The Comfort of Figs (2008)

by Simon Cleary

  Much has changed, so very much. Jack O’Hara weeps often now. He weeps through frustration. He weeps through pity. He weeps when he thinks of Lily’s love for him. He is a different man, this man who weeps.

  But Jack does not cry when Lily tells him Robbie has rung and wants to see him.

  ‘Do you want to see him too?’ she asks, sitting across from him in their bedroom. Jack is still for a long while, so long Lily wonders if she has lost him. For so long now Lily has kept Jack in the bedroom whenever Robbie visited. Each morning Jack has listened to his son’s footsteps from behind the closed door of the bedroom. He has heard Robbie arrive, has heard snatches of voice – Robbie’s, or Lily’s. Has endured these humiliations.

  This has been their arrangement. That Robbie would visit his mother, and Jack would stay in the bedroom until Robbie left.

  ‘Robbie’s on his way over, Jack dear. He wants to see you.

  Do you want to see him?’

  Eventually Jack groans, a low, pained assent.

  There is no time for Lily to change him. She washes his face, wets his hair, combs it, wheels him from the bedroom to the living room and then shuffles him into the armchair with its large rolled arms. It is too low, and the springs in the old chair creak as they take Jack’s falling weight, but the chair has been with them since he shipped it back from one of his overseas jobs as a gift for her. It’s his chair now. She fluffs a fresh sheet and a rug over him as he sits facing the apartment window, the morning light on his stroke-ravaged face, waiting for the son who has not seen him for three years.

  Jack hears knocking at the door and voices at the top of the corridor.

  He hears the sound of Robbie’s footsteps approaching – his son’s gait, calmed these last years, but still his son. He closes his eyes. The sunlight strikes his eyelids and he waits. His mind drifts.

  There is time enough to forget, remember, forget again.

  Robbie kisses his mother. From the corridor he sees the back of his father’s head where Lily has placed him in the centre of the living room. His father and the chair he is sitting in are pointed towards the window and the view over the river and the bridge, and light is pouring in upon them from outside.

  Robbie enters the open living room and approaches the figure of his father. The chair and the silhouette of his father’s head cast a single elongated shadow on the carpet, man and chair cutting a strange dark shape out of the sun’s rays. As the distance between them shortens, Robbie’s perspective changes, and he begins to make out detail. His father is dressed in pyjamas, and Robbie sees the clean light illuminate a floral pattern in the sheet which sheathes the bony crook of the old elbow.

  Robbie moves closer. He can almost touch the back of the armchair, the crown of his father’s head, his shoulders.

  He pauses, the dawn glare suddenly dizzying. Perhaps it is the flashing sunlight reflecting off the windscreens of cars which startles him – glints of light appearing and disappearing then appearing again behind the steelwork of the bridge. He turns to face the reflections, like hundreds of unsynchronised lighthouse beams flickering wildly out from the bridge. And it too is pulsating, afire. The glowing bridge looks like interlocking brand-irons freshly removed from a furnace.

  He turns away from the bridge, to collect himself. By chance, or by habit, his eyes fall upon the canopy of a single fig across the river, solid, outstretched, emphatic. It also is lit by sun, but as he steadies his gaze to rest upon it, the image of the bridge, freshly burnt on his eyes, imposes itself in pulsating flashes upon the tree.

  ‘Hello, Jack,’ he says.

  Jack opens his eyes and there is Robbie, standing in front of him.

  From his pocket Robbie produces the gift Carleton had given him.

  ‘Here you go – a memento from your Story Bridge days.

  Charlie had this in his pocket when he fell.’

  The broken man squints, then blinks, a flutter, as of butterfly wings. His eyes open and close, hard and rapid, before he surrenders and begins to weep. Robbie steps back, as this father of his sheds strange, uncontrollable tears. He sees the contorted face, the thinning hair, the loose skin around his father’s neck, the scars where cancers have been burnt from his scalp. His father in illumination, old, remarkable.

  Robbie leans forward and places the rivet in his father’s upturned left hand, where the dark lines chiselled into his palm branch out like a ragged canopy, entire.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Some events and anecdotes in this work were inspired by historical incidents, however no character is intended to depict an actual person and all episodes and dialogues between characters are fictional. I nevertheless drew from a variety of sources in researching the novel, including Marc Serge Riviere’s Discovery of the Brisbane River, 1823 Oxley, Uniacke and Pamphlet 175 Years in Retrospect; Richard Raxworthy’s From Footbridge to Harbour Bridge; Pat and Sim Symond’s Bush Heritage; L.R. Wilson’s Montreal Harbour Bridge – The Superstructure;

  James Holt’s Story Bridge, Brisbane in ‘Transactions of the Institution’, Vol XX, 1939, an excerpt from which was adapted on p. 125; archival material at the State Library of Queensland relating to the Story Bridge; and the papers of John Job Crew Bradfield held at the National Library of Australia, including excerpts from Bradfield’s speeches and correspondence, quoted on pp. 127 and 128.

  Acknowledgment is made to the estate of Berton Braley, for use of excerpts from the previously published poem ‘The Thinker’, which also appeared in The Story Bridge Commemorative Book on the occasion of the opening of the Story Bridge, 1940.

  My great thanks to Steve Foley, Peter Jensen, Justin Malbon, Victoria Marles and Maureen See, who all gave their time to comment on early drafts of the manuscript.

  My appreciation to Arts Queensland, the Premier’s Literary Awards, the Queensland Writers Centre, Madonna Duffy and Rob Cullinan at University of Queensland Press, and to Judith Lukin-Amundsen to whom I am especially grateful.

  Finally, I thank my grandmother, Helen Margaret ‘Peg’ Barry, who was there at the start of this, and who has been so encouraging throughout.__________

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