The Comfort of Figs Read online

  Chapter Five

  In the square outside City Hall there is the whir of a June westerly, swirling around, pulling at the branches of trees.

  Tiny jacaranda leaves, stripped and seized by the wind, eddy at their ankles. The wind hustles people inside, where the councillors are voting.

  Protesters crowd the chambers, smuggle placards into the gallery. A touch of madness in them, Robbie thinks. Some are evicted, struggling against the security guards.

  The voting is disrupted, but the decision is taken anyway, the choice made. The highway through Victoria Park to proceed.

  ‘Is it over?’ he asks.

  She doesn’t falter.

  ‘There are council elections next year,’ she says. ‘We’ll make this an election issue. Reverse the decision.’

  ‘That’s optimistic, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’ve got to have faith,’ she says, and she is indefatigable.

  Faith?

  It’s as if he discovers the word for the first time. Or rediscovers it, from childhood. He bounces it back at her, testing.

  ‘Faith is planting a tree you’ll never see grow to maturity,’ he says.

  She looks at him, at the unexpected gap between them, difficult to measure.

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. Think of the people who planted all those trees in Vic Park a hundred years ago,’ she replies, and then grows angry. ‘All those trees, all those figs. Those people, how do you think they would feel?’

  He wonders about them, for the first time. The sudden realisation they were like him. Tree-planters. He remembers things, the things you pick up as a kid, half-listening, wishing you were somewhere else. Pieces of story. The street-sweeper who planted the weeping fig in Lutwyche Road at Windsor – he was given the fig and told to take it to the dump in the back of his cart, but couldn’t bear to throw it away. Planted it instead. And the women who planted the figs of Bulimba Park, to remember their sons killed in the war. The kids from Milton State School who planted the Haig Road fig, on Arbour Day 1914. He wonders about their city, the quality of their faith.

  Freya continues to campaign, tireless, thinking always of new angles. A tent embassy protest in the park, in winter. Community broadsheets circulated to the city’s inner suburbs, each broadsheet with a piece about the local history, Aboriginal and settler, deepening the ties, learning herself. Lobbying the politicians, setting them against each other where she can. Nurturing the media. As the weather grows warmer, she campaigns to pull back the council decision, to slow the momentum, to force a retreat. You can’t relax. Having given so much, you must continue, redouble your efforts. Have faith.

  He watches her, wants to ask but dares not: What, Freya, if this is all in vain?

  Robbie reaches into the pantry for the tin of green tea she bought him last week. Fairly traded, she’d called it, harvested by hand from a cooperative in Sri Lanka, the profits returned to the labourers. As if she was saying to him, See, you can make things happen. You can do things, you can change the structure of things, you can make a difference. He pries open the lid with his thumbnail.

  At the table he places a hand on the back of Freya’s neck, touching a ridge of muscle with his thumb. She looks up, startled. He sees the lick of her silver hair above her forehead curling over, kinetic.

  ‘Something to drink?’ he says to her. She smiles, receives this, turns to her friends.

  ‘Who wants a tea?’

  Robbie returns to the kitchen bench. He fills the steel kettle at the sink, then places it back on the stove. Reaches for the box of matches on the window ledge, turns a dial until he hears the hiss of gas, then strikes a match and holds it to the gas till it catches, transforms into a small blue flame, the first flare burning off the drops of water which have dripped down the outside of the kettle.

  He looks out of the window while the voices swirl and catch and double back behind him. He looks to the north and the night-time hillside covered with houses like his, stilts propping them off the steep sloping ground. Slight wooden frames with caps of corrugated-iron roofing. And above the hill and the roof-line there is the glow of the city lights reflected in the September night-cloud.

  The water boils, and Robbie takes it off the stove a moment before the kettle can whistle. He spoons twisted dry tea-leaves into a large ceramic art-deco teapot, and pours the water. Hot steam rises out of the kettle’s spout in a vapour which slides across the back of his hand as he pours, scalding him a little.

  Gazing out the window once more while the fair tea draws, he listens to the sound of Freya’s voice, insistent, urgent, marshalling.

