The Comfort of Figs

by Simon Cleary

  The bridge is decorated, dressed for the evening. It has a beguiling delicacy, as if wearing its finest gown. A chain of enormous globes hangs like a string of pearls across the bridge’s shoulders. Its steel-grey frame is luminescent in the glow.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she whispers, and Robbie is aware of others around them murmuring the same hushed sentiment, pointing.

  An old weight is forming inside him, as grey and heavy as the looming girders.

  The fireworks in the sky shrink. The explosions abate, one by one, until there is only smoke drifting silently across the sky on a faint wind, and people wondering if it is over, the pause long enough for friends to turn one to the other, on the verge of voicing their regret. Then from the bottom of the stillness another burst – this time it is as if the bridge itself is exploding.

  Rockets of light erupt from its twin shoulder platforms, rushing out into the night sky before exploding. Outwards and upwards there is a mass of explosion and light, as if a tripwire has been triggered and a munitions store in the bridge has been set uncontrollably alight. There is a mad cluster of fire-burst and sound, domino runs of small light-bursts along the arms, neck and shoulders of the bridge. First one way and then returning, and before the blazing extravaganza has ended, two massive explosions launch from the bridge’s shoulders once more and the entire structure is showered in light and debris and for a moment the bridge is gone, and there is only a shroud of smoke, ringing ears and the blur of over-strained eyes.

  Gradually the wind draws the curtain of gunpowder-cloud from the bridge and it is there again, calm and solid. Steely. The bridge triumphant. Beauty flung wide.

  ‘Impressive,’ Freya says, her gaze fixed still on the bridge settling back into itself.

  Then she looks at him.

  ‘What?’ she says.

  His silence prickles. It is almost sullenness, almost petulance.

  She has never seen this in him before.

  ‘What is it?’ she says again.

  He is resistant, in a mood beyond embarrassment now, beyond talk. He wishes they could just leave.

  The smoke from the fireworks is at his nostrils, sharp with acrid bite. He says to her, as if throwing something away –

  ‘My father built it.’

  ‘Your father?’ she turns to him, incredulous. ‘What? Your father built the Story Bridge?’

  ‘That’s how they always told it.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘They built it in the Depression to give blokes something to do. To stop them from starving. Or causing trouble. Or killing themselves. It was a distraction. From unemployment, from the war which was just around the corner . . . An attempt to make a town feel good about itself. But what’s worse, it’s a try-hard bridge. If Sydney has a Harbour Bridge, then Brisbane can have its own steel and concrete version. A sad bloody trophy!’

  A fresh salvo of fireworks begins, a series of single popping sounds, like anti-aircraft flak shot into the sky.

  ‘My father was just an apprentice boilermaker on the bridge at the time, but he claims it as his. That’s the family story . . . Anyway, the bridge showed a boilermaker he could become an engineer. The bridge made him proud, gave him a reputation, set him on his way. Made a Brisbane boy believe he could walk the world.’

  ‘Did he?’ She’s tender, giving herself a chance to work this out.

  ‘He was overseas half the year. He was always overseas. Home . . . Brisbane, it was just a base for him while he worked on projects around the world. Bridges, dams, roads . . .’

  He stops for a long moment, the words inadequate, his agitation growing, until a new thought propels him forward once more.

  ‘He was away so much that, when I was young, he was someone I learnt about through Lily –’

  ‘Lily?’

  ‘My mother.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Lily would put me to bed with my father on a construction project in India. “Your father’s helping the poor people,” she’d say. Or he’d be in Africa, or in New Guinea. And we’d have the atlas out and she’d be pointing to cities. And every day we’d cross the Story Bridge and Lily would say, “Your father built this bridge,” as if he was mythic, more than just a boilermaker punching rivets . . . as if I should be grateful for the bridge –

  ‘Anyway . . . now there’s nothing there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s a statue.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Paralysed with stroke a few years ago. He can’t move, can’t speak. He spends his time staring out the window like a statue.

