The Unknown Terrorist (16 page)

“Drop the knife and get down!”

‘They’ll kill him,’ thought the Doll, ‘just like they’ll kill me.’

“Drop it NOW!”

The Doll’s body was shaking all over, people were screaming, the man kept yelling, a second cop had a gun trained on him from behind, and the Doll was pushed by someone against the wall between the soft drink dispenser and a reeking Aboriginal woman.

“Fuck this,” said the Aboriginal woman, turning to her. “I’m outta here. You coming?”

There didn’t seem any good reason to stay. Besides, she could come back later. And these two thoughts brought the Doll a great sense of relief. The cops were preoccupied with the standoff, and seemed not to care what anyone did as long as they stayed out of the way. Keeping close to the wall, the Doll and the Aboriginal woman shuffled the few metres to the door where, following a woman pushing a twin pram, they walked outside.

The Doll was too fearful to run until she was heading up Liverpool Street through the Spanish Quarter, and then she
took off, just wanting to get as far away as possible as quickly as she could. She ran wherever there were green lights, open spaces amidst the crowds. When the chasm of a shopping centre entrance opened up before her, she allowed herself to become quickly lost within it.

She breathed in its thick air conditioned chill, felt the sweat on her body cool and her skin clutch. Music it was impossible to recognise rose several storeys to a great clock. Elevators hummed in a way the Doll found oddly reassuring. People sat in a food court eating kebabs and curries and sushi, all staring at some point further on where there were more people eating sushi and curries and kebabs.

She would go back to the cops later. Now she just needed to get herself back together. She wanted another Valium 5, wanted it bad, but resolved to hold out. She needed to keep straight if she was going to talk to the police and sort out this mess with them. Here was good, she told herself. It’s all good, she kept repeating. But she knew she was kidding herself.

Like shoals of fish darting hither and thither around a bright coral reef, people moved through the shopping centre’s many storeys, its scores of shops, its thousands of shelves, products, lines, with a seemingly instinctive knowledge. Joining with them always made the Doll feel there was once more some purpose and order to her life, though what that purpose and order was she would no more have been able to say than a single fish would have been able to explain its movements. And so, to gather herself, she rode with the crowds, head bowed, up several flights of escalators, trying to summon the determination to go back to the police.

But still she didn’t feel good. Her thoughts wouldn’t
gather. She felt too visible. To be calm, to think, she needed to buy something, anything, and buy it quickly. Having established an order of action, and with it a vague possibility of progress, she felt momentarily better. Though she had sunglasses, she bought an oversize Christian Dior pair with dark brown lenses and a light gold frame. Feeling once more camouflaged in the guise of the successful woman, the Doll began riding the escalators back down, intent on putting her fear to one side and talking to the police.

At first she didn’t pay any attention to the giant screen looming upwards from the ground floor plaza. It was only when the Doll was halfway between the fifth and the fourth floors that she noticed a vast image—broken into a grid by the frames of the scores of plasma screens that stacked together formed the giant whole—of the Twin Towers burning.

The pictures of that collapsing world dissolved into a huge backpack being unzipped and a dark bomb reared threateningly over the shoppers below, before flickering and transforming into giant armed police surrounding Tariq’s apartment block.

As the escalator continued descending, the Doll recognised the footage she had seen at Moretti’s, only now it had grown into something that was dwarfing and overwhelming everything around it. The bad photograph of a bearded man in Arabic-looking dress filled the shopping centre’s plaza like an inescapable image of the devil; the grainy, dark images of Tariq and the Doll hugging each other seemed like something from a horror movie; then the Doll felt as if she too were in that school in Beslan as body after body was laid out while a figure dressed in black brandished a machine gun, threatening every shopper.