  Though she is behind him at the table, he leans out of the window to find her, thrusting his head and shoulders into the night where cicadas purr in the gully. He plays with the sounds. He listens for her again, and now the crescent of her voice passes out the French doors and through the night before arcing around to him craning out the window. The damp skin on the back of his hand tingles. Of all the words, about the freeway cutting through Vic Park and chewing up public domain for highway, about the waterholes filled in and the ancient Aboriginal camping grounds desecrated, it is only Freya’s voice which leaves an impress in him. Of all the words of opposition, all the strategies for generating community support and media attention, there is only the sound of Freya’s voice.

  ‘Robbie,’ he hears her say, her voice raised, the group hushed, waiting for his answer, ‘what do you know about the Normanby figs?’

  Chapter Six

  He leads her along the ridge between the two hills overlooking the city centre, walking along the bones beneath the city’s skin, hill to hill.

  Brisbane is a city of hills. It undulates, Brisbane, is never level.

  As they walk, Robbie strips it of its buildings in his imagination, of its roads and its footpaths and its train tracks. The land rises and falls from hill to hill in sweeping waves: Red Hill and Spring Hill, Duncan’s Hill, Windmill Hill, Cook’s Hill, Bowen Hills, Hamilton Hill, Constitution Hill, Wilston Hill, Sparke’s Hill, Highgate Hill, White’s Hill, Camp Hill, Weller’s Hill. Then, further out, Seven Hills and Alexandra Hills. And rising above them all to the west, sheltering them from the setting sun as if from a sorrow, is the city’s mountain, Aboriginal Mt Coot-tha.

  From its summit you can observe the hills like a brood of children squatting on the landscape below. You also see, curving its way through this rising falling resting forgetting remembering landscape, the river. Or rather, you see segments of it. The city’s hills conceal it, so it is never more than a series of ribbon strips as it appears and disappears among the graduating landscape.

  The river is actually more hidden than visible, and Brisbane is a city of hills and the trees which cover them.

  A monochrome cloud obscures the spring sun. Along the ridge-line the road thrums with afternoon traffic as they near the Normanby fiveways. Running off the ridge to the north, this road shovels traffic between the suburbs and the city. A row of massive weeping figs, Ficus hillii, separates the inward and outward lanes, and then curves around the pub on the corner.

  In 1909 the publican paid ten pounds for the figs. In return the town council asphalted the footpath outside the hotel. Robbie and Freya stand outside the pub, gazing at the trees across the road, asphalt under their feet.

  ‘They’re stressed,’ Robbie says, his voice raised above the traffic noise. ‘But they have been for years.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘They drop their leaves when they’re struggling.’

  Freya notices their patchy canopies, as much branch-stalk as leaf.

  ‘So . . . with major construction here, Robbie – road widening, tunnelling – the figs may not make it?’

  They wait for a break in the traffic before hurrying across the road to where the figs stand in the median strip. Robbie reaches out, running his palm around the girth of the largest of the trees as he slowly circles it. He stops at a waist-high horizontal gash, and touches the wound left in th
e trunk where a car has gouged the fig’s flesh, brutal. A day-old wound, two days at most. Sap has run and congealed over the cut.

  They feel the pull of the traffic – the sheer mass of the stream of vehicles tugging at them, the constant trembling of the earth, the fig vibrating under his fingers, cars rushing back and forth on either side, the blaring of horns, the braking, music beating from open windows, fumes scratching at the back of his throat.

  Robbie feels momentarily exhausted.

  The tree’s inner-flesh has darkened where it was opened.

  The wound is closing already, healing.

  ‘Figs are tough,’ he says to her. ‘They can take a lot. They fight their own fights. They can endure.’

  Usually you miss these moments. They pass and you are unaware they paused before you, humble, waiting. The hollowing of the air before a breeze changes direction; the touch of a jacaranda flower on your shoulder as it falls; the suspended moment between dark and light when dawn emerges, infinite, uncertain.

