The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  A strange and terrible thought formed in Tony Buchanan’s mind.

  “Those three bombs, Siv,” he said. “Who did make them?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The truth,” Tony Buchanan said, surprised to hear himself repeating what now sounded a trivial point. He realised his voice sounded thin and unconvincing.

  “Anything is better than another Sari Club,” Siv Harmsen said evenly. He gave a strange smile, an expression of weariness and knowledge that unsettled Tony Buchanan. “Australia feels like me, Tony. Just think about it.”

  And so Tony Buchanan shook hands and went back to work. He did think about it. The air con was off, the office a furnace. He had a new wife, an over-extended mortgage and alimony payments. He had a new thirty-five-foot yacht. He had taken out a second line of credit for it, secured against his Elizabeth Bay home, debt chasing debt. He was still a chance, distantly, it was true, but still a chance for an assistant commissioner’s position sometime in the next five years. He would do nothing, he reasoned to himself, for what else could he do?

  And then he had the answer.

  He would go sailing on his next free afternoon. The thought of sailing always calmed him, and he imagined himself out on the water, thinking how beautiful Sydney was and how so few people really got to see its full charms, and how lucky he was to be able to enjoy it.

  Yet something made Tony Buchanan ring Siv Harmsen one last time. He had been thinking of Tariq al-Hakim, how his murder was said to be the work of the woman, how Nick Loukakis had thought it an underworld job, but now he could see another darker, far more sinister explanation.

  “Who killed Tariq al-Hakim?” he asked.

  There was a strange laugh at the other end of the line, a how-fucking-dumb-are-you? laugh, and then Siv Harmsen said, “I would say people with an interest in terror did that. Wouldn’t you, Tony?”

  “There’s always a paper chain, Siv.”

  Siv Harmsen said nothing. Tony Buchanan recognised the old interrogator’s trick, of Siv waiting for him to implicate himself in a nervous rush of words. But this wasn’t an interrogation.

  “Always documents.”

  “I was an altar boy, Tony, you know, a child of God. Did I ever tell you? And the needs of the state, Tony, are like they used to say about God: everywhere apparent and nowhere visible.”

  “Always a record, something, Siv, that connects the highest to those who have to get their hands dirty.”

  “Once upon a time,” said Siv Harmsen finally, “maybe. I wouldn’t know. But now, mate, there’s just people like us. We don’t even have to share our knowledge verbally. We just have to share an understanding.”

  Tony Buchanan felt himself filling with terror.

  “You get me?” asked Siv Harmsen. Then he hissed one word that suddenly sounded so sinister. “Mate.”

  And Tony Buchanan finally connected with Siv Harmsen at some deeply buried place where he understood that to share power was to share guilt.

  “This heat,” said Tony Buchanan, pulling at his collar.

  “Yeah,” said Siv Harmsen. There was another long silence. Then Siv Harmsen spoke again. “There’s drinks at the minister’s office next Thursday. Why don’t you come?”

  “It’s getting unbearable.”

  “Yeah,” said Siv Harmsen, his voice as flat as Bankstown. “Unfuckingbearable. Six pm. I’ll send a car for you.” He hung up.

  Yes, of course, thought Tony Buchanan, that was the solution: he would go sailing, not sometime soon, but now, today, this very evening. In such stinking heat the harbour would be particularly glorious. It was extraordinary how many millions of people lived in Sydney and yet never used the harbour. If only they knew how foolish they were! He would let the spinnaker out, feel the sail belly, the yacht yaw like a great beast waking, and as the yacht pulled forward toward Shark Island its acceleration would push him slightly back and he would feel the salt breeze on his face. Life was beautiful in this most beautiful of places where it was possible to forget everything.

  He smiled to himself, leant back in his chair, dreaming of sailing, dreaming of passing Sydney by.

  ‘No doubt about it,’ thought Tony Buchanan, ‘people are fools.’

