The Comfort of Figs (2008) Page 15

  Chapter Thirteen

  The sixth of December 1939. The day has risen long and slow, the sunlight muted by bushfire smoke rising off one of the sand islands in the bay, the sun’s heat vehement still.

  They are riveting on the sway-frame, the crossways bracing that strengthens the road swingers and takes the sway out of them.

  There is a lull on the bridge since its linking, an ennui that has settled on them and threatens their mood, challenging any part of themselves they do not understand. There is a heat below things, indirect, brooding. The men casting around, casting out into the chasm.

  ‘How’s that girlfriend of yours going?’ Hodges says.

  ‘Keep your eye on the dolly,’ Stahl returns.

  Hodges lifts the dolly against the rivet, his body on one side of the sway-frame, O’Hara and Stahl on the other. O’Hara shoulders the rivet machine up to the frame, Stahl leaning on O’Hara’s elbow, adding his force, the two of them joined for the moment. Stahl’s strength is needed to help O’Hara with the weight of the rivet machine.

  ‘Playing with fire, Charlie, playing with fire,’ Hodges continues, a sing-song lilt to the taunt. Hodges hums the bars of a tune, while holding the dolly firm against the rivet.

  Stahl ignores him, but Hodges won’t let go.

  ‘The boss’s daughter, Charlie. How could you? The boss’s very own. Playing with fire, Charlie.’

  Ordinarily O’Hara would pull this up, would tell Hodges to keep his mind on his work. But O’Hara wants something too, wants to hear about Evelyn. Stahl has said nothing to him.

  Not as they’ve worked. Not at the boarding house before Stahl slips quietly away in the evenings after dinner, not in the mornings when O’Hara wakes him, sleepier than usual. O’Hara lets Hodges run.

  ‘Charlie-boy.’

  Hodges wants Stahl to look at him, teases him to look up.

  ‘Hey! Charlie-boy,’ he says again, shorter, with punch.

  Stahl lifts his eyes, a wearied look. And now that he has him, Hodges raises his right forearm so it is vertical, clenches his fist, and slaps the palm of his left hand against his bicep, grinning.

  ‘She’s a good girl, is she, Charlie,’ he taunts, ‘the boss’s daughter?’

  ‘You’re a prick, Hodges,’ Stahl replies, eyeing him evenly.

  ‘How your wife puts up with you.’

  ‘My wife?’ Hodges grins. ‘You’re not thinking of marriage are you, Charlie-boy? You haven’t done anything to start thinking like that have you, Charlie?’

  Hodges cannot imagine greater entertainment than this. He turns off the air compressor. He shifts the dolly to the next rivet, swinging it from rivet to rivet, a simple movement, honed to precision. He’s done it a thousand times, ten thousand. But this morning the weight of it catches and the dolly slips off the face of the sway-frame, drops, and bangs against his knee, the end of the dolly hot from riveting. Hodges groans.

  ‘You hurt yourself, Billy?’ O’Hara asks.

  ‘Damn,’ Hodges mutters, ‘another piece of skin off.’

  O’Hara waits for Hodges, lets the rivet machine fall, not wanting to spend too much of himself, the weight of the machine swinging like a slow pendulum between his outspread legs.

  The dolly rests on the planking beside Hodges, a mirage of heat swelling the air around it. He bends down to roll his left trouser leg and look at his knee. He quietens, and drops to his haunches on the staging. Hodges is squatting, O’Hara and Stahl watching him. And as they watch he is turning pale, and his eyes are fluttering – and he is leaning backwards, teetering, falling.

  There is nothing behind him. No planks, no railings, and he is falling backwards, his arms thrusting into the air.

  O’Hara lurches forward and grabs him by the ankle, the entire weight of Hodges’ body there. The terrible weight. And his grip poor, precarious, impossible. Hodges’ boot coming away in O’Hara’s stranded hand, and Hodges toppling, his feet scuffing against the staging plank before disappearing over the side.

  Stahl cries out.

  Carleton hears – the steel bridge, grey against the grey morning sky, Hodges falling serenely through the grey air, the water darker but grey still, the blood draining from Carleton’s face leaving him dizzy. He hears, head snaps up, watches the fall.

