‘Not the best idea I’ve had lately,’ Penny says, passing two Panadol tabs across the kitchen bench to Harvey. ‘Getting smashed on a weeknight. Today is going to hurt like a bastard.’
Beam declines the tablets, has always quietly regarded a hangover as a thing unworthy of mercy, and honestly, as he stands here now in the chaos of Penny’s breakfast rush, he doesn’t actually feel that bad. God knows he’s felt much worse.
‘I’m alright,’ he says. ‘Seasoned professional.’
Beam helps get Penny’s boys sorted for day care, which is to say that he ties a pair of shoelaces and finds a missing hat under a bed, while domesticity flings Penny about the house like a trained dancer. Harvey is enjoying this, being on the periphery of things, a step removed from primary responsibility but still close enough to observe the bewitching alchemy of family life. The endless race to stand still.
Penny drops the boys at their centre and Beam makes a mental note to add its title, ‘Jumping Jolly Bears’, to his long private list of Inane Childcare Centre Names, the most recent additions being ‘Cuddlewumps’, ‘Tippy Tots’, ‘Dashing Ducks’ and ‘Beautiful Tiny Minds’. How he yearns to meet the industry rogue who one day calls his centre ‘Lunch Nap Home’.
They drive over the bridge to the main shopping centre, which houses Penny’s store. Beam stands outside the entrance as his sister opens up and gets things ready for her singular staff member, a level-headed teenage girl who Penny says has risen admirably to the challenge of managing Just The Thing on her own each morning while Penny visits their father.
Harvey stands back and regards what his sister has created here, a lovingly curated small business in a fickle regional economy, and he is at once in awe and envious. Beam has never created anything significant; can’t manage money or people for the life of him.
She has always done this, he thinks, letting his mind wander back to the endless art shows and concerts and second-hand stalls arranged by Penny in the Beam rumpus room when they were young. Everything had been so well organised and expertly presented, tickets prepared for parents and the neighbours, exact starting times, price tags, two-for-one deals. And then Naomi and Harvey would inevitably bowl in and spoil things, not to be mean of course, not necessarily, but simply because that was their thing, their only thing, to be funny and mocking.
And Bryan. Where had Bryan been when all this was going on?
Beam’s thoughts are interrupted by a tap on the shoulder and he twists around to see a familiar face, at least a face that was once very familiar: Hugh Traynor, his first boss at Shorton Radio. More latterly, about fifteen years ago, Hugh had broken off his engagement with Naomi and sent Beam’s youngest sister running into the ample arms of her now husband, a man Harvey inwardly refers to as ‘Impressionism’ because he knows absolutely nothing about him.
‘God, Beam,’ Hugh says. ‘What are you doing here? Someone died?’
Traynor is twice the man he used to be, Harvey notes, self-consciously patting his own insistent paunch. The grey sideburns—sideburns, Traynor, really?—and trademark gold chain advertise a man who once had reason to strut. Now a strut might be physiologically impossible.
‘Ah, well, not quite,’ Beam says. ‘But my father is very sick, so … yeah.’
Traynor grins, looking more like an audience member welcoming a fresh plot twist than someone who just put their foot in it. ‘Well, how long are you here for?’ he says. ‘I bet the station wouldn’t give you long. Can’t let the ratings slide in the Sydney game. We’re still not even counting them here, ha!’
‘Actually I’ve got extended leave so I’m just going to play it as it goes.’
‘Really? How’s your sister?’
‘Which one?’
‘The nutter.’
‘I’m still going to need more clues, Hugh.’
And Hugh Traynor explodes with mirth and slaps Harvey on the back like an old rug with a stick.
The former colleagues exchange a few rib-poking observations about time’s treatment of their young men’s bodies, about the defiant survival of radio in the face of unthinkable technology and, finally, and perhaps most honestly, about the weather.
Then Hugh’s face opens up like an unexpected letter. ‘Mate, why don’t you do a shift while you’re here? Old times’. Shorton’s finest export returns to the microphone that launched his stellar career. Seriously, if you’re keen, let’s do it. But give me a few days to promo it first.’
‘I don’t think so, Hugh,’ Beam answers, ‘but thanks. This trip is really about family.’
‘And that cannot end well,’ Traynor laughs. ‘When you need a sanity break, call me. Shorton would love to hear you again, rattle some cages, groove the move.’
What the what?
Hugh rifles through his wallet for a business card and has an absurdly long glance at it—as though he hasn’t held one for years—before handing it over.
Beam thanks his old boss, tells him to look him up if he’s ever in Sydney, and watches him walk away. Feels a little sorry for the guy—What is he even doing in a shopping centre at 8.30am on a weekday?—but isn’t entirely sure he’s entitled to bestow pity on a man whose career hasn’t moved a single place on the board in almost twenty years. Better the steady ride, even the spectacular crash, than the cowardly withering, Beam thinks.
And he knows he has to call Trudi Rice. But first he will visit his father.
Penny drives slowly to Charles Addison. So slowly Beam can’t stand it. He breathes the pace of Sydney these days—even in gridlock, things still feel like they’re moving—and he hates this apathetic dawdling. The long slow shrug of small-town life. He would offer to drive if it didn’t risk causing a hungover Penny any offence.
