April Fool's Day

by Bryce Courtenay

  Damon took to carrying one of those loud beepers old ladies are encouraged to carry in their handbags, which set off a terrible racket if you’re suddenly attacked. The brand name of this pocket alarm was Gemini. He held it up to me one morning, looking directly into my eyes, “See, Dad, it’s the same name as the space probe, Gemini. My people have got a satellite that protects me. This is my warning system when I’m in danger.” He looked over his shoulder momentarily then back at me, “I just activate it and they take care of things.”

  He refused also to remove Uncle Robert’s bracelet even when he bathed. It may seem like a contradiction that even though he felt empowered, the general of a vast army, he was also scared and constantly felt that he was going to be personally attacked before he could do what he’d been created to do. Brent Waters explains that this kind of contradiction is not unusual. Damon also claimed that he was waiting to be told to whom he must take his AIDS cure. That he could trust no one, not even his best friends; the hospital system was also corrupt and was in the pay of the CIA, though some people within it were to be trusted. He must wait to be told who these people were. The bracelet would tell him and the buzzer was his protection; in his own mind, both were his only protection.

  As Christmas approached, Damon became more paranoid and, with it, secretive. We were terribly worried; Brent had left for Canada after calling to say he’d given Damon’s case notes to a colleague, a psychiatrist whom he’d briefed. He was confident the man could be trusted to handle Damon competently. However, we didn’t know this psychiatrist. I suppose we should have met him, but we hadn’t, so we were reluctant to call on him, unless it became a real emergency and Damon looked as though he could do himself or someone else a real harm. Again, Celeste bore most of the brunt and tells the events that followed best.

  “About a week before Christmas, the worst of all the things that happened before Christmas, happened – the worst because it was really saddening. Damon was up all night again. I’d wake up every now and again and have a look to see what he was doing and he’d be on the Apple. On one occasion, I woke to hear him talking very loudly on the telephone. It would have been three in the morning.

  “I got up and walked down the passage into the front room, ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  “’I’m trying to phone the police,’ he said loudly. He was very angry and kept slamming the receiver back down into its cradle, cursing it and everything else. It was this slamming and cursing which had wakened me.

  “He turned around and said, ‘I have to go to the hospital! I just have to go to the hospital!’

  “’Why, have you got a bad bleed?’ I asked. The Mazda was away being repaired, which was very lucky. Damon was in no state to drive.

  “’No! I have to cure the people there. It’s time, I have to go. Now!’

  “By this time I was pretty used to his phone calls at all hours of the night. After trying to persuade him to come to bed I eventually gave up. He was dressed in shorts and T-shirt and was barefoot and I knew he was too afraid to leave the house on his own, especially at night. That was when they would get him. I think I might even have reminded him of this, using his fear. I didn’t care, I was too tired, I would have used anything I could.”

  I nodded at Celeste; we’d been at the receiving end of several of Damon’s three a.m. phone calls and we’d learned going down to see him was pointless, there was nothing you could do for him.

  “Anyway,” Celeste continued, “I went back to bed and he must have called a cab. I didn’t wake up for this, but I learned later that he’d persuaded the cab to take him to the automatic teller at Bondi to get money out so that he could get to the hospital. Why, when he was dressed like that, the cab agreed, I don’t know. Though I suppose cabs are used to picking up some pretty strange people. The automatic teller wouldn’t respond to his cash card because our bank account had nothing in it. He’d cleaned it out long ago and I hadn’t put any back in, because of what Brent had said to you and, also, we had to have some money!

  “The cab driver swore at him and drove off and Damon had to walk home in the early hours from the beach front, which must have been really scary for him. After that was when the really sad business started.

