STATUE

It stuck in his craw. They’d said, So now the ol’ codger wants to see the Mother Country. Must be lookin’ for a wife … won’t find one down ’ere! It stuck in his craw, his bloody mates. He’d fought in Vietnam with one of them, he’d been a good neighbour to the others. Whenever something went wrong, he was around to lift the fallen fences, to get the seed in before it got too boggy, to get the harvest in before the summer storms wiped out the year’s gains. He was there for them and now they were taking the piss.

It wasn’t like he’d been out on the town looking for a missus. He wasn’t even in the habit of driving up to Kal to spend an hour with one of the working girls. But he could admit to himself that he was lonely. It was a long time between drinks and he was feeling it. The loneliness mainly. No kids to visit him. And just a few photographs of Val, whom he’d married and lost. He’d spread her ashes under the avocado trees. She’d planted and reticulated them herself. She’d said, Harry, you’ve got to diversify now … wheat and sheep are not the future. Avocadoes will grow a treat here.

But Val, we don’t have the water.

She’d persisted, and run water all the way from the house dam down to the saplings. Even in drought, he’d carted water to keep them alive. They were huge now. Almost tropical in their immensity. She had not lived long enough to see them bear their first fruit.

They were always at him. Not for the first decade, but after that. She’d have wanted you to move on, Harry, and It’s no good for your insides to keep it all in. They cast bets that he didn’t even wank in the long dark hours of the night when there were only the night-birds and the odd fox scream to keep him company. They never considered him weird, but just lost. A lost sheep, our ’arry.

And then he was gone overseas and his mates missed him. It’s strange not having the ol’ bastard around, they lamented. Drinking and yarning, they half realised they needed him to be just the way he was. They made wry, if slightly respectful, comments about their own domesticity and left it at that. They wondered if Harry would send them postcards. He’d never said that he would.

It took Harry a while to find his feet. He just stayed in his London hotel. He even had his meals in the hotel restaurant. He asked the waiter if it was Australian meat and the waiter looked down his nose at him. We feed the bloody world, mate, Harry said indignantly. He watched episodes of The Bill that weren’t due to be shown in Australia for another year, and that amused him. He even thought of sending his Vietnam vet mate a card outlining plots to come, just to give him the shits. Nothing worse than knowing the punchline, was his mate’s saying. Harry suppressed the urge, though sometimes it made him laugh.

Eventually he did go out to see the sights. He tried an open-top double-decker bus tour, but that didn’t work for him – he felt like a school kid. He was used to doing things his own way and making up his own mind. Big Ben and the Tower didn’t need the commentary for him to make sense of them. He’d read his history. He watched television. A lot of television, he thought, with a certain amount of guilt.

So he wandered London. The days went slowly. Too bloody long, this holiday. He’d allowed himself a month in London, then two weeks in Edinburgh, before heading back to the farm. He even thought of cutting it short.

He talked to the hotel concierge one morning about the possibilities for the day. The concierge asked which art galleries he’d visited. Why, none, he said brusquely, as if he’d been insulted. He wanted to say that galleries seemed effeminate, but as the concierge looked like a young man of the ‘other persuasion’, he kept it to himself. Harry was never one to intentionally hurt another person, whatever his personal views might be about their way of life. The concierge took the silence as a negative, and muttered the names of the big galleries before trailing off and asking Harry if he’d visited the London Zoo. Harry visited the London Zoo.

Inspired one morning, Harry decided to catch the train to Cambridge – to get out of London for the day. He wandered around the colleges, stared into the River Cam, tossed up whether to take a ride in a punt, had a pub lunch. Then he was at a loss. He wandered past King’s College … not being a song-and-dance man, he didn’t think he’d hang around for evensong. Sounds like a bunch of mewing cats, he thought. He’d heard them on television. He kept walking past Corpus Christi, though he didn’t recognise it as such – King’s stood out. Anyone would know it anywhere. Then past Peterhouse, a nondescript place, You’ve seen one you’ve seen ’em all. Then he came upon the Fitzwilliam Museum. A grand-looking structure for sure. He didn’t think about it, he just went in.

To tell the truth, he didn’t remember or care for much of what he saw. There was a vaguely rude pair of paintings – Before and After – that reminded him of a BBC period drama, but that was about it. Some of the armour and weaponry he found interesting. Then he wanted a coffee. He strolled past a white marble statue of a naked woman and vaguely registered it, as he’d vaguely registered others – similar-looking – in the gallery. He bought his coffee and again found himself staring at the statue. She was beautiful, he had to admit, but she didn’t do much for him. He wondered why he was fixed on it, though, and turned his chair slightly away. It’s not the eyes, he said to himself … she doesn’t really have any. It’s like she’s the living dead. He was uncomfortable with that. No, she’s alive, there’s that about it. Suddenly, he took it in his head to walk over and touch her skin. It looked so cold.

He touched her arm gently. Conscious that he was being watched as he did so. You probably weren’t meant to touch the artworks, he realised. He stood back. He studied her face-on. He leant forward and touched her lips. They were so cold they were warm. Her breasts beckoned him but he knew better. His face, so gnarled and damaged by the sun, reddened. He hadn’t felt that in thirty years. It’s just art, he yelled inside himself. It has no meaning, it doesn’t feed anyone, it’s not real. He tried to escape the gallery immediately, so flustered he couldn’t find the way out until he was directed.

Harry held off for three days before catching the train back to Cambridge. But it was a Monday and the gallery was closed. He clenched his fists. He searched around town and found a hotel for the night. He slept in his clothes, and unshaven and unbreakfasted, he was at the gallery at opening time. He went straight to the statue. He approached it … her from behind, and deftly ran his fingers over her buttocks, into the cleft, down around the cleat in the skin where the flesh of her bottom became the top of her leg. He leant forward and kissed the cold-hot stone. Before anyone could say anything or do anything about it, he ran his hands up from behind and gently fondled her breasts. It was over in a heartbeat – his heartbeat against her. Then he left the building with Sir … Sir! echoing behind him.

Within two days he was back in Australia on the farm, warding off the entreaties of his mates – phone call after phone call, Why are you ’ome so early, ’arry? Cat got ya tongue? Run amok over there, did ya? Threw the ol’ convict out? Sent him back home …

It had been a long and intensely hot summer. The avocadoes were so established they didn’t require reticulation, instead tapping water from somewhere deep. Avocadoes, he’d told Val, don’t have deep root systems – the heat knocks them around. They lose all their moisture. They’ve no future here, it’s too dry and what water is down there is salty. But these trees did grow, and when all else was parched and even the native species so suited to dry spells were dying, the avocadoes remained green and strong.

It’d been a good harvest of fruit, to top it all off. Harry had a ritual. The first fruit he picked, he ate and the last fruit he picked, he ate. That’s what Val had asked him to do. Harry, these trees will bear more fruit than you can imagine. I want you to eat the first and the last of the crop. He thought she might add ‘in remembrance of me’, as she had that kind of twisted sense of humour that so attracted him in the first place. His mates had loved that about her, and they always asked if he’d eaten the first and last fruits, and looked as if all the world was right when he confirmed he had done so, even though they’d add, Val wouldn’t mind if you moved on, ’arry.

*

So he ate the first fruit in the dry and the heat, and he did think of her. The flesh of the fruit was crisp and ripe at once. He tasted her and touched her with his mouth. Getting the harvest in was hard work. He always felt he deserved the last fruit. But this year he didn’t eat it. He took it from the heat inside the house, and placed it in the deep freeze. There were just some things he couldn’t explain to his mates. Some things that would always remain art.