The Comfort of Figs Read online

  ‘Don’t turn around,’ he says, his body close behind hers, his chest against her shoulder blades. ‘Close your eyes.’

  With his left hand he covers her. She feels his palm and the hardened skin of his fingers. She smells his day, so different from hers, and can’t name where he has been, what he has done.

  ‘Are they closed?’

  Her eyelids flitter against his fingers.

  ‘Yes.’

  He withdraws his hand.

  ‘Keep them closed,’ he says.

  ‘I will.’ There is playful resignation in her voice. A submission she is content to give to his world, his way of seeing it.

  ‘Now,’ he says, ‘taste this.’

  He lifts a silky oak blossom to her mouth. She senses the object near her face, and her hands rise instinctively from her sides. He catches them, presses them gently back against her body.

  ‘Trust me.’

  He holds the blossom and its long golden bristles before her.

  She smells it, the perfume, and knows then it is a flower. Her body relaxes, begins to sink into his.

  She reaches with her tongue into the dark, searching, tentative.

  ‘Here.’

  He brings it closer to her mouth. Her tongue finds the flower, the bristles with their tiny nodules. The sensation is strange, and she withdraws momentarily. Then she registers the taste, the trace of sweetness. She reaches again and runs her tongue along the head of bristles, feels them on the very tip of her tongue. Robbie releases her hands and Freya takes the flower from him, her eyes closed still. She runs her thumb and forefinger down the stalk, collecting the nectar. She raises her finger to her mouth and licks the sweet sticky nectar off. Opens her eyes. Turns her body into his. Kisses him so he tastes both her and the flower, intermingled.

  The city changes before her eyes. She is not sure whether with each afternoon’s gift, or each fig he points out to her, he is adding texture or stripping something away, some false image she had formed of the place. Or of herself. It unsettles her as it thrills.

  The deepening. That she is falling deeper into the city, and its life.

  This place she has made her home. Constructed from the stuff of its people, its geography, its politics. And the pieces of her own life – she shouldn’t forget that. She is loyal to the place already.

  And yet, here he is, quietly, showing her more. She has the sudden feeling – a surprise to her – that it is not yet home. The feeling that she has more to do. That she must do more to make it home. That she needs Robbie for this.

  So she follows him. Watches from her own car as he loads a ute with tools, picks up a mate, heads for his day’s work-site, a park in the suburbs. The two men split, to work different parts of the park, and Robbie sets down near a pond, an anabranch of the river, filled with tall, waving marsh reeds. Water hens – short, red-beaked, blue-sheened, scrappy things – patrol the banks. Freya positions herself above him on a slope, close to some shrubs: shelter for her spying should she need it. An ibis stalks nearby, its beak scratching the ground, working the grass, before it lifts itself onto a picnic table, a tilted eye fixed on her all the while.

  Freya watches as he swings a pick, drives a shovel, gets onto his hands and knees to pull weeds from out of the ground around garden beds. The steadiness of it all, the simple concentration.

  She sees him begin to sweat, the colour of his shirt darkening under his arms and down the centre of his back.

  She feels the shifts in her own body.

  She collects a handful of rocks from the ground beside her, then crouches, and aims one near him. It lands close, raises dust, tumbles to a stop. He lifts his head – a sharp reaction – then stands straight, trying to work it out, scanning his surroundings.

  After a while he gives up, and as he drops to his haunches again Freya tosses a second stone. But she miscalculates the distance, and the stone strikes him on the back, hard, and he curses.

  Robbie rises. Freya watches him mouth words, makes out two of them – bloody kids – and then he is striding up the slope, determined. She stays low behind the shrub. Then, when he is almost upon her, she jumps out like a jack-inthe-box, hooting. Robbie whips back and around, startled by the yell, by the manic figure leaping out in front of him, his heart pounding till he recognises it is her. Freya laughs, doubled over, crying with it. The ibis takes to the air, silent but for wing-beat.

  He shakes his head, his nerves not yet calmed.

  ‘And what the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘You should have seen yourself!’

  He is not yet laughing with her, but he smiles.

  ‘Freya – what are you doing out here?’

