Afternoons with Harvey Beam

by Cox, Carrie;

  ‘Look,’ Suze says. ‘I’m actually really happy that Cate’s feeling good about everything because I mean, well, that’s the point of it all, isn’t it? But what happens next, Harvey? What does she do after this? You can’t let her start thinking that this is her future, because it can’t be.’

  ‘Why can’t it be?’

  ‘What the fuck, Harvey? She’s not staying there.’

  ‘It’s not that bad, Suze.’

  ‘Well, I think your own judgement might be a little … compromised at present.’

  Beam says nothing and silently indicates to the waitress that he’d like another coffee. Same again thanks. Only it’s not a waitress. It’s a nurse. And this, Harvey, you dick, is a hospital kiosk, not the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton.

  ‘Suze, I don’t know what you want me to say about Cate. You’ve always known what’s best for the girls. And I don’t mean that sarcastically.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Harvey. And I do mean that sarcastically.’

  ‘How is Jayne?’ he asks.

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt to call her. She misses you.’

  ‘I know. I will.’

  ‘Kids don’t know you think about them if you don’t tell them.’

  ‘Yep, I know.’

  ‘But she’s good. And Harvey, she wants to come with me to the funeral.’

  ‘The funeral?’

  ‘I mean, when he goes. Sorry, Harvey. When your father passes. Dies. Shit.’

  Harvey lets the moment sit awkwardly. It feels somehow wrong, a little cosmically dangerous, to speak about funeral plans before the requisite death.

  There is a belated pause, rare dead air from Suze. ‘How is he, anyway? Is he …’

  ‘Alive? Yes. Just.’

  ‘Sorry. Fuck, you know I’m bad with death, Harvey. Sorry.’

  ‘And weddings.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And reunions.’

  Suze laughs.

  ‘And milestone birthdays.’ For as long as he’s known her, Suze has reacted badly to all the emotional extremities of orchestrated events, often before any extremities have been reached.

  ‘Just all the big things, really,’ she agrees. ‘But I am coming. To the funeral. Jayne and I will be coming to support you.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that, Suze,’ Harvey says, but finds a measure of comfort in the idea that she will.

  ‘But Harvey, I’ll need some notice so that I can get time off work and book tickets and get the dog minded and I might ask Cherie to stay in the house while we’re gone. So, yeah … keep me in the loop.’

  ‘I’ll definitely let you know when he dies.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And I’ll call Jayne.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘And you should try just turning your phone off and turning it on again.’

  ‘Wow, Harvey, I hadn’t thought of that. You should work in IT.’

  Beam laughs but it comes out wrong, an uncertain gargle. The mention of work has tripped a switch and he’s no longer comforted by the human chaos of the coffee shop and the hospital full of stories beyond it. It’s a feeling that’s been landing rudely upon him of late, unannounced and confused, as though time and place have been separated by a rupture deep below. Not for the first time he wonders if he might be depressed. A single thought removed from a fresh low point. Irrelevance.

  The Third Act: Misery.

  He ends the call with Suze and wanders out of the kiosk into the white-hot car park at the front of the hospital before remembering that he hadn’t just come here for coffee. There’d been a purpose to today.

  And though his legs seem entirely unconvinced, Beam turns around and walks back inside, down the stark angled corridors that will lead him to Lionel Beam.

  Bryan is not in the room when Harvey enters. But Grace is. She is bent over his father, adjusting a monitor attached to his chest. Lionel’s face, pinched and dry, seemingly collapsed under the weight of the room’s soupy oxygen, is turned away from everything but the window.

  Inexplicably, Harvey feels as though he has stood here before, in precisely this spot, looking at this scene. It is not foreign; it is entirely familiar. Every moment, a middle-aged rockstar had once told him, stoned and clutching the guest microphone in Beam’s studio as though conjuring an engorged penis. Every moment has been lived before. We just keep doing this shit over and over until we get it right.

  Grace smiles at Harvey, a beautiful smile that mocks the room’s ugliness. She says nothing but places a hand on Beam’s forearm as she walks around behind him and deposits Lionel’s chart back in its metal holder.

