Alex Palmer - The Tattooed Man

In the pale light, Harold walked out the gate into the main yard, heading towards the kennel where his dog, Rosie, had spent the night chained up. Her enclosure was sheltered by an old moonah bush that was still holding out in the drought. Some twelve years ago his father had walked this same distance, unexpectedly falling into infinity when his heart had stopped mid-step. Since then Harold had supposedly shared the management of their property, Yaralla, with his older brother, Stuart. Almost as soon their father’s will was read and they were pronounced joint owners, Stewie had said, ‘We can mortgage the place now.’ ‘Like fuck we will,’ Harold had replied instantly, knowing through bitter experience that whatever money they raised jointly, Stewie would never repay his share of it. Instead the money would disappear on one of his scams. It would make money; Stewie’s scams always did. It was just that neither Harold nor the farm would see a cent of it.

Since that first day, he and his brother had grappled each other to immobility. Nothing could be done on the property without the agreement of the other. There had been no improvements other than those Harold had been able to pay for out of his own cash flow or smaller personal loans. Without sufficient credit, no substantial work could be done. Everything cried out for repair but now, in the drought, there was no money at all.

Harold opened the gate to Rosie’s enclosure and unchained her. She didn’t need feeding, there was still some dried food in her bowl. Meat she got in the evenings. Right now, she was anxious to stretch her legs. She trotted after him to the machinery shed where he parked his ancient white ute and leapt up into the cabin beside him.

Harold started the engine and drove out onto his property, some ten thousand acres on the edge of the Riverina. The landscape was so stripped of its vegetation, it had become an X-ray of itself. Out on the horizon, scattered trees shimmered in a dark line between the soil and the immense sky. This morning, Harold was following his routine of hand-feeding his stock. He was heading towards his north-eastern boundary across the paddocks that stretched around him as a barren patchwork. There was still water in the dams in that part of his property and he was pasturing his stock there before he faced the question of what to do when even this water ran out. The tray of the ute, where Rosie usually rode, was loaded with feed he could barely afford to buy. When worked, the red soil on his property broke down into dusty clumps; it varied in colour across the landscape from a pale dirt-pink to a dark and hot iron-red. For three years, he’d had no crops out of any of it. The future was as bleak and unending as the blue skies that rolled above him every day. He had stopped believing it would ever rain again.

After Harold had been driving for a short while, a structure came into view. It was the Cage, as he called it, a construction built by his brother six months ago along their most distant boundary. Its alien glass and steel glittered in the early light for some time before its outline hardened against the sky. The Cage was Harold’s sole failure to keep Stewie at bay. This singularity didn’t count for much. There could have been few failures more significant or more heartbreaking to him than this one.

On impulse, Harold drove over for a closer look. Always when he came out here, he hoped that somehow the Cage might have miraculously disappeared overnight. Always it was still there. With this woman’s death, maybe something had changed. The trees Stuart had cleared to build the thing still lay in heaps next to the high steel fence enclosing the broad acreage where they had once stood. Their dry leaves rattled in the early morning breeze. Other than the raucous calling of the crows, it was the only sound in the landscape. Harold came to a stop outside the locked gate and got out of the cabin. Rosie followed him and began to nose along the base of the steel fence. As always, there was no way in for either of them. He had no key to the gate. From the beginning, he had been locked out.

Harold remembered vividly the day six months ago when he had arrived here to see the bulldozers clearing the old-growth grey box eucalyptus trees that had once covered this low slope. When he’d tried to stop them, the drivers had ignored him. The man in charge had threatened him if he didn’t get out of their way. ‘This is my property, mate!’ Harold had shouted. ‘That’s not what we’ve been told,’ the man had said. ‘I’m taking my orders from Stuart Morrissey.’ He told his workers to keep going; the trees crashed down.

Harold had driven back to the farmhouse and rung Stuart. They had argued furiously. By the time Harold hung up, he’d realised he could only stop the bulldozers by going back with his shotgun and taking the law into his own hands. He wished he had. Daily he’d watched while the fences went up, the greenhouses were built, and then the water tanks had arrived and were filled with water trucked in from outside the district. Who had pockets deep enough to finance this? Not Stewie. Stewie’s own money was never spent on anyone except himself.

Once the Cage was finished, they had planted one crop in the open, which they had covered with netting, and presumably others in the greenhouses. Unlike his desolate harvest, these unnaturally irrigated crops had flourished. Away to Harold’s right was the wide access road the bulldozers had cut the first day they had come in. It ran along his fence line, connecting the Cage to the Coolemon Road, an all-weather gravel road that served as one of Yaralla’s boundaries. The gate between this private road and the public highway was always kept locked. It was something else for which Harold had no key. Despite this, other people came and went along this private road regularly. He often saw them late in the evenings, speeding against the horizon in their four-wheel-drives. Stewie had never told him what they did inside. When Harold asked his brother questions, he received threats in reply.

The little Harold knew about what went on inside the Cage he had found out by eavesdropping. Once this would have disturbed him, but Stewie had given him no other choice. These days he was glad to find out any little detail however he did it. It was this subterfuge that had allowed him to link Natalie Edwards to Stuart in the first place.

Less than a week ago, he had looked into his living room to see three unannounced visitors sitting there: Stuart, an older man with glasses and a middle-aged woman with artificially fair hair. Both these people had been strangers to him. All three were drinking his whisky, talking. It was late afternoon and the curtains had been drawn against the western sun. Seated in the shadows, they hadn’t noticed him, had kept talking.

‘Well, Jerome,’ the woman said, ‘from what we’ve seen today, we’re all ready to go. Everything’s come along nicely. Mind you, it’s a god-forsaken spot. Why would anyone want to live here?’

‘It’s the best place for it, Nattie,’ Stuart said. ‘How many people are going to see it on that boundary? The property next door’s run by a manager for some agribusiness. He won’t care.’

‘Stuart’s right. It’s a good spot. It’s working better than I’d hoped.’ Jerome spoke with a guttural accent Harold didn’t recognise. ‘We’ll sign the contracts in the next few days at the latest and then I’ll send the staff out to harvest. I want it all shipped to Jo’burg before the end of the month. They’ll find a location for the testing over there. Once we’ve signed, I’ll courier them their copy of the contract. But first I have to let the old man know we’re on schedule.’

‘Your people will have to get a wriggle on, mate, if we’re going to meet that deadline,’ Stuart said.