With a great measure of discomfort, Beam takes Simon’s monster truck to the airport the next morning. It takes him half an hour to find a parking space that will accommodate it. Already cutting it fine, Beam starts jogging towards the terminal only to discover he’s forgotten how to run without a treadmill and his left knee seems to be collapsing in on itself. He finds it incredulous that people start running marathons at this age.
Fortunately Suze and Jayne are not standing around waiting for him because their flight has been delayed. Harvey decides to wait it out, not wanting to renegotiate that car space. He orders a coffee and finds a seat in the packed airport cafe, the only food and beverage option in a facility that clearly needs about six more. People spill across melamine tables still covered in the plastic rubble of the previous tenants, while children teeter precariously on adult knees and shoulders. The air is a mess of shouted conversations and disappointment.
Harvey does what he swore he wouldn’t do, what he has rigorously avoided since his last talk with Trudi Rice. He googles ‘Sydney radio’ and ‘industry news’ on his phone and steers willingly into the slipstream of his recent despair.
The new mornings experiment—a top-heavy team of three hosts—is rating poorly (excellent), as one might expect of a jaded ex-pollie, a retired footballer and a pompous arts commentator thrown together for the first time. Each of them, Harvey knows, would see themselves as the ‘talent’, not the listeners and callers, and he inwardly rages against this unnecessary ignorance of the basic premise of good talkback. Common sense undone by strategic planning days.
Less gratifying is the news that John Jackson is faring well in the afternoons, leading the timeslot and ‘settling in nicely’. Arse hat. Beam tightens his grip on the phone, scrolls violently to find a bad review of Jackson, anything that Trudi Rice hasn’t already massaged into something positive. He finds nothing.
All trace, too, of Harvey has been removed from the station website, the site itself bearing no resemblance to the one he last looked at a few weeks ago. More strategic planning. And he hates himself for feeling like this, like an overlooked child. He knows that nothing really ends unless it ends badly, but the truth of it bites hard. He had loved his job, loved everything about where it had taken him beyond Shorton, loved that he was good at it. Had any of it mattered?
Not according to the internet.
What now? What the fuck now?
Suze leads Jayne through the gate like a front of unexpected weather. They are both dressed in Sydney blacks and greys, Jayne looking rail thin, ever the contrast to her sister’s much softer frame. Suze has cut all her hair off, again, and Harvey reads from her approaching expression that she is distinctly unhappy about having been delayed, a fact she confirms by kissing Harvey on the cheek and uttering in his ear at the same time: ‘Tiger Air. Can we have it shot?’
He wraps up Jayne in a hug that he hopes doesn’t come across as awkward and unsure because he never does this well; always goes in too hard or too soft and gets the angle wrong. It should be easier to be a father when you do actually love your kids, but it’s not. Affection is a difficult thing to start with confidence in your twenties.
‘Hey, Dad,’ says Jayne. ‘I’m sorry about your father.’
Like Cate, Harvey notes, Jayne hasn’t referenced him as ‘Grandad’. He feels a light stab of something that is probably guilt.
‘Yes, I’m sorry, too,’ Suze says. ‘But only in a polite way. I’m not manifestly sorry.’
Harvey smiles at his ex-wife. She who knows him far better than he’d sometimes like. Who makes the best curries he’s ever had before or since, who once gave him a head job while driving across the Nullarbor Plain (Because seriously, what else is there to do, Harvey?). Who says ‘manifestly’.
‘Thanks, Suze,’ he says, leading them both toward the baggage carousel. ‘Thanks for coming. You didn’t have to, but I’m really glad you’re here.’
‘Of course I had to come,’ she says, surveying the sea of waiting travellers, a tide of untucked shirts and thongs and sports bags. ‘You shouldn’t have to do this on your own. Brush up against all the crazy. And the girls should be here anyway, out of respect.’
‘I didn’t even know him,’ says Jayne.
‘And that’s to be respected,’ Harvey says with a laugh that doesn’t quite take. Suze briefly glares at him.
‘We’re going to stay in a hotel,’ she says, edging her way through the thrum of people trapped around the carousel like late Christmas shoppers. ‘I know you said we could stay with Penny, but I’d prefer not to.’
Harvey wonders how this decision will be interpreted by Penny, who had already made up the spare beds yesterday, but knows there is no changing Suze’s course once it’s plotted.
‘How is school?’ he says to Jayne.
‘Okay.’
