The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  Next to the fridge, a small LCD screen that slid out from a cupboard at chest height—Moretti height—was on, with a television infotainment program running. The Doll poured herself a glass of water. The tv’s burbling transformed into an advertisement for magnetic mattress covers. The Doll could sense the drugs wearing off and she was feeling scratchy. She needed to feel zonked again, she told herself. She was shaking so much that she spilt the water.

  “Yes, that’s right, Holly,” a voice on the television was saying as the Doll mopped up the spill, “we have a national exclusive tonight on Undercurrent, here on Six.”

  The Doll glanced up at the screen to see a man, slightly twisted to the camera in a way that seemed familiar, doing some sort of outdoors broadcast, constantly touching with his index finger a coiled wire running into his ear.

  “Tonight,” said the man, “we’re able to reveal the true identity of ‘the unknown terrorist’ as she has become …”

  Then she recognised him: it was that creep, Richard Cody.

  43

  When the Doll came back to her senses there was some amateur footage of a man—or was it a woman?—swaddled in black, brandishing a machine gun on the tv, followed by other scenes she recalled as being from the massacre of school children at Beslan. And trailing in the wake of these was a series of images that had almost nothing to do with each other, but which to the Doll felt somehow inescapable—as if there were a logic in their ordering that demanded a yet unknown conclusion; as if they were the opening quick cuts summarising a series’ shows prior to its cataclysmic finale. On the screen, child’s body after child’s body was laid out; and this was followed by some of the things she had already seen—one of the kids’ backpacks being unzipped to reveal the bomb inside, the armed police taking up position around Tariq’s apartment block; the bad photograph of a bearded man in Arabic-looking dress who may or may not have been Tariq; the slow-motion grainy, dark images of she and Tariq hugging each other.

  Richard Cody was talking again.

  “Incredibly,” he was saying, and here the camera zoomed out to reveal him standing in Kings Cross, with the Chairman’s Lounge behind him, “in what may just be the cover of all covers, it turns out that this possible ‘unknown terrorist’—I stress possible—is no other than a lap dancer at this club right here, behind me, who was known as—and wait for this—the Black Widow! Now, as we know, this is the same name given to militant Islamic women prominent in suicide attacks in Russia.”

  It couldn’t be, thought the Doll. It wasn’t possible. It was a dream, a terrible dream. The television cut back to the anchor, a woman with improbable cheekbones.

  “This sounds incredible, Richard. What it does mean in terms of national security?”

  There was a long pause while the woman just continued staring out of the television. The Doll felt something dry and round like a pebble on her tongue that she tried to swallow but could not force down her throat. Richard Cody reappeared, touched an earpiece with his index finger, and started talking again.

  “I’m sorry, I just lost you there, Holly. Yes, incredible is the word. The Chairman’s Lounge is a very exclusive establishment and the Black Widow would have had access to some of Australia’s top political and business leaders there. And we will be revealing all this, and the lap dancing terrorist’s true identity, here, tonight, on Undercurrent.”

  The Doll turned away and, as she did so, felt a strange dizziness rise inside, as though she were on the verge both of falling into some terrible void while at the same time being that very emptiness. She leant against the sink to steady herself.

  “And here at Six,” said the woman anchor, “we’ll be keeping you up to date with the latest breaking news on this story as it comes to hand.”

  ‘Oh God, oh God!’ the Doll panicked, ‘there’s no way out of this!’ Her mind raced through the many things she might do and on reflection not one seemed a good idea. The police, if she turned herself in, were not going to believe her; she worried that the media, if she approached them, would set her up, while killing herself seemed attractive but painful and difficult. And so she hoped that something outside of herself would change and prove her innocent, just as something outside her had changed and seemed to be turning her into an outlaw.

  Moretti was still talking on the phone. The Doll knocked on his office door. He looked up and she waved a farewell. Without a word or expression Moretti looked back down and resumed talking.

  On her way out, she paused in the entrance hallway in front of the Miró. Her phone began ringing. She was shaking. She looked at the phone but it was no number she recognised. She dropped the phone back in her bag and let it ring out. Everything seemed to be swaying as if there were an earthquake: the Miró, the blue ceramic tray, the table, the room … and the Doll momentarily tensed her legs so that she might not fall. But the hallway was moving around her, rising, sloping, dropping and shifting, no matter where she stood or how she held herself.

  ‘Focus on the money,’ she said to herself, as she had so often said to herself in the past when some aspect of life had gone against her. ‘Three hundred dollars will give me … will give me … makes …’ But the world was whirling and once more her phone was ringing. Her mind could not do the simple maths. She did not know what it would make, and not knowing what it would make, it became unclear what the money might actually mean.

  The Doll snatched up the three one-hundred-dollar notes from the blue ceramic tray, tried to hold on to them, but they were just pieces of dry paper, they were leaves in a park that children chase in the wind and can never catch, and a hundred-dollar note fell out of her trembling fingers onto the floor. She dropped down, snatched it up, and put the cash in her purse as her phone began ringing yet again. ‘Focus on the money,’ she told herself, as she fumbled for her phone and turned it off. ‘Just the money.’

