The Comfort of Figs (2008) Read online

  She succumbs and takes the valium the doctor prescribed at the hospital, and sleeps for the best part of a day and a half. When she wakes it is Robbie leaning over her, concerned.

  It is as if they have changed places, have swapped ends of a playground see-saw, some invisible fulcrum between them.

  ‘What’s wrong, Frey?’ Robbie asks, his vitality returning.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  The routine these early days is an uneasy one, the awkwardness of their different trajectories. The ennui that has enveloped Freya, Robbie’s confidence returning.

  He plants again. He is ready, wants it: the touch of the earth, its reassurance and conviction. But he requires the alarm to wake, his body shunted off its rhythms by the drugs, its deep need to repair itself and pull in close for a while. He slides out of bed, and dresses, his clothes ready from the evening before. At the doorway he turns and looks back at Freya in the night. She has not stirred, but her eyes are wide open, flat in the dark, following him. He returns to her and puts a hand on her cheek.

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  He brushes her eyes closed. Looks back again and she is staring at him once more. Some sleepless sphinx, her gaze blank and impenetrable.

  The first fig is tiny. He selects it from among the figs he’s potted, under the house, which take light in shafts through the boards of the deck. It is a gesture of belief. For this first fig he plants after the attack he deliberately chooses the smallest.

  He plants it by the river. Not too close to the city centre, to the bikeway, or the riverside expressway – he is not ready for that – but by the river. The same river.

  He finds a place beside a boat ramp, with its ribbed concrete sloping away towards the water. Already there are rowers on the river, light filtering their hollowed voices and oar-slap. The bulk of an abandoned power station rises in the dawnlight, upriver.

  Robbie selects his spot, squats, kneels, opens the earth.

  Robbie takes to walking during the day, to exercise.

  One morning the phone is ringing as he returns from the corner store. Freya’s calico bag is slung over his shoulder. In it are bread and milk, some fruit. He doesn’t hurry as he unlatches the gate and walks up the front stairs. He lets the phone ring as he turns the key and enters the house. In time the ringing stops, and the answering machine clicks in. He hears Freya’s voice on the recording, just leave a message, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. He wonders whether Freya, lying in bed, is awake to hear herself speak. There is enthusiasm in her recorded voice, and he remembers, when she first moved in, the tickling and the faces he made as she recorded the message. Does she remember too?

  Then the machine beeps, there is a rush of static, and Robbie expects someone to speak as he carries the bread and the fruit down the hallway. But there is nothing, not for long seconds is there anything other than a mangle of background noise.

  Submerged in the static Robbie wonders if he hears a voice, muffled and indistinct, but the line goes dead and there is only hollowness.

  Minutes later the phone rings again. Still Robbie lets it run.

  Just to hear Freya’s voice, to hear her before she entered the cocoon of her bed a week ago. She speaks again: just leave a message, we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. He is not sure what more he can say to her, whether there is any message he can leave that will get to her.

  Freya’s voice is followed by another this time: a young, uncertain voice.

  ‘Hello . . . Look . . . We’ve found your wallet – ummm . . . Is that Robert O’Hara? If that’s Robert O’Hara then, ummm, we’ve found your wallet. So, if you want it, then –’ and at this point the child’s voice turns away to talk to someone else, and Robbie strains to hear but the voice is too distant and the other voice might be just Robbie’s imagining. Robbie makes no move to pick up the phone. His quickened breathing and the beating in his chest fill him, and he is transported in blood-pulse waves to the night two weeks ago on the path by the river.

  ‘We just thought that you might want it back, okay? Well, you’re not there so we’ll call back.’

  The message ends with a click.

  Robbie stares at the phone for long moments before he realises Freya is behind him, standing at the threshold. It is the first time he has seen her out of bed for days, and she is weak from the effort, leaning against the door jamb in her bedclothes and dulled, dishevelled hair. Her eyes are wild as she looks at him, and there is something other than fear or weariness in them.

  Hunger.

