The Comfort of Figs

by Simon Cleary

  Evelyn picks up her own satchel and leads the way to the gate, glancing at O’Hara and Stahl as she passes through.

  ‘I hope you enjoyed your day off,’ she says, and smiles.

  They laugh.

  Evelyn is walking down the gangway, stepping onto the jetty, leaving the two men on the ferry, wondering if this is all over now.

  ‘Come for a swim!’ O’Hara calls out finally, almost too late.

  A shiver runs down the back of her neck.

  ‘Where?’ she says, turning half around, not quite facing the two of them leaning over the ferry railing above her.

  ‘The Mowbray Park Baths. Been there before?’

  ‘No.’ She must be blushing. The deckhand is watching as he unhitches the rope and prepares the ferry to depart.

  ‘You can almost . . .’ O’Hara turns to look downriver, to see if the pool is visible from here. But it is not. ‘Right beside the ferry terminal at Mowbray Park. Take a ferry. Or you could walk.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she says, and she begins to move away.

  ‘Tonight!’ O’Hara calls out.

  Chapter Ten

  A rectangular mesh of wire and wooden palings hangs off big timber pylons sunk into the riverbed, cordoning off a fragment of the river as a swimming pool. Electric lights hang on poles over the pool and the bathing sheds, casting overlapping circles of light.

  At eight o’clock Mowbray Park Baths are full of summer swimmers. Young children with their parents. Older children with their friends, adults after work. O’Hara and Stahl have been here for an hour already, swimming and resting and watching and waiting.

  The girl and her younger sister arrive. O’Hara and Stahl get out of the water to greet them.

  ‘You made it.’

  ‘We’ve just finished supper.’

  O’Hara wonders if the two girls had difficulty getting away.

  ‘The water’s lovely,’ he says.

  ‘Come on, then,’ says the young girl. ‘Let’s swim.’

  ‘This is my sister Meg.’

  ‘Hello, Meg,’ says Stahl. He is about to introduce himself, to bow even, with some low sweep of his arm, but she is impatient:

  ‘Where can we get changed?’

  O’Hara and Stahl answer together, pointing in awkward overlap to the changing sheds.

  In the pool they swim. Evelyn’s long, languid strokes. Meg swimming out to the fence, touching it, and returning. Laughing, tapping Evelyn lightly on the head, and swimming out again to the perimeter fence with the swiftest of strokes. O’Hara and Stahl treading water, then disappearing below it in duck dives and reappearing in a different spot and Evelyn feigning not to notice. The pool is full of bodies. They lose one another for a time. Meg turns at the outer fence, tiring. She hangs off the perimeter railing catching her breath, and looks for her sister through the swirl of bodies. Evelyn is talking with one of the men near the stairs, the taller one. Bodies splash next to Meg and when the splashing subsides she looks across the pool to the stairs and sees that Evelyn has gone, swimming away, while the man is still there, watching Evelyn’s path through the water.

  Meg waits for her sister to stop so she can wave and catch her attention. A ripple of breeze moves across the water. Suddenly a hand tugs at her ankle below the water and she squeals, kicking the hand away. Stahl bursts from the water in front of her and together they laugh. Evelyn reaches them, pausing to rest on the fence. Floats on her back, her hands reaching behind her head to hold the top rail of the fence, her legs breaking the surface of the water in regular kicks, the water splashing up and out and over them.

  Across the river to the north-east a jagged flash of lightning momentarily links earth and sky. Clouds blunt the moon and stars. Swimmers turn in the direction of the strike and count.

  One, two, three, and get to ten before the thunder begins its roll towards them in the pool. Ten seconds, ten miles. They read summer storms like mariners once read stars, know there is no danger yet, return to their play.

  The storm builds, growing out of a strange quarter, for Brisbane, for summer. The flashes in the sky get closer, the rain still distant. Gradually swimmers get out of the water, one by one or in clusters, and walk or skip or hurry to where their towels hang over a railing.

  ‘Come on,’ Meg calls finally, ‘let’s get out! It’s getting close.’

