The Comfort of Figs (2008)

by Simon Cleary

  ‘You went back,’ she says eventually.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take me with you?’

  He looks at her, the thing sitting heavy in his stomach, chilling him – guilt. Just how much of himself he’s kept from her.

  Take her with him where? Planting figs in the morning? To his mother’s? To the park? How many other places are there she could rightly ask about?

  ‘You should have taken me, Robbie. You’ve already got back what you lost. You should have taken me . . . You shouldn’t have left me.’

  Freya rises from the table. She drops the bark chip on the hoop-pine surface and turns for the bedroom. Robbie follows her down the hall, a few paces behind. He starts again, a tumble of desperate details. To talk the weight in his gut away, to try and dissolve it. He tells her of cliffs and rivers and falls and rescues – of how he hadn’t meant to go without her. Not really.

  In the bedroom Freya peels back the sheets, gets into bed, lies down, turns from him. Robbie sits in the hardbacked chair in the corner of the room facing the bed, and in the half-light continues. A boyish enthusiasm begins to grow out of the story.

  ‘So the old man tells me he worked on the bridge when it was built. Then he starts to reminisce, and as he’s talking I’m trying to work out if what he’s saying is true or if it’s all just fantasy. He’s talking about the bridge . . . and so I ask him if he knows my father.’

  Robbie leans forward in the chair, towards Freya, confident he can pull her round with this story, that he can heal whatever hurt he is responsible for, and bring her in.

  ‘Then everything changes, Frey. Like flicking a light switch. Suddenly he’s suspicious. He starts asking me, “Who are you? What do you want? What do you want to know for?” And he’s angry . . . or he’s scared . . . or he’s agitated . . . and I just don’t know why. Everything was fine till I mentioned my father’s name – but get this, Frey – the name set something off in him. The more I think about it . . .’

  Robbie fades out. He catches himself – his breath after the rush of words, and thoughts. He speaks more slowly, across Freya’s back, over her turned shoulder, still undaunted by her silence.

  ‘This is what I think. The old bloke did work on the bridge. He did know my father, and for some reason he’s scared of him.’

  In the darkness of the bed Freya wants Robbie to comfort her, to tell her he loves her, to cradle her and soothe her. She wants him to lie beside her. She wants his arms and the room to envelop her. She wants to say, ‘I don’t want to die.’

  Instead she turns her face to him and says, ‘Do you hate your father that much?’

  Chapter Six

  Robbie doesn’t hate his father, but he has no fear of the truth, is prepared to name things for what they are. This is what he says to himself. What he will prove to her.

  So – he returns to the cliff-top shelter, alone.

  There is a haze in the air where bushfire smoke from the hills to the west has drifted across the city overnight. Robbie parks his car near the escarpment. He pauses for a moment behind the steering wheel before getting out. He has thought this through. He will say to the old man: I don’t want to cause you any trouble, I just need to know: What sort of man was my father? Or he will say: It looks like my father is a burden to both of us. Or he’ll start the conversation with: I know my father is a bastard – I need to find out why.

  Robbie crosses the grassy slope of the park and sees from a distance the cardboard and mattresses under the shade of the concrete overhang. But he senses already a different quality to the stillness. By the time he reaches the fence, and vaults over it, he realises the encampment has been deserted. He walks through the vestiges of the small cliff-top colony. The mattresses and the milkcrates remain because they are too difficult to carry, cardboard because it can be found anywhere. Robbie crouches as he looks around. Everything else gone: the plastic shopping bags stuffed with clothes, the suitcase he’d seen belonging to one of them, the cans of food, the cardboard tube of pictures. Nothing else left.

  Robbie rises to his feet. He walks back through the old camp to the park and his car and his day of planting trees, which stretches strangely long now before him. An aperture on the past has closed on him.

  There is much curling. She curled, she remembers, into a ball on New Year’s Eve. She spent long minutes, she knows, lying on the footpath beside the river under the overpass, flying foxes screeching overhead and feeding in the night trees, curled into herself. She knows she screamed and that she doubled over.