  As if her spirit has seeped out of the puncture hole where the needle entered her stomach, Freya is withering while Robbie heals. The space where her spirit once was is filled now with the fear of what the blood tests might bring.

  Robbie replays the message, and they listen to the boy’s voice.

  He is sure it is a boy’s voice.

  ‘He’s more certain about hanging up than speaking.’

  ‘Will he call back?’ Freya says, mainly to herself.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘He has to call back,’ she says, willing it to happen.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If he does, answer it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must answer it,’ Freya says, fierce. ‘You must.’

  They remain together in the solidifying, mid-morning light.

  He makes tea and they sit in easy chairs in the room off the kitchen, within sight of the phone. They are silent. It was a boy’s voice, and yet there was no child there that night, two weeks ago. Their minds turn over the possibilities.

  It is afternoon before the phone rings again. Robbie picks it up.

  ‘Robbie O’Hara.’

  ‘Ohh.’ There is a half-startle in the boy’s voice, as if he wasn’t expecting Robbie to answer. When he recovers himself the boy says, ‘We’ve got your wallet.’

  ‘Who’s we?’ Robbie asks, cautious but calm.

  ‘What?’ the boy says. How old is he, Robbie wonders – ten?

  Twelve? Then the boy’s confusion shifts to anger: ‘Look, mate, do you want your wallet or not?’

  Mate. The great distancer. Where had the boy learnt that from? It buys space. The boy might be older than he sounds.

  ‘Yes,’ Robbie says, ‘I did lose my wallet, and yes, I would like it back.’ He resists the urge to say that it was stolen from him, that he didn’t lose it at all, but he pushes on. ‘How did you get it?’

  There is a pause at the other end – a pause ridden, imagines Robbie, with guilt.

  But the boy says simply, ‘I found it.’

  ‘Of course,’ Robbie replies. He was always going to say that.

  ‘So, how do I get it back?’ he asks.

  ‘We can meet you,’ the boy says. It is practised, or at least considered.

  ‘You keep saying “we”, who’s the “we”?’ Robbie tries again.

  ‘Me and a friend.’ And then the boy says, an afterthought turned into a speech, ‘Look, mate, no worries. We found your wallet, we thought you might want it, and so we called, that’s all.

  Don’t be scared. Do you want your wallet or not?’

  But Robbie is scared.

  ‘Why don’t you post it? I can give you an address.’

  Freya is close beside him now, thrusting her face into his and shaking her head, her eyes wide, almost threatening. ‘No,’ she hisses into his free ear, ‘no!’

  Robbie hears the boy mutter a curse to himself, and senses him turning away from the mouthpiece. Then, after a break, the boy returns to the phone, irritated.

  ‘Look, Mr O’Hara. We don’t have any money, okay? It costs to post things, okay? All we wanted to do was give your wallet back, if you wanted it. Your address was on your licence and the telephone directory gave me your number. Shit, I’m just trying to do the right thing.’

  Robbie is losing the boy.

  ‘Okay, okay, okay,’ Robbie rushes to calm him. ‘Thanks, yeah, thanks very much. I appreciate it. I do. So wh
ere’s a good place?

  Where will we meet?’

  The boy answers after a long silence, but reluctantly, as if he is no longer engaged in the conversation, as if he doesn’t care.

  As if he has left.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says.

  ‘No, no. I appreciate the effort, mate.’ Mate, the great equaliser.

  ‘I’ll come and pick it up.’

  There is a long pause.

  ‘Alright then. We can meet in the park at the top of the cliff. You know the one near the bridge?’

  ‘The New Farm side? Wilson’s Park?’ Robbie asks.

  ‘You expect me to know the name do you?’ the boy replies sarcastically, and then stops.

  ‘The park near the bridge?’ Robbie repeats quickly, to keep him, then adds, ‘On Bowen Terrace?’

  ‘I don’t know names, I told you,’ the boy says with growing irritation.

