No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  She said, ‘Good morning, young man.’

  Mitchell said, ‘Good morning, Mrs Grace.’

  ‘I wonder if you might rinse this teapot under the tap for me?’ Mrs Grace said.

  Mitchell said, ‘Sure.’ He shrugged off his backpack, took the pot to the tap, filled and rinsed it.

  ‘That’s so nice of you,’ Mrs Grace said. She was thin as a pencil and wearing only her nightie, with bare feet.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  By 8.33 am, Mitchell was at the bus stop. He boarded at 8.40 am. There were plenty of empty seats – most of the other St Pat’s boys would already have been at school – but St Pat’s boys weren’t supposed to take up seats on public buses so Mitchell stood and swayed from the handrails, the cords from his iPod earphones hanging loose around his blazer.

  The bus was due to glide right by St Pat’s but Mitchell wasn’t headed that way. He got off three stops early. Given that Mitchell was not the type to wag school to hang around the shops, what was he doing? Here’s my take: Mitchell was a good kid – an excellent kid – who was getting to the age where some things mattered more than they should. Getting a pimple mattered. Being seen with your mum at Coles by a bunch of mates mattered. Not having the right computer game mattered.

  Mitchell was mildly addicted to computer games. He wasn’t one of those geeky kids who can’t be dragged away from the console but he did like to play. He’d been given an Xbox for his twelfth birthday. He could hardly get over it. His mum must have been putting money aside for a year. It had come with what Mitchell’s friends called ‘the lame games’ (free games were by definition not the ones you wanted) but Mitchell’s mum couldn’t afford to buy new games every time they came out. The new ones cost as much as $100 each. Mitchell didn’t mind waiting for second-hand copies. Let me rephrase that: he did mind waiting; he wanted every new game as soon as it came out but, since that wasn’t possible, he’d resigned himself to waiting.

  By the time of the siege, Mitchell had been waiting for what seemed like forever for a copy of the latest ‘Halo’ to turn up on one of the second-hand tables at EB Games at Surf City. His mum had said no to buying ‘Halo’ unless he could get it for under fifty dollars. He’d received gift cards from his grandma and his uncle totalling fifty dollars. You could, on a good day, buy a second-hand copy of ‘Halo’ for fifty dollars but they came up rarely and went like lightning.

  The day before the siege, one of Mitchell’s friends had told him that a second-hand copy of ‘Halo’ had been placed on the sale table outside EB Games, that it was priced at $49.99 and, if Mitchell was quick, he could get it.

  That’s why Mitchell was at Surf City shortly after 9 am on the day of the siege. He’d done the unthinkable and skipped a class at St Pat’s to see if he could get his hands on ‘Halo’. He was half an hour ahead of Ali Khan and he went through a different entrance: CCTV cameras captured him coming in from the beach side. Different cameras caught him outside EB Games with both hands up against the glass, peering through at the sale table.

  There was a sign on the door at EB Games giving the opening hours: 9 am until 8 pm. It was a few minutes past 9 am but when Mitchell tried the door, it didn’t budge. A girl came around the corner. She had nine earrings in one ear and military boots on. She was fishing something out of her hessian bag. It was a shop key. She crouched down to slip it into the floor lock.

  Mitchell crouched down and asked whether it was true that somebody had put ‘Halo’ on the second-hand table.

  ‘Oh, mate, I’m sorry, that went yesterday,’ the shop assistant said. ‘You’ve got to be quicker than that!’

  The next time the cameras pick up Mitchell, he’s on the fourth floor, iPod earbuds in his ears, adjusting the weight of his backpack, heading back down the corridor toward the men’s room. He’s looking a bit despondent, having missed out on the ‘Halo’ game. He’s also running just over an hour late for school. He’s looking down at his phone screen – changing the song or adjusting the volume – and he doesn’t see Ali Khan bang into Kimmi K. He walks straight into them and tumbles to the ground.

