The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  Holding his eyes with her own, the Doll then swung round and fell to her knees, so that her buttocks were very close to Richard Cody’s face. She looked over her shoulder at him, and as her arse slowly rocked above his nose, a drink appeared beneath it.

  “Compliments of Mr Holstein, the manager,” said the topless waitress indicating, with a slight flick of her head, Ferdy, who was standing over at the bar with a circle of five fatgutted businessmen. Ferdy raised his glass to Richard Cody.

  Unlike the businessmen, Ferdy Holstein was small in both height and girth. He had originally been a budgie of a man who, after years of weight powders, steroids and the dreary round of gymnasiums, had transformed himself into a barrel-chested budgie of a man. Though nearly bald, he had bleached what hair remained a bright blond. For all that was ludicrous about him, he was still able to manifest menace.

  A piece of bright icing, Ferdy peeled off from the doughnut of suits and walked over.

  “I’m a great admirer of your work, Mr Cody,” he said, “as I’ve noticed you’ve become of ours.” He reached into an oversized pocket of his baggy jeans, pulled out a business card and handed it to Richard Cody. “If ever I can be of help, let me know.” As he spoke, a slight spume of white saliva gathered at the edge of his mouth.

  Richard Cody looked at the card. “Ferdy Holstein,” he mused, then looked back up. “You’ve been in the news, Ferdy,” he said, pocketing the card.

  “Unfortunate event,” Ferdy Holstein said.

  “That drug rape trial, wasn’t it?”

  “I was just a witness,” Ferdy Holstein said. “As far as I could see, it was consensual sex between my business partner and the girl. But I never said I saw everything.”

  “Unfortunate,” Richard Cody repeated. And then he lit up: “Terrible thing to be tangled in a trial, Ferdy—you know what the Thais say? ‘It is better to eat dog shit than to go to court.’”

  “They’ve got a point,” Ferdy Holstein said, taking Richard Cody’s hand. “It’s good to meet. Like I said, if I can assist you with anything, let me know.” He stressed the “anything”. “We’re a misunderstood industry and we like to help our friends in the media, Mr Cody. Otherwise we all end up eating dog shit.”

  Yet when Richard Cody flashed Ferdy the briefest of smiles, it was Ferdy who was left feeling both oddly complicit and slightly fearful. Ferdy looked up into the light and, finding the Doll, indicated Richard Cody with a motion of his head.

  The music track ended. As the next dancer was announced and the inescapable beat started pushing again, the Doll stepped off the purple felt-lined table and made her way to where Richard Cody once more sat alone.

  Later, the Doll would think back on that strange half-hour she spent in one of the private rooms with Richard Cody—two shows in a row, paid for not by him but by Ferdy. At first Richard Cody simply wanting her to fondle her breasts in front of him as he mumbled obscenities. How confident he was—so unlike most men, who, no matter what their bluster, were often like lambs once they were alone with a naked woman: hopeless, lost lambs. But not this man. At one point he even quite cheerfully insulted her, saying:

  “Isn’t it humiliating?”

  “What’s humiliating?” said the Doll, picking up her drink, knowing full well what he meant. “Drinking a vodka with tonic rather than straight?”

  “Ho ho,” said Richard Cody, without smiling. “No.” He opened his hand outwards, extending his little fingers—the tiny fingers of a child, slight, soft and without strength—as though he were a magician who had just conjured a dove out of the air and released it from his palm. The Doll looked down at his hand and felt revolted.

  “This,” he continued. “Being here. Doing … this. You are an interesting woman. You could do anything you wanted.”

  “And your job, my friend,” said the Doll, “that’s not humiliating?”

  Richard Cody made a noise somewhere between a dismissive laugh and a hiss.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Now—let’s see your arse.”

  And the Doll smiled the smile that Ferdy had taught them all to use, trying so very hard not to be upset by having to continue dancing naked above this man. And as she danced once more, as he again chanted how he wanted to slide his cock up her arse and then into her mouth and then into her arse, the Doll felt betrayed by her own words.

