The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  The Doll looked up and, though sitting deep in the coffee shop, she could see men in combat black creeping along the top of the tower block with rifles, sights occasionally glinting, flickering in and out of the bright sunlight.

  She went back to the paper. According to sources close to the Danish royals, the Doll read, Princess Mary was a wonderful hands-on mother, and the young prince was a favourite with everyone at the palace.

  ‘Lucky bitch,’ thought the Doll. She dropped another Zoloft to make up for the one she didn’t have the day before and read on.

  A quarter of an hour later, the same cop came back into the coffee shop, spoke into a walkie-talkie mounted on his shoulder, then asked everyone in the café for their attention.

  “The situation,” the cop said, “has been successfully neutralised. We thank you for your help with all matters of national security.”

  No one was sure what he meant. The cop was back on his walkie-talkie, head cocked to the side. Somebody asked if it meant they could leave.

  He turned, annoyed at the question.

  “Christ,” he said. “Haven’t I already told you that?”

  27

  Now came hours of wandering through shop after shop. Though seemingly purposeless, these were rather hours of being impelled by a necessity no less real and profound than that of a nomad hunter to constantly reacquaint himself with the land and game and seasons. There was a ceaselessly unfolding knowledge to it all, vast and necessary to the Doll’s life, needing to be endlessly refreshed. The slightest suggestion of new colours or styles, the sudden collapse of a trend as indicated by the telltale discount, an offhand comment by an assistant—all these matters and moments needed to be assimilated, calibrated, judged in determining what might next be bought, and what was next bought determined how her life might then be.

  The Doll’s lodestone in these wanderings that day was the Louis Vuitton bag she had promised herself the day before. With its image firmly in her mind and the city as her destination, the Doll left the coffee shop, made her way past the police cordon and up Macleay Street. Needing to walk, to stretch her body, stiff and weary after the lovemaking of the night, she headed past its gay couples and manicured women walking manicured dogs; past its exclusive food shops where a packet of chermoula spice cost more than the powders being pushed at the next street corner; where a few slices of imported jamon would set a gourmand back as much as a streetwalker’s weary mouth would a kerb crawler up on Darlinghurst Road.

  The Doll headed across to Victoria Street and down the long set of stone steps into Woolloomooloo. As she strode through the empty bottles and cans and streamers and syringes and broken popper bottles left over from the Mardi Gras revellers, everything seemed to radiate more heat.

  She escaped from the sun into the welcome shade of the trees of Hyde Park. There a shabby ibis tottering amidst the litter below an overflowing garbage bin was trying to scrape chewing gum off the tip of its long bill. No, she told herself, she was determined not to live on scraps like the ibis, and her thinking turned to how she would soon have an apartment like Tariq’s. She would buy when the market was low, and trade when it was up. She had read about such things; it was all about getting onto the real estate carousel, and once you were on, anything was possible. There were countless stories, one heard such tales every day, and soon her story would be one more of them.

  A middle-aged couple wearing boxing gloves shadow-boxed as they jogged past the Doll. They seemed radioactive with health and prosperity. The Doll smiled at such idiocy after they had run past. And yet she secretly envied them, wanted to be like them—so affluent, so confident, so oblivious—and the way to become them, she was convinced, was through buying property.

  Perhaps her first apartment would not be up to that much, but she would transform it; she wasn’t frightened of work, and she had flair. Flair, the magazines said, could do so much. Flair was intangible, immeasurable and utterly important. Flair cost nothing but it made money. Flair was invisible but one either had it and got photographed in magazines and real estate columns, or one didn’t have it and didn’t get photographed. Given she would own property soon, the Doll knew she must have flair and to demonstrate to all who saw her that this was so, she would soon be swinging a Louis Vuitton bag by her side.

  But when she got to the Louis Vuitton shop, the bag was gone. Undeterred, the Doll drifted through other shops, in and out of Versace and Armani and Prada searching for an opportunity of equal or even greater worth than the bag she had for a short time so desired.