‘Friends all good?’
‘They’re okay.’
‘How is netball going?’
‘I haven’t played netball for two years, Dad.’
‘Wow. Really?’ Shit.
‘Really,’ she says, but softens her tone with a smile. Though she can be sullen at times, Jayne does not share Cate’s passion for biting sarcasm.
‘Well, it’s great to see you,’ Beam says. ‘I’ve missed you.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
And they both stare at the still unmoving carousel, willing it to provide the next thing to talk about.
‘So what’s Cate been doing?’ Jayne says finally.
Harvey pauses to answer, because while he doesn’t really understand the shifting sands beneath his daughters’ relationship, he knows it is mostly defined by jealousy and far more difference than one might expect of common genes. He suddenly pictures Bryan hunched over his funeral notebook and inwardly winces.
‘She’s been helping out in Penny’s shop, actually,’ he says. ‘The gift shop. She seems to like it, which surprised me.’
‘Hmm,’ Jayne says without expression.
‘This is taking longer than the flight,’ Suze says. ‘Honestly, how hard can it be? How has no-one ever come up with a better system for getting bags off a plane?’
Just be happy if they get here at all, Beam thinks.
But they do and Suze’s agitation quickly passes, as it usually does once she is extricated from large groups of people she will never need to know. Within the hour the three of them are driving through the centre of Shorton and laughing (hysterically in Jayne’s case) at Harvey’s attempts to drive a vehicle larger than his apartment.
‘There’s no way I can park this anywhere here in town,’ Beam admits. ‘People will be maimed. Let’s head out to the marina and find somewhere to have lunch.’
‘Marina?’ Suze says.
‘Don’t ask,’ Beam replies.
Jayne surprises both parents by asking to be dropped off along the way at Penny’s shop. So it’s just the two of them about to share lunch, and Beam briefly wonders when such a prospect stopped scaring him and became something rather pleasurable. He can’t even remember the last time he and Suze had done something like this post-divorce—possibly never—and he’s relieved to feel so at ease about it. There is actually no-one, he thinks, save Grace, who he’d rather be lunching with today than his ex-wife.
They find an Italian pizzeria on the edge of the marina (which Suze agrees is a physical abomination—‘cultural rape’) and they are the only customers today. The sole waiter tends to them nervously, as though suspicious of their motives. Suze orders a salad and Beam a large meaty pizza and they agree that a bottle of sauvignon blanc seems mandatory.
It is odd, though not in a bad way, to be looking at Suze up close like this. So much of their relationship in recent years has taken place over the phone. She is ever a voice in his ear, even when they’re not physically talking, even when he is going to sleep at night and recalling their last conversation; his conch shell. Suze’s voice is omnipresent. He’d forgotten it came attached to a face and a body.
And he can see now, up close like this that, while Suze is still very attractive by most conventional standards, she is now unmistakeably a middle-aged woman. And the inescapable correlation—that he is a middle-aged man—hits him hard in the chest, as it increasingly does these days. Age hasn’t just crept up on him; it’s tackled him from the side, taken out his legs and his thirties.
Suze talks endlessly about the girls, one sentence running into the next. Harvey marvels at all the things she thinks about, things that never occur to him, stuff about going on the pill and doomed friendships and social media boundaries and apparently stooped posture (Jayne). Suze’s brain fizzes like welding sparks.
‘You’re a great mum, Suze,’ he says. ‘The girls are doing great. You need to cut yourself some slack.’
At this Suze reels. ‘I’m a shit mum, Harvey. I feel like I’m doing everything wrong—that’s how I feel most days. It’s just endless, the pressure of all that responsibility. And it’s all so fucking mysterious. Like there’s no way of knowing what you’re getting right or wrong until it’s too late and they hate you and they’re completely screwed in the head. Sometimes I think parenting is the worst kind of arrogance, like how do we as mostly fucked-up people ourselves think we can be responsible for other people’s lives? What kind of delusion is that? And it never ends, Harvey. It never ends. I know I will feel this way until the day I die. Completely fucking confused and exhausted.’
Beam fills Suze glass with wine. He knows he won’t say the right thing and so says nothing. Also knows that, for Suze, an expletive-filled rant is less a cry for help than a temporary solution of its own.
Harvey recalls an interview he did last year with a humanitarian refugee from Africa, a man recently resettled in Australia with nine children. Wow, nine children, Beam had said to him. That must keep you busy. The African man had laughed good-naturedly at Harvey’s observation and replied: ‘No, sir. One child keeps you busy. Two children keep you very busy. I am never busy with nine children.’