  ‘Is he … can he hear?’ Harvey asks her, barely whispering.

  Grace looks at Lionel. She sees everything Harvey sees. The grim finality of hospital linen. The end of someone’s turn at life. Everyone’s turn. Says, ‘It’s impossible to know, Harvey. Sometimes they are coming in and out, looking for voices, especially towards the end. But I honestly don’t know.’

  Harvey looks at her. He wants direction. Wants not to do the wrong thing. Not now.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Harvey,’ Grace says at last. ‘Just sit with him. That’s all that matters.’

  And Beam does. He sits.

  He looks at his father, so pale, so barely present. And he continues looking for a long time, sometimes at the old man’s empty face (Is this what I’ll look like on my deathbed? Jesus Christ) and sometimes out the window, at the river in the distance.

  He recognises an emotion from his early radio days—a prickly uncertainty. The pressure to say something meaningful to an audience that might be entirely imagined.

  Words form inside him, then pop like bubbles. In the end, after an hour or six of just sitting, of waiting for Bryan to slink in or Cyclone Naomi to bear down, anything to puncture the endless moment, Harvey says nothing at all.

  28

  ON AIR

  ‘Give up your secrets, Shorton. I need to know if there is a single place in this town where I can buy a decent coffee. You know the kind: not just drinkable but actually enjoyable. Hot but not too hot. Quality beans. Robust flavour. Milk that still has life in it. And maybe, if it’s not too much to ask, a little finesse about the presentation. At four-fifty a go, I don’t want a chipped cup with old lipstick stains on the rim. I want a pleasurable coffee moment—a gold-star start to my day.’

  Harvey can taste it now, smell it. The cinnamon aroma of his choice coffee shop in Surry Hills. Cups and glasses full of promise and relief moving between the tables like an endless game of draughts. Strangers in overlapping moments of suspended time, perched over their addiction. Wooden boxes stuffed with coffee beans, cranky baristas in headscarves, bouncy waiters in faux aprons and Birkenstocks. An urban hip-pocket of movement and existence funded by dressed-up caffeine.

  ‘Who’s with me, Shortonites? How much better would your day be with a decent coffee or two pushing it along? I want to hear from you this morning. Give me a call and let’s talk coffee. When did you have your last decent cup? Where was it? Was it in Shorton or were you on holidays somewhere? Because, folks, if there is good coffee in this town, I haven’t tasted it. Maybe I’m wrong. It’s happened before, although … audible smirk … rarely after a decent cup of coffee.’

  Beam fades up a track from Powderfinger (their halcyon days when Bernard Fanning was still pretending he wasn’t a grass-chewing bumpkin aching to sing about falling leaves and banging screen doors) and he waits for the phone to light up. And it doesn’t.

  He goes straight into Oasis’s ‘Wonderwall’ (naff, yes, but always guaranteed to inspire a round of mimed riffing among bored drivers) and he wanders out of the booth to check with the receptionist whether calls are getting through. The girl looks about twelve and suspiciously related to Hugh Traynor. She shrugs. No calls.

  And so he plays ‘MacArthur Park’ because surely someone will call in during seven minutes of cake being left out in the rain. And someone does, but it’s a taxi driver called
Craig who wants to talk about petrol prices rather than coffee and will not be moved from the topic despite Beam’s best segue manoeuvres.

  Coffee, he decides, might not be Shorton’s cup of tea on a humid Monday morning and he opts to throw the conversational net much wider, to the topic of customer service: how bad it is here, how entirely absent it is, and what might be done about it. He knows this will run because everyone loves to whinge about customer service.

  Beam leads the way with a set piece about his last dinner experience with Grace—a thirty-minute wait for an entrée that consisted of three dips and some crackers, a misplaced order at the next table, a steak seared to old-boot status, and an amusing recount (he chuckles when he tells it, though he was inwardly seething at the time) of the waitress talking on her phone for the entire time Harvey was paying the bill and attempting to give helpful feedback.

  The first caller is Carly, a restaurant owner who quite possibly recognises the crackers-and-dip menu item as her own for she is bitterly defensive about the pressures of finding young people who will work on weekends.

