No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  I said, ‘Believe me when I tell you that Mum has plenty of grandchildren.’

  We’ve become pretty tight since then and we remain so, even though I’m not a priest anymore. Wolf appreciated having me around to answer the big questions: ‘Why do kids burn to death? What sort of arsehole would cave a child’s head in with a garden shovel because he spilt his cornflakes on the floor?’

  He understands, or I hope he does, why I’m no longer there to give those answers.

  I asked one of the uniformed officers standing beside me, ‘What’s he looking at?’

  He signalled across the atrium toward Cups and Saucy. It was the only shop that obviously still had people in it, and the only one with the door shut.

  ‘That’s where the hostages are?’ I said.

  ‘You got it.’

  My first thought was: who takes hostages in a lingerie shop? I didn’t yet know about Mouse dragging Ali Khan and the others in. I was still working under the assumption – formed in my own mind – that Ali Khan had stormed into that particular shop on purpose, and that he’d taken those hostages for a reason.

  I looked over Wolf’s shoulder. He was still sitting at the desk, now with several laptops in front of him. All were showing the same CCTV footage. It appeared to be coming to him live from inside Cups and Saucy.

  ‘I need more angles. Get me more computers,’ Wolf said to nobody in particular but his team was already onto it. I could see people all around, unpacking laptops and trailing out extension cords, so police could set up as many screens as they needed to watch what was going on inside the shop.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  Ali Khan was sitting with his back to the glass door, his legs straight out in front of him, with his feet splayed. He wasn’t a big person: from what I could tell, he was about the size of a teenage girl. He still had the hoodie on, and his face was slumped forward, so even though a camera was pointed directly at him, it was difficult to make out his features.

  ‘I wish he’d take that hood off,’ Wolf said and, as if by magic, or as if he’d actually heard, which he couldn’t have done since he was behind glass and we were across the atrium, Ali Khan reached up at that moment and slid the hoodie off his head.

  ‘Zoom in, zoom in!’ Wolf cried.

  The team operating the cameras moved quickly, refocusing on a bigger shot of Ali Khan’s face. Again, it wasn’t pretty: like Mouse would tell me later, his skin was grey and his lips were swollen like slugs, to the point that they stuck out further than his nose; he had pits in his cheeks and a deep crater in his skull, deep enough to sink a child’s fist in. It was covered – horribly covered – with what looked like melted skin and short, sharp, white hairs; a buzz cut, basically, that marched over the whole top of his head, into the crater and out the other side.

  I was trying to work out what might have caused a wound like that when Ali Khan looked up straight into the camera on the back wall, the one that was aimed right at him. I reeled back: besides the hole in his head, he had what looked like a knife wound running from one eyebrow, down under his nose on the diagonal, and over both lips.

  ‘He looks like he’s been sliced down the face with a sword,’ I said and Mouse would later tell me that was her reaction, too.

  ‘I was thinking, what the hell happened to you?’ she told me. ‘I’m not trying to make funny. I was frightened – I could feel my heart banging against my chest. But it was obvious that this kid had been in some kind of war or some horrible fight. The scar on his face – it was like he’d been hit with a big Japanese sword, like in Kill Bill or something – and he had that hole in his head like somebody had dropped a canon ball on him. I was thinking, Jesus! Sorry, Father, but Jesus!’

  Ali Khan had similar scars all over his body, especially on his limbs, marks that couldn’t be seen as he sat on the floor in Cups and Saucy, wounds that wouldn’t be uncovered until much later. Bits of one arm were pretty much missing. Close up, his skin looked like when somebody gets burnt as a kid – like it’s melted, like it’s slid down the limb. But, as I say, we couldn’t see any of that. We could only see Ali Khan’s messed-up face. He knew that we were looking at him. He made eye contact through the camera lens. He would have seen the lens moving – they move when they’re trying to focus – because he was sitting with his back to the door, he was looking right at it. For a long time – or what seemed like a long time – he didn’t take his eyes off it – and then he reached up and started tugging on his zip.

