The Comfort of Figs Read online

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  October 1939. A drop of rain falls heavily from the sky, bursts against a steel girder, explodes into fragments. A man feels the splash on the back of his neck, and straightens from his work. Looks to the sky, the grey cloud swelling now above him.

  ‘Wet steel!’ he cries. ‘Wet steel!’

  The cry catches. First one man, then another, till the bridge rings with the sound of men calling. The steel hums with the vibrations of rain and men’s cries. They secure their tools and descend from their stagings and their platforms. Out of their harnesses and bosun-belts. The men desert the bridge like ants before a storm. Surrender it to the weather. The slippery, wet, dangerous steel. They abandon it and converge on the dressing sheds, one on either side of the river. They drip with moisture – their sweat and the rain and the particles of raindrops which have detonated against the steelwork in their falling, fragments ricocheting onto girders and cross-pieces and men.

  The doorway to the shed on the Kangaroo Point peninsula is a bottleneck. Jack O’Hara and the other men jostle against each other to get through the door and out of the rain.

  O’Hara enjoys the closeness, the roughness and suddenness of the intimacy, the shared purpose. Inside the men sit on benches and catch their breath while the rain falls through the open doorway and hammers on the corrugated-iron sheeting above them.

  In time the downpour softens, lightens, and talk becomes possible.

  ‘What would you do if you slipped, Jack?’ one of the men asks O’Hara.

  ‘I’d be looking for you to catch me, mate,’ he replies.

  ‘Well, I’d be looking the other way, so that’d do you no good.’

  ‘You’d be a bastard of a mate then, wouldn’t you,’ O’Hara snorts.

  ‘What would you do though?’ the man persists.

  O’Hara is young, twenty, and already his word counts. But he knows the limits of his influence. He will not be drawn into giving an opinion on this, which he senses is beyond him.

  ‘Look at that thing around Irish’s throat,’ he says, pointing to the metal cross hanging from Patrick Flanagan’s neck. ‘There’s your answer. I’d get in as many Hail Marys as I could.’

  Flanagan the Irishman laughs with the other men. He’d have growled if it was anyone else who’d said it. Though none but O’Hara would have risked it. Flanagan cuts O’Hara slack, sees something of himself in the younger man’s spirit, something beyond the tribal bond of their names.

  ‘Would you live if you fell, but?’ Peter Carleton asks, breathless, arriving late after tying up his boat under the wharf. Carleton is the youngest, still a boy at sixteen, this question the thing, right now, he wants to know. ‘Would you live, but?’ he says again, his head thrust forward off his chest at an awkward angle, adolescent and intense. The question is anyone’s to answer, though he longs for O’Hara to take it up.

  ‘It depends on how you fell, lad,’ someone says.

  They debate ways of falling. One of them proposes rolling into a ball.

  ‘Stupid,’ heavy, square-shouldered William Hodges challenges.

  ‘It’s like concrete, the river is, when you hit it. If you rolled yourself up into a ball, you’d bounce like one too.’

  ‘Feet first,’ someone else offers. ‘Like you’re pencil-diving.’

  ‘Break your legs.’ Hodges again.

  ‘You might break your legs but they’ll mend. And if they don’t, then you’re losing your legs to save the rest of you.’

  ‘What do you reckon, Irish?’ O’Hara puts the question.

  They turn towards the dark-haired, grizzled, bull of a Celt.

  There is nothing he does not know about bridge construction.

  He’s travelled the world following them. The Harbour Bridge in Sydney, the Golden Gate in San Francisco, migrating from bridge to bridge following some hidden compass. Now Brisbane.

  He has seen the world, is their link to the greater part of it. If there is a way to fall, the Irishman will know.

  ‘Boys, there’s no one way,’ he says at the end of an expectant silence. He plays it, the silence, his accent finding the time of the rain falling soft now on the roof. ‘I’ve seen a man pissed as a newt walk right off the end of the decking without knowing it. He fell near a hundred feet. Still strolling, he was, putting one foot in front of the other when he hit and sure enough he walked away without a bruise. I’ve seen another man take a thirty-foot fall and never walk again. Paralysed for life, the poor bastard, his legs driven up either side of his spine. There’s no one way,’ he concludes. ‘You could do worse than pray.’

