No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  By the time Mouse reached the door, the two people who had fallen had become three: she recognised one of them immediately as an employee of the nail salon, Cute Nails, ‘because she was Vietnamese or Chinese or something like that, and she had on the silk top they all wear. I used to go get, like, gels or else a mani-pedi, a little treat every now and then. The second one, Mitchell, the school boy, he just looked like every school boy we used to get at Surf City: blazer, tie, black shoes. He had his iPod Touch earphones in; probably the reason he fell over was that he couldn’t hear anything or he was looking down at his screen or whatever. And Ali Khan – I didn’t know who he was then, obviously, and I couldn’t tell where he was from. I didn’t recognise him at all. He still had his hood right up. I couldn’t really make out his face. I wasn’t really trying to because there was a bit of pandemonium going on. I could see people running around. Ali Khan was scrambling, like trying to get to his feet, but it was like he couldn’t stand up properly.’

  ‘Could you tell whether he was carrying anything on him or not?’ I said and then, even though it made me sound like old Coroner Hanrahan, I added, ‘Did he smell strange?’

  ‘He didn’t smell but when I think about it now I think, did I hear like a sloshing sound?’ Mouse said. ‘I can’t actually remember. Like, I’m asking myself, did I smell him then or only later? I don’t know. But I definitely noticed that he was finding it hard to get to his feet. He was staggering, like you do when you’re carrying something heavy. Like it was hard for him to get up. Like when I’m trying to get up from the couch. But then he was up, and it was about then that I heard somebody saying, “He’s got a gun!” And I was shocked because, obviously I was thinking, who’s got a gun? Is it somebody near here? Where? It sounds stupid now but I was actually looking for somebody in a balaclava, somebody who had robbed a bank. But I couldn’t see anyone like that. All I could see was these three people on the floor outside my shop, looking pretty dazed, and people running around like headless chooks everywhere else, and I thought, right, we’ve got to get out of here, meaning, we’ve got to get out of this corridor. So that’s when I kind of reached down and took the three of them – Ali Khan and everyone – by their collars and dragged them back into the shop with me. Obviously that was stupid. But at the time, Father, I wasn’t thinking that maybe one of them is the problem. I was thinking, whatever’s going on, we’d better get out of the way.’

  Back in the security room, Foto was still watching the images from the CCTV on his laptop, meaning he could see Mouse lifting the three people outside her shop into the shop. He immediately started shouting, ‘What are you doing? Don’t do that!’ but of course Mouse couldn’t hear him.

  Mouse was on the fourth floor, way beyond Foto’s reach. He told Hanrahan, ‘I wanted to yell out to her, “Don’t drag him in there with you, for Christ’s sake!”’ – but then, just moments after Mouse finished dragging Ali Khan into the shop, Foto saw Ali Khan get to his feet, and try to rush the door to get out again.

  ‘I had to make a split-second decision,’ Foto said.

  ‘I was thinking, if he makes it back out through that door, he’ll be running around the shopping centre again. And I didn’t want him doing that. People were already panicking and saying he had a gun. I thought the best thing to do was lock him in the shop. People have asked me, would you do it different if you had that chance again? But you don’t get that chance.’

  It was a simple matter for Foto to lock the glass door to Cups and Saucy from where he was sitting. The whole security system at Surf City is computerised, so he only had to hit a few keys.

  ‘I just slammed the door shut,’ he told Hanrahan. ‘Pretty much as soon as I saw the kid getting up and going for the door, I activated the lock. And I was pretty sure that was a good idea because he straight away started going off his tree.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Hanrahan said.

  ‘There’s a long silver handle on the inside of the door. He was really tugging on that handle, trying to get the door open. But the security system – the doors have got steel rods, top and bottom. When you lock the door, the top one goes up into the ceiling and the bottom one goes down, into the floor, and there’s no undoing it.’

  Hanrahan said, ‘What, not at all?’

  ‘Not from inside the shop,’ Foto said. ‘Once those locks were down, only I could open them – and I wasn’t going to do that, not until the police arrived.’

