Lionel Beam is home late from work and Harvey has spent most of the past hour and a half wrapping and rewrapping insulation tape around one side of a tennis ball. He’d noticed older boys at school doing it to engineer swing, but he can’t seem to get it right. The tape keeps folding upon itself.
He jumps when he hears the car door shut and waits for his father’s first words, always a sign of where the evening is headed. It sounds as though his father is in a good mood because the first thing he does is summon the whole family into the lounge room.
‘I’ve been at a conference today,’ Lionel Beam tells them, ‘and we played a really interesting game.’
Harvey looks at his sisters, who are equally puzzled. Their father rarely plays ‘games’. He rarely addresses them as a group. The night is already askew.
From behind his back, Lionel reveals a set of rope quoits. He hands one quoit to each of the four children—Harvey hadn’t even noticed Bryan enter the room and slide into a chair behind the girls and himself—and he places the wooden pole stand in the centre of the room. Then Lionel walks backwards to the door and instructs the children to have their throw. To toss the quoit on the pole, simple.
Penny is first to speak, characteristically wanting to be very clear about the rules. ‘From where?’ she says.
‘From wherever you like,’ Lionel Beam answers in a measured tone.
‘But …?’ Penny is clearly rattled and sits down on the carpet. She’s going to give this some thought.
Into the breach leaps Naomi, excitedly wanting to get things started. ‘I’ll go first,’ she says, and stands as far back from the pole as the room will allow. She tosses the quoit, which hits the side of the pole and bounces off. Before anyone can comment, Naomi fetches the quoit and lines up her next throw, and misses again. After another eight or so attempts, during which time their father says precisely nothing, Naomi’s quoit spins successfully around its target and she runs around the room in a playful victory dance.
‘I don’t want to play,’ Penny says, and walks out of the room, her quoit still on the ground.
Torn between his curiosity and a strong desire to follow Penny’s lead, Harvey walks slowly up to the pole. He puts a foot on either side of it—is literally on top of it—and drops the quoit cleanly around the pole.
Harvey gives a clumsy shrug and looks around at his father. Lionel Beam says nothing and steadily shifts his gaze to Bryan.
Bryan begins by removing Harvey’s quoit from the pole. Then he silently takes up a position about one metre back from the stand. He takes aim and tosses his quoit, watches it swirl compliantly around the pole and land where Harvey’s had been minutes earlier.
‘We all win!’ yells Naomi, and gathers up the quoits to play again.
‘No,’ says Lionel Beam. ‘Bryan wins.’
‘What?’ Harvey says, as Penny creeps back into the room.
Naomi is already tossing again, this time from behind a chair with one hand covering her eyes.
‘Why does Bryan win?’ Penny says, now standing beside Harvey. ‘You didn’t say where to throw from or how many chances we could have.’
Their father folds his arms and a small grin pulls at the edges of his thin mouth. ‘That’s right, Penny,’ he says. ‘There were no rules because this isn’t a normal game. It’s a character test. It reveals things about us that we can’t mask: our ambition, our intellect, our potential.’
At this moment Harvey’s mother enters the room, informing them that dinner is ready.
But Harvey wants answers first. ‘If it’s not a game,’ he says, ‘then how come Bryan wins?’
‘Well,’ Lionel says, and he seems happy to labour the point while dinner waits. ‘Naomi here (he points at his youngest child who is now attempting to throw four quoits at once) is certainly ambitious but she wants to make things unnecessarily difficult for herself. Her heart overrules her head and that may affect her potential in life.’
‘Lionel,’ his wife says to him. ‘Can’t this wait?’
‘No, it can’t,’ he says. ‘This is important, Lynn.’
‘They’re just kids,’ she says.
But Lionel is resolute. ‘Character flaws are best addressed during childhood,’ he says, ‘when there is still time to do something about them. Now, Harvey here has a lot of work to do. He is lazy, naturally lazy, and there is no worse character flaw short of dishonesty. Harvey wants things to be quick and easy, and that’s not how the world works. The way he stood over that pole … no-one even did that at the conference. I was frankly shocked.’
‘Lionel …’
‘Lynn, I’m nearly done. Bryan, on the other hand, instinctively knew that without rules, one must apply their own boundaries. But they should be realistic—a personal challenge that’s also achievable. To think that way without instruction reveals a naturally strong character with excellent potential.’
‘It’s just a fucking game,’ says Harvey, and all the air flies out of the room. Harvey hears in the long ensuing echo a word that has never before been spoken in this house, a word he can’t believe he said in front of their father.
Lionel Beam doesn’t take Harvey to his bedroom this time, doesn’t push him on his stomach, doesn’t remove his belt. For he is far too enraged to wait, to defer for even one minute the violence that must now occur. And so Harvey can’t brace himself properly; isn’t ready for the bare fists, for the thrashing around his back and sides. Together the father and boy crash into the side of the door as Harvey tries to run. And he can hear his mother screaming, ‘Stop it, Lionel! Not like that!’
Harvey covers his head with his hands and shrinks to the ground as his father rails about him, looking for new entry points. And Harvey screams with his mother, tries to make words but can’t. Just wants it to stop. It has to stop. His father is beating his back like a drum.
‘Lionel,’ his wife yells, ‘we can’t go to the ambulance. You have to stop.’
And Lionel does. Much later, he does.