  She was coming out of a shoe boutique back into the main shopping centre when she noticed a large rear projection screen set up outside an electronics store showing crowds leaving the Homebush Olympic stadium after the previous day’s bomb scare. That image gave way to a closeup of a kid’s backpack being unzipped to reveal a bomb. But only when it cut to armed police taking up positions around Tariq’s apartment block did the Doll give it her undivided attention.

  28

  No sound came from the television, and all that could be heard was the babble of the shopping centre. Somewhere a child was crying. A reporter came on, a young woman, but what the reporter was saying the Doll didn’t know. Then a blurry photograph of a bearded man in Arabic dress was being shown, beneath which ran a banner saying, again and again:

  ‘SUSPECTED TERRORIST ELUDES POLICE DRAGNET.’

  A salesman came out from the shop with a remote control, looked at the rear projection screen, saw the Doll staring at it, and apologised. The screen momentarily went black and returned to life with Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear ran offscreen and the Doll came to her senses.

  So that was it! A terrorist in the same block that she had spent the night in. It would make for a good story to tell Wilder, but it was nothing much really, thought the Doll. Yet some feeling so vague she didn’t know what it was unsettled her. Her stomach felt tight. Her mouth seemed suddenly full of saliva. She put it down to the drink and the drugs and the late night.

  For the second time she rang Tariq, and for the second time his phone rang out to a messageless voicemail, and for the second time she felt foolish and left no message.

  How she wished Tariq had been there when she woke. How she wished he hadn’t left, or, having left, that he had managed to make it back before she left. And his disappearance now seemed to her strange rather than unfortunate; and his apartment now seemed creepy and unpleasant rather than cool; and all she could think of was the sun filling and burning its rooms. Last night she had felt so happy in his arms, and now she suddenly felt like crying.

  The Doll abruptly turned around to leave. A woman in a black burkah walked straight into her, her elbow hitting the Doll.

  The Doll’s mind leapt back to the police with their guns and black uniforms looking like death, to the television report the day before about the Homebush bombs, and then the woman appeared to the Doll not as another woman, but as something terrifying and unknown, an evil spectre she had seen so often in films, a short, stubby Darth Vader.

  The woman, for her part, seemed to be saying it was the Doll’s fault, though exactly what she was saying the Doll couldn’t understand because she was talking in a strange language. Maybe it was an accusation or maybe it wasn’t. It was impossible to say. Later, the Doll wondered if she hadn’t actually been apologising. But that was much later.

  Perhaps it was the accumulation of the events of the past few days, or the heat, or not taking her pills as she was supposed to, or just a lack of sleep, but the Doll felt strung out, her nerves jagged: the police that morning, the bombs the day before, the way she had worked hard for a Louis Vuitton bag and how there had then been no Louis Vuitton bag; whatever, she snapped.

  “Fuck off!” the Doll yelled. “Just fuck off back to wherever you’re from.”

  A few people halted to watch what might happen next, but nothing did. The woman in the black burkah stopped talking, turned, and hurried away.

  “Good on you,” a middle-aged
man in a canary yellow shirt said in a slightly trembling but loud voice. “They won’t integrate, you know,” he said even more loudly, perhaps intended for the woman in the burkah to hear, though she had already vanished. A large woman clapped. A kid in a Microsoft baseball cap yelled,

  “They flew here. We grew here.”

  The Doll didn’t know whether to be buoyed or depressed by this response. No one else said or did anything and, the confrontation ended, they drifted away as if it had been just one more piece of poor plaza entertainment. As she walked towards the main entrance the Doll found herself shaking. She felt ashamed at having lost her temper and unsure as to why she had erupted in such a rage. And yet she was still angry with the woman in the burkah.

  ‘How stupid in this heat!’ thought the Doll. ‘Why can’t they just be like us?’ She decided to pity her, and her pity felt a kind of necessary superiority. And it struck the Doll as a particularly humiliating thing for any woman to have to get about in gear as bad as a burkah. But then the Doll remembered the television creep telling her how humiliating it must be to be a pole dancer, and she felt strangely confused.