The escalator was now falling down the side of the massive grid of plasma screens; taking her past the journalist, Richard Cody. He too was huge, his face monstrous, he was saying something, she was sliding past his mouth, his lips, his obscene tongue, she felt he might swallow her. She turned her head away, tried not to look, but it was unavoidable, and still the escalator kept falling and the Doll with it, while on screen she had now appeared dressed as the Black Widow, something somebody must have videoed at a private show years ago. The Doll felt she was journeying into hell. She was ripping off her dress and then her veil, she was heavily made up, and the bad quality of the video accentuated the whorish look, the plasma grid throwing a mesh over the image that somehow added a final slutty layer. The Doll felt that they had turned her into a murderous porn star. On the vast grid of stacked plasma screens she wore a giant, sick smile. That was the worst thing, the one thing Ferdy made them all wear—that smile that was never hers.

The Doll felt herself seized by panic; she had to run, to hide, to escape this hell. On reaching the ground floor she hurried toward the exit. ‘How can I turn myself in to the police now?’ she thought, horrified that only a short time before she had been standing in a police station about to give herself up. Whatever was she thinking? Was she insane? Trust cops in this town?

‘It’s gone too far, it’s all gone too far! They’ll fix me up somehow, say I threatened them or had a weapon, something bad. And then they’ll have to kill me,’ thought the Doll. ‘It’s obvious, because I’m the only one who can prove how wrong they are. Just like the tradey, they’ll pull a gun on me.’

As she hurried past the KL Noodle Bar she noticed a middle-aged woman—a nice, round-looking woman, a woman who could well be an aunt, thought the Doll, a woman she might like to become one day, if she could cope with dressing that badly—get up to go. As she walked away, the Doll noticed she had left her mobile phone sitting on the table.

It was an old person’s mobile, a clunky, outdated Nokia 3315. Before she even realised what she was doing, the Doll had circled back around, leant slightly in to the woman’s table and, with a movement that surprised her with its deftness, placed a hundred-dollar bill under the stranger’s coffee cup and scooped up her mobile phone. And with that she was walking out of the food court and heading to an exit. As she scurried along she was already dialling a number on the stolen phone.

“Hello,” said a voice.

“Wilder?”

“Oh Jesus, Gina. Are you crazy? Have you seen the news? Are you ringing on your phone?”

“Wilder,” said the Doll, and she could hear that her own voice was trembling, “have you still got your scissors?”

45

The Doll resolved first to head back to her home. If the police had it staked out, she would see them—if they didn’t she would go in, get her cash out before it was too late, quickly grab a few clothes and then clear out to Wilder’s. The cash!—that was what would get her out of this mess, thought the Doll.

Only two hours before, with Moretti’s money added to what was left from the last two days, she had had eleven one hundred-dollar notes plus change. But the sunglasses had set her back five hundred dollars, and then after leaving the hundred for the phone, the Doll had just four hundred dollars and some change left in her wallet. It was nothing.

With her cash back at her flat there was freedom, possibilities, hope. And just thinking about all her money there, imagining the feel of those hundred-dollar notes on her body and her body once more relaxed and comfortable beneath them, made the Doll feel better. She didn’t know what she was going to do with the money, but she knew money could buy a lot of things, and the more money, the more you could buy: time, space, people. But without the money she would be lost.

Feeling she needed to walk, the Doll headed through the city, up William Street, feeling safe in the great onrush of traffic, of crowds looking through and beyond her, reassuring her that she was still unknown.

It was a long, hot walk, but she didn’t mind. It kept her panic at bay; it made her feel she was doing something, that she was getting somewhere. Her mind clearer, it occurred to the Doll that she still had Tariq’s number and a phone that couldn’t be traced to her. Maybe Tariq felt as bad and as scared as she did. Maybe Tariq knew whatever it was you needed to know at such a time. Maybe Tariq had an idea, a plan.

Suddenly excited, the Doll searched through her Gucci handbag until she found the crumpled takeaway restaurant menu with the green inked number. ‘Yes,’ she thought,
‘Tariq will know what we should do.’ And in the Doll’s mind it was now not her alone, but her and Tariq, and when she thought about Tariq, she realised what a remarkable and strong man he was, and how together they might be able to sort something out. If he could, she was sure he would find her and help her, and together they might get themselves out of this awful mess. But when she found cover in the shadows of a narrow side street and called, there was again no answer, only the same stupid American voice welcoming her to voicemail.