  She is looking at the lightning and feels the pull of the other bodies leaving the water. A tide of people getting out, the ebb of their bodies. She looks at her sister and then at O’Hara and at Stahl. None say anything, though she knows they have heard.

  She calls again, this time with the irritation of being ignored.

  ‘Come on, everyone. Time to go.’

  Again the other three do not respond and Meg fixes her older sister with a stare.

  ‘Evie, are you coming?’

  In silent reply Evelyn curves her body up and away from Meg in a clean dive and disappears below the surface. Meg huffs, turns, and strokes to the shallows where she finds the porphyry stone steps in the pool wall with her feet and climbs out.

  She grabs her towel from a fence and dries down with the other swimmers who have also left the water to watch the oncoming storm. When she is done, she sits on the stone retaining wall and drapes the towel over her shoulders, pulling down hard on both ends with her hands, feeling the tension of the material across her shoulders. Meg sits and, sulking, waits for her sister and the boys to get out too.

  Evelyn is diving. Staying under for long seconds before bursting into the air for just long enough to take her breath. And then she is diving again into the dark of the water. She is momentarily lost to O’Hara and Stahl. Dive after dive she goes under while, above, the storm closes. The boys take short backward strokes, their eyes constantly searching for Evelyn’s appearing then disappearing body. They dive too, imitating Evelyn, taking her lead, but their dives are edgy and shallow.

  The lightning strikes close. The time between thunder claps shortens. The air thickens. A gust of breeze passes over the surface of the water. O’Hara and Stahl both know the childhood rules for electrical storms: don’t stand under trees, and don’t stay in the water. Trees and water: both conductors of earthward bolts of light and power.

  The sky is illuminated again with another strike across the river. There is pool and river and red-iron roofing of the houses on the opposite bank brought momentarily into blinding relief, and then there is nothing. A giddy nothing, and for the smallest moment afterwards the world around the three swimmers is perfectly black. Their eyes refocus. Slowly the small electrical lights hanging over the pool once more throw their inconsequential light. And just as the swimmers’ eyes have grown accustomed to the lantern-lit view of the world, it is taken from them again by a great flash of power.

  Each flash gives up the cloud banks that fill the sky. Dark muscular clouds which roll across the heavens.

  O’Hara and Stahl stop their diving. Stop their nervous movement and just tread water, trying to stay calm. A lightning bolt strikes the earth somewhere close on the opposite bank of the river, and so lights everything that they see the shape of Evelyn’s body under the surface of the water near them. Then she emerges, her head and long hair with water streaming off. She does not gasp for breath but calmly exhales, and breathes in, controlled.

  A small playful smile appears on her face as she fixes O’Hara, then Stahl with her gaze. They are the only three left in the pool.

  She is utterly unhurried. Another strike of lightning illuminates the sky and they tread water, their three small bodies facing each other, marking a triangle on the river. She looks at them, serene.

  O’Hara and Stahl, treading water before the approaching storm, are held in place by her unspoken challenge. Elemental like the storm. Neither of the boys quite understands the nature of the test, or how it was issued. But it is there, powerful and real. The boys tread their water before the girl, as the storm rushes on.

  From what seems like the furthest distanc
e, Meg screams at them to get out, get out.

  The storm front’s messenger breeze is now a wind which chops the water surface, makes their treading more difficult. A gust of wind rushes across the water, and in its trail big drops of rain begin to thump against the river. The rising wind is everywhere and begins to hollow out a space in O’Hara’s mind.

  Suddenly he hears the urgency of Meg’s screaming, and the feel of the raindrops hard on his scalp, and the charging of each of the beads of river-water on his neck and shoulders with static electricity.

  And then, another clap of thunder, this time beside his very ear, inside his ear and O’Hara breaks. A reflex turn of his head to look first one way, then the other, searching out – what? But looking outwards now. The thread between the three of them severed. O’Hara turns to the bank and, with strong urgent kicks, is soon at the wall and pulling himself out as the sky is lit again with a sustained series of flashes, O’Hara’s flesh a harsh white.

