The Unknown Terrorist (17 page)

The Doll slowly stretched out her arm. With the back of the phone she lifted the boot up. A swarm of blowflies rose with it, accompanied by the Chopin, now clear and loud. She moved closer. Just as she glimpsed inside the boot, the full force of the stench hit her. She jerked backwards as if she had been punched. The boot lid dropped and then bounced slightly back up. But in that fraction of a second the Doll had seen everything, including the stainless-steel tip of his prized Nokia protruding from his trouser pocket.

46

After some time she stepped back, raised the boot lid again and looked inside for a good minute. Tariq’s corpse lay curled up in the boot, clad in the same clothes in which she had met him only two nights before.

She tried to wave the blowflies away from his face, but her hand passed through the vibrating black cloud as through water. Tariq’s face was harrowed, a husk. His cheeks were hollow and sunken, like an old man’s, as though something
had been pulled out. There was a big scab of dried blood on his forehead. It had a tail that ran down the side of his face onto the boot floor where it formed a coagulated puddle that in the darkness glistened dully like wet bitumen.

The Doll smiled as she had taught herself to smile when things were unpleasant and she didn’t want anyone to know what she was feeling. She forced herself to hold her smile as she looked through the blowflies at his still-open eyes that she wished were not open, at his slightly swollen lips, at the whiteness of his skin that did not seem that of an adult but of a child, a beautiful child sleeping soundly after the longest of days.

The Bulgari Ipno was gone from his left wrist. But it was his right hand lying open and outstretched across his belly that undid her. Those gentle fingers that she could still feel in her and in her mouth were now oddly stiff and frightening.

She fell to her knees, hands on the boot sill, and vomited what little she had in her stomach. She knelt in the filth and the stench and the wet heat of the alleyway, head dangling between her outstretched arms, dribbling strings of green bile, trying to get the sensation of his fingers out of her mouth.

Somewhat unsteadily, she got to her feet, shuffled back between the car and the wall, and walked out of the alley. On the street the full white glare of the day hit her like a spotlight in the club. She felt dazzled. It felt like a punch and she had to take a half-step backwards to get her balance. Her phone rang, she switched it off. It was difficult to breathe the oven-like air. Her mouth still tasted foully of
bile; her eyes were still full of blood, there was blood everywhere; the world seemed to need it, thrive on it; up and down the street people seemed to have trouble seeing and breathing, their eyes and throats were so full of it. She would not go to her flat now. She could get the money later, sometime soon. But for now, she felt too frightened and needed to get away. She swallowed another Valium 5. Not having any water, she sucked on her fingers to force the tablet down.

After a time, it was all good.

She raised her head slightly, as if she were about to start another show on the table, gave herself over to the sense of oblivion that bright light always brought out in her, and turned away from her apartment block. She caught a train from the Cross to Redfern. There were cops with guns everywhere in the train stations; their eyes darted back and forth, she could smell the apprehension. But the Doll felt momentarily without fear. She expected them to shoot her at any moment and part of her hoped they now would and part of her no longer cared if they did.

47

Wilder said nothing when she opened the door and saw the Doll. She hustled her in as quickly as possible and then slammed the door shut.

Inside, Wilder’s home was as ever: Max’s toys everywhere, a chalkboard, the mess of a family, telly rumbling on in the background. Only Wilder was changed. There was no gin, neither Tanqueray nor UDL. Nor were there any of Wilder’s
interminable stories about herself that the Doll listened to as others do talkback radio.

“He’s at a mate’s,” was all Wilder said when the Doll looked around for Max. Neither knew what to say next.

Wilder finally came out with it.

“Look,” she said, “I can do something with your hair, but wouldn’t it be better to turn yourself in before this shit gets any worse?”

The Doll said nothing.

“I just don’t get it,” said Wilder. “It’s a fuckup, sure, but in the end it’ll be clear that you’re innocent. Why won’t you trust them?”

But the Doll was staring at the tv, where a politician was talking, with a banner running across the bottom of the screen declaring TERRORISTS STILL ON RUN. SYDNEY ON HIGH ALERT. He was a large man who had slightly narrowed his eyes, as if he were trying to read an eyesight chart but was having trouble with the finer lines.