  That she was punctured, and that she doubled over as if to prevent a part of herself leaking out of the hole. And that she lay on the cold concrete footpath for those long minutes trying to close the wound off, trying to shut off the route by which a part of herself might escape from her body.

  She feels the trajectory of her life curling over. As if the straight line it had taken to this point has suddenly veered off course, or rather has faltered and swayed, has wilted under the weight of the stabbing, and is now curling backwards. She thought she would be strong enough to carry it. She forces herself to think objectively. It was merely an assault, a mere robbery. These are daily occurrences, mundane, un-newsworthy, so common they are almost rites of passage. It is not war. It is not as if she has been raped, she tells herself, or a victim of a lifetime of domestic violence. Freya had thought she would be strong enough to carry this. She is terrified to learn she isn’t.

  She uncurls and rises from the bed. She leaves the house and takes the short walk to the corner store at the end of the street.

  Freya returns the smile of the shopkeeper as he puts her bread, milk and newspaper into a plastic bag. She can’t bring herself to tell him not to worry, that he should save the bag, that she can carry her things easily herself, that plastic bags are not good for the environment. The things she has said to him a hundred futile times before. The opaque blue bag hangs from the end of her arm as she walks back up the street, a crude approximation of the sky above.

  She crawls back into bed with a cup of tea and the paper and reads by lamplight in the darkened room. She sees the headline Homeless Man In Cliff Plunge, accompanied by a blackand-white photo of the Story Bridge. She reads the article and sees Robbie’s name, a passer-by. There is a second piece on the plight of the city’s homeless, and another photo, a close-up of the under-bridge squat.

  She thinks, despite herself (knows she shouldn’t, knows she should be above it, should be better than this): by what philosophy is my fate – me, woman, activist, lover – a lesser thing than the fate of an old drunk who lost his footing on a cliff?

  She curses it, her fate. The thought passes. She feels worse for having let it in.

  Chapter Seven

  As Robbie plants his daily Ficus macrophylla, laying the stranglers in the crooks of exotics, the old man returns to him, again and again.

  In the mornings when he breakfasts with his mother on her balcony, he still trains the binoculars across the river to the bridge, in case the old man reappears. But the encampment remains deserted, so Robbie scans the length of the riverbank opposite for signs of other camps, new makeshift shelters.

  And during the day as he drives around the city, with the tray of his ute filled with saplings or grasses or shrubs, Robbie searches the streets and the parks for people sleeping out.

  It becomes instinctive. He sees a shape on a park bench as he drives by and he doubles back for a closer inspection, getting out of the car if necessary, to walk over and peer into a sleeping, unshaven face.

  Soon Robbie no longer returns home straight after work.

  It becomes a quest. For an hour each day he explores the city as it darkens, seeking out the old man. He starts by the river, searching parks near the bridge. As the grass loses the colour of the day and park benches and curtain figs and children’s play equipment solidify into night, there is movement in sound.

  He follows it. He interrupts people in groups sitting on the g
round, flashing his torch into their faces. He is yelled at, is taken for police or for security, and retreats. He learns to wait before approaching groups. Learns to ignore the schoolchildren experimenting with drink, and the street kids sniffing paint, their mouths and noses stained white and chrome like drunken circus clowns. He learns to cast his torch beam at chest height and see people’s faces in the halo of the light’s rays.

  After he has exhausted the parks he moves through the streets. New Farm, the Valley, the business district, West End, Spring Hill. He probes the backstreets. He walks down alleys and delivery driveways. He opens the lid of an industrial bin when he hears a scraping inside and a manged cat leaps out. He is drawn to places which offer shelter from the rain and from the wind: doorways with wide awnings, overpasses, underground carparks, unfinished building sites, bus shelters, ferry terminals.

  As if the city was built to house people like this.