  One October day, summer’s long ascendancy close, his morning’s private planting complete, he moves across the city and something catches him: the rising sun illuminating a bunch of purple fruit in the canopy of a huge Moreton Bay fig, the fruit – the figs – candescent in the sun’s rays. The tree’s size comes from its trunk with its enormous tangled, twisting, buttressrooted girth. And from the canopy, scraggy and uneven and vast.

  Its large leaves growing in hands, green-dark like giant upwardpointing fingers, and each bunch of figs resting in the palm of a hand of leaves. The underside of some of the leaves – the younger, adolescent leaves – is dusty brown, looking prematurely aged.

  Robbie climbs this tree on impulse, drawn to the figs as if they are jewels, as if he is a boy again, as if he is suddenly ten years of age and fleeing his father, seeking refuge. Southern figbirds compete with him inside the canopy for branch space and for a share of the fig treasure. A bird sets down on a branch at his shoulder, and plucks a fig from the tree, the fig pincered in its beak as Robbie watches. The bird raises its head to drop the fruit down its throat, and then pauses for a moment at the top of this motion, as if to savour it. Head tilted back, round fruit silhouetted in the beak, breast puffed out. Like an Anzac Day bugler at the dawn services his father took him to, stilled at the moment between raising the instrument to his lips and blowing. Then the fig is tossed back, and the squawking, flighty bird returns to its feeding, darts towards another piece of fruit.

  He collects the figs, as many as he can, snapping them off between finger and thumb, rubbing each purple globe against his shirt, polishing them. When his pockets are full, Robbie descends, surrendering the tree to the birds.

  On the ground, he wonders if he might make something of them for Freya, some gift. Somehow he needs to tell her about the figs, how these trees had given him direction – how, in a flash of understanding, in the stencilled shadow of steel girders, he’d seen that where his father had erected bridges he would plant trees. He wants to tell Freya that he was saved by these fig trees, their solidity, their toughness.

  The birds only finish their feeding when the tree is stripped of ripe fruit. They chatter, slur and whistle, and finally, as a flock, move on, sated. They bustle in flight, taking short hops from tree to tree. Robbie sees one of them break from the colony and land in the branches of a silky oak, resting while the swarm cackles through the air ahead. The lone figbird shifts on its branch and passes a loose bundle of tiny undigested seeds, depositing them in the high crook of the limb.

  In time those seeds will germinate, will break open into roots: adaptable, patient, tree-hugging, cunning, soil-bound – roots which will sink into the earth for the fig to take its water and its minerals from the soil rather than the sky. For its girth to swell.

  For its broad shiny leaves to cast their shadows on the trunk of the silky oak. For its embrace to strengthen, tighten, suffocate.

  For it to stand alone.

  Chapter Seven

  Sometimes Freya feels alone. Sometimes there is the whisper of doubt. That nothing arrives, no clear way forward, no obvious answer.

  Perhaps it is not faith she had meant at all, but hope, the distinction only now coming to her. Faith, and the blindness you need. She’d be prepared to be blinded, if it would help. But neither faith nor hope accommodates the anger that sometimes pools in her stomach, her sense of injustice. Sometimes she loses herself between the two, feels a weight, solid and unwanted.

  The year ends. They sit at the hoop-pine table, Freya and friends – acolytes, Robbie thinks – Bec and half a dozen others, just a few hours of the millennium remaining. They measure the progress of their campaign – someone’s idea, to take stock.

  But the victories are so small, so ephemeral. There’s no outcome certain, and the park is still destined for ruin. The disappointments build like Freya’s childhood snowballs, growing till they are presences which loom like avalanches. She is not the only one. They all doubt, in a hard slow trajectory: at year’s end there is little to show. Optimism is muted. Their zeal is stretched thin, gone melancholy.

  Robbie, sitting with them, plays with the stubble on his jaw.

  He thinks of his own year and compares it with theirs, measures it in the trees he has planted. Especially his private plantings, one a day. His city tangibly greater by three hundred and sixty-five figs.