  ‘And what,’ she fires at Harvey, ‘would you know about running a small business in a town that is struggling? What would you know about the impact of penalty rates? About how I can grow several ulcers each weekend working out whether I can afford to roster on three staff instead of two when I probably need about five?’

  Beam is passive and quietly compassionate. Knows how to play this. Let the anger fully expend itself … lots of absolutelys and of course, of course … until the caller is sated. Happier for having shared.

  Tougher to placate is Jenny, who furiously berates him for laying the blame for average food at the feet of wait staff. And she has a point, Beam thinks, and says so, even if her frequent use of gunna and would ya and ya think ya top shit somewhat lower her high horse.

  Jenny’s tantrum ignites the phones. The young receptionist smacks on the glass and holds up nine fingers to Beam. Nine calls waiting, he interprets. Fantastic.

  But there is no to-and-fro among them, no alternating of vantage points, no I have to disagree with your previous caller, just a mounting attack on Harvey himself, a personal assault on the outsider who dares to complain.

  ‘You’re a dick, mate,’ says Jim. ‘Go back to your wanker friends in the city.’

  Karen: ‘There’s a reason we live here and it’s to avoid having to put up with people like you.’

  Mick: ‘We don’t sell poofter coffee here, mate, because there aren’t enough poofters around.’

  John: ‘Shut up and play another song.’

  Liam: ‘Cock.’

  God, the language in this fucking town. Harvey tries to wrest it back, makes a few humble comments about his own cooking. He recounts a (completely made-up) tale about the nicest cup of coffee he ever had: a simple International Roast served with a biscuit by a kind old lady at the blood bank. But today’s show is gone and Harvey knows it.

  Rob: ‘You were a dick at school and you’re a dick now. Go back to where you came from.’

  This is where I bloody came from.

  Finally, regrettably, Beam mistimes the seven-second delay that would have prevented Shorton hearing him declared a pillow-biting fucktard by a man called Leslie (strangely not ‘Les’), an error that brings Hugh Traynor flying to the window, eyebrows leaping for his hairline, arms all what the hell?

  Harvey looks at him and shrugs. Throws on Counting Crows and walks out of the station into a wall of heat that sears his eyeballs.

  29

  ‘Wow, I wish I’d been listening in,’ Grace says, perched with Harvey on a too-small love seat on the balcony of her unit. Nothing about this sparsely furnished rent scam has been designed well (Harvey regularly hits his head on the swinging light bulb in the toilet), except for its aspect, a masterful accident no doubt, that affords the balcony both an afternoon sea breeze and cooling shade.

  ‘I’m glad you weren’t,’ Harvey says, his arms resting across the pair of slender legs recently liberated from stockings and now draped artfully across his lap and against his paunch. He has got to stop eating.

  ‘But I mean, isn’t that good radio?’ Grace asks. ‘When there’s conflict and anger?’

  ‘Not when it’s all directed at the host,’ he says. ‘And the profanity could get Hugh fined.’

  ‘But you weren’t the one who swore.’

  ‘I inspired it.’

  ‘So,’ she says with a kind and slightly uncertain smile, ‘you’re an inspiration.’

  God, this woman.

  ‘Hardly, Grace. But thank you. No, I’m actually a dick, a cock and a poofter, not necessarily in that order.’

  She grins. ‘And a fucktard.’

  Harvey pretends to push her off the chair before pulling her close and kissing her hard.

  They watch the sun set blithely behind a motley group of mangroves. It takes its time tonight, somehow reluctant. Afterwards Grace fetches them both a cider from inside and a candle that smells like an old bookshop.

  Harvey wants to ask Grace about her day at work but knows she’ll end up talking about his father, or more likely lead with this, and it’s a topic he just can’t come at today. This morning he had orchestrated the sort of professional failure Lionel Beam had so often predicted for him, as though being back in his father’s orbit made defeat somehow inevitable. And this, he thinks, is the irony of what happened—that the audience thought Beam felt emboldened in Shorton, not as it happened, as it had always happened, utterly diminished and lost. Caught in an adolescent black hole.

