The Comfort of Figs (2008)

by Simon Cleary

  ‘It’s alright,’ the boy says without looking at him.

  ‘But isn’t there somewhere else you can . . . go?’

  ‘Got something in mind?’ the boy snaps, their recent closeness now swept away. ‘How about your place then – got a key for us?’

  The boy’s eyes are fixed on the ground for a second or two, before rising to Robbie’s face and smiling, a tired smile which takes an eternity to unfold. As if it is the boy feeling sorry for him. ‘Just joking.’

  ‘So . . . I’m Robbie.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Aaah, the wallet. Of course. You remembered . . . What’s your name?’

  ‘Jesus, mate.’ The boy shakes his head with irritation, winces as if Robbie’s intrusion hurts.

  ‘Good to meet you, Jesus,’ Robbie tries again, thrusting his hand in the boy’s direction. The boy looks at him. Robbie is not sure whether it is doubt or disdain in the boy’s eyes, but the boy takes his hand anyway, a single, quick shake.

  ‘And your friend?’

  Robbie doesn’t address the old bloke directly. He has been silent, disengaged.

  The boy does not answer. Protective, Robbie thinks.

  ‘How did you come to live here under the bridge?’ Robbie asks, trying again differently – looking first at the boy, then the man, hopeful, though no longer expecting a response. But the reply to this comes fast.

  ‘He built it!’ the boy says, flinging the words at Robbie like a hand of cards slapped upon a table. ‘He built the bridge, so he’s got a right to live here.’

  Robbie’s ears ring, as if he’s been clapped hard across the side of the head – the way his father administered flashes of unexpected discipline, with a clip across the ear.

  When he feels he has control of his speech Robbie says slowly, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He built it!’ This time the boy’s voice contorts into a highpitched half-screech.

  ‘But what do you mean, he built it?’ Robbie says, the muscles in the pit of his stomach tightening. He looks now at the older man, examining his face for anything that might explain the boy’s words, but it is blank and motionless: his thin pursed lips and narrow chin, the sharp angle of his nose, all still. The white eyebrows are steady above watery unblinking eyes, but Robbie imagines he sees the man’s chest rise with a slow intake of breath, a small gesture of pride.

  ‘Just that,’ the boy says. ‘When he was young he built the bridge, so he’s got as much right to it as anyone.’

  Robbie hears this as an article of faith from the mouth of an innocent. For a long time Robbie says nothing, the old man quiet as rock, the loyal boy confused by the growing silence.

  Robbie’s own story is spinning hotly within the confines of his brain, hitting against bony casing.

  In the end he says only, ‘It’s a beautiful bridge,’ looking at the old man.

  ‘And isn’t it,’ the old man speaks, a gentle cadence to his voice.

  ‘A beautiful bridge. Nineteen thirty-five to nineteen forty,’

  Robbie continues, seeking to draw him to reminisce or to embroider, not sure how long he can hold this feint.

  ‘A beautiful bridge,’ the man nods, ‘a work of art.’

  ‘Designed to demonstrate the artistry and poetry of the science of engineering, so as to express simplicity, beauty and service,’ Robbie says; the words his father had made him learn by rote as a child have come back to him for the first time in twenty years. And it surprises him he has the self-control to deliver the hated formula so calmly now.

  ‘The artistry of engineering,’ the man repeats. ‘Yes, the artistry of bridge-building. We did a great thing.’

  He sighs, and Robbie thinks there’s a movement on the watery film of the old eyes, a rippling before the man blinks.

  Is all this just the delusion of a destitute old beggar? How long has the man lived like this? Robbie wonders. What toll has it taken, on his body, his mind? He might be seventy, he might be eighty. But how many years does living rough add? Robbie does the reckoning. Sixty years since the bridge was completed in 1940. That puts the old man at ten to twenty years old when the bridge was completed.

  ‘You’re a bit young to have worked on the bridge, aren’t you, mate?’ Robbie tests.

  The old man responds by throwing back his head and laughing, laughing till his heaving chest trips into a cough and he has to press both his papery hands against his breast to calm the shaking.

