The Comfort of Figs (2008)

by Simon Cleary

  Lily looks up at him, her eyes shot with red, and says, sobbing still:

  ‘It was so unfair.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘It was unfair Lot’s wife was turned to salt.’

  Robbie is confused at first, then remembers. He remembers the story from the Old Testament Picture Book his mother would read to him as a child, recalls the look of terror on the woman’s face as she stands on that desolate biblical plain, her city and its people in ruins, her feet and legs a thickening column of salt, the knowledge of her eternal metamorphosis captured somehow in her eyes – doomed.

  ‘What was unfair about it, Lily?’

  ‘That she was damned for turning back to look at the city she loved . . . the people she loved . . . all destroyed. Sometimes . . . sometimes you’ve got no choice, sometimes you’ve got to look back at where you came from. The bridge, out there . . . It’s unfair to damn a person for that.’

  They look at each other.

  ‘Why these ones, Lily?’ he asks after a while. ‘Why the Old Testament stories, never the New?’

  She looks away, thinks.

  ‘It’s where you find history,’ she says eventually, ‘King David . . . Moses . . . Abraham . . . it’s where things happened, where events unfolded and where life was lived, all of it. It’s where people wrote their names into history.’

  ‘Is that what you’ve been doing, Lily?’

  ‘Oh no!’ she almost cries it out. ‘No, Robbie! I’ve just been looking after the names of others. I’ve been shepherding others into history.’

  ‘Or protecting them from it,’ he says quietly.

  Robbie looks out through the windows of the apartment at the bridge, with its two great grey-steeled shoulders strong and enduring.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lily,’ he says.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The corner of something hangs from the front slot in the letterbox. Robbie reaches for it, his hand disappearing for a moment before emerging with a postcard. In the fading light he sees Freya’s sure handwriting. The stamp is Canadian, the postmark a place-name in French. There is no return address.

  He reads:

  Robbie, there was too much we didn’t know about each other, too much we didn’t understand. It would never have worked, Robbie, figs or not. At least, it wouldn’t have worked for me. It was too much your life. I’d forgotten mine. I’m okay. It was the right thing to come back.

  I’m just sorry it was so abrupt. Good luck. I hope this card helps. I care for you (did I ever tell you that?). Freya.

  He reads it again, shrugs his shoulders and lifts his eyes to the trees and the sky and the sun and the clouds, and shakes his head. ‘Too much we didn’t know?’ he says to himself, aloud.

  He turns the card over and looks at the photo. It’s the Story Bridge with its cantilevered shoulders and the rise and fall of its lines, the K-shaped steel links, the suspended span, the white concrete arches and its stretch across the river. Something jars inside him. He thinks: Why is she sending me this?

  For long moments Robbie sees only what he knows. But something’s not quite right. As he looks at the bridge he feels heat gathering near the top of his skull. His memory shudders as if malfunctioning, waves of something begin to pound in his brain and suddenly there is a flash of darkness and Robbie is blinded, dizzy, as if the very flow of his blood has been cut. He grasps the letterbox to steady himself, holds on till the visible world returns.

  He looks again at the bridge, and it is no longer the one seared into his memory. Robbie flicks the postcard back over to read the description, and it says, Jacques Cartier Bridge, Montreal.

  ‘Those plans that Jack and your father were after when they –’

  Robbie begins.

  ‘I’ve got them,’ Lily interrupts quietly.

  Robbie is incredulous. ‘You’ve got them?’

  ‘Every way I look at it I think I’m entitled to them. After all, they were my grandfather’s before my husband took them.’

  Lily smiles wryly, the relationships broken open now.

  Lily leaves the living room for some minutes. When she returns she hands him a bound booklet, the soft brown leather worn around the edges, its finish discoloured into a light tan where it is scuffed from use. The front cover of the booklet is also marked, with superficial fingernail scratches criss-crossing the aged leather. Imprinted on the cover in gold lettering are the words, MONTREAL HARBOUR BRIDGE, and under them, The Superstructure.