  He discovers other semi-permanent camps like the one on the escarpment. A quilt of tarpaulins tied to a chain-mail fence and stretched over a collection of mattresses. The first floor of a disused building in the city, boarded up but accessed by fire stairs at the rear. A railway station where the station-master leaves the toilets unlocked at night on condition the sleepers have gone before the first commuter train passes through in the morning.

  He talks to people. I’m looking for an old man. Or he tells them what he knows about him. An old bloke: he likes art, carries paintings around with him, worked on the Story Bridge when it was being built. Do you know him? He remembers the boy’s name, shows them the photos Freya took at the park bench, thinking that the boy might lead him to the man. He says: I’m looking for a kid named Jimmy.

  ‘Is that your son?’ someone asks him.

  He meets people like himself. Searchers. A father looking for a daughter. A mother for a son. A sister looking for a brother with schizophrenia who refuses to stay with her, who prefers the street. People fuelled by loss.

  Robbie comes home late these days. It is seven or eight o’clock at night before he gets in, sometimes later. Freya tells him she has eaten already, or that she is not hungry. He makes himself toast and sits in the chair at the end of their bed.

  He no longer brings her things. He says instead, ‘Let me describe the city to you.’

  He says, ‘I met Jesus Christ today.’ Or, ‘Tonight I watched a streetwalker shoot heroin between her toes.’ One night he says to Freya, propped up in the bed, ‘Today I spoke with a man who is searching for his wife. He threw her out of the house one night, because she was cheating on him. Now he thinks he was mistaken. He’s tried her friends, her family, everyone she used to know, but she’s disappeared. The man is insane with guilt, overcome with it, lost in it. Now he’s searching for her on the streets. He said he’s been looking for two weeks and he’s already forgotten what she looks like. He takes a photo of her with him. It is for himself, he said – so he’ll recognise her when he finds her.’

  The phone rings. The house is hollow with its echo. Robbie answers it in the dark.

  ‘Robbie?’

  ‘Hi, Bec.’

  ‘How’s Freya?’

  ‘She’s looking after herself.’

  ‘She needs to get out, Robbie.’

  There is a quality in Bec’s voice, in her concern, that stills him, challenges him and makes him doubt himself.

  ‘Got any ideas?’

  ‘There’s something happening that we thought might get her going.’

  ‘I’ll put her on.’

  Robbie takes the phone into the bedroom, lit only by the bedside lamp. The curtains hang heavily across the window, blocking out the streetlamps and the play of car headlights.

  He hands her the phone before she has a chance to ask who it is.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Freya. How are you?’

  She recognises Bec’s voice from a part of her brain she hasn’t entered for a long time.

  ‘Fine, Bec, how about you?’

  ‘Good, Freya, yes good. Have you heard the latest on the Normanby figs?’

  ‘The Normanby figs?’

  ‘Rumour is they’re going to be cut down. That Council’s miscalculated, and now they’ve got to take them out to widen the road. Do you believe it? After all the promises, they’re going to chop them down after all. Mongrels.’

  Freya makes a sound, barely audible, a murmur her friend cannot interpret.

  ‘We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to hold them to their word.’

  The phone line fills with echo.

  ‘We’ve got to do something, Freya,’ Bec says again.

  ‘Yes.’ Freya’s voice is flat, distant.

  ‘A demo. On the site.’

  ‘Sounds like a good idea.’

  ‘Are you in?’

  A pause.

  ‘I don’t think so, Bec. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Come on, Freya,’ Bec says. ‘Fire up. This is important. This is something we can do. You’ve got to help out. “We don’t just live in the world, we make it.” Remember saying that? Well, there’s making to do. We need you.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Bec. I –’

  ‘And it’ll help, Freya. Getting out, doing things . . . you know . . . it helps when you’re feeling low.’

  ‘Thanks, but I just don’t have it in me.’

  Freya is about to hand the phone to Robbie, then brings it back to her mouth.