  ‘Well then, son, tell us about some of the great enterprises you’ve been working on. Tell us about your grand achievements.’

  The old man grins as his cough subsides, still chuckling to himself.

  ‘It’s alright, son,’ he says to Robbie, ‘I know what you’re doing. You’re not the first.’

  The old man turns to the boy.

  ‘Jimmy,’ he says, ‘bring over the pictures.’

  The boy rises and walks to where one of the mattresses is laid out flush against the concrete retaining wall. He reaches into the space between mattress and wall, and takes out a cardboard cylinder smudged with dirt, the red postal symbol still visible through the grime. The boy hands the cylinder to the man, who pries the plastic cap off one end, then wipes his hands against the breasts of his shirt to clean them. It does no good, so he has the boy pour water from a plastic bottle over his hands as he rubs them together, wiping them this time on the inside lining of his coat. Then he takes up the cylinder again and taps the end of it against his thigh until a tight wad of paper slides out. He unrolls the large sheets of cardboard paper with his thin hands, and Robbie sees then they are paintings. Or rather, reproductions, dirty prints. When they are flattened out he spreads them on the mattress, weighting their corners with small stones.

  The old man starts through his collection of prints, Robbie watching, intrigued. He peels away a Tom Roberts bushland setting, an Arthur Streeton painting of the Hawkesbury River valley, more Sydney Harbour Streetons. Vision after vision of the country. Sidney Nolan’s myth-making is there: Ned Kelly, and Burke and Wills, and Mrs Fraser’s Convict. Lame attempts, Robbie thinks, though more alive now with the dirt and muck and grime on them from the old man’s hands.

  When the national heroes are all peeled away, they come to what appear to be smudged charcoal sketches of the Story Bridge and its surrounds. The old man flicks through half a dozen of these drawings till he finds one which he turns for Robbie to see, swivelling it around. A young man posing at the end of a jetty, leaning against a railing, the bridge in the background. It could have been the old man in his youth. But it could have been anyone.

  ‘So you worked on the bridge,’ Robbie says.

  The old man smiles to himself.

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘We were making history,’ the old man sighs nostalgically.

  ‘Do you remember much about it?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Memory like an elephant,’ the boy breaks in. A phrase he’s heard.

  ‘And like an elephant I’ve come home to die,’ the old man says, stretching his legs and smiling again now, his watery eyes shimmering with some breeze of the mind Robbie cannot see.

  There is a rustle, and a bearded dragon darts across the hard earth in front of them, scooping a piece of gristle from the ground. The lizard stops and lifts its head to the three of them, then scurries away under a bush with its prize.

  ‘Do you remember a bloke by the name of Jack O’Hara?’

  Robbie asks. He doesn’t know why he does this. Doesn’t know whether he is trying to trap the old bloke, or whether there is a part of him that believes. Perhaps both.

  ‘What?’ the old man’s reply like a gunshot.

  Robbie is stunned by the force of the word, and immediately regrets the question.

  ‘What did you say?’ the old man snaps again.

  ‘Nothing really . . . Jack O’Hara . . . a bloke who worked on the bridge, as well – I was wondering if you remembered him, that’s all.’

 
; The old man is leaning forward, leaning closer to Robbie, sharpened.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was just asking. Thought you might know him, that’s all.’

  Robbie feels pathetic in his retreat.

  ‘Who are you?’

  The challenge is harder, commanding. Robbie meets the old eyes, the fierceness of them – everything about the old man suddenly funnelled into his eyes.

  Robbie resists. He breathes. He does not succumb. He begins to gather himself. For long, long seconds he says nothing, taking the old man’s gaze, staying with him.

  ‘Who are you?’ the old man demands again, but now his breathing begins to shallow, a crack opening in his voice.

  ‘Who are you?’ the old man pants.

  ‘Whoa, mate, it’s okay,’ Robbie says. Only now he wonders what it is that is so important to the old man, who’s nearly weeping before him through gulps of breath.