  “Damon came back home and went to the Apple Mac and printed himself a set of cards stating that he was a doctor. These he scattered around the house for anyone to see. Then he got dressed in his best suit and put on a pair of Ray-Ban reflectors. It was weird, wearing those Ray-Ban reflectors in the middle of the night, like one of the Blues Brothers. He’d found a small basket in the kitchen and he started to collect things he was going to take to the hospital. This was his medical kit and in it was shampoo, my tampons, Panadol…all manner of very strange things, tubes, syringes…you know, just things! He was pacing up and down carrying the basket over his arm when I woke up and came out.

  “I was astonished; he’d never looked as though he was going to leave the house before. That was why I’d felt safe enough to go back to bed. He was always too frightened. Of course, I hadn’t realised that he’d already been out in the cab and walked back home from the beach. He seemed to be deep in thought, pacing the hallway. ‘Damon, why are you all dressed up?’ I was suddenly very wide awake.

  “He didn’t look up. I doubt if he could have seen me with his Ray-Bans on. ‘Hello, babe,’ he said almost absently. Then suddenly he exclaimed, ‘That’s it! The fish food!’ He hurried over to the bottom of the sink where we keep the fish food. I don’t suppose he could have seen anything inside because of his stupid glasses. ‘Where’s the fish food?’ he shouted urgently. I walked over and took the packet of fish food from the shelf in front of him and handed it to him.

  “’Jesus! Thank Christ!’ he said, clutching the fish food to his chest (we still had the fish from the flat), and then he put this packet of fish food into the basket and started to pace up and down again. Finally, he decided he didn’t need the basket, he just took the fish food out and put it into his jacket pocket. That was what he was going to use to cure the people.

  “He said to me at the time, sounding perfectly rational, that it wasn’t the fish food that was going to cure the people with AIDS, the fish food was just because people needed to think that they were having something. He said it was the placebo; he’d give them a bit of fish food and that would make them feel better, but that the cure was in his hands.

  “He was totally convinced that if he could get to the hospital he could cure people. He didn’t ask me for help or money. I think he knew I wouldn’t give it to him or go with him. He called the ambulance and explained to them that he was a doctor and had to get to the hospital. But they just thought ‘This guy’s a loony’ and hung up on him. The police were the same; they wouldn’t have anything to do with him. After this, he was raging mad, running around the house in his Ray-Bans, falling over things and he really looked mad. I didn’t know what to do, I was truly frightened; it was the first time he’d really looked as though he was insane. Then suddenly, he stopped and sat down and began to cry. ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong with me?’ he wept. I took him, I remember it was just getting light, and led him to our bedroom and put him to bed and he fell asleep still weeping.

  “That was the worst, the worst night, that was the saddest moment of all, because I realised Damon, the Damon I loved so terribly much, wasn’t going to get better unless he had treatment. I was losing him. I crept into bed beside him and took him in my arms and then I cried, too, until I must have fallen asleep.”

  Celeste was in a state of total exhaustion. She was hardly sleeping at night, as Damon required constant attention. I tried to persuade him to let me bring a nurse into the house. Tim Rigg had left CSN because his own health was now too frail to cope. Damon had made him an honorary general in his army. I called a private nursing place and they told me they could supply a trained psychiatric male nurse for eight hundred dollars per twenty-four hour shift. I would happily have paid, but Damon clearly couldn’t have
coped. “That’s just what they’re waiting for. Who do you think the nurse would be?” Damon shouted at me when I brought it up again.

  “Who?” I asked, annoyed, tired of arguing, tired of pretending he was all right.

  “Dad, you know!’

  “No! I don’t! Damon, you tell me.”

  “Them! The CIA!”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  Tears welled in his eyes, “Dad, you don’t understand.

  They’re looking for me, they want to eliminate me.”

  Celeste didn’t allow me to persist. There wasn’t the slightest doubt that Damon believed the CIA was out to get him.

