The Comfort of Figs (2008)

by Simon Cleary

  He rests the album on the table and returns to the cabinet. There are more maps, diaries, bridge notebooks. So many. O’Hara piles them on the table. When he is satisfied there is nothing more he closes the cabinet drawers, lifts the pile of papers under his left arm and clamps them to his side. He dampens the thumb and forefinger of his spare hand with his tongue and reaches for the candle, squeezing the life out of it. There is the brief hiss of the flame being extinguished, and then a waft of smoke. Beguiling.

  O’Hara pockets the candle and leaves the room. He closes the door, relocks it, and returns the key to its tiny box.

  O’Hara retraces his steps through the house to the window.

  He slides back through and lowers it after him. The outside air is cooler on his face, almost sharp. O’Hara moves down the verandah, treading as softly as he can. He reaches the top of the stairs and sees the dim shape of Stahl waiting under the tree across the road. With his left arm holding the papers against his chest, he reaches out to the railing with his right arm. He takes the stairs, guiding himself down in the dark.

  As he reaches the final steps, the sound of a single car engine separates itself from the night. Car lights stretch out along the street. O’Hara drops to his haunches, his heart quickening. He sees Stahl illuminated faintly in the beams of the headlights, before disappearing around the trunk, sliding into the safety of its lee. O’Hara looks around. Thoughts enter his head, but he cannot weigh them. Back up the stairs. Down the street. Run.

  Hide. Between the stairs and the house there is an overgrowth of thick bushes. O’Hara keeps low and crawls in, deep as he can, acting on instinct alone.

  The car and the headlights and Stahl lose shape behind the layers of azalea branches and leaves and flowers. O’Hara feels sweat forming – on his brow, under his arms. A bead rolls off his forehead, takes a path between his eyes, drops from his nose, seems to slap against the ground at his feet, louder even than the blood pumping in his heart.

  The car turns up the driveway of the house, the headlights sweeping across the azalea bushes and the stairs. It stops in front of the garage and Lawrence gets out and swings the garage door up on its hinge, returns to the car and drives it forward under the house till it disappears from O’Hara’s view. The engine cuts out and the sound of O’Hara’s heart is suddenly too loud again.

  There are voices.

  Evelyn and Meg are out of the car, moving ahead of the others, away from the vehicle and their parents, up the stairs.

  Meg is leaning into Evelyn, whispering in her ear as they pass the place where O’Hara is hiding. The girls are almost running up the stairs.

  Then Lawrence is speaking to his wife. They are close. O’Hara sees the woman’s shoe as she places it on the first step. Her ankle and the hem of her dress. Then the tip of Lawrence’s cane and the soles of Lawrence’s own black shoes hit the wooden steps hard and he is on the stairs, passing.

  O’Hara joins Stahl down the street.

  ‘Close.’

  ‘Oath.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  They move on, legs and hearts pacing fast, talk superfluous.

  In the house Lawrence notices a faint tinge of smoke. He pauses to take it in. Not cigar, not pipe. Not his. The lights are now on. He closes his eyes to shut them out, sniffing hard. He thinks he finds a trail, follows it. In the study it is strongest. Still present. He hits the light switch. No one. Nothing. He scans the bookshelves, the surfaces. Undisturbed. His gaze falls to his desk chair. A little close to the desk, tucked too tight. He pulls it out and thinks perhaps there is a depression in the cushion.

  He places his palm on the seat, warm. He begins to open drawers.

  His desk, his cabinet – a cabinet drawer empty. He does not understand. The plans, the manuals, his notebooks, gone. He calls out:

  ‘Evelyn, Evelyn!’

  Minutes later he is calling the police.

  Their route back is different from the one they took across, the night’s last ferry now departed. They make their way instead to the river beach where Carleton will be waiting as arranged.

  They give themselves some distance from the engineer’s house before talking. Stahl knows where there is lamplight.

  ‘What did you find?’

  O’Hara pats his hand on the collection of papers under his arm.

  ‘It’s all here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Plans and diaries.’

