The Comfort of Figs

by Simon Cleary

  He kisses her then, on the forehead.

  ‘I’m scared, Robbie,’ she says.

  He pulls her close, his arms enfolding her.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ he says, ‘everything will be okay.’

  Chapter Nine

  I ’ve come home to die. After weeks of searching in parks and streets and boarding houses, Robbie remembers what the old man had said to him: that he’d built the bridge and was coming home to die.

  Robbie slaps his thigh with his hand. ‘Yes.’ He hisses it to himself. ‘Of course!’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  He is working with a crew of men, all of them sweating, planting tussocks of native grasses beside roadways, roundabouts and median strips since morning, softening this landscape of traffic. In Robbie’s judgment it’s a vain attempt to subdue the violence of it all.

  ‘Damn! I just remembered something. Sorry,’ Robbie says, ‘there’s something I’ve just got to check, something I’ve forgotten – I won’t be long. I need the ute. Can you give me an hour?’

  The Story Bridge. Home. Robbie knows the old man is no longer under the New Farm end of the bridge – he’s scoured it bare – but perhaps he’s settled under the bridge on the southern bank of the river.

  Robbie drives to the peninsula at Kangaroo Point, unable to believe he hasn’t thought of this before. He leaves the ute where the road ends and walks out across the grass to the river’s edge. From the point he surveys the landscape. In front of him the land drops away to a thin strip of mangroves and then to the narrow beach where sand has built up over time. Beyond the beach is the brown river slugging by. Above, humming with traffic, is the bridge. Robbie pivots, his back now to the river. The broad underbelly of the bridge stretches above, retreating from the river to where the deck merges into the approach-way, which sets itself down, far ahead, on solid ground.

  Robbie begins to walk. He follows the cantilevered line of the bridge, keeping it above him. Walking, he looks for any sliver of space where a man might sleep.

  He traverses the park, skirting the bridge’s massive piers, then crosses the road to a clutch of derelict old workers’ cottages directly beneath the bridge, frail and pallid from lack of sun.

  In the bridge’s deep shadow he knocks on the front doors of each. He asks after the old man, and gets shakes of the head.

  He goes cottage by futile cottage. Where there are backyards he pauses at the fence-line and peers inside, looking for sleeping holes. A massive weeping fig leans over the street, its long limbs cascading downwards in gentle arcs. The footpath is buckled where subterranean roots have stretched and grown, and Robbie catches the toe of his boot on a sinew of fig root which has broken through. He continues, reaches Yungaba House, once an immigration depot for migrants, then a refuge for the destitute during the depression of the 1890s. Later, he knows, the building became the site office for the bridge engineers. Now it is government offices. He peers through the locked gates of the property, sees nothing, moves on.

  Past the ethnic radio station and the Italian restaurant with its lunchtime diners, he comes to the Story Bridge Hotel, a hundred years old, three-storeyed with wrap-around balconies and wrought-iron railings, painted white these days. Once called the Kangaroo Point Hotel, it changed its name after the bridge was opened, as if somehow it would prosper by mere association with the engineering achievement.

  He enters the public bar, scanning faces. He asks the bartender if an old man drinks here. The bartender gestures with a sweep of his hand at his midday patrons.

  ‘Take your pick.’

  Robbie tries again.

  ‘An old homeless bloke . . . worked on the bridge when it was built.’

  ‘Old Man River?’ the bartender says.

  ‘Who?’ Robbie asks.

  ‘Is it Old Man River you’re after?’

  ‘Well . . . maybe. So high?’ Robbie gestures at chest level. ‘He likes his art. He was with a boy when I last saw him.’

  ‘Don’t know about the kid, but it sounds like it’s Old Man River you want. I can tell you where to find him.’

  Robbie follows the bartender’s instructions. He steps outside onto the footpath and sees the concrete pier the bartender told him to look out for, sees the stairs zig-zagging up the side of it. He walks away from the graceful old pub, passes a long low-roofed shed called ‘The Den’ – where a blackboard lists bikie nights, poetry readings, cockroach racing – and reaches the pier. His first step reverberates up the iron staircase and he feels the vibration of the railing in the palm of his hand. He follows the bartender’s directions, climbs the stairs till he is about half-way up, and then does what the bartender told him to. He looks down. What he sees is the flat roof of The Den. On the roof is a junk heap sheltered from the rain by the bridge above.