  ‘Reconnoitring.’

  ‘You followed me?’

  ‘You can’t take risks, you know. Not with men.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  She is still laughing as she reaches for him, and pulls him with her to the ground beside the shrub. Robbie isn’t ready to give entirely, is not yet with her, is still tense. She hasn’t yet encompassed him, not yet. He feels the grass hard against his elbows, hears it crunch under the weight of their bodies. There is a sharp crease of fallen eucalypt bark in the small of his back as Freya rests on top of him, her eyes closed.

  But he pulls away from her kisses, suddenly.

  ‘Snake!’

  Freya snaps up onto her bottom, half-erect, then – pure reaction – begins to scramble away, desperately kicking at the earth, pushing against the ground, and then against Robbie in her urgency to get away. Then she is on her feet, and she is taking short backwards stumbles before she realises that Robbie has not moved. He is still sitting on the grass, his arms propping behind him, at ease. And now it is he who is laughing.

  ‘You bastard,’ she pants.

  They remain like that for some time, looking at each other – he reclined on the grass, she standing hands-on-hips, catching her breath. Eventually he rises.

  ‘Been out here before?’ he asks.

  ‘I didn’t know the park even existed.’

  He takes her hand.

  ‘Let me show you around.’

  There is the weeping fig at the top of the Dutton Park cemetery hill. Its leaves shine translucent in the early morning. Then there are the figs in New Farm park, their branches growing into each other, the western sun setting through their enmeshed canopies, its rays sparkling through the small gaps in the foliage, the leaves themselves darker still, heavier, more solid before the lowering sun. Other days, on his way to a planting job, he drives down the avenue of figs on Kelvin Grove Road. Driving through them is like passing between two lines of elysian dancers, the twisting torso of each tree facing its partner opposite.

  Moving through them he feels the tug of their dance, and his blood quickens. On Saturday afternoons there are the figs of Davies Park ringing the football oval, throwing a shade so deep it dizzies. And then there are those along the river nearby which glow phosphorescent when winter mists rise off the water, engulfing them. He takes her, also, to the banyan at the fig tree reserve in the city’s financial district. Traffic routes around this vast-buttressed monumental fig. It is like the stationary centre of a moving traffic-mandala, and though it is an exotic, it still moves him.

  When Robbie first understood the figs, he saw the city anew, unbuilt. It became a place populated not with people and buildings, but with plant life. After seeing the trees, he noticed the contours of the landscape. Beyond the buildings and railways and roads, the land, he’d come to realise, is one of ridges and rises and ranges and low valleys. Of creeks and catchments.

  When he opens the street directory now, it is not the streets, but the threads of water-blue and the green patches of park he reads. And it is the rise and fall of the land beneath the bitumen and buildings that becomes his terrain.

  She wakes, late one Sunday afternoon, disoriented by the sound of some bird she cannot name calling outside. She rolls to observe him. The long deep breathing of his sleep, his ches
t rising and falling, the seams of muscle running beneath his skin and the symmetrical sloping of his pectorals down into the shallow gully running along his centre from his stomach to the boned ridges collaring his throat, otherwise so vulnerable. She takes in his long brown hair, the stubbled jaw, the leanness in his cheeks. She purses her lips and blows a stream of air onto his eyelids, watches them flutter, and blows again, harder, till they open. Earth-brown.

  ‘How long have you lived like this?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Alone.’

  ‘I don’t feel alone.’ He shifts, turning to her.

  ‘Why am I here then?’ she smiles.

  ‘Why are you here, Frey?’

  She gets up to explore his house, her lithe body naked in the still, soft light. A weatherboard cottage with a roof of corrugated iron – ‘workers’ cottages’, they call them here. A handful of steps off the street up to a narrow front verandah, the floorboards dry and grey where they are daily exposed to the afternoon sun. His large bedroom, and opposite it, across the corridor which splits the house, a second bedroom, used for storage. He is at her shoulder as she peers inside.

  ‘Go on.’ He kisses her on the back of the neck. ‘Tell me what you find.’

  ‘Don’t rush me.’

