Afternoons with Harvey Beam Read online

  She hands him a wad of printouts, runs back to the printer for the most important bit—her summary, the ‘Gemma Sting’, but it’s needless because the plucky redhead has it all in her head.

  ‘Fewer graduate jobs than ever before,’ she says, ‘and far more graduates too.’ She unleashes a barrage of figures, then continues. ‘There are loads of tertiary-qualified kids working at Cash Converters and Petbarn and just shit jobs, up to fifty hours a week, leaving just enough time to apply for jobs that don’t even exist anymore. And now the government wants them to pay their HECS debt immediately—have you heard about that?’

  He stops her. Doesn’t want this to be about uni fees—dull radio. Says, ‘What’s the proportion of arts graduates versus the rest?’

  Gemma looks at her pile of instant research. ‘Ah, not sure,’ she says, ‘but there’s also this: one in four secondary students now don’t have a job or a course of study within a year of leaving school, so maybe this should be about the broader issue of youth unemployment and the need for transition programs …’

  ‘No, it’s about arts degrees,’ Harvey says, swinging into his chair and firing up the panel. The kindling has caught. The endless courting and flirting with this thing that he loves.

  Gemma looks wearily at him in full flush. She may never understand what happens in the tunnel between Beam at 12pm and Beam at 4pm; ’twixt sleepy rumination and the hot-wired bulldozer. But he knows what he’s doing—at least, he’s been doing it a while. Today’s mission is Annihilation of the Arts Degree and implicitly the salvation of all young people via the prime-time assassination of Humanities Department overlords.

  By 4.30pm however, just half an hour into it, the show is not going to plan, not that it ever does. The beauty of talkback is of course its ugliness—the chaos and terror of faceless humans colliding, listeners empowered by the hermetic security of their drive home, verbal stoushes in which the mediator is also one of the combatants.

  But Beam hasn’t counted on calls from Jeremy Kayne, a hardware engineer running a Forbes-listed software company who only employs people who’ve first done a liberal arts degree. ‘If you teach students one skill,’ he says, ‘it’ll be obsolete within two years on current form, but if you teach them how to look at lots of information and make meaningful connections within it, and only a classic liberal education does that, then you will have taught them adaptive skills for life. That’s who I want.’

  He hasn’t counted on Professor Genny Story, who runs the drama program at a top-100 university and cites an eighty-five percent industry employment rate for her graduates compared to a thirty percent rate for the same university’s engineering school.

  He hasn’t counted on Arthur Vivian, a curmudgeonly newspaper journalist of thirty years’ experience, who says he often feels like a fraud mentoring today’s journalism graduates as they seem to know far more than he does about defamation law, background research and ‘some waffly but probably important faff about a Code of Ethics’.

  It’s good radio, good talent, but it’s quickly blooming at Beam’s expense. The argument he has framed is being dismantled, assumption by assumption, and his statistics mask discrepancies. Many of the law graduates he cites as having far better employment prospects than arts graduates are in fact arts graduates who then topped up with law. More and more arts graduates are taking up overseas volunteer postings for needy NGOs, so they’re employed, just not according to the narrow defines of Australia’s census data.

  Beam’s only allies arrive in the form of wounded meatheads; guys (and they’re all guys) who say that university is a time-wasting crock of shit for people who can read books but can’t build the bookcase to stick them in. And then someone called Hamish calls in to say that not only has he read all the books in the bookcase he built himself, but that the bookcase he built himself rests within the million-dollar eco-house he built himself that recently featured on Grand Designs Australia. ‘Did you see it?’ asks Hamish. Beam: ‘No, I didn’t.’ Hamish: ‘It’s a show about architecture.’ Beam: ‘Yes, I know that.’ Fuck.

  But mostly Harvey hasn’t counted on university students ringing in. Ringing in, texting, emailing, facebooking and tweeting their download accounts off. Aren’t you meant to be studying? Beam thinks. Or fixing a basket to a bike? They’re not even remotely located in his demographic. Arts students, medical students, international students, postgrads … they’ve all got an opinion and it isn’t his.