  The engineer who turned iron ore into bridges has himself become stone!’

  It began with a gift.

  It is his tenth birthday, his double-figures birthday. As if he is doubling in age overnight, graduating from one to two digits in a single sleep. A gravely important event. The next quantum birthday leap – from two figures to three – usually doesn’t happen. His mother has told him that in the Bible Methuselah lived to nearly a thousand years, but Robbie knows people die before they reach three figures. Robbie knows this from his own experience, from weeks of tugging on his mother’s dresses, and pointing to people with their walking sticks or on their benches and asking, Is he a hundred Mum? And the answer always: Not quite, love. Once you enter two digits, that is where you stay, nine-year-old Robbie sees. This is the only birthday of such magnitude he will ever experience. It has to be special.

  And for a while after waking it is. There at the end of his bed, resting on his brightly coloured quilt, is an enormous box covered in newspaper. It is heavy too, Robbie finds, as he carries it down the corridor to his parents’ bedroom. He stands outside their closed door and shakes the box, hears it rattle inside. Robbie puts it down to knock, then waits till he hears his father’s voice calling him in, before he turns the handle and pushes the door open. The expectation is almost too much, not just for him. His father motions him to come round to his side of the bed, a strange urgency, and Robbie is vaguely aware this is different from previous birthdays, when it was his mother he gravitated to at the moment of unwrapping.

  Robbie peels off the layers of newspaper, the wrapping falling to the floor on either side of him like shed skin, or bark.

  At last he reaches the box, sheathed in a tight, thin plastic film, transparent so he can see the picture on it – a crane. Robbie pauses to try and understand, and in the moment of his pausing – the shortest of moments – his father reaches across, and with the back of his man’s fingernail slices open the plastic film. In years to come it will be the violence of this moment Robbie remembers, the sureness of it. But for now Robbie watches as his father lifts the box into his own lap and opens it, watches how his father lifts the cardboard flaps one by one, with something like reverence. How he does it slowly, deliberately, heightening Robbie’s anticipation.

  Robbie is confused at first, by what is there in the box. Or what is not there. There is no crane at all. Just a plastic moulding with lots of metal bits and pieces sitting in separated tubs. Parts.

  Then Robbie begins to understand.

  A surge of disappointment rises in him, swamping the happiness of only moments before. Robbie doesn’t understand the disappointment – it is too big, and too new – but he knows that what is in the box isn’t a present at all. He wanted a gift that was ready to use. Like a bike, or a game, or even a book. Not something that isn’t even finished. He is going to have to make his own present. Robbie looks down at his fingers, black with newsprint. He is ten years old now. He will not cry.

  Despite his disappointment he is aware of his father’s excitement, feels his father’s energy overcome him. His powerful father unfolding the instruction booklet and pointing out the diagrams of things you can make. A crane and a truck and a car. The buildings. A bridge. Robbie is shrinking already as his father opens the little plastic satchels which separate the differently shaped tin struts and panels, and the tiny nuts and bolts.


  The little spanner. Through eyes small and distant Robbie follows his father’s finger as it points out the neat photos on the underside of the box – little meccano structures standing lonely on a table. A crane without a weight to shift, a truck without a highway, a car without passengers, buildings without a city, a bridge without water.

  Robbie’s disappointment lingers for weeks. His father refuses to let it to go away, magnifies it. Each night after school, and then on weekends, Robbie’s father has them sit together over the verandah table and make things out of the meccano pieces.

  He feels powerless. It is not the first time, but this is absolute.

  How could a father not know his child hated this? How is it that Robbie can’t make his father see? Evening after evening Robbie excuses himself to go to the toilet where he stays for long minutes with his father barely noticing he isn’t there, or hasn’t come back at all, or returns with a runny nose from where he has cried, despite himself.