  ‘Bec . . . ?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I – I don’t know if I should be here . . . Is this where I should be? Bec?’

  ‘Get out. Get out of the house. It’ll do you a world –’

  ‘No – I mean – this country.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Freya?’

  ‘If . . . if . . . if you were dying, Bec, you’d want to make sure you were in the right place, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Oh, Freya,’ Bec says, her voice low, catching, ‘oh, no.

  That’s . . . that’s just crazy thinking. You’re not dying. You’re going to be fine. You are. You’ll see. Come on, come out with us. Come out. Join us.’

  There is silence between them, Freya with nothing more.

  Bec unsure if she should keep talking, if she has words which might overpower her friend’s thoughts, might force them to retreat.

  ‘Thanks,’ Freya says, eventually, ‘but I’m just too tired. Good luck.’

  Robbie takes the phone.

  ‘Still there?’

  ‘She’s in a bad way, isn’t she, Robbie.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘Come,’ he says to Freya the next afternoon.

  ‘Where?’ She’s lying inert on the bed, as if grown into the sheets.

  ‘Trust me.’

  He pulls back the blanket, and sees her thinness for the first time, the weight she has lost. He helps her out, his arm around her waist. She puts on her jeans, her shoes, and follows him out of the house, hand in hand, and into the car.

  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘put this on.’

  It is one of her cotton scarves, a red paisley pattern. He reaches across her.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Trust me.’

  She relents, and he drapes the scarf over her eyes, tying it in a knot at the back of her head.

  ‘A surprise trip,’ he says, ‘a mystery.’

  He talks to her in the car, constantly, a stream of words, a week’s worth compressed into a single twenty-minute trip.

  Gradually she shifts, allows his enthusiasm to infect her a little.

  She tries to guess, but she can’t. She doesn’t know the city well enough, doesn’t nearly know the contours of its skin intimately enough. She can’t work out where he is taking her, and she can’t intuit it.

  When eventually the car stops, he says, ‘Not yet,’ but as he slams his door shut and walks around behind the car to her side, she secretly lifts the blindfold, the briefest of glances, and sees where it is he has brought her. She doesn’t understand.


  He opens the passenger door and leads her out, checking that the scarf is still tight around her eyes.

  ‘Hold my hand.’

  She steps from the car onto a footpath, and they walk along concrete for a few paces before turning off onto grass. The traffic noise recedes, muffled by distance and by trees. She hears a bird call, and another one answer, willy-wagtails.

  ‘Careful here,’ Robbie says as he leads her down a gentle slope. She allows it, but she is quiet now, and responds to none of Robbie’s chatter. She realises he is nervous too.

  Finally he stops, and when he does she guesses, though she keeps it to herself. Robbie leans over her, their bodies touching, his neck close to her face, both his arms enveloping her as he unties the scarf at the back of her head. It comes free, Robbie pulls it away, and she opens her eyes.

  They are in Victoria Park – she knew this – and as she suspected, they’re at the fig he’d first brought her to, so long ago, its small-leaved canopy dappling the sunlight above them.

  Softening it after the blindfold. She sees the light-grey trunk of the fig flecked with dark nodes. She sees too the break in its skin, the gaping hole – what she had mistaken for a knot before she had realised it was altogether a different texture, a different colour – a different tree entirely being hugged tight by the fig.

  She sees the vertically grooved bark of the silky oak in the fig’s embrace.

  A strangler fig, she has learnt since that first time here, starts its life as an epiphyte, germinating high above the soil, from seeds deposited by birds in the branches of a host tree. Over time its roots grow down towards the soil and the fig ceases being an epiphyte and takes on an independent life with roots in the earth. As the fig matures, it slowly encircles the host tree, eventually strangling it.

  ‘Always figs,’ she whispers.

  He touches her lightly on the lips, then withdraws, waiting for her response, her signal.

  ‘Am I going to be okay?’ she asks, lifting her eyes to him.