  Beam doesn’t mind being challenged, doesn’t even mind being wrong occasionally, but he hates when the show jumps track completely and starts gaining a speed that he can’t control.

  He makes a time-call at 5.29, just before headlines, and warily looks up through the glass at Gemma. She is impassive; he can’t read her mood. It might just be the girl’s most marketable skill that she can so convincingly hide being pissed off.

  Then his eyes adjust and Beam sees that Gemma is not alone. Behind her stands the station manager, Ron Ibbotsen. Ribbot. He has his arms folded, hands gripping his cuffs. Simultaneously subdued and seething, it would appear, and it looks like he’s settled in. This isn’t just a friendly tour of the facilities.

  Gemma throws Harvey a bone. She phones a guy who had called the morning presenter that day about the dying art of reading. A measured old fellow, he had discussed the economic benefits of self-education; said he’d read more than five hundred books in the last three years—far more than any he might in any university degree. He wasn’t boasting, merely saying, ‘Why pay university fees? Libraries are free.’ Gemma gets him on the phone and encourages him to add some levity to Beam’s conversation, which he happily does.

  ‘Thanks’, Beam types into the studio monitor for Gemma’s viewing on the other side. He shoots a thumb in the air.

  ‘Welcome’, she types back. ‘How were you to know Ribbot’s wife is an arts professor at Deakin, his kids are all studying arts, and the station proprietor has just joined the Senate at his alma mater, UTS?’

  Jesus.

  So soon after the awards dinner debacle and on the back of last week’s shitstorm, when Beam had inadvertently outed a retired Catholic priest, prompting a legal letter from the office of Cardinal George Pell and all sorts of hellfire from the gay community (whom he thought would be happy), today’s show is not what Harvey needs. He’s had a bad run. Is either fading to black or spinning towards implosion. Willing failure to give him a leave pass.

  He feels it, the loosening. Something has become untethered. Something, somehow has got lost.

  3

  Beam leaves his mother’s address details with an airport clerk who has vowed through lips trained to smile to locate his luggage as soon as possible. He ends up directly behind Grace in the taxi line and sees now that she is the slightest bit taller than him and is wearing one of those long flowy dresses that have somehow become fashionable. They each shuffle forward while reuniting with their phones—Grace checking messages, Beam playing Candy Crush to avoid checking messages. When a taxi pulls in as Grace reaches the front of the line, Harvey wishes her all the best for her nursing stint.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, and turns to smile at him. That nose. ‘I hope things work out okay. You know, with your dad.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harvey says with a what-do-you-do half-shrug. ‘But thanks for the company, Grace. I usually hate flying.’

  ‘Take-offs?’ she says, sliding her bag into the car’s back seat.

  Beam nods, a little bewildered.

  Grace smiles at him one last time. ‘Me too,’ she says.

  And she’s gone. And not for the first time lately Harvey Beam briefly wonders if there might be a more eloquent plan to life than the one he has so far understood. A plan that is out of his hands. One that puts him in the path of people he is meant to meet, delivers him unlikely lessons and fresh possibilities. Maybe it’s like this for everyone and he’s just late to catch on. He also knows this sort of hippie thinking is a sign of an ageing brain that has lost its edge.
<
br />   Beam waits a good while for the next cab. He realises there is probably still only one taxi company in town and not a lot of competition for jobs. No rush, fellas.

  Twenty minutes later a cab pulls up and Harvey hops in the back. He is instantly disconsolate and weary. Most of his wearable clothes and shoes were in that bag. It’s a pain in the arse, complicating a trip that feels like hard enough work already.

  Beam looks at the back of the driver’s head. It’s familiar. He has always recognised people from the back more readily than the front. He thinks it might be Tony Finetti, in the same year as him at high school, possibly going back to primary school. They played in the same rugby league team, billeted together on at least one trip. Back then Finetti didn’t have tattoos all over his hands and an earring resembling a bone, so Beam might be wrong about this. It certainly looks like the back of his head.

  Harvey gives the address and sits in silence. Had thought briefly about going straight to the hospital but now thinks he would like to see his mother first. Needs a calmer port.

