The Comfort of Figs Page 22

  The old man draws breath, taps the table with his fingers, looking for something, his tapping growing more forceful, ever more urgent.

  ‘But the fact remains, they beat Oxley to it. As discoveries go it was a shambles: unplanned, incompetent and unwanted. But it was them who discovered it, not Oxley.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  *

  Freya kneels before a bookcase. Scattered around her on the floor are volumes from the lowest shelves, Robbie’s books on flora, his botanical resource books, the scientific works. She’s searching out what she can about figs in the large pages of these heavy-bound texts. How can there be fruit without flowers?

  This question, chasing itself around the inside of her head.

  She learns about Moreton Bay figs. Their taxonomy, Moraceae their family name. The etymology of their species name, macrophylla: from the Greek ‘macros’ large, and ‘phyllon’ a leaf. Too large, she thinks, for the first time. She sees diagrams sketched by careful, deliberate hands, of leaves and fruit, but no flowers.

  She learns about them, the scientific dissection of them: trunk, bark, branchlets, leaves, venation, fruit, habitat, distribution.

  She discovers, slowly, that they are not flowerless – that is just how they seem. Their fruit, purple ripe and edible, is both fruit and flower, the flower both inflorescence and fruit. Rather than opening, expanding, and unveiling at bloom, the fig tree’s flower is enclosed in the cavity of the fig. It grows in the dark, it blossoms in the dark, it is pollinated in the dark. It is an inwards-looking flower, a hidden flower, hundred-floreted.

  You eat a fig, you are eating fruit and flower. Potent, intense, secretive.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It is morning in the apartment. His mother opens the door for him, and Robbie enters. Today, rather than pass it by as he usually would, he pauses before the shrine his mother has made to the Story Bridge, a different reflex at work in him. Lily continues into the kitchen to prepare breakfast, glancing at him as she goes, wondering.

  Robbie touches a picture frame standing on the top shelf of the bookcase. He is exploring. Incompetent, yes. Unplanned?

  True. But he wants this now, wants to know. He picks up a china plate with the bridge painted on its face, turns it over, but does not understand the markings on its base, some coded stamp of ceramic authenticity.

  His eyes rise above the bookcase to a framed sketch of the bridge, hanging on the wall. He sees it as if for the first time, this drawing that has always been there, hooked on a wall in his parents’ home. The artist was sketching from the north side of the river, from the cliff, rather than from the southern bank, at river-height. The bridge crosses the page in deft pencil strokes, breaks where it is still unfinished, still unjoined, then recommences in criss-crossed girders which compress in perspective as the far end of the bridge shrinks away in the distance. The water sweeps underneath the bridge, then arcs around the tip of low-lying Kangaroo Point and continues its curve upriver. Its long graceful sweep strikes a contrast with the broken bridge. Robbie places the sketch in time. Late 1939.

  Robbie lifts the sketch off the small nail driven so carefully into the plasterboard. There is no inscription on the back, nothing to help. Robbie takes it into the kitchen.

  ‘Lily,’ he says, ‘who drew this?’

  Lily looks around to her son.

  ‘The bridge,’ she says.

  ‘Where did the drawing come from?’

  ‘Your father gave it to me,’ Lily answers.

  ‘Did he draw it?’

  ‘No – a friend of his did.’

  ‘Who? It’s unsigned.’

  ‘A friend of your father’s from his bridge days, love.’

  ‘What was the friend’s name?’

  She pauses, and in the moment she turns back to continue slicing fruit for their breakfast she says:

  ‘I think his name was Charlie Stahl.’ Then, ‘Love, do you want mango with your cereal?’

  Robbie remounts the sketch, and reaches for the photograph album resting on the second shelf of the bookcase. He turns its leaves until he finds the photo he wants, then takes the album in to Lily. He stands beside her at the kitchen bench, and she pauses in her cutting, her son so close to her elbow, the old sepia image thrust into her line of vision.

  It is a picture of his father and a dozen others on the bridge.