  He follows her around the house. The living room is lined with old, unpainted chipboard bookcases reaching to the ceilings – bookcase set upon bookcase obscuring the walls, each shelf swollen with books, buckling in the centre from their weight. The collection of books tells him that his university years – the half-completed degrees in literature and art-history he’d built as a shield against his father – were not entirely wasted. She circumnavigates the dark room and the sweep of books, close, womb-like.

  Beyond the living room and the bathroom there is the small kitchen and the dining room with a long timber table. Freya sits on a straight-backed chair, her body cool against the seat. She runs her hand along the boards of the table.

  ‘You made this yourself?’

  ‘Recycled hoop-pine floorboards.’

  ‘And this?’ She touches the wooden bowl set in the centre of the table, her fingers playing with two fine symmetrical arcs of grain on opposite lips of the bowl.

  ‘Hand-turned jacaranda.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ she says.

  She points to the rows of framed photos on the wall.

  Black-and-white eucalypts, a series of solitary pines on hills, colour photographs of fierce blue native flowers from the granite belt, a collection of figs in shadow.

  ‘No people,’ she observes.

  ‘Mmmm,’ he answers.

  French doors open onto the deck at the back of the house.

  She steps out and finds it cooler than inside. She rests her elbows on the railing and looks down at the land falling away sharply into a deep gully beyond the house, before bottoming out and sloping up the hill opposite.

  ‘Does the creek run?’

  ‘Not for years,’ he says.

  Rainforest trees rise up from the gully, a black bean and a colony of umbrella trees, but it is a fig tree which dominates.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she says. ‘A Moreton Bay fig?’

  ‘Ficus macrophylla. It’s why I took this place. You just don’t find these in your average backyard.’

  Though there was more to it than that. There had been the tremor of recognition at the precise moment he’d seen the fig, some violent, ungraspable memory. A vestige of his childhood he hadn’t yet erased. When he was a child he’d carved his initials into a tree just like this one, which might have been a fig – a tree anyway which had offered him shelter, sanctuary from his unyielding father. The protean memory had stopped him, seized him, touched him; he took the house because he wanted to know this feeling, to get at it, to understand it. To bury it. Finally.

  He climbs down the back stairs. She watches him slip on a pair of sandshoes and descend into the deep cool beneath the fig in the gully, his own nakedness luminescent in a shade the afternoon sun never penetrates. He climbs into the fig, his shape ghosting through the tree. He climbs up far enough to tear a leaf off a branch, then makes his way backwards down the trunk, feeling chords of muscle stretch along the soles of his shoe-enclosed feet.

  When he returns, panting lightly, he passes her the leaf, large as a hand, soft as leather to the touch. Its sap is crystallising at the end of the stalk when he gives it to her, its milky bleeding just slowing. She takes it between thumb and forefinger, raises the leaf and rolls the stalk between her fingers. The leaf turns slow rotations before their eyes. A dancer on a music box; or a dervish, not yet ecstatic. She sees the glossy dark green of its face turn into the rust brown of its back, turn to green and then brown again. Green, brown, green and brown.

  ‘Shiny on the surface,’ he says, ‘but sombre underneath.’

  ‘Strange,’ Freya says, ‘and beautiful.’

  ‘It’s an honest tree. You can see its dark side.’

  They laugh together and return inside.

  ‘So,’ he says, ‘what did you find?’

  ‘A passionate man who likes his solitude,’ she says.

  ‘I can be an activist too,’ he says. ‘Move in with me.’

  Chapter Three

  Each morning he leaves her. He slides from the bed they now share and dresses quietly in the dark. Then he tiptoes out of the house in his thick socks, sits on the front steps, pulls on his boots, and enters the day before it has yet become solid.

  Aloneness. Solitude. Singularity. He thinks about the way he is, the way he has become. About his relationship to things, to the world, to people, to women. Growing up an only child he’d wondered often enough, but he’d learnt there were competing theories, rival explanations, none of which seemed to allow each other.