  There are long uncoiled lengths of ships’ rope, removed from the discipline of the ship’s deck and roughly intertwined now like writhing earthworms. There are forty-four-gallon drums, a doorless fridge with beer stickers on its side. Airconditioning ducts – long silver-lined concertina-tubes glittering in the sun.

  There are piles of old timber doors and casement windows, the glass still in the frames. There are bone-coloured metal lockers, rolls of carpet, upturned Brentwood chairs with punctured wicker seats, sheets of corrugated iron, orange witches’ hats discarded or stolen from roadwork sites, PVC pipes, an old red telephone box with peaked roof and shards of glass jagging across panels at shin-height. And among the debris is a doubleseater couch with a blanket folded neatly across its arm, and Robbie knows he is close now.

  So he sits on a landing of the staircase and waits. People pass: joggers, walkers, a man with his bike lifted to his shoulder.

  The stairs echo with footfall on iron, dull, contemplative. From above his head comes the regular sound of car tyres hitting the expansion joints in the bridge. He thinks of his mother, then plays a game to distract himself: he closes his eyes and guesses the type of vehicle passing above him by the time that elapses between the front and back tyres hitting the joint – the interval fractionally longer for trucks, shorter for motorbikes. This passes time. When eventually he opens his eyes he sees pigeons sheltering among the girders. There is a burst of wing-flutter as two of the birds compete for the same girder space. After the frenzy the pigeons settle to cooing beside each other on the beam, a handful of soft feathers floating through the air to the ground.

  The cast of the bridge’s shadow changes. It moves east along the ground and the rooftops of the houses below. The sun reaches in under the bridge as the afternoon lapses, its rays falling on the foot of the concrete stanchion and beginning to rise up both it and the stairs bracketed to the side of the pier.

  And then the old man arrives.

  It is his head Robbie sees first, as it appears over the edge of the roof, followed by the shoulders and then his chest, the old man rising in segments above the roof-line. He wrestles himself up the last rungs of what Robbie guesses must be a ladder propped against the far side of the building. Then he swings a plastic bag onto the roof and wrenches his body up after it, pulling himself to his feet. Robbie wonders if the boy will follow, but the bearing of the old man soon shows he is alone. He carries his plastic bag of goods across to the couch, and drops it on the cushions before sitting down and taking a slice of bread from inside the bag. He chews the bread with slow, deliberate rotations of his jaws. A pigeon stirs from its perch above Robbie and glides through the air, landing with a flutter of its wings on the rooftop near the man. He doesn’t seem to see the bird, or perhaps he ignores it. He finishes the bread, and rolls a cigarette, lights it and lies back on the sofa, face to the exposed ribs of the bridge high above.

  Robbie waits again.

  After the cigarette the old man remains lying on the couch in the lowering sun. He is so still Robbie can’t tell if he is asleep or just resting. It is only when the daylight turns from white to gold that he sits up. He rolls another cigarette, lights it, and then
rolls another half-dozen. He puts the cigarette tin in a jacket pocket and rises, gripping the padded arm of the sofa to steady his legs. He gathers himself, straightens fully and shuffles across the roof to the ladder, where he disappears from Robbie’s view.

  Robbie leaps down the stairs, breaking into a run when he reaches the ground, taking the footpath round the back of the hotel till he turns a corner, blind, and sees the man emerge from a delivery driveway behind the pub. Slow and shuffling, the old fellow walks beside the pub, shadowed by its wide awning, until he reaches a glass side door. He leans on one hip and swings a leg up onto the first step, then disappears inside the hotel.

  Through the pub’s big plate-glass window, Robbie watches the old man approach the bar, exchange words with the bartender and look around the room, then shrug his shoulders and take the beer offered him. He doesn’t join the regulars on their stools at the bar, instead taking a table near the main doors, facing them as they swing open with each new drinker.