  He’s not sure who will be at Lynn’s house. She’s lived on her own for years now (since Ken, since Richard, and before that his father), but he knows, he imagines, her place is still the spill zone for his siblings—that place to which they can escape the families they’ve created themselves and come back to what they better understand. Which is not each other.

  56 Upton St, Shorton. Emotional space station.

  The taxi moves from the south to the north side via the centre of town. Beam feels ready to check his messages now but can’t resist a visual appraisal of Shorton’s piecemeal aesthetic evolution. The town is wilting, it seems, on this igneous summer day. Few people test their nerve outside of cars and shops and he guesses the air-conditioned local shopping centres will be heaving. He spies old haunts—pubs, nightclubs, cafes, rebadged over and over. Fresh colours that quickly fade. Naff names. Chalked specials. Hanging racks on footpaths.

  A ‘rejuvenation plan’ is underway in Town Central—or so he recently read on the local newspaper’s website, a place his fingers sometimes wander to for no clear reason except the prospect of some exceptionally bad and amusing junior reportage. It looks as though rejuvenation means the planting of immature trees and the installation of parking meters.

  The cab crosses the bridge and he looks down at the river, still paint-swatch blue, still calling out to him and criminally underutilised. As a boy Harvey had thought this was his river, for no-one else seemed particularly interested in it. He had spent countless hours digging for yabbies in the mudflats. Entire school holidays had disappeared in a sun-blistered haze of wriggling, dying crustaceans. It had always seemed very important to Harvey that his fisherman’s basket—his mother’s old peg basket, in fact—was filled to the lip with tangled claws and tails before he even contemplated rigging up a handline. And then he would fish, fish all afternoon, full of hope and fresh resolve, until the tide changed or the sun went down.

  Once, he had caught a whiting big enough to keep. He couldn’t believe his luck. It hadn’t even been a big yabby on the end of his hook. The fish had given Harvey a decent fight, a real to-and-fro that spoke to Harvey’s manhood. He had instinctively known when to let the fish run, give it a little confidence, and then when to pull up hard. Over and over. It had to have been instinct, Harvey told himself, because no-one had ever shown him how to do it. And now he had the spoils, a quickly fading whiting in his sling. A hundred thousand yabbies had not died in vain.

  And Harvey wondered as he walked home that evening if instinct too wouldn’t show him how to cut up the fish and make it into something his mum could cook for dinner. For the whole family. But Beam’s father had made him throw the fish into the big bin behind the shops.

  ‘Disgusting,’ Lionel Beam had said. ‘Absolutely putrid.’

  Harvey catches the driver’s eye in the rear-vision mirror and quickly pulls out his phone. Two of the messages are from Trudi Rice, one is from his sister, and two are from Cate.

  Trudi wants to catch up, wants to know why he isn’t answering his phone, wants to talk deadlines. Wants human relations.

  His youngest sister, Naomi, sounds upset but it’s hard to tell because she’s also whispering. She says their father may only have days. When is Harvey going to get here? She says not to listen to anything their other sister, Penny, has to say about anything while he’s here.

  Beam winces, bracing himself for a fresh round of warfare between his fractious sisters.

  But it’s the final two messages from his eldest daughter that make him want to turn the cab around now, abort this misguided mission and head back to Sydney. She is clearly distressed and very angry. She says she didn’t get into environmental science, didn’t get her second or third or fourth preferences either, and that her mother believes she has been LYING about the amount of study she’s done for the past two years and wasted THOUSANDS of dollars worth of school fees because she’s a SELFISH BITCH and that she, Cate, would have thought her mother would be sympathetic instead of ATTACKING her because she DID study, Dad, she did.

  ‘And can I please live with you for a while because I’m OUT OF THERE. I mean it. This is emotional ABUSE.’

  Message two from Cate: ‘Dad, I’m at your place. Where ARE you?’

  It’s been a long time since one of his daughters asked him for anything besides money or use of his station-sponsored cinema card and Harvey feels both elated and sick. He hadn’t even told Cate and Jayne he was heading to Shorton; had briefly thought about bringing them along to see the grandfather they barely knew but their mother quickly shut down that idea.