  It is the boy who answers at last, who puts a small hand on the shaking shoulders of the man.

  ‘Robert O’Hara, Pop.’ Gently, firmly. Frightened too.

  ‘Remember the wallet? His name’s Robert O’Hara.’

  At the boy’s young voice the panting stops. The man’s eyes flicker and fade. He slumps in his seat, withdraws into himself and is gone.

  Chapter Four

  The day lengthens, and still Robbie has not returned. Freya waits. She is not sure why. She tries to rest. Sometimes her eyes are open, sometimes she sleeps.

  From time to time she gets out of bed. Each rising the start of a journey. To switch the ceiling fan on or, later, when the heat has ebbed, to turn it off again. A trip to the backyard at the height of the day, where she fills a watering can and walks it to the herb garden, pouring water over the dill and the parsley and the basil before abandoning the aluminium can on a stone.

  So he’s staying out all day, she thinks, finally.

  * * *

  His day has swollen, beyond the point of any containment, beyond thinking of Freya. Already he has secreted a fig sapling in the branches of a camphor laurel, and breakfasted with his mother on the balcony of her apartment. Already he has seen, way across the river, an old man from a make-shift squatters’ camp fall from a cliff-face. And already a man, rescued, has whispered to him I know about your father, and has then snapped shut, leaving Robbie to stumble back from the cliff ’s edge, the world suddenly gone out of focus.

  So he turns from the old man, and the cliff and the bridge, and drives to the council depot. ‘I’m ready,’ he says to them, ‘I’m ready to start again.’ And he knows he is. That he is strong enough, surging; ready enough to return to the council and its public, transparent plantings.

  Robbie thinks of the old man at the cliff. He marks out a garden bed and thinks. He drags a pick along the ground, tearing the grass, opening the earth in a shallow, ragged line, and thinks of the man he left near the bridge that morning.

  He is making a bed around a sandpaper fig. The soil is hard, compacted. Breaking it with a mattock, he adds water to soften the ground first. Then he lifts the mattock above his head and brings it down in its arc, his back bent, his shoulders rolling to their work. His arms swing past the brim of his hat, past his ears, past the line of his jaw, and this breeze of his own making cools the perspiration on his cheeks for the briefest of moments.

  He works in the fig tree’s shade as the day moves, migrating with its shadow. As he labours, he thinks: a trace of the past. This man knew my father.

  Robbie digs holes a foot and a half deep. He mixes fertiliser and soil, and cradles shrubs, low-growing lilly-pillies, into the holes. He presses the soft soil mix around the roots of each shrub and stands back to ensure it is straight. As a tree bends so shall it grow. Robbie wheels barrow-loads of bark chip from the truck.

  He tips the bark in piles onto the ground, like so many anthills.

  He leans the barrow against the side of the truck and takes a shovel, thrusting it into the mounds of bark again and again, spreading the bark across the ground. He thinks about the old man recoiling from his father, even after all these years. One by one he razes each pile till all around is bark chip, the unmoved sandpaper fig surrounded by a rust-red sea of bark.

  Chapter Five

  Late afternoon light smirls through the window, catching her shape under the sheet. Freya is shrivelling: she is balled up, her thighs against her chest, her hands grasping her legs firmly below the knees. Freya has come to know her legs these last weeks: the ridges of bone at the top of the shins, the long sinewy straps of muscle running their length, the light downy leg-hair under her fingers, the pale feet hanging weak from her ankles.

  Freya is collapsing into herself. She doesn’t understand it, the low-creeping anxiety that has found and enveloped her since she was stabbed, the way she is responding to it.

  The fear, too, of her own reaction. The fear of fear itself, is that what it is? What trauma does to you, and the changes wrought by each passing day. And the aloneness of it.

  The strength of her need for Robbie, and today, today especially, her disappointment.

  Finally there are the footsteps she has been waiting for.

  Slow and firm. Footsteps she wants to understand. She listens to each distinct footfall on the front timber stairs, hears the different resonance each step makes when hit, the different character of each. Their tones rise, like dull piano scales. Then there’s the key in the door, the handle turning, the tongue of the door retracting into itself, sliding against the door jamb and then clicking into space as the door swings open. There is more air, more light in the room than Freya feels she can bear.

