by Carrie Cox
It’s one of those days on air, so much rarer now than when he started in this game, that finds Beam hearing each word as it’s spoken, not just in anticipation of the next question and not only hours later during another pointless attempt at sleep. He is in the moment today, the sweet spot, and he hears not only the human battle cries of loss and despair but beyond that, a clear common thread: family.
For almost every caller, every rundown soul, tells a story of a day that ended, inevitably somehow, at Point A. Blood. Family. The origin of the species.
Even those for whom family had come to represent something painful, or dangerous, or simply something so long ago that phone numbers have been erased, photos lost, heirlooms sold at garage sales … they’d each followed their legs home. Powerless, pained, lost and found. They returned to childhood homes that had long been rebuilt. To grown-up daughters who hadn’t spoken to them for twenty years. To ex-husbands, ex-wives, grandparents long forgotten. To whatever, in the face of the unspeakable and the unknown, looked like a sanctuary one might be entitled to or where, amidst the unbearable noise of it all, one mightn’t have to say anything at all.
Strip it all back and douse it in fear and all that is left in this world is family. That’s the message from today’s program. Common noses. Shared bedrooms. Drunken grandpas. Hand-me-downs. Old jokes. Irrevocable damage. Brutality. Joy. Fear. Neglect. Hope.
It all starts and ends with family.
Beam finds it deeply irritating and profoundly concerning.
37
In the darker days after his separation from Suze, before the genuine matter of his singledom had set in and given his flagging libido a fresh and guiltless cause, Beam had contemplated suicide. Not in the very deliberate way of the purposeful, but rather as an abstract idea that swam into his brain on occasion, unbidden and therefore momentarily arresting. It usually coincided with a macabre opportunity, an afternoon’s walk at The Gap, wild waves at Avalon, or a long drive down the coast passing oncoming trucks. It was never more than a one-minute thought excursion and he often wondered if this was the tiny window of madness into which most suicides fell. Just a thought, just a jump to the left. A minute’s silence, please? Instantly regrettable if that were possible.
But he knew of exceptions too. A second cousin. Not close to Harvey in adulthood but they’d spent many a summer locked in bloodied cricket crusades as children. When Beam learned two years ago that Gerard had taken his life, had overdosed on pills ordered several months earlier, had shored up his family’s finances, changed his life insurance policy and penned his beloved wife and four children long earnest letters of explanation, love and absolution, well, he had developed a new respect for suicide. And for Gerard.
Beam’s mother had said the funeral had swirled with rumours of sexual abuse by a priest at Gerard’s boarding school circa year five. And Harvey remembers thinking, Fair enough, Gerard. Your call, mate.
He is grateful, then, that Cate and Jayne are sitting with him here in this sweltering coffee shop, killing the time they would have otherwise have spent watching Lionel Beam’s coffin descend into the earth, because he might have gravitated to suicide-lite this afternoon. Might have ventured down to Shorton River, sat too long and started thinking … how? Now?
Because even dead, Lionel Beam had managed to wound Harvey. And if there is no end to the race away from his father, if it can’t stop here, on this day, then he’s not sure if he has the heart to keep going. It’s just too fucking exhausting.
But he looks now at his daughters, sitting here today in a town far from their home because of him. For him. Quietly watching him stir his coffee. He remembers Suze’s words all those years ago, about the most important family being the one you create yourself. And he knows she was right.
But it’s still exhausting.
‘Dad, I think I might stay here for a while,’ Cate says. ‘In Shorton.’
‘Really?’ Harvey says and looks at Jayne for any sign of surprise. But they’ve clearly discussed this already.
‘I really love working in Penny’s shop and I’m getting lots of experience and I thought maybe, like, I could do this for, like, a gap year or maybe six months or nine or eleven months and then come back to Sydney maybe and do … like, something, I don’t know. A course. Or go somewhere else even.’
‘Sounds like a hell of a plan, Cate,’ Harvey says with a playful wink at Jayne. ‘Is there a spreadsheet to go with it?’
