The Comfort of Figs

by Simon Cleary

  Robbie settles in the crook of a large branch, and picks leaves from the tree, depositing them into his hessian sack. White sap runs from the base of each leaf as he breaks it off its twig.

  Robbie interrupts his work at intervals to wipe the milky sap off his hands. He fills the hessian sack, leaf by leaf, and when he is done descends the tree, climbs the gully slope and takes the stairs up to the house.

  In the house he lights a beeswax candle and tips the sackful of fig leaves onto the long hoop-pine table. He spreads the leaves out across the table, ordering them in lines according to size. Moreton Bay fig leaves: big and broad with their glossy surface and rust-red underside. Base to tip, base to tip, each leaf placed so it overlaps the one before it, the glossy surfaces of the leaves face up, until the table is covered with a pattern of overlapping leaves.

  Robbie settles himself into a chair at the table, and begins to sew the leaves together. He passes a needle threaded with dark twine through the back of one leaf and then through the next.

  The needle pierces the flesh of the leaf and the leaf-membranes stay intact; the leaf holds its shape. He sews two leaves together.

  Then he adds a third and then a fourth, and he continues like this, adding one leaf at a time as he builds his leaf tapestry, leaf by leaf, row by row. Even from here he can still hear Freya crying out in her sleep.

  The candle stump burns down. He replaces it with a fresh candle and continues his work. From time to time he tests that the blanket will hold, that there are no weaknesses and that the thread will not tear through the leaves from the growing weight. He must be gentle.

  At some stage in the night, when Freya calls out again in her sleep, Robbie thinks he hears his name and pauses in his sewing to rise and check on her. She groans as he enters the room, and Robbie makes out a furrow deep in her forehead as her eyes fight against her dream. In one continuous motion she groans again, turns over and settles beneath the cotton sheet, her back to the doorway and to Robbie watching. It was merely a cry – no audible word.

  He returns to the table and his work. His sewing fills the night.

  Closer to dawn, there are stirrings. Creatures waking, others returning from their night’s odyssey. It is dark still as Robbie completes the fig-leaf blanket, the night not yet doused. When he is done, Robbie folds the blanket once, twice on the table, and then over his forearm. He carries it into the bedroom where Freya sleeps, the sheet pulled up to her chin against the chilled hour before dawn. He rests his night’s work at the foot of the bed and then, section by section, gently unfolds it over her sleeping body, the cool glossy surface of the leaf-blanket face down on the bed, so as he unfolds its final portion, the leaves fall against the skin of her shoulder.

  Freya stirs with the strange, cool sensation. She rolls over, so that her back is no longer to the door, and her body moves under the leaf-blanket, under its weight. She wakes and her eyes find him, standing beside her.

  ‘What?’ she murmurs.

  She feels strangely uncomfortable under his gaze. He remains silent, and even in the fog of her sleep she understands there is something here that he wants her to discover, some wish, a revelation perhaps. Freya feels she does not have the strength to feed his desire.

  She closes her eyes again and is aware of the unfamiliar weight upon her, heavier than the thin cotton sheet, the balance of the weight different. She draws her arms up, lifting them out and over the fig-leaf blanket. She feels its roughness with her forearms, the ridges of leaf and stalk against her skin. She shudders.

  She resists the instinct to shake off this foreignness, to toss it all off with a single violent shake. She is awake enough for that.

  She knows what this is. She knows the leaves. His talismanic fig. His fig. His leaves. He is suffocating her.

  ‘Do you like it?’ he says.

  She is more tired than she can ever recall. ‘It’s heavy, Robbie.’

  ‘The tree of truth, remember?’

  She doesn’t respond.

  ‘Remember – the Moreton Bay fig leaf – the leaf of truth?’ his voice rising with anxiety.

  ‘I know.’ Her voice distant and sad.

  ‘Don’t you like it?’ he says to her.

  Even as she shrinks away from him, she realises that he too is desperate.

  ‘It’s heavy, Robbie,’ she says again.

