by Simon Cleary
His eyes are hooded, darkness squinting out from sunned skin.
He is not yet pubescent, but there is sureness in his jaw. The boy is alone.
‘Heya,’ Robbie calls over, his voice rising gently, rather than in challenge.
‘Hey,’ the boy responds, cautiously coming closer. ‘You Robert O’Hara?’
‘Yep.’
The boy stops a few paces from the bench and swings the bag around to his front without taking it off. He unfastens the clip, reaches in and produces Robbie’s wallet. He does not hand it over immediately, but opens it and shuffles through the plastic cards. The night of the assault rises inside Robbie again. This intrusion by the boy, this liberty taken, this power exercised.
‘It looks like you alright,’ the boy says, inspecting the photo on Robbie’s drivers licence. His shudder-laugh sounds wooden.
‘Here you go,’ and then he takes a step forward and offers it to Robbie in a small outstretched hand.
‘Thanks.’
Robbie takes it, his eyes on the black wallet now rather than on the boy. He opens it. No cash, though the cards seem to be there. The two credit cards, the licence, the telephone card, work identification that gets him into the council building in the city when he needs to. A photo of him and Freya. A fig leaf, dried and cracked.
‘Where did you find it?’ Robbie asks.
‘In the city,’ the boy responds.
‘But where exactly?’
‘In the park.’
‘The Botanic Gardens?’
‘Dunno the name. Down the end.’ The boy turns around and points at the dark green mesh of the Gardens, as much as they can see of it from here.
‘There’s money missing,’ Robbie says while the boy’s head is still turned, looking across the river to the Gardens and the city.
This jerks him back.
‘Huh?’
‘There was a hundred bucks there,’ Robbie says.
‘Well, there wasn’t a hundred bucks there when I found it,’ the boy shoots back. His hands are on his hips now, his mouth pouted.
‘Right,’ Robbie says, nodding his head. And then, after a long pause, ‘Thanks for calling . . . Thanks for letting me know.’ Robbie’s mind is whirring with possibilities. After another pause, ‘So, tell me . . .’ and Robbie figures he has nothing to lose, ‘I don’t know your name?’ But what is the point? Why does he want to know? Is this for Freya?
The boy just stares at him blankly. Stares through him. Says nothing. As if he is stupid.
‘Look, you know my name, you may as well let me know yours.’
But the boy is unmoved. The boy can hold this silence. A crow pulls in out of the sky and lands on the cliff-fence. It cranes its neck at the two of them, inspecting them with a single white eye for long moments. Then it drops to the ground and picks at something embedded in the grass, its hard black beak making a cracking sound as it works at whatever has caught its attention. Robbie looks back at the boy, who has barely moved, and tries again.
‘So, you found it in the park. Like, where was it? Just on the ground, or in a bush, or in the water or something?’
He feels the leading questions coming out, the plaintive note to his voice, the likelihood they will flounder. But the boy is still here.
‘We found it in a bin,’ the boy says, his head lifting, his forehead creasing and his eyes lit, before rushing on. ‘We were looking for food and found it in a bin, okay. There was nothing in it, okay. We just found it, saw the cards and stuff and thought you might want it back, you know?’
Robbie looks at the boy with his unkempt hair and clothes and broken shoes, and the little hardnesses about him despite his age, and thinks that all this may be true. He constructs a narrative, simple: the attackers are junkies, interested in one thing only – cash – they take the money, discard the wallet in a rubbish bin, and a homeless boy foraging for food scraps left by New Year’s Eve revellers finds it. Yes, Robbie thinks, this may be all that has happened, there may be nothing more.
The sun is dropping below the level of the city skyline. Pulsating corridors of orange light push through the city towers beyond the bridge.
Robbie is tiring, is being pulled towards the end of this meeting.
‘Thanks again, mate. Thanks for getting it back to me.’ Robbie pulls a fifty dollar note from his pocket and holds it out. The boy steps up and takes it, the transaction done.
