Wakes are the loosest of social ceremonies and the most fraught. Harvey did a whole morning of talk on this a few years ago after a wake in south-west Sydney erupted into gang war and arrests. ‘Macca would be happy’ was the front-page splash of the Telegraph, a quote from one of the deceased’s brothers tendered as a statement to police in the paddy wagon.
The assumption by people about the recently deceased’s send-off expectations—usually with a subtext along the lines of He would have wanted us to get shitfaced—makes for many unsatisfactory wakes. Listeners made the case to Beam that wakes should be abandoned altogether; they do nothing to aid grieving and are frequently hijacked by strangers looking for either a party or a cause. Others said wakes could have greater purpose with a set framework just like funerals—a run sheet and an endpoint. Others still justified the free-for-all approach—death is shitty. It deserves chaos.
Harvey remembers one call that day in particular, from a middle-aged woman who’d recently buried her mother, a stoic matriarch who, when she knew she was dying, began baking and freezing in earnest so that the wake would not be catered for with anything less than her best recipes. Everyone subsequently sat about a churchyard nibbling Nanna’s famous fruitcake, four months in the deep freeze and shrouded in imminent death. Delicious, they said.
He is thinking about this as he wends his way through the current confusion in Naomi’s house, wondering if Lionel has left a few careful instructions for the wake just as he did for the funeral. But there is too much haphazard movement in here, Beam decides, and even the venue—a house of roaming boys and hopeful furnishings—feels as though Lionel Beam might never have set foot in it.
The place is heaving with sweaty, tentative people. There’s a gaggle shoring up martyrdom in the kitchen, nuking sausage rolls and relaying headcounts on the number of children gathered around the game device in the lounge room. There are people gathered in tiny circles of earnest chat, surreptitiously eyeing off other circles. There are men laughing loudly, bottles of Matt’s unlabelled home-brew in their hands, beads on their brows. There are shrew-eyed women moving between everything, working it all out.
Beam wanders through as though invisible, expected at the next juncture. He heads straight out the back door and down the side yard towards Matt’s shed where three men he doesn’t know bundle out of the metal door in rambunctious laughter. Matt follows them, issues a hardy cheers with beer aloft and then spots Harvey.
Beam smiles at Matt but feels like someone practising at smiles. Matt puts his beer down on the uneven grass where it promptly falls over. He reaches out his arms to Harvey and pulls him roughly into a bear hug.
In one of those half-minutes that splices through time and moorings, Beam pictures Matt as his best friend. A real buddy. They’re fishing on Sunday mornings, testing out a first batch of new home-brew, laughing uproariously at a shared observation, nodding sagely the next—the wisdom of brothers. He sees this all in Shorton settings, as it would need to be, and it seems odd and yet utterly plausible that the family he’s kept at highways’ length for so many years should finally deliver him that tricky thing: a real male friend.
He’s never been able to shape this for himself in Sydney and certainly not after he and Suze broke up. She’d been the library monitor of their shared friendships, always reminding him to phone someone (usually a husband of one of her friends) because it was the anniversary of something or to organise a hit of tennis because nascent friendships die in the first few months if nothing is scheduled, apparently.
Beam has always enjoyed good associations with people at work and might justifiably call many of them his friends, but even he knows these connections fail certain tests: none of them live in his phone, he can’t remember any of their kids’ names, he actively avoids them on public transport. It’s unlikely any of these relationships, as loud and privileged and funny as they seem within the station’s walls and floors, would survive beyond work.
And I don’t work there anymore, so there’s that.
People want to be Harvey’s friend, of course, in the way that people feel a certain ownership of public figures. They pat him on the back at his local coffee shop, address him by his first name to comment on a recent talkback topic, even wave at him on the train in a casually intimate manner. Perhaps because of this, and knowing that close family friendships had been an option he’d cut off himself, Beam has never felt lonely or obviously friendless. He’s never felt the need to replace empty encounters with anything solid. If you don’t look friendless, it’s hard to feel it. And he’s always had Suze, even now.
