Afternoons with Harvey Beam

by Carrie Cox

  ‘Left,’ Harvey hears himself say.

  At the end of the street, Harvey’s father turns the car left.

  ‘What next?’ his father says.

  Harvey shivers with something that is either excitement or encroaching dread, he can’t be sure. ‘Right,’ he says.

  The car turns right.

  ‘Left,’ Harvey says.

  His father turns left. Says, ‘I hope you know where you’re going, son.’

  Harvey laughs nervously. Of course he doesn’t know where he’s going, but that’s the game, isn’t it?

  A dozen or so more lefts and rights and go-straights and Harvey and his father are well beyond the city gates. The land is agricultural, the houses few and far between.

  ‘Left,’ says Harvey, now uncharacteristically jaunty in his father’s company. They are both, he thinks, somewhere new here. Somewhere just beyond terror and loathing.

  ‘There are no lefts or rights now, Harvey,’ his father says. ‘This is a highway. Can you see?’

  Abruptly the car pulls to the shoulder of the road and Harvey’s father waits for an oncoming road train to pass before he swiftly turns the car around. Looks at his watch, shakes his head, and makes the car go much faster than it was before. Dusty crops whizz by Harvey’s window.

  He isn’t sure if the game has finished. Waits a minute or two, tries to read the silence, the pull of his father’s jaw. Then Harvey says, with a hopeful smile in his voice: ‘Right!’

  Lionel Beam smacks his left hand hard against the top of the steering wheel; yells furiously at the windscreen and the world: ‘You’ve always got to take things too far, don’t you? You never fucking know when to stop. You’re just so stupid.’

  Harvey drops his head to his chest, looks down at the sweaty hands in his lap and wonders where he made the mistake. Hopes to God there’s enough road left to let his father stop being mad.

  Years later, many years later, on the eve of his father’s funeral, Harvey looks back on this day and reads it with fresh eyes and a heart that isn’t jumping out of his chest. His tongue finds the gap where his father had pulled the offending tooth out himself with pliers later that night. A new one had never grown through.

  That strange car trip had not, he decides, been a botched game or even one of his father’s many psychological tests. He hadn’t imagined the forced shift in the atmosphere, the tiny gap between kindness and rage.

  That day Lionel Beam had consciously made an effort to like the child that he simply, conclusively didn’t.

  35

  St Emmanuel’s is a beautiful church, less for what it is than what it isn’t. It isn’t grand and it isn’t pretentious. The pulpit doesn’t look like a Charlton Heston movie set. Though large, its dark panelling and original rough-hewn pews evoke a quaint colonial air. There is an authentic sense of modern history about the place, as though the walls have absorbed many a sermon, many desperate prayers, which in other churches merely bounce off the shiny tiles and gilt edges.

  Harvey’s first girlfriend, Wendy, had once given him a head job in the confessional box and he tries not to think about this as he moves down the centre aisle to take a seat at his father’s funeral.

  Predictable Beam drama had consumed the day’s beginnings. Penny had discovered a spelling error in the funeral booklet and raced into her shop at 6am to redo the entire thing and print off new copies. Harvey had stayed behind at her house to mind the kids, innocently mentioning to Naomi via text message that he was struggling to find appropriate funeral wear in their cupboards. Appalled that Penny was letting the children attend at all—A funeral is NO place for kidz!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, she’d texted back (and he’d winced at the spelling and the excessive exclamation)—Naomi had then vented her exasperation to their mother. Lynn had subsequently had words with Penny, who in turn phoned her husband to instruct him, not for the first time, to find a job in another fucking town.

  At some point in the morning, Naomi had decided that she needed to speak at the funeral. She would be emotional but she could do it. Harvey had no idea why this had suddenly become a compelling necessity and he didn’t dare ask. But it meant that Matt was ordered to get the kids out of the house while Naomi wrote frantically on the home computer, grief pouring out of her in the unedited blur of a late school assignment.

