The Unknown Terrorist (26 page)

And the Doll felt she was finally going somewhere. She
wasn’t exactly sure where, but for a time it felt good. Even the shock of her friends felt good. She was making real money, and she was proud, so proud. She looked better. With the exercise every night toning her right up and the clothes, the beautiful clothes and shoes and bags she could now buy, she looked like a movie star. Only sometime later did it become clear. She wasn’t a movie star. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was a lap dancer and she was falling.

Then the authorities banned lap dancing, and it was only tips from pole dancing or fifty bucks for a fifteen-minute private show, and somehow the clubs were no longer the thing, the place to go, but an embarrassment, and all the girls were sad, and all the men were mean, and you had to work twice as hard to make half as much. She was a lap dancer, no matter what she held on to nothing held, everything was collapsing and she was falling.

For a time the Doll worked elsewhere: a club in Perth where anything seemed to go; she lasted there three weeks until she was asked to do a full body soap slide. Apart from not wanting to do it anyway, it just seemed too ridiculous. For a few months she had flown to the Gold Coast to work weekends at a club there. Then she came back; tried to be proud once more. She was a dancer, an erotic dancer. It was an industry, not a game. She went back to the Chairman’s Lounge: it was near where she lived, and that was enough of a reason.

‘I am beautiful,’ the Doll said to herself over and over, and men paid to admire her beauty and the way she displayed it. But in her heart the Doll felt otherwise. In her heart the Doll felt that they were paying for something else, and the more they paid, the more distant became that thing they sought. The Doll
could now see that she had been no different from the men, that all the time the dollar notes had been rising over her body she had been falling further and further from what she really wanted—friendship, trust, serenity, love—that she had been falling and no one had said anything and everyone had known.

And as the Doll danced above the suits, their shirt tongues hanging out, she knew the men had to imagine she was thinking about fucking them, fucking anything, imagine that she existed in a state of sexual desire so absolute even they could enter it, a sexual desire that did not need another human being with a name, a past, a life, but just an assembly of flesh.

The Doll had to imagine other things. She imagined a life in which she had an apartment and an education and a job that people admired, a life in which she amounted to something, and her imagining became the plan, and the plan became the dream of dollar notes papering her body.

And once more, the Doll persuaded herself she was going somewhere, when all the time she was falling. She had always been falling but now she knew nothing ever changed. People lived, people died. There would always be women stripping for rich men, there would always be men paying to look at women, she would continue falling until death, and a month or two after her death only a few people very close to her, like Wilder, would remember her, and after a few years more even Wilder would have trouble recalling her face or her laugh, and out of her only lantana would grow.

The day of Liam’s funeral had been a beautiful winter’s day of the type that makes Sydneysiders smile and say:

“It’s the best place on earth.”

The air seemed full of joyful noise to the Doll. Everywhere were the sounds of children playing, of people laughing, pleasant music rising—and it was clear to the Doll that death was of no concern to such a world, where life was good and cheerful, and the appearance of suffering was an embarrassment, where she was falling and out of the dead only lantana grew.

72

Near where the Baby Lawn ended and the Greek cemetery began was a tap from which the Doll filled her bucket. As the water ran, the Doll saw two large Greek women and an older, small Greek man in an ancient cream linen suit set up in front of an ornate, beautifully kept Greek grave. They were sitting on director’s chairs beneath an umbrella, chatting away as if it were a barbie.

One woman reached into a plastic bag, pulled out two salad rolls, passed one to the other woman, and they began eating. The man leant back, as though taking a break from some arduous task, reached into his pocket, and took out a metal cigarette case. He opened it and took out a cigarette, tapped it top and bottom on the case, then lightly ran it along the length of his moustache before putting it between his lips and lighting up. He leant even further back, looking very satisfied to be sitting in the city of the dead on such a splendidly hot day. And though they seemed somehow comic to the Doll, she envied them their ease. With them death had a place.

