The Comfort of Figs (2008)

by Simon Cleary

  It draws him outside himself, separates him. He’s high on the edge of the balcony facing down to the river below. He thinks of Freya, strong. As she was before. Freya at the Centenary Park pool, Freya standing at the end of the diving board, high above the water, Victoria Park around her, arms outstretched, a moment before launching into space. Powerful. Robbie opens his eyes and blinks for the light.

  He rests his forearms on the balcony railing and looks out across the river to the park he’d been in the day before, a kilometre away by a crow’s reckoning – too far for him to see anything with the naked eye. So he raises his mother’s binoculars, turns the adjusting wheel, and from the blur emerges a single, clear picture – the bridge. So strong at full magnification that he can make out a line of rivet-heads which appear like stitching in the seam of a steel girder.

  Robbie follows the decking of the bridge until the roadway reaches the north bank of the river, and then swings the binoculars off the bridge and onto the cliff-face – a sheer sixtymetre-high concave wall of schist and tuff rock, quarried naked by years of scraping. Robbie shifts his view to the right and finds the park. The bench is empty, though red and gold beer cans which had not been there yesterday now lie strewn beneath it, and the bin on the footpath behind the bench is also overflowing.

  A strange curiosity has gripped him, but there is no one there now, nothing to be seen.

  ‘It’s lovely you’ve come to visit,’ Lily says, stepping around to face him, looking into his eyes, questioning him.

  ‘I thought we could have breakfast together.’

  ‘What a lovely idea.’

  She continues to look at him in silence for long moments, this characteristic half-stare of hers which used to discomfort Robbie’s childhood friends when they came to visit. They could never work the stare out, never knew if it was inquisitorial or merely vague, but it was enough for them to avoid visiting Robbie at his home. Now, like then, it is in her own time that Lily turns away and busies herself in the kitchen with bowls and cutlery and boxes of cereal and juice.

  Robbie lifts the binoculars again, shifts his view from the bench, along the park, beyond the sliver of grass, over the fence and along the ledge of ground between the retaining wall which props up Bowen Terrace, and the cliff-edge itself. A flange of concrete juts out from the roadway there, a footpath where walkers and joggers are already journeying in and out of the city. But underneath it, beneath the concrete rind, Robbie finds what he’d guessed might be there. Still, he is shocked.

  Though the morning light has not yet pried open the deep shadows, Robbie sees bodies on the narrow ledge of earth above the cliff. They are motionless: sleeping, or lying steady against the coming day, shrouded in blankets. Around them are pieces of flattened cardboard and blotches of white which he guesses are plastic supermarket bags. Robbie keeps the binoculars trained on the sleepers for long minutes. He’s appalled, and intrigued, looking for movement among the sleepers lying at awkward, disordered angles to each other. Then he looks harder, searching for the boy body by body – but can’t make him out, not with any certainty. The sizes of the bodies are warped by the angles of their repose, the shadow and the distance. But he’s satisfied, he has found something, after all. The visit has been worth it.

  Freya stands in the cool of the laundry beneath the house, the washing machine set on a small slab of concrete, two old wash tubs beside it, their colour faded to grey. A naked light bulb hangs from a beam above her head, throwing a clean harsh light.

  Spider webs shimmer above her, wafting in the currents of air her body creates in this still space.

  She faces the washing machine. It is as white as a hospital ward. Resting on its lid are the clothes that have lain there since New Year’s Day, the clothes she wore when she was assaulted.

  Her clothes only. Robbie’s had been thrown away by the hospital.

  They’d been too messed up: his bloodied jeans, his stinking underwear. His shirt sliced open by surgical scissors in triage so he could be lifted out of it without pain, the cotton material no longer a shirt – returned to being a piece of cloth cut from a sewing pattern. Robbie’s clothes had been destroyed – incinerated, she guesses – while hers had been returned to her in a closed white plastic bag. Seemingly undamaged.

  Freya reaches for the pile and recoils at the first touch, the smell of fear still in them, the memory of the night visceral.

