Afternoons with Harvey Beam by Carrie Cox

Author:Carrie Cox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2018-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

21

ON AIR

‘It’s bloody hot and the air-con’s cracked it but that’s not how I know I’m back in Shorton, folks.’ Breathe. Pause. ‘No, I know I’m back home again because the ute that I followed into the station this morning had spotties that could throw shadows onto the moon. I know I’m back home again because there’s a bloke on the main drag peddling pies out the back of his van instead of drugs. And I know I’m back home again because this is the same chair I sat in twenty years ago—pause—and it’s still broken.’

Beam flicks up the sound on the station jingle, checks the time, cues his first tune (‘Run To Paradise’ for old times’ sake) and forward-promotes the morning’s talkback topic: What the hell happened to Shorton Beach? It’s exhilarating to be working his old console—the very same panel with the addition of a new computer screen that doesn’t appear to be connected to anything—and he’s quietly surprised that it is coming back to him so readily, as though the information has been stored in his fingers all this time and he just has to keep them moving.

Hugh Traynor knocks on the glass, gives Beam the two thumbs up. The room behind him, crammed with empty desks and boxes, is full of sunlight—it bores through the cracks in this fibrous building, threatening to bust it wide open—and for a minute things are exactly as Beam remembers them: sunny, simple, safe. He’d wanted none of these things in 1994. Today they seem far less threatening.

‘And that was the Choirboys,’ he says when the song is over, brushing his hand smoothly down the left volume column as though shushing an orchestra. ‘Who were anything but in their day. It’s two minutes to news time and after the news I want to hear from you about something that I, well, quite rudely discovered upon flying back home to Shorton this week.’ Pause. Breathe. ‘My old beach, your old beach, is gone. Come on, you remember it, Shortonites? That long wide strip of glorious sand folding under the Pacific Ocean? Those big coconut trees lining the road—did you ever run up the side of one of those and score a coconut and then wonder what the hell to do with it? Do you remember the little kiosk with the ice-creams and the slushies and do you remember the old surf club? There were some ripper parties held in that lunk of a building. To me, and perhaps you, Shorton Beach holds many of the childhood memories that I still retain in this ageing brain and guess what? It’s gone. Replaced by, God, a marina. Well, let me tell you, that was a shock, and maybe some of you are still processing the shock of this development actually having gone from a bad idea to a real thing. An ugly thing. Maybe you like it? Maybe you were the one who asked for it? Maybe you thought you wanted it but now

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