  ‘How did the other people in the shop react to that?’

  Foto looked down at his big feet.

  ‘They were pretty calm,’ he said. ‘But the Ali Khan bloke, the little one, he was near hysterical. He was tugging at the door, really putting all his weight into trying to get it open.’

  I asked Mouse what she thought of Foto’s decision to lock the door. She was pragmatic about it, saying, ‘Oh, look, I’d seen the locks slide shut but I wasn’t panicking about that. I was thinking, okay, the police are locking people in their shops, we must be safe here. Because I didn’t know that Ali Khan was the one we were supposed to be being kept safe from. I actually went up behind Ali Khan because he was tugging on the door to say, “Hey, it’s okay,” but he would not stop. It was like he couldn’t believe that he was locked in.

  ‘I kept saying, “Hey, calm down, they’ve locked us in, you’re not going to be able to open it,” – and that’s when he swung around to face me and I know I shouldn’t say this, Father, but I got such a shock. His face wasn’t white, it was grey. His eyelashes were grey, his eyelids were grey, his lips were like fat slugs. And he was ugly, ugly – his skin was all pockmarked, like he’d had boils or something, and he had this big cut down his face. He still had his hoodie on at that point. You couldn’t see the big hole in the top of his head. But the way he was looking at me, I just said, “Oh, Jesus,” or maybe I used another word, but you know what I mean, I was freaking out.

  ‘And now I wanted the door open. Because the worst thing was, as soon as he turned around, I could really smell him. He stank – I mean, he absolutely reeked of petrol. I could really smell it now. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it when I first picked him up and dragged him into the shop. Maybe the box he was carrying had only just started to leak or whatever, but once he was standing right in front of me – ugly, ugly! – it was like I could smell nothing else, just petrol. And that’s when I knew: this is the guy we’re supposed to be running way from. And he hasn’t got a gun. He’s got a bomb.’

  Chapter Five

  If there’s any upside to being middle-aged and ordinary, it’s that I tend to blend in or, at least, I don’t stand out. I say that because, obviously, I was hoping that nobody would mistake me for some kind of troublemaker as I tried to get into Surf City from the loading bay.

  I had a pretty good feeling that once I’d found Wolf, I’d be okay; he’d asked me to come down and police chaplains are allowed ‘beyond police lines’, which basically means inside the police tape, provided the New South Wales police have given them permission to be there. That said, police tend not to like ‘outsiders’ of any kind potentially getting in the way during a major operation, so I was praying – not literally, obviously, although I guess I might as well have been – that I found Wolf before police from the terrorism squad, who wouldn’t recognise me, found me and either arrested me or threw me out.

  Access to the ground floor of Surf City from the loading bay wasn’t difficult; there was a fire door with a central bar, so I pushed on that and waited for the wailing to start but, to my surprise, it didn’t. Maybe the fire brigade had already cut all the alarms; I can’t say for certain: all I know is that when I pushed on the bar, the door gave way.

  The first shops I saw on the ground floor were the florist’s and the fruit shop. It felt strange, seeing all those apples there, piled up and polished, and the bananas and the last of the season’s mangoes, all ready to be purchased, except that the shop was completely empty, with nobody even standing by to guard the cash registers. I
t was the same at the florist’s: there were six black buckets on the ground, half-filled with water; a green hose snaking along the floor; and piles of roses dumped right next to the buckets. Whoever worked there had obviously been asked to leave before they’d even been able to put the stems in water.

  I kept going toward the escalator and it was there that I saw the first member of the New South Wales Emergency Response Team, the blokes we call the ERT. You’ll know them when I describe them: they are the ones you see dressed head to toe in black canvas with a heavy, hessian belt weighed down with baton, flash and gun (and probably a can of capsicum spray, since that’s all the rage now). The instant this particular ERT saw me, I put my hands straight up in the air but he still pulled his gun.

  If I didn’t know it already, that’s when I thought: this is serious.

  ‘I’m Father Paul Doherty, New South Wales Police Chaplain,’ I said, as quickly as I could.