  ‘You’ve taken them?’ Stahl says, amazed, seeing the bundle under O’Hara’s arm for the first time.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘The tender?’

  ‘I got everything that was there.’

  Stahl can’t believe it.

  ‘But you were just going to read them. You were going to read them in the house. You –’

  ‘It was too dark,’ O’Hara cuts across him. ‘There were too many papers. And anyway –’

  ‘You shouldn’t have, Jack.’

  ‘. . . if we didn’t have the papers, we wouldn’t have any proof.’

  Stahl’s mind is racing, trying to think. They reach the park.

  Others have also sought its seclusion, couples in the night.

  Lamplights ring the park’s circumference, but in the centre, deep, it is dark. O’Hara and Stahl approach one of the lights, squat at its base, enter the circle of its radiance.

  ‘Got a smoke?’ O’Hara says.

  Stahl reaches for the inside pocket of his vest, removes a tin of tobacco and hands it roughly to O’Hara, who places the thick bundle of papers and folders and albums on the grass.

  Stahl reaches across to pick one up but O’Hara pushes his hand away.

  ‘First things first, Charlie.’

  ‘I want to know what Evie’s risked, Jack.’

  ‘Relax for a bit, will you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have taken them.’

  O’Hara rests the tobacco tin on his thigh and rolls a cigarette with his fingers, seals it with his tongue, hands it to Stahl. He rolls another for himself, and takes the matches from his pocket.

  His fingers brush against the candle and the small pool of wax which has run and now hardened in the bottom of his pocket.

  O’Hara peels the wax from the cloth of his pocket, rolls it into a warm ball with his fingers and flicks it out into the night.

  He lights his cigarette and tosses the matches to Stahl, a slow loop. In the lamplight the arcing box casts its thin trajectory of shadow on the grass.

  They draw back on their cigarettes. Above them a flying fox sweeps low and plunges into the branches of a palm tree close by. It shrieks, shifts its weight and settles to feed.

  A siren sounds somewhere. O’Hara and Stahl look up. A long, mechanical howl, not far away. They meet each other’s eyes.

  ‘Can’t be,’ says O’Hara.

  They listen as the siren cuts out, and its echo dies in the night.

  They both pull hard and long and deep on their cigarettes.

  ‘Evie does know, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Not that we’d take them. Not that we’d steal them. Christ, Jack.’

  Stahl’s words sharp, hard, reverberating. O’Hara shifts.

  ‘Sorry, Charlie.’ Then, an afterthought, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll take them back later. I’ll make it up to her.’

  They are silent a while, pulling on their smokes.

  ‘The boss’s daughter, as Billy put it.’ O’Hara whistles. ‘You’ve got some pull over her, Charlie. Some pull.’

  Stahl says nothing. He looks up into the lamplight. Insects flitter around its glowing, moths and flying ants bunting against the lamp. He looks past the insects into the light itself, directly into it, and holds till his eyes begin to blur and to water.

  ‘The boss’s daughter,’ O’Hara says again.

  ‘She’s had enough of that.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Being Lawrence’s daughter.’

  ‘Ahhh,’ O’Hara says, drawing it out. His smile long. ‘Are you that serious
about her, Charlie?’

  A car engine approaches. O’Hara and Stahl drop their cigarettes and stamp them into the ground, rising as they do. O’Hara has the bundle under his arm again, and without speaking the two of them retreat deeper into the park. They pull in behind a fig tree planted in the middle of the space, and take shelter behind its thick trunk. They watch as the engine becomes a car and recognise the shape of a slow-moving police vehicle. They sink further behind the fig’s girth, become invisible between the fig’s tentacled buttress roots. The car skirts the perimeter of the park which is bounded on three sides by street. O’Hara and Stahl are aware of a torchlight probing the park from the car’s window. A couple who had been embracing on a darkened bench rise, turn their backs to the intrusive beam and hustle away, no longer touching. The police car finishes its inspection and moves on, increasing its speed as it moves away.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Stahl says.