‘Was that Hugh Traynor you were talking to?’ she says, slowing down for a traffic light that still has a decent stab of orange in it.
‘It was indeed,’ Beam says. ‘He hasn’t changed a bit. Apart from losing most of his hair and getting fat and forgetting how to dress.’
Penny nods, checks both mirrors, nods again. Time stands still. ‘I see him all the time. He comes into the shop, loves a chat.’
‘Really? What does he talk about? Does he ask about me?’ Beam, you dick.
‘Is there any other topic?’ Penny says. ‘No, Princess. We talk about local stuff, sometimes about Naomi.’
‘Bit late now to be hung up on her,’ Beam says. Even though he’d left Shorton by the time Hugh left Naomi, Harvey knew his youngest sister had been utterly devastated by the event, her grief inspiring a local caterwaul of outrage and sympathy.
But Penny says, ‘He’s not hung up on her. People still judge him for hurting “innocent little” Naomi,’ Penny makes the marks in the air, hands briefly off the wheel, ‘and he feels the wrath of that in this town. I think he feels I’m a safe harbour, like we both know the real Naomi. Everything isn’t always black and white. There was fault on both sides.’
‘God, it was forever ago, Penny.’
Harvey looks purposefully out the car window, willing his eyes to focus on something familiar. He pictures Penny and Hugh slouched across the gift store counter, bitching about Naomi to their mutual satisfaction. Then he thinks about a book he finished reading not long ago, about a band of Australian POWs stuck on the Thai–Burma Railway in WWII, laying their own deaths stake by stake, peg by peg, flogged and starved by Japanese overlords, their only salvation, the one thing that saved some of them but not nearly enough of them, being solidarity. Mateship. That most cloying of clichés, but maybe so because it’s true. Brothers in arms.
And Beam thinks to himself: there is no mateship among sisters. No implicit loyalty. Only love and destruction.
Bryan is conspicuously absent when Penny and Beam walk into their father’s hospital room, and soon Penny is too, excusing herself to get some restorative coffee from the cafe.
All too quickly it’s just Harvey and his sick father again, this time alone, in a pale room wafting with dust motes, a bed, a chair, a tall table of books. And it is just as Beam had pictured things and also nothing like he might have prepared himself for.
For he has, if he’s honest, imagined such scenes in the odd reflective moment. Or because a saccharine movie scene led him there. He’s imagined deathbed conversations with his father, not in any morbid literal sense but mostly out of curiosity. Would there be, Beam has wondered over the years, some utterances of regret? Explanation? Justification? Latent frightened softness that is almost like love? When there is nowhere left to hide, and no reason to, would there be something other than still more wilful indifference?
Lionel Beam is sleeping, his face turned to the sunny window, eyelids pitched in two dark grottos. Harvey feels somehow guilty just looking at him like this, as though the act should require permission of sorts. And then he realises that this strangeness is because he has never actually viewed his father sleeping. Had there ever been an opportunity? Had he seen his father do anything bar read books and walk out doors?
Harvey shifts his gaze to the books on the side table. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation, Breaking the Mirror of Heaven: The Conspiracy to Suppress the Voice of Ancient Egypt.
Jesus Christ, Beam thinks. Surely a Max Walker could do no harm at this point.
He realises these and the many other books piled around them have likely been placed here by Bryan, taken from his own or their father’s bookshelves, for the two men shared—apparently—a reverence for forgotten worlds and buried civilisations. Ancient history. Harvey is not without his own interest in the past but nothing before people invented cars and picked up the pace a little.
A few years ago Beam had found his father’s PhD dissertation, the thing that became for Lynn Beam a rival worse than any mistress, and which finally led her to end their marriage. It wasn’t just the writing of it, the ceaseless days of single-minded research, the thump-thumping of books on the office floor at night, the ignorance of bedtimes and birthdays, years and years of that, but later the book tours, the symposiums, the guest lectures and, inevitably, but unforgivably to Lynn, talk of the next book. Lionel Beam and his big historic brain had walked into a world that was so removed from his old one, and so much more welcoming and sensible, that his own personal history, in the face of millennia of far more significant history, could simply no longer be accommodated. At least, that was Lynn’s hypothesis and also her final conclusion based on the available evidence.
Harvey had not merely stumbled across this digital tome; rather he had gone looking for it, scouring academic sites for one that he didn’t have to join and subscribe to, even though that would have been a far less embarrassing online footprint than his recent porn activity.
And he had struggled admirably through this thing, something about the Edwardian Reformation of the 1500s and its shaping of the Church of England, looking for … what? Beam still isn’t sure but it probably smells like insight. Clues to a closed mind. But what he actually learned from that tedious few days of reading and re-reading was frankly nothing about his father and rather a great deal about the essence of academia itself: criticism. The art, the apparent measured joy, in picking holes in every piece of work that doesn’t support one’s own and applauding those few that do.
So maybe it was about his father.
The door opens abruptly behind Beam and a woman walks in and he sees it’s not Penny returned but a nurse. A nurse with a ponytail and a nose that he knows.