The Unknown Terrorist (11 page)

The Doll turned the tv off once more. She fought her growing panic by grasping for words that might help hold her up as flotsam does a drowning man. But there were no words of hope, only a dimly perceived sense that something unknowable had changed, something terrible had taken place, and her life was no longer as it had been.

31

The Doll rang Wilder again.

“Wilder …” she said, and then she didn’t know what else to say.

“Can I come over?” the Doll asked finally. How could she say she was frightened? It was ridiculous—what was there to be frightened of? No, she wasn’t frightened.

“It’s nothing, really,” continued the Doll. “I just don’t feel like being by myself at the moment.”

Before leaving, she changed once more. She stared for some time at an old black Prada dress that she had never much liked because it seemed somehow bland and inconspicuous. And then she put it on.

She caught a taxi to a run-down brick tenement in Red-fern that Wilder had rented for as long as the Doll had known her. ‘It’ll pass,’ she told herself as she walked up to the front door, open to vent the house, thinking of all the shit she had waded through in her life and how, compared to that, this was nothing, really, nothing at all.

She walked down the narrow hallway to the rear of the cottage where a small extension doubled as a kitchen and family room. There, the Doll found Wilder lying on an old red leather couch, wearing only a black bikini and a denim mini, reading a Freedom Furniture catalogue.

“Oh, thank God it’s you, Gina,” said Wilder. “I’m dead.”

Wilder paused, picked up a can of UDL gin and tonic that sat next to the couch, sipped, and started talking again.

“You’ll make Max’s day. Did you see us last night? My back’s shot. That stupid dildo—my God, it was like carrying a baseball bat around. No wonder men moan all the time.”

There was a child’s yell from a room up the passage.

“Picked Max up an hour ago from his father and all he wants to do is play. All I want to do is die.”

A small boy clad only in a pair of wet Spider-Man jocks peeked his white-haired head shyly out from a doorway. When he saw the Doll, his face lit up and he bolted down the hall into her arms.

“Maxie!” the Doll cried, grabbing him and whirling him around. “You’re a big fella now! Two days to your birthday,” the Doll cooed. “How old?”

Max held up six fingers.

“Three!” said the Doll in mock surprise.

“Six,” said Max, “six years old.”

“How could I ever forget,” said the Doll, and she pulled him in to her, held him close, rubbed her face in his tiny chest, smelt him musty and doggy; felt him writhe, his limbs longer, his thrusts and clutches stronger, and every movement felt at once incredibly sweet and incredibly bitter to her, as if with his growth something in her receded and shrank, as if with his increasing brightness something further dimmed in her. And yet the Doll loved Max as if he were her own son, and Max loved the pretty dark woman who wrapped around him like a towel after a bath.

“He seems well recovered from his near-death experience,” said the Doll.

“Rather,” agreed Wilder. “Not every day you’re saved by a suicide bomber. A tinnie?”

Wilder fetched a can of gin and tonic for the Doll, Max went and got his new radio-controlled car to show her, and while the car bobbed around like a small buzz saw, the Doll and Wilder chatted. The Doll would occasionally make a grab for Max, who would pretend to want to get away and play with his car, but then would allow her to cuddle and nuzzle him.

Wilder was taller than the Doll; lighter featured, snub nosed, and fuller figured, breasts always presented to advantage, hair blonde where the Doll’s was dark. Not conventionally beautiful, Wilder would never have got a job at the Chairman’s Lounge: her looks were too much fixed in her laugh and her conversation, in her passions and the way she involved those around her in them. One of her past boyfriends had told the Doll that Wilder had presence, and though the Doll had not heard the term used before, she understood what he meant.

Wilder was a good ten years older than the Doll: when the Doll was nineteen and first met Wilder such a difference felt like a world. Wilder seemed wise to her, and experienced, and to have arrived at some serenity about life. She knew a lot about homeopathy and meditation and spoke with authority about these and other matters, not least of which was how one should behave in this life.

One night early in their friendship Wilder, given to discovering revelation in cliché, told the Doll that power corrupts people, and then paused, as if this were some profound new insight, before saying:

“I believe that, you know, I really do.”

