by Carrie Cox
On his way out, Beam encounters Matt, arms and cheeks covered in something grease-like and carrying a piece of machinery that may or may not belong in a car.
‘Hey,’ Matt says. ‘I hear you went on a date.’
‘Something like that,’ Harvey laughs.
‘I’ve got room in there for an extra shelf if you need it.’
Harvey laughs and by the time he reaches the hospital car park he has worked out what Matt meant.
The hospital is much quieter today than during the week, even if the patients are no less sick. Beam has a coffee in the foyer cafe and drafts ten or more text messages in his head for Grace before angrily ruing the absurd regression of modern communication. He calls her.
‘I’m sorry I’m only getting back to you now,’ he says when she answers. ‘My daughter arrived here yesterday and it’s been sort of chaotic ever since. Everyone wants a piece of her.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Grace says. ‘It’s absolutely fine. I was just … I thought … well, I start at five today and so I thought maybe you’d like to get some lunch. Something that isn’t a pie from the hospital cafe.’
‘Grace,’ he says, ‘If you don’t love those pies then I don’t think we have anything more to discuss.’
Grace laughs. How quickly he has learned to love the sound, its instinctive propulsion from a generous place.
‘Seriously?’ Beam says. ‘A meal that can also stop a car from rolling backwards? That’s all kinds of genius.’
He pledges to pick up Grace at midday and have a think about a lunch venue in the meantime. And even though it’s an even more casual arrangement than their first meal, it somehow feels less so, as though a more considered investment of time has been brokered. A second viewing of a potential property.
Harvey wanders to his father’s ward and finds Penny manning bedside. The room is strewn with shadows. Their father appears to be awake and Penny is reading something to him, her face close to his ear.
She spies Harvey, puts her book down, says, ‘Dad, look. It’s Harvey here to see you.’
Lionel Beam doesn’t respond, and Harvey slides carefully into the chair opposite Penny’s.
‘Hello, Dad. It’s good to see you awake.’
Lionel blinks at his son.
Penny smiles uncertainly at Harvey.
Their father blinks again, his white eyelashes seeming to get enmeshed in the slow gesture.
‘Can he speak?’ Harvey says from the corner of his mouth, looking up at Penny. He imagines the process of dying as losing something new and precious each day without warning or fanfare. One withered leaf after another.
‘Of course he can,’ she says.
Oh.
Harvey puts his hand on the side of the bed, fingers the heavy sheet.
‘Dad,’ he says, and he’s going to try harder this time. This time with feeling. ‘I’m really sorry to see you so sick. I know you must be hating this.’
And Lionel turns his head slightly, away from Harvey and towards Penny but his gaze rests somewhere between the two of them.
‘Where …?’ he says with great effort. ‘Where is Bryan?’
20
Many things diminish with age, while others—hair in the ears, odd spooling splotches of disgruntled skin on the forearm, midweek funerals, newspaper consumption, weather observations—flourish without watering. Things recede and new things trickle into the cracks, and it all happens so slowly, when no-one is paying attention.
For Beam, what has gone and what has replaced it are, in turn, surprise and inevitability. Nothing surprises him anymore, or at least very little. Most events, the things that might have once elicited an inner Wow, I didn’t see that coming, seem increasingly predetermined; certain and unalterable. What was once a grudging acceptance of inevitable change, and before that a wilful determination to change everything, is now just acceptance on its own. Of course governments must lose in order to win again. Of course cancer will visit people close to us. Of course fortunes shift, love dies, humans self-destruct.
The burgeoning seniors travel industry, Harvey has thought of late, is driven by people unashamedly curious, sometimes desperate, to see if they can still be surprised by something, anything, in this world.
And so it is that Beam finds himself laid out and naked in Grace Hamilton’s bedroom, her body reclined breathily on his outstretched arm, the ceiling fan tick-ticking overhead, and all around him the ancient scent of something completely unexpected.
He is deliriously, gratefully, surprised.