  At the end of every evening there is a new creation. A different structure his father has built while Robbie looks on. And every evening, when the structure is complete, his father claps his hands together and says, There we have it! And his mother is summoned to see whatever it is they’ve built. Evening after evening she will smile and congratulate them and say how nice it is and fail to see the greater part of it – Robbie’s horror. A boy without a present.

  In the end he tries burying the meccano set in the backyard.

  Not all at once, but over time. He comes home from school and, when his mother’s busy in the kitchen preparing dinner, he takes one or two pieces of tin from the set which is strewn over the verandah table. Or some nuts, or a few bolts, and with no one looking he tosses them off the verandah into the backyard, where they disappear in the tangle of overgrown bush beyond the boundary between the mown and the unmown.

  His father realises eventually, of course. He counts the parts one evening, so there is no doubt. Pieces have gone. He writes out an inventory of what is missing, or rather calls out the numbers for Robbie to write them down in an exercise book. How many long struts, how many short ones. How many nuts, how many bolts.

  Robbie halts his sabotage after this reckoning. It is too dangerous.

  But the meccano construction continues relentlessly, worsens. As if now there is a new lesson in this for his father to teach him, a lesson about persistence in the face of obstacles.

  With fewer pieces it means they spend even longer each evening designing and building their meccano pushbikes or their tin-and-nut clothes lines.

  Sometimes Robbie cannot bear the not-understanding. The failure of it. That a collection of small narrow, hole-punched pieces of tin is somehow responsible. That his mother can look through him not seeing. Is there nothing there for his mother to see? Or is her sight, her mother-sight, somehow failing? Or does mother-sight compete with other things, like wife-sight?

  But this story fails to capture what went before. Robbie knows this. The dark spaces of his father’s life, the shadowed chasms filled with experience and being which cause a father to reject a son. The gift that petrified their relationship was only the thing that opened Robbie’s eyes. Not the thing that hardened his father. There are moments when he allows his father this, that his father may once have been a different man.

  Chapter Nine

  He has slumped into silence under the stars. Freya waits, in case some new fragments of him break off.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he says. ‘Come on.’

  He pulls her arm, a rough, impulsive movement. Away from the crowds, away from where they had left her friends, towards the rainforest, his grip on her arm over-firm. There is an opening in the wall of trees in front of them. He makes for this path into the forest, but when they reach it – the close, tangled trees and the track burrowing into darkness – Freya baulks.

  ‘Robbie, where are you going?’

  ‘Fireworks by forest light,’ he says.

  There is no enthusiasm in his voice. She hesitates.

  ‘The others are expecting us,’ she says. ‘They’re waiting. They won’t know where we’ve gone.’

  He shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘They’ll be worried,’ she says, still unsure.

  He shrugs again, turns and disappears alone into the darkness of the forest, leaving her at the edge of the crowd.

  The murmur of human-noise fades, drops as sharply as the temperature. He enters a different world, tight and thick and dank and dark with trees. He pauses, lets his eyes become accustomed.

  Buttressed roots like enormous stabilising fins holding firm to the earth, spread like experiments across the ground. Strangler figs entwined around box trees, intimate in suffocation or surrender.

  Supplejack vines thick as an arm drape from tree to tree. In forked limbs, crows nest ferns and staghorns nestle, their broad-tongued leaves radiating outwards in sensuous falling arcs from centres wet and deep.

  Above the forest the fireworks continue. But in here the colours’ metamorphosis is slow, a gradual moving through the spectrum of light. A passing of strange sunsets through the thick canopy.

  He follows the footpath through the fan palms and the cabbage tree palms, tall and smooth like posts. The path takes a turn towards the water and drops to steps cut into the slope. The steps are rough-cut basalt, with tar slapped over them, dark and greasy, to even the roughness of the stone. The basalt blocks are damp with moisture seeping from cracks in the aging mortar, cracks which the tar has not covered. Robbie loses his footing as he descends, and thrusts his hand out towards the basalt steps, instinctive. He rights himself, his hand stinging from a cut caused by the sharp rock. The dampness of blood and rainforest moisture mix in his palm before he wipes them both off on the side of his trousers.