  She lifts her shirt, holds it up to the light bulb and finds the tiny entry hole in the front. She brings the material to her eye, and through the hole sees the glowing bulb of light suspended from above. Just a pin-hole, smaller than she’d imagined. Not big enough even for a finger, but large enough for violation.

  She shudders.

  Freya takes her jeans, almost fresh. She finds a piece of paper in the back pocket. She unfolds it and sees her own handwriting, neat given the circumstances, on the pages of a medical note pad. She reads what she’d recorded of the doctor’s advice: the names of viruses, odds of contraction, recommended postexposure procedures. These facts have been repeated to her since then, but this paper is the first tangible sign of what may happen to her. She reads the name of the prescription drug printed on the bottom of the paper: zidouvidene. The word odd on the page, then strange to her ear as she says it aloud. Not Latin, the language of medicine, but exotic, like something Persian. She attempts the word again but her tongue cannot hold it. Just one more thing she cannot hold.

  His mother pauses at the doorway to the balcony, breakfast tray in hand. She looks at Robbie inspecting the bridge. She remembers the peregrine falcons and the nest they had built the previous year at the top of one of the bridge’s two shoulders.

  For months they’d been there and she would bring the binoculars out to look for signs of chicks. She puts the tray down on the patio table.

  ‘What is it, love? What do you see?’ she asks, leaning over his shoulder.

  ‘Nothing, Lily,’ he replies, and sits down with her.

  When he has gone Lily raises the binoculars to her own eyes and runs them along the bridge. It is the family story itself which she sees there – constructed piece by piece, year by year, telling by retelling. She sighs, lowers the binoculars, and fits their plastic caps over the lenses.

  He’s returning, she thinks to herself, he’s coming home.

  Chapter Two

  E ach morning now, Robbie visits his mother. Each morning after leaving Freya, and after dropping a strangler fig into the crook of a camphor laurel, he makes his way to the apartment.

  It’s always the same: he enters the apartment and walks down the hallway, glancing at the door to his father’s bedroom. And every time he is relieved to see it closed, as his mother promised it would be. His mother is a woman who keeps promises. Every morning he collects the binoculars from the kitchen bench, and makes his way straight to the balcony.

  For a week Robbie keeps watch on the group of bodies across the river from the apartment. He comes to recognise the seven people who live there on the cliff-top, sheltered by the road’s overhang. Some mornings he sees them stir and rise, other days he watches only their rest. Sometimes he sees them pick their way along the cliff-top towards the bridge, to the place where they take their pisses and their craps. Other times he watches them slug water, or the dregs of beer from bottles which seem to glow, as if light itself has been trapped inside them. Once he saw two of the men grapple at each other with their hands in argument, an altercation in slowest motion. And some mornings he sees the shape of the boy sitting upright, blanket round his shoulders, his young back leaning against the wall like a weary sentinel torn between rest and duty.

  After a week of visits, it is almost an afterthought. Robbie raises the glasses one last time, his coffee now just a hardening stain on his cup as he is about to farewell his mother. The morning is hazy from the summer’s exhaust fumes trapped close to the city, suffocating it. The sun is blurred in the sky, throbbing with heat behind the haze.

  Through
the binoculars Robbie sees one of the men making his slow way across the cliff-face, loosening his belt as he shuffles into waking. He squats, and Robbie is a moment from dropping his glasses and leaving the small lean figure to his privacy – when the man overbalances and falls on his backside. He moves to stand, but his foot slips and the man hits the ground again hard, tumbling awkwardly, without control, towards the cliff, a jerking character in a silent film. Robbie watches, frozen, as the man slides feet-first off the edge of the precipice and disappears into the cliff-face foliage below.

  Robbie’s heart lunges against his ribcage and he jerks the binoculars back to the shelter where no one is moving. His blood pounds faster as he wills one of them to rise, wills one of them to hear the man’s screaming. Surely he is screaming.

  Surely someone in the camp must hear. But there is nothing and the still bodies remain still. The schoolyard ditty comes to him – and if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there’ll be six green bottles, standing on the wall.