Cate laughs. Shrugs.
‘What about your mother?’ Beam says. ‘What do you think she’ll say about it?’
‘I thought,’ Cate says sheepishly, ‘that maybe you could tell her?’
‘Well,’ Harvey says, making a pistol out of his right hand and aiming it at his temple. ‘I look forward to that conversation, Cate.’
‘What about you, Dad?’ says Jayne, tucking her too-short fringe habitually and fruitlessly behind her ear. ‘When are you coming back home?’
Beam looks for an answer in the dregs of his cold coffee. Nothing. ‘Don’t know,’ he says. ‘Unlike Cate here, I’m not great with solid plans.’
‘I think you should come home with me and Mum,’ Jayne says. ‘I don’t think this place is good for you.’
Beam understands she’s talking about the funeral. Of the public portrait of a family with one face heavily pixelated. Jayne is so like her mother, he thinks, when it comes to lining up cause and effect.
‘I’m thinking about it, Jayne,’ he says. ‘There are a few things to weigh up.’
‘Yeah, like the nurse he’s schtooping,’ Cate says to Jayne and loudly slurps the last of her milkshake for effect.
‘God, Cate!’ Beam exclaims. And at the same time, in that very instant, he sees himself in the ocean, Grace astride him, kissing like teenagers. How that scene would look to his children. Feels his jaw burn, red hot. God.
‘I’m not schtooping anyone,’ he says.
Grace aside, Beam had always thought he’d be much better at this: taking to his children about sex. At the very least, fielding a question about it without hiding behind an imagined pillar. As young parents, he and Suze had enjoyed ridiculing their own parents’ pathetic attempts to articulate human affection. The mechanics of it. The need for it. They would never leave their children to work it out for themselves. And yet they had, for the most part. Talk of walking about the house naked for the benefit of the children’s development had quickly given way to blushing deference to the children’s development. Sex was taken care of, quietly, on Sunday mornings. Mostly. Once they had been caught by Cate—she would have been five maybe—and they made up an elaborate story about furniture arranging and a sudden heatwave. The birds-and-the-bees discussion had never happened with either daughter. Despite the best of intentions, Suze and Harvey had both known that by the time they were ready to sit the girls down for the awkward chat, the girls already knew everything. Probably more than Suze and Harvey did. Best not to go there.
‘Where is your bloody mother?’ Beam says finally. ‘She just disappeared after the funeral. Is she going to the wake?’
‘Are we going to the wake?’ asks Cate.
Beam isn’t sure about this. He wants today to be over. Just … done. But at the same time he feels an urge to thank Matt for his words at the funeral, not to mention a disquieting sense that today isn’t yet done with him.
‘I suppose so,’ Harvey says finally. ‘If you girls want to.’
Cate looks at Jayne, who returns a noncommittal shrug.
‘Nothing else around here to do,’ Cate says. ‘Unless you’re cool with us getting a couple of tatts each and an early drug habit.’
Jayne laughs, but for once Beam is unimpressed with his elder daughter’s sass. ‘That’s enough,’ he says. ‘This is where I grew up.’
He has no idea from where that sentiment arose or whether it has any shred of truth about it. White-hot day of madness.
‘Anyway, we need to find your mum first,’ Beam says, signalling to the wa
itress for the bill. She signals in return that he needs to get off his arse and pay at the counter. And as he does so, Harvey’s back pocket vibrates and he pulls out his phone and sees a message from Suze that reads, inexplicably: I’m with Grace.
He puts his phone on the counter and stares at it for a very long time.
38
As she later recounted to Beam, Suze had sure enough spotted Grace in the church early on, before the first round of mumbled warbling in fact, thanks to Harvey’s clunky attempts at the furtive glance. She’d also seen Grace leave the church prematurely and knew at once the nervy walk of a woman upset and keen to disappear.
