The Comfort of Figs (2008)

by Simon Cleary

  As he fights against them he sees, far down the slope of the deck, the other boy, standing in the middle of this closest lane of traffic, directing cars away, waving them out of the lane they’re in, towards the centre lanes. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is real, nothing right.

  It is all he can do to swing his head around to see what they are doing with his arm. They have it over an expansion joint.

  A fresh wave of fear. Almost! he can hear them. He feels the steel of the expansion joint, then, against the palm of his hand.

  Almost got it! they’re yelling to each other, forcing his fingers down. Just about got ’em in! He hasn’t got the strength any more, and he feels his fingers thrust between the steel teeth of the expansion joint, as far as they can go, stopping at the third row of knuckles. Robbie is no longer resisting, is weak beneath the weight of the boys, the fingers of his hand jammed down into the steel-toothed gap.

  ‘All we have to do now,’ whispers Kettle, the meanest of whispered teenage taunts in Robbie’s ear, ‘is wait till the bridge cools down for the night.’ As if there is some cruel delight to be had out of it. Some mature evil, beyond Robbie’s conception, issuing from Kettle’s lips.

  Robbie vomits.

  ‘Fuck me!’ Kettle yells. ‘Aaaww fuck!’

  ‘He’s fucking spewed!’ another shouts, and they release their grip on him, and they are standing up now, and wiping vomit off their shirts.

  ‘Can’t take no fucking joke, can ya?’

  He kneels on the earth, the day breaking open around him.

  The dampness of the ground comes through his trousers at the knees, and the wetness of the dewy earth reaches his skin. He is solitary. A man kneeling alone on unwanted land by a railway, in a sleepy suburb in his city. An early mist seems to glow with its own even light. Broad day has not yet come, and the cry of a single crow swirls around him through the fog.

  He kneels with his gloves tucked into his belt and, barehanded, scoops out shallow cups in the earth. He keeps his fingernails bitten short, but the soil still wedges between skin and nail, strains against the quick. He cups his hands and scrapes the sides of them against the ground, enjoying the abrasion of it. Enjoying the feeling of the earth gently giving way. A train whistle sounds through the mist and Robbie stops to listen. He straightens and rocks back on his haunches, the muscles in his thighs tightening, filling out his legs. His toes push against the ends of his boots, and he feels the blood beating there. Robbie brushes his hands against his thighs, shaking off some of the soil. The sounds of the train’s coming get louder: the whooshing of the displaced air, the ka-thicking of the wheels passing over the joints in the track, then the breaking as it slows for the station. He counts his heartbeats, and feels heart and count quicken, till the train passes and recedes.

  Robbie dips his hands into the soft earth again. At the bottom of their scooping the two hands meet under a shallow cover of soil. He pauses and gazes down for a moment at his arms which look strange, handless, disappearing into the earth at the wrists. He thinks of childhood holidays at the beach and being buried in the sand by his father, his small body lying in a trench of his own digging and his father scooping the sand over him so it is only his head which is above-ground. Sand.

  Clean and pure and rinsed and glistening. Sanitised, he thinks.

  Suffocating. It is the earth, the lived-in, broken, secret-keeping earth which comforts him these days. He has grown away from sand, grown from sand into soil.

  The earth hollowed, Robbie reaches for a seedling he has brought. He takes the potted fig and tips it upside down, loosening the roots and the soil by squeezing, then tapping. The plant slides out and Robbie cradles it gently in his outspread fingers before righting it and lowering it into its place in the earth.

  He fills the hole around the young fig with the soil and pats it down, the first of his day’s plantings complete.

  He does this in the early mornings – planting figs in the city before it wakes, sewing them into the city’s fabric before it rises, dropping them like dream-seeds into the city’s repose.

