by Carrie Cox
Beam follows her out to the parking lot where Naomi has commandeered a handicapped bay.
‘Don’t judge,’ she says before Harvey can mouth a word. ‘We’ve all got our special issues. Mine is parenting these buggers.’
These buggers are the three boys now arranged haphazardly in the back seat. Toby, Finn and Jamie. Beam has no idea what ages they’ve reached, but he mentally high-fives himself for the full name recall. Toby looks as though he might be in early high school, the kid’s furious acne instantly reminding Beam of his two most hellish years at Shorton High.
‘I’m sorry we forgot to tell you about Mum’s move,’ Naomi says, checking her mobile phone and reversing the car at the same time. Beam isn’t sure who she means by ‘we’. It could be Naomi and their mother, or Penny might be thrown in too, or even Bryan. It could be all of Shorton for all Beam understands about the current military deployment.
‘No worries,’ he says. ‘I just felt a bit stupid rocking up to someone else’s house. Lucky no-one opened the door.’
‘Yeah,’ says Naomi, nudging the car’s nose into a tiny traffic gap that inspires a flurry of wild arm thrashing in the rear-vision mirror. ‘Well, she had to move because of the stairs. She fell down those stairs one night and nearly died.’
Beam automatically adjusts ‘nearly died’ to ‘had an accident’. Naomi only ever speaks of full-scale drama.
‘The doctor said it was the worst case of concussion he’d ever seen and could have led to long-term brain damage,’ Naomi continues. ‘It was just lucky she landed on Boner. I just said, you’re out of there, Mum. Come and live with us. We’ve got a spare room. There’s no need to be all on her own at her age. That’s what trans-generational living is all about.’
Beam grips the door handle. Naomi drives as though manoeuvred by cosmic malevolent forces.
‘Trans-generational living,’ he says. ‘Is that a thing?’
‘Penny says it’s a huge overreaction,’ Naomi goes on.
Beam wonders when he’ll get a chance to turn around and say a proper hi to the kids.
‘She says I’ve made Mum feel far more old and vulnerable than she needs to, that I’ve just made a problem where there wasn’t one. But she nearly died, Pencil. I don’t think that’s something you can overreact to, do you?’
‘No, death is pretty serious,’ he says.
‘I think she’s just jealous that Mum is at our place now and not hers. I mean, I think that’s where she’s actually coming from. Whether or not she can admit that to herself, I don’t know.’
Harvey glances briefly at the empty cow paddocks flying past. What is Boner?
‘We’re not even speaking at the moment,’ Naomi says, now reaching for something in the glove box that opens with an abrupt thwack on Harvey’s knees. ‘At all. So it’s a bit awkward—sorry about that. But I’m not going to apologise, Pencil. I haven’t done anything wrong bar care about Mum. And you know Penny won’t apologise. As if. So you know … it just is what it is.’
At a red light that can’t present itself too soon, Beam turns around and smiles at the kids, who seem completely tuned out to this possibly familiar rant. Apart from Toby, who seems vaguely interested and angrily disinterested at the same time.
‘I can’t believe you’re still fighting over our mother,’ Beam says to his sister when the car again launches into the breach. He immediately regrets articulating the observation.
‘I’m not fighting over Mum!’ Naomi yells, turning the car viciously into her street.
Shit, too far.
‘It’s nothing like that at all. God, there is so much you don’t know, so many things you haven’t seen. Penny is such a bitch to me. She’s constantly talking about me behind my back. It’s taken me a long time to work this out, and I know you think I’m not very bright but I do get there in the end, but Pencil, Penny is a poison in my bloodstream. I heard that on a show the other day and I thought, that’s exactly it. That’s what my sister is to me. Poison. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, and I can’t fix it. I’m sick of trying, Pencil. It just …’
‘It is what it is,’ he says.
‘Exactly,’ Naomi says, visibly thrilled with Harvey’s conclusion. ‘This is what happens in families where there isn’t enough love to go around in the first place.’
Wow.
Harvey suddenly realises he should have bought Naomi’s kids a present. And Penny’s kids too. He is hopelessly un-prepared for this trip, in every sense.