  ‘But what would you do?’ O’Hara asks him.

  Irish looks none of them in the eyes now, his glance his own.

  He understands, at moments like this, he is a seer to them. He is reluctant but feels their need.

  ‘I’d dive in head first. The prettiest swan dive you ever saw.’

  ‘And have your skull pushed through your shoulders?’

  Hodges shakes his head, unconvinced, emboldened.

  ‘You weren’t listening, Billy-boy, were you?’ Irish says. ‘You’re a slow one. There’s no sure-fire way. But I figure it like this,’ and Irish looks around the tight room, meets their eyes one by one, as many as he can. ‘If you pull the dive off, if you slide into the water – fingers hands arms head shoulders torso,’ he touches the parts of his body as he names them, elevating them into things of beauty. ‘If you get it right, then you walk away. If you don’t, then I figure this. The impact of your head on the water will kill you.’

  ‘Or knock you out,’ says Carleton spontaneously.

  ‘Or knock you out, boy,’ Irish concedes. ‘But if you’re unconscious you drown. Look, boys, I’m not saying you’d survive. You may not. But there’s no middle ground if you dive, there’s no lifetime of sitting in a wheelchair.’

  There is a silence among the men as the pitiless choice Irish offers begins to resonate, expands and fills what space is left inside the dressing shed. The rain falls heavily once more and the beating on the roof starts again. In time the men break into smaller conversations, a layer of murmur below the drumming of the rain.

  ‘It depends on the water,’ Karl ‘Charlie’ Stahl says to himself. ‘It depends on the wind.’

  But Carleton is close enough to hear.

  ‘What do you mean, Charlie?’ Carleton asks, all eagerness, the world and its intricacies waiting to be understood and all it takes is to ask.

  ‘If the water is flat, then it’s like Billy says – hard as concrete and it won’t matter how you hit, especially from our heights.

  But if there is a wind . . . and if the surface of the water is broken up . . . then your chances are better. Much better. Then it’s just water, and there’s no tension in the surface. You’re a better chance of sliding into the water.’

  Carleton catches on, enthralled. ‘So all you have to do is break the tension, break the surface?’

  Stahl watches Carleton think, watches Carleton’s fervent brain turning. Says nothing just yet, lets him whir.

  ‘So if you’re falling,’ Carleton says after a moment, ‘if you’re in mid-air, the thing to do is to throw something in front of you.’

  Carleton throws an imaginary object out in front of him, acting this out.

  Stahl smiles.

  Carleton continues. ‘Your shoe, or a coin. Even that would do it, wouldn’t it? You reach down and toss a penny from your pocket so it hits the water before you do. Hits the water, breaks it up, gets a ripple going. Is that it? Is that the trick?’

  And Carleton looks across at Stahl, looks across with huge excited triumphant eyes, waiting for his response, some reward for working out a puzzle.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it, Charlie? I’ve got it, haven’t I, Charlie? Come on, tell me.’

  Stahl says nothing. He simply reaches into his pocket in answer, slow and deliberate. When his hand slides out again there is a piece of steel in it, five inche
s long, grey, mushroomheaded.

  And Carleton understands. For a long moment the rivet rests in Stahl’s open palm, a key to some esoteric knowledge, as if it is imbued with power, as if it is a secret Carleton has now received.

  Chapter Two

  O’Hara and Stahl rise. O’Hara is up first. Always. He takes pride in it, reads in it a sign of natural authority. Or that his body will bend to his will. He is first to survey the new day, to take what bearings it might offer, to set its course. ‘It’s blowy, lads,’ he’d say after an overnight shift in the weather, or ‘Big day ahead of us,’ or ‘What did you get up to last night, Sullivan?

  Something you wouldn’t want your mother to know?’

