Afternoons with Harvey Beam

by Carrie Cox

  ‘She’d probably like that,’ he says. ‘I don’t think she’s been doing much.’

  ‘So how long do you think she’ll stay? Will she go back with you?’

  Beam realises this is Penny’s way, once again, of trying to get a better sense of her brother’s plans. He knows she smells a rat about his job.

  ‘I still don’t know, Penny. I’m not thinking too far ahead. I guess a lot depends on Dad.’

  ‘Well,’ Penny says, doing something with her fringe in the cloudy mirror of the fridge door. ‘I don’t think he has long, Harvey.’ She turns to him square on. ‘I don’t. He doesn’t.’

  Beam shrugs. ‘You’ve been saying that for weeks.’ He realises how this sounds and he looks at Penny apologetically.

  ‘I just don’t know what sort of role to play with Dad, Penny. Bryan doesn’t want me there. I don’t think Dad does either, if he even knows what’s going on.’

  Penny is adamant. ‘He recognised your voice, Harvey. He knew you were there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Beam, ‘and that apparently reminded him he was dying.’

  ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying,’ Penny says, ever the Beam family translator. ‘Of course he wants you there. You’re his son.’

  ‘Penny, I have no relationship with him. I haven’t for twenty years. I might as well be visiting the guy in the next room.’

  ‘But you can’t leave yet,’ she says. ‘You have to stay.’

  And Harvey knows that he will stay, for now, mainly because he doesn’t feel like being anywhere else in particular.

  18

  There is an odd melancholy that descends upon a person a few days into time spent away from home. Harvey recognises it as a kind of displacement, a forced inspection of lives and choices beyond the familiar terrain. He anticipates it these days, this unsettling; has got better at heading it off at the pass. Which is why he wakes the next morning with a clear head and a fresh sense of purpose.

  First things first: sign the forms and email them back to Trudi Rice. For this task he enlists Penny’s printer and scanner and afterwards her coffee machine. It is done. It doesn’t even hurt.

  Next up, he calls up Hugh Traynor, says why not? ‘Let’s do a show or two for old times’ sake. I’ve got some thoughts about the new marina.’

  Then he texts Grace: Hope this finds you in the ocean and that your phone is waterproof. Thanks for a great night. Care to repeat sometime? Cheers, H.

  Finally he gathers his things, musters up the courage to drive Simon’s beast of a vehicle and heads to the local shopping centre to get some supplies for Cate.

  And all of this feels good, for resolve can be its own salve.

  If there is a space more spiritually barren than Shorton’s main shopping centre, Beam is yet to encounter it. Yet this is where the locals spend much of their time (he gathers), escaping the heat and seeing who else is around. There is much aimless wandering, discussions over empty trolleys and comfort taken in franchise signage—evidence of the town’s wider connectedness. And there is great pride in visible progress, most notably the new David Jones. Shortonites strut in and out of its Melbournesque entrance with faux aloofness, as though they haven’t been talking about this very thing for two decades.

  He sees familiar faces. Old faces that seem new and new faces that seem old. He sees a battered man in a wheelchair enthusiastically picking his nose and realises it’s his maths teacher from year eight. He sees the boy who used to live next door to his family in Norwich Street, now grown up and wrestling a tribe of young children. He sees a former mayor stockpiling home-brew ingredients into a trolley. He sees a girl he used to covet in his senior years, now barely recognisable amidst large folds of tattooed flesh spilling out of a singlet top.

  Tattoos. There are so many. Complex sleeves of tribal warfare and children’s names and roses and arrows and death by a thousand indecipherable fonts. Punctuating the ink are piercings: metallic full stops, commas and em dashes. Studs in eyebrows and cheeks and chins. And everywhere, everywhere, there is the iridescent flash of hi-vis workwear. Shorton’s cultural dress: John Deere cap, hi-vis shirt, jeans, no shoes, cigarette, scowl. The men too.

  Harvey knows he is being judgemental; he is choosing to look across this scene from a high horse of capital-city horror. This could just as easily be a suburban shopping centre in western Sydney, sans mining apparel and with a liberal dousing of ethnicity. His own siblings exhibit none of the stereotypes he has just picked out like an ancient school inspector. In spite of himself, he is behaving in no less elitist fashion than his own father. Still. This is not the town Beam grew up in; these are not the people he remembers. And moreover, no-one seems to remember him.