  It’s as if he’s gone deaf. He waits. He begins to doubt what he has seen. He drops the binoculars to his lap, then raises them to his eyes once more. The same silent stillness. His brain plays the scene again. And again. The seconds tick by until his waiting becomes macabre. Finally a horror wells in him so strong he spins out of his balcony chair and runs through the apartment to the door, his mother calling after him.

  Seven minutes in his car from the apartment across the Story Bridge to the park on Bowen Terrace. The man’s falling has over-filled him. He brakes fiercely when he gets to the park and rushes across the road. The grass is dewy when his foot first makes contact and he slips, then catches himself without falling.

  He runs across the park and is soon catapulting over the guard-fence at the end and landing on the rough ground on the other side.

  ‘Hey!’ Robbie yells. ‘Hey, get up! Get up!’

  Rather than wait Robbie leaps over the sleeping bodies, and the crunching sound of his boots on the ground is as urgent as his yelling. He slows down as the ledge narrows, and stops at the place where the man fell. The ground is flat by the base of the retaining wall, then curves away towards the cliff before arcing sharply and disappearing over the edge. There is nothing to see.

  Nothing at all of the man. The absoluteness shocks him.

  He tries to think. To listen. He concentrates, but the blood is beating loud in his ears, and for long moments he cannot hear anything over it. Slowly it begins to settle, and Robbie leans forward, straining to pick up any sounds from below.

  ‘What the hell you think you’re doing?’

  His attention is torn from the cliff ’s edge to the voice. He sees the boy, wide-eyed, the imprint of the day not yet on him.

  Behind the boy, a large shirtless man, his tight-swollen, thickly haired gut, his rough voice, and his challenge.

  ‘Shh!’ Robbie brings a finger to his lips to quieten the man, to calm him.

  ‘I said what the hell you doing?’ the man yells. ‘Bloody turning up like that, I’ll give you bloody what-for.’

  ‘Shut up, will you!’ Robbie shouts back at him. ‘Someone’s gone over.’

  But his words make no impression, so he points his finger over the edge and shouts it again: ‘Your friend’s gone over.’

  The big man begins to blink. His brow contorts in dumb confusion, as his gaze follows Robbie’s finger and then comes back, blank.

  ‘A man,’ Robbie says. ‘He’s gone.’

  The boy understands suddenly. He yanks his boots off and tosses them behind him towards the base of the retaining wall. They thud against it and settle as he lowers himself onto his hands and knees and crawls towards the precipice. Robbie watches the soles of the boy’s feet, dirty with the build-up of sweat and grime. The boy’s toes feel out the ground as he inches forward. Without speaking, Robbie kneels behind him and grasps his ankles, ready to clamp them tight if he begins to slide. The boy accepts Robbie’s contact.

  Inch by inch the boy squirms forward, his child’s chest flat against the ledge as the earth curves away. Closer to the edge until Robbie feels the boy’s body straining against itself. His head is over the lip now, and Robbie is holding him, taking his weight, as if holding scales in balance. Robbie feels he has all of the boy’s weight in his hands, that he is in contest with gravity itself, that he can’t be responsible for this. And just when he must say something, must begin to haul the boy back onto the ledge, the boy cries out.

  ‘Pop, Pop, I can see you.’

  The boy’s yelling ripples back through his whole body, and Robbie feels the vibrations of the child’s voice in his hands.

  ‘Pop, are you alright?’

  Robbie stops breathing, his hands locked in place around the boy’s ankles, waiting for a response. But there is none. Or nothing he can hear.

  ‘Pop, are you alright?’ the boy cries again, and this time his voice is trembling, faltering.

  Robbie feels the boy’s body loosen in his hands, feels gravity begin to claim him. Robbie checks the boy’s fragile surrender, jams his elbows into the hard ground, then hauls. Though small, the boy is like a weight of concrete, and Robbie has to drag him back in fits, in disconnected, exhausting jerks. And when he has him back on the ledge, the boy is sobbing in great chafing gulps of cliff-air and tears. Robbie lifts him up and sets him down by the wall.

  A crow caws somewhere above them before taking to the air with heavy wing-beats. And then, coming in on the echo of the crow’s wing-thumps, from what seems like the very air itself, there is a moan. A sound that on another morning might have been lost in the rumble of cross-bridge traffic.