‘Hi guys,’ he says to the three boys as Naomi pulls up on her front verge.
‘Hi Uncle Pencil,’ says Finn, giggling. Toby mutters something indecipherable and the three boys fall over each other getting out of the hot car.
Harvey opens his door to get out too but Naomi hurriedly explains that their mother will mind the boys now while she and Harvey go straight to the hospital.
‘He doesn’t have long,’ Naomi says. I just think it’s best you see him straight away and it’s so much easier without the kids. Last visit Jamie punctured a lady’s IV bag with a Transformer. Hey, where are your bags?’
Harvey looks around as though his luggage had been here a minute ago, then he remembers.
‘Might be on the next flight or lost somewhere out the back,’ he says. ‘They’re going to send it to Mum’s. Shit. I gave them the Upton Street address.’
‘Oh well, just ring and give them mine.’
‘Or should I stay at Penny’s?’ Harvey says, thinking only now that this might be the better option. ‘Seeing as you’ve got a full house now?’
Naomi flicks on the radio. Shorton Radio. His first job in the industry.
‘Do what you like,’ she says.
Oops.
It’s a more subdued drive to the hospital and Beam can see his sister is now deep in thought about something. He suddenly feels sorry for her because she’s never been able to relax; can’t sit still long enough to enjoy anything properly. Add three young boys to the mix and you’re talking enough constant cerebral activity to power the town’s grid.
He quietly checks his messages—nothing—and turns his eyes fixedly to the road ahead.
The emotional by-product of a career spent in radio is that Beam only tends to think about two shows at a time: the one he’s doing and the next one. His anxiety span is forcibly short and therefore manageable. So now he’s thinking about the next show.
Seeing Lionel Beam.
6
If true love is being understood by someone, really understood, then Harvey Beam is in love. Suze (short-for-nothing) Myer understands him in a way that’s almost unsettling, except it’s not. It’s wondrous.
This woman, this person altogether removed from anything he has ever known, peers into Beam’s soul on a daily basis, reminding him it’s there. She knows when he is disconnected and soon after knows why, and she knows when his heart is light because usually she’s the one who made it so. And yes he knows, but somehow doesn’t care, that this is the stuff that brings the world unstuck.
Within six months of going out together, Suze had insisted Harvey take her home to Shorton to meet his family.
‘I know who you are,’ she’d said to him with a sex-sated sigh one afternoon, ‘but I want to know why you are.’
And so they’d travelled back to his hometown, his radio star on the rise, his confidence soaring, and Beam had introduced Suze to all of his family members in various arrangements over the course of a week. She had dived into it all, his childhood, his siblings, his old haunts, picking up every last item to inspect underneath, looking far too hard for riddle endings and connections. She had observed the time-bomb rivalry between Penny and Naomi, the silent anger that inhabited Bryan, the different version of herself that his mother presented for each child. And despite Harvey’s best attempts to obscure any close examination of his father, Suze saw immediately that the answer to Harvey was here, in the space occupied by the tight-jawed man called Lionel Beam.
It was her mos
t triumphant observation and one he vehemently, angrily rejected. The woman was exhausting him. But Harvey had also been humbled by Suze’s interest in him, for the clear sincerity and comprehensiveness of her love. He knew he could never love like that; he didn’t know how it was done. How does anyone actually understand anyone?
When the trip was over, on the flight back to Sydney, Suze had looked at him earnestly and put a hand on his arm. She’d said: ‘He doesn’t have to define you.’
And Harvey had looked past her, out of the small window, and smiled at the clouds disappearing beneath them.
And now here they are, their first child in their tangled arms, a curious shiny pile of limbs whom Suze has named Cate. The King George V Memorial Hospital room is awash with flowers. This bed that’s not meant for two, let alone three, is the centre of Beam’s universe and he didn’t know, just had no idea, that all of this was part of the same world he’d been inhabiting.
‘She’s so beautiful,’ Beam says.
Suze says, ‘She’s us.’
