Afternoons with Harvey Beam

by Cox, Carrie;

  Harvey waits for him to say her name.

  Instead, Matt says loudly, ‘Here’s to Lionel Beam.’ And he lifts his beer above his head.

  Confused but compliant, Harvey does the same.

  Aping majesty, Matt continues: ‘May all of his earthly opinions reach him at his new address!’

  ‘No lost luggage,’ Beam pipes in.

  ‘May there be books!’

  Harvey adds: ‘That he’s already read.’

  ‘May there be non-stop FM radio talkback!’ Matt says.

  ‘Nothing but shit all day long.’

  ‘And may you, Harvey Beam,’ Matt continues, ‘find peace now. Find a little bonsai.’ And with this toast, Matt thrusts his beer extra skyward, causing it to shoot out foamy spray.

  ‘Wait,’ he adds with a comedic head-turn, ‘you’ve already found a piece now, Harvey. The nurse. Here’s to you, Don Juan!’

  Beam makes a laughing sound. He sees that Matt couldn’t possibly have seen Grace at the funeral today or is making a really bad joke. Finds himself beginning to say something, words that get lost as he moves around them, suddenly feeling the need to reinspect Matt’s beloved tiny trees. He starts mumbling about leaves and hobbies and brothers and is bending up and down to get a closer look at each shelf. Eventually, he hopes, he will arrive at what he needs to say.

  And then Harvey spots it. In the very corner of the lowest shelf in the shed, overwhelmed by larger plants and the layering of shadows, a small bonsai with a neat handwritten: Amazing Grace.

  ‘What’s that one about?’ Beam asks, heart in his cheeks, pointing at the little plant and then recoiling his arm to spin and point at something else, which happens to be a watering can requiring little explanation.

  ‘That one,’ says Matt, taking a long swig of his beer, ‘is the one that got away.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harvey says. ‘Yes.’ He looks to his beer bottle for the next line. Can barely focus.

  ‘And this?’ he says at last. ‘What do you call this particular home-brew, Matt?’

  ‘That’s just home-brew, Harvey.’

  ‘No special flavour?’

  ‘None that I can recall.’

  ‘Well, I think you’ve nailed it with this one, Matt. Really, really nailed it.’ Beam eyes the bottle at ridiculously close range lest it reveal a secret ingredient.

  ‘You okay, Harvey?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Beam says, and wipes the beer across his forehead as though just back from auxiliary firefighting duty. ‘It’s just been a big day.’

  ‘Sure has,’ Matt says. ‘Although it didn’t go as badly as I thought it would.’

  ‘Fuck, really?’

  Beam feels for the shape of his phone in his suit jacket, which is presently holding in an olfactory tsunami of sweat and terror.

  Matt says: ‘No, I really thought Naomi and Penny would go hammer and tongs today—it’s been building up again like the mother of all afternoon storms. But I think Bryan’s efforts took the wind out of that.’

  ‘Is he here?’ Harvey says.

  ‘I doubt it. Not sure I’d be opening him a beer if he did turn up.’

  ‘Look, Matt,’ Harvey says and looks at him squarely. ‘I really can’t thank you enough for what you did today. I mean, I just. I can’t, I didn’t … there’s … it was, I don’t know. You know. So many. What do you do?’

  Matt grins. ‘You should work in radio, Harvey.’

  Beam laughs. ‘I used to. Now I wouldn’t even get a job hosting late-night love song dedications.’

  The two men step out of the shed and walk slowly back to the house.

  Falling into step behind Matt, his head full of things unsaid, Harvey stares hard at his funeral shoes and wonders if he’s just failed the first and only test of friendship.

  40

  The hours lose shape after the sun sets. People go and people still come. No-one arriving now seems remotely post-funereal. Lynn makes an abortive attempt to put Naomi’s boys to sleep, an act unnoticed by Naomi who is sitting on a dark-corner divan with Penny. They are ensconced in a conversation that, from Harvey’s furtive glance, seems almost affectionate. It is, incredibly, the least strange thing he’s observed today.

  Conversations grow louder and Grace still hasn’t answered his text. Beam considers phoning her, the liquid-courage call that is always the best and worst idea, but soon enough finds himself sat at Naomi’s dining table with Suze, Cate and Jayne. Harvey signals to Suze that he might like a glass of that red she’s having, to which his ex-wife rolls her eyes and takes a deep sip.

