PENGUIN BOOKS APRIL FOOL’S DAY Bryce Courtenay is the bestselling author of The Power of One, Tandia, April Fool’s Day, The Potato Factory, Tommo & Hawk, Jessica, Solomon’s Song, A Recipe for Dreaming, The Family Frying Pan, The Night Country, Smoky Joe’s Cafe, Four Fires, Matthew Flinders’ Cat, Brother Fish, Whitethorn, Sylvia and The Persimmon Tree. The Power of One is also available in an edition for younger readers, and Jessica has been made into an award-winning television miniseries. Bryce Courtenay lives in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. Further information about the author can be found at www.brycecourtenay.com BOOKS BY BRYCE COURTENAY The Power of One Tandia April Fool’s Day A Recipe for Dreaming The Family Frying Pan The Night Country Jessica Smoky Joe’s Cafe Four Fires Matthew Flinders’ Cat Brother Fish Whitethorn Sylvia The Persimmon Tree THE AUSTRALIAN TRILOGY The Potato Factory Tommo & Hawk Solomon’s Song Also available in one volume, as The Australian Trilogy Bryce Courtenay APRIL FOOL’S DAY PENGUIN BOOKS This is Damon’s book and it is for Benita and Celeste, whom he loved with all his heart. To his love and gratitude I add my own. A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS As always with a book of this kind there are a great many people to thank who don’t get a mention between the pages. Damon, my son, was fortunate in that he had so many people throughout his life who cared about and loved him and who often played a quiet but wonderfully supportive role in making his life easier. To all those who loved and cared for him but who are not mentioned by name—thank you. Then there are people who helped to shape Damon’s life, some of whom are mentioned in this book, but others, as important, who are not. Tony and John Wallace for their love and help all his life and especially at the end; Shirley Ham who made his limbs work again when they’d stopped; Michael and Roberta Wilson; the voluntary CSN workers; the Bobby Goldsmith Foundation; the nurses from the Waverley Community Health Centre; the doctors, nurses and staff of the Marks Pavilion, Prince Henry Hospital; Roger Tonkin; Bernie Carlisle and Wendy; Patricia Cook; Nola and the late Mark Bishop; Sally and Peter Kalina; the late Pixie and Bruce Harris; Lana and Lucy. Many other people gave generously of their time, knowledge or facilities to help me with the task of writing: Alan Barry; Lorraine facilities to help me with the task of writing: Alan Barry; Lorraine Cibilic; Owen Denmeade; Steven Fearnley; Ethna Gallacher; Alex Hamill; Barbara Volk; Dr John Vivian Wells; Carol Shorter for her help to Celeste; George Patterson, my agency, who were always generous in allowing me time and facilities when I needed them. Four more names remain: Jill Hickson, my literary agent in Australia; Mic Cheetham, my agent in London; Laura Longrigg in London, who did the early editing; and Louise Adler, Publishing Director of William Heinemann Australia, who brought considerable skill, patience and tenacity to bear as the major editor responsible for thinning and shaping a book which sometimes threatened to overwhelm me and in which I was often too closely involved to see its substance with clarity and calm. I thank you all for your generosity of mind and spirit. All at once the warmth fell away and the life passed into the moving air. Virgil, Aeneid IV WHITETHORN From Bryce Courtenay comes Whitethorn a new novel of Africa. The time is 1939: White South Africa is a deeply divided nation with many of the Afrikaner people fanatically opposed to the English. The world is on the brink of war with South Africa electing to fight for the Allied cause against Germany. Six year old Tom Fitzsaxby finds himself in The Boys Farm, an orphanage in a small remote town in the high mountains, where the Afrikaners side fanatically with Hitler’s Germany. Tom’s English name alone proves sufficient for him to be racially ostracised. And so begins some of life’s tougher lessons for the small, lonely boy. Like the whitethorn, one of Africa’s most enduring plants, Tom learns how to survive in the harsh climate of racial hatred. Then a terrible event sets him on a journey to ensure that justice is done. On the way, his most unexpected discovery is love. PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 2005 BOOK ONE Damon Courtenay is Not to be Touched, Not Ever. One Death on a Saffron Morning. D amon died in the third week after Pinatubo, a small, unknown volcano in the Philippines, started to belch smoke and spew ash, pushing smoke higher and higher into the stratosphere where the great up-draughts and crosswinds that swirl above the earth swept it to a height of twenty-two thousand feet and spread it like a blanket across the blue Pacific Ocean. An hour before dawn each day the sunset on the light side of the earth reflected its glow against this great smokescreen and bounced it into the dark sleeping side to create a false dawn. The first of these false dawns occurred in Sydney on April the first 1991, the morning Damon died. An April Fool’s dawn on April Fool’s Day. We all thought Damon would die sometime over the Easter long weekend, though God knows, he’d beaten the odds often enough before. The mighty Damon, just when you thought he was a goner, he would make it round the final corner on wobbly legs and totter down the home straight to be back with us again. But each time it was harder and each time he was weaker, a little bit of his old self left behind. His brothers Brett and Adam were there with Celeste and Ann. Also Benita, his mother, with her anger at a son passing before his father, her Benita, his mother, with her anger at a son passing before his father, her love and the private, unreasonable guilt she’d carried for twenty-four years. We were Damon’s family, Benita, Bryce, Brett, Adam, Celeste and Ann. Celeste had been Damon’s lover and had lived with him for the past six years. She had been his constant and devoted nurse. She dressed his bedsores, swabbed the thick yellow crusted thrush from his lips and the inside of his mouth and pus from his conjunctive eyes. She washed him and cleaned up when he was incontinent and dressed his shingles. She had administered his morphine and the complex two-hourly cocktail of pills that kept his frail heart pumping and his mind more or less focused. It was Celeste, more than any of us, who had watched his body slowly deteriorate, his ribs growing sharply more pronounced under his taut translucent skin and his limbs becoming so thin and dry that it seemed as though they might snap when he was lifted into bed. Damon, whose body had never been his strong point, now looked like a walking corpse, a Jew in one of those flickering black and white newsreel pictures taken by the Allies when they liberated the concentration camps. Funny how those pictures were somehow meant to be in black and white, because the first thing you notice about approaching death is its lack of colour. Colour is an obscene pigment in the dying process. Before death came to Damon, he appeared to fade, to be losing his colour. Damon’s eyes were now smudged large, and set deep in his skull. There seemed to be no clear, clean hazel left to nourish them with life, they’d changed to a mottled brown, the colour of grape vinegar. Often, as he drank liquid morphine straight from the bottle, they would glaze over and lose focus, as though he’d pulled a shroud over them so he