  No longer able to contain herself, she turns her back to him, sinks her face in her pillow, and sobs.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In the early evening, when Robbie enters the empty house, there is no lamplight in the front room. The bedroom door is open and somehow sags on its hinge. From the front door, with the street behind him and the echo of the pub and the old man’s voice fading, it is the silence of the house he hears.

  He knows. He knows immediately. But still there’s the shock of it.

  He goes through the motions. He enters the bedroom to nothing. There is enough streetlight coming through the stillopen front door to show him the empty, made bed. Robbie walks the corridor to the living room and the kitchen. He flicks lights on. Nothing. Despite himself he calls out – ‘Freya, Frey?’ – and searches each room of the house. Then he is back in the bedroom.

  Her clothes are gone from her drawers, her backpack removed from above the wardrobe. On the chair in the corner of the room is the fig-leaf blanket he sewed for her the night before. It is neatly folded in four. It glimmers where the street-light slides off the glossy leaves.

  He slumps on the bed, hollowed out.

  Freya had waited for him to go to work before packing. Before taking a taxi out to the airport, before walking down the long aisle of the plane to find her seat, before dropping into it, before trying to make herself comfortable.

  It was late in the afternoon when her plane lifted from the tarmac and rose over the river’s estuary. A layer of cloud hung above the city and the bay. She looked back as the plane began its curve out to the ocean. The sun in the west below her lit up the river in an orange blaze, as though a drunken trail of petrol had been splashed across the city and then torched. Her fingers tingled as if it was she who might still be holding the match. The river burned as she watched, burned with fire and light like a tear across the city, flaming.

  And in the burning river’s glow she found the house she had just left, dwarfed by the quiet, dark fig in the gully behind it.

  The house where she had been broken, by whatever thing it is one gives up when one tries to love. Then the plane angle altered and the river-fire was drawn from her vision, doused.

  She has begun her long flight home. This decision she has taken. An act of faith. That there will be a home, that you can’t simply make one, you must find it.

  She is gone. He is not sure what he does next. At some point he looks for a note but finds none. He spends the long night waiting for her to return. Each sound in the street is Freya making her way back. Each sound in the street is a hope dashed. He gets snatches of sleep, careful to leave her side of the bed free should she slip back into the house while he is dozing. Light rain falls during the early hours. A dull dawn arrives with the sound of pigeons cooing on the roof of the house next door. He hears a crow landing on his own corrugated-iron roof, and the beat of wings as the pigeons take to the air. The crow’s claws scratch against the iron sheeting as the bird jumps and slides down the pitch of the roof. Robbie waits for it to take to the air again, but the scratching sound continues as the bird moves around above him, picking out food in the roof-guttering. It begins to caw in short bursts in answer to another crow across a gully of houses.

  Robbie rises from the bed. The front door is wide open, and he realises he forgot to close it the night before. He descends the front steps, damp from the overnight rain. In the middle of the street he looks back at the house and the black bird perched on the roof. It caws again and Robbie hisses at the bird. Then, ‘Garn,’ he yells, throwing his arms at the crow. The opaque sky looses itself once more and a shower of rain begins to fall.
Robbie feels the first drops on his forearms. ‘Garn,’ he hisses and the crow takes to the air with slow wing-beats.

  He rings the airlines, but they will give him no information.

  The bus companies have no record of her. He calls Bec. She hasn’t heard from Freya since she rang about the protest. ‘Is she alright?’ Bec asks. Robbie hangs up, unable to answer.

  Robbie waits out the day in the house. There are no phone calls. No one visits. He wanders the rooms and things come to him. He notices the depth of the stain in the white ceramic teapot Freya always used. How the different-sized drinking glasses have been ordered in the cupboard. Which recipe book she last used. He notices that Freya has cropped the herbs in the garden. In the fridge the freshly cut herbs are tied into bundles with rubber bands, and line an entire shelf: basil and dill and parsley and lemongrass. He notices the way postcards have been arranged on the kitchen sill. How, beside them, in an old jam jar, stand two Moreton Bay fig leaves, drying in the afternoon sun.