  29

  When the Doll got home, she was relieved to finally get out of her clammy Versace jeans, shower and change into old shorts and a singlet, split the coke Tariq had given her, putting one portion in with her bag of cash, and wrapping the other in some tin foil and putting it in the Gucci handbag that she had hoped to no longer need, ready for whenever she might want it.

  She put some music on loud and the tv on low. There was an ad for the new Toyota Prado. Everything in the ad—men, women, roads, and skies—looked beautiful and at peace. It calmed the Doll.

  She went and cleaned her bathroom. When she came back a quiz show was on. A reality show. A sports show. She dozed off. She woke to see the screen filled with armed police taking up position around Tariq’s apartment block. The Doll grabbed the remote and turned up the volume.

  The newsreader was talking about a failed police stake out of a notorious Islamic terrorist—at which point the vision changed, as before, to the same bad photograph of a bearded man in Arabic dress. The newsreader read out an Arabic-sounding name, the only part of which she recognised was the word Tariq. Then the picture changed again, this time to grainy, dark images taken from on high.

  “To assist with their enquiries in regard to yesterday’s attempted bombing of Homebush Olympic stadium, police have tonight released security camera footage,” the newsreader said, “showing the terrorist suspect entering an apartment building last night with a female accomplice.”

  The grainy images showed a couple hugging each other as they entered a building. The footage was slowed down so much that she could see the frames clicking through. In contrast with their dark surroundings, they had used some digital effect to spotlight the couple’s faces.

  “It is not yet known,” continued the newsreader, “who the woman is.”

  The Doll felt her mouth go dry. The man was Tariq. The woman was her.

  30

  At first, the Doll regarded what she had just seen on the television as she regarded much that she found disagreeable and stupid in this life: irrelevant, and she simply ignored it as she did everything else that she regarded as irrelevant. After all, it was just like all the other crap the journos and shock jocks and pollies carried on with: maybe it had everything to do with their world, but it had nothing to do with hers. It struck the Doll as an excellent idea to simply regard it all as amusing; it arose out of nothing and it would soon all go back to nothing, and none of it was to be taken seriously. She forced a smile, and made herself laugh. What a joke!

  “It’s so empowering to keep your skin supple,” the television said in a voice softly American. As the ad break continued, the Doll went and poured herself a straight Zubrowka vodka, skolled it, and poured herself a second. It’s creepy, though, she thought, knowing you’d slept with a terrorist, even one as cute as Tariq.

  She rang Wilder, and told her some, though not all, of her story. Wilder, who sounded weary and neither overly interested nor that concerned, told her not to worry.

  “Everything blows over, Gina,” said Wilder, who always used the Doll’s Christian name, “and life goes on as ever. I mean, just focus on the good in your life, and in a year’s time we’ll be having a drink and you’ll suddenly remember when you met another hottie on the beach and became a terrorist for five minutes, and all it’ll be is a funny story.”

  ‘Yeah,’ thought the Doll, ‘and maybe not even a year, maybe just a couple of days, and it will all be over except as a stupid joke.’

  “Don’t worry,” said Wilder before hanging up, “you’ll be voted off quick enough. Just remind me to come to the eviction party.”

  The Doll lay back down on her sofa, and after a time drifted off to sleep. When she woke, she surfed the tv, taking none of it in, until she noticed the same security camera footage of Tariq and her on another station, blown up so that their distorted faces filled the screen.

  “Police are fearful,” said a voiceover, “that two terrorists who escaped a midday raid at Potts Point may strike somewhere in Sydney any day.”

  The Doll quickly changed stations, then switched the tv off, put some Cat Empire on up loud, then switched that off and put the tv back on. She tried to focus on Wilder’s advice, but wasn’t able to do what Wilder said; she couldn’t just focus on the good, and Wilder’s everything blows over seemed only a dumb cliché that turns out to be a lie. Rather than calming her, it made her uneasy.

  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.