  In the centre of the photograph is a large steel upright. Men sit or stand on a platform around it, or they hang off it on either side, leaning out at angles like branches off a trunk. His father, hatless, is sitting centre-frame on the platform. Singlet and shorts. His left leg swings loosely over the platform, while the right is propped up, the foot on the platform itself. His father’s elbow rests casually on his right knee, while his left arm is swung back, opening his chest to the camera. There is ease and there is strength in him.

  ‘Which is Charlie Stahl?’

  Robbie hears his mother take an awkward breath of air, a gulp which bottoms out. Lily clutches for another breath.

  ‘I think that’s him, Robbie,’ she says, pointing to a man standing close to the girder. ‘That’s Charlie.’

  Robbie sees a man in a short-sleeved shirt and beret. A man of average height and build. An open face with the forehead wide and the beret sitting high on his head. Robbie can’t discern the man’s finer features – the image is too small, the resolution of the photo too crude. Robbie peers hard, then lets go.

  Out of his mother’s sight, Robbie takes the photo from its sleeve then replaces the album in the bookcase. He slides the photo under his shirt and feels its cool surface against the skin of his stomach. Robbie sits to breakfast.

  ‘Don’t you want the binoculars, love?’

  ‘There’s nothing more to see out there, Lily.’

  Another thing Freya learns is that each species of fig tree has its own species of pollinator wasp. For the Moreton Bay fig, it is Pleistondontes froggatti, minute and unlikely, but without which the Moreton Bay fig is inconceivable. Nothing else, no other insect, no other wasp, will pollinate it. The great tree and the tiny wasp, the symbiosis of them, tight and infallible. So many revelations, Freya thinks.

  When the fig is ready to be pollinated, a foundress – a pollenbearing, egg-laden female wasp – enters the cavity through a tiny pore in the skin of the fruit, and burrows deep inside. Once there, enclosed in the dark, the foundress has two tasks, one for the fig, one for herself. She brings grains of pollen with her, from her previous fruit, and these she leaves on the stigma of the fig flower, fertilising it. But she also deposits her eggs on the ovules of the flowers. As each larva grows, it will eat a developing fig seed, obtaining from the seed the nourishment it needs to survive. As a wasp grows, a seed is consumed. Each developing wasp is one less fig seed. But figs have so many seeds, and when the fruit is mature, the wasps emerge from their galls. Still surrounded by the walls of the fig, their universe, the wingless males seek out females in the dark, often their sisters. They mate. And only then do the female wasps leave their birth fig, loaded with pollen, emerging through a tunnel in the fig-wall cut by the males, seeking out a new fig which will receive their eggs.

  Freya pictures it: wingless males, the entirety of their existence lived inside the dark of the fig, and females that fly.

  * * *

  Robbie says, ‘Can you show me your bridge sketches again?’

  The old man picks up the cardboard cylinder at his feet – it accompanies him everywhere.

  ‘Clear the decks.’

  Robbie moves the glasses of beer and the ashtray to another table, then runs his forearm across the table, using his shirt sleeve to wipe off the condensation left from the cold glasses.

  The old man peels back the prints Robbie saw when he first met him in the camp under the bridge. Streeton and Roberts and Nolan and the others.

  ‘The nation-building artists,’ says Robbie as the old man lifts them back, one by one, ‘the myth-
makers.’

  ‘I never did get to see much of the country,’ the old man murmurs. ‘They did it for me.’

  He lifts the prints away until he reaches the sketches, drawn by the same hand as the one Robbie examined this morning in his mother’s apartment.

  ‘Is your name Charlie Stahl?’ Robbie asks.

  The old man does not react.

  ‘Is this you?’

  Robbie takes out the photo, slips it from a folder he’s brought, turns it around so the old man is looking at the group of men.

  So he is looking at the bereted one. ‘Is this you?’ Robbie says again, pointing.

  The old man does not blink. He looks up and then straight ahead to a point somewhere on Robbie’s chest. His eyes begin to water, but still he does not shift his gaze, locked on some arbitrary place where Robbie’s shirt opens onto his chest.