  Stahl and Evelyn are only a few strokes behind O’Hara, and they scramble over each other to get out of the water. Meg is there shoving towels at them.

  ‘Idiots! Come on, it’s going to bucket down.’

  They shelter beside the wall of the changing shed, their four bodies leaning in a row against the weatherboard. The lightning illuminates the driving rain, single and double-headed strikes which crack earthward. The storm has lifted Evelyn. Another lightning strike and she is hooting with laughter and the electricity that is fizzing just beyond their shelter. Her delight is infectious, Meg giggling now too at the stupidity of them all getting caught out. Stahl just laughing, strong.

  But O’Hara has gone quiet, has withdrawn, has pulled away from the others. He looks out into the teeming rain. The narrow shelter under the roof ’s overhang is too small, and O’Hara feels constricted between the rain and the wall and the other three.

  Chapter Eleven

  Saturday, 28 October 1939. Dawn. There is a banging at the entrance to O’Hara’s sleep. Bolts hammered into a dream, cracking it open. The knocking shifts to the front door at the end of the hallway as O’Hara opens his eyes. A boarder in another room curses. There is a brief pause in the banging before it starts again, a fistful of the sharpest knocks. O’Hara tosses the sheet and is out of bed, turning the handle of his bedroom door, and padding along the worn hall runner to the end of the corridor.

  He opens the door onto a man with a beret and a thick moustache.

  ‘O’Hara, Stahl?’

  The arrival of the taxi driver is no surprise, but O’Hara is irritated that he has overslept, is not awake to greet the driver.

  ‘Be with you in a minute.’

  ‘That’s all you’ve got, mate.’

  O’Hara turns, and hurries back down the corridor towards his room, Stahl’s head emerging now from his own doorway.

  ‘We’re on,’ he says.

  O’Hara pulls on the clothes that lie draped over the chair in the corner of his room. In less than a minute he is ready and draws the door of his room closed behind him. Stahl has already emerged from his, and is turning a key in the lock.

  The two of them move quietly down the corridor towards the front door, behind them the sound of other boarders snoring in fits, heaving stale air around their rooms, through the moulded slats of ventilation screens, and into the hall. The taxi driver has returned to his car and the front door of the boarding house is ajar. The doorway is full of a muted light. The two men walk towards it. Their departing footsteps beat a discordant rhythm against the snoring at the back of the house.

  O’Hara and Stahl are the first two in the taxi. The driver consults a piece of paper with a long list of typed names, five of which are circled in pencil. He pulls away from the curb in front of the boarding house and makes for a second New Farm address. Then a third. Soon five of them are in the taxi, and then the driver is dropping them off at the bridge-site. Other taxis are arriving and depositing their men.

  It is grey and overcast. Low clouds muzzle an early, dull, sun.

  The dressing shed spills over with expectancy as the men change into their work gear. The engineer Lawrence gathers them together outside and gives them instructions, a half-time speech from a football coach. Irish mutters as they break and move in different directions along the bridge. There is no need for the instructions. They have been ready for a long time, understood the task and prepared themselves. Soon enough they are moving into position, each aware of what they must do.

  To close a bridge: a dull sky, a derrick, the final trusses, the wedges, some men, their bolts and their rivets.

  The wedge-operating crews take their places. The eight wedges have been in position for weeks, four at either end of the central suspended span, which is still in two halves, almost brushing, indecently close. The wedge mechanisms: eight of them, each as big as a man. Each wedge is forged steel, six feet long – two feet at its widest, tapering down to twelve inches at the thin edge. The wedges have been built into the steelwork, constructed into the superstructure between the end of the cantilever span and the beginning of the suspended span.

  A man stands before a wedge, feet planted, shoulders set, hands gripping the rim of the hand-wheel. Now! He heaves, and shoulders the mechanism into movement. The hand-wheel turns the worm-wheel turns the operating screw, the wedge being at the end of the screw. In fractions of inches the eight wedges ease out, and the two halves of the bridge temporarily shorten. The crane lowers the last chords into place, into the newly expanded space. Delicate, precise. Each wedge eases out a little more until the suspended span and the holes of the members of each chord are perfectly aligned. Then in!

