Ten-year-old Harvey sits this morning in the back of his father’s Commodore, a slick of wetness between the back of his legs and the vinyl seat. Lionel Beam regards air-conditioning in cars as a reckless indulgence, the world going mad, and he never switches it on, not even on sweltering Shorton days like this.
It feels strange to be the only other person in the car besides his father. Can’t remember when this has happened before. Even stranger that the rest of the world is at school right now while he got to leave early for a dentist appointment. A painful hole in his tooth.
His father had picked him up from school at 10am, an unwelcome disruption to Lionel’s work day that had caused an argument between his parents the night before. But he seems less cranky now, Harvey notices. Was even friendly to Harvey’s teacher, who he had never before met.
He looks at the back of his father’s head as he drives, the neat clipping of his dark hair. Harvey could pull a face right now, stick his tongue out and cross his eyes, twirl his finger at the side of his head and point it at his father—he would never know. But Harvey can barely move for the strangeness of this setting.
If he was Penny or Naomi or even Bryan, he would think of something to say in this sticky, silent car (his father doesn’t like the radio either—says it pollutes the air with stupidity). But Harvey can think of nothing that might not be the wrong thing, that thing that turns a normal moment into an explosion, and he hopes his thoughts aren’t making any noise.
‘Why don’t you tell me where to go from here?’ Harvey’s father suddenly says over his shoulder.
Harvey is so taken aback he isn’t sure he heard the words correctly. Says, ‘What do you mean?’
‘You tell me whether to go right or left and we’ll see where we end up.’
Harvey’s eyes dart about the car as though he’s just been shaken awake and has no idea where he is. Doesn’t know what to make of this request or how to respond. He looks out the rear window, desperate to recognise something—a shop, a park, a street sign. The right answer. But he has no idea where he is, for the family dentist is on the opposite side of the river to home. It’s the side of town he doesn’t know, an old swampish chequerboard of little streets, sinking houses and corner shops.
‘Left,’ Harvey hears himself say.
At the end of the street, Harvey’s father turns the car left.
‘What next?’ his father says.
Harvey shivers with something that is either excitement or encroaching dread, he can’t be sure. ‘Right,’ he says.
The car turns right.
‘Left,’ Harvey says.
His father turns left. Says, ‘I hope you know where you’re going, son.’
Harvey laughs nervously. Of course he doesn’t know where he’s going, but that’s the game, isn’t it?
A dozen or so more lefts and rights and go-straights and Harvey and his father are well beyond the city gates. The land is agricultural, the houses few and far between.
‘Left,’ says Harvey, now uncharacteristically jaunty in his father’s company. They are both, he thinks, somewhere new here. Somewhere just beyond terror and loathing.
‘There are no lefts or rights now, Harvey,’ his father says. ‘This is a highway. Can you see?’
Abruptly the car pulls to the shoulder of the road and Harvey’s father waits for an oncoming road train to pass before he swiftly turns the car around. Looks at his watch, shakes his head, and makes the car go much faster than it was before. Dusty crops whizz by Harvey’s window.
He isn’t sure if the game has finished. Waits a minute or two, tries to read the silence, the pull of his father’s jaw. Then Harvey says, with a hopeful smile in his voice: ‘Right!’
Lionel Beam smacks his left hand hard against the top of the steering wheel; yells furiously at the windscreen and the world: ‘You’ve always got to take things too far, don’t you? You never fucking know when to stop. You’re just so stupid.’
Harvey drops his head to his chest, looks down at the sweaty hands in his lap and wonders where he made the mistake. Hopes to God there’s enough road left to let his father stop being mad.
Years later, many years later, on the eve of his father’s funeral, Harvey looks back on this day and reads it with fresh eyes and a heart that isn’t jumping out of his chest. His tongue finds the gap where his father had pulled the offending tooth out himself with pliers later that night. A new one had never grown through.
That strange car trip had not, he decides, been a botched game or even one of his father’s many psychological tests. He hadn’t imagined the forced shift in the atmosphere, the tiny gap between kindness and rage.
That day Lionel Beam had consciously made an effort to like the child that he simply, conclusively didn’t.