  Tonight he makes love to Grace in the way that couples sometimes do—to disappear. Eyes shut tight, dismissive of time and space, he pours himself into the act, vanishes into sparks and flares and gaps in the air. Sandpaper tenderness. Sex that expels every breath and all the words between two people that in any other setting sound insane. Sex that exacts a deep and grateful sleep. He could be anywhere.

  In the morning, after not a single dream he can remember, Harvey wakes to Grace in her hospital uniform, hair damp from the shower, handing him his ringing phone.

  It’s Naomi and she speaks to Beam in a soft and measured tone that sounds nothing at all like her.

  ‘It was early this morning, Pencil,’ she says. ‘Maybe two thirty. The nurse checked on him and he had just, you know, stopped breathing.’

  Harvey looks at Grace and he can see that she knows what he’s hearing.

  ‘Was Bryan there?’ Harvey asks.

  ‘No, he was alone. Harvey, he’s gone.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  In his mind, Beam sees books. A ragged pile of books hit by a whirly wind and sending loose pages, thousands and thousands of them, flying into the sky.

  Finally, with Grace’s hand on his knee and his heart outside of himself, Beam says, ‘Are you okay, Naomi?’

  And Naomi says, ‘I’m okay, Pencil. I mean, sad, but, yeah. Are you okay?’

  Harvey thinks about this—Am I okay? What is this?—and waits to see what rises from his chest, what reaction comes of its own accord, without summons, without thinking too hard about it. He stares at the patch of carpet beneath his feet and it seems too far away, as though he is looking down from the ceiling, watching himself, curious to witness his own reaction. And there is none for now. Not yet, he thinks. Maybe later.

  ‘Harvey,’ says Grace, ‘I’m so sorry. Let me drive you to your sister’s house, or to your mum’s.’

  Beam shakes his head.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ Grace asks. ‘I’ll take you there.’

  And the options seem suddenly endless, he thinks, because Lionel Beam is no longer here.

  30

  The narrowest section of Shorton River flows quickly today, sluiced through two banks that seem destined to touch at some point in the future. Beam is not surprised to find himself here, standing on a small coarse shore, wrongly dressed for the occasion and minus a fishing rod. He needed to buy some time, wasn’t ready yet for the Beam fa
mily’s take on Death Of A Father, the intermingling of grief, real and imagined, the set pieces and positional play.

  Until he had a better sense of what his face might convey to sisters who’d be scanning it, and each other, with infra-red precision, Beam knew he needed to be alone and he’d asked Grace to drop him into town on her way to work. Within an hour, his feet had brought him here, to a familiar current and a blue that spilled into everything.

  Once on his show he’d trialled a weekly segment called Thrillosophy, an attempt to sex up philosophy by asking listeners to give their take on an ancient riddle or lofty ideological quote. It hadn’t really taken off, but one of the better chats prior to the show’s quiet disappearance had been sparked by that quote from Greek philosopher Heraclitus about a man not being able to step into a river twice because it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. Beam had loved this idea, that he might be continuously evolving, even without trying, that childhood wasn’t a mould that couldn’t be discarded, and that everything, all of it, keeps flowing and flowing and nothing stands still.

  Every mistake disappears, eventually.

  It had been this hope, if he’s honest with himself, that Harvey had carried back to Shorton on previous occasions: that things might somehow be different with his father. Different then, too, with his whole family because that one relationship had somehow skewed all the others, creating fracture lines and conversational no-go zones too confusing to plot on any map. He’d hoped that old misunderstandings, hurts, transgressions, whatever had led to all the wilful indifference between Harvey and Lionel Beam, all of it would have flowed beneath them by then. Different river, different men.

  But Shorton River feels the same today, same water washed back by ancient tides, and the feeling of relief Harvey had long imagined might accompany the death of his father has not yet presented itself. Even Lionel Beam’s face, so ravaged and beaten within the folds of the hospital sheets, had looked more like sameness than difference to Harvey. The eyes. Nothing had shifted and clearly nothing benign had flowed beneath them over the years, and so Harvey’s words had remained in his chest by his father’s bedside, suspended and possibly irrelevant.