  Matt had turned up at Penny’s, his three boys in tow, and with Penny absent, the two men had let both sets of children go nuts on the computer while they shared a funereal beer in place of breakfast.

  ‘I don’t know why she feels she has to speak at the funeral,’ Matt had said to Harvey at Penny’s kitchen table. ‘And she won’t be able to do it. She won’t. And she’ll tear strips off herself for months and we’ll all duck for cover. And then she’ll read an inspiring quote somewhere and decide she needs to become a personal trainer for disabled people. And we’ll all ride that wave.’

  Harvey had laughed. ‘But you do love her?’ he asked, feeling suddenly protective of his sister and her many aborted plans and wild emotions.

  And Matt had put his beer down on the table for emphasis and looked at Beam square on and said: ‘God, yes, Harvey. I love your nutty sister an unspeakable amount.’

  At this, Harvey had chinked his beer against Matt’s and knew that this would probably be the high point of the day.

  Within minutes, he was attending to Suze’s own funeral drama: a missing shoe. Apparently she’d packed a pair of high-heeled black shoes in her luggage but only one shoe had survived the flight. ‘Fucking baggage handlers,’ she’d said to Harvey over the phone. ‘All criminals.’ Harvey had replied, helpfully he thought, that it was more likely that she’d only packed one shoe by mistake because it seemed an odd thing for a baggage handler to pilfer just one shoe and Suze had responded by telling him she had had some very serious second thoughts on their wedding day.

  Harvey had rung his mother for a suggestion on where Suze might buy a pair of appropriate shoes on short notice and Lynn had responded with undisguised curtness: ‘She’s going shoe shopping? Before a funeral?’ Unbelievable.

  Beam suddenly turned over the thought in his mind that his own mother really didn’t like the mother of his children. That possibly she’d been feigning affection all along and how had this fact never presented itself to him before? They’d always been polite on the phone.

  Beam desperately wants today to be over.

  In the midst of all this, he had called Grace to ask if she was coming to the funeral. If she’d made up her mind. In recent days she’d said she was undecided and would make a call on the day. She felt weird about Suze being there, about his kids being there, about Bryan, all of it. But she knew Harvey wanted her at the church—he’d made that clear in the ocean and in a dozen text messages since. Even though they wouldn’t be sitting together, he would know Grace was there. This person who is not family and who likes Harvey even though she has a choice in the matter. It’s a selfish request and he knows that.

  But Grace didn’t answer her phone this morning and so now, as Beam walks along the church aisle ahead of Suze, Jayne and Cate, and behind someone he suspects is an aunty, he is feeling slightly sick.

  St Emmanuel’s is about half full—so much for Bryan’s standing-room-only expectations. Harvey takes a seat flanked by Cate and Jayne a few rows from the front. Ahead of them are Naomi and Matt with Lynn in between them, and ahead again is Penny, Simon and their boys.

  He glances about the front of the church at the other attendees, a few of whom look faintly familiar. A cousin called Tom, a teacher from his old high school called Mrs Dalton (Beam has no idea of her connection with Lionel), Aunty Faye (who is not really his aunty), Hugh Traynor (What is he thinking?), and the city librarian with the French surname. Bryan is at the front of the church, talking earnestly with the priest.

  Beam wonders if any of the other guests are ‘professional mourners’, people who surreptitiously attend funeral services to sate either morbid curiosity or unquenchable pa
thos. He knows this to be a thing, having done a talkback segment about it a few years ago. An open-casket viewing is the money-shot for these people. Many are even bold enough to attend wakes, counting on clueless mourners to assume their legitimacy. Some with less disturbing intentions are just lonely souls in search of human connection and free hugs from strangers.

  Harvey would happily pay any one of them to take his place today.

  He glances toward the back of the church (no sign of Grace) and then turns his attention to the priest, a man in his early seventies at best, shiny face sprouting from a swathe of heavy cloth and sashes. He is looking out over the congregation, an ambitious term for this lot, Harvey thinks, and unmistakeably the man looks disappointed. Surely he must see, on days like this, a collection of disconnected people for whom religion is just scaffolding for major life events, nothing more.