  You can’t go back.

  Beam arrives at the hospital in the one-hour buffer zone between Penny’s and Naomi’s visits. Bryan is sitting beside their father’s bed, head in a book as Lionel sleeps. There is a spare chair on the opposite side of the bed and one in the corner of the room and Harvey opts for the lesser of two evils. He assumes Bryan will soon find a reason to leave, so apparently discomfited is he by these occasional visits from Harvey, but Bryan remains fixed in his Rodin pose, defiant or oblivious or a calculated combination of the two.

  Unlike the rupture between Penny and Naomi, which can be fixed to various events and hurtful outbursts and larger-than-life misunderstandings over the years, the chasm between Harvey and Bryan is without an anchor point. Until this visit Beam hadn’t even been sure if it still existed, if it ever did—does not having a relationship have to be the opposite of having one? But Bryan’s dislike of Harvey is so palpable in this room that it feels even heavier than the dank hospital air, louder than the whispers of grave illness.

  He tries to think back to their last encounters. A brief catch-up in the presence of their mother when Beam travelled back for his high school reunion; nothing to report there. Naomi’s wedding, at which the whorl of festivities and the cast-of-thousands guest list made virtually any conversational exchange impossible. Penny’s wedding, which Beam did not attend because it clashed with Suze’s thirtieth (an oversight on Penny’s part that Suze never really forgave); he had sent a funny telegram, a poem entitled ‘A Penny for our thoughts’, and asked Bryan to read it out on the night. As far as he knows, that’s what transpired.

  So what is this … thing? If he dared ask Bryan—and he wouldn’t, he can’t—how would his brother respond? Incredulity … How can you not know, Harvey? Anger … How dare you think about yourself at a time like this. Or surprise … I have no idea what you’re talking about. Any of these answers is possible, and many more besides, and Harvey has no clue how to respond to any of them. Can only ponder and stare at the emotional sphinx that is Bryan Beam.

  And as he does so, sitting here in this tiny plastic chair, the unwanted voyeur of something deeply personal and entirely beyond him, Harvey grows steadily angrier. If anyone should have a grudge to bear, it’s him. He was the son overlooked by a father who never once considered how his actions, his inaction, might damage a young man’s mettle. He, Harvey, was left behind to wonder if it was something as simple as birth order that had denied him his father’s interest, or whether it was something else entirely. Something about Harvey being more difficult, more challenging, unpredictable. Unlikely to sit in a corner and read for hours on end.

  Harvey has tried to recall, but cannot, instances when Lionel Beam hit his eldest son. It was instead Harvey who had weathered the beatings, felt the thirsty whack of the strap on the back of his thighs, across his middle, around his shoulders, until the crying shut it down. It was Harvey, not Bryan, who had once gone to school with a black eye, the result of an exasperated backhand from his father. He’d told everyone it was the product of a wild bouncer hurled by the kid next door and that he’d gone on to bravely cart him to every corner of the street.

  Bryan had done nothing to attract punishment; flew quietly, effortlessly, cleverly, beneath the radar. Harvey, on the other hand, inspire
d a rage inside their father that he latterly suspected scared even Lionel himself. Rage that was only ever countered with ambivalence. He must, Harvey reasons, have seen something in the face of his second-born that was either the very image of himself or the very opposite, whichever caused the greater irritation. And he turned away from it, turned away from it again and again. Because he could. Lionel had options.

  Harvey had visited his father’s post-marital home, the little house Lionel had magnanimously set up for him and Bryan, just once. He had glanced at Bryan’s bedroom off the hallway, had not even walked into it out of curiosity, and quickly eyed the sunroom-cum-study complete with two desks, one large, one small, and a wraparound bookcase. He had stayed for fifteen minutes, just long enough to tell his father that he’d be working over summer at the local radio station, to which Lionel had said, without shifting his gaze from the newspaper, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ And then Bryan had wanted to show Harvey something, but Harvey had had enough and he walked out the front door and all the way back to his mother’s. Across the bridge. Eight kilometres in the angry sun.