But at the Chairman’s Lounge, where she had been working for a short time by then, the Doll had already seen how people would do most anything for power and money. The Doll saw it was people who made these things, who thought these things mattered, who made these things important. And so she said:

“I dunno. Maybe it’s people who corrupt power.”

Wilder laughed so much she spilt her drink. The Doll
realised she had said something both naïve and foolish. She felt very stupid and, not wanting to feel so very stupid ever again, the Doll let Wilder do more and more of the talking as the years rolled on.

But what at first seemed clever came with the passing of time to sound to the Doll almost pompous, even ignorant. In the same way, over the years, what was initially captivating became repetitious, while what seemed insightful and wise began, like cheap paste jewellery that flashes brilliantly when new, to grow dull and even tawdry. And what at the beginning appeared an exotic, exciting private life increasingly came across as simply messy.

Wilder had had a string of relationships with men who often seemed as crazy as she was. The most recent, with a married cop, had ended only three months earlier, because, according to Wilder, he wouldn’t leave his wife.

“He just didn’t get it,” Wilder had said. “I thought our love would see us through everything.”

The Doll thought that the certainty of Wilder’s opinions came from having in some way never quite grown up, while Wilder thought the Doll’s blank incomprehension of many of Wilder’s opinions was a consequence of not having gone to university. But Wilder liked the clarity of the Doll’s directness, and the Doll liked the enthusiastic profusion of Wilder’s contradictory thoughts. They frustrated each other and they could not bear to pass more than a few days without seeing each other.

“We’re mates, eh, Gina?” Wilder would frequently say. She would hold out her hand with the neatly rolled joint that was never far from her lips and point it in the Doll’s
direction as though it were a judge’s gavel, “I
know
nothing will ever pull us apart.”

And when the Doll didn’t bother replying to such declarations—because the Doll wondered how Wilder could know such things, and both hated and envied Wilder her certainty—Wilder would end, as she ended so many of her conversations, by saying:

“I believe that, you know, I really do.”

And somehow that always seemed to seal the matter.

Wilder believed in so many things: the Labor Party, trade unions and the
Sydney Morning Herald
; the therapeutic effect of porridge in the morning and gin and tonic in the evening. She believed in politics and that the world could be made better, that Australians were good people, the best of people, kind and generous. She believed in belief. And the Doll found all Wilder’s beliefs at once reassuring and annoying, for the Doll felt certain about nothing, and had come to believe in little other than what she made of her own life.

Wilder and the Doll went out and sat in Wilder’s small backyard. There was a trellis and a grapevine and a bougainvillea that seemed as weary as the world felt that night. There was a brick side wall along which Wilder had placed rocks and where she kept her bonsai plants in a miniature garden. Most were dead.

“My poor darlings,” said Wilder. “This heat was the end for them.”

Wilder had believed in her bonsai garden, but, she said, when things are not fated to be, they are not fated to be. The Doll knew Wilder to be as careless with her plants as she could sometimes be with her friendships: the lack of regular
watering she suspected had as much to do with their demise as destiny. But she said none of this, and they talked for a time about trivial things, and it suited the Doll to lose herself in such triviality.

“People are good,” Wilder said at one point, “and in the end goodness comes through. I believe that, you know, I really do.”

32

Wilder was always out to convert the Doll to goodness. Whether it was the merits of organic food or the wrongs of globalism, whether it was refugees or minke whales or trade unionists or some other endangered species, she was always seeking to sign the Doll up to good causes, lending her DVDs, books, magazines, all of which the Doll never looked at until Wilder asked for them back and she had to find them, lost amidst an ocean of decorating and fashion magazines.

“Even Athens,” she said, referring to the cop boyfriend of whom she had only spoken of violently since they split up. “Even he was a good man, you know. In his way. He gave me that bonsai there,” Wilder said, pointing to some dead twigs sticking out of a dried piece of peat in a blue china dish.

Wilder was drunk now, and Wilder was lost in all that she believed was good, in the power of good, and this left the Doll feeling only more scared. Wilder relit her joint, took another sip from her can of gin and tonic, then, giving up on the weary joint, butted it out in an ever overflowing Bakelite ashtray.

