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.
‘Well, this is a bit weird,’ pipes up Cate, her legs swaying from side to side like a bored toddler.
‘What is?’
‘This father–daughter movie moment,’ she says. ‘Is this where you’re meant to tell me something profound about life, or that I’m adopted or something?’
Harvey laughs. ‘Cate,’ he says, ‘you’re adopted. And I’m okay with you finding your real parents.’
‘God, I hope they’re rich,’ she says. ‘With a boat.’
A man in a silver tinny idles past them, gently lifts his index finger and nods his head. The universal wave of regional Australia.
‘Are you enjoying it here?’ Harvey asks.
‘I am, actually,’ Cate says. ‘It’s like, small, but cool small.’
‘There’s not much to do, I know,’ he says.
Harvey had spent most of the day helping Matt transfer his bonsai plants into a new, larger lawn-locker, a task prolonged by the occasional ponderous beer and the always entertaining philosophical musings of his brother-in-law. He had heard vignettes about more of the women who had inspired his potted projects—Runaround Sue (girlfriend #4), Mother Mary (his mum), and Stacked Stella (his year six teacher). Harvey had found himself intermittently recalling the ghosts of girlfriends past and also smiling about the new and unexpected development that was Grace. A whiff of romance out of step with time and place. A buzz in his chest. He had wanted to see Grace today but she was working a double shift.
‘I like helping Penny in the shop,’ Cate says. ‘Today I redesigned her whole front window. It’s now like an Eiffel Tower wedding proposal scene for Valentine’s Day.’
‘The Eiffel Tower?’ Harvey snorts. ‘Well, that’s very Shorton.’
‘Good marketing is about aspiration over reality, Dad. People want to buy when their imagination is stretched.’
‘Wow. Now who’s being profound?’
Cate throws a stone into the water. ‘This is the first time I’ve felt good at something,’ she says. ‘Penny says I’m a natural.’
‘A natural at retail?’ Harvey says, not meaning to sound judgemental, but still. ‘At working in a gift shop?’
‘Forget it,’ she says, and Harvey realises he has ruined the moment. Like trying to hold an ice cube between two fingers, one of Beam’s studio guests had once described the act of talking with teenagers.
But Cate is forgiving and changes the subject. ‘So,’ she says, removing her shoes and settling in. ‘I visited your dad … my grandfather.’
‘Today?’
‘Yep.’
‘And how did that go?’
‘Okay. He’s pretty sick.’
‘He is.’
‘It felt weird because I don’t really know him. Like, am I meant to cry or … I don’t know. It was just weird.’
Beam gives a good impression of a sigh. ‘Well, Cate, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t really know him either and I never know what to do in that room.’ That room. Does he have to go back there?
Cate lies back on the pier, looks up at the mauve sky.
‘Why do you hate him?’
Harvey coughs, runs his hand through his thinning hair, searches for the right answer. ‘I don’t hate him, Cate. I’m just … indifferent to him.’
‘God, that’s so much worse.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Yeah it is. Like, you don’t even care enough to hate him.’
Harvey feels a burning in his chest. ‘That’s not quite right.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ Cate says. ‘Why can’t you love him? The others love him.’
The others?
Harvey rubs his breast bone. ‘I don’t know that they … maybe Bryan … I don’t know, Cate,’ he says. ‘Maybe they’re just better than me at pretending. Lionel is not an easy man to love. I doubt he’s ever even used the term.’
‘Do you like him?’
Harvey thinks about this, about the picture he is painting of himself on Cate’s nascent emotional landscape. She is not yet old enough to know that bitterness can set like a stone; a gradual petrification that becomes part of you, immovable.
Finally he says, ‘It’s a moot point, Cate. My father didn’t like me.’
Cate sits up, mildly incredulous. ‘Is that even allowed?’ she says. ‘For a parent?’
Harvey laughs. ‘There are no rules for parenting, love. Most of us just do the best we can. The good thing about having two parents is you can get away with having one who’s pretty shit at it.’
‘Like you?’
Beam looks at his daughter, who has only the smallest hint of a smile in her eyes, and he gently punches her in the arm.
‘I’m not that bad, am I?’ he says.
‘You were pretty shit at it most of the time,’ Cate says, but now she offers him a smile to temper the moment.
‘I was, wasn’t I? Thank goodness you girls had your mum.’
‘Who is not having her best year, either.’
‘Look,’ says Harvey, realising this is probably the longest conversation he has had with Cate in recent years. ‘She just wants what she thinks is best for you. She might be wrong about what is best for you, I don’t know, but she’s being tough because she loves you.’
‘Right. Sure. Tough love. Do you love me?’
‘Oh for shit’s sake, Cate, of course I do.’
‘Poetic,’ she says.
‘More importantly,’ Beam says, ‘I like you.’
‘Well,’ says Cate, standing up and dusting off her legs. ‘What’s not to like?’
Beam realises as they drive back to Penny’s house, Cate trying desperately to establish a bluetooth connection between her phone and Simon’s giant, industrial-looking car stereo, that this fresh connection with his eldest daughter has happened because of Shorton. Something about being here, about disrupting his Sydney existence and letting all the cogs shift and resettle, has brought him closer to his daughter, to one of them at least.
Something good is happening to his life, Beam thinks, and for once he’s present enough to notice.