She hung up and was making her way along the narrow street, when she heard noises up ahead and came upon a woman squatting in the deep black shadow of a driveway, back against green wheelie bins, knickers around her ankles, a puddle beneath her. Three young boys with skateboards were laughing happily, running in and out of the darkness, yelling at her and giggling.

“You heap of stinking shit!”

“You old scrag! Go and piss somewhere else.”

“Lick it up, Mum!”

The Doll looked at her watch: she was meant to be at work in two hours. She hurried past, so caught up in her own problems she scarcely noticed the old woman. It was dawning on her that if she was too scared to go to the cops, it would be far too dangerous for her to go to work. And this thought made her furious. How was she to make the money she needed to live? How was she to get the cash she would need for her mortgage repayments? She told herself that perhaps she would still go to the cops when she felt ready, so why not go to work? But in her heart she knew that this was
lying to herself. She would never go to the cops now, and she would not be going back to dance. And these thoughts made her far angrier than anything else.

Once more, her mind returned to Tariq, who by never answering his phone somehow seemed to grow in her mind as the person who could help her out of her ever worsening situation. And the more she kept on ringing him, and the more she heard only his infuriating American voicemail message, the more she realised she needed to speak to him and the more she understood his ongoing silence meant she must turn to him, that she must find him: fate had brought them together, and only together could they alter fate.

And so as the Doll continued making her way to Darlinghurst, she sought small refuges and nooks where she could ring Tariq’s phone, and each pick-up by his voicemail only confirmed in her own mind the urgent necessity of finding him. And then the Doll would step back out of the shadows with their dead rats and syringes and leaking black plastic bags and resume walking along the sticky bitumen pavements, past the skips with the ice addicts unravelling their minds in their meticulous search of junk, and the Doll began wondering if she was any less deluded than they in her own hunt.

Still she kept on walking and dialling. After a good half-hour she had almost reached her flat when yet again she took cover to try once more, this time in the alleyway in which the blue Toyota Corolla was still parked, still covered in tickets, its windows now all smashed.

The alleyway was particularly muggy and there was a bad smell, as if a dead animal were rotting in its shadows. As she
reached into her handbag and found the phone, the Doll fanned her face in a pointless attempt to be rid of the stench and the heat. Fumbling around for the Nokia 3315, the Doll realised why Tariq wasn’t answering. It was because she had been ringing from the stolen phone that he hadn’t recognised the number and so ignored her calls. She paused, then grabbed her own phone. If using it was what it took to make contact, she would run the risk. She switched it on, ignoring the missed calls and messages. She dialled, and as she waited for an answer she heard something nearby. It was muffled, at once distant and close, but familiar. Then she recognised the sound. It was Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor.

She looked around. There was nothing save walls, some garbage, and the Toyota Corolla. It was a good omen, though, she thought, her thinking of Tariq and hearing Chopin. It meant something was meant to be. The Chopin stopped playing. In her ear the Doll heard the usual voicemail message. She hung up.

Something that was not a thought nor an idea, but a need without form, an awareness of a desire that had to be fulfilled, came into the Doll’s mind. She took a few tentative steps deeper into the alley, then slid into the small, stinking space between a dark brick wall and the blue Corolla.

She flicked sweat off her cheek with a finger. With her back to the wall, she redialled Tariq’s number. She didn’t bother raising the phone to her ear. Even with the phone at her waist she could hear the dial tone. Again, from somewhere now closer and a little louder, Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor began playing.

As the Doll edged further down the alley, the stench grew
worse, and then the music stopped. Down by her waist the voicemail message began. The air was now so bad that for a moment she thought she might vomit. She concentrated on adjusting her vision to the darkness. Her eyes fixed on the car, she hung up without looking at the phone, counted a few beats, and then hit redial. For the third time there were a few seconds of nothing. She rubbed her damp cheek with the phone. She had just noticed that the Corolla’s boot wasn’t properly closed when the ringing tone and the Chopin began simultaneously.