  Hodges makes no sound. Not as he leaves the bridge, not as he passes through space to the river below. Is he man still, or in his falling is he just body? The falling shape is stillness itself, turning the slowest of turns, his curved, muscled shoulders tight against his dark shirt. Carleton close enough to see the vein in the left side of Hodges’ neck bulge and then disappear.

  A split second. He sees the man close his eyes just before he hits. Or rather sees one of them – his left eye – slowly close, as if deliberately. That night Carleton will dream that the falling man was winking at him. Will dream the man turning his head and meeting his watching gaze, will dream him nodding his head and winking his big left eye at him. But now, in the elongated moment before impact, the boatman sees a vein bulge and recede, and an eye close.

  And then there is impact.

  Time crumples with the body. He is back in the urgent, pitiless present, the thud of body on water reaching him in waves of echoing sound. He thrusts his oars into the water and rows hard for the place where Hodges entered the river. And, as the panic begins to fill him, Carleton sees Hodges’ hat, like an unexpected encore, following the body, the air catching in the bowl of the hat, and then the worn felt sliding over on itself, upside down, and falling like a heavy fig leaf onto the dark grey water. Carleton makes for the hat.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Give it to me again,’ O’Hara demands.

  ‘They have to know. They can’t but know,’ Carleton replies.

  The funeral is over, the wake has begun, the coroner’s inquest is still days away. O’Hara and Stahl and Carleton have broken away from the other men who crowd the cottage in Woolloongabba where Hodges’ widow lives. There are more than a hundred of them here, filling the living spaces and spilling out into the yard at the back. The brotherhood of the bridge.

  ‘More.’ O’Hara is terse, unforgiving. ‘Give me more.’ An echo of Hodges’ scepticism comes to him, the need to be faithful to him, to his doubt.

  ‘They’re engineers. They plan these things. They know.’

  ‘How, for fuck’s sake, Carleton, how? I was there, Carleton.

  Don’t forget that. He was fucking beside me. He overbalanced.

  He just fucking overbalanced. How can fucking Lawrence or fucking Bradfield or any other fucking one of them know that come six December nineteen thirty fucking nine, William Leslie Hodges, husband and father of two young kids, is going to fall. Tell me fucking that, Carleton. Tell me fucking that.’

  O’Hara is almost spent.

  ‘Let me read you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A rhyme.’

  O’Hara glares at Carleton, incredulous, incensed.

  ‘Don’t play with me, boy. Don’t fucking play with me.’

  Carleton burrs up.

  ‘I may not have known him like you, but I was the first one there. Don’t forget that, Jack. I was there too. I didn’t want him to die either.’

  Carleton’s chest is heaving, his face red with speaking to O’Hara like this.

  ‘Come on, boys.’ It is Stahl. ‘We’re here for Billy. Let’s not forget that. Let’s just take a deep breath or two.’

  O’Hara tips back his glass, pouring the beer down his throat in one. Makes for the kitchen where the drinks are. He returns with three glasses: pots of beer for Stahl and himself, a ginger beer for Carleton. To hurt him, to take control again.

  ‘Alright, Carleton, you’ve got a poem?’ he says. ‘One of yours?’

  ‘Not a poem . . . a rhyme.’ He is still exhausted from running himself out as far as he had.

  ‘I don’t care what you call it. Tell us about it.’

  ‘I’ll read it.’

 
Carleton reaches into the back pocket of his trousers for the folded piece of paper. He takes a steadying breath:

  ‘The drudge may fret and tinker

  Or labour with dusty blows,

  But back of him stands the thinker,

  The clear-eyed man who Knows;

  For into each pipe and tabor,

  Each piece and part of the whole,

  Must go the Brains of Labour,

  Which gives the work a soul!’

  ‘Where did you get this?’ O’Hara interrupts.

  ‘Ask Charlie.’

  ‘Charlie?’

  ‘Evie gave it to me,’ Stahl says calmly. ‘It was something her father showed her a week or two back.’

  ‘Lawrence wrote it?’