  ‘There’s nothing in that town for them to do, Harvey,’ Suze had said in an email. ‘Your father wouldn’t even recognise them anymore. But do say goodbye to him from me, I mean, for what it’s worth.’

  Sure. Suze says bye!

  Beam finds Cate’s mobile in his contacts. It goes straight to her voice message—a cavalier and no doubt much-practised ‘So yeah, leave some words’—and he tells her to get his spare key from his neighbour to the right and make herself at home.

  ‘I’m sorry about the uni place,’ he says, ‘but it’s really not the end of the world. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat. Everything happens for a reason.’ Any more clichés, Beam? Done?

  Suze is right on this. He’s never known what children need to hear.

  The cab pulls in to his mother’s driveway and Harvey passes forty dollars over the centre console to the guy who may or may not be Tony Finetti.

  ‘Keep the change,’ he says, and hears, ‘Yeah, thanks Beam,’ as he shuts the door.

  Honestly, what could he have discussed with Finetti?

  Harvey takes a minute to consider his first words to Lynn. He marvels at families that don’t have to do this; those for whom constant engagement is the most natural thing in the world. The only thing. He sometimes watches these families—at barbecues, the beach, on TV—and regards them as the most fascinating social experiment. An unlikely hypothesis that returns a positive result.

  He decides he will give Lynn a hug and gauge things from there.

  The first thing he notices at his mother’s front door is that her gardening phase has clearly ended. The pavers are overrun with runaway buffalo grass and the pot plants lining the porch are all dead. The next thing he notices is that she’s taken up smoking because all the late plants have been squashed out with cigarette butts. Finally he notices a Eureka flag taped to one of the front windows and he no longer thinks he should knock on the door.

  Beam dials his mother’s mobile.

  ‘Harvey! Are you here?’

  ‘I’m at Upton Street. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at your sister’s, remember? I moved into Naomi’s place. I told you that.’

  Harvey starts walking quickly down the driveway and into the street.

  ‘No, Mum, you didn’t tell me that,’ he says, nervously looking back at the house over his shoulder. ‘That’s why
I’m at Upton.’

  ‘Well, I definitely thought your sisters had told you. Hang on. Naomi?’ she yells, and then Lynn’s voice becomes hand-over-phone muffled: ‘Didn’t you tell Harvey I was here?’

  There is a solid minute of radio silence as Harvey decides he might as well walk to the tavern at the end of the adjoining street, if it’s still there.

  ‘Harvey, stay where you are and Naomi will come and pick you up now.’

  ‘I can’t stay here,’ Harvey says, exasperated at how obvious that should be. ‘Tell Naomi I’ll walk to the Rosewood and meet her there.’

  Beam walks quickly in the direction of the tavern until the midday humidity overwhelms him and he slows to a beaten shuffle. Why does his mother always assume that important information will automatically find him one way or another, if not via her in their sparse phone chats, then somehow via the osmotic process of ‘family’? Why does she place faith in something that has never worked the way it’s meant to?

  He remembers once looking at an electricity pole in central Bangkok that was completely swamped in a writhing, sparking mountain of tangled wires and broken cords pointing nowhere and ripe for disaster, and his first thought had been: behold the Beam communications model.

  He can’t believe he’s here again.

  4

  The Australian Commercial Radio Awards is a suitably boozy affair where egos and logos can swill around for a good four hours until it’s time to steal the centrepieces and flee. At least, that’s how it’s gone down for the last twenty-six years. This year the organisers have taken the advice of a new boutique events company that won the job with a pitch that promised ‘a new era, new focus, new possibilities’. Subtext: less alcohol, no sit-down meal.

  The new venue, a heritage-style room within Sydney Museum, is adorned with sepia prints of radio’s golden era (no-one is quite sure when this was) and about twenty rows of linked chairs. The stage is backlit by a large screen spooling through the monikers and frequencies of all the major stations and their sponsors. What looks like a card table holds aloft a small cityscape of trophies.