  It saddens him that the Moreton Bay fig is not respected in Brisbane, not celebrated. That it is just one of the fig species populating the city’s parks. That free, nineteenth-century Brisbane-town should have uprooted its figs, the colony’s flogging trees. Should raze them as it sought to erase the memories of its convict beginnings. In Sydney, to the south, the Royal Botanic Gardens promoted Moreton Bay figs for its grand avenues and parks. They are found in so many public gardens, so many churchyards. It irritates him. It irritates him that Brett Whiteley, who had such glorious licence to paint Sydney Harbour, would presume to sketch the Moreton Bay fig, as if to claim it too, for Sydney.

  He hates it. He hates it that the fig is forgotten in Brisbane.

  So he leaves her each morning to plant. Somewhere in his city, in some corner, he finds earth to kneel upon and open with his hands. Each morning he places a tiny Moreton Bay fig into the earth, to settle, to take root. Each morning this private ritual, this quiet offering.

  When it is done he returns to the house. To Freya, stirring.

  The first time she is confused.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Planting.’

  Her head is tilted in query, needing more.

  ‘The first tree of the day is mine,’ he says. ‘The rest of the day is the council’s.’

  She doesn’t push him, her strange lover, doesn’t ask to accompany him, lets him be.

  He lifts the sash window one morning at the end of their first week together in the house. Freya is used to this already – his return, her daily alarm. The sound of the timber frame clattering up its grooves, and then when she opens her eyes the muscles in Robbie’s back and shoulders tensing and relaxing with the effort of lifting, then the fresh air from outside swallowing the remains of the night, the shifting air carrying Robbie’s scent to her as she lies in bed. It is the freshness of the day, and Robbie brings it new each morning. She is growing to like this. She rises and joins him at the window. For a moment they embrace, then she draws away, lightly, her day too now begun.

  She pulls the thin grey blanket from the bed. Keeping hold of one end in her fists, she launches it towards him.

  ‘Here, help me out.’

  Robbie snatches at it, misses, and then bends to collect it, fumbling till finally he has an edge, then he straightens and they both take backward steps and the blanket becomes taut between them.

  Freya leads. She makes the first fold, from right to left – but Robbie doesn’t follow, and when she looks up she sees his brow knotted, gaze lost and breathing gone shallow.

  ‘Hey,’ she says.

  He looks at her and shakes his head, as if wrestling something free.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘A memory. A deja vu.’

  ‘Have we done this before?’ she says. ‘In another life?’

  Robbie smiles.

  ‘No. My father. A bad memory.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s nothing . . . the last time I folded a blanket . . . it’s nothing.’

  They stand there, awkward, the blanket between them sagging.

  Despite himself, he remembers. A camping trip. Allows the memory to swell, and holds it in. He was in year ten, and his father had just returned from overseas. How long had he been away that time? Robbie can’t remember. Two or three months, more. Robbie can’t remember the project, can’t remember the country. Something important, whatever it was, something grand.

  But by year ten Robbie had begun not to care, had begun to resent his father, and his golden returns to Brisbane and their home. This time, he’d pulled Robbie out of school for a camping trip on Stradbroke Island. By the final morning when they were packing up – decamping, his father called it, some remnant from the war – and his father demanded he help fold the blankets, Robbie’s resentment had become fierce and unanswerable.

  It was prickly, sloppy, adolescent resistanc
e at first. Then, when his father hardened, and grew irritated – Stop being bloody difficult.

  You know how it’s done, Robert, now just do it. Don’t push me! – Robbie had shrugged his shoulders, dropped his end of the blanket to the ground, and turned away. He had only taken three steps – he was going nowhere in particular, just away – when he heard his father’s heavy step and Hey boy, what do you think you’re doing?

  Robbie stopped, turned square, set himself as solid as he could, arms straight down, tightening, ready now, ready.

  Who do you think you are? Robbie challenged – the rest of it, the whole of it, was no less clear for being unspoken: Who do you think you are to turn up like this? By what authority? By what right? His father did not yet see the resolve, did not see it shift and become fury, youthful, expanding and unpredictable. His father came closer.

