Beam takes the aisle seat and realises he’s on the wrong side of the plane to wave goodbye. He hopes someone on the other side makes sufficient hand movements in one of the tiny windows to give his family something to aim for.
It had been an overly long morning of farewells at any rate—a two-hour flight delay that neither Penny nor Naomi was going to yield to. Little Finn had become lost in the airport at some point and Harvey had made increasingly frantic checks of the men’s toilets before the boy reappeared holding a stuffed kangaroo and the hand of an elderly Chinese woman.
‘Three is so much harder than two,’ Naomi had said to the woman by way of thanks.
Penny had glanced at Harvey and rolled her eyes. While the sisters had seemed to make a semblance of peace at Lionel’s funeral, they had quickly settled back into the bristly circling game that is their discomfort zone. To fully unpick the hurts of the past would require a laying down of arms that neither woman seemed to have the energy for.
Harvey had listened to both sides of their stories in recent months, countless times in myriad settings, sober and drunk, tearful and indifferent. He’d entered an echo chamber long vacated by their mother. And he believed both his sisters, in fact. Each case would win at trial. And he had rediscovered how fiercely he admired their strength to simply stay here. Maybe you had to stay angry to hold on.
Bryan had not come to the airport, not that Harvey had either expected or wanted him to. ‘He sends his best wishes,’ Penny had said sincerely. And they had all laughed uproariously as if it might be true.
Beam had said goodbye to his mother at Naomi’s that morning. Lynn hated airports—the noise of the planes could set her tinnitus off for days. She gave Harvey a long hug and told him to come home sooner next time. ‘I won’t live forever,’ she’d said. Patted his stomach and told him to lay off the wine for a while.
‘Why don’t you come and visit me, Mum?’ Harvey had said. ‘I’ve got a spare room and you’d love it. You’d love Sydney. I could take a few days off.’
‘Well,’ Lynn had said, nervously eyeing the tiles between their feet. ‘You know the terrorism worries me. There’s no need to keep building all those mosques. I worry about you crossing that bridge too. I sit here and I worry about it every single day.’
Harvey thought this seemed highly unlikely.
‘But let’s wait until you get a job,’ she’d said, ‘and we’ll talk about it then.’
A job.
Beam knew his mother would never come to Sydney. He’d have to come back here to see her again—and he would. The idea no longer sat in the dark part of his brain that couldn’t make a decision.
Plus Cate was staying here for now. Beam had not been able to talk her out of it, not that he’d tried hard. He could see what appealed to her about the idea—the lure of a fresh canvas. Reinvention. Roll again. She was not so different to him.
‘You’ll get bored,’ he’d said to her the night before. ‘You’ll miss your mum and your sister.’
‘They drive me crazy, Dad.’
‘What about me?’
‘They drive you crazy too.’
He’d laughed and hugged her tightly and kissed her on the crown of her head.
And then he’d cried. In spite of himself, Beam let a single tear give way to a stream of them. He’d cried for reasons he didn’t know and couldn’t see yet. Not while he was still here.
He had to go.