  Music is playing, he can’t tell from where. It sounds like a choir or possibly just the ‘choir’ button on an organ. Do organs exist anywhere outside of churches these days? Beam suddenly recalls that the family who lived beside the Beams for most of his younger years were the proud owners of an organ, and Harvey had got to play it once. He couldn’t believe that you could just press a button and a drumbeat started, masking all the imperfections of any attempt at melody. Beam had thought it pure genius and clearly the way of the future—death to the piano! He’d been one of the first people to buy a Beta video recorder too.

  And he is thinking about anything now really to avoid thinking about this funeral.

  One last look back to the entrance and, yes, he sees her. Grace in a navy dress takes a seat in a pew behind the last of the gathering. He tries to catch her eye, wants to thank her with a smile, but she is focused on her feet and possibly being invisible.

  The service finally begins, fifteen minutes late according to Harvey’s phone, which he quickly flicks on ‘silent’ lest Murphy enacts his law. Maybe Bryan’s private words to the priest were to allow some time for additional mourners to arrive. But save for Grace, there are no late arrivals.

  Let’s just get on with it.

  Harvey looks down at his left knee just as Cate puts her hand on it. To his right, Suze has both Jayne’s hands wrapped within hers. He is so grateful that they are here, that they know what Harvey needs sometimes better than he. For a second he feels a surge of pride, a heart swell that quickly slips into its more familiar guise: the sense that when it comes to keeping a family, Harvey has somehow got away with it so far. One more child and the odds are one would have hated him.

  Father Steven introduces himself over the sound of the organist having a coughing fit and slipping out a side door. In fact, all the church doors are wide open—it’s another broiling, airless Shorton day—and the effect is a steady backdrop of cars going past and trucks working through their gears and the occasional cacophony of birds. Reminders, if any were needed, that even when a life ceremoniously ends, the world keeps rolling on and, broadly speaking, doesn’t give a shit.

  Harvey senses movement to his right and feels a tap on his shoulder. It’s Suze reaching behind Jayne to get his attention. She is all mouth-gestures and dancing eyebrows. Is she here? he finally understands her as saying. The nurse? And Harvey shrugs in a hadn’t-even-occurred-to-me way.

  Suze glares at him, quickly and all too aware of the circumstances, but still right through his eyeballs to the back of his skull.

  Beam thinks, She will find her. She will find her and she will make an immediate appraisal. An appraisal that she will subsequently refine within a relatively short space of time but ultimately come back to because Suze loyally trusts her first instincts and always has.

  Harvey looks properly at the casket for the first time. His father in a box with flowers on top. Flowers chosen by whom? Most likely Bryan. Maybe the funeral organisers or maybe the church. He wonders how much organisational minutiae he has been left out of in recent days. He could have formed an opinion on flowers if pressed.

  ‘This is so weird,’ Cate whispers to Harvey.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Everything,’ Cate says. ‘Funerals. They’re just so weird.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Beam says, not really sure which things are most presenting themselves as odd to his daughter. But he envies it, this third-eye perspective inherent to Cate’s generation. He was never one to question rituals and traditions, things presented as part of life by people who had been around longer. Cate, however, and the young radio producers he has worked with in recent years share a cool suspicion about pretty much everything, especially if it predates social media.

  Harvey looks about the church, at the audience gathered for a dead host and a sexless man in a dress, at a group of people connected by one person’s mortality, quietly shaken by this reminder of their own. He decides Cate’s assessment is not unfair: funerals are weird.

  A truck outside howls to an inelegant stop and Beam realises he is now on his knees and can’t remember getting there. Fortunately everyone around him is kneeling too. At least one person here must know what they’re doing, he thinks.

  ‘The reality of death,’ the priest says, ‘confronts us all today and it is this collective sorrow that brings us together.’

  Father Steven looks out to the congregation and then somewhere well beyond them.

