Because he’d caught a cab from Shorton Airport to the house that is no longer his mother’s, Beam hadn’t then taken stock of the vastness of the facility’s car park. In fact, the airport’s car park proper can no longer contain the spillover of utes and four-wheel drives stretching in a melange of unspoken grid arrangements across several reclaimed paddocks. Thousands and thousands of vehicles; one airport coffee shop. The FIFO phenomenon had evidently not been anticipated by last decade’s town planners.
Beam finally negotiates a parking spot of sorts for his brother-in-law’s behemoth, hearing as he does so a promo for the guest spot on SR95.3 on Monday. Returning to his old chair next week, star of Sydney radio and courter of controversy, Shorton’s own Harvey Beam!
So. No backing out now.
Cate enters the arrivals hall a picture of whimsy, smiling at something on her phone and emphatically removing her scarf.
‘Hi Dad,’ she says, kissing Beam on the cheek. ‘Fuck it’s hot.’
‘Only between midnight and midnight,’ Harvey says. ‘Language, Cate. Welcome to Shorton, love.’
Cate has been here only once before, as a seven- or eight-year-old at Naomi’s wedding, but she barely remembers it. Now, casting her heavily made-up eyes over the modest arrivals hall and its current inhabitants, Cate looks every bit the haughty city upstart.
‘Welcome to Shitsville more like it,’ she says.
Harvey hastily guides his daughter to the baggage carousel, hoping no-one heard her first-impressions appraisal. ‘You might need to lose the sass,’ he says. ‘They don’t go for it much around here.’
‘Okay,’ Cate says. ‘But only if you promise never to use that word again.’
‘Done,’ he says.
After an exhaustive walk (Cate: ‘Jesus, Dad, Mandela would have given up by now’) back to Simon’s car (‘Why don’t we just wait until it shits out a normal-sized car?’), Beam and Cate drive through town and across the bridge to Penny’s house.
‘Seriously, Dad,’ Cate says, surveying the flat and unsurprising landscape, ‘what did you do here when you were growing up? Just sit around wondering what a cinema is?’
‘It wasn’t that bad,’ Harvey says, all of a sudden feeling defensive about the first third of his life. ‘I spent a lot of time in that river,’ he says, pointing to its implausible blueness with a measure of pride. Something like pride. ‘And I played a lot of cricket. A lot of cricket.’
‘How’s your dad?’ Cate asks, getting to the point of why someone might return to such a clearly uninspiring place. Beam notices she doesn’t mention Lionel with reference to herself—Grandpa—and he briefly considers the fact that his children have no relationship with their grandfather largely because he doesn’t. The sins of the father.
‘I’ve barely seen him,’ Harvey says. ‘I mean, I’ve seen him every day but he’s never awake.’
‘That’s sad,’ Cate says, and Beam supposes it is.
On a whim Harvey decides to take a few detours. He shows Cate the house he grew up in and the two schools he went to—Shorton Primary and Shorton High—and he senses his daughter’s wilful detachment starting to wane.
‘Wow, mini-Dad,’ she says. ‘Weird.’ And Harvey recognises in her face that odd feeling, possible to encounter at any age, that accompanies the realisation one’s parents were once children too.
Harvey drives past the main shopping centre and towards the town’s giant twenty-four-hour McDonald’s restaurant—the state’s biggest and busiest, he informs Cate, having just learnt this from Matt. He expects Cate to share his revulsion at such junk food largesse, at a town’s devotion to eating even more shit than anyone else, but instead she looks wistfully at the red and yellow monolith and declares: ‘Cool.’
‘So, how’s your mother, anyway?’ Harvey asks, changing the subject. ‘Has she come around?’
‘Yeah, she’s calmed down a bit,’ Cate says. ‘I think she’s moved on from the disappointment of her firstborn and has decided to focus her hopes and dreams on number two. All eyes on Jayne, race fans.’
‘That’s ridiculous, Cate. Your mother isn’t disappointed in you. She’s disappointed for you.’
‘Whoa!’ Cate says, holding up her hands in mock protest. ‘Cliché alert!’
He continues regardless. ‘But we both know you’ll get through this,’ Beam says. ‘You’re only seventeen, for goodness’ sake. You’ve got a big future ahead of you.’
‘Why do futures have to be big?’ Cate says.
Beam has no good answer for this.
Penny is animatedly thrilled to see her niece in the flesh again and almost swallows her whole with questions and hugs and compliments. James and Javyn look up from their places on the lounge room rug with puzzled interest.
‘Oh my God, Harvey,’ Penny almost yells. ‘She’s so beautiful. Look at her! You didn’t tell me she’d got so beautiful.’ His sister runs her hands over Cate’s long auburn hair and stands back to admire the unfolding adolescent chrysalis.
‘I didn’t say she was ugly.’
‘Listen to your father,’ Penny laughs, rolling her eyes at Cate, who is clearly relishing this avalanche of adoration. ‘Now sit down here and tell me everything about everything.’
Dismissed by implication, Harvey leaves his sister and daughter to reconnect in the all-consuming way of women. He is happy to see Cate so embraced by Penny and feels a twinge of guilt that his daughters have long lived without the fullness of extended family, of curious aunts and quirky cousins. He has seen it in friends and colleagues—the armour that a big family can provide; the sense of place and comfort that comes from being part of something bigger and pre-written.
Still, it doesn’t always work and Beam secretly enjoys encountering exceptions to the rule. Fractious family Christmas disasters shared around the office each January are among his favourite guilty pleasures.
He retreats to the spare room and checks his phone. Trudi Rice has punctiliously acknowledged receipt of Beam’s redundancy forms. Hugh Traynor has emailed him some health and safety information for Monday (presumably in case Harvey falls off his chair and decides to take down City Hall). And Grace writes: Amazing day in the water. Miraculously survived. Can do lunch on Sunday?
Sunday, he thinks. Lunch.
Lunch on Sunday.
But Cate is here. Plus it’s lunch, which is not dinner. A step back from the cover of night?
Beam lies back on the bed. What does any of it mean?
On Sunday morning Harvey is on his way to Naomi’s house when he remembers he hasn’t replied to Grace’s text. He had woken the previous evening, foggy and off-kilter due to an unplanned nap, to find Cate and Penny giggling over photo albums and sharing a butcher’s paper spread of fish and chips. Before long he had joined in and the night had furtively dissolved in a slew of memories, old and new. Now Naomi and Lynn were set to deliver the show’s second act.
‘Hey,’ Beam says to Cate as they pull into the driveway. ‘You go on in and I’ll be right behind you. Just have to make a quick call.’
‘Dad, are you high? I’m not going in without you. I haven’t seen them for years.’
‘Okay, okay,’ he says, and realises he might just have blown it with Grace. Whatever he’d been going for there, it’s clearly beyond his life management skills to return messages within an acceptable amount of time.
Unsurprisingly, Naomi has upped the ante on Cate’s welcome-back festival, planning a full day of activities, a tour of the town, picnic at the marina and more—poor Cate—photo perusal. Such ambition is only possible, Harvey thinks, because of Lynn’s conspiratorial enthusiasm and her practical help with Naomi’s boys, and he finds himself feeling a little sorry for Penny and her more solitary parenting effort. You don’t have to move two thousand kilometres away to be cast adrift, it seems.
Fortunately there appears to be no expectation that Harvey should be part of today’s activities and he gratefully begs off and agrees to return for dinner this evening. He sees that Cate is still happy, greedily inhaling all the activity and attention, filling the void created by her lonely sabbatical in Harvey’s apartment, and he is proud of this, this too-rare capacity to make a child of his, however briefly, content.
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?’