  He takes the path as it runs through the forest, until he comes across a second set of steps, pink sandstone this time and cut into the embankment itself. The steps lead down to the river bank, and Robbie finds himself on a path running along the edge of the river. He turns upriver, the dark water and the mangroves on his left. To the right is the flood embankment which withstands all but the largest floods: an 1893, or a 1974. Beyond the embankment is the cover of forest he has just left.

  Mangroves. Once, they extended no further than Breakfast Creek, miles downriver. Now thick and protected, the mangroves have crept further and further upriver from the bay, colonising new country, sustained by the soil flooding downstream from the cultivations in the Brisbane River Valley. You pass through mangroves now where once forest grew to the water’s edge. Silver-grey trunks and branches reaching like arms from the tidal mud, limbs of what could be half-buried bodies stretching out imploringly from the mud, hands and fingers of leaves brushing against each other in the canopy.

  Surrounding these undead limbs are swathes of black tap-roots rising a few inches from the mud: thousands of oxidised quills, rusted black and caked with the flakes of accumulated tidal residue.

  The path merges into a boardwalk. What had been packed earth under his feet gives way to timber, and his footsteps now echo. Water is below and beside him, washing around the base of the mangroves which spread out for metres as a buffer from the open currents of the river.

  He pauses on the boardwalk, and leans over the railing, looking into the dark river-water eddying around the base of each tree, creeping across the mangrove mud with the rising tide. He watches the tide slide over the mud like a dark veil.

  Above the low creeping sound of the water Robbie hears another: the quick-step of feet on the boardwalk, and alert, he waits.

  ‘Robbie?’ It is Freya’s voice. ‘Robbie?’

  ‘Here,’ he calls, the shape of her becoming distinct as she nears. She draws beside him, only an uneven echo of feet on timber lingering.

  She is panting and has to catch her breath. ‘Thanks for waiting,’ she says eventually, agitated.

  ‘I didn’t think you wanted to come.’ But he is smiling now and Freya sees his mood ha
s lightened. Has the forest done this?

  The river? The solitude? She nestles her shoulder against his and for a time they look out through the mangroves together.

  ‘Here,’ Robbie says after a while, taking a coin from his pocket. He rests it for a long moment on the back of his thumb before flicking it out from the boardwalk. The coin spins hard through the air as it leaves his hand. Its trajectory vanishes into the dark, and they listen. There is a plop-suck noise when it hits the mud.

  ‘Now you,’ Robbie says, taking out another coin. ‘For luck.

  The river can be our wishing well.’ Freya tosses her coin into the darkness, and together they hear the double-sound of the coin rebounding off something solid before landing with its plop in the mud.

  They walk together. The river finishes its ninety-degree arc and swings out of the Botanic Gardens and into the long stretch of the city reach. The path hugs the riverbank, mangroves still fringing the water. The sound of traffic enters their consciousness and the ceiling of plant life in the forest gives way to concrete, as the riverside expressway, hanging off the side of the city like a ledge over the water, stakes its claim to the riverbank.

  Soon the suck of the water against the bank is gone, and the forest-muffled sounds of the fireworks are swallowed by the noise of traffic. Robbie and Freya emerge from the dominion of plants and are back in the city, a canopy of highway above their heads.

  This path rolls out along the riverbank for miles, skirting the water, following upriver the route of the broad watercourse.

  They’re tempted to believe they could walk to the source somewhere high in the range far to the west.

  They stride out now along the path, concrete hard and unforgiving under their feet, the noise and light of the city harsh after the forest. They stay at river-level, following the path. Beside them as they walk, the river’s embankment rises steeply close by, and the path begins to narrow. The concrete underbelly of the expressway rumbles above them, and suddenly they are not alone.