  Robbie enters the pub through the side door, and skirts around the bar. He leans against a poker machine, out of view of the bartender, and settles to observe the old man again, like a birdwatcher in a hide. He wonders about the limp, whether it is from the fall, or merely age come to claim him. The man looks cleaner than when Robbie met him at the cliff-top. The jacket is the same, but somehow he is fresher, his shirt and trousers newer. Robbie wonders if the pub looks after him.

  Minutes pass. Eventually Robbie makes his way to the bar.

  ‘You miss him, did you?’ the bartender says.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s him.’

  The bartender nods rather than points.

  ‘What does he have?’ Robbie asks.

  Robbie orders two. He steadies himself, then crosses to the table by the door, the bartender’s gaze hard against his back.

  Robbie pulls out a chair, his head bowed, and he is already seated before the old man looks up.

  Robbie is peering into rheumy eyes, their natural slate colour bleary with opaque film. When the old man blinks, water runs from the corners of his eyes.

  ‘Remember me? I’m Jack O’Hara’s son. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Please . . . have a beer.’

  Robbie pushes the glass across the table. He tries smiling, tries to make the man before him feel at ease, but Robbie is nervous, and his smile contorts into something else. The old man begins to draw his breath in fits just as he had last time they met. He raises his right hand too quickly to his face, knocking the glass of beer – the pot topples, falls and smashes on the pub’s wide floorboards.

  The sound of breaking glass mutes the talk in the room. Every head turns. The quiet deepens. Robbie wishes, desperately, that he had some control over this. He watches the beer as it pools on the surface of the table, forms a rivulet, then runs off the edge like a waterfall in miniature.

  The bartender calls out, ‘Hey, River, you alright over there?’

  The old man is startled. By Robbie, by the faces looking at him, by the bartender calling out so loudly across the room.

  ‘It’s not like you to get clumsy with a beer, River. I’ll pull you another one.’

  The old bloke remains still, as if paralysed. Robbie fetches a cloth from the bartender, who gives it to him cautiously, almost reluctantly. Robbie wipes the table down, then kneels on the floor to collect the shards of glass that have fallen around their feet.

  The bartender brings across the replacement beer, placing it in front of the old man. In his other hand he carries a dustpan and brush.

  ‘I’ll finish it off,’ he says, as if he is responsible not just for the broken glass, but the old man too. Robbie drops pieces of glass into the dustpan and stands awkwardly beside the table, uncertain whether he should sit, watching instead the bartender on his haunches as he brushes at the floor.

  ‘All done,’ the bartender says and stands. ‘Look after that one, now,’ he says kindly, pointing at the beer before returning behind the bar. ‘Look after it as if it’s your last.’

  The sound of conversation in the pub resumes to its normal mid-week pitch and Robbie tries again.

  ‘I don’t want to cause you trouble. I just want to find out about my father, that’s all. I don’t know anything about him, and when you said you worked on the bridge – well, I thought you might be able to help me.’

  The old man looks at the floor. His head is bent and still.

  Robbie runs on.

  ‘He didn’t say much to me about the bridge when I was a kid.’ This is not a lie. ‘And now he can’t speak, so it’s too late for him to tell me about the bridge. Even if he wanted to.’

  The old man raises his head and looks Robbie in the eyes, a question.

  ‘He’s had a stroke,’ Robbie says in answer. ‘He’s paralysed.

  He’s lost his speech.’

  ‘Jack O’Hara?’ the old man says.

  ‘Born nineteen-twenty, took a trade as a boilermaker, drove rivets on the Story Bridge, went to war, became an engineer, returned, married my mother Lily, had a son, worked on construction projects overseas for years, retired, had a stroke, is living in an apartment in Brisbane overlooking the bridge and the river and is cared for twenty-four hours a day by his wife. My mother.’

  ‘I heard he married – Lily,’ the old man says.

  ‘Did you know my mother?’

  ‘Everyone knew about her . . . Lily.’

  The old man lifts his hands from his lap to the table, and rests them there. The yellow fingernails are hardened and thick.

  ‘What is your mother like?’ the old man says. ‘Describe her for me.’

