The Unknown Terrorist (2 page)

She caught a taxi to Bondi and as she rode between the tall buildings under a blue and brilliant sky, her eyes filled with tears: for no clear reason she felt happy and small happinesses she allowed herself.

At the beach she went swimming, lay on the sand, let herself fill with sun. She took pleasure in feeling her breasts spreading in the towelling beneath which the sand firmed; in smelling suntan oil and wet sand and air salty from the sea and acrid from the outfall sewage frothing to a latte on distant points.

As she turned her head sideways, one ear on the beach,
one open to the sky, the roar of the waves became louder, the squeals of children a floating accompaniment that began to disappear as she lost her body and mind in the regular swoop and wash of the waves; it was a dream, a dream in which life was worth living after all.

Faraway, she could see a cloud, the only one in the sky. It looked like … but it didn’t really look like anything, just a slow-moving cloud, beautiful and alone. It kept changing, like the world, and, like the world, it was indescribable.

A nearby radio ran the same news it always seemed to run and its repetition of distant horror and local mundanity was calmly reassuring. More bombings in Baghdad, more water restrictions and more bushfires; another threat to attack Sydney on another al-Qa’ida website and another sportsman in another sex scandal, a late unconfirmed report that three unexploded bombs had been discovered at Sydney’s Homebush Olympic stadium and the heatwave was set to go on, continuing to set record highs, while here at the beach, waves rolled in, crashed, and rolled out again, taking all this irrelevant noise with them, as they always had, as they always would.

The radio said: “Live the dream!”

And wasn’t that just what she was doing?

There was nothing on earth she wanted at that moment, nothing she felt denied her that she wished to have, no ambition she felt unfulfilled. She desired neither friends nor a man, not money nor clothes nor to be other than who she was. The bad she had known seemed not important. Her body felt neither skinny nor fat, neither weary nor spent, nor excited, nor in need of exercise. She was not beautiful or ugly, but felt her body existed only to receive the gift of this life, and
everything at that moment seemed good. It was enough to hear the waves crash and roll, to pour sand from one hand to the other and look at the falling grains.

The radio said: “Congratulations, Australia! We want to thank you with a knockdown sale on our bathroom accessories!”

She dozed, awoke, watched the beautiful surfies in their long boardies and the clubbies in their budgie smugglers, the gays with their tight bods, the girls with their muffin tops poking out proud as can be, the old men with tea bag bellies strutting, and the old women with bodies like weary pavs sagging in the heat, just sitting, watching; breasts and arses and wedding tackle all hanging in such wild disarray and the sun shining like there’s no tomorrow and over it all the waves returning the world to some other, better, larger rhythm—who couldn’t feel happy as a bird and, as her friend Wilder would say, as free as a fart with all this?

And everything about the beach at that moment blended into something that seemed delightful and comforting, and the name the Doll gave it all was Sydney, and she felt she understood why many had come to love it so.

6

She was dozing when her phone rang. It was Wilder, saying she and Max were at Bondi, that it was a beautiful day, and why didn’t the Doll come and join them for a swim?

“It could take me a while,” the Doll said, standing, picking up her towel and bag, and scanning the beach, “what with the traffic and all.”

She began walking through the throngs of people and spotted the five-year-old Max digging a hole less than a hundred metres away, his mother Wilder lying next to him, majestic and brazen as ever, dark brown and topless.

The Doll rang Wilder back and asked her exactly where she was on the beach. As Wilder began issuing directions, the Doll snuck around behind her and continued talking, until her mouth was right up next to Wilder’s mobile phone. Wilder, who was in a splendid mood, turned, looked up with her unforgettable face and shrieked with delight. Max swung around in his hole and, on seeing the Doll, scrambled out and threw himself into her arms.

As the Doll cuddled and tickled Max, the two women chatted. Max soon grew bored and went back to his hole. Wilder told the Doll how she had been invited to be in a Mardi Gras float, Dykes with Dicks, that night. As far as the Doll knew, Wilder wasn’t a dyke, but Wilder said someone had taken ill and a friend had rung that very morning and asked her to make up the numbers. Last minute though it might have been, Wilder viewed it as an irresistible proposal, and now it was all arranged, with Max going to his father’s.