‘Lucky, hey?’ the boy says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Lucky I found it before the bin was emptied. You’d never have got it back then.’
There is another moment of uncomfortable silence, as if Robbie has overstayed a welcome. He pushes himself off the bench with his right hand and gets to his feet. He goes to thank the boy once more, but nods instead in the boy’s direction without meeting his eyes.
Robbie starts up the grassy incline to his car. There are scores of marble-sized palm seeds lying scattered on the grass, dislodged from the cocos palms above by night upon night of flying fox feeding. The smooth orange seeds are hard under the soles of his shoes, and his weight presses the seeds deeper into the earth with each footfall.
‘What do you think?’ Freya demands.
‘He’s just the kid who found the wallet.’
‘There might be fingerprints,’ she says, ‘of the attackers.’
They look at the wallet, greasy from the bin and the boy’s pocket, and Robbie’s own hands. Inert and greasy.
‘I think we’ve reached a dead-end, Frey,’ he says gently, resting his hand on her shoulder.
She looks away, turns her shoulder, drops it and sinks into the seat, says almost to herself, ‘I’ve taken some photos anyway.’
Robbie opens his wallet, flicking again through the cards and receipts he’d stored there. He comes to the photograph she’d given him months ago: the two of them after a bushwalk at Tamborine, exhausted but beaming, the angle of the photo askew from where she’d propped the camera in the fork of a gum to take the self-timed shot.
‘Here,’ he says, ‘remember this?’
She turns back to him, takes the photograph in her hands, studies it for a moment. It is not just the captured splitsecond she remembers, but her entire life till then. Dread comes upon her – that she has changed, that her old life has ended, and nothing will be the same again.
‘It’s good to get this back anyway,’ he says.
She sighs, and the photo, with her hands, the blood draining from them, drops lifeless into her lap.
Chapter Thirteen
The next day is different. It is early when Robbie rises. He doesn’t look, as he drives through the pre-dawn grey, for an empty patch of ground in which to plant a fig. This morning, instead, it is a camphor laurel he seeks.
He makes for an avenue in Chelmer, a street he knows is shaded by the camphors, their thick-barked limbs, their deep canopies, their perfumed leaves. Parking in the avenue of trees, Robbie gets out and walks the length of the street, inspecting each of the camphors by streetlight, scanning their branches, their forks. When he is done and has selected one, he pauses at its foot, eyes raised, as if paying respects. He returns to his car and drives closer, till he’s underneath the chosen tree. Out of the car boot he takes a fig sapling, some twine, a bag of soil and an old wooden fruit box, a small one made from thin slats of plantation pine.
Robbie climbs onto the car roof and quickly swings up and onto the overhanging branch. The sky is lightening, but suddenly, deep in the tree, it is darker. He will find no birds’ nests, he knows this. He looks for possums instead, sated on leaves and berries, but there are none. He slides down the branch towards the trunk, and when he reaches the fork, he nestles the box in the crook between trunk and branch. He secures it by digging its edges into the bark with a pocket knife, fixing it there, then running twine around it and under the branch before tying it off. Into the box he plants his sapling, tipping the soil and roots in, patting it down, adding soil. He checks it, that the fig is
firm and comfortable in its epiphytic nest.
Back along the branch, he swings from the tree onto his car, and then slides down again onto the road. The pine box is barely visible from the road.
He looks down the long avenue of camphor laurels, unwelcome now. Looks at the mornings before him, the task of reclamation. The camphors that will need to die. The slow, necessary stranglings.
Hardened by this, he sets out on the second journey of the morning. He drives through Rocklea, past the fruit markets where he will collect more boxes in the weeks to come, along Ipswich Road to Woolloongabba. He crosses the marsh of freeway entrances and exits and, once clear of them, pulls up onto the long cliff-top road at Kangaroo Point which will take him to his parents’ apartment at the end of the peninsula.
