13

Penny drops Beam at Naomi’s place, his mother’s new home, and Naomi rushes past him out the front door, en route for her shift at the hospital.

Harvey wanders down the short hallway to the dining room where he finds Lynn Beam feeding Naomi’s youngest something that the child wants no part of.

‘Harvey,’ she sings, and wraps him in an embrace that is warmer and less awkward than he might have expected.

‘Look, Jamie,’ she says to her grandson, ‘this is my little boy.’

‘Pencil,’ says Jamie, and Lynn laughs.

‘Looks like that one’s stuck,’ she says.

Harvey wipes his hands on his sides. It’s hot in here. ‘You look great, Mum.’

‘I do not.’

‘You do.’

And she does. His mother looks good for her age, if a little too trusting of her hairdresser. But she was never going to be someone who woke up fat, creased and shocked at age sixty. Lynn Beam had always kept the years at bay with good tailoring, a daily walk and a healthy dose of vanity.

‘I look ancient,’ she says. ‘But let me look at you. I hear you had a big night last night.’

Beam thinks, How does she know this? How does it even work with these Beam women?

‘I’ve had plenty of practice, Mum,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t that big a night. Maybe for Penny.’

Lynn clears up Jamie’s lunch and wipes his vegie-smeared mouth. Cute kid.

‘Now. I’m going to take this little soldier for a walk in the stroller, get him to nod off. Let’s walk and talk.’

Harvey and his mother head off out the door in the direction of the nearby duck ponds, where as a boy he would rip up and toss entire loaves of bread at overfed ducks and geese until they got bored and turned on him. It’s far more overgrown now than he remembers it; the trees are taller and the rushes more unkempt. And it has the effect of making Harvey feel smaller than he once was, instead of bigger. It’s unsettling and he feels strange.

And what I see is a man no longer making connections, a man who is not happy in himself.

‘How does your father look?’ Lynn asks, weaving the stroller along the rocky path. ‘I was thinking about visiting him myself—of course I’m sad for him, for all of you—but I honestly don’t think he’d welcome it. I don’t think he’d want to see me now.’

Harvey watches a duck dive in the water, arse confidently in the air. ‘I don’t think he wants to see me either.’

‘Why?’ Lynn stops and looks at Harvey. ‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing. He’s been asleep both times. Two strikes.’

‘Yes,’ his mother says thoughtfully. ‘All that morphine. It’s not just for pain. The nurses know what they’re doing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The long slow goodbye,’ she says.

Beam moves this idea around in his head, imagines an unspoken world of winks and nods among medical staff. Dimwitted families looking on.

‘Bryan seems to be running the show more than the nurses,’ Harvey says.

‘Well, that’s his thing.’

‘I don’t see why it has to be his thing. Unless that’s what Dad asked him to do.’

‘Well,’ Lynn says. ‘That’s probably what happened.’

Beam thinks, Why? Why Bryan over everyone else?

‘But it’s not something to be jealous about, Harvey,’ Lynn says and rubs her knuckles kindly on his upper arm. ‘It is what it is.’

Jesus. The Naomi effect.

Harvey looks at the child in the pram. Oh to be a child in a pram. ‘I’m with Penny on this, Mum,’ he says. ‘That’s a ridiculous saying. It means nothing. Just writes off whole chunks of reality and history as though they never happened.’

‘Well. Maybe we shouldn’t get into this now, Harvey,’ Lynn says, directing his attention again to Jamie, who seems to be asleep.

‘No. Okay,’ he says.

They wander right around the main pond and back to the house and Lynn puts Jamie to bed for his nap, though not convincingly. Ten minutes later the kid is pounding on his bedroom wall.

‘It’s probably too hot to sleep,’ Harvey reasons. Christ, it is hot.

‘If he can just get an hour in before his brothers are home from school, it makes for a much easier night,’ Lynn says.

And in this Beam can see that his mother has quickly become part of the sway and thrum of Naomi’s daily life.

‘So this is permanent?’ he says. ‘Staying here?’

‘I think so. I don’t look too far ahead.’

‘It must make it hard to see Penny.’

‘Harvey, I don’t have anything to do with your sisters’ issues.’

This sounds very much like a declaration, Harvey thinks, a speech Lynn has delivered a number of times now to various interested parties. She may have been judged harshly by small-town critics for leaving a husband who did nothing worse than completely ignore her for the best part of a decade, but she will not be blamed for any other fissures in the Beam model.