  Not for the first time, I silently thanked my parents – and maybe God – for giving me such an ordinary-looking, middle-aged Australian man face; I don’t want to sound racist, but I felt sure that I didn’t look like somebody who was about to make trouble.

  The ERT said, ‘Get down on the floor.’

  I got on my knees and put my hands behind my head, not to steady myself but because that’s what I’d seen people do in the movies. I said, ‘I am the police chaplain,’ and the ERT officer said, ‘Lie down on the floor.’

  There was no point, and probably considerable risk, in putting up an argument so I put my hands forward to catch myself on the way down. Before I knew it, the ERT officer had his boot on the back of my legs.

  ‘Hands behind your back,’ he said, and this was a first for me: I was getting handcuffed. It was only when I was completely immobilised, with his foot holding me in position and my hands locked behind me, that the ERT officer entered into the conversation.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

  I said, ‘I’m Father Paul Doherty, police chaplain. Superintendent Wolf Boehm of the Bondi LAC told me to come down. He said you’ve got a man holding hostages. I’m here to help.’

  The ERT officer said, ‘If you’re a priest, where’s your collar?’ and I swear, the first image that came into my mind was that of my mother, wagging her finger at me.

  ‘I came straight from home; there was no time to put it on,’ I said. ‘Call Wolf; he’ll vouch for me,’ but the ERT officer had his own ideas. He was talking to somebody on the other end of his walkie-talkie.

  ‘Short guy, grey hair,’ he said. ‘Ground floor, near the florist. Says he’s the chaplain. Wolf called him.’

  There was some garbled feedback, more like static than English, and the ERT said, ‘You got ID?’

  I said, ‘In my back pocket. Top right, jeans.’ I knew he’d want to get it himself. He got onto his knees, fished around a bit, and brought out my business-card holder plus my wallet. Still with one boot on the back of my legs, he started going through it; I assumed, looking for something with a photo ID.

  ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘Wolf’s on four. I’ll take you up.’

  I hadn’t had the cuffs on more than a minute but I was glad to get them off. The skin on my wrists was already sore. I dusted my jeans down. The ERT officer was still holding my business card, the one that made it clear that I was a priest. He said, ‘Sorry, Father, it’s a bit tense here today,’ and I said, ‘So I see. Don’t worry. Take me up to Wolf.’

  We rode the escalator to the fourth floor. Again, I couldn’t get over how quiet the whole place was. I didn’t know it at the time, but pretty much as soon as the local police had arrived, they’d been joined by the AFP – that’s the Australian Federal Police – and they’d ordered a complete evacuation, not only of the floor Ali Khan was on, but the whole centre, the car park and the streets around Surf City.

  Instinct told me that Surf City management wouldn’t have been happy about any of that, and Wolf told me later that some short bloke from management had tried to object, saying, ‘Can’t we deal with this quietly?’ Wolf had turned on him, saying, ‘Right, but if he shoots all the hostages . . . do you think your customers want to see us carrying the body bags out?’ The bloke backed right off.

  In terms of logistics, clearing a place the size of Surf City isn’t easy, but then most of the New South Wales police have training in large-scale evacuations, either because they worked on the Sydney Olympics in 2000 or at APEC in 2007, plus the formula is pretty much standard, worldwide. The trick is to keep people calm and quiet, and the best way to do that is to keep them moving. You have to turn the escalators off, so people don’t start pushing and falling; you have to discourage chatting because it leads to jostling; you should set off all the fire alarms (these days, they are ‘emergency alarms’) because that’s going to get everyone’s attention; and you should make sure that all the fire wardens know to start moving people toward the exits. You’ll normally get a few people who don’t want to move – in the case of Surf City, it was mostly shopkeepers, especially one guy who had a jewellery store, who couldn’t believe he had to leave all the diamond rings in their velvet cradles in the front window – and the main thing police try to do with people like that is stay polite, but firm, saying, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but there are no exceptions, and there is no time to waste. Please move toward the exits.’