  He sleeps that night in the depression Freya’s body has made in the bed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Robbie wakes again without her, and finally realises she is gone. It is early, but he dresses, a new force in him, the shock turned to anger. What more could he have done?

  What more could he have given? For the first time in a year he leaves the house without having to worry about waking her, the sound of his boots sharp on the floorboards, as if each bootfall is deliberately struck.

  Pigeons stir when Robbie climbs the ladder to the roof of the pub, and it is the movement of the birds which wakes the old man, their disturbed fluttering, their short, panicked warbling. Robbie apologises, but the sound of his voice is swamped by the bridge traffic. He says it again, louder –

  sorry – and as the old man sits upright on his couch Robbie passes him a loaf of warm bread from a West End bakery.

  ‘You said you heard that my father had married my mother?’

  Robbie almost yells the question above the traffic noise.

  ‘Lily, yes.’

  ‘You said you were surprised. Why?’

  The old man reaches for his smoke tin. To slow Robbie down, as much as because he needs one.

  ‘Couldn’t believe it,’ he says eventually. ‘Jack had been away for twenty-odd years, and then he comes back and marries Lily.

  Just like that. Couldn’t believe it when I heard.’

  ‘But why not?’

  The old man, Old Man River, Peter Carleton, takes Robbie into his eyes now, and it dawns on him. It comes to him in rolling waves of sorrow and sadness and sympathy.

  ‘You know who Lily is?’ Carleton says gently, as gently as he can.

  Robbie feels an unease rise from his stomach.

  ‘My mother? Of course I know.’

  Carleton begins the story again, tells Robbie the thing the old man thought he already knew.

  ‘Charlie Stahl had a girl when he died – a sweetheart. He . . . he loved this girl. You could see it. He loved her. You understand?’

  Robbie does not. He feels sick. The only thing he knows is that the old man is looking at him with an intensity he can’t meet. He realises it is pity. He feels Carleton wanting him to understand, forcing him to understand, but he can’t think for the tightening in his gut, the dread spreading like roots through his body.

  ‘Evelyn was her name.’

  The old man looks for recognition, but it is not there. He continues, slow and patient.

  ‘Evelyn was the Canadian engineer’s daughter.’

  Robbie’s face remains blank.

  ‘She was young – still at school, though she was older than that. Older than that in here.’

  Carleton touches his heart with his hand. Once, twice, three times.

  ‘And here,’ he says, lowering his head slightly and pressing his finger against his forehead. ‘You could tell it here too.’

  Carleton keeps tapping his forehead, looking at Robbie at an odd angle, as if to say, you got it yet, do you understand?

  ‘Evelyn was pregnant when Charlie died,’ the old man goes on. ‘She had a little girl. She called her –’

  ‘Lily,’ finishes Robbie.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘Charlie Stahl, Lily.’

  She doesn’t turn, the morning light on her face, Robbie at her back, her hips pressed against the kitchen bench and her hands suspended now from whatever morning task has been obliterated by the name.

  ‘Charlie Stahl,’ Robbie says again.

  Does she turn to face her son? And if she does, then what?

  She thinks of God’s wrath, and searches for guidance. But her Old Testament stories, her beloved stories, deny her at this moment. Was it God, or Lot himself, who forbade the turning back? She simply can’t recall, her mind dizzy with the name and the engulfing past.

  ‘Charlie Stahl.’

  ‘Yes, love,’ she says, and looks at him now.

  ‘Charlie Stahl was your father,’ Robbie says to her.

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘Charlie Stahl was Jack’s best mate.’

  ‘Yes, love.’

  ‘You married your father’s best mate.’

  ‘Yes.’

  His family story falls away and another rushes to replace it.

  ‘Jack has always been here, he’s always been part of my life, Robbie. He supported us – my mother Evelyn and me – after I was born. After Charlie had died. He sent us money year after year, he cabled it to Mother from all over the world. And once a year, sometimes more, he’d visit. I got to know him from those visits. Twenty-five years of visits. Regular as the seasons, Jack was. He was committed to us, Robbie. He was always part of my life.’

  He lets her explain.