  Why hadn’t she shut up, just kept playing the ditz, keeping herself hidden, safe, so that this shit would just pour off her as it normally did? And at that moment, the control, the sass and the front—which at other times seemed so potent and almost second nature—stretched to paper thin, and the Doll felt somehow deceived by life.

  At the end, as she was putting her clothes back on, the Doll noticed him pull a small bottle out from his jacket pocket, pour some fluid into his hands and, in a strange ritual, wash them. She felt as if she were filth being flushed down a sink.

  17

  At the bar Ferdy pulled out a red ledger—no recoverable, traceable hard drives for Ferdy—opened it, ran his finger down a short column of figures, and said:

  “Seven hundred and twenty dollars.”

  He turned the book round, pushed it toward the Doll, and passed her a pen.

  “Not bad for an early night, Doll.”

  While he went to the cash register and from a drawer beneath it pulled out the cash, the Doll checked the figures. When she was sure they were correct, she took out her black Prada Saffiano leather chequebook wallet from the Gucci handbag she now hated, and opened it. The six credit card slots were empty, as was its chequebook compartment. The Doll had neither bank account nor credit rating: the chequebook wallet, she believed, helped convey a different impression. To the eight hundred dollars in its cash compartment, she now added the notes Ferdy handed her, though not before quickly thumb-counting them.

  “Good for now, Ferdy. A few years ago we would all have been a little disappointed.”

  Once outside, the Doll was hit by the pungent, sticky heat of the night. Everywhere there were people, far more people than usual. The Doll walked to the edge of the road and held out a hand.

  Inside the Chairman’s Lounge, Richard Cody had had enough. Leaving the club, he nodded to Billy the Tongan at the head of the red carpet, then looking up saw the dark dancer, the one with the great arse, now fully clothed, standing by the road trying to flag a taxi. The street was busier than at peak hour, choked with traffic, and the pavements were thick with people, all sorts of people: tourists, families, gays dressed wildly. Richard Cody was thinking how, when he got home, his wife wouldn’t be in any mood for sex, and here he was, feeling fit to burst.

  Whistles were sounding and a thousand different songs seemed to be erupting from streets not far away. It was, Richard Cody suddenly realised, the night of the Mardi Gras parade. Everyone, he thought, gets sex on Mardi Gras night, and he didn’t see why he should miss out.

  He casually strode the way of the dancer, and came up behind her.

  “Well,” Richard Cody said, “if it isn’t Tiffany.”

  “Hello,” the Doll said, but avoided his gaze, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the traffic, holding her hand out more forcefully now, to make her intention clear.

  He smiled, his best, most charming smile, turning slightly so she would see him in profile from his left side. As a joke a cameraman had once told him it was a far more handsome profile than his right.

  “Tiffany,” Richard Cody said, reasonably sure it was her name, and reasonably sure that if it weren’t it wouldn’t matter: “I pay well for a good blow job.”

  The Doll turned to him. She noticed his head was twisted in a strange way.

  “You’ve got the wrong idea, my friend,” she said, and then walked quickly past him and up to where a cab was pulling in, adding an aside over her shoulder: “Arsehole.”

  18

  A minute later, riding through the crowded, sweating city, the Doll had forgotten about the creepy tv man. Around her the streets surged with colour
and sound as Mardi Gras got into full swing. The chaos was exacerbated by the presence of security everywhere—cop cars, uniformed cops, dogs, cordons and spot searches of bags. Pedestrians outnumbered cars and cars were moving slower than people as the taxi shoved through the crowds, crawling the short distance to the Doll’s flat in Darlinghurst. The Doll enjoyed the vibrant anonymity of it all. A great city is a great solitude, and the Doll, above all else, liked being alone.

  When they became ensnared in a traffic jam, she left the taxi and walked the last block to her flat, past the side lane where an abandoned blue Toyota Corolla continued to accumulate parking tickets as it had done for the past several days—so many that it now looked to be covered by a leaf storm. She turned into the entrance of a dirty and undistinguished brick apartment block.