Then she made her way back to Liam’s grave. The old
man and the small girl were gone. The Doll thought how the Baby Lawn was a place where deaths were less easily digested, life not so readily understood, and people fragmented rather than came together. No one set up director’s chairs. No one ate salad rolls. No one smoked. No one chatted. People came, remembered a few sad things, and then left.

The crack of a seed pod exploding open in the heat brought the Doll back from her thoughts. Reaching into her plastic bag, she pulled out the scrubbing brush and the detergent. But when she began scrubbing the plaque, it came away from the concrete and fell into the dust. A cemetery gardener drove past on his mini-tractor, dull plastic kegs of poison jogging in their brightly coloured lift-up tray.

“Good times, great value!” said the tractor radio. “Barbeques Galore.”

The Doll looked at the wet plaque now lying filthy on the ground, the dust turned to damp dirt. She felt her heart grab, but she would not let this get on top of her, could not let it get on top of her: she would do as she always did, as she felt she always must—she would start again, turn disadvantage to advantage. She picked the plaque up, put it in the bucket and scrubbed it until it was cleaned only in order, she knew well enough, to be tarnished and dirtied once more.

The Doll had nothing with which to refix it to the concrete beam. She had some chewing gum in her bag, so she got it out and, while polishing the plaque with some Brasso and her handkerchief, chewed the gum, then pressed it down on the concrete and pushed the plaque onto it, fixing it back into a position as best she could.

She put the dead flowers away in the plastic bag and
arranged the already wilting fresh flowers in front of the cleaned and refixed plaque, then propped the plastic horse against the concrete beam.

A crow swore from a nearby tree.

She gathered her brush and detergent and litter into the plastic bag, and began walking back to the railway station in the stinking heat. She cut through an older part of the cemetery with its broken graves and fallen headstones, inscriptions lost to the erosion of wind and rain and sun. Berry bushes, pines, wattles, and lantana thrust up through graves, pushing aside railings, cracking concrete capping, slowly flattening headstones, gently, inexorably destroying with life the last attempts to pretend death wasn’t forever.

The Doll thought of how Liam would never send her letters. Never text or email her. Never bring home a girl who would become a woman who would bring grandchildren to visit the Doll. Never hold her old unheld body and feel it soft in his strong young embrace. Never tell her stories, sing, make her smile with his laughter. Never kiss her thin unkissed lips, her wrinkled and papery cheeks. Never let her know she loved and was loved.

Beneath a stunted gum tree with low, sweeping boughs, the Doll saw a broken wooden cross lying on the ground. Tiny ants toiled in its rotting splinters. She looked up and saw Homebush Olympic stadium in the distance. When it was being built for the Olympics and she was a teenager, its wings had reminded her of angels. Now she could see there was so much that was more amazing than any angel, but that there was nothing left to believe. People put all their energy and brilliance into making things more extraordinary than
themselves, only to have it make them feel that they were, in the end, less than nothing.

And somehow the ants in the cross and the people of Sydney with their Olympic stadium became the same thing in the Doll’s mind, everyone doing what they did because they had to, and yet everything that was done seemed to serve no greater point, not ants toiling to make a nest out of decay, nor people labouring to make great cities and an Olympic stadium. And maybe that was why they wanted to be frightened of her, thought the Doll, so that they might think being like an ant was a good thing to be. But there seemed something wrong in this, or in her thinking, and then it all got too hard to hold in her head, and when her stolen phone rang for the second time, the Doll answered it instinctively, gratefully, and only after she had it to her ear did she wonder whether this was wise or not.

73

“Gina, listen. I had to call.”

On hearing Wilder’s voice the Doll felt relieved. ‘A friend,’ she thought, ‘thank God, a friend!’

“After I rang earlier there’s a knock on the door. I open it,” Wilder continued, “shitting myself, but it’s bloody Athens Loukakis.

“Look, you know how he’s not a Fed or ASIO, he’s a drug squad cop. He knew nothing about the raids. He told me he thinks ASIO and the Feds have got it all wrong. He thinks it’s a terrible mix-up. He’s not even sure Tariq was a terrorist.”

The Doll did not know what to say. It seemed the cruellest of jokes.

“Who was he, then?” she asked.

