The Comfort of Figs (2008) Page 6

  In front of them a figure emerges from behind a concrete pillar, and behind they hear the sudden sound of running footsteps, and the moment Robbie turns is the moment he is knocked to the ground. The cracking sound of his head hitting the pavement merges with Freya’s cry, terrified.

  Robbie finds himself stumbling and rolling across the ground in an uncoordinated attempt to rise again. He is barely aware he is taking kicks – fierce, bruising boot-strikes – and that it is the kicks keeping him off balance. He gets to his feet in a swirl of elbows and forearms, and finds he has cleared a space around himself. He steadies. One of the figures is dancing in front of him with something Robbie can’t make out in his hand, spitting as he screams:

  ‘Your wallet, man. Your fucking wallet. Give us your fucking wallet, man!’

  Robbie knows he should be trying to meet the man’s frenzied eyes, should attempt to defuse him, should protect himself.

  But he can’t help looking for Freya as he says ‘it’s cool, it’s cool’ over and over again, as if the words alone might somehow keep this all at bay.

  ‘Your fucking wallet!’ the man shrieks again, before Robbie is able to find her. ‘Your fucking wallet!’ and the man feints a lunge at Robbie who sees now the contorted face and the eyes, wild under a baseball cap.

  ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ Robbie yells back, urgent, desperate, and reaches for his back-pocket, the wallet held tight there, and winces with the pain.

  ‘Here you go, here it is,’ and he holds out his wallet. The man grabs it from his hand, and Robbie is immediately pushed to the ground again from behind, this time with a knee driven hard into the small of his back. And again. And again.

  ‘Where’s yours?’ the voice screams again. ‘Where’s yours?’ and Robbie knows it is Freya the voice means. From where he is lying on the ground, he hears Freya sobbing no, no, no and Robbie is craning his neck to see what is happening, and he hears again Freya’s distraught no, and he thinks he might be yelling at Freya himself: ‘Give it to him, give it to him.’

  But above it all the voice reaches a new pitch of hysteria:

  ‘Is this what you want, bitch? Is this what you want?’ And Robbie knows it is going to be a needle, and there is enough light when he finally angles his head so he can see, and it is.

  ‘Is this what you want?’ But the crazed words are coming too quickly, and there is no time, and the needle is being jabbed into her stomach even as she recoils.

  ‘Bitch, dumb bitch,’ the man says when it is done, but almost to himself. As if it is a muttered, inevitable Amen.

  Things slow. There is Freya doubled over like a crumpled marionette. There is the river. And the needle being thrown into the water. Robbie watches it. He follows its dark, serene trajectory as it is flung off the path, wheeling slowly end on end, till it drops in the air and falls silently against the water, the surface of the river disturbed already by the wake of a ferry that has passed just moments before. The pulse of the ferry’s engine is suddenly audible. The thought crosses Robbie’s mind that perhaps he should be diving into the water after the needle. As if it had been a snakebite: you kill the snake if you can. Bring it in. You need to identify it to know what antivenene to administer.

  Freya’s screaming disturbs some fruit bats feeding in a fig somewhere distant, and as Robbie blacks out he hears the bats screeching, as if mocking his impotence.

  Chapter Ten

  He finds himself in hospital, and remembers, later, the colours of the trip in. Freya’s face and voice in the back of the ambulance with him. The blur of hazy red and green lights through the windows of the vehicle. The colours switching on and off in strange concert with his flickering consciousness.

  The pull on his organs as the ambulance brakes for traffic lights before passing through intersections. Sounds of doors slamming shut or open, of a concertina-legged stretcher snapping into place. Freya and the night so far away.

  Freya is unhurt, with only the smallest prick-mark where the needle entered her abdomen. And whatever else entered her with the needle. Nothing punctured, no organs damaged, no muscle torn. ‘Fortunate,’ the doctor says. ‘Not like a knife wound.’