  ‘But there is something else that unites us today,’ he says.

  Beam whispers quietly to his eldest daughter: ‘Obligation.’

  ‘It is faith,’ says the priest.

  Harvey reaches into his jacket pocket, double-checks that his phone is off.

  ‘Faith opens our minds to the big picture … life, death, love and forgiveness. It gives us strength. It gives us hope for what lies beyond death. For Lionel’s next journey, beyond what we know.’

  Harvey looks hard at his father’s casket. Christ. Let this be it. Journey over.

  Father Steven moves on, through retribution, through sin, through grief and unconditional love. Through Serving the Lord and something about sheep. Through walking towards the Light and, Beam thinks to himself, being so blinded by it that you can’t see anything else for several minutes at a time.

  Finally, having made his best fist at converting at least one of the hapless sinners in these ill-fitting pews, the priest introduces Bryan. And Harvey realises now, with a grinding twist of his gut, that this is what he has been silently dreading about today: a summation of their father by the only son permitted to get close to him. The laying bare of the Beam family’s wildly unequal playing field for everyone to publicly question and assess. One version of a dead man that will do nothing to explain the trail marks of Harvey’s adolescence.

  Because if Beam is honest with himself, and he feels inclined to be today, it’s the numbers game that bothers him most. For it’s one thing for a father to let loose a child without explanation and certainly without regret, but it’s another entirely for a sibling to follow suit, for the two of them to be united in their disinterest. It just, well, it looks bad.

  In his more morose moments, usually after too much red wine or on his birthday or both, Harvey again suspects he has given Lionel and Bryan more to jointly criticise than any poorly written thesis, more joy than they would ever wish to unpick in the name of family. Merciless assessments of Harvey’s intellectual failings might represent the ultimate in academic downtime. But then, when he has a clearer head, Beam is embarrassed to realise just how self-important the very idea sounds. And how unfair it is to assume that Bryan is just another version of their father, two peas in the proverbial, when really he doesn’t know Bryan at all.

  Maybe Bryan’s whole life has sucked because he didn’t, couldn’t, fly away.

  Beam’s brother steps up to the lectern, all elbows and loose paper. He looks nervous, but Harvey suspects there isn’t a ‘confident’ look in Bryan’s repertoire. Not once looking up from his notes, Bryan reads in an unbroken tone details about Lionel Beam’s life that, to Harvey (and surely everyone else here, he t
hinks), sound more like a job application than a eulogy.

  Much of it Harvey hadn’t known: the multiple research awards, a Distinguished Professor prize, international citations, key speaker invitations and prestigious conferences. His father was undoubtedly an anomaly in a town whose highest educational option remains TAFE. Harvey briefly wonders why his father chose to stay here when he might easily have secured a position at a sandstone university somewhere.

  Then, for no clear reason, Bryan reads a quote from Thomas Cromwell, who, as he explains to the presumably unenlightened gathering, was chief minister to King Henry VIII. Harvey briefly recalls his father’s PhD dissertation being about the Tudor period. Bryan reads: My Prayer is that God give me no longer life that I shall be glad to use mine office in edification, and not in destruction.

  Suze catches Harvey’s eye and mouths a none-too-subtle What the? Beam shrugs back at her.

  Bryan continues: ‘Before and of course during his rich academic life, the legacy of which will endure to the benefit of generations of historians and students, Lionel raised a family including myself and two daughters, Penny and Naomi, and they themselves have children of their own.’

  To Harvey’s left, he sees Cate’s hands turn upwards in her lap in a what-the-hell? fashion.

  Bryan’s pace now quickens. ‘And so,’ he says, ‘Lionel Beam dies a grandfather and sadly not a great-grandfather, although great he most certainly was. As a father, Lionel believed in discipline, respect and honesty, and we as children are the beneficiaries of that approach. Society is the beneficiary of that approach and all who execute it.’

  With that Bryan appears to be finished. He folds his papers in half, nods to the priest, glances at Lionel Beam’s casket, and walks off the pulpit.