“As leader of the Opposition,” an invisible interviewer was now saying, “what do you say to government claims that your party is soft on terror?”

The politician leant slightly forward, as if trying to focus better on that tantalising, elusive eyesight chart.

“Let me just say this: we are not going soft.” He made an emphatic movement with his hand. “Terrorists are not Australians. Australians are decent people. Let me just say also that we welcome calls to change the law to strip any Australian citizen of their citizenship, whether they be native born or naturalised, if they are involved in anti-Australian activities. Either you are with Australia or you
are no longer Australian and have lost your right to the rights of other citizens.”

“My God,” said Wilder, then swung to another station where a current affairs show anchor was talking.

“Does your government have a shoot-to-kill policy?” said the anchor, and the screen cut to the prime minister who, Wilder realised, was being interviewed.

“We have an appropriate policy which—” The prime minister never got to finish, for Wilder had already changed stations again. But on the next channel the same armed police were surrounding Tariq’s apartment building.

“This is insane,” whispered Wilder, once more pointing the remote at the tv with the intention of switching it off, but the Doll pulled her arm down.

“Let it play,” she said. “I have to watch.”

And so standing together they watched the same footage run again—the same bomb in the same kid’s backpack; the same bad photograph of the same bearded man in Arabic-looking dress; the same slow-motion grainy images of Tariq and the Doll hugging each other. The repetitive images clicking over filled the tv like loose change filling an empty pokie.

The Twin Towers fell again; the same children’s bodies were laid out once more in Beslan; the same man or woman dressed in black brandished the same machine gun; the Doll continued dancing naked. And there were new scenes—a murky London tube train moments after it had been bombed; the Sari nightclub burning after the Bali bombing; wounded being taken away from the Madrid train bombing, the montage culminating in a shot that zoomed in on the
Sydney Opera House before blowing out to white, a cheap effect accompanied by an ominous rumble.

The Doll closed her eyes.

When she opened them, she saw Osama bin Laden. George W. Bush. Missiles being launched. Men in robes firing grenade launchers. Great buildings exploding into balloons of fire. Women covered in blood. Hostages about to be beheaded. New York! Bali! Madrid! London! Baghdad! The Doll disintegrating into dancing squares of colour, herself pixelated, smiling a smile that was never hers.

A Fujitsu air conditioner ad came on and Wilder switched the tv off.

“It’s like when I bought my Subaru Forester,” said Wilder after a few moments’ awkward silence, “and all we could see for weeks after were other Subaru Foresters—parked on the street, driving through the city, stopped at lights. But there are other cars, Gina, and there are other stories.”

This was small comfort to the Doll. There was, she knew, much else on the tv, other headlines in the paper, other voices on the radio talking about other things. But all the Doll could see was her face, her name, all she could hear was one more opinion about her. And it was seizing her like a cold current and taking her somewhere she didn’t want to go, just as the rip had carried Max out to sea.

“I’m not a car, Wilder, and this isn’t another story,” she said, lifting up a copy of that day’s
Telegraph
. “Look here.” And there, on the third page, was an article that declared “the story of the homegrown terrorist cell is shaping up to be the story of the year”.

“And how’s it end?” the Doll asked. “Do I get shot or
what? You tell me, Wilder. It can hardly end up as a mistake. That’s not the story of the year—that’s an embarrassment.”

Wilder went quiet.

“It happens, Gina. They go crazy for a few days, then they move on like dogs. Besides,” she said, picking up a
Sydney Morning Herald
and brandishing it like a sacred oracle, “not everyone’s against you. There’s something here saying how there’s a climate of hysteria that could lead to innocent people being persecuted.”

“Could?” said the Doll incredulously. “What’s with the fucking ‘could’?”

“It is here,” said Wilder leafing through the pages as endless, as indecipherable, as irrelevant, as a phone directory, “somewhere.” She gave up. “I’ll find it later and cut it out for you.”

“Wilder, no one cares about a shitty article lost in there. It’s like throwing a corpse in the harbour,” said the Doll. An image sprang into her mind of Fung’s dead face staring out of a wheelie bin. She pointed at the
Sydney Morning Herald
. “You’re the only person I know who reads it. Everyone else is like me—they just look at the
Telegraph
headlines and watch Richard Cody and listen to Joe Cosuk.”