Beam stares at this something that has changed everything and knows instinctively that he could do it forever. How could anyone not love their own child?
‘And so it begins,’ says Suze. ‘The most important thing.’
He looks at her. Pale, tired, beautiful. Says, ‘Being a parent?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘The family you create yourself.’
And Beam thinks, Yes. And also, with a rising sense of panic, Shit.
7
The Charles Addison Private Hospital, named after one of Shorton’s first measurably rich people, is a small collection of buildings abutting the river and offering the sick and dying serene water views. It’s a new addition to the town with no history to speak of and so he wonders why his father would wish to be here instead of the town’s main hospital, which at least has a solid grip on the soil. ‘In history,’ his father used to say, quoting Churchill, ‘lies all the secrets of statecraft.’
Naomi parks in a restricted area, informing Harvey, before he dares point out the transgression, that no parking inspector is going to work on Australia Day. Harvey had completely forgotten the day, the best one of the year to live near Sydney Harbour.
His sister is her own GPS, leading Harvey at a trot out of the car park, through the foyer and around an L-shaped corridor. They are at their father’s room in way too short a time. He is definitely not ready for this. It’s Australia Day, for God’s sake. Naomi pushes the door open and Beam sees an old man in a bed, his father, not awake, and nearby his brother having what appears to be a fervent conversation with a nurse.
The bed is not quite central. The curtains are drawn. A medical machine hums or maybe it’s the air-conditioning.
Thank God Naomi is here because Beam has no idea what to do right now; no idea where things are at or how long they’ve looked like this. He’d felt an obligation to come here, and a sense of entitlement too, but right now he feels absurdly out of place.
Bryan sees him, pretends not to, and refocuses on his conversation with the nurse, which Beam quickly ascertains is about pain relief. Morphine levels. And something about a shower.
Naomi begins fussing over the flowers in the room, emptying vases, replacing water, consolidating small bouquets and unashamedly reading all the card messages. Beam stands there, motionless. His younger daughter Jayne had recently shown him a film clip in which a guy stands fixed to a spot on a road and the whole world swirls nauseatingly around him on hyper-speed, and this is how he feels now. Cannot move.
As is the way with cancer patients, bodies cruelly divided as cells multiply, Lionel Beam is a shrunken version of himself. Once a tall man, wide-shouldered and handsome in the manner of a peppery academic, he now looks like a small sculpture, a generic representation of an old person, resigned to bed, disappearing into the sheets and slowly retreating from the world.
‘He sleeps a lot now,’ Naomi says as if reading her brother’s thoughts. ‘But sometimes he only looks like he’s sleeping though he’s still listening. It’s hard to know. You should still say hello.’
At this Bryan turns and looks dimly at his brother. ‘He’s asleep now,’ Bryan says. ‘He won’t hear you.’
‘Hello Bryan,’ Harvey says, and somehow it sounds provocative, and it might be. ‘It’s great that you’re, you know—what?—doing this.’
‘Some of us don’t have a choice,’ Bryan says. ‘And some of us want to.’
And some people say what they fucking mean.
‘Well, anyway, thank you,’ Harvey says. ‘For everything. Naomi says you’ve quit work.’
‘He needed proper care. It’s what people do.’
Jesus.
‘Well, what can I do to help now?’ Harvey says, patting his sides as though ready to jump on in. ‘Now that I’m here?’
Bryan wipes a wet flannel across their father’s freckled brow, a brow once given to fits of fury, stormy sermons and tortuous indifference. ‘Nothing really,’ he says. ‘It’s all taken care of. I hear you’re only here for a few days anyway.’
And which one of them told you that? And in what context?
‘I might stay longer,’ Beam says. ‘I haven’t booked a flight home yet. And I’ve got leave from work.’
Instantly Harvey pictures the face of Trudi Rice and feels a little sick.
‘Well,’ Bryan says, ‘if you’d asked me two days ago how long he had to go, I would have said five days tops. But he sort of rallied yesterday and he’s kept down food this morning and he just looks better in himself.’
He looks shit.
Naomi fixes their father’s pillow. ‘It’s day-to-day, isn’t it, Bryan,’ she says. ‘Like everything.’
