Afternoons with Harvey Beam

by Cox, Carrie;

  ‘I don’t want to play,’ Penny says, and walks out of the room, her quoit still on the ground.

  Torn between his curiosity and a strong desire to follow Penny’s lead, Harvey walks slowly up to the pole. He puts a foot on either side of it—is literally on top of it—and drops the quoit cleanly around the pole.

  Harvey gives a clumsy shrug and looks around at his father. Lionel Beam says nothing and steadily shifts his gaze to Bryan.

  Bryan begins by removing Harvey’s quoit from the pole. Then he silently takes up a position about one metre back from the stand. He takes aim and tosses his quoit, watches it swirl compliantly around the pole and land where Harvey’s had been minutes earlier.

  ‘We all win!’ yells Naomi, and gathers up the quoits to play again.

  ‘No,’ says Lionel Beam. ‘Bryan wins.’

  ‘What?’ Harvey says, as Penny creeps back into the room.

  Naomi is already tossing again, this time from behind a chair with one hand covering her eyes.

  ‘Why does Bryan win?’ Penny says, now standing beside Harvey. ‘You didn’t say where to throw from or how many chances we could have.’

  Their father folds his arms and a small grin pulls at the edges of his thin mouth. ‘That’s right, Penny,’ he says. ‘There were no rules because this isn’t a normal game. It’s a character test. It reveals things about us that we can’t mask: our ambition, our intellect, our potential.’

  At this moment Harvey’s mother enters the room, informing them that dinner is ready.

  But Harvey wants answers first. ‘If it’s not a game,’ he says, ‘then how come Bryan wins?’

  ‘Well,’ Lionel says, and he seems happy to labour the point while dinner waits. ‘Naomi here (he points at his youngest child who is now attempting to throw four quoits at once) is certainly ambitious but she wants to make things unnecessarily difficult for herself. Her heart overrules her head and that may affect her potential in life.’

  ‘Lionel,’ his wife says to him. ‘Can’t this wait?’

  ‘No, it can’t,’ he says. ‘This is important, Lynn.’

  ‘They’re just kids,’ she says.

  But Lionel is resolute. ‘Character flaws are best addressed during childhood,’ he says, ‘when there is still time to do something about them. Now, Harvey here has a lot of work to do. He is lazy, naturally lazy, and there is no worse character flaw short of dishonesty. Harvey wants things to be quick and easy, and that’s not how the world works. The way he stood over that pole … no-one even did that at the conference. I was frankly shocked.’

  ‘Lionel …’

  ‘Lynn, I’m nearly done. Bryan, on the other hand, instinctively knew that without rules, one must apply their own boundaries. But they should be realistic—a personal challenge that’s also achievable. To think that way without instruction reveals a naturally strong character with excellent potential.’

  ‘It’s just a fucking game,’ says Harvey, and all the air flies out of the room. Harvey hears in the long ensuing echo a word that has never before been spoken in this house, a word he can’t believe he said in front of their father.

  Lionel Beam doesn’t take Harvey to his bedroom this time, doesn’t push him on his stomach, doesn’t remove his belt. For he is far too enraged to wait, to defer for even one minute the violence that must now occur. And so Harvey can’t brace himself properly; isn’t ready for the bare fists, for the thrashing around his back and sides. Together the father and boy crash into the side of the door as Harvey tries to run. And he can hear his mother screaming, ‘Stop it, Lionel! Not like that!’

  Harvey covers his head with his hands and shrinks to the ground as his father rails about him, looking for new entry points. And Harvey screams with his mother, tries to make words but can’t. Just wants it to stop. It has to stop. His father is beating his back like a drum.

  ‘Lionel,’ his wife yells, ‘we can’t go to the ambulance. You have to stop.’

  And Lionel does. Much later, he does.

  26

  Shorton is a taut blister today and Harvey is spraying Naomi’s boys with the hose in their backyard.

  ‘How about some cricket?’ Harvey says when he suspects the town’s water supply has been halved by his efforts. ‘Have you got a bat and ball?’

