Afternoons with Harvey Beam

by Carrie Cox

  Harvey’s eyes don’t work. He blinks and blinks until the focus returns. His throat starts swallowing by itself. Feels as though he’s somewhere on either side of this moment, before when it couldn’t possibly happen and after when it just did. He feels someone’s hand on his shoulder and shakes it off. Briefly considers lifting both his legs onto the pew in front of him and kicking with the full force of his chest.

  Cannot fucking believe it. And yet he should and he does and he knows he will. Over and over again, for all the years he has left. Harvey thinks: This changes everything. And I imagined none of it. Bryan’s final act of devotion to their father was Harvey’s humiliation.

  Complete omission of his name.

  Of his very existence.

  In front of his own family.

  In front of everyone.

  And just as quickly as the fire roared into his head, it stops. And Harvey thinks, in spite of himself, in spite of the injustice that can’t be undone, It doesn’t fucking matter.

  And this too: It never fucking did.

  As he thinks this and wonders if he really means it, if any unbidden emotion can ever be truly trusted, Beam sees Matt clumsily work his way out of the pew in front of him and walk up to the lectern. The priest is there again, talking into his big book, and he looks up sharply at the interloper, at Matt looking certain and uncertain at the same time. And the two men exchange words that no-one else can hear and Father Steven recedes to the side of the pulpit and Matt stands squarely at the lectern. And speaks.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘I’m Matt. Married to Naomi.’

  Matt gestures to the location of his wife with a nod of his head.

  ‘I’m not part of the schedule on your booklet there and I hadn’t planned to speak, but Naomi isn’t quite feeling up to it, so yeah. Look, I didn’t actually know Lionel Beam very well and I don’t know that I was ever going to. But I sort of think every life should be celebrated and people should be remembered properly, and I think Bryan did a good job of outlining the many achievements Lionel had in his career. I actually didn’t know a lot about all of that academic stuff, so I guess one of Lionel’s qualities was that he was a fairly humble man. And I think there’s a lot to be said for humility.’

  Harvey glances about for Bryan and finally spots him sitting on his own in one of the side pews flanking the stage. He is looking down at his hands, still holding his sheafs of paper.

  Matt grips each side of the lectern now. He looks over at Naomi, who is now weeping with full shoulder-shudders.

  ‘I think,’ he continues, ‘that grief is different for everyone. And not just because some of us are tougher than others or just, you know, wired differently. It’s more because we all know different sides of a person.’

  Harvey feels movement beside him. Suze is swapping places with Jayne, untidily for her patent efforts to do so unnoticed. She grabs Beam’s knee with her hand and squeezes it roughly. Less affection than a prediction of battle. Suze is angry and it’s firing out of her pores.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Harvey whispers to her and diverts her eyes to focus on Matt.

  Matt continues: ‘Bryan’s version of his dad is different to Naomi’s, different to Penny’s, and vastly different to Harvey’s. I’m not sure that Harvey was mentioned in Bryan’s speech, but yeah. There was Harvey too and he’s a bloody champ.’

  Matt now runs his hand, almost violently, through his hair. He might have expected Naomi to back out of speaking, Harvey thinks, but he clearly hadn’t planned to do it himself. His discomfort fills the church and Beam is immensely grateful for it.

  ‘Lionel and Lynn had four kids,’ he goes on. ‘Bryan, Harvey, Penny and Naomi, in that order. I don’t think Lynn was mentioned either, but yeah, Lynn was a big help to Lionel when he changed careers and she’s a terrific mum to his kids. She’s a terrific grandmum too. Because I think, look, I don’t know …’

  Matt pauses here. Then says emphatically, ‘Shit.’ And immediately, ‘Sorry Father.’

  The priest nods back with a wan smile.

  Matt says: ‘Parenting is probably the toughest gig of all. I find it really, really hard and I don’t even do that much of it. The only easy bit, I think, is loving them. And it’s the first and most important thing we owe our kids, every single kid, in exchange for dragging them here. You meet people who didn’t get that love and you see that life is different for them. All the little things, they’re just … harder. And they make it harder too, for themselves, because no-one tells them not to.’

  A ripple of wind moves through the church, ruffling restless shirtsleeves and Penny’s hard-won booklets.

