by Simon Cleary
What does she need?
She goes to the kitchen table, and the large wood-turned fruit bowl at the centre. In it are the daily offerings Robbie presented to her over so many months. She sinks her hand into the bowl, swirling through this collection of his gifts, feeling the different textures of a dried silky oak leaf, macadamia nuts like polished marbles, birds’ feathers still soft, sharp pieces of rock and tiny seeds and bark both rough and smooth. Of dried and shrivelled Moreton Bay figs, dimpled like testicles.
She immerses her hand in the bowl of naturama, until her hand disappears from view, swallowed by the exotica of his country.
She assesses her life. I am twenty-seven. I feel ancient. I may be dying. I am in a foreign land. I am too tired to love. I am surrounded. I need to swim.
Freya enters the street. She walks, strides with her arms swinging in long arcs. She feels the blood pumping inside her chest, her heart an organ apart. Her feet slap against the footpath hard, her hands clench into fists and her arms are driving now,
everything about her body fierce in its rhythm. She pushes on through the streets, this body of hers issuing some challenge to fate with each step.
She walks until she feels the skin at the top of her chest begin to warm. There is a dizziness filling her head, a dizziness she enjoys. A giddy power. A clawing back, a retrieval.
She walks harder, following streets down hills and then up new ones. Along ridge-lines, as if she is tramping the uncovered vertebrae of the country, the beasts lying buried beneath it. She crosses small parks and strides past corner stores, and through streets which slowly thicken with people. The city is nearer, and curving around its office towers are glimpses of the brown river ahead. Her eyes follow the line of the river looking for the Story Bridge, Robbie’s bridge, the uneasy monolith which shadows his city.
South to north, Freya crosses the river by the low Grey Street Bridge, and walks until she hears herself panting, hears her breath start to labour. The giddiness in her head becomes a thumping: of blood and the echo of her heaving lungs. At the top of the Normanby Fiveways hill she slows, the river at her back, the boulevard of distressed figs before her. She is suddenly tired and, weakened from inactivity, she falters.
Freya feels her skin prickle as if her blood is about to burst through. As she rests against a low brick fence under the freckled shade of a poinciana, her head bowed and sweat dripping off her face, she thinks: Is this a sign, is my blood now bad?
She walks along the ridge, in snatches. She counts each hundred paces then pauses to catch her breath. The skin at the top of her chest is aflame. Beside a school building a grey tap rises from a garden bed and she kneels before the running water, splashing it onto her neck and her chest, dousing her burning skin till schoolchildren watch from first floor windows.
She reaches the park: long, thin, precarious Victoria Park.
She takes off her shoes and finds the grass hard and hot against the soles of her feet. Barefoot, she continues through the park, walking against its slopes as though she’s mapping a line of contour for Robbie. She passes beneath the fig trees, over-large, their shade too deep after the midday sun’s brightness. Her eyes swirl, and can’t adjust to the changed light. The world blurs, and she stumbles out of the dangerous shade, propelled from it towards the high fence of the swimming pool ahead.
At the pool’s entrance Freya brushes past people queuing to enter. She pushes through the turnstiles, banging the aluminium tubes with her hips. The pool is before her, glittering. Behind her the voice of an indignant attendant trails until it disappears in her ragged wake. Freya reaches the water’s edge, the tiles under her toes cool where the pool water laps over them with each passing swimmer.
She does not pause. There is nothing in all the world that needs be weighed in this moment. Freya reaches the water and steps off the tiled lip of the pool deck, dropping into space.
Her feet, her ankles, her jean-clad legs – all of her sliding into the water-cool dimensions. Her hands meet the surface of the water as her torso enters. They slap against it, and release, as if some trigger-nerve has been struck, the shoes clutched in her fingers on the walk through the parkland. Freya sinks into the water. Sinks through blue till she is resting on the silent floor of the pool, her blouse billowing under her arms, her eyes blinking with sweat-salt and pool-chemicals, the elongated shapes
of swimmers passing overhead muting the Brisbane sun, the helixed shapes of her own two shoes floating above her like dark angels. All is passing strange, and the water alone is her friend.
Chapter Eleven
Robbie goes to the pub again the next afternoon after work, and the one after that, and the next again, his days circumscribed by breakfast with his mother, and the conversations with the old man at dusk; by the figs he plants at dawn, and Freya by night.
He buys the old man a beer, sits with him, and they talk.
He learns that the pub feeds him, showers him, lets him squat on the roof under the bridge. The bar staff have grown fond of him, of his eccentricities and his insularities. One of the girls brings fruit for him, another biscuits. A duty manager runs an electrical lead from the hotel up the outside of the building to the roof where he sleeps, and sets up a small fan for the hot nights when mosquitoes come off the dead water in swarms.
A barman tells a journalist friend about him and one day, too late to do anything about it, he is interviewed for a piece in the local paper, gives a false name, disappears for a couple of days till he is satisfied the interest has died. He returns, and the barman apologises. The Story Bridge Hotel nourishes the old man, protects him.
‘What did you do after the bridge?’
‘I took a job on the cross-river ferries. Ferried people from Customs House to Holman Street. From Sydney Street to Mowbray Park.’