  ‘Then, after Mother died – How do these things happen, Robbie? . . . I don’t know.’

  She answers herself: ‘I fell in love with Jack, but that happened a long time before I married him. Maybe even when I was still a child. Probably . . . Mother used to call me her ‘water lily’, her ‘river lily’, her ‘Brisbane River Lily’ – Jack liked that . . . Anyway, after Mother died we got married.’

  ‘Her dying gave you permission, did it?’ he asks, the question folded over its own sharpened edge.

  ‘He was fine, Robbie –’ Lily catches herself – ‘is fine. The sketch of the bridge that Charlie did, the one you asked about – well, Jack gave that to me. And he gave it to me to remember Charlie, my father. I don’t have my own memories of him, but I’ve got that. And it helps. Maybe only a little, but it helps. I think of my father sitting in front of the bridge, observing it, studying it, then sketching it out. The drawing helps. It tells a story. And it was also a gift from Jack, it doubled as that.’

  ‘There’s another story, Lily.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she says, her voice subdued.

  ‘Your father falling off the bridge to his death, your husband with him when it happened. Your husband abandoning your father to the police. The police pursuing your father off the bridge, pursuing him to his death. And your husband silent about it.’

  ‘Abandoned?’ Lily raises her voice. ‘Where did you get that from? Jack didn’t abandon anyone, love. You think I don’t know what happened? Look, Robbie, I know about my father’s death.

  Abandoned!’

  She shakes her head, shudders at the thought, preposterous.

  ‘My father wasn’t abandoned. He was leading the police away from Jack!’

  Lily calms.

  ‘But that doesn’t mean Jack didn’t feel guilty about it, didn’t feel he owed my father. I knew when I married him that he felt he was responsible. It was a guilt that would never leave him, Robbie. It’s haunted him. It drove him from the city . . . from the country. I tried to persuade him, to convince him that history would forgive him, that he didn’t need to flee . . . But when a thing happens it leaves its imprint on you. Things don’t go away. Never.’

  ‘The bridge was a curse then.’

  �
�No, Robbie, it was a gift.’ Fiercely, ‘A gift, always a gift. And Jack is only half of it. There’s more of the bridge in me than there is in Jack – my father worked the bridge too, and my mother was the steel engineer’s daughter. I reckon that makes me bridge blue-blood, Robbie,’ she tries to laugh, old and full of sorrow. Then she adds, ‘Without that, you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘But why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

  ‘Guilt.’

  ‘Pah!’ Robbie nearly spits it out, dismissing her, matching her ferocity, a different question swelling inside his brain now: Why didn’t you tell me?

  Lily continues:

  ‘You don’t know guilt, Robbie – the hold of it. Jack was riddled with it. He was guilty Charlie had died, guilty he’d kept quiet about it, guilty my mother was alone, guilty I didn’t have a father.’

  ‘Guilt’s no basis for marriage, Lily,’ Robbie says, soft, cold, hard.

  ‘Guilty he couldn’t give you a clean, straight history,’ she continues, choking now.

  ‘Don’t,’ he says, unrelenting, ‘don’t bring me into it.’

  ‘Oh Robbie!’ Lily cries. She wilts into her chair and drops her head into her hands, sobbing.

  He almost leaves then. Having hurt her, satisfied, he is a moment from walking out the apartment into the corridor, the lift, the street. But something keeps him. Something touches him. A hollowing of the air beyond the apartment as the morning breeze changes direction, a crow’s echo falling through the sky outside, the muffling of the dawn light as a cloud passes low across the sun.

  He stays. He watches her weeping, watches the great chafing sobs, the shaking of his mother’s small shoulders, the bowed head. Something enters him, small.

  He begins to see his mother. A small woman, an only child, a fatherless child. A woman who dedicated herself to looking after others: her own mother, her husband, her son, her husband once again now he is an invalid. A woman who subjugated herself time and again, who made herself small at every opportunity, the better to cling to her place in things. Keeper and carer. A woman who brought her husband to this apartment with its Story Bridge views as a comfort to him, and, he now realises, as a comfort to herself.