The Comfort of Figs (2008) Read online

  There is no difficulty in designing a bridge, aesthetic and satisfying all interests.

  Dr J.J.C. Bradfield

  December 1931

  And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.

  Book of Genesis

  Prologue: January 1940

  Beneath the steel bridge, a rowboat. Two oars come to rest, heavy drops of water sliding off the blades, falling into the river, falling deeper into night, slapping against both. The rower and his passenger drift on the river’s tide, its slow ebb; the rivermouth and the bay so many winding miles to the east. They listen. The rower hears more, with his ear trained to the sounds of the river, and the sounds too of the air between bridge and water. He closes his eyes. He hears the river’s inhalations, its exhalations, its soft suckings and slappings; the movement of water against the banks, against the wooden hull of the boat, against the massive concrete piers, so recently sunk deep into the riverbed.

  The boat pulls towards the closest pier, an almost imperceptible shift in its drift; some unseen eddy at work, the rower thinks, some gravity. He corrects the boat. Not with his oars – which remain resting in his lap – but with his right hand, which he drops silently into the water, cups, and deftly rudders below the surface of the river till the bow of the boat turns, just enough.

  He lifts his hand from the water then, wet and dripping, and a little calmer. Closes his eyes again.

  The still air reverberates above the rower as a lone flying fox beats its path upriver. He hears its wing-beats – faint but regular – and shifts the angle of his head to follow it without yet opening his eyes. Then, as it nears the bridge, he hears it suddenly falter. He hears it stall and turn sharply, abruptly, against the night sky. He hears its mid-flight panic of wing-beat and bodily contortion. It is, he knows, the bridge. Of this he is certain.

  That the new steel crossing of the river has surprised the flying fox, is still an interloper, is not yet part of its bloodmemory.

  The flying fox changes course. It drops, and drops again, and with shorter, less certain beats, passes through the channel of air between bridge and river, and then it emerges and is gone in broad sweeps of wing.

  But in the flying fox’s wake, another sound. This, finally, is what the two men were listening for. Above them now they hear the sound of footsteps on the bridge.

  It is the rower’s passenger who first recognises the hollow thud of bootfall on planking. It may have been me, he thinks – an odd thought – who laid that planking, those temporary ironbark boards resonating in place until the time comes for the bitumen to be poured, and for the deck itself to be completed. In the night quiet he recognises, of course, the gait of the man above. It gives him comfort, but brief.

  Then they raise their heads suddenly – both – as they hear the clattering above them of more boots. They raise their eyes and the night sky is filled by the vast bridge and its rising, swelling, steelwork. There’s a rugged, rising staccato of booton-plank, of more men on the bridge, of running men on the bridge, and of the gait they know being drowned by the others.

  They look. But it is too late. In the space above, in the space between bridge and river, a man is falling.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  He is waiting for her in the square outside City Hall. On one of the monumental pedestals at the front of the old sandstone building he sits. Beside him a bronze lion guards the Hall’s entrance. A second maned figure crouches close by, impervious to the presence of its mate, the two stilled creatures staring tirelessly out at the square and the people who occupy it.

  He too waits. He has learnt to wait. Trees teach you this – that some things take time.

  A late afternoon storm passes, short and fierce. He doesn’t move, feels instead the pelting rain on his scalp, on his shoulders, on the nape of his strong, bare neck. His clothes dampen, and begin to pull on him. The languorous gravity of them. But when the rain ceases, it is so abrupt it surprises him. And yet, he knows, it shouldn’t. These February storms do this. He should expect it – the change – but he doesn’t, and the suddenness of the sky’s transformation is unsettling, comes to him as the death of something. The rain ceases and the light that follows is infused with sadness. And with humility.

  Robbie O’Hara runs his hand through his long wet hair and muses. He imagines the eucalypt-edged waterhole that was once here: sees it filling with rain, then spilling over in growing rivulets to the next in a chain of waterholes, the ponds linking, one overflowing into another, to become a creek. The creek itself running slow and sure and rain-swollen across the soft sloping land, feeding the broad brown river beyond. A creek which, in the city’s frontier years, provided drinking water for soldiers, convicts and free settlers in equal measure. A creek which then took its name from the grains they planted on its banks. But the Wheat Creek was soon sucked dry and buried by the town it had sustained, and in time the watercourse was covered over by the business district. The stream became merely an underground sewer, remembered now only by the street name, Creek Street. A silent lament, hidden.

  Robbie watches people leaving the Hall, looks for her face among them. Feet splash on the ground as the square fills again, sunlit once more, shoes scuffing shallow puddles of rainwater and spraying arcs of water droplets into the air with each step.

  Then, abrupt as the storm, she is there, bursting from the Hall portico with three others, all animated, into the light. She is taller than he remembered. He watches as she stops, sunbathed, and turns in to face the others, her back to him. She is slender and erect, this woman he has come for, the contour of her spine distinct through her loose dress, her shoulders purposeful, her neck long and adamant. And then there is her hair, that extraordinary hair. Short-cropped and silver, flecked with white. She is only in her twenties, but she is silver-haired and startling, charged with energy, mercurial.