  The eldest boy Toby disappears into the garage while little Jamie peers down the eye of the hose, wondering where the water has gone. Lynn Beam walks out of the house and scoops up the toddler with a towel, leaving Harvey to engineer a three-man game with Toby and Finn.

  It’s not easy talking up cricket to a generation raised on small screens and Harvey has long predicted the test match will not survive Generation Y or Z or whatever lurks beyond it. Yet he perseveres with the boys today, their father having gone back out to work and Naomi putting in a big day at the hospital.

  He teaches wiry Toby, whose limbs appear to have outgrown his body in that cruel and ungainly passage of early adolescence, how to deflect the ball when batting and even nick it past the invisible wicket keeper when the opportunity presents itself. It’s these subtleties of cricket that Harvey likes best, although Toby seems much keener at this point to hit a six or break a window. Encouragingly Finn shows some promise as a bowler, which is to say that he can generally peg the ball within a four-metre radius of the wheelie bin currently serving as stumps.

  Not for the first time, Harvey finds himself wondering how his experience of fatherhood might have been different if he’d not had two girls. It’s a guilty thought, and he feels even guiltier when he reasons that it hadn’t been gender inhibiting his connection with Cate and Jayne; it had always been work. Work and a wife who filled every corner of the space left behind.

  He would be a much better parent if he started again tomorrow.

  As shadows stretch like ghosts across the backyard, Lynn calls them in for an early dinner. ‘Naomi’s going to stay at the hospital for another couple of hours,’ she says, and busies herself with some sort of fishes-and-loaves routine in the kitchen. Harvey had peered in the fridge at lunchtime and saw nothing bar odd-looking wet food in plastic containers. Now Lynn is making it obvious that a well-rounded meal lurked within.

  ‘Hit the showers, boys,’ Harvey says to Toby and Finn, who don’t appear to get the sporting reference. Then he quietly flicks on the TV in the lounge, hoping to catch the first bit of news he’s watched since landing in Shorton. A few weeks ago it was unheard of for Beam to miss a single bulletin or update. He watches it now as though it’s all happening in a parallel universe. Anti-austerity protests in Greece. A shopping-centre knife attack in Tokyo. Hurricanes somewhere. Bushfires. Blizzards. A thousand stories reduced to a dozen headlines. A cat that swims laps. So much shit.

  ‘It was nice to see you playing with your nephews today,’ Harvey’s mother says to him after dinner.

  ‘Yeah, it was good,’ he says, still wondering how a two-decade investment in world affairs had dissolved in the space of a few weeks. Had he ever really cared?

  Lynn pours them each a glass of red wine. ‘You seem content,’ she says. ‘Happier than when you arrived.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s surprised me, this visit,’ he says and then pauses, letting the words catch up to the recent equanimity he’d yet to fully inspect himself. ‘I’d actually been dreading it, but it’s been okay. Better than okay. And I didn’t expect Cate to like it here, but she’s a different kid. Loves working for Penny in that shop.’

  His mother taps her finger gingerly on Harvey’s hand. ‘Are you sure it’s not just a certain nurse who’s making you smile?’

  ‘God, Mum,’ Beam says, taking a quick gulp from his glass. ‘Can we not have this conversation?’

  Lynn laughs. ‘A holiday romance, Harvey. Who would have thought?’

  ‘Who would have thought I’d start up something while visiting my dying father?’

  ‘Oh, Harvey, no. Not at all. No-one is judging you about that. If anything, I’m impressed that you came back at all. I didn
’t think you would.’

  ‘Well,’ Beam says, ‘I’m not sure it’s made any real difference to anything, not as far as he’s concerned. If your ex-husband has had any deathbed epiphanies about his shortfalls as a parent, I haven’t been in the room to hear them.’

  Lynn sits back into her chair, breathes in deeply and wearily, as though suddenly rendered helpless by global tragedies out of her control.

  ‘What would you like him to say, Harvey? What do you need to hear?’