  They make for the riverbank where Carleton will be waiting, half a dozen short blocks away. Leaving the park, they take a narrow street. They stride along the footpath for a time, hugging the fence-line of the houses, where trees sometimes hang over the path and the street, interrupting the glow of the streetlamps.

  Then they turn into another road, smaller and narrower.

  It is dark, electric streetlamps not yet having reached this far.

  Here Stahl notices that the houses are all dark, and he realises how late it must be. He tries to read his wristwatch but it is too dim and he rolls his shirt sleeve back over its face. The two men pull out into the centre of the street, confident, side by side. To their right, running parallel, the southern approach to the bridge begins to slope upwards to the steelwork. In front of them at the end of the street, the work-site, the riverbank and Carleton.

  They quicken their pace, begin to jog, so close now. They reach the perimeter fence which encloses the work-site. The gates will be locked. O’Hara hands the bundle of documents to Stahl, finds a fence post, feels with his boot for a toe-hold, then swings himself up and over the fence in one fluid movement.

  Graceful. On the other side O’Hara kneels and prises the bottom of the chain-mail fence off the ground, enough room for Stahl to push the documents under. O’Hara takes them, stands, secures them again under his arms.

  Suddenly a car turns into the street which runs along the fence-line. Stahl swivels to meet it and the headlights catch him.

  The sound of the car engine lifts, and the vehicle increases its speed. The siren blares.

  ‘Come on, Charlie.’

  Stahl does not move, the car a hundred yards away.

  ‘Come on, Charlie, move!’

  Something in Stahl shifts. Some primitive instinct takes over.

  Stahl bursts into movement. Not over the fence to join O’Hara, but along its outside. Running, pounding, his head down, arms driving. Ahead of him is the bridge’s concrete approach-ramp, the solid shape of a massive sandstone pier looming, his goal.

  O’Hara stifles a cry. He looks for Stahl, now broken away, leaving him. He watches Stahl’s shape distort through the fencing then disappear into the resonance of bootfall pounding on earth. The sound of his friend’s running is swamped by car engine and siren. O’Hara flattens himself to the ground as the police car approaches, still picking up speed. The car rushes past, the sole object of its interest now Stahl.

  O’Hara picks himself from the ground. He lingers, confused.

  He leans forward into the fence, pressing his right cheek against the wire in an attempt to glimpse Stahl and the police car pursuing him. The angles are wrong, and there is nothing to see. O’Hara clamps the documents tight under his arm, and scales the fence once more to look for Stahl. At its top he hovers, the weight of his body on his free hand, the wire of the fence cutting sharp impressions into his palm. O’Hara balances on the top of the fence like a gymnast on a high bar, and with the extra height sees Stahl reach the foot of the approach pier.

  He watches as Stahl leaps over a fence blocking off a set of stairs running up the outside of the pier, and sees Stahl zig-zagging upwards to the decking of the bridge.

  Smart, O’Hara thinks, as he drops back to the ground. The bridge is Stahl’s home territory. Even in the dark he’ll know every step, could cross it with his eyes shut.

  Alone now, O’Hara picks his way through the work-site, past the gravel-rinsing plant on his left. Piles of fabricated steel bracing, lorries parked overnight, toolsheds, the men’s changing shed. He breaks out through the sheds and before him finally is the river, the bridge, and Stahl clambering up onto the superstructure somewhere to his right.

  Running the last yards, O’Hara reaches the small jetty. Carleton has drawn his rowboat tight beside the wharf, the boat partly hidden beneath the timberwork.

  ‘Where’s Charlie?’ Carleton whispers.

  ‘It’s fine,’ O’Hara says, urgent. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘The siren just then?’

  ‘I said it’s fine, let’s go.’

  O’Hara drops into the boat, his feet thunking against the hollow timbers. The boat sways, then takes his weight as he settles onto one of the benches, hugging the bundle of documents close against his chest.

  The tide is running out now, not long turned. Carleton looks at O’Hara, sees him whispered and frantic, somehow altered in his excitement. Something has gone terribly, horribly, wrong.