“He was a man called Tariq,” continued Wilder. “He was a computer programmer. He worked on the side as a mule bringing in heroin and coke.”

The Doll could feel her upper lip smarting from the salty sweat beading there. It now seemed too stupid to be true—that who someone said they were, was, more or less, who they were. She wiped the sweat away with the back of her hand.

“He’s dead,” she said. “Does he know that?”

“Everyone knows it now, Gina,” Wilder said. “The news hasn’t stopped running it. Athens thinks a drug ring had him killed because he was getting too much publicity and they didn’t want the police catching him and working out the real story.”

The Doll had now reached the boundary of the cemetery, and made her way across a busy highway.

“What’s all that noise?” said Wilder.

The Doll looked up and about, and almost told her where she was, but instead just said, “Cars.”

“He thinks you’re innocent, but he needs you to turn yourself in so he can prove it. He wants to meet you, and you can hand yourself in to him. Peacefully. No SWAT squads. He’ll help you get your story listened to. No men in black with machine guns. He wants to avoid the possibility of anything bad happening.”

The Doll walked past headstone shops. Behind their high Weldmesh fences were displayed glistening new marble headstones—black and red and charcoal—on which the
names of the dead were inscribed in Cyrillic, Chinese and Thai.

“He tells me they think you’re armed and he can’t guarantee your safety. I told him not to be stupid, that you don’t have a gun.”

The Doll felt her hair with her hand.

“Then he told me you’d stolen one from that sleaze Moretti.”

The wavy locks that Wilder had with such care straightened, which the Doll had avoided getting wet in the shower to keep flat, were, in the heat, resuming their natural kink.

“Christ, Gina,” said Wilder. “What were you thinking …”

And the Doll listened to Wilder saying it would be best to turn herself in and agreed with her, agreed with her too that in Australia things always get sorted out in the end and the mistake would be rectified.

But the Doll thought no such thing. ‘Have I become such a fool?’ she was thinking while she talked. ‘The mistake can never be rectified—I can only make sure I’m not caught.’

How not to get caught was something about which the Doll had no idea other than those gleaned from movies. And so she continued telling Wilder how it made sense to sort this out, to clear her name and put the mess behind her, while all the time thinking she would run—but to where? To leave Australia struck the Doll as impossible—she would need a fake passport and how on earth were such things to be got? What would she use for money to escape?

And the thought of money threw the Doll into fresh despair—here she was dreaming of escaping and she only had Wilder’s mother’s credit card and a little over two
hundred dollars left in her wallet, enough money, if she was very careful, to survive another two or three days. And then what?

The Doll’s mind pitched and swayed with the impossibility and hopelessness of her situation. To give herself up was madness, for they wanted her as a terrorist, no matter what Wilder or Nick Loukakis said, they wanted their victim. Nick Loukakis could be lying, he could be telling the truth. It didn’t matter. The Doll sensed that no one would tell the truth about her once she was in their power. Too much had been said, too much done, too many powerful people were now mixed up in it. And anyway, who would listen to her, a pole dancer, a nobody, a westie, when they had taken the little truths of her life to make up a big lie?

With her hand the Doll flattened her hair against her scalp, a futile action, and, knowing it to be so, felt something close to panic as she continued to pat her hand as hard as she could against her head. She abruptly stopped, feeling more foolish than ever, fearing people were looking at her, wondering why on earth she was slapping her head.

“I’m frightened,” Wilder said. She paused, as if waiting for the Doll to reach some conclusion that to Wilder seemed so obvious. “They’ll kill you.”

The Doll tried to stay in the shadows of buildings as she made her way toward the Lidcombe train station.

“I told him, Gina. I told him about the hotel. I told him about Mum’s credit card. I told him everything. I told him because I believed in him, Gina, and if you won’t give yourself up, it’s better he finds you than they do.” But the Doll was no longer listening, she was walking quickly, walking to
God knew where, while Wilder kept talking, talking. “It’s not betrayal, Gina, it’s friendship. He wants to help you. ‘This is Australia, not Nazi Germany,’ I told him—”