Pulling out of Matt’s beery embrace, Harvey looks upon his brother-in-law as someone who could have been a clear contender for more substantial friend material. He is that wonderful thing: a good bloke.
A good bloke once married to Grace.
‘Need some shed time?’ Matt asks and doesn’t wait for a reply. He ushers Beam into the tin bunker, produces two fresh beers and looks at the roof.
Harvey waits for him to say her name.
Instead, Matt says loudly, ‘Here’s to Lionel Beam.’ And he lifts his beer above his head.
Confused but compliant, Harvey does the same.
Aping majesty, Matt continues: ‘May all of his earthly opinions reach him at his new address!’
‘No lost luggage,’ Beam pipes in.
‘May there be books!’
Harvey adds: ‘That he’s already read.’
‘May there be non-stop FM radio talkback!’ Matt says.
‘Nothing but shit all day long.’
‘And may you, Harvey Beam,’ Matt continues, ‘find peace now. Find a little bonsai.’ And with this toast, Matt thrusts his beer extra skyward, causing it to shoot out foamy spray.
‘Wait,’ he adds with a comedic head-turn, ‘you’ve already found a piece now, Harvey. The nurse. Here’s to you, Don Juan!’
Beam makes a laughing sound. He sees that Matt couldn’t possibly have seen Grace at the funeral today or is making a really bad joke. Finds himself beginning to say something, words that get lost as he moves around them, suddenly feeling the need to reinspect Matt’s beloved tiny trees. He starts mumbling about leaves and hobbies and brothers and is bending up and down to get a closer look at each shelf. Eventually, he hopes, he will arrive at what he needs to say.
And then Harvey spots it. In the very corner of the lowest shelf in the shed, overwhelmed by larger plants and the layering of shadows, a small bonsai with a neat handwritten: Amazing Grace.
‘What’s that one about?’ Beam asks, heart in his cheeks, pointing at the little plant and then recoiling his arm to spin and point at something else, which happens to be a watering can requiring little explanation.
‘That one,’ says Matt, taking a long swig of his beer, ‘is the one that got away.’
‘Yes,’ Harvey says. ‘Yes.’ He looks to his beer bottle for the next line. Can barely focus.
‘And this?’ he says at last. ‘What do you call this particular home-brew, Matt?’
‘That’s just home-brew, Harvey.’
‘No special flavour?’
‘None that I can recall.’
‘Well, I think you’ve nailed it with this one, Matt. Really, really nailed it.’ Beam eyes the bottle at ridiculously close range lest it reveal a secret ingredient.
‘You okay, Harvey?’
‘Yeah,’ Beam says, and wipes the beer across his forehead as though just back from auxiliary firefighting duty. ‘It’s just been a big day.’
‘Sure has,’ Matt says. ‘Although it didn’t go as badly as I thought it would.’
‘Fuck, really?’
Beam feels for the shape of his phone in his suit jacket, which is presently holding in an olfactory tsunami of sweat and terror.
Matt says: ‘No, I really thought Naomi and Penny would go hammer and tongs today—it’s been building up again like the mother of all afternoon storms. But I think Bryan’s efforts took the wind out of that.’
‘Is he here?’ Harvey says.
‘I doubt it. Not sure I’d be opening him a beer if he did turn up.’
‘Look, Matt,’ Harvey says and looks at him squarely. ‘I really can’t thank you enough for what you did today. I mean, I just. I can’t, I didn’t … there’s … it was, I don’t know. You know. So many. What do you do?’
Matt grins. ‘You should work in radio, Harvey.’
Beam laughs. ‘I used to. Now I wouldn’t even get a job hosting late-night love song dedications.’
The two men step out of the shed and walk slowly back to the house.
Falling into step behind Matt, his head full of things unsaid, Harvey stares hard at his funeral shoes and wonders if he’s just failed the first and only test of friendship.