  The circle breaks and the four move in their different directions, this woman singular now, and no less bold. Robbie slides off the pedestal and catches her as she steps out of the square.

  He reaches, and his hand touches the side of her arm. She stops and turns, and for a moment he is a stranger, and this woman caught still in whatever it was she has just left.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Bastards,’ she replies, recognising him. ‘Bastards, bastards, bastards.’

  The touch of her skin lingers on his fingertips, crackling.

  ‘Ten thousand signatures not enough?’

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered if every man, woman and child in the city had signed it. They wouldn’t have listened. They’ve made up their minds.’

  ‘So what now?’

  ‘A swim to clear my head. You?’

  ‘Walking you to the pool,’ he says. He is not normally this confident, surprises himself, doubts he has ever been confident like this before, wonders where it has come from. ‘Where do you swim?’

  ‘Centenary Pool,’ she says, her smile grim, her accent North American. ‘Where else? From the diving tower you can see the whole of Victoria Park. Who knows how much longer we’ll have it.’

  We, he thinks, we. The way she does this – her identification with his city – intrigues him.

  From the square they walk up Ann Street, one of the girls’ names, as it runs away from the river. His city is simple. Streets with boys’ names run east–west, streets with girls’ names run north–south. For many years much of his city had this uncomplicated view of the world. Boys and girls were different.

  Though their paths may intersect from time to time, their life trajectories were at right-angles to each other. He accepted it for a while, this ord
er, when he first perceived it, but in time it began to unsettle him, to agitate him. It continued to disturb him until he found a way of making sense of it. Though never quite coming to love the grid of street names, he learnt to shape their pattern into his own story. To give them meaning. This was, he felt, something. His something.

  ‘Each street, no matter which way it runs, starts at the river,’

  Robbie says to her as they walk. Or ends with it, he thinks.

  ‘It’s because the city was built in the crook of the river. Every street – boy or girl – eventually runs into the water.’

  The river claiming both sexes as its own.

  This grid of boy–girl names was broken, interrupted, by a single ragged, subversive street. Robbie enjoys that. How at the end of the boy axis, at the business end of town, Creek Street, angling across the grid, answering a different compass, claims its own place. A song from another time, a different order to things.

  They turn off Ann, and start up a steep set of steps – Jacob’s Ladder, a name his mother loves – cut hard into the hill. They climb through a little-used park, a swathe of rainforest plants hugging the long flight of steps. They reach Wickham Terrace on the ridge-line at the top of the hill, looking over the city and the bridge and snatches of river, and then they chart a course through the streets of Spring Hill until they reach Victoria Park.

  As they walk he points out the trees. Leopard trees and lillypillies and tulipwoods and tuckeroos. She is distracted at first, her mind replaying her meeting with the mayor over and over until it is distorted by the repetition. Gradually Robbie’s voice asserts itself, and she finds she is listening as he describes their route, tree by tree, fig by fig. Silky oaks and hoop-pines and Moreton Bay chestnuts. Hill’s figs and rock figs and sandpaper figs and nipple figs. As each new tree approaches he stretches out his hand and touches the trunk without breaking stride. It is a gesture of familiarity. And affection. It reminds her of the way a father puts a hand on his child’s head.

  At the pool he watches her swim, her long angular body reaching out stroke by stroke. The stillness of her close-cropped head between her rhythmically rotating shoulders. He watches her from the stand as she finishes her laps, climbs out of the pool, and towels herself down on the pool deck. He watches as she turns her head first to one side, then to the other, shaking water from her ears. She looks up at him, her head tilted, and meets his eyes for a moment. She enters the changing rooms, like a magician’s assistant will enter a box, and comes out again some minutes later, dressed.

  He offers to walk her home. He tells her his name. That he was born in Brisbane. That he is an only child. That his father was nearly twice his mother’s age when they married. That his father was an engineer, cold and inflexible as his creations.

  That his parents still live here, in an apartment overlooking the river. That Robbie has been planting trees for the city council, the same council she has been lobbying. And that of all the trees in this city, it is the Moreton Bay fig which is the most remarkable.

  * * *

  A fig grows on the banks of a river flowing into a bay. ‘Imagine it,’ he says to her, his voice quiet. Or it stands like a lonely sentinel on a hinterland slope. Or lowers curtains of root onto a rainforest floor. Ngoa-nga to the Turrubul people, who wove its stringy bark fibres into scoop-nets for fishing. Then, on 17 May 1770 a ship made of wood from trees unknown passes by the vast bay, outside its long sheltering islands. Its men looking at the land of this country and seeing paddocks for grazing, trees for timber, rocks to extract from the earth; and measuring, always measuring, recording and capturing, drawing lead lines on paper made from yet other trees of that other place – and, when gone, naming the bay ‘Morton Bay’ after one of their people – one who was not even with them as their ship passed by.

  Morton, a patron of Captain James Cook, being James Douglas the 14th Earl of Morton, President of the Royal Society, lover of the stars, financier of Cook’s voyage of discovery in the year of Venus’ transit. Morton itself not a man’s name but a title, a barony, a castle even then crumbling into the frigid waters of a Scottish loch.