  Mouse told me that she watched in horror.

  ‘One minute he was undoing the zip, the next he was holding the two parts of the hoodie open,’ she said.

  Wolf was saying, ‘Zoom in! IN! IN!’ and the tech guys were scrambling to steady the image. It wasn’t easy, not at first, to figure out exactly what we were looking at. To my mind, when Ali Khan pulled the two sides of his jacket apart, he revealed what looked like an old tin box, like a shoeshine box, about the size of a four-litre ice-cream container, but perhaps not as square. It looked heavy. It was resting on what looked like an old, stained towel that was in turn resting on Ali Khan’s pale chest.

  ‘As soon as he opened the jacket, I could see where the smell was coming from,’ Mouse said. ‘The box must have been filled with petrol because the towel was filthy with it, and the smell flooded into the room. And I could see that the box wasn’t just resting on Ali Khan’s chest. It was chained to him. It had two big chains welded to it, and those chains were held together, around his neck, with this U-shaped bike lock. And I have to tell you, Father, I started really hating Ali Khan from then, because he was just sitting there, not crying for help, not saying anything, just sitting there, looking at us, showing us this thing on his chest, and I was thinking, you bastard, how dare you come in here with that, because that’s how scared I was – I had kind of forgotten that he hadn’t come in, I’d dragged him in.’

  Chapter Six

  There was a time – it wasn’t even that long ago – when it would have taken a fair amount of police work just to figure out who was stuck inside Cups and Saucy with Ali Khan on the day of the siege.

  At the risk of sounding like an old fart, which I suppose I am, times have changed. Police can pretty much figure out who’s in a room – or on a plane, train or in an automobile – by stripping data off their SIM card, which explains why one of the first things Wolf did, when he took over the ‘situation’, as it was being called, was get his tech guys to isolate whatever SIM cards they could find in the shop.

  I was standing there while they went to work on the problem. It took less than fifteen minutes for police to identify the presence of four SIM cards and even less time to find out who the registered owners of those SIM cards were. It wasn’t an absolute guide to who was in the shop but it was a good start.

  One card was registered to a Nichole Harding of Sydney’s La Perouse – in other words, to Mouse. Police checked the list of employees registered as working at Surf City, and were quickly able to ascertain that there was a Nichole Harding working at Cups and Saucy. All Surf City employees were required to be registered, and to carry a security pass, with a photograph in the top-right corner, that would get them through the main doors before the centre was officially open.

  The photograph that Surf City had on file matched the images of Mouse that were coming through on the CCTV.

  Everything added up, in other words: at least one of the people in the shop was the shop assistant, Nichole Joy Harding, whose date of birth, place of residence, passport number and contact details were all on file with Surf City.

  Mouse had no criminal record. She was associated with no known terrorist groups. Everything about her suggested that she’d accidentally found herself in a terrible situation, through no fault of her own.

  ‘Verify it’s her before we contact the next of kin,’ said Wolf.

  A team got straight onto it, locating the shop’s owner, Carole, who’d taken the morning off but who had been desperately trying to reach Mou
se on the shop phone – police had cut those lines, too, electronically – since hearing about ‘the Surf City siege’ on the radio. Police went to her house to show her some of the still photographs from the CCTV, including those of Mouse dragging Ali Khan into the shop.

  ‘Do you know this girl?’ they said.

  ‘It’s Mouse,’ she said, and burst into tears. ‘Is she going to be okay?’

  ‘Do you recognise the young man she’s picked up off the floor?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘What about the other two – do you recognise them?’

  ‘No . . . maybe the Asian girl, she looks like she’s from the nail salon. I don’t go there. I go to the other one, on the lower floor. But I think I recognise the shirt. The boy . . . he’s from St Pat’s, the private school. I recognise the uniform.’

  ‘But you don’t know them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No reason why Mouse would have a grudge against Surf City – the shoppers, the management, you?’