“Off with the boys tonight,” said the Doll, whose view of the hole was obscured by Wilder’s body. “Eh, Max?”

There was no answer. The Doll looked up and Wilder twisted around. But Max was no longer in his hole, and was nowhere to be seen. Wilder jumped up, scanned the crowds and then the sea.

“Oh my God,” said the Doll. “He’s caught in the rip.”

And she pointed to a dark snake tongue of water whipping
back through the breakers, on which a small boy on a boogie board was being swiftly carried to the ocean beyond.

They could see Max mouthing screams, helpless and terrified. But with the noise of the waves breaking, people yelling and squealing in the excitement and pleasure of catching waves and having waves crash on them, no one could hear him, and no one, not even the lifesavers, had noticed the small boy’s plight. Both women leapt up and began running to the sea.

But before they reached the water or found a lifesaver, they saw a young man strike out into the rip and swim after the now crying boy. The man was a confident swimmer, riding the rip with ease until he reached Max. The two women watched mesmerised, Wilder silently sobbing, as the man took hold of the board and slowly, almost casually, swam it sideways out of the rip. Then he swam Max and the board back to shore, timing their journey inward between the breaking waves. When at last able to stand, he picked Max up and, trailing the board behind them on its wrist leash, walked to where the two women were now making their way through the shore slop toward him, waving and shouting.

He was dark and slender, with short curly hair, and his dark skin was accentuated by the long white Billabong board shorts he wore. Without a word, Max climbed out of his arms into those of his mother.

Wilder stood knee deep in the sea, the larger waves crashing into her waist, crying and smiling, holding her son to her chest, angrily berating him, halting every so often to thank the man before returning to tick Max off, all the while kissing and
hugging and burying herself in him, as Max attempted in a half-hearted fashion to shy away from such an embarrassing outburst of maternal affection in front of a stranger.

The young man said little, making light of his rescue, trying not to stare at Wilder’s breasts. Then he smiled, said goodbye, shook Max’s hand as if they were men who had shared an adventure together, and headed back out into the surf.

“He’s a bit of a looker,” Wilder said, as he disappeared into a wave.

“Very woggy,” said the Doll.

Later, the Doll went for a bodysurf. This feeling she loved above all: diving beneath that wall of white water, feeling its power tumble over her, and popping back up in the confused aftermath of boiling water, the brilliant light slashing her eyes.

The Doll blinked twice because of the brightness and the stinging salt, and then only a few metres away she saw him, similarly blinking and tossing his head, the young man who had so bravely rescued Max.

He smiled. She smiled. He raised an arm out of the water and waved. On impulse, she swam over to where he was treading water, put her arm around his neck and kissed him on the lips. It was a gentle, affectionate kiss, and though neither of their lips opened, her legs washed around his for a moment, and the Doll felt her body tingle.

“Thank you,” she said.

And then the water began pulling them apart, a wall of water bearing down and pulling them backwards. They began rising with the wave like sea creatures, and she just had time to give a small smile before she made the split-second
decision to catch the wave. She jackknifed and threw herself into the wave’s wall the moment before it broke. She felt it lift and hurtle her in its wild aerated force back towards the beach. She seemed to be in the wave for the longest time.

When the wave’s power was almost spent and she could feel it bottoming out, agitated sand swirling around her skin, she stood up, gulped a few times, and with smarting eyes searched the glaring sea around and behind her. The slender young man was nowhere to be seen. She half-expected him to surface out of the water and grab her unawares. But he had disappeared. Though the Doll would not admit she was disappointed, she spent some time scanning the waves and wash for his lean body before giving up and going in. She went back up the beach and lay with Wilder and a now subdued Max. The sun beat down on them, she slumbered a little, and when she woke, it was time to leave and get to the Chairman’s Lounge to start her early shift.

7

How the Chairman’s Lounge held on to its reputation as one of the most upmarket pole dancing clubs in Sydney was an achievement not easily explained. Though it had twice won Eros Foundation awards for “Hottest Naughty Nite Spot (NSW)” and once been awarded an impressive five breast rating in
Hustlaz.com Adult Almanac
, such gongs meant nothing to anybody other than on the award evening, and, as the Doll herself pointed out, who didn’t win prizes these days?

