Today, Beam says to himself, aware he’s feeling something close to happy and uncharacteristically still. Today I will have the conversation.
He is sat in the kiosk at the front of the hospital, where the coffee is predictably appalling and scalding, as though brewed in a fire pit, and where a constant movement of people in various states of worry and anticipation and feigned concern inspire an odd sense of calm within him. Peace in the shared terror of getting by. Of just coping. Processing all the scary possibilities, drawing up new deals.
Yes, today, he thinks, his mother’s words having given him a rare restful sleep (the truncated wine intake having helped too) and an almost worrying measure of comfort—You were such a smart boy to fly away—Harvey will tell his father, conscious or not, that he forgives him. That everything good and bad shapes us and takes us places and most of it all works out in the end. That if he hadn’t left Shorton, hadn’t raged against Lionel’s rejection and disappointment, hadn’t taken it all so personally, then he wouldn’t have met Suze, wouldn’t have had his daughters. He almost certainly wouldn’t have pursued a mostly successful career carved out of angry opinions.
He will tell his father that parenting is hard. Really fucking hard. So many ill-matched expectations flying at each other like rabid bats in a storm. He gets that. And Harvey hasn’t made the best fist of it himself, although he does now intend to spend more time in the nets, getting it right.
He will say that family isn’t everything. It is one thing. And maybe it works, and maybe it doesn’t. Maybe parts of it work. Maybe it’s just people thrown together and there’s no magic alchemy to it at all. DNA might mean everything and nothing. Love is arbitrary. It doesn’t exist outside of the decisions we make every day, the things we say. The things we don’t. Tiny things. Suspicion and expectation. The law of diminishing returns.
I didn’t like you either, Harvey also wants to say, but probably won’t. He won’t. A deathbed is not the right place to indulge the satisfaction of the final word, he thinks, and is instantly relieved that this was the ethical card he randomly selected from today’s deck. For he had expected anger at this juncture, stunted boyhood anger, fighting words and parting shots and X-rays of his mangled heart. Far from closure, he had long wondered about busting things wide open if given the chance. A boy needs his father. Where were you? What was wrong with me?
Harvey explores the bottom of his cardboard cup. Maybe it’s not forgiveness for his father that he’s feeling right now. Maybe it’s kindness, the base compassion one might feel for anyone pulled up short by imminent death.
Maybe it’s regret.
Maybe it’s nothing.
Beam’s phone lights up with Suze’s name and he smiles to himself, for if anyone can offer him an accurate diagnosis at this moment, it’s her. She who knows him well enough to have wisely cut him loose.
‘Harvey, have you been trying to call me?’ Suze says in her signature breathless tone. Always running somewhere. ‘Because I think my phone is fucked. It rings people randomly but then I think other calls aren’t getting through.’
‘No,’ Harvey says.
‘Yes! It’s bizarre. Yesterday it rang my aunt, for God’s sake. I had to actually talk to her. It was like dental work.’
‘No, I mean I haven’t rung you, Suze.’
‘Oh. Well, why not?’ And then she laughs.
‘Sorry, I’ve been busy.’
‘Really?’
‘No.’
‘How’s the nurse?
‘For God’s sake, Suze.’ Jesus. ‘How’s the fireman?’
‘What fireman?’
‘There’s always a fireman.’
‘Right. Okay. Anyway, how is Cate, do you think? She called me yesterday—she called me, get that—and we had a really good talk. She does seem happy there at the moment. I think your sisters have been very good to her. Naomi anyway.’ This is unfair of Suze, Harvey thinks but without surprise. Penny’s been the one looking out for Cate in Shorton, but Suze favours Naomi and will always line up her evidence to support her first impression.
‘Yeah, she is happy. Seems she’s got a knack for retail.’
‘Good God. I’m bursting with pride.’
‘Suze, your own mother runs a shop.’
‘No, Harvey, she stands at a counter all day so that she doesn’t have to be home watching my father navigate the weather channel.’
‘Anyway,’ Beam says and wants to say more on this, he does, but he missed the window a long time ago to help Suze make sense of her family. He would listen, at various moments over weeks and years, to the abruptly finished phone calls, the meaning-bereft text messages, the forgotten birthdays, and he would look to Suze for cues on how to respond. There were no clear cues. She seemed okay with it all. Mad, yes, always mad, but somehow resigned to the distance between childhood and adulthood, a family of origin that held her at arm’s length. All those blind turns to avoid.
‘Look,’ Suze says. ‘I’m actually really happy that Cate’s feeling good about everything because I mean, well, that’s the point of it all, isn’t it? But what happens next, Harvey? What does she do after this? You can’t let her start thinking that this is her future, because it can’t be.’
‘Why can’t it be?’
‘What the fuck, Harvey? She’s not staying there.’