  Cate looks up from her phone and says to no-one in particular, ‘You know what’s weird?’

  ‘Twins,’ replies Jayne.

  ‘Weirder,’ Cate says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Suze.

  ‘Tonight,’ Cate says, ‘was so much more fun than I thought it would be. It should have been depressing or lame, but it wasn’t. Is that bad?’

  ‘Evolution,’ says Harvey.

  His daughters reply in unison: ‘What?’

  ‘Humans developed laughter in the face of grief because we can’t process all that sadness,’ he says. ‘It’d kill us.’

  ‘That’s bullshit, Harvey,’ Suze says. ‘Is that bullshit?’

  ‘No, I think that’s been studied,’ he says. ‘It’s an academic theory.’

  ‘I’ll google it,’ Jayne says.

  ‘Oh,’ Harvey says, now feeling the need to show that the sadness of which he speaks is not his own. ‘Normal Google won’t have it, Jayne,’ he says. ‘Mere mortal Google won’t have it. You’ll have to access the Google reserved for academics.’

  Jayne looks at her sister quizzically. Beam’s tone has ventured into his comfort zone of the uncomfortable.

  ‘Someone academic came up with it,’ he continues. ‘Devoted an entire life to stumping up a case for it, referenced all sorts of boring arseholes and died an ironically miserable death celebrated by neighbourhood strangers with home-brew.’

  Suze looks at the ceiling.

  ‘Jesus, Dad,’ says Cate. ‘Issues.’

  ‘Shots fired,’ says Jayne.

  ‘Harvey, can we have a word?’ Suze says. She stands up, pushes in her chair and gestures to the next room or somewhere beyond.

  Beam follows but not before giving the girls a playful thumbs up.

  His route through the lounge room is happily interrupted by Finn’s demand for Uncle Harvey to take the corner shot in the FIFA contest being played out on Matt and Naomi’s large flat-screen. Beam obliges and somehow manages to switch off the Xbox and turn on the ducted vacuum with the push of two buttons.

  He finds Suze in one of the children’s darkened bedrooms, a child’s night light soft-focusing one corner.

  ‘Suze?’ he says, finding his way to the sentry in the opposite corner. ‘Are you angry with me? Should I stay in Shorton? Are we going to kiss for old times’ sake?’

  ‘You idiot,’ she says and slaps him on the shoulder. ‘I just wanted to know if Matt knows about Grace. What did he say?’

  ‘I don’t think he knows,’ Beam says. ‘I honestly don’t.’

  ‘Well,’ Suze says, brushing the shoulder she’s just slapped. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Beam says. ‘Call for back-up?’

  ‘Harvey.’

  ‘I don’t know, Suze. It’ll be okay.’

  Even in the semi-dark, his ex-wife finds something exasperating to look at directly above her. ‘Harvey,’ she says finally, ‘you know not everything takes care of itself. You can’t run away from everything.’

  Beam thinks he doesn’t know this at all; is about to say so when the room lights up out of his jacket pocket.

  Beam pulls out his phone, sees Grace’s name. He kisses Suze on the cheek and calls a taxi.

  41

  ON AIR

  ‘A wise man once said, or quite possibly a woman—in fact, I’d pay good money on it being a woman—that betrayal is its own punishment. If that’
s true, then we should all get off Wayne Carey’s case now because the size and scope of that man’s betrayal should buy him a lifetime in purgatory. Of course that’s not me saying that, listeners—let he who is without sin and all that—but that’s what you would have read in the weekend’s papers. That’s certainly what I read all weekend, ingesting it all in one hit like a bad airport novel. Speaking of bad airport novels, Kelly, have we got a prize for Caller of the Morning? We neglected to give one away yesterday and I haven’t heard the end of it.’

  Kelly, a commerce graduate who’s lost her way, doesn’t look up from her desk.

  ‘Thanks, Kelly. Fantastic concert tickets coming up for the best call.’

  Kelly looks incredulously through the glass, arms upturned: What concert tickets?

