The narrowest section of Shorton River flows quickly today, sluiced through two banks that seem destined to touch at some point in the future. Beam is not surprised to find himself here, standing on a small coarse shore, wrongly dressed for the occasion and minus a fishing rod. He needed to buy some time, wasn’t ready yet for the Beam family’s take on Death Of A Father, the intermingling of grief, real and imagined, the set pieces and positional play.
Until he had a better sense of what his face might convey to sisters who’d be scanning it, and each other, with infra-red precision, Beam knew he needed to be alone and he’d asked Grace to drop him into town on her way to work. Within an hour, his feet had brought him here, to a familiar current and a blue that spilled into everything.
Once on his show he’d trialled a weekly segment called Thrillosophy, an attempt to sex up philosophy by asking listeners to give their take on an ancient riddle or lofty ideological quote. It hadn’t really taken off, but one of the better chats prior to the show’s quiet disappearance had been sparked by that quote from Greek philosopher Heraclitus about a man not being able to step into a river twice because it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. Beam had loved this idea, that he might be continuously evolving, even without trying, that childhood wasn’t a mould that couldn’t be discarded, and that everything, all of it, keeps flowing and flowing and nothing stands still.
Every mistake disappears, eventually.
It had been this hope, if he’s honest with himself, that Harvey had carried back to Shorton on previous occasions: that things might somehow be different with his father. Different then, too, with his whole family because that one relationship had somehow skewed all the others, creating fracture lines and conversational no-go zones too confusing to plot on any map. He’d hoped that old misunderstandings, hurts, transgressions, whatever had led to all the wilful indifference between Harvey and Lionel Beam, all of it would have flowed beneath them by then. Different river, different men.
But Shorton River feels the same today, same water washed back by ancient tides, and the feeling of relief Harvey had long imagined might accompany the death of his father has not yet presented itself. Even Lionel Beam’s face, so ravaged and beaten within the folds of the hospital sheets, had looked more like sameness than difference to Harvey. The eyes. Nothing had shifted and clearly nothing benign had flowed beneath them over the years, and so Harvey’s words had remained in his chest by his father’s bedside, suspended and possibly irrelevant.
This he now understands: something got stuck all those years ago. Something broke in a way that no-one deemed reparable, like one of those old cars left to rust in the outback.
Beam’s shoes are beside him and his feet are buried deep in the rough, wet sand. The hairs on his arms look brassy in the sun and the top of his head is burning. He should have worn a hat. Always forgets hats. Lionel Beam had once belted him into a half-open cupboard, his ear splitting on the handle, for forgetting to bring his hat home from school. Like a dog with a practised nose, Lionel had looked only in Harvey’s schoolbag, one of four lined up like sandbags near the front door, certain if not hopeful he would be the errant child again. In the hours when some men reached thirstily for a beer, Lionel Beam had looked to Harvey as his transitional activity between the working day and the quiet terror of sleep.
Now he is dead. And this, Beam thinks, is more than he can process today. More than he can process alone anyway, and certainly more than he can make sense of with his family. Not yet.
He lets his head burn. It’s going to hurt tomorrow.
‘Suze,’ Beam says finally, sloppy tears punctuating his voice down the phone line to Sydney. He had promised to call her when it happened, but he is really doing this for himself. Suze doesn’t always say the right thing, but it usually becomes the right thing at some point. And she has always been able to bring him back to the present.
‘Is he gone?’ she says, the roar of inner-west traffic buffeting her clipped syllables.
‘Yes,’ Beam says. ‘Last night.’
‘Well. About fucking time.’