  The bolts driven home. The top chords first. Then the chord splices, the laterals. Then the bottom chords. Pins are driven into the holes – and the suspended span is one. With the last of the pins driven home, the jigsaw is complete. The wedges are withdrawn.

  And the river is bridged.

  O’Hara folds his arms across his chest and leans back against an upright. Observes people rimming the cliff-tops around them, gathering on the riverbank below. Even from here he can see the smiles, the flutter of pointing hands.

  ‘How’s that, mate?’ he says.

  ‘Not bad, Jack,’ Stahl replies. ‘Not bad at all.’

  The men laugh and whoop and toss hats all along the bridge.

  One of the derrick cranes honks its horn like a crowing rooster:

  cock-a-doodle-doo. The second crane joins in, finds the meter of the first, and they are soon hooting in unison cock-a-doodle-doo,

  cock-a-doodle-doo. The hooting swallows the men. Two giant mechanical insects leading them in a round of celebration. Tugs start up on the river below, cars pick up the tune, and the air resounds with the mechanical crowing of scores of counterfeit roosters.

  On the water Carleton beats out the same tune on the outside of his wooden-hulled dinghy. Bang a bang da-bang, bang a

  bang da-bang.

  From the school on the hill, the girls hear the rising cacophony through their classroom windows and guess. The nun at the head of Evelyn’s classroom relents and the girls stream out of the room to the viewing terrace where they look wide-eyed across at the bridge now linked. At last, Evelyn thinks, at last. She sees her father standing on the decking, hands folded behind his back. She sees her father and smiles for him and his achievement.

  Though today it is not only him she is seeking out.

  Chapter Twelve

  By the time they are off the bridge, it is after midday and the brewery at the top of the cliff has set up a five-gallon keg inside the changing shed. O’Hara works the tap. He pulls beers, and jokes as he thrusts glasses into his workmates’ hands. All the room is before him, the men and their success. O’Hara watches the engineer Lawrence move among them, speaking with one, then another, like a prince at a royal reception.

  ‘Come round this side and take over for a while,’ O’Hara says to Carleton, who is lingering near the keg, observing the atmosphere from a
distance. Carleton beams. O’Hara pours a last beer. As he hands over the tap to Carleton he roughs him on the shoulder: ‘Most important job in the house. Don’t muck it up.’

  O’Hara approaches the engineer.

  ‘Congratulations, Mr Lawrence.’

  ‘Not at all, Mr O’Hara,’ he says, and accepts the beer O’Hara offers. ‘This is your work. It is I who should applaud you. So well done, Mr O’Hara. You’ve done well. We’ve all done well.’

  The two men raise their glasses, take long draughts.

  ‘It went off without a hitch in the end, didn’t it?’ O’Hara says.

  ‘That it did.’

  ‘According to plan?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Did you expect any problems?’

  ‘One never knows. One plans as well as one can, Mr O’Hara, and the rest is left in the hands of fate.’

  The voices of other men bubble inside the shed, boiling out through the doorway, spilling around outside. Someone hoots, another man is slapping people hard on the back.

  ‘What will you do now, Mr Lawrence?’

  ‘There is still work to be done here, Mr O’Hara. After that?

  Who knows. I expect that the war will keep us busy. But until then,’ and Lawrence is extracting himself now, ‘there should be work enough here to keep us.’

  Bradfield and the politicians arrive for the following morning’s front page. Forgan-Smith, the Premier, attempts a speech.

  He has barely begun when Hodges at the back of the room starts up a chorus of ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and the others join him, loud and insistent, till Forgan-Smith gives up and joins the song.

  * * *

  Out on the decking the roadway workers employed by Hornibrook are still toiling, following the steelwork, laying bitumen behind. The steel men pour ale into billy-cans, disguising the beer and walking the cans out onto the decking, where their mates slough the warming beer down their throats and onto their chins, across the fronts of their chests and onto the hot tar.