  ‘But back to Wayne Carey. King Carey. Football royalty. On the field he can do no wrong and in this country that counts for a lot, if not everything. But according to reports that are now widely confirmed, the King is now at odds with his own club due to an indiscretion at a recent social gathering. That’s how the ABC is describing this tawdry situation, folks, but I can put a finer point on it. Wayne Carey had an affair with his teammate’s missus. The missus. Of his teammate. In the very same act, he ultimately betrayed his own wife in a very public and humiliating way. Folks, we could talk all morning about what sort of guy does this to his wife, about the long-term repercussions of a very short-term act. And I’m happy to take those calls. I’m always happy to take your calls. But I’m also very keen to explore the other dimension to this and in many ways it’s the part that enrages us most, whether or not we care to admit it. It’s what I’m calling the no-go zone. It’s that place not bounded by contracts or rules; nothing is written down about the no-go zone. It’s shaped by human expectations, dangerously implicit and often only ratified after the zone has been breached.’

  Beam looks over at Kelly, who is reading the Sydney Morning Herald with her feet on the desk.

  ‘Wayne Carey didn’t just have adulterous sex with anyone. He had it with his teammate’s wife. That’s a no-go zone. We’ve called it. Polite society has called it. And it lifts the act from linear betrayal to something far more complicated and socially unforgivable. Or does it? Are we only having this discussion because the centrepiece is Wayne Carey? Maybe Wayne Carey doesn’t think the no-go zone applies to him because he’s Wayne Carey? Maybe elite sport occupies a rarefied atmosphere that exists beyond normal society?’

  Beam spins the biro at his fingertips. Today’s topic hits on everything. God he loves this job. ‘Maybe,’ he posits, setting up his call to arms, ‘King Carey and Anthony Stevens will be able to sort this out over a little kick-to-kick?’

  He looks through the glass at his utterly disengaged producer just as the phones light up and her arms flail across the desk, causing an eruption of broadsheet chaos.

  It’s going to be a magic morning, Beam thinks. A huge ratings week. Thank you Wayne Carey and your kingly dick.

  And it is. It’s talkback gold, bar a couple of suitably twisted ex-wives who argue vehemently that all zones that aren’t the home-zone are no-go zones. After the last couple of dry, politics-heavy days of talk, Beam knows the suits on level eight are being reminded today of his power to get people talking.

  He hears a litany of betrayal yarns, some choked out in rage, others eked through sniffly recollections. Always the common denominator is a betrayal made infinitely more painful by the choice of target; by the breaking of a rule that shouldn’t have to be written down. Some are clear-cut—the guy who hooks up with his best mate’s ex-wife, the woman who sleeps with her sister’s husband—yet others are beautifully divisive dinner-party fodder, panoplies of ethical conundrums and moral ambiguities. It’s sad and dark and wonderful.

  Bookending it all are two calls from self-confessed breachers of no-go zones, both women, both now married to their best friend’s ex-husbands, who argue that the zone is redundant if permission from the otherwise aggrieved third party is granted.

  ‘Indeed,’ Harvey says, rounding out three hours of talkback manna that felt like twenty wild minutes, ‘it’s generally easier to ask for permission than forgiveness. But how many of us would grant it?’

  42

  Harvey stands at Grace’s unopened front door, abruptly weary and uncertain. He experiences an unbidden rush of self-awareness—it’s been happening a lot lately—that merely serves to illuminate how confused he is. Having never coveted clarity, Beam is underwhelmed by its staccato arrival in middle age.

  He’s about to knock when the door opens and Grace stands before him. She is wearing a thin white dress, no shoes, her hair splayed around her shoulders. Oh God, Beam thinks. He instinctively bends down to remove a shoe because his dick is getting very hard, very quickly. For fuck’s sake, Harvey.

  In the cab he had prepared himself for a night of talking, for the revelations about Grace’s marriage to Matt that she’d always glossed over. For hours about sliding doors and missed opportunities, regret and resolve. For an inevitable ending.

  But Grace only wants Beam, for now at least, to make love to her. She tells him this as she roughly takes Harvey’s hand and leads him along the dark hallway to her bedroom. The bed is unmade, awash with sheets and cushions, and Grace climbs into the middle of it and waits for Harvey to remove a suit that might as well be a straitjacket secured with magician’s padlocks so frenzied are his movements to escape it.