  Chapter Nine

  One of the questions Wolf was repeatedly asked to answer at the inquest into the siege at Surf City was: given what happened, why didn’t you or anyone else give the order at any point, and certainly before any damage was done, for a sniper to shoot Ali Khan through the glass door?

  Hanrahan himself put it this way: ‘Once you knew that the hostage-taker, for want of a better term, had an explosive device around his neck, once you’d seen the footage of him sitting there, showing it off to people, why didn’t you consider one well-placed shot?’

  Listening to him say that, I thought, ‘Does Hanrahan think this is Hollywood?’

  There were a million reasons not to shoot Ali Khan dead on the floor in front of the people caught inside Cups and Saucy. First and foremost, for all the technology the police had on standby, they had no way of telling precisely what kind of device Ali Khan was wearing. The risk in shooting him through the door was that he might explode and others would be killed.

  On the flipside, what if he wasn’t wearing a bomb – what if the box on his chest was fake or something else entirely – and police shot him through the door? That’s an emotional nightmare for the officer who has to fire the shot, and a professional nightmare for police.

  Beyond that, police for a long time didn’t know what they were dealing with in Ali Khan. I don’t pretend to be an expert on the operational side of things but the kind of questions they were asking each other were: what if he’s not working alone? What if this is a plot to distract attention from a larger operation, such as a truck bomb that’s parked outside? Or a bomb being carried in a backpack on a train, in some other part of Sydney?

  What if there’s a series of strikes planned, such as in Bali, when one bomb was set off, distracting paramedics, before a bigger one went off? Something similar happened in London on 7/7 – there were strikes on buses and trains – and, of course, on September 11, there were strikes on the two towers, the Pentagon, plus another plane went down in Pennsylvania.

  What if Ali Khan was the decoy, in other words?

  There’s also the fact that whatever you’ve heard, police officers don’t like shooting people, especially not young people, and Ali Khan was young. To me, watching him through the glass, he looked like a kid. It’s true that police have a reputation for being trigger-happy – an officer in Melbourne shot a fifteen-year-old boy in Melbourne a few years back, after the boy started waving a knife around – but, in my experience, police behave with restraint and patience when they see a person in some kind of strife. One police operation I witnessed involved a man who wanted to jump from the Harbour Bridge. Police talked to him for twelve hours. It held up traffic all day but they saved his life. It’s a delicate balance they have to strike: the public’s safety must come first, and I don’t doubt for a minute that police would shoot somebody who was coming at them with a knife or waving a gun around in a public place. But think about that case from a few years ago, when a dad took three of his kids hostage inside the Family Court. He was claiming to have a bomb in his backpack, and police were thinking, ‘Should we take him out?’ But what if a police sniper took him out, and there was no bomb in the backpack?

  How is the police officer going to feel?

  How are the children going to feel, seeing their dad shot dead, knowing that the only reason he’d gone to court to make a fuss was because he wanted to see them?

  The police talked that man out of the building. That was inconvenient for everyone else in the city. The court complex had to be closed for the day. Surrounding streets were closed to traffic. Nobody could get to their office or to their car or to their email, which seems to worry people more than anything else these days. But the dad was talked around, arrested, charged and, as I understand it, he’s working through whatever issues he had with the court system, and there’s at least a chance that he’ll one day see th
ose kids again.

  I’ve had some personal experience with how patient police can be. I once saw one of the police officers I know from Bondi having a quiet beer at the Bondi Hotel. I went and sat beside him and asked what he’d been up to that day. He’d been out at what they call a ‘domestic’, which is actually one of the things that occupies more police time than just about anything else. The case in question involved a bloke whose marriage had broken up. The wife had started seeing another bloke behind her husband’s back – that’s more common than a husband doing the dirty in my experience – and she wanted out of the marriage, plus she wanted to keep the house, the kids and the dog, which was devastating but he was doing his best to get through it but then, one afternoon, the husband had gone around to the house to see his kids and he saw the new bloke riding around on his ride-on mower.