Of course Harvey had thought about having sex with Grace; what it might be like, how it might be possible. It had first occurred to him at forty thousand feet. He had imagined back then, and again in his father’s hospital room and again in the Thai restaurant and in the many hours between, what it might be like to hold a woman so lovely, so unknown. He had imagined it and incredibly, thanks in no small part to their shared hatred of courting and awkward anticipation and Grace’s relatively bare fridge and a tour of her apartment that finished at the bedroom, it had happened.
Just now. On this bed. In this room. To him.
The wondrous surprise of it all.
Beam knows that whatever he is about to say now will somehow diminish what has just occurred. What post-coital comment has any hope of a safe landing? But he wants to try anyway, to say something that will stretch a perfect moment to the limit of its expansion.
‘Grace,’ he says finally. ‘Thank you so much.’
And she laughs. Laughs so hard the bed shakes.
‘Harvey, you’re so very welcome.’
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean that to sound … I just mean … that was so lovely, Grace. So incredibly good, and I—’
‘Good?’
‘Well, I can only speak for my own performance,’ he says, pulling up the bedsheet to cover his middle.
And she laughs again.
‘It was rather good,’ Grace says.
‘Mind you,’ Harvey reasons, turning now to face her and gently guiding a skein of loose hair behind her ear. ‘I would have been happy with bad sex. I would have been happy with a lame kiss.’
‘Really?’ she says.
‘God, yes, Grace. You have no idea.’
‘Well, that’s very sweet,’ she says, running her fingers along the hairs of his forearm. ‘You’re a very sweet man, Harvey Beam.’
‘That case has never been made before, Grace. I don’t think you’ll get a lot of support on that front.’
‘Well,’ she says. ‘I think there is something there. I can see how distant your father is. How difficult Bryan is making things for you, for everyone. Yet there you are at the hospital every day, doing the right thing.’
Grace prods with her finger at a spot close to Harvey’s heart. ‘There is goodness in there,’ she says. ‘Sweetness.’
He kisses her. Delights again in the surprise of her mouth. The shape of her.
‘Some people,’ he says, ‘think doing the right thing counts for nothing if you don’t really feel it.’
‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘Maybe.’
Because, Beam thinks, he really doesn’t feel anything when he looks at his father each day. There is pity, of course, but it’s of the sort he’d feel for any person rendered shell-like by cancer. Sometimes there is anger, but it’s weak and it’s old, the smoky residue of something once much hotter and more dangerous.
He had wanted to feel something bigger, of course. He had wanted to fly to Shorton and walk into that hospital room and be surprised at how he felt. It was that curiosity, that hope, that had got him on the plane. Surely the anger and the love and the disappointment and the joy and the terror that spins at the core of a family can be summoned at any age; wrest us back into our bodies, awaken old bones.
But he had felt nothing. Nothing unsurprising, until now.
Until Grace.
21
ON AIR
‘It’s bloody hot and the air-con’s cracked it but
that’s not how I know I’m back in Shorton, folks.’ Breathe. Pause. ‘No, I know I’m back home again because the ute that I followed into the station this morning had spotties that could throw shadows onto the moon. I know I’m back home again because there’s a bloke on the main drag peddling pies out the back of his van instead of drugs. And I know I’m back home again because this is the same chair I sat in twenty years ago—pause—and it’s still broken.’
Beam flicks up the sound on the station jingle, checks the time, cues his first tune (‘Run To Paradise’ for old times’ sake) and forward-promotes the morning’s talkback topic: What the hell happened to Shorton Beach? It’s exhilarating to be working his old console—the very same panel with the addition of a new computer screen that doesn’t appear to be connected to anything—and he’s quietly surprised that it is coming back to him so readily, as though the information has been stored in his fingers all this time and he just has to keep them moving.
Hugh Traynor knocks on the glass, gives Beam the two thumbs up. The room behind him, crammed with empty desks and boxes, is full of sunlight—it bores through the cracks in this fibrous building, threatening to bust it wide open—and for a minute things are exactly as Beam remembers them: sunny, simple, safe. He’d wanted none of these things in 1994. Today they seem far less threatening.