  ‘Mouse? She’s never had a grudge against anyone. Look at her! Oh, she’s wearing those rabbit ears. The sweet girl! Oh, is she going to be okay? Oh, my God, you think she had something to do with this? Mouse wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

  Chapter Seven

  I mentioned earlier that my friend Craig, the Bondi plumber, identified one of the people who Mouse had dragged into Cups and Saucy as a ‘little girl’ who looked Asian. That’s the kind of statement that can get a person into trouble these days – Wolf would often complain to me that he’d send out a press release searching for suspects of a ‘Middle Eastern appearance’ and the description would get cut out, making the appeal somewhat useless – but it was very handy information for police as they set about identifying who else was in the shop.

  Craig wasn’t wrong: the girl did look Asian. She was little; she had long, shiny black hair; tiny hands; tiny feet . . . to my mind, she was probably Vietnamese or maybe Chinese; at a pinch, Korean. She was wearing skinny jeans – tight from waist to ankle – flat shoes and a silk blouse with a Mao collar. Zooming in on the images from the shop, police could see that the writing over her right breast pocket said ‘Cute Nails’. Police knew from the Surf City log that Cute Nails had twelve registered employees but – and again, this might get me into trouble – it was fairly well understood that there were more than that. Some girls were called in only when it was busy, and got paid in cash. Management was never particularly bothered, since, you guessed it, ‘they all look the same’.

  The question, then, was which Cute Nails technician was this? The second SIM card identified by police was registered as part of an Optus mobile phone package to a Kim Pham Ho, who had declared on the contract that she was twenty-one years old and a resident of Auburn in Sydney’s west. She had given her employer’s name as Cute Nails at Surf City.

  ‘So, we think that’s Kim Pham Ho?’ said Wolf. ‘The name tag says Kimmi K.’ (The name tag, like the embroidery on Kim’s breast pocket, was visible on the CCTV.)

  ‘I don’t think the name tags match up to what their names really are,’ one of the other police said.

  Wolf nodded: ‘I think you’re right. My guess: they already had a Kim on staff when they hired her. They didn’t want to call her Kim Ho on her name tag so they called her Kimmi K.’

  I’d been thinking much the same thing. Like Wolf, I was studying Kimmi K. She was crouched, and nearly hidden, underneath one of the clothing racks, her face pretty much obscured by the swaying blue negligees on their plastic hangers. She had her knees up under her chin, her head down, and her arms wrapped around her legs. I thought about the title she’d been given by police: she was a nail technician. There were no such things when I was a kid. My mother used to mock women who kept their nails long and red. Never in a million years would she have considered going to what were then called ‘beauty salons’ to see a ‘nail technician’. She wouldn’t have known where to find such a place.

  ‘Vanity,’ she’d say, whenever she came across a woman who did have proper talons and, predictably, if not quite in context, she’d add, ‘Pride comes before a fall.’

  It wasn’t just Mum. I don’t remember any woman in my family ever having a manicure. Going to the beauty parlour was something the idle rich – or maybe spoiled women, like Barbara Cartland, with her fluffy dogs and chocolates on the bed – might have done in France or America. Prostitutes supposedly kept their talons red and polished; I don’t know that for certain, since I never met one growing up as a boy, and, by the time I got to the soup kitchen in King’s Cross, I’d figured out that prostitutes on the streets don’t look like they look on TV.

  Most of them are teenagers. Some of them are middle-aged mothers-of-three. Some are men or boys.

  I’m off track. I understand that it’s no longer possible for a woman to go anywhere unless she’s had her nails done. I’ve heard my sisters talking to each other about it: ‘I need a mani,’ or ‘I’ve got to get a pedi.’ The first time I heard that, I had to ask what it was: pedi, for pedicure. I tried to imagine my mother letting a stranger touch her feet. No, thank you. It would not have happened. Now you can’t walk down the street without seeing rows of women sitting with their feet in the bubbly water, old copies of New Idea on their lap, getting their toenails trimmed down.