  ‘Robbie,’ she says.

  He closes the door carefully, comes from the hall into the bedroom, following her voice.

  ‘Frey.’

  He sits beside her on the bed and strokes her hair, half expecting to see traces of silver, like glowing phosphorus on a midnight beach, come away on his palm. Freya smells him as he leans into her, his hand, the sweat dried into his shirt and his shorts, grass seeds clinging to his leg-hair, his socks.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ she asks, her voice hoarse from under-use.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘The smell of you . . . where have you been?’

  He presses her forehead with his thumb, finding creases, rubbing them out. He takes her hand, presses a piece of bark chip into her open palm, and folds her fingers over it. She brings it to her nose.

  ‘Pine bark,’ Freya guesses, though there is none of the joy which used to fill her when they played this before. So he’s gone back to work, she realises, without telling me, she thinks.

  ‘You’re a genius,’ he smiles.

  But the game is inconsequential to her. She is elsewhere, and his smile fails to reach her, falls short, flattens somewhere in the space between them.

  ‘How are you?’ he asks.

  ‘I went in to the clinic. For a check-up.’

  Robbie’s body tenses, and he withdraws his hand from her brow.

  ‘You should have told me. I would have come.’ And then the next thought, ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The room darkens. An overhanging jacaranda branch moves against the corrugated-iron roof, stirred by a laggard breeze, scratching the tin, muzzling the golden afternoon light.

  ‘Still the same. They won’t know for six months,’ she says, as if by rote. ‘Blood tests at three months, and again at six.’

  ‘It’ll be okay. Come on,’ Robbie says, ‘let’s eat.’

  He positions an armchair just off the kitchen and sits her down, facing him while he prepares the meal. He pours her a glass of red wine from an open bottle.

  ‘I don’t know if I can,’ she says. ‘I can’t remember what they said about alcohol.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Robbie says.

  He pours himself another, and raises it towards her. Freya’s smile is slow, a thing of habit. She raises her glass in response to him, half a room away.

>   ‘Yes. Salud.’

  But she remains only half-present, her eyes fixed on the swirling waves of wine settling in her glass, like a red sea calming after a storm.

  The frying pan begins to spit and sizzle with oil and garlic.

  ‘I met a bloke today who worked with my father on the bridge, back in the nineteen-thirties.’

  ‘Really,’ Freya replies, the word indeterminate, a question if anything at all, her voice flat, her conversation run dry. She sways the wine back and forth in the bowl of her glass, and even this takes effort.

  ‘Are you up to talking?’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, ‘just tired. You met a guy who worked with your father . . .’

  The phone rings. Robbie answers it. It is Bec.

  ‘Tell her I’ll call back,’ Freya says.

  A little later Robbie asks, ‘Did you swim today?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You need to swim.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He leaves the kitchen bench, comes to her, squats and takes her head in his hands. He brings her eyes to his, his face to hers.

  ‘You need to swim,’ he whispers. Close, gentle, urgent.

  She smiles. She nods her head. She wants to cry.

  Something is missing. Freya doesn’t know what. The chill that has settled in her arms feels like a withdrawal, an absence. At night she returns to the scene of the stabbing in her sleep. She opens her mouth to scream and the screeching sound of a flying fox emerges. At night Freya beats her arms against her torso, her arms dream-wings with which she would escape. But from what? When she wakes this is never clear.

  ‘I was going to tell you about a bloke I met today,’ Robbie says.

  ‘Someone who worked with your father . . .’

  ‘Yes. So I found this old fella, camping on the cliff-top under the bridge with a group of homeless people. Including the boy.’

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘The boy who found my wallet, Frey,’ he says, going back to fill a gap he hadn’t realised was still there – and suddenly seeing a vast space open between them.

  Freya stares into the wall, her gaze lost before it reaches the vertical timber and the tongue-and-groove joints.