidly falling behind in their payments for the car. They’d let the phone go, mostly because they couldn’t afford it and because there was a public phone minutes away on the corner, but also because Bob Glover’s phone calls asking for his money were becoming too frequent and traumatic. Damon, in a bold move to get Bob Glover off his back, had been to see him to complain. Finally Glover admitted that the Fiat, like the people he looked after, was basically permanently disabled and that he’d never really been able to get it going properly himself. He agreed to drop the price by a thousand dollars, but only if they’d bring their payments up to date immediately.

  Damon returned home and told Celeste the news. They were two thousand dollars behind and Damon was still making tea, fetching cigarettes and sticky buns; his salary couldn’t possibly cover what they owed even if the car never broke down again.

  Damon decided he had no alternative but to sell his hi-fi gear, the joy of his life. He’d built it up over the years, matching each component for the ultimate in high fidelity. As sound gear it was a small masterpiece. They sold it for eighteen hundred dollars, about three thousand dollars less than had gone into it. Damon’s tapes and records fetched another two hundred and fifty dollars, all of which went to bring them up to date with the payments on the Fiat 124.

  The end came when, after the umpteenth repair and the usual assurances that their problems were finally over, they decided to take a trip to the Hunter Valley, a wine-growing area about a hundred and fifty kilometres from Sydney. Andrew Sully’s parents had invited them to spend the weekend at their small vineyard near Branxton. They left on a Friday night and, although the traffic heading away for the weekend was pretty hectic, for once the car didn’t overheat and they soon found themselves on the Newcastle Expressway purring along, happy as Larry. Then, about fifty kilometres out of town and for no apparent reason, they lost their headlights and had to pull over and sleep the night on the side of the expressway.

  At first light they set off again and made it to the Sullys’ small vineyard by breakfast. Later that day they decided to explore the district and to visit some of the bigger wineries. On the outskirts of a tiny hamlet, named Broke, the Fiat 124 hit a gigantic hole in the bitumen at some speed and responded by breaking down in a terrible clatter of metal parts, which appeared to be separating from each other as the car wobbled and bounced to a halt, hissing steam and smoke. The suspension collapsed and the chassis mysteriously separated from the bodywork. In this metallic shearing of parts, the conrod spat through the side of the engine and blasted the distributor off, the engine fell through its mounting and split the engine block, broke the radiator and caused all manner of internal combustion damage. It was the end of the road for the Fiat. The marque 124 CC, a genetically imperfect member of a great Italian family, had finally dropped dead. Adam, who sang and played guitar rather well, composed a song about the Fiat 124. I don’t recall all the lyrics, but one verse went:

  Damon, who was broke,

  had a car that was broke,

  in a place called Broke.

  On the Monday following the final demise of the Fiat 124, Damon lost his job without ever having made it beyond the status of tea-boy. He’d been having too many bleeds and too many days when he simply couldn’t make it into work. His severance and holiday pay came to eight hundred dollars, which covered the cost of towing the car back to Sydney, where he sold it for spare parts for another seven hundred dollars. I added the remaining thirteen hundred to make the final payment to Bob Glover, the true friend to the disabled.

  The first disastrous step to owning a Dino Ferrari was thankfully over.

  Damon had no car, no music, no job and no immediate prospects.

  He had also started to get night sweats.

  Eighteen

  Dripping and Steaming and the Return of the Prodigal Tom.

  The new house in Talfourd Street, though clean and neat, had been renovated using cheap gyprock internal walls; through them every sound travelled, almost as though they were made of Japanese rice paper. Sam and her boyfriend, Paul, who was also a great friend of Damon’s from his school days, were having a really sexy affair. They’d developed a ritual which caused their love making to be particularly noisy. They’d blow raspberries on each other’s bellies. It would begin with a great baritonal “Prrrrrrrrrrhph!” from Paul, followed after a bit of giggling by a much lighter soprano “Prrrrrrrph!” from Sam. This sequence would continue, growing louder and louder, the giggles growing to gales of laughter until the “Prrrrrrrrphs” became simultaneous and really urgent, this was a sure sign that the serious stuff was about to begin. “Oh, God, another night of raspberry love!” Damon would groan, pulling the blankets up over his head.

  Paul Green, Sam’s boyfriend, along with Bardy, Toby, Andrew and Christopher were Damon’s closest friends and had been so since prep school. Paul was at Sydney College of the Arts studying to be a photographer; Sam, who had just completed her nursing degree at university, had decided she wanted no more medical experience in her life and Andrew now attended Sydney University. Celeste, of course, was still doing her Bachelor of Science in Architecture. Already she was showing a great deal of talent working in ceramics and would later win the university art prize for her final-year work.

  So the little house was filled with laughter and lively discussion by a group of talented young people who all got on very well together. There was no Roger the Lodger among them, although Celeste admits to having been a bit of a pain insisting that the house be run along orderly lines and kept really clean. The period spent in Talfourd Street, Glebe, was a very happy time for Damon.

  Damon had reluctantly come to the realisation that working full time in the city was not going to be possible and he started to make new plans. He’d caught the computer bug while working for the money people and now decided to start on his own business at home as a desktop publisher. This meant he could work the hours that suited him, or rather those when he wasn’t laid up with a bleed.

  Gareth Powell, a famous journalist and travel writer who, at that time, produced several of the world’s airline magazines, is a friend of mine and an expert on desktop publishing. He generously agreed to help Damon to learn the business. I financed an Apple Mac and a LaserWriter which Celeste purchased at a special rate through the Students Co-op at Sydney University. These two machines, basically a word processor and a printer, were the essential hardware required. Gareth, though enormously busy, was always generous with his time and his mind. He helped Damon with software and instructed him in the initial expertise on the computer required for des
ktop publishing. He also allowed him to use his own considerable facilities when Damon’s somewhat limited operation wasn’t adequate for some over-ambitious task he’d undertaken with his usual aplomb.

  Damon proved to be a quick learner, a surprisingly accurate typist and apparently clever with computers. He was soon in business for himself turning out letterheads and pamphlets for local businesses, thesis papers for students, brochures and sales training manuals for small companies – in fact, just about anything his limited resources, or those borrowed late at night or on Sundays from Gareth Powell, enabled him to do.

  Quite soon he had a small income and with it, as always with Damon, came an inflated ambition. He would become a major publisher and build a stable of magazines and perhaps even publish books, starting with his own. He told me about Richard Branson, the British multi-millionaire, who’d started a magazine at school, at the age of seventeen, in which he’d offered for sale discount records which he’d persuaded a local record shop to supply. The record orders started to snowball and Branson started Virgin Records. By his mid-twenties, Virgin Records was one of the world’s big music producers. This was a story tailor-made for Damon’s imagination. He was in desktop publishing, but his first love was music; in his mind he could clearly see the way to greatness, a repeat performance of the Richard Branson story – but with one small variation. Damon wouldn’t be content to let his publishing empire simply pave the way to a musical one, his own book would be a brilliant novel based on his life and would be his very first serious venture into publishing. Naturally, it would be a best-seller and so become the launching pad for the rest of his mega-empire. As usual, Damon was away and running before he’d properly learned how to tie his publishing shoelaces.