  When she stepped outside, the heat hit her body, held her throat. The Doll walked back down the road, concentrating on moving, not hoping, not fearing, but walking, getting on, trying to think of money. But her mind would not work: she couldn’t remember whether it was $49,700 she had saved, or whether it was $47,900; if it was $300 left to save or $2,100, or if it was $21,000 that was her target. She couldn’t calculate whether it was another three weeks of the man who ate the sun eating her arse out with his eyes, or one week, or several months before she could stop this, be free of it forever.

  It was all a blur, everything was a horrible blur of numbers that no longer had any meaning. So instead the Doll tried to see the hundred-dollar notes covering her body and imagine where she would place these next three notes, but all she could see was the wind blowing the notes everywhere and she could not bring her mind to heel and make the wind stop blowing. She tried so hard to see her body slowly disappearing as if by magic, money papering over it. But her body would not disappear, she was naked, the earth was blowing away in a cyclone, and still she was naked.

  44

  The Doll got off the ferry at Circular Quay. If she was still bewildered by all that was happening, the boat trip had at least been good in helping her mind settle on one thing: she would—she had to—go to the police. But how and where? She paused for a moment under the cool shadow of the Cahill Expressway, trying to think, to decide on some clear course of action.

  But as the traffic’s violent rumbling seeped into her from the great iron-clad causeway above, her mind returned to its previous turmoil and all certainty abandoned her. For a moment she again toyed with the idea of not going to the police. But, she then thought, if she didn’t go they would hunt her down. With their guns and helicopters they would find her anyway and they would kill her.

  No, no, she then reprimanded herself, this was just allowing herself to panic. She had to stay cool, she had to go to the police, for only in this way could the nightmare be ended. But she would not turn herself in to the next cop she saw on a street corner, no, she didn’t want to be alone with a cop. Far safer, thought the Doll, to go
to a cop shop where there were too many witnesses for anything awful to happen. And somehow she felt a certain security in the idea of going into the cop shop as a free and innocent woman.

  But as she began walking into town toward the city police station, she started to remember stories about bent Sydney coppers. She began to fear that she would be framed and locked away forever. And in the heat that built the further she got from the harbour and the deeper she went into the city, she found herself beginning to slow and dawdle. But it was only when she turned into George Street that she took fright.

  She had walked straight into a police cordon. There were cops and cars and lights and a sense of slight panic everywhere. For a moment—when a big biker cop in jodhpurs turned and stared at her with his thuggish face—she was convinced she was about to be shot dead. It felt to the Doll that they were waiting for her, that it was an ambush. It took all her self-control not to turn and run.

  “Anthrax scare,” he said to her in a surprisingly soft voice, but it was too late. As she retreated into the heart of the crowd rather than trying to skirt it, she saw through bobbing heads white-suited emergency workers walking beneath portable showers. Staying in the middle of a throng that broke off from the main crowd, she headed away as quickly as she could.

  Still, she pressed on. She had to, she told herself, trying to ignore her body that was somehow quivering as she walked. She skirted the edge of Chinatown, past Chinese girls with bleached hair and Chinese punks in bright nylon trackies in spite of the stinking heat. She turned into a narrow street and headed down a hill toward Darling Harbour. At its intersection with a main road was the city cop shop—a wedge-shaped building, mirror glassed down to its ominously black-tiled bottom storey. It reminded the Doll of a chain-mailed fist. ‘What goes on inside?’ she wondered. ‘Why can’t you see in?’ Her stomach began churning.

  But she stuck to her purpose and walked to the police station’s public entrance. Inside was a small waiting room full of people, and, apart from a confectionery and drinks dispenser, devoid of furnishings. A man who seemed off his face on something was gibbering beneath a domestic violence poster, a Chinese girl was quietly sobbing near the drinks dispenser, a few others were chatting, while a lone drunk was swearing and mumbling to himself. Behind the counter a couple of uniformed cops and a receptionist were trying to sort the confusion into some order of official documents and formal statements.

  She welcomed the strange crowd, seeing in it a disguise and, in the waiting it imposed on her, a final chance to ready herself, to prepare in her head what she would say. A man stood two in front of her in the queue for the counter. He was middle-aged and burly, dressed in big boots, shorts and a t-shirt, covered in concrete dust. Occasionally he turned around and she could see his eyes, bright red from irritation, like vivid make-up against his grey-dusted face. He looked like the ghost of a tradesman. The Doll caught him saying something about a restraining order his wife had out on him. The woman behind the counter was polite. A little later he began yelling how he just wanted to see his kids. The woman remained calm, even, thought the Doll, gentle, and tried to quieten him down, but he only yelled louder.

  “I’m the victim here,” he yelled. “Not that bitch.” A cop came out of a door and was walking up to him, when the man pulled a knife out of his shorts. “Why can’t I see my kids?” he yelled. “I just want to see my kids.”

  And then there were cops everywhere, spilling into the room, some with drawn batons, shoving the waiting room crowd away from the man, who was now waving the knife back and forth, while one pulled a revolver and was shouting,

  “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.