Suze had known that if Grace was on foot, she would soon find herself on a walking trail into the nearby botanic gardens, an ambitious description for a tangle of unkempt warrens and broken benches. And this is where she’d found Grace, sitting on the edge of a dry fountain and looking into her hands.
‘I’m Suzanne,’ she’d said to Grace as she approached the fountain, momentarily startling the woman and causing her cheeks and neck to flush like algae bloom.
‘Sorry, love. I’m Harvey’s wife. Ex-wife. Very ex.’
Grace had looked up at Suze, suitably mystified.
Suze plundered forth, feeling that she was doing good here and would be able to say the right thing once she’d determined the cause of Grace’s sadness. It was her gift.
It transpired that in attending a funeral she’d almost not attended and now wished she hadn’t, Grace had come face to face with her past. With her first husband, the man whose love for her had somehow withered on a childless vine. Who had let her go when she’d said she wanted to go—a request she’d made partly to hear what it sounded like outside of her skull. A man she’d thought about ever since but had never contacted and hadn’t known how. He wasn’t on Facebook, a fact that did not surprise her. Grace had heard he’d moved to the country, settled down. She’d heard he moved overseas. What had become of him? Her Matthew.
Matt.
‘Fuck,’ says Harvey, toe to toe with Suze on the driveway at the front of Matt and Naomi’s home. Cars are parked at odd angles all over the front lawn. The wake is in full swing. Their daughters are inside.
‘I know,’ says Suze. ‘I know. It’s unbelievable. They were married and everything. Not for long, but still. Married.’
Harvey looks down at his feet, at Suze’s feet. His head is moving side to side of its own volition. ‘Fuck,’ he says.
‘I know.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘I know!’ Suze seems increasingly pleased that Harvey’s reaction is commensurate to the size of the news and her delivery of it.
‘She’s mentioned him to me before,’ Harvey says, finally leaving the comfort of dumbstruck obscenity. ‘She said she was married, they’d tried to have a kid and couldn’t, so she’d gone overseas to work as a nurse somewhere, some sad and poor place, and that was it. They’d lost touch. She didn’t seem heartbroken, but maybe … who knows. Shit.’
‘Well, it would have been confronting today to see him standing up in front of everyone, effectively saving the day. To know that he’s remarried and has children. No matter how you feel now, that would be difficult,’ Suze says.
Harvey nods. Suze puts a hand on his shoulder and then removes it, deciding it’s not Harvey who most needs comforting.
‘Did Matt see her?’ he asks after a long pause, during which a family he doesn’t know files past them wielding things covered in alfoil.
‘She said she doesn’t think so,’ Suze says. ‘She said she hopes not.’
‘Do you think I should call her?’
‘Maybe,’ Suze says. ‘I don’t really know.’
Harvey takes this to mean yes.
‘Fuck,’ he says.
‘I know.’
With this, Suze throws up her arms in a flippant oh-well-must-run gesture that looks utterly unconvincing to Harvey and she strides into Matt and Naomi’s home as though there is still much more interference to be run before the day is out.
Beam looks at his phone. At the sky. At the phone. At the faded ‘No Junk Mail’ sign on the mailbox and the kaleidoscope of catalogues bulging out of its slot.
He hadn’t meant to find Grace. He hadn’t asked to find Grace. This isn’t his fault, and yet somehow he feels responsible for a woman he hardly knows, at least not in the sense of time and injury, walking tearfully out of a funeral for all the wrong reasons. He has done this, brought old worlds together via the clusterfuck of his own. Even if you walk softly through this life, you hurt others, he thinks. Probably just as well he’s never bothered to.
Looks at his phone. Types: Grace, are you okay? Can we talk?
39
Wakes are the loosest of social ceremonies and the most fraught. Harvey did a whole morning of talk on this a few years ago after a wake in south-west Sydney erupted into gang war and arrests. ‘Macca would be happy’ was the front-page splash of the Telegraph, a quote from one of the deceased’s brothers tendered as a statement to police in the paddy wagon.