‘Honestly,’ Lynn says to Harvey, brushing her hand through the air as if erasing a cobweb. ‘They are grown-ups and I just stay out of it. It has nothing to do with me.’

Naomi returns to the house a little while later, the two older boys in train, school uniforms wrenched askew by the heat. She advises that their father definitely looked better this afternoon and made a good fist of conversation. Harvey detects an inference that he should have stuck around for the second sitting.

And then, while emptying lunch boxes and rifling notes out of schoolbags, Naomi invites Harvey to stay for dinner, nothing special, and he squares off with her prickly disposition by saying yes.

‘And we’ll have a few drinks to welcome you back,’ she says.

Beam isn’t sure whether the drinks quotient is genuinely to welcome him back or to even up the score with Penny. Regardless, he’s grateful for a crowd-pleasing liver.

‘Absolutely,’ he says.

Harvey texts Penny to let her know he won’t be back for dinner and may even stay over if it’s a late night. Penny replies, ‘K. Key under mat’, and Beam is pleased to see Shorton’s criminal element has still not progressed beyond a locked door.

Shit, Cate. Harvey excuses himself to make the call outside.

The air is ferocious and Naomi’s backyard is a scorched minefield of upturned bikes, soccer balls, cricket stumps and squeaky dog toys. Separated from the house next door by a porous hedge, the setting is a still-life chaos of suburban family life, of half-finished projects and constant interruptions. But it is also somehow brimming with aspiration and hope, as though keeping the wheels turning, the grass growing and the toys replenished will amount to something in the end.

Beam wanders down to the rear of the yard and is surprised to see a man sitting in a wooden deckchair in the middle of it all. Underneath the ragged goatee and the dark glasses, he realises it’s Naomi’s husband, the mystery known as Matt. By his side, a lumpy black dog sits hungry for attention.

‘Matt,’ Harvey says. ‘I didn’t realise you were home.’

Matt rises and holds out a hand to Harvey, shakes it roughly.

‘Mate,’ he says, ‘I heard you were coming. I just got off shift. Fucking eight and six knocks you around.’

‘Yeah, I’ll bet,’ Harvey says, figuring that whatever an eight and six is, it’s probably something he’ll never have to drive or climb or build.

Matt yanks his fluorescent work shirt out of his jeans like it’s the most pleasurable thing he’s done all week. The dog trots off to another corner of the yard.

‘Beer?’

‘Sure,’ Harvey says, because there is no other answer, and Matt disappears into his shed, returning with a cold Heineken and another chair.

Beam is fairly confident he has never before had a conversation with Naomi’s husband. Not one. Not even at the wedding. And no-one ever speaks about him. How does someone exist, he thinks—exist in the quite significant sense of being a provider to a wife and three children—but cast almost no shadow? How often does he hide out here?

Harvey adopts the pose being demonstrated now by Matt, which is to stare ponderously at the abortive vegie patch adjoining the shed. Their chairs are close and parallel, like a plane ready for take-off.

‘Tough job growing things in this heat,’ Beam says, eyeing a cucumber that looks like an eggplant.

‘Fucken oath,’ Matt says, sipping thirstily. ‘I’d water more but the bloke next door is a nazi about restrictions.’

‘Right.’

‘And I’m just away too often to get a good go at it,’ he says, surveying the rest of the yard.

‘That must be hard,’ Beam says. ‘Being away so much.’

‘On the contrary, Harvey,’ Matt says and raises his beer to the sky. ‘It’s the secret to a happy marriage, mate.’

Harvey laughs. ‘I wouldn’t know, mate.’ And the mate lingers in the air uncertainly—Beam never uses the term in Sydney and may well have forgotten how to say it properly.

‘So you’re here to see your old man?’ Matt says.

‘Yeah, that’s the primary objective.’

‘Gotta be tough.’

‘Well, hard for us all, I suppose.’

Matt stares hard at something that might be a dead animal. ‘But I mean, you know, given your history with him.’

And Beam looks across at Matt a little differently now, as though he might not be a man completely removed from the family life flying about around him.

‘I guess so,’ he says. ‘I mean, I don’t really know what that history is. It’s just kind of nothing.’

‘Well, if it makes you feel any better about things, Harvey, I don’t reckon I could sit here with your father and have a beer and find anything to talk about. Not one thing.’