  ‘So anyway,’ Matt says, his voice now sounding as if it’s about to expire, ‘you’re probably thinking, what does any of this have to do with Lionel Beam?’

  He waits here for an answer from the audience, possibly hoping for something better than the one he has, which is, it transpires: ‘I dunno. Whatever you want it to. Just, you know, whatever.’

  Then he fiddles nervously with the microphone, as though just noticing its presence for the first time, and the effect is to issue a violent stab of feedback throughout the hall. ‘God!’ Matt says, as frantic hands fly up to assaulted ears and Penny’s children squeal. Father Steven drops his head to the floor, to the feet he can’t see beneath his robes, exhausted by all of mankind.

  But Matt is not apparently finished. ‘The more important thing I want to say up here is this,’ he continues. ‘We’re having a wake for Lionel Beam at my place and you’re all welcome. I’ve got stacks of home-brew and my neighbour, the nice one, not the idiot, lent me some chairs. Just follow someone from here who knows the way to my place. Make it around two o-clock-ish, though, or I won’t have cleaned out the garage and Naomi will rip me a new one.’

  At this, a semi-generous whorl of laughter rises from the floor.

  ‘If you’re interested,’ Matt says, inhaling the laughter, ‘I’ll be taking a few tour groups through my bonsai shed from about four when the beer kicks in.’

  Matt looks down at Naomi hopefully, and Harvey can’t see her response but he hopes that she’s proud of her husband. He hopes she understands.

  And he hopes Lionel Beam, from his keynote position at the front of the room, heard all of it.

  Harvey reaches behind Suze to tap Jayne on the shoulder, not because he wants to tell her something but because he wants to look back at Grace now without it seeming obvious to Suze.

  Jayne mouths ‘What?’ and Harvey says, ‘You okay?’ and this gives him just enough time to furtively move his gaze to the rear of the church where he sees Grace. He sees the back of Grace leaving the church through the front door. She is walking quickly and with one hand raised to the side of her face. Is it possible she’s upset, Harvey thinks, on his behalf? Embarrassed?

  Instantly he wants to text her but Suze’s presence has a bodyguard feel to it. All personal space has been exhumed.

  Father Steven leads them now in a song, a hymn that squeezes twenty-eight lines of scripture into eight lines of music, like every hymn ever written. Nothing rhymes and not a single true note is struck by the collective warblers. Then he says a final prayer, and a grateful group ‘Amen’ rises to the high ceiling.

  And it is done.

  It is done.

  Harvey checks now to see what he is feeling, just as he’s attempted at least once a day for the past five. Whether there’s been a change, any change at all from a dim nothingness. From an opaque sense of anti-climax and muted failure at the departure of Lionel Beam. Anything?

  He isn’t sure. Maybe something has shifted, maybe it hasn’t. He’s starting to suspect that anger is the only emotion he’d readily identify in a line-up these days.

  ‘Right,’ says Suze, as the crowd starts to extricate itself from the narrow pews. ‘I’m talking to Bryan.’

  ‘No,’ says Harvey, tugging her sleeve to sit back down. ‘Don’t worry about it, Suze. Honestly, what’s the point?’

  Suze’s chee
ks flood crimson. ‘The point is that he’s completely fucked in the head and he made you look stupid, Harvey.’ She is madder than he’s ever seen her, at least in recent years. ‘He deliberately hurt you in front of everyone. What a … ’ and Suze flounders a little here, momentarily tempered by the expectations of the venue. But she gets there in the end with: ‘Cock. Just a right cock.’

  Beam is about to try a different tack with his ex-wife, a sideways manoeuvre to prevent her from flying at Bryan like a winged monkey, but he is too late. Suze is off, marching purposefully in the direction of his brother, who is stood now beside their father’s coffin.

  Harvey hurries after her, noting his mother’s worried gaze as he passes her seat. Feeling his sisters’ eyes on his back. Feeling his daughters stumbling behind. He is a step behind Suze as she reaches Bryan.

  ‘What the hell was that all about, Bryan?’ she says, gesturing manically in the direction of the lectern. ‘What exactly were you hoping to achieve there?’