  Beam has no idea how to answer this. He is suddenly aware that any response will expose his own character flaws more than any of his father’s. Lionel Beam has made no obvious mistakes. There’s no clear path of destruction. Acts of omission, ambivalence, hitting one of his children with a little too much enjoyment and spite in an era when that made for a good anecdote—they don’t easily court apology or explanation. Emptiness, Harvey thinks, just vanishes into itself.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says finally. ‘There’s really nothing to say.’

  ‘Of course there is,’ Lynn says, now sitting up straight and drawing Beam’s gaze out of his empty glass. ‘But you won’t hear it from your father, Harvey. Believe me, I know. So how about you let me say some things that might help you a little—’

  ‘No,’ Harvey interjects, instinctively rejecting the whiff of pity. ‘I don’t need help, Mum.’ And instantly he feels not just one set of eyes upon him but figuratively those of his sisters too, a quorum of judgement and misunderstanding. Hates this more than anything. None of them know him.

  ‘Harvey,’ Lynn says, ‘the biggest mistake I ever made was letting Bryan live with your father. I was in a bad place, making bad decisions.’

  Harvey gets up from his chair, reaches for the wine bottle on the bench and pours them another glass. ‘Mum, you don’t need to say anything. It all happened a long time ago.’

  But Lynn is resolute and pushes her glass away to the centre of the small dining room table.

  ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘Look at me. I thought your father needed, I don’t know, something. I thought he was empty. Even though I hated him at the time, and I did, I really did, I felt sorry for him too. I know that sounds ridiculous, Harvey. I let him take Bryan, still thinking we’d see your brother every week, have an easy back-and-forth arrangement, people do that, but it was like Bryan disappeared. He became your father’s shadow. I don’t think he had the confidence to be anything else, not like you. So I lost a son and you all lost a brother. Bryan has no time for me now because your father had no time for me.’

  Beam knows he should say something. Can’t think what would not be the wrong thing. He’d never really missed Bryan. How did this get to be about his brother?

  ‘And yes, Harvey,’ Lynn continues, ‘it’s the same thing with you. Bryan ignores you because your father ignored you. He treated you very, very badly, Harvey, and I should have left him years earlier because of what he was doing to you. He saw things in you that made him angry. I mean, he was always angry about something, angry and frustrated with the world, but you were like the spare key on the kitchen hook. The thing that unlocked him. Easy to reach for.’

  Harvey looks up at his mother in surprise, blindsided by her uncharacteristic use of metaphor.

  ‘But why me?’ he says. Hates how that sounds, but there it is. ‘Was I that difficult a child?’

  ‘No,’ Lynn says, ‘but you expected more than the others. You expected more of Lionel and you probably still do. Expectations can feel like unfair demands to someone who just can’t deliver. Harvey, don’t blame yourself. I did the same thing until I finally gave up.’

  And then she says, her hand on Harvey’s, the air in the room a billion particles awaiting rearrangement … she says: ‘You were such a smart boy to fly away.’

  Harvey sees himself now, from outside himself and this room and this lifetime, a terrified young man on his first ever plane flight, descending over Sydney, the harbour suddenly blinding him with her shiny curves and angles and light. How could so much bigness not swallow all his smallness? He couldn’t wait, couldn’t wait.

  Harvey looks at his mother now as if a stranger just sat down in front of him. He has never heard his mother express regret. There was always veneer. Thick, busy veneer and fortnightly phone calls about the weather and his sisters, and generic vouchers at Christmas. It didn’t seem to him that she ever stopped long enough to understand the events that propelled them all forward, all in different directions, Harvey the furthest of all. They were her children, part of her story, but not necessarily four individual human beings.

  Suze had been the first person to really understand Harvey, and as far as he knew the only person.

  But now Lynn Beam is crying, gently weeping in front of her son, and Harvey is moved to stand behind her and hold on to her shoulders and kiss her on the top of her purple-streaked head.

  27

  Today, Beam says to himself, aware he’s feeling something close to happy and uncharacteristically still. Today I will have the conversation.

  He is sat in the kiosk at the front of the hospital, where the coffee is predictably appalling and scalding, as though brewed in a fire pit, and where a constant movement of people in various states of worry and anticipation and feigned concern inspire an odd sense of calm within him. Peace in the shared terror of getting by. Of just coping. Processing all the scary possibilities, drawing up new deals.