  Not for the first time, perhaps for the thirtieth or fortieth, Beam finds himself feeling utterly grateful and unworthy of this woman’s body. Of her unlikely presence in his life.

  He’s grateful too that he hadn’t had the conversation with Matt tonight that might stop all this. To hell with courage.

  If this is the last time he gets to make love to Grace, Beam is going to ensure its preservation in both their memories. He is acutely present, slow and deliberate, addressing every contour, every hollow, every part of her that might never have been kissed. He returns to her mouth again and again, makes it about them, about her. When he is deepest, Beam holds himself deathly still inside her, rejecting every compulsion to rush. He grasps the small of her back as she comes and tells Grace he loves her over and over.

  Everything that is wrong with the world can be fixed, he thinks.

  In the morning, Beam awakes to Grace’s fingers playing with the hairs on his chest, disappointingly grey and wiry in the unforgiving early sunlight.

  ‘You know what’s weird, Harvey,’ she says at last.

  Beam improves his arm’s cradling of Grace’s head, looks up at the ceiling fan and smiles to himself. ‘Twins?’

  Grace laughs loudly and Harvey inwardly thanks his funny daughters. An image of Suze snaps into his vision and he blinks to flick the channel.

  Finally Grace says, ‘No, what’s weird is that you came back here for closure, but I’m the one who found it.’

  And Beam nods, though he isn’t entirely sure why.

  43

  Beam takes the aisle seat and realises he’s on the wrong side of the plane to wave goodbye. He hopes someone on the other side makes sufficient hand movements in one of the tiny windows to give his family something to aim for.

  It had been an overly long morning of farewells at any rate—a two-hour flight delay that neither Penny nor Naomi was going to yield to. Little Finn had become lost in the airport at some point and Harvey had made increasingly frantic checks of the men’s toilets before the boy reappeared holding a stuffed kangaroo and the hand of an elderly Chinese woman.

  ‘Three is so much harder than two,’ Naomi had said to the woman by way of thanks.

  Penny had glanced at Harvey and rolled her eyes. While the sisters had seemed to make a semblance of peace at Lionel’s funeral, they had quickly settled back into the bristly circling game that is their discomfort zone. To fully unpick the hurts of the past would require a laying down of arms that neither woman seemed to have the energy for.

  Harvey had lis
tened to both sides of their stories in recent months, countless times in myriad settings, sober and drunk, tearful and indifferent. He’d entered an echo chamber long vacated by their mother. And he believed both his sisters, in fact. Each case would win at trial. And he had rediscovered how fiercely he admired their strength to simply stay here. Maybe you had to stay angry to hold on.

  Bryan had not come to the airport, not that Harvey had either expected or wanted him to. ‘He sends his best wishes,’ Penny had said sincerely. And they had all laughed uproariously as if it might be true.

  Beam had said goodbye to his mother at Naomi’s that morning. Lynn hated airports—the noise of the planes could set her tinnitus off for days. She gave Harvey a long hug and told him to come home sooner next time. ‘I won’t live forever,’ she’d said. Patted his stomach and told him to lay off the wine for a while.

  ‘Why don’t you come and visit me, Mum?’ Harvey had said. ‘I’ve got a spare room and you’d love it. You’d love Sydney. I could take a few days off.’

  ‘Well,’ Lynn had said, nervously eyeing the tiles between their feet. ‘You know the terrorism worries me. There’s no need to keep building all those mosques. I worry about you crossing that bridge too. I sit here and I worry about it every single day.’

  Harvey thought this seemed highly unlikely.

  ‘But let’s wait until you get a job,’ she’d said, ‘and we’ll talk about it then.’

  A job.

  Beam knew his mother would never come to Sydney. He’d have to come back here to see her again—and he would. The idea no longer sat in the dark part of his brain that couldn’t make a decision.

  Plus Cate was staying here for now. Beam had not been able to talk her out of it, not that he’d tried hard. He could see what appealed to her about the idea—the lure of a fresh canvas. Reinvention. Roll again. She was not so different to him.

  ‘You’ll get bored,’ he’d said to her the night before. ‘You’ll miss your mum and your sister.’