  ‘I think I know it,’ Robbie says, fearing now the boy is close to hanging up. ‘It’s the one with grass, and a couple of benches, and there’s a cliff and the river in front of you, with the Story Bridge there on your right as you’re looking out over the river?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Okay, I know it. Well, what’s a good time? What about later this afternoon? Five?’

  ‘Yeah, okay then.’ The boy’s voice strengthens again. ‘See ya.’

  And he hangs up.

  Chapter Twelve

  The day has hardened, and there is glare coming off everything. The polished car bonnets, house windows, television aerials. The clouds have been burnt away, excised from the day. The blue above hollows out into black with too much looking.

  As the long day draws towards five o’clock they leave the house. Heat pours out of the car when they unlock it, as if they’ve opened the doors of a furnace. They wait a minute or so for the air to escape and Freya, revitalised, checks the film in the camera around her neck. His camera. They wind the windows down then get in, gasping still at the hot stale air scalding their throats. Robbie starts up and pulls the car into the street, steering through the narrow gap between cars parked on either curb, and then turning left into the major road.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Freya asks.

  ‘The park,’ he says.

  ‘You’re going the wrong way, Robbie.’

  ‘No, this is fine.’

  He is firm, will countenance nothing else. A river city is held together by its bridges, collects them like sutures across a wound.

  Freya retreats, and gazes out as he takes the car towards the city rather than to Kangaroo Point and over the Story Bridge, which crosses the river near the park which is their destination at New Farm. She keeps her silence, her hands playing with the camera in her lap until she is sure, until the car has passed out of West End and is about to cross another bridge – the Grey Street Bridge – and enter the city itself with its choking traffic and one-way streets.

  ‘Robbie,’ she says, ‘it would’ve been much quicker to go over the Story Bridge.’

  ‘I don’t drive over that bridge,’ he says, dropping gears, crunching them. Short, firm, factual. He is not joking.

  ‘You don’t go over the Story Bridge?’ she repeats, amazed.

  ‘Superstition.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ she says with sarcasm. ‘Come on, Robbie –

  what?’

  ‘Superstition. For some people it’s star signs. For me it’s that bridge.’

  Freya twists in her seat, the safety-belt pulling hard against her body as she looks at him and tries to penetrate what he is saying. Robbie’s gaze remains fixed on the road and traffic all around. In the distance, beyond him, between the office buildings, she sees the steelwork of the Story Bridge. His father’s bridge. The one his mother drove them across.

  They enter the Ivory Street tunnel and flash back into sunlight, emerging near Brunswick Street. At the change of lights Robbie turns up Brunswick, and then right into Harcourt, lined with its boarding-houses. At the end of this road the bridge is visible, filling the short horizon, so huge it appears to link the houses on either side. He drives slowly, the bridge growing as the houses fall away. The steel-girdered cross-work pulls him up the street. Magnetic. As if, despite everything, the bridge itself is his destination.

  At the end of Harcourt Street is Bowen Terrace and the park.

  Robbie stops the car by the side of the road and, still with some discomfort, pulls himself out.

  Freya remains in her seat, leaning forward, fingers tapping against the dashboard. She watches as Robbie crosses the terrace and sits down on one of the park benches. Shivering despite the heat, she reaches for the camera. She attaches the zoom lens, turns the camera on and trains it on Robbie, ready to photograph the scene. This is all she can do: make this attempt at certainty. Try to reclaim something. Everything is leeching away, draining from her. She reasons: if this is one of the men from the attack trying to extort money, I’ll photograph him. If it is the one, the mad one, then I’ll remember, I’ll call the police.

  They should have done that already, she thinks suddenly, and checks she has her mobile phone in her bag. What risks are they taking? Why are they here? To plug a hole, staunch a wound?

  * * *

  The afternoon light is still strong, and evening is an hour or more away. Behind him people jog past along the footpath, or walk home from work. Others, he hopes, look down from their apartment balconies. It is light and it is open and it is public.

  And Freya is watching from the car. Robbie waits, anxious.

  The park is small, a thin slice of rich-green grass sloping away from the street to the sheer drop of the cliff. There is a near undisturbed view from the park down to the river, and across it to the city. The cliff is fenced off, the bridge too.