‘It’s not that bad, Suze.’
‘Well, I think your own judgement might be a little … compromised at present.’
Beam says nothing and silently indicates to the waitress that he’d like another coffee. Same again thanks. Only it’s not a waitress. It’s a nurse. And this, Harvey, you dick, is a hospital kiosk, not the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton.
‘Suze, I don’t know what you want me to say about Cate. You’ve always known what’s best for the girls. And I don’t mean that sarcastically.’
‘Well, thank you, Harvey. And I do mean that sarcastically.’
‘How is Jayne?’ he asks.
‘It wouldn’t hurt to call her. She misses you.’
‘I know. I will.’
‘Kids don’t know you think about them if you don’t tell them.’
‘Yep, I know.’
‘But she’s good. And Harvey, she wants to come with me to the funeral.’
‘The funeral?’
‘I mean, when he goes. Sorry, Harvey. When your father passes. Dies. Shit.’
Harvey lets the moment sit awkwardly. It feels somehow wrong, a little cosmically dangerous, to speak about funeral plans before the requisite death.
There is a belated pause, rare dead air from Suze. ‘How is he, anyway? Is he …’
‘Alive? Yes. Just.’
‘Sorry. Fuck, you know I’m bad with death, Harvey. Sorry.’
‘And weddings.’
‘And reunions.’
Suze laughs.
‘And milestone birthdays.’ For as long as he’s known her, Suze has reacted badly to all the emotional extremities of orchestrated events, often before any extremities have been reached.
‘Just all the big things, really,’ she agrees. ‘But I am coming. To the funeral. Jayne and I will be coming to support you.’
‘You don’t have to do that, Suze,’ Harvey says, but finds a measure of comfort in the idea that she will.
‘But Harvey, I’ll need some notice so that I can get time off work and book tickets and get the dog minded and I might ask Cherie to stay in the house while we’re gone. So, yeah … keep me in the loop.’
‘I’ll definitely let you know when he dies.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And I’ll call Jayne.’
‘Excellent.’
‘And you should try just turning your phone off and turning it on again.’
‘Wow, Harvey, I hadn’t thought of that. You should work in IT.’
Beam laughs but it comes out wrong, an uncertain gargle. The mention of work has tripped a switch and he’s no longer comforted by the human chaos of the coffee shop and the hospital full of stories beyond it. It’s a feeling that’s been landing rudely upon him of late, unannounced and confused, as though time and place have been separated by a rupture deep below. Not for the first time he wonders if he might be depressed. A single thought removed from a fresh low point. Irrelevance.
The Third Act: Misery.
He ends the call with Suze and wanders out of the kiosk into the white-hot car park at the front of the hospital before remembering that he hadn’t just come here for coffee. There’d been a purpose to today.
And though his legs seem entirely unconvinced, Beam turns around and walks back inside, down the stark angled corridors that will lead him to Lionel Beam.
Bryan is not in the room when Harvey enters. But Grace is. She is bent over his father, adjusting a monitor attached to his chest. Lionel’s face, pinched and dry, seemingly collapsed under the weight of the room’s soupy oxygen, is turned away from everything but the window.
Inexplicably, Harvey feels as though he has stood here before, in precisely this spot, looking at this scene. It is not foreign; it is entirely familiar. Every moment, a middle-aged rockstar had once told him, stoned and clutching the guest microphone in Beam’s studio as though conjuring an engorged penis. Every moment has been lived before. We just keep doing this shit over and over until we get it right.
Grace smiles at Harvey, a beautiful smile that mocks the room’s ugliness. She says nothing but places a hand on Beam’s forearm as she walks around behind him and deposits Lionel’s chart back in its metal holder.
‘Is he … can he hear?’ Harvey asks her, barely whispering.
Grace looks at Lionel. She sees everything Harvey sees. The grim finality of hospital linen. The end of someone’s turn at life. Everyone’s turn. Says, ‘It’s impossible to know, Harvey. Sometimes they are coming in and out, looking for voices, especially towards the end. But I honestly don’t know.’
Harvey looks at her. He wants direction. Wants not to do the wrong thing. Not now.
‘It doesn’t matter, Harvey,’ Grace says at last. ‘Just sit with him. That’s all that matters.’
And Beam does. He sits.
He looks at his father, so pale, so barely present. And he continues looking for a long time, sometimes at the old man’s empty face (Is this what I’ll look like on my deathbed? Jesus Christ) and sometimes out the window, at the river in the distance.
He recognises an emotion from his early radio days—a prickly uncertainty. The pressure to say something meaningful to an audience that might be entirely imagined.
Words form inside him, then pop like bubbles. In the end, after an hour or six of just sitting, of waiting for Bryan to slink in or Cyclone Naomi to bear down, anything to puncture the endless moment, Harvey says nothing at all.