  We did manage to get Dr Phil Jones, his doctor at Prince Henry, to prescribe a strong sedative to make him sleep at night. Phil Jones is a sensitive and capable doctor, whom Damon liked and who understood the situation. Celeste put it into his drink and for a few nights he slept and she was able to get some rest. But even this had an unfortunate outcome. It was an abnormally wet December and we discovered, to our dismay, that the cottage had been built on a sandstone quarry and that the basement filled with water after sustained rain. One morning several days before Christmas, Celeste woke to find it had risen above the floorboards. She called a plumber who placed an underwater pump in the basement with an ordinary garden hose pushed through a window to pump the water into the street. There were several thousands of gallons of water in the cellar and, as the weather forecast promised rain until beyond Christmas, it was decided to run the pump day and night for several days in an attempt to empty the underground supply. However, the pump was not allowed to be run at night. Damon insisted on the windows being locked at nightfall. As most of the rain seemed to fall at night, Celeste would wait until the sedative had taken effect and he was asleep, when she’d sneak out to the front room and switch the pump on again, opening the window and pushing the hose through it. A flooded Christmas was more than she could have coped with.

  On the second night of Damon’s sedation and one when it was raining, Celeste woke to find the figure of a man bending over her. In her half-wakened state she throught it was Damon going about his usual nocturnal manner, but then she realised that he was asleep, breathing fitfully beside her. Celeste screamed and the man fled through the house and Damon somehow woke, though still in a drugged state from the sedative. Celeste sat on the bed hugging her knees, terrified and hysterical. Damon, unaware that he was on sleeping pills, thought that he’d been deliberately drugged and that the intruder was a CIA agent who’d come to kill him. He clung to Celeste and she to him, neither quite sure who was protecting whom.

  It was probably this more than anything else that brought the two of them to their senses. It was not long before dawn when the incident had occurred and with more light Celeste calmed down sufficiently to call the police. By the time the police arrived it was quite light and most of Damon’s sedation had worn off, though Celeste made him promise that he’d let her do all the talking. But of course, this didn’t happen, and after a few minutes, the two police constables were glancing meaningfully at each other. They took the details, such as they were; ignoring Damon, they asked Celeste to establish what had been stolen. This turned out to be nothing. The man must have been a drug addict looking for money or drugs and that’s why he’d come into the bedroom. There was no bathroom cabinet and Celeste, fearing Damon would find the sedatives the hospital had given her for him, had hidden them behind a detergent pack in the outside laundry. To the intruder, the bedroom would have seemed the most likely place to look for either money or pills.

  They were stony-broke as usual and while there were heaps of drugs in the house, kept in a box under the kitchen sink, they were not of the kind an addict would instantly recognise as useful. They had no video recorder to steal, the record-player was being repaired and the TV, an old one given to them by us, would have been too cumbersome for one man to move. The window the man had come through was, of course, the one left open for the hose but, as the hose was still stuck through it pumping water, to the police officers present it was hardly convincing evidence of a “break and entry". They left, no doubt deciding that clearly Damon was a case (one look at him said it all, he looked like an addict himself) and the girl was clearly the hysterical type. As far as they were concerned, it was an open and shut nut case.

  Later, after the police had gone, they discovered where the man had calmly sat in the lounge room smoking a cigarette. He’d also found the box of Damon’s bleed stuff under the kitchen sink. And there was another containing Damon’s medications which Celeste, knowing they contained no drugs of addiction, hadn’t thought to mention to the police. He’d taken the box containing the bleed stuff into the lounge room and had gone through it, afterwards pushing the contents into a corner of the old settee and casually covering them with a couple of cushions.

  Celeste knew it would be pointless recalling the police; they wouldn’t believe her anyway, so she used this evidence to try to convince Damon that it was an addict looking for money or drugs and not the CIA.

  But Damon, seeing the swabs, a couple of butterfly needles and syringes and other gear used for bleeds in the corner of the settee, cleverly countered by saying that CIA agents weren’t stupid and that scattering the contents of his bleed box was simply a cautionary plan.

  If the agent had been caught he would have admitted to being a drug addict and used his drug dependency as his reason for breaking in. The whereabouts of the box of Damon’s medication would then seem to be clear evidence of his addiction.