  It’s probably not completely true, but it’s got to be at least a little bit true that all the bare feet in those establishments are white, and all the girls on the little swivel stools – the girls doing the scraping; filing; the trimming of dead, ugly skin – are Vietnamese. Nail salons are an industry built from nothing – from the ground up in under a decade – by South-East Asian women. Some people think they must be Buddhist or Hindu or some other Eastern religion but a lot of them are Christian, which is in turn why I know a bit about them – or about the industry, anyway. Back when I had a parish, instead of the police to care for, I knew quite a few of them. They used to come to my church in Sydney’s west very early in the morning or late at night. They’d sit quietly in the pews, shiny hair folded softly over tiny shoulders, praying. Sometimes, they’d light candles.

  I’d been in church one evening, taking care of some business, when I started up a conversation with one of them. This was back when I was younger, and still wore the robes and the collar, always. The girl was very pretty. I’d noticed her before, and had to fight back thoughts of getting to know her better. I asked her if she was a student.

  She said, ‘No, I work in a nail salon.’

  I asked her how she liked the work. It seemed like something I wouldn’t have enjoyed.

  She smiled and said, ‘You come in one day, Father! I give you good service!’

  It unnerved me, maybe because I grew up hearing a lot of racist stories about Asian girls: they were all mail-order brides; they wanted to marry anyone who would have them so they could get a visa. I knew that this girl couldn’t possibly have designs on me, but I wasn’t often asked to go anywhere by a young girl, either. I’ll admit it, I was flattered. In any case, I went by that girl’s salon one afternoon. I thought – let me correct that, I knew – I wouldn’t be having a pedicure. I’d just go and say hello, but as soon as I walked through the door, one of the girls from the row of swivel stools looked straight at me and said, ‘Yes, mister? Manicure? Pedicure?’

  I said, ‘No, no, I am seeing my friend here,’ but, for whatever reason, the girl from my parish was not there, and in any case, they didn’t believe that I was there to meet a friend. I wasn’t dressed as a priest. I was in jeans and a black T-shirt.

  They assumed I was one of those men who goes in and then tries to back out. The girl who had spoken to me said, ‘No, no, you sit down, we do your manicure,’ and before I knew it, I was seated on a chair, my hands under a plastic lamp, while a young girl filed and shaped my nails. (It can’t have been too unpleasant for her. I’d always kept them fairly short, clipped and clean; it’s one of the things they insist upon in the seminary.)

  I learned a few
things that day, things about human nature. We like to think that we live in a classless society in Australia but we don’t. There were three female customers in the salon, two of them reclining in burgundy chairs, one with her feet in the bubbly water, the other wearing rubbery toe separators while the technician applied a coat of paint. A third sat with her hands splayed under what looked to me like a countertop; I guessed that it was some kind of dryer. Two of these three were rude to their technicians. Not the third one – she said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘that’s lovely’ and ‘have a nice day’ – but one of the women in the massage chair kept getting the poor girl on her low stool to do things over, saying, ‘That’s not good enough,’ and the other client snapped that no, she would not turn off the massage chair, despite being asked.

  ‘I paid for this, and that includes the massage,’ the client said, ‘you’re just trying to save electricity.’

  The technician tried to explain, saying, ‘The chair shake hand, make difficult,’ but I’m not sure that the customer wanted to understand.

  I stayed long enough for a girl to file my nails and buff them with a block of what I assume was foam. I can’t say I enjoyed it. I didn’t like the chemical smell; I didn’t like the little plastic table fans they had on all the tables (they seemed dangerous, next to the bowls of water); I didn’t like the rap videos they were showing on the plasma, of near-naked women draped over black men (the only saving grace was that the sound was turned down); but, more than that, I didn’t like the idea of the place: the little girls down on their hands and knees, buffing the feet of white women who treated them badly.

  I noticed when I went to pay there was an ornamental temple with a Buddha near the cash register. The owner or manager – one of the older women in the salon – saw me admiring it and said, ‘I rub him belly, make customer come!’ There was also an empty drinking glass with a handwritten sign, ‘Please tip’, and a smiley face. My best guess was that the tips – like most of the money that flowed through the establishment – went to the proprietor.