  And yet – Robbie pauses – in the first published version of Cook’s journal account of his voyage, ‘Morton’ became ‘Moreton’ – an error in transcribing Cook’s handwriting into type-set. By the time of publication, Cook is no longer alive to correct the error, speared on a distant Hawaiian beach. And the 14th Earl is no longer alive to be offended.

  So this tree, this silent giant creature which is cousin to the trees across the seas who were present at the dawn of creation, becomes a ‘Moreton Bay fig’, after the bay, after the island, after a man who had never been here and never stood in its shade, and who was himself never known by that spelling.

  * * *

  ‘Where does it come from?’ she asks. ‘This love of figs?’

  He takes her hand and leads her through the park towards a nearby stand of trees. He picks a way through, weaving a path between their trunks.

  ‘There,’ he says, stopping, his voice hushed.

  She turns a circle where they stand. The grass underfoot is thin and pale despite the afternoon’s rain. Around them is a light eucalypt forest. Above, through the canopy of leaves, the sky is deepening quickly, falling into purple. She turns a second circle. Nothing rises from the landscape.

  She shakes her head, confused.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He gestures to the tree directly in front of them.

  Then she sees it. Or rather, them. There is the light grey of the trunk. A fig of some sort, the smoothness of it flecked with thousands of tiny, dark grey nodules. On the trunk, level with her stomach, she sees a wave in its skin, a curving-under like a lip, full, and she notices what she thinks is a knot in its flesh – a break in its surface, large, the size of her thigh. She reaches for it. She runs her hand along the fig’s skin, rougher than it appears. She reaches the knot, explores it with her fingers and the palm of her hand. And realises that it is not the fig’s skin at all. The different texture, the new colours. This bark is ribbed: long undulating grooves running vertically upward, long deep crevices of something foreign.

  She takes a step back and looks up. Then she understands: there are two trees here. The fig and another species, their leaves and their branches interweaving above her into one mottled canopy. A smile crosses her face and she turns to him, her pale blue eyes glittering.

  ‘Silky oak,’ he says.

  Two trees growing side by side. Entwined, she thinks.

  ‘How romantic,’ she says – not a word she’d normally use.

  ‘How . . . connected,’ she corrects herself.

  He hears the strangeness in her accent, some vague, inchoate danger.

  She reaches out and takes his hand and pulls him with her towards the tree. Two small steps and she is against the fig, her shoulder blades coming to rest on its skin, her buttocks soft against the fig’s hard trunk. She draws Robbie closer till he too is pressed against her.

  Chapter Two

  He brings her things. Gifts at the end of the day. He arrives at her place as the afternoon begins its fall into darkness.

  ‘Close your eyes . . . Here.’ He passes an object to her.

  A leaf from a silky oak, like a page of Braille. Or a macadamia nut, embedded still in its soft sheath. A mopoke feather. A shard of schist. An old bolt rusted almost beyond recognition, a gentle test. A mangrove seed pod. A jacaranda flower.

  Something different each day. He describes his days to her like this.

  Or they meet in the afternoons when he has finished work and she her day at university. On a park bench overlooking a certain bend in the river, not a bridge in sight. Or at the base of a cliff-face. At a lookout, or the end of a jetty. By a doorway. In front of a block of pink porphyry in the façade of a colonial-era building. At the foot of a silky oak. Or a bunya pine. Inside the roots of a curtain fig. He describes his city to her like this.

  Freya Adams lis
tens. She watches. She touches. She feels. This city of his, her adopted town. That you can live in a place for so long and not see it. That you can pass across the surface of a city as you would skate across a frozen childhood lake, impervious to its currents. It has taken her by surprise that there is something more, other layers he can show her. She thought she had it, had the measure of the city, thought she had seen it true, unencumbered by having been born here.

  A city of a million and a half, stretching, growing. A city reaching further outwards, towards the bays and the forests and the mountain ranges she’d glimpsed from the airplane window, but couldn’t grasp when she first flew in. So much water, so many trees, so many ridge-lines. A developing city, and a place of rough politics, hard to detect. A city shaking off a past it seems half-embarrassed by. Here, she sensed immediately, there was work to be done, and there might be a place for her. Somewhere she might settle.

  She sought out a university, a respite from the immediacy of the place, thinking-space. In this three-university city, the one she chose was outside the urban centre, perched on the crown of a hill, its buildings hidden among gum trees, lost among them – this the reason she’d selected it. It had the right attitude, the right relationship with the environment, the right respect for nature. And it didn’t matter that she spent the first few weeks of that first hot summer lost – as it seemed half the students were – following tracks through the bush, seeking out lecture theatres among the trees, the sweat of February dripping down her legs, the scent of eucalyptus oil strong and disorienting. It didn’t matter, because the politics of it was right, was everywhere, and in everything.

  But here she is, listening, watching, touching, feeling, anew.

  She succumbs to Robbie’s gentleness, to the force of each day’s revelations.

  Without her hearing, he enters the house she shares with other students. They are alone.