  Yes, today, he thinks, his mother’s words having given him a rare restful sleep (the truncated wine intake having helped too) and an almost worrying measure of comfort—You were such a smart boy to fly away—Harvey will tell his father, conscious or not, that he forgives him. That everything good and bad shapes us and takes us places and most of it all works out in the end. That if he hadn’t left Shorton, hadn’t raged against Lionel’s rejection and disappointment, hadn’t taken it all so personally, then he wouldn’t have met Suze, wouldn’t have had his daughters. He almost certainly wouldn’t have pursued a mostly successful career carved out of angry opinions.

  He will tell his father that parenting is hard. Really fucking hard. So many ill-matched expectations flying at each other like rabid bats in a storm. He gets that. And Harvey hasn’t made the best fist of it himself, although he does now intend to spend more time in the nets, getting it right.

  He will say that family isn’t everything. It is one thing. And maybe it works, and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe parts of it work. Maybe it’s just people thrown together and there’s no magic alchemy to it at all. DNA might mean everything and nothing. Love is arbitrary. It doesn’t exist outside of the decisions we make every day, the things we say. The things we don’t. Tiny things. Suspicion and expectation. The law of diminishing returns.

  I didn’t like you either, Harvey also wants to say, but probably won’t. He won’t. A deathbed is not the right place to indulge the satisfaction of the final word, he thinks, and is instantly relieved that this was the ethical card he randomly selected from today’s deck. For he had expected anger at this juncture, stunted boyhood anger, fighting words and parting shots and X-rays of his mangled heart. Far from closure, he had long wondered about busting things wide open if given the chance. A boy needs his father. Where were you? What was wrong with me?

  Harvey explores the bottom of his cardboard cup. Maybe it’s not forgiveness for his father that he’s feeling right now. Maybe it’s kindness, the base compassion one might feel for anyone pulled up short by imminent death.

  Maybe it’s regret.

  Maybe it’s nothing.

  Beam’s phone lights up with Suze’s name and he smiles to himself, for if anyone can offer him an accurate diagnosis at this moment, it’s her. She who knows him well enough to have wisely cut him loose.

  ‘Harvey, have you been trying to call me?’ Suze says in her signature breathless tone. Always running somewhere. ‘Because I think my phone is fucked. It rings people randomly but then I think other calls aren’t getting through.’

  ‘No,’
Harvey says.

  ‘Yes! It’s bizarre. Yesterday it rang my aunt, for God’s sake. I had to actually talk to her. It was like dental work.’

  ‘No, I mean I haven’t rung you, Suze.’

  ‘Oh. Well, why not?’ And then she laughs.

  ‘Sorry, I’ve been busy.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How’s the nurse?

  ‘For God’s sake, Suze.’ Jesus. ‘How’s the fireman?’

  ‘What fireman?’

  ‘There’s always a fireman.’

  ‘Right. Okay. Anyway, how is Cate, do you think? She called me yesterday—she called me, get that—and we had a really good talk. She does seem happy there at the moment. I think your sisters have been very good to her. Naomi anyway.’ This is unfair of Suze, Harvey thinks but without surprise. Penny’s been the one looking out for Cate in Shorton, but Suze favours Naomi and will always line up her evidence to support her first impression.

  ‘Yeah, she is happy. Seems she’s got a knack for retail.’

  ‘Good God. I’m bursting with pride.’

  ‘Suze, your own mother runs a shop.’

  ‘No, Harvey, she stands at a counter all day so that she doesn’t have to be home watching my father navigate the weather channel.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Beam says and wants to say more on this, he does, but he missed the window a long time ago to help Suze make sense of her family. He would listen, at various moments over weeks and years, to the abruptly finished phone calls, the meaning-bereft text messages, the forgotten birthdays, and he would look to Suze for cues on how to respond. There were no clear cues. She seemed okay with it all. Mad, yes, always mad, but somehow resigned to the distance between childhood and adulthood, a family of origin that held her at arm’s length. All those blind turns to avoid.