  The bridge stands at his shoulder, to the right, filling the western sky, leaping off the cliff and into the space above the river. But he gives it nothing, looks away as he surveys the view.

  Below him the river. Always the river. Solid and muscular, carving its way through the city. Curling around the office towers of the business district, each of the houses of commerce marked by vast lettering, each tower placed into the city as if it were a piece on a board game. And the river makes its own claim, an old, slow, strong claim.

  A group of black shapes curves through the large sky before him; their mid-flight carping pierces the insidious din of traffic crossing the bridge. The crows pick their way through the air towards the bridge before dropping, and then dropping again, until they land in the high branches of a eucalypt in the park at the tip of Kangaroo Point, over the river.

  Across there, where the bridge sets itself down on the other side, the land has been moulded into a point by the river’s coursing.

  Over the millennia the river has deposited up-valley sand and soil on this point, as it has swept its way downstream to the ocean, so that now a sandy beach has grown there. As a child Robbie played on the flats of this beach, his feet squelching in the damp grey sands in search of small-boy treasures. Often the beach, and the river, would offer up bottles or pieces of tin or fishing net, and he would argue with school friends over these spoils. One year the beach became a camp for an army of blue soldier crabs, and none of the boys would venture onto it for fear the crabs would rise as one out of the myriad holes that dotted the beach, and surround them.

  Downriver from the point, long-abandoned jetties linger off the bank of the river, planks grey-bleached over darkened wooden pylons. They appear to him now like strange waterspiders standing deathly still in the shallows, waiting for prey.

  Beyond these, a marina has sprouted from the bank, and scores of sleek white yachts are moored at pontoons which rise and fall with the water.

  Above the gleaming white of these hulls and masts and yachtsmen’s leisurewear, the land on this eastern side of the point is now crowded with apartment buildings, a growing cluster of high-rise towers which compete with each other for river views. From where Robbi
e sits he can see the building where his parents live. If he were to look, if he were to count the floors from the bottom up, he could pick out their apartment, their balcony, their sliding glass doors, open or closed.

  Instead he looks, as always, for his figs. Brush strokes of green, emerald through lime through grey, speckled across the city below. He counts them off – the canopies in the streets and parks below – as if checking the health of the city, checking that everything is in place. Surveying his garden. He begins to lose himself, fig by fig, seeking them out in expanding circles.

  Interrupting the sweep of this vision, a camphor laurel has taken root on the edge of the cliff, just beyond the metal fencing.

  He stops at the tree, its solid girth, its roots tentacled over the cliff, its glossy pointed leaves. Across the deep grooves of its barked trunk, kids have sprayed their initials in black paint.

  BS and JC. He admires it reluctantly: tough and magnificent, imported from China via the Kew Botanic Gardens in London in the early years of the colonies. A landscape tree, an ornamental.

  But the gardeners lost control very early on. Now its colonisation of the east coast is unceasing: tireless, it has become a weed, poisonous to birdlife and fauna, narcotic, addictive.

  The wind shifts. The traffic noise on the bridge pulses louder and Robbie is drawn to the thudding of car tyres as they hit the expansion joints. He shudders, involuntarily, and has to catch his breath. The wind shifts once more and the traffic noise fades into its steady thrum.

  A small ferry makes its way upriver, against the tide.

  At the end of the park, there’s movement in his peripheral vision. A figure emerges, an adolescent boy. He has probably been watching Robbie for a while. As the boy approaches, Robbie inspects him, guesses he is twelve, thirteen at most. He wears a dark t-shirt, with fading blue jeans stained in places, bleached pale in others. A canvas army-disposal bag is slung over his shoulder, the strap crossing his chest. On his feet, where Robbie expected to see Nikes or thongs, the boy wears black school shoes, heavily scuffed. The leather toe of one shoe has sliced open where the boy has kicked against something sharp, and Robbie can see the soft white under-leather there. The boy’s hair is straight and brown and stuck together in clumps.