The assumption by people about the recently deceased’s send-off expectations—usually with a subtext along the lines of He would have wanted us to get shitfaced—makes for many unsatisfactory wakes. Listeners made the case to Beam that wakes should be abandoned altogether; they do nothing to aid grieving and are frequently hijacked by strangers looking for either a party or a cause. Others said wakes could have greater purpose with a set framework just like funerals—a run sheet and an endpoint. Others still justified the free-for-all approach—death is shitty. It deserves chaos.
Harvey remembers one call that day in particular, from a middle-aged woman who’d recently buried her mother, a stoic matriarch who, when she knew she was dying, began baking and freezing in earnest so that the wake would not be catered for with anything less than her best recipes. Everyone subsequently sat about a churchyard nibbling Nanna’s famous fruitcake, four months in the deep freeze and shrouded in imminent death. Delicious, they said.
He is thinking about this as he wends his way through the current confusion in Naomi’s house, wondering if Lionel has left a few careful instructions for the wake just as he did for the funeral. But there is too much haphazard movement in here, Beam decides, and even the venue—a house of roaming boys and hopeful furnishings—feels as though Lionel Beam might never have set foot in it.
The place is heaving with sweaty, tentative people. There’s a gaggle shoring up martyrdom in the kitchen, nuking sausage rolls and relaying headcounts on the number of children gathered around the game device in the lounge room. There are people gathered in tiny circles of earnest chat, surreptitiously eyeing off other circles. There are men laughing loudly, bottles of Matt’s unlabelled home-brew in their hands, beads on their brows. There are shrew-eyed women moving between everything, working it all out.
Beam wanders through as though invisible, expected at the next juncture. He heads straight out the back door and down the side yard towards Matt’s shed where three men he doesn’t know bundle out of the metal door in rambunctious laughter. Matt follows them, issues a hardy cheers with beer aloft and then spots Harvey.
Beam smiles at Matt but feels like someone practising at smiles. Matt puts his beer down on the uneven grass where it promptly falls over. He reaches out his arms to Harvey and pulls him roughly into a bear hug.
In one of those half-minutes that splices through time and moorings, Beam pictures Matt as his best friend. A real buddy. They’re fishing on Sunday mornings, testing out a first batch of new home-brew, laughing uproariously at a shared observation, nodding sagely the next—the wisdom of brothers. He sees this all in Shorton settings, as it would need to be, and it seems odd and yet utterly plausible that the family he’s kept at highways’ length for so many years should finally deliver him that tricky thing: a real male friend.
He’s never been able to shape this for himself in Sydney and certainly not after he and Suze broke up. She’d been the libr
ary monitor of their shared friendships, always reminding him to phone someone (usually a husband of one of her friends) because it was the anniversary of something or to organise a hit of tennis because nascent friendships die in the first few months if nothing is scheduled, apparently.
Beam has always enjoyed good associations with people at work and might justifiably call many of them his friends, but even he knows these connections fail certain tests: none of them live in his phone, he can’t remember any of their kids’ names, he actively avoids them on public transport. It’s unlikely any of these relationships, as loud and privileged and funny as they seem within the station’s walls and floors, would survive beyond work.
And I don’t work there anymore, so there’s that.
People want to be Harvey’s friend, of course, in the way that people feel a certain ownership of public figures. They pat him on the back at his local coffee shop, address him by his first name to comment on a recent talkback topic, even wave at him on the train in a casually intimate manner. Perhaps because of this, and knowing that close family friendships had been an option he’d cut off himself, Beam has never felt lonely or obviously friendless. He’s never felt the need to replace empty encounters with anything solid. If you don’t look friendless, it’s hard to feel it. And he’s always had Suze, even now.
Pulling out of Matt’s beery embrace, Harvey looks upon his brother-in-law as someone who could have been a clear contender for more substantial friend material. He is that wonderful thing: a good bloke.
A good bloke once married to Grace.
‘Need some shed time?’ Matt asks and doesn’t wait for a reply. He ushers Beam into the tin bunker, produces two fresh beers and looks at the roof.