  “See!” Damon pointed to the various scattered items revealed under the cushions, “He took almost all the syringes and needles! That’s very clever. If they’d caught him, they wouldn’t find any drugs on him just the syringes and needles which we couldn’t positively prove belonged to us anyway. He’d be clean and with a perfect alibi. The police don’t give drug addicts a hard time unless they find them with drugs in their possession.”

  It was true, the thief had taken all but half a dozen of Damon’s syringes and packets of butterfly needles as well as the tourniquet he used for his transfusions.

  The intrusion occurred three days before Christmas and the fact that the intruder had not taken any of the Christmas presents Celeste had made and lovingly wrapped and placed in front of the fireplace was further proof to her that a drug addict was involved; and just as convincing to Damon that the CIA wanted it to look this way.

  The three days leading up to Christmas were very difficult – Damon’s mania became a lot worse, he locked all the doors and windows, despite the December heat and the tremendous humidity from the recent rains, and he spent most of the time patrolling the house with his beeper in his hand. Celeste was made to sit by the phone so that when the beeper went off she could quickly phone the police. Though Damon wasn’t completely sure that they, too, weren’t a part of the conspiracy.

  Brett was home from Malaysia for Christmas, but Adam had left for England in late October, so the family wasn’t complete for the first Christmas ever. We cooked a large leg of lamb and a sirloin of beef for Brett, Celeste and myself as well as a small turkey to last over the holidays and because Benita doesn’t eat red meat. Christmas has always been a cold meal for us and this would be the first when Brett and Adam wouldn’t squabble over who was to get the lamb bone to chew. Benita also ordered a superb salmon mousse from David Jones’s food department. Damon loved smoked salmon and the mousse was soft enough for him to swallow in relative comfort.

  Damon tried hard to be relaxed and seemed to enjoy it when we played “Biggest Memories” where everyone tells of his or her biggest childhood or family memory. Celeste added some new material with her biggest memory, which was the story of the sudden explosion, in busy traffic, and subsequent demise of Daddy’s precious 1956 Peugeot, an event which resulted in the family never again going out together as one unit. It was very funny, while at the same time a rather sad story, much like Celeste’s life.

  Damon, with his fa
mily around him, felt reasonably safe and, though he was very quiet, seemed to be enjoying himself. Brett amused us all and I can remember Damon cracking up at a story Brett told of one of his exploits in Malaysia. He was laughing, as we all were, when he started to cough and, a little later, to shake violently, unable to control his coughing. We thought he might have another fit, then he went scarlet and seemed to be fighting for breath, as Celeste rushed to take him in her arms, urging him to try to throw up as he was beginning to heave. But quite suddenly he was okay again. “That was very funny, Brett,” he said, gasping for breath and wiping his mouth with a napkin. But we’d all been shocked. His frail little body had looked as though it might collapse entirely from the coughing and violent shaking and I think we knew that it wasn’t only his head that was wonky, but also how very physically vulnerable and ill our darling Damon really was.

  Damon and I were seated at the far end of the room, slightly away from the others, and Celeste was lying on the carpet fast asleep. It was a not unusual Christmas Day, very humid, with late afternoon clouds gathering over the Harbour, so that it looked like rain again that night. But for Damon’s sickness, it was an Australian Christmas afternoon like any other – too much of everything and the quiet that comes after the family hullabaloo at the table.

  “Dad, is there something wrong with me?” Damon suddenly asked, though quietly so that I alone could hear.

  “Why do you ask?” I said, my heart suddenly beating faster.

  “I think there is, but I’m not sure. Is it something wrong with my brain?”

  I put my arms around him. “Damon, you’ve been hearing things, acting rather strangely; your mother and I would like you to see a doctor.”

  I could feel him stiffen in my arms, “Dad, I’m well. I haven’t had a bad bleed for nearly a month. That’s an all time record!”

  “Damon,” I said gently, “this thing you have, funny things happen. I know you haven’t had any bad bleeds but we think something else may be wrong.”