  ‘She’s younger than my father. She . . .’

  Robbie halts, emptied out by the old man looking at him so hard, the eyes boring into him, as if he has some entitlement to inspect him this close.

  ‘There’s your father in you,’ the old man says eventually.

  ‘You think so?’ But Robbie doesn’t want an answer. He listens to the sounds of the pub for a while – the murmur of talk, race-callers on television screens, chairs scraping against floorboards – before coming back.

  ‘Please,’ Robbie says, ‘tell me about my father.’

  ‘He’s really had a stroke, has he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The old man looks at the pot of beer in front of him, untouched. Its head has collapsed and there is a trace of foam like a high-water mark below the rim of the glass.

  ‘I haven’t spoken to your father for sixty years.’

  ‘Since the bridge?’

  ‘Since then.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Life moves on.’

  ‘My father used to talk about “The Brotherhood of the Bridge”.’

  ‘I was never part of that.’

  ‘He was proud of it – a Brisbane bridge made by Brisbane boys.’

  ‘He was a proud bastard.’

  ‘You didn’t get on with my father then?’

  ‘We had a falling-out’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘What falling-out isn’t?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Aaah, son, you ask too many questions.’

  ‘But that was a long time ago.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The man lifts his beer. Robbie follows.

  * * *

  It is dark when he leaves the pub, and Robbie curses himself as he starts the walk back to the ute.

  ‘Damn,’ he says and grimaces. ‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.’

  He drives home and, inside the house, strides down the corridor to the kitchen and the phone. He rings his crew leader.

  He’s still not sure what he’ll say even as he’s dialling, only that he can’t say he’s been at the pub all afternoon.

  The man is beside himself.

  ‘What the hell, O’Hara. What the hell. Give me a story, mate, and make it bloody good. We were sitting out there on our arses for bloody ages. We ended up giving the depot a call to get someo
ne to come out and pick us up. And don’t they want to bloody well know what’s happened to you!’

  ‘Sorry, mate, sorry,’ Robbie says, falling into another language.

  ‘It was an absolute emergency. Freya, mate. She had a doctor’s appointment. I just had to be there, and afterwards – well, you know how it is. I just had to be there. The time just totally got away from me. Sorry. I know I left you all in the lurch, mate.

  I’m really sorry.’

  ‘Shit, mate. A doctor’s appointment? I wish you’d told us.’

  ‘I know, I know, I just forgot.’

  ‘Shit.’

  The man relents, and his voice changes. ‘So how is she, mate? Things alright?’

  ‘She’ll get there.’

  ‘Alright, Rob, alright. You’re right for tomorrow, are you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Alright . . . well . . . I hope she’s on the mend.’

  ‘Thanks, mate. Thanks for understanding. See you tomorrow.’

  Robbie puts the phone down and rubs the palm of his hand across his forehead and down to his jaw where he feels the roughness of stubble coming through. He thinks, that was close.

  Then he turns and sees Freya standing in the doorway.

  Chapter Ten

  Y ou need to swim, this the thing Robbie keeps saying to her.

  But does she? What does she need? Bed rest? Sleep? A

  mother’s care? Negative test results? In the meantime, a demonstration to save a tree? Before, it wasn’t just a tree, but the whole damn road she’d wanted to stop.

  Freya rises from her bed to make yet another cup of tea. Her mail is accumulating on the kitchen bench, opened and incuriously read these last weeks. Or is it months? Things she must get to. Bills, newsletters, postcards from friends. The letters from the university: handwritten notes from lecturers whose calls she hasn’t returned, worried she’s not been at class, followed then by the formal notices warning her of the pending cancellation of her enrolment. None of it yet having touched her.

  She takes the tea onto the front steps and watches the odd little mickey-birds playing in the grevillea below, sucking nectar from the coloured blossoms before making their flitting way off again. When she is finished, listless, she reaches into the low branch of a eucalyptus tree, for a leaf which she crushes in her hand for the scent which is still foreign to her. Will it always be strange, this place? Will it always remain exotic? She smears the traces of eucalyptus oil and its fragrance on the inside of her wrists and returns inside.