  As he opens the booklet Robbie knows what he will find. A photo of the bridge spanning a river is on the frontispiece. But the river is different from the one he knows. Where his river runs its short winding distance from the Great Dividing Range to the bay, this one sweeps vast miles, and strange seasons, freezes and thaws as it goes, parts and rejoins. This much can be seen even from the photos. And the bridge across it has been built by the Dominion Bridge Company rather than Brisbane’s Evans-Hornibrook consortium. The date of construction is 1930.

  Robbie turns the pages and a story takes shape, leaf by leaf.

  He is looking at a ghost. There are the diagrams of the bridge, mapping out a northern approach and a southern approach, anchor spans, a main span. Diagrams showing the construction of the bridge stage by stage. Then photos – the same series of photos he had seen as a child, but transposed now onto a different landscape: the same bridge shape, the same arches, the bridge’s two halves growing together in the same way, across a river, in a photo-series. The same wedge mechanism used for the final linking. Then an account by the engineer-in-charge of the bridge’s construction. The engineer was A.L.R. Lawrence, his mother’s grandfather.

  ‘It’s the same bridge.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Lily.

  ‘You knew.’

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘A thousand times Jack said the Story Bridge was “Queensland designed, Queensland built”.’

  ‘It wasn’t just your father who said that, love. Everyone did.’

  ‘But you knew all along that it was a replica of a bridge in Montreal?’

  ‘It’s not that simple. And anyway, there are so many stories you could tell. How do you know which is the right one?’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Summer wilts. March arrives, limping. Robbie wants to be angry but can’t hold it. Freya is slipping further away, and his father has shrunk. Or the world has grown.

  One evening Bec calls. It is nearly midnight, and the phone’s ringing startles him awake.

  ‘Can you spare an hour?’ she asks. ‘Can you come now?’

  Robbie arrives at the Normanby Fiveways. It is surreal, ghostly. The figs on the Kelvin Grove Road median strip, which rises steeply to the intersection, are lit by fierce white spotlights projecting upwards into the canopy. The blinding lights beat colour from the trunks, the branches, the underside of the leaves, all leeched and dimensionless.

  In the centre of the lit area, bleached like the trees, is a crowd of people, fifty, a hundred, swirling around the trunks. They are agitated, chanting, the object of their excitement three men with chainsaws standing not far from the figs. The men are gloved, the orange reflective stripes on their vests crossed in a way that reminds him of the armour of crusader knights. He looks at their faces, and recognises the men from other jobs over the years: fellings and cuttings, trimmings and plantings. They are anxious now, their work suspended, their chainsaws swinging loose from their hands, the crowd, baying, too hostile.

  Robbie finds Bec among them – the leader now Freya has gone – and waits until she finishes speaking with a journalist from one of the television stations. Waits until the camera crew has swung away from her, and has begun to film the men with chainsaws.

  ‘It’s not bad, is it?’ Bec says, gesturing to the crowd. Robbie notices more of Freya’s friends with placards, and loudhailers. ‘It took us less than an hour to get this group together after we got wind of what they were doing.’

  ‘What is it that they’re doing?’

&nb
sp; ‘They’re about to fell the figs. They say they’re only trimming them. Do you believe it! Trimming! They would say that – they would’ve been told to. But of course they’re cutting them down. In the middle of the night, so no one’s the wiser.

  So it’s too late to do anything. It’s happened before. Remember Cloudland.’

  He doesn’t, but he knows what she means. The Cloudland Ballroom, part of the city’s memory, knocked down by bulldozers while the city slept. Cloudland, the word a code for all the heritage buildings lost in the 1970s and 80s: Cloudland, the Bellevue Hotel, the Hoffnungs Building, the Queensland Trustees Building, the ANZ Bank on Queen and Wharf. Cloudland, a call to arms.

  ‘They want to cut them down, Robbie.’

  Robbie looks across at the three men, distorted by the light.

  ‘They might, but not today, Bec.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He points to the nearest fig, a number of grey branches already sawn from it and lying loose on the ground beneath.

  ‘The figs are stressed, look at their leaves.’

  She follows the direction of his finger.