  This is only a guess but I’d say the process of clearing out Surf City took something like half an hour. Then, just as the last of the public – or, as the police call them, the civilians – were being pushed out the door, a whole lot of other people started to arrive. There were guys there from the army, from the terrorism squad, from police media liaison, which is why I should say that while the rest of Surf City was deserted, there was a small corner of the fourth floor, where police had set up their command centre, that was buzzing.

  It was on the opposite side of the atrium from Cups and Saucy. That sounds like police had set themselves up pretty close to the action, and they had, but there was a reason for that: they wanted to be close enough to the shop to be able to react with both speed and force if anything happened to the hostages. They’d put bomb screens up, between them and the shop windows. Most of the cops on the scene were wearing the kind of vests that protect against a bullet or an explosion. That shouldn’t be taken to mean they were safe. They weren’t safe, but first responders never are. They’re in the business of managing risk while trying to save the public.

  I noticed that most of those who had arrived or stayed behind when the drama broke out were in uniform – New South Wales police, Federal police, ERT, ambulance or army – but there were also quite a few people in ‘civvies’ (civilian clothes). Whatever they were wearing, all were armed.

  My ERT officer – the one who had had me down on the floor; his first name was Mal, which is about as much as I ever found out about him – walked me over, muttering into his walkie-talkie as we went. I could see Wolf standing near what looked like a display table. Somebody had obviously cleared it of whatever wares it had been hosting, and dragged it out of a shop for police to set up laptops on.

  Wolf turned and saw me, and said, ‘Father Paul. Thanks for coming.’

  I said, ‘No problem. What’s going on?’ but he couldn’t immediately deal with me. He had a mountain of problems on his plate.

  That was fine; I was used to being left to my own devices at the scene of whatever disaster might be unfolding. It used to confuse me. I’d feel like a shag on a rock, not knowing what I was supposed to do. I’d get in people’s way, trying to offer assistance or else, if I had my uniform on, I’d get mistaken for an actual police officer. Somebody might rush past me and yell, ‘Quick, come grab this!’ and the next thing I’d know I’d be helping move a body in a stretcher up above my head.

  Over time, I figured out the main thing the police wanted was for me just to be there. At a bushfire, for example, I might find a soot-covered officer sitting on a burnt log, head in hands, maybe having failed to
save some children.

  I might ask, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ but more often, I’d just pull up a pew, say nothing until the officer would say something and go from there, with me saying, ‘You’ve done your best,’ and them saying, ‘Why does shit like this happen, Father? What kind of god lets a child burn to death?’ And although I’d spent six years in the seminary and all those years in the community, and I’ve been trained in how to answer that question – ‘We don’t always understand why things happen . . .’ – inside, I’d often be thinking, ‘I’m buggered if I know and when I get my audience with Saint Peter, it’s the first question I’m going to ask him.’

  In any case, I found a position for myself at the back of the command centre on Surf City’s fourth floor. Wolf was toward the front, sitting down now on an ergonomic office chair that somebody had wheeled out from Harvey Norman. He was examining what looked like CCTV footage on his laptop but, because of the number of people gathered around him, all I could really see was his silver hair.

  It’s always struck me that silver is the perfect colour for a policeman’s hair: it lends gravitas to the situation. Wolf’s hair was thick and coarse, almost like horse hair. He’d been a police officer all his life: into the academy at eighteen, graduated at twenty-one, five years in uniform, then drug squad, then homicide, and then Bondi, to run the area command. The first day we met, in Bondi, he said to me, ‘I’m not a believer.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, but, of course, he already knew it was fine.

  He said, ‘Most of the blokes here don’t go to church, either.’

  I said, ‘Most Australians don’t go to church.’

  He said, ‘Why did you become a priest?’ and I said, ‘Why did you become a police officer?’

  He said, ‘My mother liked the idea,’ and I said, ‘Mine too.’

  He said, ‘She didn’t care about not having grandkids?’ because that’s always the first thing people think about when they meet a priest: ‘This bloke never has sex!’