But like much else, the puzzle of its prominence was entwined with the mystery of money. By the straightforward
expedient of charging twice the admission price of the other clubs and an even more exorbitant mark-up on drinks, the Chairman’s Lounge kept its status bolstered and its punters happy, because they would not throw away such money unless it was one of the best clubs in Sydney and therefore worth every vanishing dollar.

Each day at noon the head bouncer, Billy the Tongan—a large man inevitably clad in an immaculate white tracksuit, gold chains and knock-off Versace sunnies—created the entry to the Chairman’s Lounge by rolling a length of grubby red carpet out of the ground storey of an old hotel into the border country that bestrode Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.

Here seemed to be the perfect position for a business that specialised in pompous cock teasing. The city centre was only a short walk distant, while a block away were the brothels and sex shows and streetwalkers of the Cross—an area chiefly known for a dying retail line in old world sleaze, its major feature being a run-down strip mall that parted the hillock on which it sat like a bad mohawk. Here the junkies and the pros, the pervs and the homeless, looked out over their daily shrinking atoll with as much bewilderment and as little hope as the inhabitants of some South Seas micro-nation, knowing whatever the future might hold, it held nothing for them.

Around them, washing up from the gentrified tenements and newly built designer apartments of Darlinghurst and the ceaselessly refurbished mansions of Elizabeth Bay, rushed the incoming tide of property values and inner-city hypocrisy, rising as inexorably and as pitilessly as the nearby globally warmed Pacific Ocean.

Along either side of the carpet that somehow joined all these disparate worlds, Billy the Tongan would set up the brass poles down which he ran an ornate gold-coloured rope. Inside, the true nature of the club began asserting itself. A strip of bare purple neon tubes ran like tracer fire down the half-dozen steps that led into the entry foyer. Here arose the deafening break-beat of doof music and the insistent scratching of the entrance cash register attended by a semi-naked woman charged with undertaking the first fleecing. Beyond this foyer, along a corridor and around a corner, was the main lounge with its scattering of purple felt-lined dancing tables, each replete with a brass pole.

If in the dusty light of morning the club had all the charm and erotic allure of an Eastern European airline’s executive lounge, this too was for a purpose. For its dirty, dun-coloured tub chairs and its generic bar and its featureless tables, its unremarkable nature and meanness of finish pretended to be no other than what it was, more of the bland sameness that was the world of those who came and watched. In its familiarity it relaxed its customers, as in its meanness it reassured them. Its manager, Ferdy Holstein, knew that any attempt to alter this relentless dullness and ordinariness would be an attempt to raise the tone that could only prove an overwhelming commercial error.

Ferdy claimed to come out of rock’n’roll, and frequently dropped names the Doll had never heard of. Ferdy wore Mambo shirts and thought it was fashion, not knowing it was middle age.

The truth was that Ferdy had left his job at a pearl oyster hatchery in Broome a decade earlier with a bootload of
Kimberley dope. He drove two thousand kilometres south, traded the dope and made enough to refill the boot with ecstasy he got through a contact in the Gypsy Jokers. He crossed the interminable length of the Nullarbor and made his way along the Great Ocean Road.

He liked to say he arrived in Melbourne in a ’73 Charger and left it a month later in a ’96 Beemer, making his way in that same year to Sydney, where he bought a half-share and the job as manager of a run-down bar, and invested what was left of his new wealth on refitting the bar with felt-lined tables and brass poles in the manner of the pole dancing clubs that were then becoming so popular. He would later recall those early years with the tone of feigned humility so many self-made men feel necessary:

“We had our hopes.”

Hopes were unnecessary, for the times, as he frequently told his customers, were his. In the Broome oyster hatchery he had spent the first fifteen years of his working life as a technician breeding vats of microscopic algae to be fed to juvenile oysters. All that mattered in that job had been getting several constants right, and thereafter never varying them. Ferdy applied the same principles to his management of the Chairman’s Lounge.