  Chapter Three

  The ambos tend his wounds at the cliff-top, the old man refusing to go to hospital. Their latex-gloved examination reveals no fractures, nothing punctured. Just grazes on his arms and legs where he’d lain wedged between the cliff-face and the trunk of a sinewy rock-fig, the tree having seeded and grown large in a cleft, just over the ledge.

  ‘Hardly a scratch,’ the old man says, ‘they’re just souvenirs.’

  ‘We’re dressing them anyway.’

  The man is even older than Robbie might have guessed, and much smaller, though not yet frail. Despite the age there is a vitality in him. In his wiry hair. In his shoulders, unstooped. He sits up, and swings his legs off the fold-up stretcher. One of the ambos stands close to the old man, hands on hips in navy shorts. The second waits to the side, arms folded across his starched white shirt as if he has entirely lost interest in this one, this difficult patient.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the old man says. ‘I’m fine. There’s nothing broken, nothing bruised. A short roll off a ledge. People go on rides at the Ekka more dangerous than that.’

  The boy paces behind the ambulance officers, never taking his eyes off the old man. The boy is the only one who remained. The others had fled as soon as they could, slipping away in the early confusion ahead of the siren. Only the boy stayed with the old man, hovering behind the ambos and the police, never straying far.

  They give the old man fresh bandages and antiseptic powder and wish him some sort of luck before packing and leaving. The police take their statements, cold notebook accounts, and leave too. One of them farewells Robbie as he goes, but not, Robbie realises, the old man, not the boy.

  ‘You right, mate? You need a lift anywhere?’

  ‘I’m fine. I’ve got a car. Thanks.’

  Robbie is left with the boy and the old man, and suddenly he is awkward. The only sound is the bridge and its traffic. He is shaken himself, but it occurs to him that he is standing in the middle of their home, uninvited. How very much a stranger he is here.

  ‘I might sit for a bit,’ he says anyway, his words so tentative they become a request.

  ‘Okay.’

  It is the boy who answers.

  Black plastic milk-crates are positioned upside-down near the concrete wall, in a rough semi-circle. Robbie selects one and lowers himself onto it, feeling the chequered
pattern of the plastic moulding sink into his buttocks. The old man and the boy do the same, taking a cautious lead from him.

  It is mid-morning now, and rising hot. Behind his head the concrete wing generates its own dusty pulsating heat. Robbie becomes aware of the smells which the heat draws out of everything around him, as if this sense has been suspended until now.

  The trees and the bushes in front give off dank odours: sweating leaf litter and ancient, decaying foodscraps curdling in the heat at the base of low bushes. His nostrils pick up other, discrete smells, acrid and human. There is stale beer, vinegarised bladders of wine, and rotting food trodden into the earth. A trail of ants pulls at breadcrumbs on the ground in front of him, and he is grateful, in his awkwardness, that he has somewhere to direct his eyes.

  ‘Thanks,’ the boy says to break the silence.

  ‘Nothing,’ Robbie replies.

  Robbie feels calmer. After a time he looks across at them.

  For the first time he notices that the boy is dressed in the same jeans, top and boots he was in when Robbie saw him a week ago. The old man is white-bearded, white-haired, a stripe of grey surviving at the back of his head. He wears a brown coat buttoned at the front, the four large leather-plaited buttons like badges on his chest. The coat is large and neat, and under it Robbie sees a grey cotton shirt, stained and fraying at the wrists.

  The man’s trousers are patterned by grass stains, but otherwise seem fairly new. Robbie examines the man’s ankles. Where he expected to see swollen joints he sees instead ankle-bones like pins protruding under papery skin, and the man’s scuffed brown shoes cutting a line around his ankles, as if ring-barking him.

  Close-up like this, Robbie wonders if the two are long-term homeless, or more recent arrivals.

  ‘It looks dangerous,’ Robbie says, ‘sleeping so near to a cliff.’

  Neither responds.

  ‘If you rolled in your sleep . . . ?’ Robbie gazes over the cliff.