  ‘No. But Lawrence liked it. They’re going to use it at the bridge’s opening ceremony.’

  O’Hara rubs his eyes with his hands, shaking his head to himself.

  ‘And how come you’ve got it Carleton?’

  Stahl answers for him, shrugging his shoulders as he does:

  ‘His bridge theory . . . I thought he might appreciate it.’

  O’Hara takes it in, then says to Carleton.

  ‘Keep reading then.’

  ‘Back of the motors humming,

  Back of the belts that sing,

  Back of the hammers drumming,

  Back of the cranes that swing,

  There is the eye which scans them,

  Watching through stress and strain,

  There is the Mind which plans them –

  Back of the brawn, the Brain!’

  Carleton looks up when he’s finished. Looks for O’Hara’s response which, when it comes, is reluctant, indirect, incomplete.

  ‘A fine recitation,’ O’Hara says, his jaw tense, his fury yet uncooled. ‘You could make yourself really useful and get us another couple of beers.’

  Carleton takes their glasses and moves away, wounded.

  ‘Not too hard, Jack. He doesn’t mean any harm.’

  O’Hara plays with the throat of his shirt near the top button.

  He pulls the collar away from his skin, stretching his neck left and right, as if to free himself from the shirt.

  ‘What do you reckon, Charlie?’ he says. ‘Does Lawrence really think that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The poem – back of the brawn the brain.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘And what do you think, then, Charlie? Do they know the exact numbers already? Billy was the third. Do they already have a total for the bridge? Four? Five? Six? Ten? Are they on target? Fuck.’

  Stahl lets him go.

  ‘A man doesn’t want to believe it, does he?’ O’Hara mumbles.

  Without the comfort of a glass O’Hara fidgets. He looks down at his hands. Something catches. O’Hara lifts his hands, palms upturned, and inspects them in the afternoon light.

  Sinewy, calloused, scarred. He holds them in front of him. Tenderly, as if they are broken. Or not his. He looks at his hands and sees Hodges’ boot – scuffed brown leather and worn sole, the sole so thin it is cracked right through. He sees the nails in the sole. He could count them. For long moments Hodges’ boot lies resting in O’Hara’s hands.

  The afternoon light begins to fade.

  Stahl looks around. Hodges’ wife sits in the living room of their cottage, sunken into a worn couch, tired but taking visitors still. There’ll be a compensation claim, but a lifetime still lies ahead of her. One of her boys, three or four, nuzzles at her side, her arm around him drawing the child close. Bradfield and Lawrence and some of the others have gone now, having paid their respects. Stahl looks around, sees his workmates in suits, though they are more relaxed here at the wake than they were at the funeral. They will all return to work tomorrow, return to their allotted tasks on the bridge. To their jobs and their height money.

  From the corner of his eye Stahl sees Irish approaching, empty glass in hand, making his way towards the bar and a topup.

  He nods as he reaches them, serious, respectful. He is about to pass them when Stahl catches him, blunt.

  ‘Irish, tell us, is it possible the engineers can calculate the number of deaths on a job?’

  Irish answers without breaking stride:

  ‘On your New York skyscrapers, boys, the formula was a life for every floor.’

  He continues on his way, leaves them to his broad-suited back and the echo of his words.

  ‘The oracle has spoken,’ O’Hara says bitterly.

  They lapse into silence again, too many possibilities competing with each other now.

  ‘What do I think, Jack?’ Stahl says. ‘I think it is possible they know.’

  ‘Alright,’ O’Hara says, ‘let’s find out.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Night comes. It is lowered upon the earth. The moon has whittled to a sliver, to almost nothing. Carleton unhitches his boat from its mooring under the Howard Smith Wharf, and pushes off into the water, alone. He works the oars, pulling the boat across the dark water towards the Kangaroo Point side of the river, where he was told to wait.

  With the night, the bats. They come in chorus, charting their course along the river from day roost to night feeding grounds, their numbers spreading a path across the firmament, their blackness darker than the night. The Milky Way and all the stars smothered by the swathe of black.