  By then Robbie had just one thought. It was simple and clear, not even a thought – truer than that. It was the sound of his blood, the rhythm of its very beating: Go on, touch me, just touch me, just touch me.

  Robbie’s hands became fists as his father leant closer, and said again, What the hell do you think you’re doing? The rhythm of Robbie’s blood began thumping in his brain, regular as the beating in his chest. Just touch me. Robbie wishing now his father would press a finger into his chest, hoping it would happen, desperately willing it to happen.

  But his father saw it, at last, and stepped back, retreated. And Robbie’s chance was gone.

  * * *

  ‘My father was into control,’ he says to Freya. ‘Folding blankets as much as everything else. He thought there was only one way to fold a blanket. Seriously – that there was one way that was better than all others, one perfect way. He was an engineer, this stuff mattered to him. And if you challenged him he’d tell you why – he’d list his criteria: speed, compactness, number of folds, efficiency of process. He’d insist you did it the right way. There was no alternative. He’d force you to bend. He was a bastard of a father.’

  ‘Will I meet him one day?’ Freya says, slowing him down.

  ‘No, Freya . . . He’s not half what a father should aim for.’

  ‘Even so,’ Freya says, ‘I’d like to meet him one day – so I can learn more about you.’

  ‘That’d be a poor deal, seeing as I’d have to leave the country to meet yours. No way.’

  ‘Come on . . .’

  ‘No chance. He’s gone, Frey. Gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘As good as. He’s not part of my life, and hasn’t been for ages.’

  Robbie had done the sums once, what part of his childhood his father had spent away: well over two-thirds. Now he thinks of the false returns, all those quick trips back into the country. Visits. His father sneaking home for a few days or a week or a month, coming home to suffocate Robbie. And his mother – dutiful, obedient, allowing it to happen.

  ‘Anyway, forget my father, Frey.’ He touches her shoulder, strokes it with his thumb. ‘Here, let me help you with that thing.’

  Robbie takes up the grey wool blanket again, arms raised, outstretched along the edge. He waits until Freya mirrors him, till she faces him with open arms, then he steps towards her, one step, two, gravity drawing the blanket down, halving it between them. He leans forward and takes her edge from her, his fists filled with the tight woollen knit. Then he steps back, so she – her hands now free – can reach down and take the blanket along its new fold. So they can begin the second movement.

  Chapter Four

  A private equilibrium emerges. While the mornings are his, the evenings are Freya’s.

  As the months pass, she settles each night, after university, at the long hoop-pine table, to work. In the centre of the table, always, is the jacaranda wood bowl she is filling with his gifts to her: the leaves and seed pods and feathers, his descriptions of the city. Surrounding it, papers are strewn: rough minutes from campaign meetings, newsletters, council pamphlets, a copy of the city’s planning regulations, hand-written notes, doodles sketched in the top right-hand corner of a writing-pad. The evidence of her labour – thoughts, wishes, will – all that she is trying to do reduced to words.

  Once a week she and her campaign colleagues gather around the hoop-pine table. It’s a disparate group – students and scientists and teachers; professional environmentalists and locals.

  Among them is a legal aid lawyer, Bec, dark-eyed, firm-jawed:

  Freya’s friend, the reason she settled here in the first place all those years ago. They muster here, full of anger or justice unrequited, to plan how they will stop the highway through the park.

  Each week Freya starts the discussion, shapes it, directs it, shifts it when it stalls. She extracts hard facts from the talk, records what they’ve decided, what each of them has committed to, when each of them must accomplish their own contribution to the campaign.

  In the room, or passing through, Robbie will watch as her hands move to emphasise some point she is making, rest for the shortest of moments on the table, then take up a pen to write.

  He sees the incline of her head over the laptop as she types, sees her rock back on her chair when she is done to listen to someone else’s argument, her hands behind her head, her fingers intertwined. Sometimes she will feel the intensity of his gaze and swivel in her chair. She will smile at him, wink, and smile again before returning to her meeting.