  ‘Now look at the chainsaws. You don’t cut down a tree as large as this with a saw that small. If they say they’re just removing dead branches, they probably are. To conserve them, to stimulate growth. Sometimes you have to prune them to save them.’

  She is dubious, disbelieving.

  ‘It’s the middle of the night, Robbie!’

  As if this is proof of guilt, as if this alone makes it a trespass, fatal.

  ‘That’s the best time to lop big branches.’ Robbie nods to the closed lane and the line of orange witches’ hats shaping the route of the merging cars. ‘There’s not the interruption to traffic.’

  ‘Nooooo,’ she says, to herself, a long note sounded, to give herself time to think.

  ‘The figs can’t help you, I’m afraid,’ Robbie says.

  Bec stands there for a while, shaking her head, trying to understand. Then she says – looking at him, trying to fathom him, her friend Freya’s boyfriend, Freya’s discarded boyfriend –

  ‘Stuff you.’

  ‘Huh?’ Robbie is startled by the vehemence, the sharpness of the judgment. Its finality.

  ‘“The figs can’t help”,’ she repeats, capturing an echo of his voice, falling short of mimicry. ‘But what about you, then? Are you going to help?’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Listen to you, Robbie. Listen to yourself,’ Bec says.

  ‘Pathetic.’

  ‘Wha . . . what?’

  ‘Your figs help no one, do they? Never do. Never did. They sure as hell did nothing for Freya.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Robbie says.

  ‘Robbie,’ Bec says, turning on him, hard, grinding, ‘what did you ever give her? Really? What did you have to give?’

  ‘You’ve got no right, Bec.’

  ‘Right? I’ll tell you what’s right. It was right that she left you, Robbie. She had to leave. What else could she do? You damnwell drove her away.’

  ‘That’s just not fair.’

  ‘Take your bloody figs, Robbie. Take them.’

  Robbie turns, stumbles and goes, a quick erratic walk, headbowed, as if pushing into something, through it. He stops when he gets to the Normanby Hotel at the corner, puffing from the hill. His heart is thumping as he looks back at the figs and the spotlights, and the swirling bleached figures of the protesters. Protesters.

  He remembers saying the word to Freya. Believers, she had countered. He sits down on the footpath, his back resting against the tiled wall of the hotel. He pulls his knees to his chest, wraps his arms around them, and watches. There is the cluster of Freya’s friends. The thought occurs to him then, a question: What part of her did they know that he never did? Bec knew her in Canada, Bec was the one she followed to Brisbane. Bec, he realises, has lost a friend.

  Another camera crew arrives. The crowd of Freya’s friends respond, they raise their placards, grow louder. He thinks of one of the Bible stories his mother told him as a child, Moses in battle, holding a staff above his head. As long as Moses held the staff aloft, the Israelites would be victorious, but the moment he tired and lowered it, the battle would swing in the enemy’s favour. But how do you know which battles to fight?

  Though he tries, Robbie can’t remember the name of the tribe the Israelites were fighting. There is a wild screech overhead.

  Robbie looks up at the flying fox landing in the high branches, the branches and their sound as they take its weight.

  But the flying fox is unable to settle, caught too in the outer reaches of the spotlights.

  Robbie gets up. He walks back down the slope and through the swathe of light to the arborists, in their tight, anxious group of three, Bec watching him as he crosses over to them.

  ‘Attracted quite a crowd, mate,’ Robbie says to one of the men, the largest, the one with the woodsman’s physique, the thick sprawling beard.

  ‘It’s a bloody joke, mate, a bloody joke.’

  ‘Yeah – you don’t get an audience like this every day.’

  ‘Bloody ridiculous,’ the man says – then, suddenly suspicious:

  ‘What are you doing here? Are you with them or something?’

  ‘Nah,’ Robbie answers, ‘passing by.’

  The two men stand there for a while, unspeaking in the blinding light. The man shifts on his feet, scanning the crowd, keeping watch.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Robbie asks.

  ‘Well, we can’t continue like this, not in these conditions.

  Not without protection. We’re getting out of here as soon as we get the word.’

  Robbie nods.