Robbie laughs:
‘Old Man River?’
‘I once counted the number of times I’ve crossed the river. Can’t remember any more but the figure’d make you dizzy.’
‘So you built the bridge, then end up ferrying people across the river. You work for years building a link that people can drive across, and then you toss it in.’
‘Yes,’ the old man says quietly.
‘Ironic, isn’t it?’
‘I am old, son. Irony is like a toenail fungus, the way it grows on you when you get to my age.’
Robbie gets closer, teasing information from the old man, angling always towards his father.
‘What about others? Did my father get on with people?’
‘Get on with people? Son, he was a god. We worshipped your father.’
‘Did he have friends?’
‘Plenty.’
‘What was he like?’
‘What was he like? What was he like?’ the old man ponders the question. ‘I’m unreliable. Ask your mother.’
Breakfast in the apartment by the river. He enters, greets his mother with a kiss, receives one.
Lily sees, and waits for him to speak. In the bedroom is her husband, propped in his bed like a mute sideline spectator. She longs for things to take shape. So she can grip them, can shake them, can cast them out if that is what is needed.
Robbie longs to ask, but finds himself not yet ready, his father’s name too great a weight to lift from inside him, too opaque a form.
When he rises to go –
‘How is Freya?’ Lily asks, for he rarely mentions her now.
‘Fine.’
Freya dreams again of the stabbing: the riverside path, the freeway above, night all around. Fear and fever, and sharp things glinting with violence. Then the dream metamorphoses and Freya becomes the flying fox, screeching, screeching, screeching and soon she is awake.
Robbie gets a fresh tea towel from the kitchen, dampens it with cold water, and brings it in to her. He dabs her forehead, cools the back of her neck.
‘It won’t go away,’ she says to him.
‘It will,’ he says, rocking her through the hours before dawn.
* * *
She is not in bed when she hears the knock at the door, but is sitting on the back deck in the overcast mid-morning. There have been so few knocks at the door lately. At the second set of raps Freya rises from her chair, set to look over the gully, into the branches of the fig and the umbrella trees and the other plants competing out there for space.
‘Good morning.’
‘Morning.’
The two women look at each other from either side of the threshold.
‘I thought you could do with a good cup of tea,’ and Lily reaches into her leather handbag for a decorated tin which she offers Freya.
‘Thanks.’
Freya looks at the tin but doesn’t take it. Nor does she reject it.
‘Come on, let me make you a cuppa,’ Lily says and she bustles inside, past Freya who moves to make way, and down the corridor towards the natural light at the back of the house, towards the kitchen.
Lily talks as she moves. She is expert at this. She talks as she sums up the room, takes in the kettle, the stove, the cupboards where she will find the cups and mugs. Knows, as she talks, precisely where Freya is: standing at the boundary of the kitchen, not yet having yielded it to Lily. Knows the art of the question, how to fill the smallest of them with immediacy, with urgency.
How to say where do you keep your matches, dear? in order to take control, or at least to signal her intentions. How to follow Freya’s silence with some harmless observation – about gas and the evenness of the heat – even as she opens the pantry and scans its shelves for matches. Knows too, how much consent can be taken from silence.
She lights the stove, fills the kettle, names aloud the tea-leaves she has seen in the pantry, the different types of tea, their various medicinal qualities. And as she does this, she feels Freya give to her, senses the exact moment, a mere turn of Freya’s shoulders which she catches from the corner of her eye.
All this being for Freya’s good, she thinks, because people want you to take control, they want to give themselves over. Especially when they are lost. Then, when it has happened and Freya has yielded, Lily knows to slow, to shift into gentleness, and to hand something back.
‘Where shall we sit, dear?’
Freya leads her onto the deck where, seated, Lily asks, ‘So how are you coping?’
Coping. A misjudgment. A word which sparks resentment in Freya. That she could be used like this. Only now does she flare.
‘You mean Robbie, don’t you? You mean, “How’s Robbie coping?” ’
Lily wonders if Freya knows about Robbie’s morning visits to her, their breakfasts together. But suddenly she questions herself as well.
‘I suppose I might,’ she says slowly, uncertainly.
The two women look out over the railing. The trees in the gully are dulled by an opaque light from the low-clouded sky.
There is a mass of vegetation, dark and indistinct. Lily’s eyes search for something to settle upon, a point of reference, something from which she might start to build the conversation again.
‘Is that a Moreton Bay fig?’ she asks.
‘Yes. Robbie’s fig.’
‘Robbie’s fig . . .’ Lily slowly repeats the words. She says it again, but this time a query, ‘Robbie’s fig?’
‘He calls it the most truthful of all the trees,’ Freya says.
‘I’m sorry?’
Freya gets up, walks back inside to the kitchen. This morning she plucked three fig leaves from the tree, and placed them, standing upright, in a glass on the windowsill. Some gesture to Robbie, unclear even to her, especially now. She takes one from the glass and out onto the deck, and sits again in her cane chair.
Between the women is a small, low, circular table, the grain of its wood hidden by a coat of paint which Robbie has talked about stripping. Freya places the leaf on the white table, and demonstrates the thing which Robbie had once shown her, turning the leaf over, pointing out its two sides, one glossy, one darkened, unhidden equals.