  The ride-on mower! It sounds like a punchline but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. His wife sitting back with his kids at the breakfast table with the Rice Bubbles crackling in their bowls, with the new bloke getting ribbed because he’d burnt the Vegemite toast, he could deal with all that, but seeing him riding on the ride-on was a bridge too far, and he snapped, by which I mean, the next time he was spotted in public it was on the ledge of the twelve-storey Holiday Inn in Ultimo.

  My mate in the bar had sat with him for sixteen hours – that’s a bloody long time – trying to talk him down, and it didn’t work. The bloke jumped, and the way he landed, with arms and legs bent at odd angles – it’s hard to get that image out of your head.

  ‘People say the cops don’t care,’ the policeman told me. ‘They care.’

  Wolf was thinking along those lines: Ali Khan wasn’t in the shop alone. He was in there with a tiny nail technician, a girl in rabbit ears and a schoolboy. What would it do to Mitchell – to any of them – to see Ali Khan get shot?

  Sure, legally, the police could probably have gotten away with shooting Ali Khan through the glass but, as Wolf told Hanrahan, it didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

  ‘We weighed up the risks,’ he said, ‘and decided it would be right to at least try to talk Ali Khan out.’

  This might sound strange, but police do have a manual for dealing with hostage situations, so it wasn’t like they were flying blind. I remember the first time I saw some pages from that manual. It was while I was on some kind of multi-faith initiative at a Jewish school: there was me, a rabbi, an imam – we were there to show the kids how well we all get along despite the fact that we disagree about everything.

  We had to report to the principal’s office, and I’ll admit that I was feeling a bit cynical about the whole thing, thinking, ‘What do these initiatives actually achieve?’ and ‘Haven’t we done all this before?’ but I’ll never forget this: waiting in the foyer, I saw a list of instructions Blu-Tacked to the wall near where the office girls sat, and they were for dealing with bomb threats that came in over the phone.

  The headline was something like ‘Questions to Ask if You Receive a Bomb Threat’ and the questions were things like:

  Is the bomb real?

  Where is the bomb?

  When will the bomb go off?

  I couldn’t stop looking at the list, and when the principal came out – he was quite a character, in that his kippah wasn’t the standard black; it was in Hawthorn Football Club colours – and saw me staring, he said, ‘It looks like common sense but, believe me, when the threats come in, the ladies on the front desk tend to panic and forget what to ask.’

  I said, ‘How often does that actually happen?’

  He said, ‘We get about one a week.’

  He said, ‘It’s alright for you lot,’ – I must have been wearing the collar – ‘there’s more anti-Semitism than people realise. And you’ve got to treat every threat like it’s real.’

  I’ve never forgotten that conversation. If I remember rightly, the pages on the wall were taken straight from the New South Wales police hostage manual, which also makes it clear that, when there’s a hostages-and-bomb situation, police should try to get a conversation going with whoever is holding the hostages. In doing so, they should take into account that the hostages are going to be frightened – who’s going to doubt that Mouse and the others weren’t absolutely terrified, being in that shop with Ali Khan slumped on the floor in front of the locked door, his skin all pockmarked and his head half caved-in, and his whole body reeking of petrol? – but it’s like when an aeroplane passes through turbulence: people are frightened, but there’s often very little screaming and swearing. Your heart might race, but you tend not to cry out.

  The scene inside the shop was actually pretty calm, at least at first.

  Wolf had turned to one of the security guards – Foto – and asked him to explain the communication system to him. How could he speak to the people who were stuck in the shop?

  ‘You can use the landline,’ Foto said, ‘plus there’s a speaker system, where you can speak to anyone in the centre. I’ve never done this but you can isolate the speaker that goes into that particular shop, and speak only to them.’

  Wolf considered both options and decided to go with the telephone. It would be less like a booming voice from on high, and more like a quiet negotiation.

  Ali Khan was still sitting with his back to the glass and his feet stuck straight out. Wolf had one of his team ring the phone. I could hear it from where I was standing, ten back from Wolf in a pack of people, so Ali Khan must have been able to hear it in the shop, but he didn’t move to answer it.