  81

  The café’s air con seemed to be freezing the sweat that coated the Doll into frost. A newspaper scattered over her table said that they had sold out of gasmasks in the Blue Mountains. The television was singing “I Still Call Australia Home”, but Australia no longer felt like any sort of home to the Doll. Australia felt like a war. It wasn’t the war against terrorism that everyone kept talking about, but some other war that nobody was talking about, and the Doll had ended up on the losing side.

  A radio from the café kitchen said: “Nissan Maxima. Wow!”

  It was a war against everyone, and it didn’t matter whether you were Muslim or Christian, a Leb or a lap dancer—there was only this war and whatever you were, whatever you thought: nothing like her; something like Wilder—you were going to be sucked into it no matter what.

  The paper said: “Learn strategies to build up your wealth and self-esteem! Call us now!”

  But the war was vague, thought the Doll, difficult to nail down, camouflaged in words and messages that wearied you and seeped into you like the ceaseless heat.

  “What kind of scumbags?” the radio asked. “Islamic scumbags.”

  The tv said: “Four hundred mill Pantene Pro-V. $4.95. Today only. We’re the fresh food people.”

  The radio said: “And it’s not politically correct to say it, but I’m saying it.”

  “Yeah, I’m with you, Joe. My uncle was in the war, and he said the only language they understood when he was in Syria was a good boot up the arse.”

  “Maybe we should listen more to our old people who fought for our freedom.”

  “You get me, though, Joe?”

  “We all get you, Trev, and, what’s more, I think we’re all with you. We’re the land of the fair go, but these troublemakers who come from elsewhere need to know that’s not the same thing as weakness. And if the government won’t do it, sometimes it’s up to the people to show what our standards are, to make it clear what discipline and punishment mean. And if that’s beyond us as Australians I don’t think we should be living here either. I’m Joe Cosuk and this is Australia Talking on 2FG. Now, my friends at Toyota have come up with a beauty …”

  Out on the street, a woman with her head out of a car yelled abuse at the car in front of her.

  The Doll felt everything blurring, and taking her away from some understanding she had momentarily known. She was unable to recall what it was she had been thinking just a few seconds before. The noise of radios and tvs, the sight of endless magazines and catalogues and papers that spilled over the café tables were like Temazepam, setting her adrift from reality and heading her back down a deep tunnel.

  “Fucken elites,” a thin, bearded man was yelling outside, so loudly that it cut through the radio and the tv and chatter inside the café. Startled out of her thoughts, the Doll turned and looked out, and by accident caught his eye. He stared at her. “Fuck you!” he yelled even louder. “FUCK YOU!”

  The bearded man gobbed, and smeared on the glass at the Doll’s head level, not an arm’s length away, was a green scallop of mucus. As the man disappeared along the street the phlegm slithered slowly down the glass like a snail, and then stopped level with the Doll’s mouth.

  Her thoughts scattered like snow.

  82

  The Doll walked outside and, simply to escape, opened the door of a parked taxi. When the driver asked where she was going, she said, “Darlinghurst,” because it was what she mostly said to cab drivers. But she had no intention of getting out there. No, she would just drive around for a while and compose herself, confident in taxi drivers’ utter lack of interest in any customer. But he too had his car radio tuned in to another talkback show.

  “Well, that’s what I reckon, Ron,” a caller was s
aying. “She’s as guilty as sin. You know, if you sleep with terrorists, if you look like a terrorist, and, look—I’m no racist—I have Aborigine friends …”

  She would drive around and then return to the Retro Hotel. Although she knew it was highly likely the police would have tracked her there, the Doll now merely wanted to agree with her destiny, not fight it. She wanted an end to her own fear, and submission seemed the best way of ensuring this. It was fine to be free, but free to do what? To go mad? To endlessly hear your own name being talked about with horror and fear? To know that whatever you did, wherever you went, you were doomed? And besides, where else could she go? She was weary, so heavy and weary with it all.

  “Some of my best mates are Aborigines,” the shock jock’s honeyed voice oozed in. “Jimmy Little. Mark Ella. It’s not racist, Terry, to speak honestly—”

  “—well, she’s dark, isn’t she?”