  He looks upon them. They slouch at the hoop-pine table, drinking, listening to the low murmur of protest songs, till eventually the music begins to mock them.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Bec says suddenly, standing from the table.

  ‘The fireworks,’ someone else suggests. A distraction.

  They all enter the night, piling into someone’s station-wagon, Robbie somehow at the wheel. The city is shifting, as if rolling into a more comfortable position, its centre of gravity altering.

  Everywhere people are looking for vantage points – places to watch the millennial fireworks as they light up the river. There will be thousands of people on the high-ground of the Kangaroo Point cliffs with their views of the city and the vein of water sweeping both left and right, and the bridges which leap across the river. The Southbank parkland will be choked. Mt Coot-tha too far away.

  ‘The Botanic Gardens,’ Robbie says to Freya beside him in the passenger seat. Just right for the fireworks, the city Gardens shelter in the crook of the river, as if driven there by the march of buildings and the traffic which roars up to the ornate memorial gates.

  It is less than two hundred years since John Oxley’s expedition first rowed up the river, first looked out from their whale-boats at the pocket of land which is now the Botanic Gardens, first rounded what is now Gardens Point. The point was thick then with rainforest: crows ash, yellow wood, tulipwood, figs, hooppines rising tall on the edges of the forest, silky oak and cedar.

  Staghorns and elkhorns nestled in tree branches, luxuriant flowering vines draped across the forest. On the water’s fringe, perfumed lilies grew. A Garden of Eden, as Robbie imagines it.

  Since then this patch of ground has lived half a dozen lives, has metamorphosed again and again. It was the first country to fall: the hoop-pines for masts and shipping timber, cedar for the first crude shelters. Next the land inside the elbow of river became the farm for the white settlement, the first crops of wheat and the hopeful plantings of fruits in that rainforest soil.

  Then it was the playground of the colony’s first botanist, an early tree-planter. Here Walter Hill mused over vegetative possibilities.

  Experimented with mangoes and sugar cane. Collected specimens of subtropical plants and grew them, all together, in this garden of his. The rainforest strip along the river with its Moreton Bay chestnut is Hill’s, first planted in the 1860s. Thus the Gardens were born, and among the vast lawns fig trees were sown – to suffocate mosquitoes with their canopies of shade, in accordance with the wisdom of the day. Then, in the 1930s, the Gardens became a zoo, a menagerie of exotic birds and animals, cages of mo
nkeys and parrots, and a bear pit for mothers to lean over with their children. A fascinating – but alien – exhibit in the city’s heart. Eventually the bear pit was filled in, and lagoons returned, swollen with fish.

  People respectfully describe this dark rainforest stretch along the river as a remnant. As though it’s a thing which cannot be killed off and which, by surviving, has earned a begrudging right to stay. As if there is honour in surviving. But although it appears to be a remnant rainforest, it is not. This sliver of rainforest in the tightest corner pocket of the Brisbane River, in the middle of the city, is not a remnant but a replica.

  There is an unmistakable pop, pregnant with what sounds to Robbie like malevolence. A flying fox above them jags sharply mid-flight, an instinctive change of direction. Waves of sound they cannot hear pulse through the air and press against the bat’s body in warning. Robbie watches it wheel uncertainly away, one beat, two beats, three, wings driving. In his peripheral vision he sees the first white flash-pop of a firework rising, a reversed celestial body. At the height of its trajectory, in the long suspended moment of hanging there, this small white light explodes into coloured tracery, the sky a fluorescent swirl of red and green, the bat’s coat wet with a red-green sheen.

  And in the short pause between light and sound the flying fox drives away through the air, then there is the explosive bang and the night shattering. And the sky, for all the sound and light, is empty.

  Freya breathes into his craned neck, looking up again at the torrents of colour, the breaking of white into orange and purple, the outward-spreading blankets of green, the falling curtains of red and blue mesh.

  ‘Come on!’ she motions with her hand, and he follows her.

  She makes for the footpath that runs along the river bank. As they get closer to the river he sees the water and the view of the Story Bridge opening before them, and some light in him goes out, fizzles and dies like a firework fallen too early to the water.