And Harvey is taken aback by this. Because for as long as he can remember, no-one has ever ventured an appraisal of Harvey’s relationship with his father that found Lionel lacking in any way. The conclusion has always been that Lionel simply is what he is, a man with his mind on other eons, and that perhaps Harvey’s expectations are patently too high or unfair.

‘And I don’t think,’ continues Matt, ‘that it’s okay to just not like one of your kids. I mean, I don’t think that should be an option for parents.’

Fuck, Harvey thinks. Is this the conversation I was meant to come back here for? Maybe it was this.

His phone rings and Beam apologises to Matt, sees that it’s Cate and wanders a few metres away from their odd little reverie to take the call.

‘Cate?’

‘Dad.’ Her voice is minus its usual ironic lilt and hints at recent tears. ‘When are you coming home?’

Harvey looks up at the sky, at other places. ‘Is everything okay, Cate? Where are you?’

‘I’m at your place,’ she says. ‘I got really scared last night, Dad. People come home at all hours around here. There are so many noises.’

‘There’s nothing to be scared of there, Cate. Honestly. It’s very secure. They’re just noises.’

And a lengthy pause ensues, in which time Matt walks up to Harvey and hands him another beer. Thanks, mate.

‘Why don’t you invite a friend over?’ Harvey suggests. ‘Invite Jayne over?’

‘Mum won’t let Jayne stay the night and I’m not even going to ask her. And everyone else is … away. People are planning their uni accommodation and stuff. Everyone’s got stuff on.’

And Cate has nothing on, Harvey thinks, and is instantly awash with sympathy for his daughter because he can remember, even now, how scary nothing feels at eighteen. The emptiness, the void. What’s everyone else doing? The urge to run. Reinvent.

Beam’s next words form even faster than the idea itself.

‘Cate, why don’t you come here?’ he says. ‘I’ll pay for a flight. Why don’t you come here and see everyone and just … be somewhere else for a while?’

And possibly the idea had already occurred to her because she says, ‘Thanks, Dad. I’ll book it online.’

After another beer with Matt and a quick education about truck cycle times at your average iron ore mine, Beam heads back inside with his new mate and into the whorl of the witching hour. Naomi is in full flight, chopping potatoes, rinsing saucepans and issuing orders, while their mother listens to Finn reading on the couch. A headphone-encased Toby is seated at the breakfast bench flicking through items on a phone, while duelling TVs on either side of the open-plan area pit Deal Or No Deal against the Channel Ten news.

‘Hey,’ says Naomi, looking up from the sink. ‘I thought you must have found each other out there. Did he bore you with his bonsai collection?’

Beam laughs, confused.

‘I’ve got this new butterfly bush,’ Matt says, ‘that a mate spotted online. It’s rarely used as bonsai so there’s a lot of scope there to create something quite informal or maybe cascading.’

Shit. He’s serious.

‘How long have you been doing bonsai?’ Harvey says. Doing? Making? Growing?

‘About three years now,’ Matt informs him. ‘I’ve got about twenty trees out there in the shed. I’ll show you them tomorrow if you’re interested.’

Twenty bonsai trees and a beer fridge in the back shed? Even after twenty years in radio and constantly finding the most unlikely and ‘ordinary’ people to be the most fascinating, Beam is still thrilled when he discovers one of life’s genuinely interesting characters. ‘Impressionism’ has made an impression.

It’s an enjoyable evening, if executed in little more than ten-minute reprieves between overtired toddlers, ruminations over burnt lasagne, teeth-brushing disputes, bedtime stories and the sullen protests of a young teenager. Beam and Matt sit and chat at the dining table, aware of and somehow emboldened by their sharing in this most stereotypical of male behaviours—doing nothing in the eye of familial chaos—and Naomi joins them intermittently as Lynn happily takes care of the children’s closing arguments.

Beam sees amidst all this that Penny was probably right. Even though she meant it in terms of emotional support rather than practical assistance, Lynn is helping Naomi in a way that is vital to her daughter’s survival. If their mother hadn’t fallen down the stairs, Harvey reasons, this experiment in ‘transgenerational living’ would still be occurring. Because one way or another, if the world is working as it should, family has to shift and settle into the cracks that need filling.

For the first time in several hours, Beam remembers that he is now officially unemployed.