  ‘Mind if I take a piece, mate?’ Robbie asks him, pointing to a freshly sawn limb.

  ‘Go ahead, we’d just mulch it otherwise.’

  Robbie lifts one of the fig branches to his shoulder, measures its weight and its length, balances it before stepping away.

  ‘Careful you don’t get lynched.’

  He approaches Bec. She folds her arms against him.

  ‘Well?’ she says.

  ‘You’re right, Bec,’ he replies. ‘You’re right. They’re not going to cut them down. They wouldn’t dare. They’ve got the message.

  Even if they were thinking of it before, they’ll have got the message tonight.’

  Robbie trims the branch, sets it aside for a few days. Then he cuts it into lengths, selects one, mounts the block on the lathe under the house. Still green, but he can’t wait. He flicks a switch and the block of wood begins to turn, to spin, fast and dizzying on the lathe. Robbie leans forward and raises a chisel blade to the turning timber. It disappears in shavings of fig-wood blasting in shifting arcs of dust. Shrouding him in its delicate castings.

  At last he lifts his goggles, releases the work from the lathe, and feels the weight of a fig-wood bowl in his hands.

  He takes it upstairs to the long hoop-pine table, where his gifts to Freya rest in the jacaranda bowl he’d turned years before.

  He puts the fig bowl down, places the new beside the old. Then, item by item, he transfers the things he’d given her, weighing them carefully in his hands as he does, lifting each close to his eyes, inspecting them all, each one. Remembering. Carefully.

  Laying to rest, as best he can.

  Chapter Twenty

  It’s still dark and a koel is calling, even now, in March. Coo-ee, coo-ee, coo-ee. A series of high rising notes that hang in the air, unfinished. A storm bird, his father had called it, but it was not prophetic in that way. Its song had never heralded a storm, in the way that long thin lines of ants signalled impending rain – though as a child Robbie believed it and after hearing the koel call in the morning would wait all day for a storm to arrive, only to go to bed disappointed. It was not a storm bird but a summer bird, with its blood memory of monsoon weather patterns, and its summer migration to the branches high in Brisbane’s trees to escape the rains of Asia.
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  The koel calls again, a distinctive pre-dawn cry from a thickleaved fig or old camphor laurel. Coo-ee, coo-ee, coo-ee. A strange, out-of-season call. The migrant koel should be returning home to the north. Is it lost? Robbie wonders. Disorientated? The cry again, rising with each succeeding note. Or is it lingering, tired of being an eternal visitor?

  Robbie lies in bed as the dawn breaks, listening to birdsong.

  Koel, crow, pigeon, then, as the day brightens, magpie and mickey-bird and currawong.

  The house begins to warm and Robbie rises. Sunlight streams in, as if it has accepted the invitation of each window to enter and now explores the house at will.

  Jack O’Hara sits in his favourite armchair. The sun swallows the windows in front of him, dissolving the glass. Though the sunlight falls evenly when it reaches him, his body receives it in patches, arbitrary and pitiless. His right side is paralysed and feels nothing. His right leg has atrophied and hangs limp, a shape without mass. Jack looks at the sun falling on the back of his numb right hand, folded gently into his lap, and feels nothing of its warmth. He looks at it and observes the way the light illuminates his papery skin, as if it is someone else’s hand.

  The stroke has not destroyed his left side as it has his right.

  He sometimes feels he is split in two, that there are two halves of him. Jack feels the sunlight tickling the skin on the back of his left hand, still alive to him.

  The stroke has taken much. He forgets much. He forgets sometimes that Lily has brought him breakfast. Sometimes he will eat it, spooning his cereal slowly into his mouth with his left hand, and half an hour after he has finished and Lily has cleared his plate he will signal to her to bring him his breakfast again. He needs Lily. She nurses him, prepares his meals, dresses him, trims his thinning hair. She moves him, supports him as he stands with his weight on his left leg and swings his body from one chair into another, or into his plastic shower seat, or into bed. He has given up trying to speak. The months of rehabilitation gave him sound, but no words. He can summon groans and grunts, the primeval noises, but nothing as complicated as speech.