  “Here will be fine,” the Doll said to the taxi driver, trying to control the quaver in her voice. “Please, just here.”

  Walking, she thought, even in this intense heat, would help calm her. But it didn’t help. To the contrary, almost everything was panicking her now. When she heard a rolling whoosh coming up from behind, she overreacted, jumping backwards and knocking a café table at which two women sat.

  A short, heavily muscled man, wearing only Quiksilver boardies and leather belts tied around his oiled torso, rolled by on a large skateboard, dragged along at a clip by a pit bull terrier to which the board was harnessed.

  “Fucking Ben Hur,” said one of the women with a scowl. She had an upended apricot Danish stuck to her skirt. Two men talking intensely at the pub’s entrance looked up and one swore before returning to his conversation. The Doll put her head down and walked on. She made her way through some back streets, and was cutting through the Cross, trying to think of nothing, when her path was blocked by a small crowd gathered outside Happy Hockers.

  Two young men were kicking a body that lay curled on the ground. One of the young men wore Industrie three-quarter pants and a Morrissey t-shirt, while the other had a neat Mambo singlet and Billabong boardshorts. Both had sunglasses and baseball caps on, both, thought the Doll, were hotties, with the well-cut arms and calves of gym junkies.

  The body on the ground moved with their blows like a heavy mattress. It made no sound other than the dull groan each kick forced from it. The body—its rags, its crumbling bomber jacket, the plastic shopping bags stuffed with trash that lay spilled around it—was clearly that of some beggar or another.

  Though most people walked quickly around the scene, anxious not to become involved, a small crowd had gathered.

  “Leave him alone!” yelled an old woman.

  The men stopped momentarily and turned their aggression onto the onlookers.

  “What the fuck are you going to do about it?” said the shorter man, his handsome face wet with exertion, his splendid biceps moist as if freshly waxed and oiled.

  Realising nobody was going to do anything, he took a step toward them. He took off his Diesel baseball cap, his Revo sunglasses, wiped the sweat off his forehead like a man unnecessarily challenged in the middle of a necessary labour, then thrust his gleaming head forward and scanning the dozen or so spectators, looking each one in turn in the eye, sneered:

  “Well, what the fuck are you gunna do?”

  The crowd was going to do nothing. They stepped back, and began dispersing.

  The Doll looked down. The scabs, the thin, ratty hair, the bomber jacket: it was him, the beggar she had given money only a few days earlier. His face was covered in blood and filth. His blue eyes were open and caught hers. They asked for nothing. That is how it is, they seemed to say.

  The Doll avoided acknowledging his gaze, those terrible blue eyes. Like everyone else, she abruptly turned away and resumed walking.

  Under her arms, on the wrist beneath her watch, on the back of her knees, under her chin—everywhere, the Doll could feel herself sweating. Sweat trickled down her cleavage and sweat furrowed her back as she scurried townwards. She could feel it slimy between her buttocks. She could feel it in the way her damp bra gripped her body unpleasantly, and her singlet caught on her wet body and held more heat against her.

  And behind her they kept on for a few minutes more, kicking him as if he were to blame for everything in that dirty, dead decade they were all condemned to live through, a sack of shit that had once been a man, in a place that had once been a community, in a country that had once been a society.

  83

  The Doll turned into William Street and walked past a hair-dressing salon. She halted, turned and walked back. Through its front window she could see the salon was empty. A young woman stood at a small counter looking at her nails.

  I’ll begin again, thought the Doll. I will—but then she realised that no new beginning was possible now. There was no starting over, there was no choice, no freedom, only the time left waiting for fate to seize her. There was no home, no family and no friends. There was no belonging. Everything, everyone had to cut out and cut off. There was no hope, nor was there despair, only certain events that felt to her ever more predestined. Everything had to be shaved off. Everything.

  The Doll summoned her courage and went in. The salon was a long, narrow room, little more than an enclosed alley-way. The hairdresser seemed uninterested in the Doll’s request.

  “It’s a bit weird, I know,” said the Doll, feeling the need to say something.