She never spoke to Wilder like this. Both felt a little stunned. With not a word more, Wilder led the Doll into her bathroom. Haircutting was one of a number of unexpected skills Wilder possessed, having done two years of an apprenticeship in a salon, before tossing it in to go to university, before in turn tossing that in to go work with a boyfriend in his landscaping business.

Wilder bleached the Doll’s hair blonde, making the Doll
laugh as she worked. Any story was welcome now. As a hairdresser, Wilder said she was made for landscaping, telling tales of perms gone bad and highlights turned technicolour. For all the stories she told against herself, Wilder proved surprisingly able, trimming the Doll’s hair into a short bob, shaping it with a slant running down the sides, so that it accentuated the Doll’s cheekbones and made her face look different, less heart shaped than the images being run in the papers and on television.

When Wilder had finished, the Doll asked her if she could have a bath. Wilder’s home had an unrenovated bathroom, which meant it had a real bath, deep and made of steel. The Doll spun the hot water tap and the room filled with steam. Then she cooled the bath just enough to make it possible to sit in without scalding herself. When it was finally ready, the Doll stepped into the bath and gave herself over to the blessing of water. And though the air was almost intolerably hot and humid, she loved this feeling of letting her body return to water, to which it seemed always to have belonged.

After a while, she felt better. If she craned her neck and twisted, she could catch half a reflection of her head in the mirror. She was pleasantly surprised at how different she now looked. And not only that, she thought, sinking back in the bath, no one knew her name anyway. What had happened wasn’t all that good, but perhaps Wilder had a point, for nor was it all bad. After a time, she dozed a little, heard Wilder go out to get Max and come back, and woke when the bath was cooling and night was falling and the room darkening.

There was a knock at the door. It was Wilder, saying that while the Doll had been asleep,
Undercurrent
had been on. Richard Cody had named her as “the Black Widow”. There
hadn’t really been that much else that was new, though, said Wilder. There was to be an investigative special about it all the following night.

The Doll said nothing in reply. She turned the hot water tap with her big toe. She held a foot under its steaming flow, trying to lose herself in the pain, yet it was impossible to keep it there for longer than a few seconds. She let the bath warm back up, sank back and dozed off again in its pleasant waters.

But her dream was anything but pleasant.

Savage dogs were running at her. They had no flesh on their faces. The Doll saw that it was their nature to hurt. Again and again they ran past her, as if they could not see her. And then she saw herself reflected in the bathwater with a fleshless dog’s face, and with that face she was kissing Tariq and flies were crawling from between his cold lips … there was a knock on the bathroom door and she awoke.

“Everything okay?” asked Wilder.

48

After her bad dream, the Doll summoned the energy to get out of the bath, dress in Wilder’s batik dressing gown and make her way down the dark, toy-littered hall to where Wilder was standing at the door of Max’s bedroom, gazing inwards.

“Sometimes I stand here for an hour or more,” Wilder said softly, without turning to the Doll. “Just looking and listening.” They both watched over Max lying curled up on his bed, his flesh the thinnest of coverings over a question mark
of a body, the hush of the room occasionally broken by the snuffles and slight sounds, almost yelps, he made in his sleep. “It’s my happiest time of day,” Wilder said. “There’s a peace in it.”

The Doll said nothing. She put her arm in Wilder’s. As they stood together in the half-light of the hall, watching a child sleeping, the Doll hoped for this moment—that would soon be forgotten and unknown and mean nothing—never to end.

“They have no words for it,” said Wilder finally, still without turning to look at the Doll. “No one can name it and no one can take it from you.”

“They can take everything from you, Wilder,” the Doll said, sensing that for a second time she was going to consciously disagree with Wilder. She spoke in a hush, so that Max would not be woken. “They make these things up, they take something innocent about your life and say it proves you’re guilty, they take a truth and they turn it into a lie. How can they do that? Like, there’s this guy today at the ferry terminal, reading these lies about me in the paper, and he’s shaking his head and swearing about me. I knew he believed them because up until yesterday I was like him, just hanging around, waiting for this or that, swallowing all the crap I read and heard, and then just puking all the crap back up.”