  ‘Hey . . . Old Man River,’ Robbie says as gently as he can, ‘ . . . are you Charlie Stahl?’

  The question hangs between them, long and heavy.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ the old man says eventually, his gaze unmoved still.

  ‘I’m trying to piece this all together.’

  ‘Piece what?’

  ‘The sketches,’ Robbie says. ‘My parents have one hanging on a wall.’

  ‘Your father has one of the sketches?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of Stahl’s? Of the bridge?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The shameless bastard.’

  ‘So who was Charlie Stahl?’

  The old man rolls a smoke, each movement deliberate, each component of this ritual magnified by the silence: opening the pouch, sliding a paper from the Tally-Ho packet, taking a pinch of tobacco between forefinger and thumb and dropping the dried leaf onto the white paper. Robbie waits while the gnarled tobacco leaf is teased along the strip of paper. The man raises the paper and leaf with both hands cradled beneath it and rolls a thin white cylinder which he lifts to his tongue to seal.

  ‘Stahl was a friend, your father’s best mate. He died on the bridge, and your father and I were responsible.’ Then after a pause, ‘In our own ways.’

  He watches these first words reach Robbie and, when he is sure they have arrived, strikes a match, its head bursting into flame as he raises it to the cigarette between his lips. He draws breath so the tobacco catches. Inhales, and resumes talking, smoke and words swelling from between his lips. The old man speaks rhythmically, in incantation, as if his revelation and the ceremony of smoking are the same thing.

  ‘It was a crazy theory. Mine. I have to own that. It was madness, looking back, and if there’s any explanation it’s because it was after another mate, Billy Hodges, had died. We were young, we were angry, we needed someone to blame. We got this idea that the engineers could measure how dangerous it was, that they knew precisely how many deaths it would take to build the bridge. Precisely. And that therefore we were just pawns to be disposed of. Once the theory got a hold, it couldn’t be dislodged, and your father wanted proof. Owed it to Billy, he said.

  ‘The steel engineer was a Canadian – our perfect scapegoat, looking back . . . It’s funny how quick we are to do that. How feeble we really are. Though it shouldn’t be a surprise . . . human nature being what it is. So, Jack and Charlie worked out a way of getting into the engineer’s house, to read the construction notes . . . and the tender papers, if they could find them.

  Jack and Charlie would find the papers – that was the plan.

  They’d find the proof. And I was the getaway. When they had what they needed, they’d meet me at the river and I’d row them back across to the other side.

  ‘But only Jack got to the boat. Something had happened. The police were after them. There were sirens going and police cars everywhere. Jack, well he continued on to the boat as arranged, but Charlie got left . . .

  ‘The next I saw of Charlie he was above us on the bridge. It had just been linked, and it wasn’t safe, not at night. In fact it was dangerous as hell. So while I rowed Jack across to safety – chauffeuring him – Charlie was up there on the bridge with the police on his tail.’

  Old man Carleton shakes his head to himself.

  ‘We were still on the water when Charlie fell.’

  He looks at Robbie through liquid eyes, watering now from the cigarette smoke as much as age and memory.

  Robbie nods, thinks he understands.

  ‘Your father and I made a pact that night,’ Carleton goes on, ‘. . . or more accurately, he got my agreement. “Not a word to anyone,” Jack said. “Not a word” – your father said that, and I went along with it. We didn’t want to lose our jobs, we didn’t want to get involved with the police. And it was, after all, an accident. So not a word during the police investigation, not a word at the coroner’s inquest, not a word to Charlie’s parents, not a word to his girl. Not a word.’

  Carleton has unconsciously lifted his forefinger to his lips, hushing his imaginary self, not a word, not a word. As if he is whispering to a child. Hush, hush. He becomes aware of the gesture, and drops his hand back to the table. So much silence for so many years.