  The doctor speaks to her in words without shape. Baseline tests. Post-exposure prophylaxis. Antiretroviral. She sips water from a disposable plastic cup and signs a consent form. She wants to laugh but is too alone. A nurse enters the room. Pathology take a biopsy, will test her blood. She closes her eyes with the new needle, is overcome with nausea, vomits over the lino floor, long and violent.

  Freya asks the nurse later: ‘How long until I know the results?’

  ‘What did the doctor say?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘I’ll walk you back there, after we’re done here,’ the nurse says.

  ‘HIV, Hep B, Hep C, tetanus.’ Her mind grasps at the words but they won’t stick.

  He begins to speak in percentages and she thinks he is trying to reassure her.

  ‘I want to write this down,’ she says. He offers a pen, and a notepad with a drug company’s name printed on each sheet.

  She records what he says, folds the sheet of paper slowly, neatly, and puts it in her jeans pocket. As if sealing something, some moment, some fact, some truth.

  The doctor walks her to Robbie’s room. She leans over Robbie and rubs her nose gently against his unbruised cheek.

  The doctor waits.

  ‘He’s sedated. He’ll sleep for hours. Do you have someone you can be with?’

  ‘I think so.’

  An orange light comes off the east, already burnt.

  She calls Bec, and her friend picks her up from the hospital and takes her back to the house. Bec makes a bath for her. She tells Freya not to talk unless she wants to, and Freya feels the kindness, the gentleness of it. Freya is tired and needs to sleep, but the day is too bright. Bec stays with her till being in the house makes no sense any more, and drives her back to the hospital mid-morning, New Year’s Day.

  When Freya arrives, a woman is settled in Robbie’s room, a solid small-faced sixty-year-old woman in a dress which falls heavily against her legs when she rises in greeting.

  ‘You must be Robbie’s girlfriend.’

  Freya looks blankly at the woman.

  ‘The nurses told me what happened. Awful. Awful, awful.’

  Then, remembering, ‘I’m Robbie’s mother.’

  Freya turns from the woman, a distraction, and moves over to Robbie, sleeping heavily still in the bed. He is serene. His hair is wild and stuck back, and though there are abrasions on his cheek, and cuts on his forehead, it is the serenity that takes her. Freya reaches for him, but her arm begins to quiver as she stretches it out from her own body. The tiny tremors become shakes that refuse to stop. She drops her arm to her side, and remembers the other woman in the room.

  ‘How is he?’ Freya says.

  Lily repeats verbatim what the nurses have told her and pronounces with authority what she remembers from the charts hanging at the end of the bed. Freya nods as she speaks.

  ‘I’m sorry, who are you again?’

  ‘His mother.’

  ‘Ah. So he’ll be alright?’

  ‘In time. And how are you, love?’ Lily asks, her voice round and gentle, as if trained by the softest of accents.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Of course you’ll need your rest too, dear. Robbie will appreciate the visits but you need to look after yourself too now.’

  ‘There’s nothing that can be done for me, Lily,’ Freya says, disengaged, unconnected, but remembering her name. ‘It’s just waiting for the test results.’

  ‘Rest. Rest is what you’ll need, love. Don’t spare yourself.

  Get your sleep. And don’t worry if you can’t be here, because I can sit with him. And the good Lord is watching over him too, of course.’

  Lily O’Hara is an accomplished carer. She can remember nothing else. Though, if asked, she might retrieve a faint memory of herself as a young girl straining against
the role. It is the merest echo of a struggle between some other vision of her life and the demands of sacrifice which came with being the only child of an ailing single parent. And yet even so she wonders if this half-memory is real, or if it is something she creates.

  The truth is, she simply does not know whether she ever did make a decision years ago to do one thing over another. To stay rather than to go. To look after her mother rather than look after herself.

  She prefers to see it as a calling, that God has called her to be a carer. Like the priestly vocations the church would sometimes ask people to pray for – those young Catholic men whom God had so mysteriously called to be priests but who were resisting, out of folly or pride or some private motivation no less mysterious.

  She, however, has heard and answered her calling. There is solace in this. And certainty. The sureness of one’s place in the greater scheme. The comfort that comes from doing God’s will.