  Beam looks more closely now at his father’s form in the hospital bed. Shrinking beneath sheaths of linen and blankets, Lionel’s body barely forms a hillock. The incongruence of space and impact. His hair looks like the strange material Harvey’s mother used to affix to his sisters’ dance costumes. His skin is tracing paper atop a spider’s web. There is so little left of this man, Harvey thinks. What does Bryan see when he stares at him for so long?

  And yet, there is something. Lionel’s jaw. It is still set in just the way Harvey remembers: pushed forward slightly, daring a question, arrogant, resolute. And Harvey finds himself thinking something new about Bryan’s barely concealed hatred of his younger brother.

  Maybe he didn’t really have a choice.

  19

  Because he’d caught a cab from Shorton Airport to the house that is no longer his mother’s, Beam hadn’t then taken stock of the vastness of the facility’s car park. In fact, the airport’s car park proper can no longer contain the spillover of utes and four-wheel drives stretching in a melange of unspoken grid arrangements across several reclaimed paddocks. Thousands and thousands of vehicles; one airport coffee shop. The FIFO phenomenon had evidently not been anticipated by last decade’s town planners.

  Beam finally negotiates a parking spot of sorts for his brother-in-law’s behemoth, hearing as he does so a promo for the guest spot on SR95.3 on Monday. Returning to his old chair next week, star of Sydney radio and courter of controversy, Shorton’s own Harvey Beam!

  So. No backing out now.

  Cate enters the arrivals hall a picture of whimsy, smiling at something on her phone and emphatically removing her scarf.

  ‘Hi Dad,’ she says, kissing Beam on the cheek. ‘Fuck it’s hot.’

  ‘Only between midnight and midnight,’ Harvey says. ‘Language, Cate. Welcome to Shorton, love.’

  Cate has been here only once before, as a seven- or eight-year-old at Naomi’s wedding, but she barely remembers it. Now, casting her heavily made-up eyes over the modest arrivals hall and its current inhabitants, Cate looks every bit the haughty city upstart.

  ‘Welcome to Shitsville more like it,’ she says.

  Harvey hastily guides his daughter to the baggage carousel, hoping no-one heard her first-impressions appraisal. ‘You might need to lose the sass,’ he says. ‘They don’t go for it much around here.’

  ‘Okay,’ Cate says. ‘But only if you promise never to use that word again.’

  ‘Done,’ he says.

  After an exhaustive walk (Cate: ‘Jesus, Dad, Mandela would have given up by now’) back to Simon’s car (‘Why don’t we just wait until it shits out a normal-sized car?’), Beam and Cate drive through town and across the bridge to Penny’s house.

  ‘Seriously, Dad,’ Cate says, surveying the flat and unsurprising landscape, ‘what did you do here when you were growing up? Just sit around wondering what a cinema is?’

  ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Harvey says, all of a sudden feeling defensive about the first third of his life. ‘I spent a lot of time in that river,’ he says, pointing to its implausible blueness with a measure of pride. Something like pride. ‘And I played a lot of cricket. A lot of cricket.’

  ‘How’s your dad?’ Cate asks, getting to the point of why someone might return to such a clearly uninspiring place. Beam notices she doesn’t mention Lionel with reference to herself—Grandpa—and he briefly considers the fact that his children have no relationship with their grandfather largely because he doesn’t. The sins of the father.

  ‘I’ve barely seen him,’ Harvey says. ‘I mean, I’ve seen him every day but he’s never awake.’

  ‘That’s sad,’ Cate says, and Beam supposes it is.

  On a whim Harvey decides to take a few detours. He shows Cate the house he grew up in and the two schools he went to—Shorton Primary and Shorton High—and he senses his daughter’s wilful detachment starting to wane.

  ‘Wow, mini-Dad,’ she says. ‘Weird.’ And Harvey recognises in her face that odd feeling, possible to encounter at any age, that accompanies the realisation one’s parents were once children too.

  Harvey drives past the main shopping centre and towards the town’s giant twenty-four-hour McDonald’s restaurant—the state’s biggest and busiest, he informs Cate, having just learnt this from Matt. He expects Cate to share his revulsion at such junk food largesse, at a town’s devotion to eating even more shit than anyone else, but instead she looks wistfully at the red and yellow monolith and declares: ‘Cool.’