  ‘We also never said another word about it to each other. In fact, we never spoke again. Never. I don’t think we trusted ourselves. We kept away from each other in the months we finished off the bridge. Then we just went our different ways. He worked in the Evans Deakin shipyards, building ships for the war. Then he enlisted and went up to New Guinea or the Pacific or wherever he went. I worked the ferries. I saw him from a distance once or twice over the years. When he was passing through town. And some of the boys give you bits of information. You hear things. But not another word passed between us.’

  ‘And . . . Stahl?’ Robbie says.

  ‘Charlie was gone two days. For two days the water police dragged the river. For two days the police launch hung on the water. Like a drifting headstone, it was. Charlie rose eventually. You know, I thought he might have survived . . .

  ‘Anyway, it was midday on the third day . . . always the third day . . . when Charlie floated to the surface. Bloated and fisheaten, he was. Recognisable only from the clothes – his tweed trousers and plaited leather belt. His shirt was gone – ripped clean off by the current. And one oil-stained sandshoe, with mud thick between his foot and his shoe. I was the first to see him – just a dark shape below the surface of the brown river. Then the tide turned him over and his shoulder rolled out of the water, and I knew it was him. He was too heavy to drag up alone, so I ran a rope under his arms, tight around his chest, and rowed him in to the bank. Towed him in like I was a bloody tugboat.’

  A neon light flickers on outside the hotel, and Robbie sees the man lit up now by coloured flashes, his old face throbbing strangely pink and green and alternating blue.

  ‘We grappled him ashore at the bank – an ungainly thing to do. You ever dragged a man out of the water? They don’t want to come. But we pulled him out. And when we’d lifted him out there was something I had to find out. I slipped my hand into his trouser pocket when no one could see. And you know, there it was.’

  He reaches into his own pocket and pulls it out, the rivet. A piece of five-inch steel sixty years old, but rubbed smooth from where he’s handled it day after day, year after year.

  ‘There was nothing special about it. It was just any old rivet, but it was a talisman for him.’

  ‘And for you, since then?’

  Carleton considers this, grunts in response, a huff, short but open.

  ‘Maybe not,’ he says finally, this piece of the bridge resting in his palm. ‘Either way, I’ve no need for it now.’

  He tosses it then to Robbie, lobs it the short distance between them so it turns over itself in the air as it flies, floats and drops into Robbie’s hands.

  ‘It’s yours.’

  That night Robbie lies awake, turning the conversations with the old man over in his head, piecing events together, fitting his life into history.

  ‘Frey?’

>   She is awake.

  ‘I was right about him. I was right all along,’ Robbie whispers to her in the dark.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘My father. And what he did, the hollowness of it. The bastard built his career after the Story Bridge on the death of his best friend.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asks, croak-voiced, tired.

  ‘He basically killed his best mate.’

  ‘The old man told you this?’

  ‘Near enough. That he was responsible for it.’

  Freya listens to Robbie’s version, waterlogged and, she thinks, swollen out of shape. She is growing tired of the bridge – and all it is responsible for, all the distortions – and its place between them.

  ‘Every bridge he built, every dam, every viaduct, every bloody tunnel – it cost him his best mate to learn that the engineers weren’t what he’d imagined, and then he bloody well became one! . . . The path of his career passes over the grave of his best friend.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Lily moved him to that apartment overlooking the bridge after he had his stroke. I think she wanted it to be a comfort to him . . . But I wonder now if it was a torment – there’d be justice in it, if it was.’

  Freya whispers the word to herself, comfort. Thinks, that’s all I want, that’s all I’m asking for. Not your bridge, not your father, not your figs. Is it so much?

  Chapter Fourteen

  There is chattering in the darkness – night-feeding birds and bats and the insects which smell him or feel the warmth he radiates. In the bedroom Freya is tossing feverishly. Robbie fetches an empty seed sack from beneath the house and finds a torch. He slides down the banks of the gully till he is at the base of the fig tree. With the torch light he picks out the familiar route up the fig’s trunk and into its branches. He climbs in the dark, the flesh of the fig cool under the palms of his hands.