A flash of dawn light reflects off one of the city towers across the river to his left. Robbie has never seen the city from this angle at this time of day. On impulse he pulls into a parking bay looking out from the Kangaroo Point cliffs, over the river to the city. He walks the few metres to the chest-high granite wall at the top of the precipice. Across the river are the Botanic Gardens, settled dark in their river nook. He sees Freya and himself down there, just two weeks ago, looking up at the cliff where he now stands.
Three dozen yachts are moored off the Gardens, the white of their masts rising tall from their decks and outlined sharp against the dark of the forest behind them. To the right of the Gardens the city begins, the transition from forest to skyscrapers abrupt. Robbie watches the reflection of the sun rising in a blue-glass tower by the river. The curved glass is burnt orange near the ground as the new sun’s radiance first strikes it, fading upwards into blue-black reflections. Moment by moment the building catches fire, until the entire structure is alight.
The cliff-top street joins the main flow of vehicles which merge into the Bradfield Highway to cross the bridge. The ‘Bradfield Highway’ is little more than an on-ramp; named after the bridge’s designer, it would have remained unnamed if there weren’t so many people to publicly reward. I wonder if he was embarrassed, Robbie thinks to himself.
As usual, rather than cross the bridge Robbie pulls off the approach-ramp at the last opportunity and curves back around and under it, the traffic above sounding a dull roar through his window. ‘Riverview’ comes into sight: twenty-four levels of apartments populated by business executives, wealthy retirees, young couples – and his parents.
At the entry he presses the buzzer beside their apartment number.
‘Hello?’ His mother’s voice.
‘Morning,’ he says. ‘It’s me.’
‘Robbie!’ she exclaims. ‘I’ll let you up –’
‘Lily –’ Robbie speaks quickly, before she has time to disconnect – ‘Is he . . . will he . . . ?’
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ she says, her delight dulled. ‘Don’t fret.’
In the foyer Robbie crosses to the lift, presses and waits.
He waits, and feels, for the first time this morning, anxious.
He watches the numbers descend, watches the lift counting backwards in small red digits. A sensation of going backwards, of falling into the past, comes over him. He begins to doubt.
But when it arrives, he forces himself to enter the small space, to press the button for the twentieth floor. He starts the slow rise.
His mother is there when the lift arrives, waiting for him at the entrance of her apartment.
‘Is everything alright, love?’ she asks.
He bends, her voice close to his ear as she kisses his cheek, and with the kiss comes the sweet memory of his mother leaning over him in childhood, in bed, to bid him goodnight.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he says.
‘And Freya?’
‘She’s fine too. I just thought it’d be nice to visit. To thank you for looking after us at the hospital.’
He passes in front of her and enters the apartment.
It is years since he has been here. And yet it is unchanged.
Everything is unchanged: he enters the apartment feeling – and the realisation of it disappoints him – as much a stranger as he ever did. No stronger, no surer. Is this just foolishness? he asks himself, unsettled now. He is aware, suddenly, of all that he does not want to see.
This place appears to him, as it always did, to be in conflict with itself, wrestling between that which is open and that which has been closed, between illumination and shadow. Robbie steps forward, steps into silence and secret and memory.
Off either side of the dim, darkly carpeted entrance hall are the two bedrooms. The doors are both shut, as his mother assured him they would be. Yet Robbie feels a pang in his stomach, sharp as if he’s been stabbed. He steps past the doors, looking fixedly ahead. He is conscious of his mother’s footsteps brushing the carpet behind him. He walks quickly, unbreathing, down the hall to the living room, which is bathed in sparkling sun.
Standing there, he’s dizzy from the brightness. A sliding glass door opens onto a balcony, and out further onto the world beyond. The apartment faces north across the river, down the line of the bridge, level with it. That was, after all, why his mother had moved them here after his father’s stroke. But Robbie doesn’t yet look out through the glass. It is not a conscious decision to ignore the bridge, rather what is inside the apartment has seized him.