  Bryan looks oddly at Suze, as though he’s trying to place her, and Harvey suddenly remembers that it has been years (and maybe twenty hairstyles on Suze’s part) since the two of them have seen each other.

  Finally Bryan says: ‘I’m sorry, Suzanne. What do you mean?’

  ‘Not including Harvey,’ she says, thrusting both hands in the air. ‘Not even mentioning that he was a son of Lionel’s too. Why would you do that?’

  Bryan looks down at his shoes, which Harvey once again notices are completely at odds with his otherwise conservative dress code. Are those tassels?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Bryan says. ‘It’s just one perspective.’

  Suze’s eyes widen, her red lipstick now a slash of fury. ‘Perspective is not fact,’ she says. ‘Fact is fact, Bryan. Lionel and Lynn had four kids. Just like I had two. There is no perspective on how many children exit a vagina.’

  Of all the words uttered today, ‘vagina’ seems to ricochet most wildly off the oak panelling. Beam grimaces.

  ‘Suzanne, I didn’t write the eulogy,’ Bryan says. ‘I was just the one to read it out.’

  Suze looks at Bryan in confusion, then quickly at Harvey, who is now looking at the casket to their right.

  Beam gets it now. Understands what power would motivate Bryan to make himself look mean-spirited, or clearly wrong at the very least.

  ‘He wrote it,’ says Harvey, shrugging at the flower-draped box. ‘Dad wrote it.’

  ‘He asked me to read it,’ Bryan says, looking at Harvey with an uncertain expression that might be guilt or remorse or the absence of both. ‘It was the last thing he said to me.’

  Beam looks at the creased sheafs of thin paper hanging limply in Bryan’s hands. Old man’s paper. Says to Bryan: ‘Hell of a dying wish.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bryan says, and Harvey wonders what it would feel like to punch him out right now, punch him hard. John Jackson style.

  Possibly sensing Harvey’s unwelcome urge (Suze had once dragged him away from a sightseeing walk along The Gap because she correctly intuited Harvey’s silent compulsion to leap into its nothingness), his ex-wife now grabs his elbow to lead him back to their daughters and out of the church. She turns back to Bryan only once but directs her parting comment at Lionel Beam’s coffin.

  ‘What a fucker,’ she says.

  A small crowd mills at the front of the church. Back-row attendees retreat on tiptoe to the car park. Streaky clouds cool the air and the footpath. Naomi is sitting on a stone step, Matt beside her, his arm around her shoulders. Penny’s husband is cradling their youngest while also appearing to inspect the tyres on a large ute.

  Beam’s mother is deep in discussion with Penny, but as Harvey approaches it’s clear they are waiting for him. Suze peels away from Beam’s side just as a conversation with his mother appears unavoidable.

  ‘Harvey,’ she says, brushing some small apparent thing off her son’s shoulder. ‘I just don’t understand. What did you say to Bryan in the hospital? Why would he do that?’

  And Beam blinks hard at his mother, at this request for an explanation, of all things.

  ‘Mum,’ Penny barks at Lynn. ‘It’s not Harvey’s fault.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was his fault, Penny. I’m just trying to understand why it happened.’

  Penny throws her gaze upward. Her face looks as though it’s done a carnival of funerals today rather than just one. ‘Everything doesn’t have an explanation, Mum. People do shitty things all the time.’

  At this, Cate steps up to her father’s side—Harvey hadn’t even realised both daughters were standing behind him (a blind spot he’d had since they’d been able to walk)—and she looks at her grandmother and then at Penny. She explains to them that Lionel had written his own eulogy, had asked Bryan to read it. That it was his ‘dying wish’, quoting her father directly, and in hearing her do so, Harvey is relieved he didn’t say many of the other things that had streaked across the windscreen of his forehead just minutes ago.

  ‘He didn’t need to do that,’ Penny says, shaking her head. ‘He shouldn’t have done that.’

  But Lynn seems unconvinced, shaking her head slightly and glancing left and right to check, it seems, for onlookers. ‘Maybe he didn’t feel he had a choice,’ she says.

  The air is abruptly split by the sound of a plane tearing low above their heads and Beam instinctively lifts his gaze to watch until it disappears or plummets without warning.