‘And that was the Choirboys,’ he says when the song is over, brushing his hand smoothly down the left volume column as though shushing an orchestra. ‘Who were anything but in their day. It’s two minutes to news time and after the news I want to hear from you about something that I, well, quite rudely discovered upon flying back home to Shorton this week.’ Pause. Breathe. ‘My old beach, your old beach, is gone. Come on, you remember it, Shortonites? That long wide strip of glorious sand folding under the Pacific Ocean? Those big coconut trees lining the road—did you ever run up the side of one of those and score a coconut and then wonder what the hell to do with it? Do you remember the little kiosk with the ice-creams and the slushies and do you remember the old surf club? There were some ripper parties held in that lunk of a building. To me, and perhaps you, Shorton Beach holds many of the childhood memories that I still retain in this ageing brain and guess what? It’s gone. Replaced by, God, a marina. Well, let me tell you, that was a shock, and maybe some of you are still processing the shock of this development actually having gone from a bad idea to a real thing. An ugly thing. Maybe you like it? Maybe you were the one who asked for it? Maybe you thought you wanted it but now secretly miss what once was? Look, I’m not an immediate fan but I’m happy to be convinced otherwise. I want to hear from all of you. 4489 2000 with your calls please or text me on 0418 700 600 or join the conversation on our Facebook page.’
Hugh knocks on the glass, waves his arms.
‘Sorry, no Facebook yet, folks. We’re going to wait a little longer to see if this whole social media lark has legs. So give me a call. Here’s the news.’
Like a hopeful junkie, Beam is thrilled to strike a laden vein. The calls come in quickly, too quickly for the station receptionist, who seems perturbed at this sudden lining up of her activity levels with her job description. The texts come in too (including this one from Grace: You are nailing it, Harvey xx) and Beam juggles it all masterfully and with a smile on his face that would be impossible to subdue at this point. Shortonites have far more opinions on the marina than there are boats inside it and they are diverse and sometimes measured and sometimes articulate and occasionally incomprehensible, but they are each earnest and true, and they fill the airspace with all that makes a small town feel bigger than itself.
And it is great radio. Trudi Rice is wrong, Harvey thinks as he winds up the three-hour show and crosses to the news. He is a man still making connections and he is happy within himself. At this moment he’s never been fucking happier.
22
‘Killer’ Rhodes is Harvey’s best mate this week. It’s not easy making friendships stick when loyalties shift and fray every lunchtime on the school oval, but Killer seems as keen as Harvey is to take this ragged pairing beyond the cricket pitch. They both barrack for the Swans, are stingy with their favourite tombowlers, and share a fervent comic dislike of their year-five teacher, an American woman called Mrs Sass (Harvey prefers the Aussie pronunciation).
It’s a blowy Friday afternoon and Harvey orchestrates a stilted conversation between his mother and Killer’s in the schoolyard, the goal being to have his mate over for a play. As Killer lives on a farm out of town, it isn’t a simple matter of riding a bike over to Harvey’s. The two mothers swap addresses, pick-up times and polite discussion while nearby Harvey and Killer kick each other’s feet as if to stub out their mounting excitement.
It’s a great afternoon and Harvey is secretly thrilled at the spectacle he is providing for his sisters: a kid at their house who’s not from the neighbourhood. Harvey has a real friend. Penny and Naomi have each other, Bryan has his books and his microscope, now Harvey has something too. Something even better.
Killer happily launches himself into the neighbourhood cricket game, an almost daily event held in a patch of cleared bush behind Harvey’s house. Anywhere from four to twenty kids descend upon the parched turf each afternoon, a silver bin at one end, someone’s shoe at the other, and it’s an unspoken race to see who will score the first six or hit a passing car.
Killer is an average batsman but a gun bowler with the dramatic crease-marking cred to match. Harvey watches him bowl a near-perfect yorker with a pride that collects around his neck and rises up to his cheeks, turning them red. The kids in his street look on in quiet admiration. It’s the best day, and it’s still going.