  Genes – one of the theories, the word he’d first heard from his year-eight science teacher. Genes now, it seems, an explanation for everything, stripping mystery from things, emasculating will, blind to the decisions you make. Robbie doesn’t doubt their power – in fact likes the solace of being able to surrender to them – but he believes there are other masters too. Such as experience.

  What people do to you.

  As a fourteen-year-old, envious of those kids with easy friendships, he’d tried hard to join them. For months he tried: exposing too much of himself, or too little, trying too hard, outrageous boasts about him and his family that even he didn’t understand.

  He suffered the endless little humiliations of not being accepted. Then, suddenly, he was one of them. Suddenly, without warning, the boys from one of the gangs at school invited him to join them on a night-time escapade. Even as he climbed out his bedroom window near midnight, he saw himself as the fifth member of the gang, had already become a part of the group, was one of them.

  They meet in the street, all upturned collars, bent heads, and bravado. Robbie doesn’t know where they are going – the details of the adventure don’t matter. Just moving with them through the night, together, is enough. After five or ten minutes Robbie hears one of the boys say the name of the bridge, and he guesses it’s their destination. The thought excites him. The bridge at night: the lights, the noise, cars and trucks and motorbikes roaring past, the height, the view. The things you can do, the things you can get up to.

  Robbie’s mind races with possibilities as they leave the dark side streets and reach the approach to the bridge: six lanes, three each way, though the traffic thinned now at this late hour.

  They take the footpath. Soon it leaves the roadway, and they are on the decking of the bridge itself, and can feel through their sandshoes – through every nerve of their bodies – the vibrations of vehicles on the deck. He thinks of the stories he’s heard about older boys, the things he’s heard they do on the bridge.

  Throwing stones from the approach-ways onto the rooves of houses, or flicking bottle tops at ferries. Laying throw-downs or cap-gun caps or empty soft-drink cans on the road for car-tyres to set off. Brown-eyes from the t
op of the staircases.

  One of the boys – Nick Kettle, the oldest of them – stops, and turns to the railings. They all halt, waiting for him. Kettle unzips his jeans, leans close to the railings, and takes a piss – the arc of urine immediately pushed out of shape by the breeze up here. When he is done they continue. The steelwork of the bridge is now directly overhead. They are not just on the bridge, Robbie thinks, they are in it.

  He’d heard rumours of boys climbing the bridge at night, scaling it all the way to the top, and he thinks, yes, that’s what this is about, an initiation! The thought carries both excitement and fear. Robbie looks up at the tunnel of intersecting steel beams, the different angles, and wonders how you could select a route through all that.

  About a third of the way across the deck they stop, he the last of them. The other boys part for him, and somehow he is at the centre of the group. They all turn to face the traffic, taking Kettle’s lead, resting their elbows on the safety barrier separating them from the vehicles flashing past. Robbie also looks across the bitumened deck. There is only the odd car or the lone truck now. Kettle points. He says something that Robbie cannot hear over the engine and the tyre noise of a semi-trailer that passes in front of them at just that moment. One or two of the other boys turn to look at him, and Robbie thinks, yes, they are here for him, an initiation. A boy breaks from the group and walks back down the footpath, facing the oncoming traffic. He is fifty metres away before he stops. There is more talk between Kettle and the others that Robbie cannot pick up.

  A long gap appears in the traffic. Kettle climbs over the barrier and steps out onto the bitumen, looking back at him. Ah, Robbie thinks, this is what the test is then: not to climb, but to cross the bridge on foot, to run across the six lanes, to dodge six lanes of traffic. Yet, it seems almost too easy – with so little traffic, with only midnight traffic. Robbie waits, his heart beating with excitement, for more.

  Then he feels a hand on his shoulder blade. Then arms around his legs, followed by a ferocious shove in the back, and Robbie is over the barricade and on the ground, on the bitumen of the deck itself. There are two boys on top of him, their full weight pinning him to the deck. Kettle has his right arm, and is stretching it out in front of him. Robbie is pinned, impotent, doesn’t understand, feels only terror. He struggles and kicks, but they have him. He yells out but his voice seems so small, muffled by the bodies on top of him, and the expanse of bitumen against his cheek, traces of warmth still remaining in the deck from the day’s heat.