  He can’t take it anymore, any of it, not today. Can’t have one more conversation like this. Can’t listen to the women of the Beam family unpick and rethread versions of reality that best marry with the way they’ve always seen things. Far from tending to wounds, they are simply reviewing the military strategy.

  He leads Cate and Jayne away from the church, from the event he had presciently dreaded, and from Lionel Beam. He’ll be buggered if he’s going to the cemetery.

  Beam has no idea where Suze is now. Or Grace for that matter. But he will not be following any hearse. He will not be filing any additional efforts today under the headings of obligation and respect. He is done with this.

  ‘Let’s get a milkshake,’ he says to his daughters.

  36

  ON AIR

  ‘Maybe it was the first thing that occurred to you this morning. Maybe it wasn’t until you wrote down the date. September 11. A month and a number that have come to mean so much more. They conjure instantly in our minds pictures of burning towers, of ashen faces craned skyward, of desperate leaps toward an unimaginable death. Perhaps what you most remember—I know it’s what I most vividly recall—was that sense of collective disbelief, of sheer incredulity, a sort of numbness. It felt like everything, in a single day, had changed irrevocably. That nothing would or could ever be the same again. The future turned into a giant, terrifying question mark. Would there even be a future? Was this the beginning of the end?’ Pause. Two beats. ‘And here we are. Ten years down the track. Living in the future we doubted might exist. And things have changed irrevocably and many changes can easily be pinned to that day. Others have been more subtle, a kind of slow burn.’

  Breathe.

  ‘Today I don’t want to talk about the political fallout from the September 11 terrorist attacks. In many ways, we talk about that daily on this show, every time we talk about protecting our borders and international security and what sort of immigrants we want and don’t want. It’s all related in some way to the brand new set of fears we inherited on September 11 and through the subsequent “war on terror”. The war on whatever.’

  It’s a long intro, a little self-indulgent, but Beam figures it’s justifiable.

  ‘No, today I want to talk about the human fallout from September 11. Because I read earlier this week that at least ten thousand people in the US—emergency workers, police officers and everyday citizens—have been found to have post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of their exposure to the events of September 11. They have recurrent nightmares, they can’t sleep, they jump at every
little thing. They no longer trust easily, they love less fully. They self-medicate to devastating effect.

  ‘And,’ he continues, ‘they’re not getting any better. Which is why the US government is now spending at least four billion dollars—that’s billion, folks—on getting September 11 victims to start talking again. To talk about what they saw, how it made them feel and how they’re coping. I’m in the right game, you see, because it turns out that talking about things, really talking about things to people who will listen and attempt to understand, is the best hope for the future of this damaged human race. Whatever pain lurks in your soul, the pathway out is through your mouth.

  ‘Today you’re going to hear from a panel of guests who were in various different ways directly exposed to the September 11 attacks. They are all Australians who happened to be in New York at the time, either holidaying or working there. And they’ve all come home with baggage they’ve never completely unpacked.

  ‘After you’ve heard their stories, which I think you’ll find both motivating and inspiring, I want you to call in with your own September 11 stories. Do you remember how you felt when you first heard what had happened? Where were you when you saw those unimaginable pictures on the television? Perhaps you were in New York at the time, one of the thousands of Aussies who live and holiday there on any given day. Perhaps you saw things you’ll never forget.

  ‘Perhaps it’s time to talk.’

  And they do. Listeners dial the station in waves unbroken, many just to share their own where-I-was-when-the-Towers-collapsed-on-TV moments—a caravan park in Ryde, an arrested hangover in Kiama, a final wedding gown fitting that felt like a funeral. Some ring with unrelated tales of trauma (that Beam elegantly deflects in the manner of a batsman who respects the off-form bowler). But many others still—and this is what Harvey and his producer had openly hoped for—call in with first-person accounts of being on the ground in New York at the time. About their instinctive reactions, both immediate and now ten years down the track.

  Talkback at its best: compelling pictures painted in the gaps between words, in hollow sighs, faltering breaths and the pure honesty that only hiding behind a voice can provide. The events might have happened yesterday, so vivid are many of the descriptions of smoky calamity and swirling panic. Beam is an untiring fieldsman of the storytelling, covering every position.