  She thinks of the Bible stories, the women of history. A history of daughters, and wives, and mothers, and God forever opening and closing women’s wombs. It is always the Old Testament women she thinks of – Sarah and Ruth and Hannah and the others – who did God’s will and attained their place in history.

  A great, robust, unpredictable, imperfect, forgiving history.

  Comfort in this.

  However it happened, nursing her mother when she was just a girl set the course of her life. Just a few months after her mother died she married Robbie’s father, Jack, and soon after that came Robbie, and the years of raising him while Jack was away. Keeping him at her breast, on her lap, and then by her side. Like Old Testament Sarah, she had just the one child, a son. Unlike Sarah, God granted him to her when she was still young. That was enough. It was good. She has been blessed. In recent years there has been the task of caring for her incapacitated husband, the hours of each day now shaped by his needs, and there is a blessing in this too.

  And yet how fortunate, Lily thinks, waiting by her son’s bedside, that she is still available when Robbie needs her now. That she is strong enough still to care for them both.

  Again.

  *

  Robbie wakes after half a dozen starts. He wakes into a clean white-lit world. In the whiteness his mother takes shape, close by. His mother. He is conscious enough to wonder where Freya is, and whether the figure leaning with her back against the white wall of his room, behind his mother, beyond his blurred eyesight, is her. His thinking becomes swamped by the ache of the blood and sinew and muscle of his back, and the rippling pains across his chest and stomach, and the headache at the back of his skull.

  He coughs to loosen his dry throat and the coughing sets off a domino train of thumping aches down his spine, the pain bringing flashes of the attack back to him. He lies still and resists the urge to cough again. His mother brings a glass of water to his mouth and he sips. With her other hand she strokes his head.

  He feels her eyes, penetrating.

  Caring is not all caring either. You have to be tough to care.

  People don’t realise this. You see it in nurses. They are crisp, starched. They have to be hard, disciplined, know better than the patient what they need to recover. Lily has learned exactly this: that there are times, often, when you have to be firm. On these occasions she inclines her head and looks down from her tilted-head angle and says noooo, long-drawn and rising. The low-pitch of it, the way she holds the sound for a second or more like a meditational chant, her eyes unmoving. It signals that she will endure, that she will stand firm, that she will outlast whatever passing objection her mother or her husband or her son might have.

  *

  Robbie’s injuries aren’t serious: superficial wounds mainly, though the bruising is extensive. He can walk, but it is stiff and painful. His lower back has been tenderised from the beating. It will take time for him to become fully mobile, longer still for the strength to return.

  On the second day he is discharged. Bed rest – this is his mother’s prescription as he leaves the hospital ward. She repeats it like a mantra. Bed rest. It is this simple. And yet what a strange term, he thinks when he first hears it, stirring into consciousness.

  A term from another era.

  Lily drives them home, Robbie and Freya, after he is discharged, though in the car it’s as if she is aware only of her son. She fits the key into the ignition and then, about to turn it, pauses.

  ‘You know, love, it’s like taking you home after you were born.’

  Robbie winces. The nostalgia in her voice is dangerous, a seductive purr which would draw him back to his childhood.

  Not now, he hopes, tired and weak, not now.

  ‘Soon as we got in the car you started up – crying I mean. It was probably the sound of the engine that you didn’t like after the quiet of the ward. You started up, Robbie, and you just didn’t stop. Not for me, no matter how I rocked you, and Jack was driving and he was trying to soothe you too. But no, Robbie, you kept crying and crying. You were almost choking, you were that upset. And you’d been so good in the hospital.’

  Robbie has heard the story before, knows it intimately. It is one of his blood-stories. He wants to interrupt her, wants to stiffen his response and include Freya somehow. To pull the talk off this past, and onto something else, but he is too weary. Lily is concentrating on the story, lost in another time. The car keys swing in the ignition still, the engine waiting to be started.