Harvey feels a sense of solidarity here, a solidarity that he’s not part of and not entitled to claim. And he honestly can’t remember feeling any other way.
Beam steps closer to the bed. ‘Hi Dad,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if you can hear me but it’s Harvey. I just wanted to say that I’ve come here to see you and I’m sorry that you’re sick. I just … yeah. You look … it’s hard. I’m sorry. I flew here this morning. Suze and the girls say hi.’
And bye. They say bye.
And he needs to go outside now, needs air. Harvey pulls the door open and walks quickly into the corridor, back through the foyer and out the glass doors to the scorching concrete circle of the ambulance bay and the fitful blue of Shorton’s sky.
8
Naomi drives Harvey to Penny’s house on the other side of town. Pulling out of the driveway, she beeps the horn three times with gusto and Harvey is pretty sure it’s an ‘I saw him first!’ message for Penny, for it seems completely unnecessary.
The sister born just eleven months after him looks nothing like Beam and very much like their father. Or how their father used to look. She is statuesque, almost masculine in build, with a savage blonde bob-cut that hasn’t changed since late high school. Yet there is a softness in Penny, not hidden but readily visible in her face; eyes that move quickly to smiling and a blush that is never far away.
Naomi is undoubtedly the more attractive Beam sister—Harvey’s schoolmates long ago made that abundantly clear to him—but what they didn’t see, and weren’t looking for, was Penny’s relative safety and what a beauty that is in itself. After the last few hours in the company of Naomi, Beam is quickly reminded that he has always felt more at ease with his first sister.
Penny has been briefed on his arrival, he doesn’t know how, and gives him a warm hug at the door, a child astride her hip.
‘Hello … little one,’ Harvey says. Why can I never remember this kid’s name?
‘Javyn’s got a cold.’ Ah, that’s why. Because it’s ridiculous. ‘He just wants to be held twenty-four seven. It’s driving me nuts.’
‘Is this okay?’ Harvey asks. ‘Staying here? I feel like it must be like Grand Central Station over there.’
‘God, yes, it’s fine,’ Penny says, running her free hand down Harvey’s arm
and then up to his stubbly chin as if to make sure it’s him. ‘It’s great. You know Simon’s up on site for another three weeks—he only left yesterday, so it’s perfect. I can use the adult stimulation.’
‘I’m sorry I missed Simon,’ Harvey says, although he most definitely isn’t because Beam has no idea how to speak to men who can change the tyres on giant trucks and crawl into manholes. He hates it when these guys call into the show, can instinctively sense their evolutionary superiority goading him down the phone line.
‘Actually you can use his car while he’s away,’ Penny says, ‘so you don’t have to rely on … I mean, be restricted by us. You must have loads of people to catch up with.’
‘Not that many, actually,’ says Beam. None.
She pulls out a chair at the dining room table for him, pats it gently to encourage him to sit down. Says, ‘Where are your bags?’
‘Long story,’ Harvey sighs. ‘Not that long, but boring. Actually do you mind if I call the airport and give them your address? What’s the number here?’
‘Twenty-seven. Okay, you do that while I bath the ferals.’
Penny disappears towards the back of her home, a once-beige affair now exploding with the kaleidoscopic entrails of her giftware store. Beam calls the airport, which helpfully knows nothing about the missing bag but is ‘looking into it’, and then he calls Cate, who uncharacteristically answers.
‘So you got in okay?’ Beam asks.
‘No, I told you, Dad, I didn’t get into anything. I picked all the wrong preferences. Stupid guidance counsellor, she said that—’
‘Not uni, Cate, into my apartment. Did you get the key off Bill?’
‘Oh, yes. He’s a dude. We talked for ages. He said university is just like a hiding place for people afraid of hard work. He said I can borrow his Wilbur Smith collection any time, and I was like, thanks SO much, but now I’m not sure whether that’s, like, books or music or guns.’
Beam has had little more than two-minute conversations with his elderly neighbour for the past six years, although he sometimes suspects Bill calls into his show.