  O’Hara is already dressed and has sniffed the air outside his own bedroom window when he turns the handle of Stahl’s door and enters without knocking. He leans over the bed where Stahl sleeps, leans close over the other man’s face to measure his breathing, to watch the movement of his eyelids, to read what dreams might be projected onto their inner screen. O’Hara senses Stahl not far from waking, and leans closer over his friend, feeling the touch of Stahl’s night breath cool against his own freshly shaven cheek. O’Hara reaches further and gently pinches one of Stahl’s ear lobes, a delicate pressure. It wakes him.

  Stahl doesn’t object, though he would never enter O’Hara’s room like this. O’Hara takes his own permission, shapes relationships with men so that no consent is needed, or given.

  The others like it when O’Hara enters rooms in this way, joins private conversations, gives them nicknames which take hold, become currency. There are intimacies O’Hara takes that would be intrusions by others.

  They do not speak. O’Hara has withdrawn to the chair by the window as Stahl props himself up on an elbow and shakes his head to rid himself of the night’s residue. O’Hara gazes from the chair into the half-dark beyond the window, as Stahl dresses.

  A possum screeches in the night, its mating hisses coming in through the window from the branches of the mango tree in the yard next door. O’Hara takes the glass of water from the bedside table and tosses it through the darkness towards the tree.

  The sound of water on leaves and branches cracks the night, the first booming shock followed by a falling clatter as drops of water cascade through the foliage to the ground. There is a fresh possum hiss, fierce, followed by a scrambling of fur and short legs through the tree, and into the next and soon it is gone, and O’Hara is smiling to himself.

  Then, with the darkness thinning, and the echoes of possum-flight still hanging in the air, a murder of crows starts up. ‘Black dingoes’, the way they sit eternally alert on a pole or fence or rim of a forty-four gallon drum and lift their heads back to caw, their cunning, their faultless sense of danger. Stahl lathers to the sound of two crows plotting some intrigue in the street outside, slaps water onto his face from a basin while O’Hara and the black birds mark out their territory, runs a blade across his cheek as a third crow arrives. Stahl finishes and looks around for his towel.

  ‘Charlie,’ O’Hara whips his name at him, the first word of the day, and Stahl turns his head to see the towel flung through the air towards him. He catches it and holds it to his face in the one movement before tossing it back to O’Hara, who drapes it over the windowsill again. In the moment it takes Stahl to tie the long laces of his boots O’Hara has left the room and is waiting at the front door of the boarding house, the crows wheeling away from him through the crepuscular light.

  Into the half-dark they step, the two of them, the sound of their bootfall crisp and full as they stride along the footpath down the Harcourt Street hill. For a moment these men and their boots are one. O’Hara and Stahl stretch their legs into Brunswick Street and lean into the slow hill, the day gathering strength at their backs, the bridge before them emerging, slowly, from the night.

  O’Hara stands on a wooden platform of six-inch planks, the platform mounted on top of the bridge’s northern shoulder.

  Stahl beside him, the river three hundred feet below.

  O’Hara loves the height. The power, the possibilities, the close horizon. Especially the horizon. He loves this view of the edge of the world. He looks out along the river to the silvery haze of the bay, and the elongated sand islands thirty miles away. Islands which protect his town from the Pacific. Across the morning, clouds stretch themselves flat and the sun crawls up and over them. The day has begun, has shrugged off its lateness and he is there to greet it. O’Hara sucks it in – the morning, the view, the height – and rubs the back of his right hand hard against his nose till the skin between lip and nose burns with the friction of it.

  He owns this country. No one, no one, he feels, perched on the northern shoulder of the bridge, the working day still ahead of him, owns it like him.

  A single fishing trawler returns from its night’s work, motors in on the dying tide, noses towards its berth. Each morning this boat and its Greek captain leave and return alone, keeping different hours from the rest of the fleet. O’Hara gathers a ball of spit from his chest, gathers it long and deep and guttural, and holds it in his mouth as the trawler nudges closer.