  ‘So, how’s your mother, anyway?’ Harvey asks, changing the subject. ‘Has she come around?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s calmed down a bit,’ Cate says. ‘I think she’s moved on from the disappointment of her firstborn and has decided to focus her hopes and dreams on number two. All eyes on Jayne, race fans.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous, Cate. Your mother isn’t disappointed in you. She’s disappointed for you.’

  ‘Whoa!’ Cate says, holding up her hands in mock protest. ‘Cliché alert!’

  He continues regardless. ‘But we both know you’ll get through this,’ Beam says. ‘You’re only seventeen, for goodness’ sake. You’ve got a big future ahead of you.’

  ‘Why do futures have to be big?’ Cate says.

  Beam has no good answer for this.

  Penny is animatedly thrilled to see her niece in the flesh again and almost swallows her whole with questions and hugs and compliments. James and Javyn look up from their places on the lounge room rug with puzzled interest.

  ‘Oh my God, Harvey,’ Penny almost yells. ‘She’s so beautiful. Look at her! You didn’t tell me she’d got so beautiful.’ His sister runs her hands over Cate’s long auburn hair and stands back to admire the unfolding adolescent chrysalis.

  ‘I didn’t say she was ugly.’

  ‘Listen to your father,’ Penny laughs, rolling her eyes at Cate, who is clearly relishing this avalanche of adoration. ‘Now sit down here and tell me everything about everything.’

  Dismissed by implication, Harvey leaves his sister and daughter to reconnect in the all-consuming way of women. He is happy to see Cate so embraced by Penny and feels a twinge of guilt that his daughters have long lived without the fullness of extended family, of curious aunts and quirky cousins. He has seen it in friends and colleagues—the armour that a big family can provide; the sense of place and comfort that comes from being part of something bigger and pre-written.

  Still, it doesn’t always work and Beam secretly enjoys encountering exceptions to the rule. Fractious family Christmas disasters shared around the office each January are among his favourite guilty pleasures.

  He retreats to the spare room and checks his phone. Trudi Rice has punctiliously acknowledged receipt of Beam’s redundancy forms. Hugh Traynor has emailed him some health and safety information for Monday (presumably in case Harvey falls off his chair and decides to take down City
Hall). And Grace writes: Amazing day in the water. Miraculously survived. Can do lunch on Sunday?

  Sunday, he thinks. Lunch.

  Lunch on Sunday.

  But Cate is here. Plus it’s lunch, which is not dinner. A step back from the cover of night?

  Beam lies back on the bed. What does any of it mean?

  On Sunday morning Harvey is on his way to Naomi’s house when he remembers he hasn’t replied to Grace’s text. He had woken the previous evening, foggy and off-kilter due to an unplanned nap, to find Cate and Penny giggling over photo albums and sharing a butcher’s paper spread of fish and chips. Before long he had joined in and the night had furtively dissolved in a slew of memories, old and new. Now Naomi and Lynn were set to deliver the show’s second act.

  ‘Hey,’ Beam says to Cate as they pull into the driveway. ‘You go on in and I’ll be right behind you. Just have to make a quick call.’

  ‘Dad, are you high? I’m not going in without you. I haven’t seen them for years.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ he says, and realises he might just have blown it with Grace. Whatever he’d been going for there, it’s clearly beyond his life management skills to return messages within an acceptable amount of time.

  Unsurprisingly, Naomi has upped the ante on Cate’s welcome-back festival, planning a full day of activities, a tour of the town, picnic at the marina and more—poor Cate—photo perusal. Such ambition is only possible, Harvey thinks, because of Lynn’s conspiratorial enthusiasm and her practical help with Naomi’s boys, and he finds himself feeling a little sorry for Penny and her more solitary parenting effort. You don’t have to move two thousand kilometres away to be cast adrift, it seems.

  Fortunately there appears to be no expectation that Harvey should be part of today’s activities and he gratefully begs off and agrees to return for dinner this evening. He sees that Cate is still happy, greedily inhaling all the activity and attention, filling the void created by her lonely sabbatical in Harvey’s apartment, and he is proud of this, this too-rare capacity to make a child of his, however briefly, content.