  ‘Jack, we can’t leave Charlie.’

  ‘Go! Now! Now!’ O’Hara snaps.

  His uncertainty growing, Carleton pushes off from the jetty with his left hand, then uses an oar as a pole to thrust them further from the bank. He sets out across the river, rowing diagonally against the slow tide.

  ‘Jack,’ Carleton asks again when they are free from the bank, the boat pulling strong across the dark water, ‘what’s happened to Charlie?’

  ‘Shh,’ O’Hara hisses, knife-edged, silencing him.

  Carleton rows, reaching forward with the oars, dropping the steady blades into the water, then pulling till the oar handles are nudging against his ribcage as his chest heaves with his breathing.

  Head bowed, he rows, unable to look at O’Hara, gut-sick with uncertainty, the thought rising in him, shocking, unfaceable, that perhaps – perhaps, Stahl has been abandoned.

  The boat moves into centre-stream. O’Hara is facing Carleton, but his eyes are on the bridge, his neck craned so he is looking up, intent, at the southern span. O’Hara whispers again:

  ‘Stop for a moment. Carleton, stop rowing. Listen.’

  Carleton pauses, lifts the oars from the water. There is the noise of the city pulsing across the river, the breathing of the two men, and drops of water falling off the oar blades and slapping against the surface of the river. O’Hara holds his breath, silencing that sound at least. Carleton too is listening hard. This skill of his, developed, of listening. Something else emerges from the night. A hollow, regular thumping reverberates in the distance above them. Footfall on planking.

  The boat is drifting now on the current, the slow tide pulling it downriver, the bridge floating closer. Even on a moonless night the bridge casts its image onto the dark river. The tide draws the small rowboat directly beneath the bridge. O’Hara has never seen it from this angle, fresh, new. He sees the southern approach span, and the underbelly of the timber decking which has followed the superstructure at a distance as the steel was cantilevered, piece by piece across the river. O’Hara sees the line where the decking peters out and gives way to the steelwork of the newly linked centre span. Stars emerge, flickering through the steel girders.

  O’Hara and Carleton listen to Stahl on the bridge above them. The sound of his running, sure and regular, a distant drumming in the night. The rowboat drifts. The breeze shifts and a mullet leaps from the river. An eddy sucks against itself on the water surface, and a dark cloud begins to muscle its way across the sky. The beat of Stahl’s running becomes distorted, swollen – oddly magnified. O’Hara and Carleton listen and realise that the c
hange is the sound of another set of boots, stumbling, or perhaps it’s two, hitting against the decking further back. Stahl is being chased.

  The tremolo of Stahl’s running stops where the decking itself stops, near the middle. O’Hara and Carleton look up again.

  They see a shape now, Stahl, moving onto the bare steelwork.

  Reaching out with his feet along a beam, step by step. The drifting boat emerges from beneath the bridge. Stahl above them, treading the chords, the sound of his pursuers a muted backing for Stahl’s high-wire performance. No one would chase him across there.

  A foot mapping out the dimensions of a girder in the dark. A boot-sole tapping forward in increments. Then Carleton senses the movement before O’Hara. A boot overreaching, catching on space. A hand pushing against air for balance and finding nothing. Carleton looks up.

  Stahl is detaching from the bridge, coming off it like a flake, peeling. Awkward, rough, twisting against himself, his arms momentarily flaying. Then Stahl’s body rights itself. The work of a stage dancer, of physics defied. His body slows. It half-turns through the long soundless space between steel and water.

  It’s the grace of the fall, the impossible dark beauty of it.

  There is bridge and river and diving body and watchers. All else space and silence.

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  The air swells with the morning’s light and its growing warmth. Robbie steps outside into the bright air rising, out onto the balcony, the reason he has come.

  He breathes and feels the air at his flaring nostrils. Out here on the balcony his father is not just behind him inside, is not just in another room, another light, but is further away, deeper behind him, in another place entirely. He calms his breathing and closes his eyes. A gust of wind on his face and in his hair.