  Carleton watches the bats move upriver. They take their bearings from the watercourse itself as they make their way through the night. The bats sweep through the sky as the river curves across the earth. Carleton watches them reach the metalwork of the bridge, sees them still confused by this new obstacle across the sky. Watches them prop and stop and turn and rise, buffeting against freshly displaced air which carries now the smells of steel and man where those smells had never before been. Carleton senses their agitation. All is moving darkness, and above him devil-shriek.

  In the boat Carleton rows, caught between confidence and fear. There is the strength, the power that comes with O’Hara taking him seriously. He thinks, Jack’s listened to me, he’s really listened. But the pleasure of this thought won’t settle in him for long. The moment O’Hara’s approval begins to warm him, an unexpected, formidable anxiety takes hold. More than the bats and their agitation. It is the anxiety that his theory has taken tangible form, is being acted on, so everything has changed. As if the sealed container that held his theories – like a glass jar he might present to them for show – has cracked, and his theory has now escaped, moving in the world, shaping it. It frightens him, this unknown.

  Carleton draws in to the south side of the river, pulls into the bank just back from the point, and waits.

  O’Hara and Stahl have alighted from the ferry. Their boots hard, first against the gangway, then the concrete, then the bitumen.

  Hard and committed to their purpose. Stahl leads – this is his territory, at night. He is changed, O’Hara thinks. There is sureness in him.

  Stahl leads him through the park, to Evelyn’s house, perched high on the street. In the shadows opposite, Stahl whispers, points out what he knows. O’Hara listens, following the line of Stahl’s gesturing finger, squinting, intent. But he needs more.

  He breaks a twig off a bush, hands it to Stahl.

  ‘Sketch it for me.’

  The two drop to their haunches, the house still in sight. Stahl scratches a diagram in the dirt. A crude floor plan, incomplete, half Chinese whisper. He draws a window, names a room, points up beyond the sweeping verandah to the house inside it, just as Evelyn’s described it to him.

  O’Hara crosses the road and smoothly takes the steps up onto the verandah. The living room window is open, as they were promised. O’Hara props the sash wide enough to slide his body through. He is tall, but he is agile. Inside he crouches low on the carpeted floor. He waits while his eyes grow accustomed to the dimness, until he can see objects. With the diagram in mind, he moves from the living room into the dining room.

  Past a lo
ng table with a candelabra set in its centre. He runs his hand along its edge and feels its cool, smooth, polished surface, some foreign timber neither his father nor grandfather would ever have cut. Under a low arch and into the sitting room. There is a fireplace, cold for months. In a further wall of the sitting room is a doorway. O’Hara approaches it. He turns the handle. It is locked, precisely as they were told it would be. O’Hara takes a step back and sees the coffee table. On it the small box. He reaches out and feels its sandpaper-rough surface. He wonders what it is made of. The lid of the box is smoother, inlaid with shell, or ivory or bone. He cannot tell in the dark, his fingers inexpert. He levers off the lid, removes the key, replaces the box.

  This door opens into a small room which is the study.

  O’Hara closes the door behind him and takes out the candle he has brought. He strikes a match and holds it to the wick till it catches. The room flickers around him. There is a desk, cabinets, oak-panelled bookcases on three sides. He places the candle and its holder on the blotter and lowers himself into the desk chair. He tries the drawers first. There are piles of letters which he does not read. Papers he does not want. He knows this much at least about the object of his search.

  He goes over to a cabinet in the corner of the room. It is tall, with three deep drawers, more strange wood. He slides the first drawer open. In it is a fresh, leather-bound album with embossed writing on the front cover, the words themselves indistinct in the candlelight. The leather is tender, calm. He turns the pages of the album and they fall randomly, perfectly, to what he is looking for. His nostrils flare with the discovery.

  O’Hara moves through the leaves of the album, folio after folio, page after page of diagrams, the bridge emerging from the half-dark. The bridge in diagram. The sketches unfolding beyond the size of the pages, long maps of the bridge concertinaed into this album. This must be what the bridge would look like from the school. In the candlelight O’Hara recognises the spans, the piers, the outline of the bridge entire. The bridge reduced to diagrams on leaves of soft paper. And beside each diagram, notes. Directions, though it is too dark to read them.