  By the exorbitant standards of the inner city the Doll’s third-floor flat was cheap, but for the same reason that its rent was low—its small rooms, its dilapidated kitchen and squalid bathroom—she rarely let anyone come back there. One day she would have an apartment, a real home that she would bring people back to, and everything would be designer—the Alessi sugar bowl, the La Pavoni espresso machine, the Philippe Starck toilet. Until then, she bought the designer products that mattered—the ones other people saw—and that was clothes.

  The Doll put both radio and tv on—she hated the flat silent and found any noise preferable to none—undressed, showered in the crappy shower that dribbled like an old drunk, and then naked, preferring not to towel herself but to stay wet in the heat, the Doll went to her bedroom.

  With one foot on her bed between the two Garfields with whom she slept, the other balancing on a precarious pile of Renovating Today magazines that sat on a bedside table, the Doll stretched her arms up to the low ceiling. She peeled a Beyoncé poster off its Blu-tack, revealing a hand-sized hole in the ceiling, from which, not without difficulty, she pulled out a bulging silk bag decorated with batik patterns.

  The Doll lay on her bed, undid the bag’s drawstring and took out a fat roll of banknotes bound with a brown rubber band. The Chairman’s Lounge paid well, but they paid cash, and she didn’t want to get caught by the tax office. And so none of her money went where it could be traced, and all of it went into the batik silk bag.

  She had learnt to survive by making the most of the small things of life. The Doll wanted what she could hold on to and that was this fat roll of cash—what she knew without counting to be four hundred and ninety-two one-hundred-dollar notes. To that roll she now added five hundred-dollar notes from her Prada Saffiano leather wallet, for it was her way to always keep a grand in her wallet in case she saw something she wanted.

  If pressed, if drunk, if unguarded, she might have confessed to longing for dreams, feelings, sensations that never appeared in a catalogue or a magazine and which no one had ever paid cash for. But as to what these things were, she had neither words nor even images; they were as mysterious as the cloud that had entranced her at the beach that morning, about which she could later not recall one detail. No one remembers a cloud. But $49,700—who could forget that?

  The Doll was saving for a deposit on an apartment. Her mind was full of dreams as to what it would be like. She imagined she would find something run-down, some overlooked bargain which, through her hard work and imagination, would be transformed as such places were transformed by magic and seemingly within seven minutes on television DIY programs.

  And changed as miraculously with it would be the Doll’s life. She would start that uni course; she would ease out of dancing, only doing the minimum to keep up the repayments. Everything was arranged, everything was ready. Because the Doll had no legitimate income, it would be bought in Wilder’s name, and then Wilder would sign it over to the Doll. A few days, a week or two at the most, and the life the Doll had so long dreamt of would begin. Her flat was chaotic testimony to this dream of new order. Scattered everywhere were renovating magazines, furniture and home-ware catalogues, real estate guides with circled ads and pinboards ruffling with fabric samples and cut out pictures.

  Each night after work she would play out the same ritual: shower, retrieve the silk batik bag from the ceiling, lie on her bed, and begin covering her naked body with her hundred-dollar notes. For though the Doll counted the notes nightly, she had come to regard the real measure of her savings as the extent to which she was able to paper over her flesh with money.

  Three years earlier the notes had only covered her belly. Then they crept up and over her breasts and the last winter they began to spread down over her groin and thighs. Now she had to start at her odd labour sitting up, delicately placing the first notes on her ankles.

  As if her body were a large jigsaw puzzle, she toiled patiently, carefully overlapping each note like fish scales, imagining herself a mermaid of money. Come the day the notes completely covered her naked body, then, the Doll told herself, she would stop dancing full time. Then she would have enough money for the deposit on an apartment.

  The notes felt damp and slightly ticklish. They felt like purpose, justification, the future. They felt like what makes a life possible and bearable. They felt good, like only possessing a lot of money can. These days, the Doll preferred the touch of money on her skin to the touch of a man. It was all good. On Monday, dancing for Moretti, she would earn the final three hundred dollars she needed to make $50,000, the sum she had set herself for a deposit. She would place the final three notes on herself. She would put one over her mouth, one over each of her eyes. And, her body finally covered, her new life would begin.

