There is an odd melancholy that descends upon a person a few days into time spent away from home. Harvey recognises it as a kind of displacement, a forced inspection of lives and choices beyond the familiar terrain. He anticipates it these days, this unsettling; has got better at heading it off at the pass. Which is why he wakes the next morning with a clear head and a fresh sense of purpose.
First things first: sign the forms and email them back to Trudi Rice. For this task he enlists Penny’s printer and scanner and afterwards her coffee machine. It is done. It doesn’t even hurt.
Next up, he calls up Hugh Traynor, says why not? ‘Let’s do a show or two for old times’ sake. I’ve got some thoughts about the new marina.’
Then he texts Grace: Hope this finds you in the ocean and that your phone is waterproof. Thanks for a great night. Care to repeat sometime? Cheers, H.
Finally he gathers his things, musters up the courage to drive Simon’s beast of a vehicle and heads to the local shopping centre to get some supplies for Cate.
And all of this feels good, for resolve can be its own salve.
If there is a space more spiritually barren than Shorton’s main shopping centre, Beam is yet to encounter it. Yet this is where the locals spend much of their time (he gathers), escaping the heat and seeing who else is around. There is much aimless wandering, discussions over empty trolleys and comfort taken in franchise signage—evidence of the town’s wider connectedness. And there is great pride in visible progress, most notably the new David Jones. Shortonites strut in and out of its Melbournesque entrance with faux aloofness, as though they haven’t been talking about this very thing for two decades.
He sees familiar faces. Old faces that seem new and new faces that seem old. He sees a battered man in a wheelchair enthusiastically picking his nose and realises it’s his maths teacher from year eight. He sees the boy who used to live next door to his family in Norwich Street, now grown up and wrestling a tribe of young children. He sees a former mayor stockpiling home-brew ingredients into a trolley. He sees a girl he used to covet in his senior years, now barely recognisable amidst large folds of tattooed flesh spilling out of a singlet top.
Tattoos. There are so many. Complex sleeves of tribal warfare and children’s names and roses and arrows and death by a thousand indecipherable fonts. Punctuating the ink are piercings: metallic full stops, commas and em dashes. Studs in eyebrows and cheeks and chins. And everywhere, everywhere, there is the iridescent flash of hi-vis workwear. Shorton’s cultural dress: John Deere cap, hi-vis shirt, jeans, no shoes, cigarette, scowl. The men too.
Harvey knows he is being judgemental; he is choosing to look across this scene from a high horse of capital-city horror. This could just as easily be a suburban shopping centre in western Sydney, sans mining apparel and with a liberal dousing of ethnicity. His own siblings exhibit none of the stereotypes he has just picked out like an ancient school inspector. In spite of himself, he is behaving in no less elitist fashion than his own father. Still. This is not the town Beam grew up in; these are not the people he remembers. And moreover, no-one seems to remember him.
You can’t go back.
Beam arrives at the hospital in the one-hour buffer zone between Penny’s and Naomi’s visits. Bryan is sitting beside their father’s bed, head in a book as Lionel sleeps. There is a spare chair on the opposite side of the bed and one in the corner of the room and Harvey opts for the lesser of two evils. He assumes Bryan will soon find a reason to leave, so apparently discomfited is he by these occasional visits from Harvey, but Bryan remains fixed in his Rodin pose, defiant or oblivious or a calculated combination of the two.
Unlike the rupture between Penny and Naomi, which can be fixed to various events and hurtful outbursts and larger-than-life misunderstandings over the years, the chasm between Harvey and Bryan is without an anchor point. Until this visit Beam hadn’t even been sure if it still existed, if it ever did—does not having a relationship have to be the opposite of having one? But Bryan’s dislike of Harvey is so palpable in this room that it feels even heavier than the dank hospital air, louder than the whispers of grave illness.
He tries to think back to their last encounters. A brief catch-up in the presence of their mother when Beam travelled back for his high school reunion; nothing to report there. Naomi’s wedding, at which the whorl of festivities and the cast-of-thousands guest list made virtually any conversational exchange impossible. Penny’s wedding, which Beam did not attend because it clashed with Suze’s thirtieth (an oversight on Penny’s part that Suze never really forgave); he had sent a funny telegram, a poem entitled ‘A Penny for our thoughts’, and asked Bryan to read it out on the night. As far as he knows, that’s what transpired.
So what is this … thing? If he dared ask Bryan—and he wouldn’t, he can’t—how would his brother respond? Incredulity … How can you not know, Harvey? Anger … How dare you think about yourself at a time like this. Or surprise … I have no idea what you’re talking about. Any of these answers is possible, and many more besides, and Harvey has no clue how to respond to any of them. Can only ponder and stare at the emotional sphinx that is Bryan Beam.
And as he does so, sitting here in this tiny plastic chair, the unwanted voyeur of something deeply personal and entirely beyond him, Harvey grows steadily angrier. If anyone should have a grudge to bear, it’s him. He was the son overlooked by a father who never once considered how his actions, his inaction, might damage a young man’s mettle. He, Harvey, was left behind to wonder if it was something as simple as birth order that had denied him his father’s interest, or whether it was something else entirely. Something about Harvey being more difficult, more challenging, unpredictable. Unlikely to sit in a corner and read for hours on end.
Harvey has tried to recall, but cannot, instances when Lionel Beam hit his eldest son. It was instead Harvey who had weathered the beatings, felt the thirsty whack of the strap on the back of his thighs, across his middle, around his shoulders, until the crying shut it down. It was Harvey, not Bryan, who had once gone to school with a black eye, the result of an exasperated backhand from his father. He’d told everyone it was the product of a wild bouncer hurled by the kid next door and that he’d gone on to bravely cart him to every corner of the street.
Bryan had done nothing to attract punishment; flew quietly, effortlessly, cleverly, beneath the radar. Harvey, on the other hand, inspired a rage inside their father that he latterly suspected scared even Lionel himself. Rage that was only ever countered with ambivalence. He must, Harvey reasons, have seen something in the face of his second-born that was either the very image of himself or the very opposite, whichever caused the greater irritation. And he turned away from it, turned away from it again and again. Because he could. Lionel had options.
Harvey had visited his father’s post-marital home, the little house Lionel had magnanimously set up for him and Bryan, just once. He had glanced at Bryan’s bedroom off the hallway, had not even walked into it out of curiosity, and quickly eyed the sunroom-cum-study complete with two desks, one large, one small, and a wraparound bookcase. He had stayed for fifteen minutes, just long enough to tell his father that he’d be working over summer at the local radio station, to which Lionel had said, without shifting his gaze from the newspaper, ‘Why would you want to do that?’ And then Bryan had wanted to show Harvey something, but Harvey had had enough and he walked out the front door and all the way back to his mother’s. Across the bridge. Eight kilometres in the angry sun.
Beam looks more closely now at his father’s form in the hospital bed. Shrinking beneath sheaths of linen and blankets, Lionel’s body barely forms a hillock. The incongruence of space and impact. His hair looks like the strange material Harvey’s mother used to affix to his sisters’ dance costumes. His skin is tracing paper atop a spider’s web. There is so little left of this man, Harvey thinks. What does Bryan see when he stares at him for so long?
And yet, there is something. Lionel’s jaw. It is still set in just the way Harvey remembers: pushed forward slightly, daring a question, arrogant, resolute. And Harvey finds himself thinking something new about Bryan’s barely concealed hatred of his younger brother.
Maybe he didn’t really have a choice.