All around, competing with the light and the windows and the air and the space and the very modernity of the apartment itself, are the mementos of his parents’ life. In the middle of the living room he turns a slow circle, taking in the museum of his parents’ existence and all its exhibits. He gasps with fresh surprise, and with a flood of misgiving.
The souvenirs of his father’s journeys are all still there: the hand-carved furniture; the ceremonial masks; statue after statue carved of timber or ivory or bone, from Goa, or Ghana or Guinea Bissau. Carpets and kilims hanging from walls. Feathers and shells and beads. A chest-high shield propped in a corner.
Paintings on bark, on hand-made paper, on hide, scenes of village life from three continents. Primitive histories that his father’s modern engineering constructions must have swept away. Robbie thinks of these as his father’s guilty record of those places, those times.
His mother’s keepsakes are here too. Her vases stacked on shelves, above cupboards, as centrepieces on tables or benches.
On the dining room table is a single large white vase – more bowl than vase – filled with water, on top of which float frangipanis, their scent fading, their soft tips beginning to brown.
They will be changed today, he knows – his mother is fastidious about old blossoms. And beside the porcelain vase, his mother’s King James Bible has been recently laid aside. The first half – the Old half, the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament – is wellthumbed, but the second half, the New half, has barely been touched. Even so, a waist-high plaster statue of Mary stands in a corner of the room, her blue robes chipped, her left hand amputated at the wrist.
‘I remember this,’ Robbie says.
‘The parish gave it to me. It was lovely of them. For arranging the altar flowers. After I couldn’t do it any more – after your father . . .’ She trails off, but Robbie doesn’t notice.
He’s wondering rather, as he looks at it, if the gift was more than a simple thankyou, if the parish priest may also have been trying to counterbalance Lily’s unusual interest in the Old Testament with a statue of the Queen of the New. Robbie’s gaze lingers on it. He recalls the Sunday masses of his childhood.
Back then, the statue held a golden orb in its outstretched hand. Robbie wonders when it was disfigured. He wonders almost idly: Was she an imperfect gift, or has she been damaged under my mother’s care? Eventually his mother says, ‘What is it, love?’
There is something else in the room. The thing Robbie has been ignoring, conscious of all along – the gravitational centre of the apartment.
He turns to it eventually. Against its own wall is a low silky-oak bookcase. ‘
The Story Bridge bookcase’, his mother calls it. Old tensions knot his stomach when he finally faces it, their Story Bridge shrine.
The books on the shelves are histories with old black-andwhite or colour-plated photos of the bridge, chapters about its importance to the city, about its iconic status. The bridge kitsch is there too: souvenir teaspoons with tiny images of the bridge captured on their handles, china plates with delicate paintings of the bridge in gold paint, postcards, a Story Bridge inside a plastic liquid hemisphere which you can shake to see snowflakes fall on this land for the first time since the ice age. There are the scrapbooks with fifty years of newspaper clippings, his mother diligent about her collection of articles. Every news item about the bridge from the local newspapers has been cut out, kept and catalogued in the scrapbooks. And on the walls above the bookcase are paintings of the bridge, prints or sketches, dulled from years of sunlight.
Then there are her private keepsakes. The biscuit tin with its treasure of pay-slips and notices from the 1930s. The ceremonial booklet from the Opening Ceremony. Old photos in old frames, propped on the shelves. The bridge-workers posing for the camera, strong and proud and sure.
One of the posing workers his father, Robert John O’Hara.
Jack.
Robbie turns towards the windows, and the bridge, vast, sweeping across the river. An unusual movement out there catches his eye, something apart from the bridge. In the early light, a lone flying fox – the last of the night – is making its way across the sky. The others have all returned to their roosts.
What has kept this one? Robbie watches the bat as it staggers across the sky, lost, injured, or, Robbie wonders, simply frail.
The bat – turned dark gold in the sun – navigates itself around the bridge, then drops out of sight, a mile yet from the nearest roosting ground, a long way yet from home.