  It’s not that he doubts her. It’s not that he doubts the worth of the campaign, the rightness of it, the impulse behind it. It’s just that he can’t entirely bring himself to believe in it. He feels that it is beyond him, too big for him to grasp, beyond his capacity to understand and trust. The planning, the strategising, having to think two, three, four steps in advance. He watches Freya at work, watches as she sets upon a course, meets some obstacle, changes tack. Watches her herd and corral, lead and inspire people. Or identify their weaknesses, and exploit them.

  It’s not that he doubts her – it attracts him, intrigues him. But he feels it is beyond his capacity to know. There are too many people involved, so many different motivations, too difficult to fathom.

  ‘Freya?’

  ‘What?’ she says, the house dark, her friends gone, the two of them in bed, winter outside now. This the season the city denies. The cold is probing to get in through the cracks in the floorboards, the gaps in the sash windows.

  ‘Where is the accent from?’

  As if the question has only now occurred to him.

  ‘Toronto.’

  ‘Toronto . . .’ he sounds it out. Then, ‘My grandmother was Canadian.’

  The maternal grandmother, a woman he’d never known. Her nationality was a dry fact fallen long ago from the family tree.

  ‘And your name?’

  ‘Freya?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A Norse goddess.’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Love . . . fertility . . . sex.’ She smiles, reaches for him under the blankets. ‘A phase my mother was going through. If I was a boy I would have been Thor.’

  She laughs.

  ‘Why do you do it, Frey?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The . . . campaigning.’ A strange word, one that sits awkwardly on his tongue.

  ‘Because someone has to.’

  He is silent, unsatisfied. She gives a little more.

  ‘Because I believe in it.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘And because I enjoy it. Because I need it.’

  ‘But why here, Frey?’ he asks. ‘Why are you satisfying your need here? Why not . . . in Canada?’ And then, ‘Why did you leave?’

  She laughs again, playful.

  ‘Why must it be a leaving? Isn’t it just possible,’ she says, teasing, ‘that all I’ve done is arrive?’

  ‘Every arrival is a leaving,’ he says, but immediately feels he has gone too far, in his own preoccupation with leavings.

  She shrugs. ‘This is where I am.’ Where I’ve chosen to be.

 
; After a while she resumes, narrating into the dark.

  ‘When I was a young girl I packed a bag and put on my warmest clothes. I took all the money from my bank account, and hitchhiked across the country . . . I wasn’t scared, because my parents were travellers – we were used to it. And I knew that people were generous. That they’d feed me and drive me a little further along the way, or arrange lifts with people they knew who were travelling that way. I just knew things would work out.’

  She remembers long journeys with her parents in their Kombi van. South, for days on end, for weeks, a flight from winter.

  She remembers evenings spent in broken, darkened rooms, in Guatemala or Salvador or Nicaragua. Childhood seasons on the move, her mother a centre she could never quite hold onto, but the constancy of discovery.

  ‘When I got to the edge of the mainland, a ferryman took me across – so I reached the west coast of Vancouver Island, where oil was washing onto the beaches with each new tide. A tanker had been punctured off the States, pouring thousands of gallons of oil into the ocean, the oil sweeping north on the currents. And when I saw that oil, I cried. I’d seen it on TV, the volunteers and the sea otters and murres and bald eagles . . . But still.’

  Robbie lies in the night beside her.

  ‘Is this better than what you left?’ he says after a while.

  ‘Different,’ Freya flashes.

  Freya looks out the window at the Brisbane night, her home now, the chosen city. The world beckons, and you answer. But it irritates her that the question keeps returning. That she is marked: by her accent, by other things imperceptible to her.

  You leave because you stand at the edge of possibility. You scan the horizon. See what you can. You look, you choose. You hug your decision close while you’re making it, but you discard it when it’s done. You move.