  ‘We didn’t know what to do. Do we take you back into the hospital where you might calm down? Do we go get a nurse to help? Do we wait until you tire yourself out? Do we just go?

  On the one hand it was nothing, Robbie, but it was awful. I didn’t know what to do. And you were crying so loud, so upset.

  And why were you crying? I mean, why were you crying? I didn’t know what to do . . .’

  He cannot let it continue. But just as he resolves to summon the energy to stifle this conversation, Lily trails off, remembers the car and turns the key. The engine starts and she guides the car, ramp by ramp, down the levels of the hospital carpark. She stops at the entrance boom-gate, pays the attendant and pulls out onto the wide terrace with its lanes of traffic in and out of the city. When they enter it they find the traffic slow, the city muffled and uneasy. Itself hungover or injured.

  ‘We left eventually,’ she recommences. ‘I don’t think it was a decision to go – Jack just started driving. He had to do something.

  But the driving didn’t stop you. You got louder. You were telling us something, love. Louder and louder you got with your wailing. And I was almost beside myself and neither of us were saying anything, we didn’t know what was going on. The first time and all. We just wanted to get home.’

  Her story wearies him, dulls him, shrinks him. He reaches for Freya’s hand, and it is all the effort he has left to grasp it.

  They drive past the old museum building on Gregory Terrace, sanctuary for reconstructed dinosaurs and German First War biplanes which thrilled Robbie as a visiting schoolboy. Past the first of the Valley pubs – the Shamrock – and the red light district deeper in, pausing at an intersection before swinging down the hill into a slight depression which was once a shallow valley. And then up again to Kemp Place and onto the approach to the bridge.

  ‘Screaming and screaming, Robbie, you just wouldn’t stop, and the car was full of your crying. You were so distressed, Robbie, and what was I to do? And Jack in the front – by this time he wasn’t even looking around, he’d fixed himself on the road ahead. He’d left us, in a way . . .’

  The car presses forward, All Hallows’ girls’ school with its convict wall on the right, the firestation with its viewing tower on the left, and the mouth of the bridge with its open-throated tunnel of interlocking silver girders immediately ahead of them.

  ‘And then we got here, Robbie. Right here where we are now. And as we pulled onto the bridge and started to drive across it, the car tyres began hitting the expansion joints in the road, and you began to quieten.’<
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  Despite himself, Robbie is listening now for the sound: the car travelling over the bridge deck, the wheels hitting the regular breaks in the black bitumen.

  ‘It was the thumping of the joints, rhythmic they were. The bridge itself was beating out a rhythm for you, love.’

  Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

  ‘And then you stopped your crying. About here, about threequarters of the way across.’ Thump-thump. Thump-thump. ‘You just plain stopped. The bridge had put you to sleep. True.’

  Robbie wants to weep.

  * * *

  Steel and vibrations. Bridges are fragile constructions. This is what his science teacher told them, the shaven-headed priest who’d once been a chaplain during the war in New Guinea, and who’d stayed on as a missionary. An army platoon must break step as it crosses a bridge. If the vibrations of the platoon’s marching is the same as the natural frequency of the bridge, it will sway. Bridges have been known to shake so violently with those vibrations, that they have been destroyed simply by a group of soldiers marching across.

  Robbie had stared at the priest in disbelief. Bridges are immovable. That is the truth.

  Chapter Eleven

  Days pass. Robbie rises. Freya falls.

  She begins by looking after him, settles him into the house, prepares his meals, helps him in and out of bed, cushioning the movements of his sore body. She takes calls from Lily, calls which make her strangely jealous. Lily visits unannounced one of the first days, and the two women sit awkwardly on the verandah drinking tea while they wait for Robbie to wake.

  Robbie strengthens with rest, with Freya’s care, and with the long quiet hours alone looking out over the rainforest gully at the back of the house.

  She worries about him. It tires her. The lack of sleep. The shock of the assault which comes creeping back to her. The trauma of it revisiting her unexpectedly, unwanted, peeling back her dreams, forcing its way in. Finally, finally, she is exhausted.