  19

  After a time the night seemed hotter than ever. The noise of mozzies cut the thick heat in an unpleasant way. The Doll sat up, the dollar notes falling away from her body and fluttering to the floor. She collected the money, counted and rolled it and stowed it in the silk bag, and hid the bag back in its hole.

  The Doll stared at the accordion folds of her tightly packed wardrobe, deciding what she might wear. Before she had begun saving, all of her money that wasn’t needed for rent and food and a little fun had gone on clothes. Now the Doll proudly told her friends,

  “I’m on a budget.”

  Being on a budget meant the Doll restricted herself to $2,000 a month for clothes. Another grand went out on rent each month, and she allowed herself two grand for living, most of which disappeared on taxis and restaurants. The rest she tried to put away, aiming to add four thousand dollars worth of notes a month to her body. To achieve that the Doll needed to earn nine grand a month.

  Sometimes she worked six or even seven nights a week, spent less on clothes and living, and she was able to make her target. Mostly, though, she didn’t. Mostly she blew out somewhere or other, or just couldn’t be bothered dancing that much and, instead of four grand, it was at best one or two grand or plain nothing that she saved. And so instead of one year it had taken her three years, but still, over time, the money accumulated, and now the Doll and the blue Corolla were competing to be the first covered in paper.

  As for the two grand reserved for clothes this seemed to her miserable enough and economy indeed, for in her early years as a dancer the Doll had developed a taste for the best European designers, and so some months her two thousand dollars, even with the most astute shopping, would only be enough to buy two or three things.

  Though some of the other girls teased her about her expensive tastes, it was a simple matter for the Doll: she became someone else. No one would imagine that she had ever been other than beautiful, privileged, one of the elect who belonged not in the mortal world, but came down from the world of the gods—the billboards and women’s magazines, the films and ads—to walk among mere mortals. It was a fix, like blow, and like blow it always wore off too quickly and left you wanting that feeling back.

  Yet the more clothes the Doll bought, the more the Doll spent, the more the Doll was reminded of who she was, where she lived and how she made her money. And after a short time every Bulgari accessory, each Versace shirt, and
all the D&G skirts and jeans and Prada shoes only reminded the Doll of one thing: that she was less.

  And then she would have to go shopping again.

  She would roam the beautiful shops with their beautiful décor and beautiful shop assistants, their exquisite, thoughtful interiors marred only by their awful customers: the rich Asians she resented, the fat rich Australians she despised, the anorexic rich Australians she pitied, the poor rubbernecking westies she hated. So much beauty in service of so much that she found so ugly, so much that was hideous seeking cover, and in all the shoppers she saw only a different aspect of herself: wounded animals desperate that no one else see and know their fatal hurt.

  Finally, the Doll put on matching La Perla knickers and bra, beautiful pale green lace embroidered with small pink flowers picked out in Swarovski crystals—how she loved that sweet feeling of them against her skin, so hidden, so secret. They felt like walking around with $49,700 wrapped around her body. Then she wrestled on her favourite rhinestone-studded Versace jeans, draped a gold chain belt around her waist, and over her top slid a little black singlet brightly emblazoned with what, for the Doll, were the most magic of letters: D&G.

  Then she headed back out into the night and the Mardi Gras. The scene was much as ever, the same burning smell of Asia: food, crowds, piss, smog. She passed the Aborigine who always slept naked in a driveway just around the corner; the familiar ice addicts; the old men cruising; the same beggars, one of whom even waved to her; a dead cat’s skin rippling with the maggots moving beneath.

  Her foot rolled and she nearly fell when she trod on a syringe.

  “Eh,” a voice said. “I know you.”

  The Doll steadied herself and looked back up to see a beggar standing in front of her, who, in spite of the heat, was wearing an old brown bomber jacket.

  “You and the other girls,” the beggar said, his head twitching as he spoke. “I see you coming out of the club. You get the rich boys. You girls understand. Couple of bucks ain’t much for you.” He stank, his skin was scabby and filthy, but his eyes were the brilliant blue she had seen below frozen water on tv documentaries. “My brother fucked me up the arse,” he continued. “Twelve, I was. Fucked me so I’d have AIDS, like him. Some brother, eh? I won’t lie, I need a hit. Help me, please.”