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.
‘I’ve already got the shipping lined up,’ Nattie said. ‘When I told them they were dealing with Natalie Edwards, they sat up and paid attention. They’ll move quickly.’
‘My people will do it anyway, don’t you worry,’ Jerome replied. ‘I want to replant with a new round of crops as soon as we can. We have to move this program along. The whole setup here took too much time.’
‘Who’s that?’
Nattie spoke. She had seen Harold standing in the doorway.
‘That’s Harry,’ Stuart had replied, frowning.
‘How long has he been there?’ Jerome asked.
‘Don’t know. How long have you been standing there, Harry?’
‘I just got here. How long have you been here?’
Stuart ignored him.
‘Don’t worry about Harry,’ he said to the others. ‘He’s harmless. He never does anything.’
Rather than be shut out of his own living room, Harold walked in and sat down. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
This was greeted with silence. Stuart made no introductions. All three had stared at Harold as if he was the intruder. The wind was shaking at the curtains while heat and dust hung in the air. Jerome glanced at Natalie and Stuart and then got to his feet.
‘Time to get out of this dump. We’ve got a plane waiting on the airstrip.’
‘Don’t forget your keys, Jerome,’ Stuart said. ‘You don’t want to leave those behind.’
Jerome laughed. He picked up a complicated set of keys attached to a keyring in the shape of a heavy bronze football. Nattie and Stuart stood up too, also collecting their wallets and keys.
‘Dinner at Pittwater for the contract-signing, people,’ Nattie said. ‘I’ll get it catered. I think we should celebrate.’
‘Turn on the champagne,’ Stuart said. ‘It’ll be worth it.’
‘You can pay for that, Stewie. Your share will stretch to it.’
After pocketing his keys, Jerome had picked up the whisky bottle and screwed the lid back on. He made to walk out with it. Harold reached over and pulled it out of his hand.
‘That’s my whisky, mate. I’ll keep it, thanks.’
‘Keep it,’ Jerome said. ‘It’s rotgut.’
‘You’re a possessive little man considering all you own is dirt,’ Nattie said in passing.
Now, some six days later, this woman was dead but for what reason Harold couldn’t know. He looked at the Cage’s high fences, strung along the top with electrified wires marked by signs that read Danger. There were no strangers here to warn off, just the birds who couldn’t read and whose bodies lay scattered at intervals along either side of the fence. There was nothing he could do about this. He called Rosie to him and drove away.