  O’Hara measures the breeze – easterly, and slight. He pauses, counts to himself, then launches his spittle into the air with a sharp whip of his head and neck, the spit tumbling over itself down towards the trawler. O’Hara leans forward to watch it, the globule shrinking with the distance, though big enough still for him to see the trawler slide safely under it before it hits the river and is gone. Lucky bastard, he thinks, and considers the correction he needs to make next time. Trial and error: the weighing of variables, experimentation and the accumulation of results, the precision of the calculation. The science of spitting.

  O’Hara looks along the line of the bridge to the other, twin shoulder, a second collarbone of steel. From where they stand he and Stahl can see the perfect line of the steel chord dropping away down the sweet sloping descent of the northern cantilever span, before levelling out into the flat of the suspended span.

  But then ending. Stopping abruptly at the narrow gap between the two halves of the bridge, as if the two shoulders are waiting for a neck.

  Mirror images, the two halves have been growing simultaneously towards each other from opposite banks of the river for a thousand days. There is only the smallest of spaces between them now – a single remaining section to be swung into place, a mere morning’s work.

  And yet now that they are so close they are told they must wait.

  Ambition blows like a wind at his back, fills him, keeps him awake at night.

  O’Hara’s grandfather arrived from Ireland at Maryborough, a few hundred miles up north. The man arrived hungry, the stench of bad potatoes still in his nostrils as he disembarked.

  He, and then his son – Jack’s father – Roberts both, settled into the timber country to the north, logging the bush, clearing the land and selling the wood. Hoop-pine for floorboards, cypress and silky oak for cabinets, she-oak for wharf-piles, spotted gum for planking and buggy shafts. Timber-getters and timbercutters, and then briefly farmers with failed crops of bananas, before returning to the forests. His family cut their way south to Brisbane, that’s how O’Hara sees it. Cut their own path over fifty years down to the city. But in the city, where O’Hara was raised, he took up a trade, became a boilermaker, learnt to work steel.

  With steel came a new knowledge, a knowledge that belonged to the future. Where his father and grandfather had known timber, he knew steel; where they built houses, he would build bridges; where they built settlements, he would build cities. And this bridge – what an opportunity, what a prize!

  O’Hara claimed it, not only for himself, but for all the O’Haras.

  Because he understood history and the arrowhead of its trajectory.

  He understood that you stand on the shoulders of those who’ve gone before. Here he was, third generation, perched at the highest point in the city, the work of his own hands. Jack O’Hara, boilermaker
to the sky.

  A high-flying crow passes above O’Hara and Stahl, between them and the rising sun, full of shadow, spreading it as it goes.

  Stahl calls out to the bird as it passes, ark, ark, imitating its sound, but the crow ignores him and continues on its way. O’Hara sweeps his eyes one last time across the horizon, taking in the space more than any detail.

  ‘Too clear,’ he says to Stahl.

  Stahl looks out, blue-eyed, at the low cloudbank on the eastern horizon, and the wisps of white cloud which soon will be burnt away. But it is through his hands – long-fingered and beautiful despite the work – that Stahl understands things, through his hands that objects take their shape. Now Stahl runs his right forefinger along a girder, slowly, the pad of flesh pressing against the steel. Gentle, firming, then brushing soft again as his finger rubs against the steel’s surface, working the steel, finding the weight of the cloud on the steel. It is spontaneous, unthinking, but practice for later when he will take up his pencil and draw charcoal on paper, capturing the shape of cloud through his fingers.

  ‘There’s too much light,’ O’Hara says again. ‘It’ll get too hot, too quickly. It won’t happen today.’

  O’Hara speaks with authority, as if he is responsible for more than heating rivets. As if this is O’Hara’s decision to make, and not the Canadian steel engineer who is probably below them somewhere already measuring the temperature in half a dozen places along the bridge. Something suddenly dawns on O’Hara.

  ‘That’s why they’ve got him here – Lawrence.’

  ‘What?’ says Stahl, his hand now stilled.

  ‘That’s why Lawrence’s here,’ O’Hara exclaims. ‘So if it’s a stuff-up, if they’re out and the ends won’t join, they’ll have someone to blame! Hah!’ he laughs. ‘Poor bastard. The entire city will be on his back if it goes wrong.’

  Chapter Three