Sure, no time to overthink things, Harvey had thought, although he later realised the gentleman had meant that the older kids look out for the younger ones and life works out in a way that transcends ‘play dates’ and micro-managed birthday parties and the new season’s clothing.
‘Anyway,’ Suze says with a smile, quickly discarding her vented spleen like junk mail. ‘Your job, Harvey. It’s gone, isn’t it? I’ve been listening most mornings and there’s no talk of you returning or any new project. What happened? What’s wrong?’
Beam’s pizza lands in front of him like a meaty UFO, a Shorton up-yours to nouveau cuisine. ‘I’m sorry,’ Harvey says to the waiter, ‘but I actually ordered a “large”.’
Suze laughs. This is one of their old jokes, best enjoyed when a waiter doesn’t get it. But this one does and indulges them with a smile. The sort of smile, Harvey thinks, that young people reserve for old farts making bad jokes.
‘Yes, the job has gone,’ Harvey says. ‘I got a redundancy but only just. John Jackson wins again because the world is designed by arseholes.’
‘Harvey, I’m so sorry,’ Suze says as her salad arrives, two cherry tomatoes crowd-surfing a sea of lettuce. ‘That really sucks. It’s not fair. I hope you realise it’s not fair.’
‘Actually,’ he says, a geyser of cheese suddenly hitting him in the cheek. ‘It feels kind of … inevitable. Like I was running out of rope. Like I didn’t have enough rope in the first place and everyone knew it.’
‘That’s bullshit, Harvey. You were one of the best. You are one of the best. I think you actually got better at it in recent years—you lost all that arrogance. I even enjoyed listening to you sometimes, and I used to hate it. This salad is shit.’
‘Have some of my pizza,’ Beam says and slides a piece onto Suze’s bread plate.
‘Harvey, I know you’re hiding here at the moment, but you can’t hide forever.’
‘I don’t know, Suze,’ he says, reaching for his wine glass. ‘Maybe I can.’
Suze puts down her fork abruptly, leans across the table and fills Harvey’s field of vision with an incredulous expression.
‘You are not,’ she says, ‘seriously thinking about staying here?’
And Beam pauses, gives in to dead air. Wonders what will come out of his mouth next. Fills it with pizza.
‘You cannot stay here, Harvey. You’re only considering it because your current response to the situation is self-destruction.’
‘Honestly, Suze, I think I’ve reached the end of my career. About twenty years too early.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Harvey,’ Suze says, whipping a piece of bacon off Beam’s pizza like a shameless seagull. ‘Do you know what the common denominator is in every midlife crisis?’
Beam shrugs.
‘Overreaction,’ Suze replies. ‘Supreme overreaction.’
‘I think that’s a bit simplistic, Suze.’
‘No, it’s not,’ she says, damning her serviette into a perfect half and wedging it under a plate. ‘This town might have been your beginning, Harvey, but it’s not your end. This is not where it ends. Life is not a circle. It’s a … some other sort of fucking shape.’
Beam leans back in his chair, hands interlaced over the gut he plans to resurrect with sit-ups in the next week or so. ‘Thanks, Suze, I just … you know, it’s just. Hard. To make a plan. Without a job to wrap it around.’
‘This isn’t about the nurse, is it?’
‘What? No.’
‘You’re not throwing everything away for a hometown fling?’
‘Suze, she’s not even from here. She’s only here for work. It’s nothing to do with Grace.’
‘Grace,’ Suze says, draining her glass. ‘Nice name. Doesn’t sound like she’s from here.’
He smiles curtly, tries not to look like someone who’s definitely been having amazing sex. ‘That’s a bit harsh.’
‘Harvey, you have a skill. You have a profession. There are plenty of radio stations in Sydney. Just because you’ve finished up at one of them doesn’t mean the sky has to fall in. It doesn’t mean you have to scamper back home with your tail between your legs.’
Harvey feels a small wave of salami rise to his throat. ‘I came back here because my father was dying, Suze. Losing my job at the same time was just a coincidence.’
‘But somehow, Harvey, you’ve wrapped it all up together and you’ve got stuck. And you can’t think clearly because you’re having hot nurse sex.’
Beam thinks about this for a minute, stares out the window at the vivid hue of the stagnant marina, and decides: That’s probably about it.