  The other people in the shop – including Mouse, who was closest to the phone – looked anxiously at each other. I could feel them thinking, ‘Now what do we do? Are we supposed to answer that?’

  The phone kept ringing.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Wolf said, as much to himself as to anyone else.

  Foto said, ‘We can use the loudspeaker to say it’s the police calling.’

  It was a good idea. Wolf got on the speaker system and said, ‘Attention! This is the police! My name is Superintendent Wolf Boehm. I am in charge of the police negotiating team. I have no desire to shout our conversation all through the shopping centre. I will call the phone on the counter so you can tell me your demands. Please pick up the phone!’

  He nodded toward Foto, who cut the loudspeaker and made the phone on the counter ring again – and it rang, and rang again, and kept on ringing. And you know how that feels, when the phone is ringing but nobody is answering; you get so agitated, you feel like shouting, ‘Answer it; will somebody answer that phone!’ And it must have been that, times a factor of about 100, for the people inside the shop, and I suppose that’s why Mouse decided that enough was enough.

  She looked at Ali Khan, looked at the phone, back at Ali Khan, and then kind of shrugged and took a step toward the counter.

  She picked up the receiver but, just as she did, Wolf said, ‘Stop! Hang it up! We don’t want one of the hostages picking up the phone!’

  The phone stopped ringing. Mouse was left standing there, her hand not quite on the receiver. I mentioned before that she’s plucky. She couldn’t have been more annoyed to see the phone stop ringing. She picked the handset up from its cradle, tested it by her ear, heard the dial tone, which proved to her that the police had hung up before she could answer, and started waving the phone in the air above her head, as if to say, ‘Hey, what’s the story? Why did you hang up?’

  Wolf said, ‘Now she’s pissed off.’

  Foto said, ‘Why didn’t you let her answer?’

  Wolf said, ‘I’m trying to figure out what this guy on the floor wants. I don’t want her involved. Why doesn’t he pick up? Who comes into a shopping centre with a bomb around his neck, without having something to say?’

  Foto said, ‘We should get out of here. He’s a suicide bomber.’

  Wolf said, ‘Then why hasn’t he blown himself up?’

  Later, he told me that of course he’d considered the possibility that Ali Khan was
a suicide bomber but then, why didn’t he just detonate himself when he was still outside the shop, with more people around?

  Maybe he changed his mind. Decided he didn’t want to die. I’ve heard of that: people approaching checkpoints in Israel, to use one example, wired up to the eyeballs, suddenly throwing their hands in the air, saying, ‘I don’t want to die.’

  From what I could tell from the footage I’d seen, Ali Khan hadn’t wanted to go into the shop. He’d been dragged in there and he’d already tried to get out by tugging on the door. So Wolf’s big problem was: why doesn’t he answer the phone?’

  Chapter Ten

  I mentioned earlier that some people like to ask priests the hard questions: why are we here? What does it all mean? But just as often, they also go to priests to ask about more mundane things: ‘What do you think of Facebook, Father? Should we let the children use it?’ It’s not the kind of question they’d taught me to deal with at the seminary but I understood the concern of parents in my parish: the media had pretty much given up on the idea that the ‘idiot box’ was going to rot kids’ brains or give them square eyes, but they had whipped up something else for parents to worry about: computer games, then social media and texting. Parents want to do the best by their kids. Despite the fact that I didn’t have any children, they saw me as a font of wisdom on the subject.

  Back when I had a parish, I probably wouldn’t have been able to say this, but I personally think the new technology is fantastic. It makes the world smaller. One example is how Wolf was able to tap into the internet to find people who could help him while the siege at Surf City was underway. He was sitting at the laminate bench, across the atrium from Cups and Saucy. He was in charge of the team but he wasn’t on his own. Word spread quickly through social networks that a hostage drama was underway in Bondi, and Bondi is a famous place. So is Sydney.