When the game starts to dissipate—the last available ball is lost in the long grass—Harvey suggests a bike ride and Killer is keen. Harvey tells his friend to use Bryan’s bike. In his best-day excitement, Harvey forgets—just doesn’t even think of it—his father’s rule about not riding beyond the end of the block where the Beams’ street meets a busier road. The two boys ride another two blocks, crisscrossing each other’s paths, one-wheeling it up kerbs and yelling manly jibes at the darkening sky.
Harvey doesn’t see his father’s car pass them by.
It’s the best day.
Out of breath yet somehow still full of energy, Killer and Harvey slide their bikes into the courtyard at the back of the Beam house. Immediately his mother exits the rear screen door and softly, without looking squarely at either boy, tells Harvey that his father wants him inside.
It must be after five, Harvey realises. The best day has flown by, almost gone.
Killer stays behind with Harvey’s mum, starts prising an imaginary stone out of his wheel tread. Harvey walks through the screen door. And now, now he remembers the rule and his head turns inside out and his gut tightens and his jaw locks and he knows what’s coming, knows what’s coming, knows what’s coming.
Lionel Beam is standing at the end of his bed, leather belt in hand, steel weight swinging by his trouser leg.
‘You know the rule about where to ride,’ Harvey’s father says. ‘Get on the bed.’
Harvey stands, can’t move. Lionel pushes him down, the back of his hand on Harvey’s head.
Harvey doesn’t scream this time, doesn’t say stop, doesn’t reach his hands behind him, which only makes Lionel go harder. The pain ricochets through his back, down his legs, like being burnt, like stepping on coals and then falling into the campfire. Twenty times. Thirty times. One rule to remember. One friend. His face is jammed tight into the mattress, wet and on fire.
And all Harvey thinks this time is Killer … Killer … Killer. Don’t hear this.
When it is finally over, night has descended and his friend has gone. Harvey’s mother is stirring something on the stove. His father tells him to fetch a beer. There are no beginnings or endings to anything, anywhere in the world.
He goes to sleep on his stomach that night, no sheet. His skin is still alight. His brain is banging inside his skull.
He wonders what Killer heard, what he will tell the other kids. What he heard, what he heard.
Bryan is in the bed opposite Harvey. He says nothing, still seething no doubt about his bike’s role in the afternoon’s activities.
Through the wall Harvey can hear his father remove the cap off another beer.
At last, well after all the lights in the house are off and doors to bedrooms closed, he goes to sleep by trying to think about something good. He thinks about those two blocks beyond the end of his street.
23
Frazzled parents refer to the witching hour, that passage at the end of the day when time bends upon itself, children grow horns, boiling pots spill over, and a glass of wine just doesn’t seem to cut it. Suze would often rail against Harvey about the witching hour he’d just missed, again, and he was never sympathetic enough because he knew he couldn’t make it better. Couldn’t fix it.
Besides, Beam has long had a witching hour of his own. Between five and six o’clock each day, give or take half an hour, Harvey Beam’s skin seems to crawl. He can’t settle, can’t focus, can’t finish a conversation, doesn’t know how he’ll get through the long night, how anyone gets through anything, and he aches for a drink to wash it all away.
It took him years to make the connection between his afternoon meltdowns and the hour his father used to get home from work.
Harvey’s best bet these days—and he’s getting better at it, a rare display of midlife progress—is to crowd out the witching hour with distractions. To outrun it; trick it into disappearing. A busy train carriage, a harried walk through Centennial Park, a beer with a colleague at the Strawberry Hills Hotel. Just don’t be sitting alone with your thoughts and a watch.
Today he’s crowding it out in the nicest of ways, sitting with his eldest daughter on the edge of a blunted pier overlooking Shorton River. The evening air is fresh and mild, the shorebirds are steadily drifting back to their nests in the mangroves, and the tide seems to be turning.