“No Tanqueray, I’m afraid,” Wilder continued, “only this shit. Kiwi corn syrup with industrial alcohol and some artificial essence of gin. Where was I …? Yeah, people, like, people think they can’t do anything against the world. But you watch: their goodness will out.” She fixed the Doll with a smile. “Even Athens, you know, even him.”

“He was kinda cute,” said the Doll, who wasn’t displeased at the conversation going elsewhere, and her mind with it.

“When I met him,” said Wilder, rolling another joint, “I thought he was
real
cute. We talked a bit—it was that wanky bar in town, the Art Bar—and first it was good, but then he got going on about justice, how there wasn’t any.”

“‘All these young cops,’ he says, ‘I tell ’em, I say, just one bit of advice, just one: Don’t ever think it’s fair. And then in five years they come back to me about this or that, and they say, it’s not fair. What’d I say? I say.’”

She went on about Athens then telling her how in his early days as a cop he had been a sniper in their special operations group. One night, they had to stake out a Vietnam vet holed up in the bush out of Newcastle. There was a long siege that ended with Athens getting told to take the vet out, a double tap, one bullet for his heart and one for his head. He shot the vet dead as ordered.

The Doll had heard some of this before—she had known how Wilder had met Athens, and how Athens had been a sniper, but she didn’t know that he had killed someone. Not the least pleasure she took in Wilder’s company was the way old stories were at odd moments reinvigorated with such fresh, remarkable details.

“And then,” said Wilder, “in the middle of the bloody bar
Athens’ eyes just fill up with tears. He’s pissed, I mean, he’s really pissed.

“‘You know,’ he says to me, ‘I didn’t feel bad. That’s the worst of it. I felt really good. Pumped, you know. You’d think it’d be hard and bad, but it wasn’t. I never felt so alive.’

“‘That’s not right,’ I said.

“‘Of course it’s not fucking right,’ he says. ‘Nothing’s right. Nothing’s fair, that’s what I tell all the young cops, I say’—and then he was off again, and it was just the same shit over and over. But you know what? He had me after that.”

And her story told, Wilder seemed suddenly deflated, as if it was all that had kept her going. “I was down the street just before, and I was thinking about Athens and turned to look at something in a chemist’s doorway and I knocked over a whole stupid sunglasses stand,” Wilder said. “Fell everywhere. You know that feeling, Gina, when things just won’t stop falling?”

33

Richard Cody was not given to consciously thinking out his desires and ambitions. He would have been offended if anyone had suggested to him that he used people to his advantage, or that he had ever hurt anyone in order to better his own situation. And yet, when confronted with the fact of his humiliating demotion on the one hand, and on the other with his recognition of the shadowy face on the television news as that of the pole dancer who had insulted him the night before, his first instinct was to begin to make contact
with a range of people, most of whom he had had nothing to do with for a long time, but for whom he now felt a suddenly renewed fondness.

He opened his wallet, took out the card Ferdy Holstein had given him the night before, and rang him. Richard Cody stressed the confidential nature of their conversation and how, if Ferdy were to keep quiet, it could work well for him.

Ferdy Holstein told Richard Cody what Krystal’s real name was, but went on to say that he knew little else about her. If he was curious as to why he was being called, he gave no inkling of it.

“She’s a loner,” said Ferdy Holstein.

Perhaps he too had seen the footage, thought Richard Cody, and was keen to put some distance between him and the dancer.

“You want to know what she thinks?” said Ferdy Holstein. “You never know what she’s thinking.”

Over that long Sunday evening, Richard Cody wandered his Vaucluse home with his phone, piecing together not so much the truth of Gina Davies’ life as rehearsing the story he would present about it. He remembered with pride how he had held the table at Katie Moretti’s with his tales of the three bombs and terrorists and evil. He wanted to do the same again, but this time mesmerising not a dozen people, but millions. And so he saw the story as if he were sitting in a lounge room watching his own plasma screen as the shocking tale slowly unfolded.