‘The most truthful of trees.’
‘Freya, dear,’ Lily replies, quietly, evenly, ‘you’re ever so mistaken.
It’s nothing of the sort. The fig is riddled with secrets. It was made to hide things. It was made by God for that very purpose, its leaves so big you could even hide behind them yourself if you had to.’
She looks at Freya, says to her, slowly, mouthing each word, giving each the same weight, as if each is precious, and none can be separated one from the other: ‘And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.’
Freya fingers the leaf, turns it over once, twice, then lays it down on the shiny table, the spine of the big leaf at such a curvature that it seems to her then, as she places it back on the surgically white surface, that the leaf has become a human body, writhing in sharp, back-arching agony, frozen at this moment on the clean sheets of an indifferent bed.
‘You know about figs?’ she asks.
‘I’ve learnt.’
Lily looks at Freya, waits until the younger woman has met her eyes, then fixes her as firmly as she can with her gaze. ‘A mother wants to understand what it is that takes her son from her.’
Freya smiles, broadly, almost warmly, an energy coming off the conflict, entering her.
‘It’s okay, Lily,’ she says, ‘I’m no threat.’
Lily returns the smile and nods, not in agreement, but in understanding, and after a pause the tone of her voice changes, as if she is beginning a new conversation, open, light.
‘How long have you been here, Freya dear?’
‘Years.’
‘I mean in this house, with Robbie. Twelve months?’
‘Yes, something like that.’
‘So you’ve been watching that tree for a year?’ Lily says, pointing out over the railing at the fig.
Freya lets her continue.
‘Let me ask you, in all that time have you ever seen it flower?’
The question penetrates. The answer is immediately, startlingly, unsettlingly, no. But rather than acknowledge that to this woman who has come for her, Freya continues to think, to try and recover some information, some comment Robbie might have made in passing which could explain this odd fact. Surely he must have told her this, surely he must have mentioned it.
But there is nothing to retrieve. She doubts herself.
‘They don’t flower,’ Lily says.
Chapter Twelve
Robbie asks about the bridge, working at the old man’s memory like a needle probing skin for a splinter, asks him his name.
‘Names don’t matter when you get to my age. Belonging is what matters.’
‘Tell me about the others, then. The names that have stuck to the bridge. The Bridge. Kemp Place. The Bradfield Highway. Did you know them – Story? Kemp? Bradfield?’
‘Yes . . .’ The old man weighs the word before speaking it – ‘Bradfield.’
‘The engineer who designed the bridge,’ Robbie says.
‘You know about him and the Sydney Harbour Bridge?’ asks the old man.
‘He designed that too?’
‘The public record has it that way, but not everyone says so.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Another engineer – Ralph Freeman – also claimed credit for the designs. He was the consulting engineer, an Englishman with an English firm, Dorman Long and Co. They fought it out in the papers for years, he and Bradfield. For the right to say the Harbour Bridge was theirs.’
‘What’s the saying?’ Robbie muses, ‘. . . about success having many fathers?’
The old man considers for a long time, then rather than answer he says to Robbie:
‘Do you know who discovered the Brisbane River? The whites, I mean?’
‘John Oxley,’ Robbie says. ‘Sent up here by Sir Thomas Brisbane, the Governor of New South Wales, his uncle.’ Schoolboy history.
‘Wrong. It was a couple of convicts. Not only th
at, lost convicts, castaways blown off course in a storm.’
Robbie shrugs his shoulders, turns up his palms.
‘They pulled out of Sydney Town one fair April day in 1823, four of them. A few short days’ sailing to collect cedar for the colony. But no sooner were they through the Heads than they were hit by a storm, a vicious one. Only when it ended, eleven days later, did they put up sail. So happens, they thought the storm and the current had taken them south. So happens, they thought they were off Tasmania – Van Diemen’s Land. So happens, they couldn’t have been more wrong. They weren’t south of Sydney – they were north of it. But unawares, they chart a course north-west, and take it for near on three weeks sailing up-coast, sailing further and further away, further up-coast until, desperate and starving, half-mad from drinking seawater, they beach on Moreton Island. Believing, all along, they were still south of Sydney rather than seven hundred miles north.’
‘Uh-huh,’ says Robbie slowly, trying to work out what the old man is telling him.
‘So they island-hopped – stealing canoes – till they reached the mainland. Then they skirted the bay on foot. They were beyond disorientation, they were. They were mad . . . Delirious. All but naked. Eventually they stumbled upon this big river, and worked their way up its south bank looking for somewhere to cross, or another canoe they could pinch. See, they were still committed to this idea that Sydney lay to the north. Amazing what belief can do, isn’t it? The deceptive power of it.’
‘And the river?’ Robbie prompts as the old man seems to fade, seems to wander.
‘The river? It was an obstacle to them . . . an obstacle. Almost did them in. Banks thick with trees, too. Eventually they crossed it, and soon after that they were found. By whites. Rescued, I mean. In the country north of the river. It was Oxley who found them, on his expedition.’