  “I’ve had plenty weirder,” the hairdresser told the Doll. “It’s about all I have,” she continued, a little ruefully, pointing to a chair for the Doll to sit in. “Weird people. Weird requests. One woman wanted extensions to her pubes. Can you believe it?” She couldn’t.

  The Doll watched in the mirror as her damp hair fell in short blonde hanks to the floor, and a hideous white scalp and a stranger’s face were slowly revealed. She felt she looked like a skinhead. An ugly, dykey skinhead. She felt what she wanted to feel. She felt nothing.

  84

  When the electric doors of the Retro Hotel slid open and the Doll walked in, grateful for the chill damp of the air con, she felt a dim sense of disappointment that there were no police waiting with guns and black uniforms. Nor was there anyone in her eerily empty hotel room.

  She had, she realised, no gift for evasion. There was no longer anywhere or anyone to run to. She felt an exhaustion so complete it required a great effort to walk the last few steps across the room. She drew the heavy hotel drapes, and when she switched off the lights the room was darker than any night. She lay on the bed, her head heavy, her limbs without energy, thinking she would simply wait there on her bed for them. Whoever they might be—men with guns, police, soldiers; whatever they might do—arrest her, beat her, lock her away forever, kill her, none of it any longer mattered to the Doll, only that it end and end soon.

  But no one came.

  She closed her eyes for a long time, waiting, and still there were no police. The Doll felt both relieved and irritated. Where were they? What would she do if they did not turn up? They were a kind of solution, and she had no other.

  The Doll now forgot that just three days before, she had been happy, her griefs and worries seeming no better or no worse than what other people had to bear, and she had conducted all her affairs with one single rule in mind—to make and save money—and this rule had seemed to her infallible in pointing her ever ahead in the right direction.

  In that complete darkness the Doll wanted to think that somewhere life was good, that truth was not chaos, that the world was not random, that a good person could build themselves a good life … but then these just seemed thoughts with no basis, rooted in nothing. So instead the Doll tried to think of what had been good in her life, and she thought of her friends and she thought of how when she was a child her mother used to take her fishing in a little dinghy, and how her father would lose his temper with her for tangling her line, or being scared of a fish being landed, and he’d
yell at her and then give up and take the boat back in. And so it was that there was no good memory that somehow didn’t seem to lead into a bad memory: her parents fighting, her mother leaving and the death of someone from Home and Away, Wilder’s friendship and Wilder’s betrayal, Tariq’s kisses and Tariq’s corpse, all her money and all of it gone and the fishing lines and Wilder’s hair all tangled and she could undo none of it, none of it …

  85

  The Doll jolted awake. She looked across at the clock radio. It was 6.30 pm.

  Green button taut beneath her finger, the Doll held out the remote control. She tried to ready her body for what was to come, as if it were about to absorb a punch or a fall, but her stomach was watery and she felt somehow seasick. She was, she realised, terrified. Until two nights before, she had never featured in the media, and the shock of it had quickly honed her responses such that she now scanned every screen, every paper, every broadcast only for mention of herself, and there was more than enough about “the pole dancing time-bomb” in the news to see only herself everywhere, screening out all other matters.

  She knew for most watching and listening she was a wonderful story—mysterious, sleazy and sinister—all in the form of an instant celebrity. She was, as Wilder had predicted, going to get voted off soon. Everyone knew it; the interest in the tale was simply when and how it unravelled. Perhaps she, a long-time Survivor fan, instinctively thought that the rules and logic of the show she now found herself in would be revealed if she too just watched carefully and patiently. Maybe then an omnipotent presenter would appear and an immunity challenge present itself whereby she would have the chance to save herself for another week.

  But, as yet, nothing had become clear to the Doll. No presenter had outlined the rules of an absurd challenge and handed over a clunky bead necklace in an act of evening salvation. For the Doll was alone in a world without divine saviours, a world without rules, a world in which she could see nothing and everyone could see her. She realised that her life was no longer what she made of it, but what others said it was. For the first time she clearly understood her fate. There was no choice, she had to know, and so she pressed the green button.