The Unknown Terrorist (25 page)

69

The Doll directed the taxi driver along the cemetery’s narrow avenues, through its endless graveyards, old, new, this religion, that religion, no religion, beneath its palms, past its loud and large graves, its scattered, broken graves, its obscure and lost graves, through its occasional eucalypt groves, past sections of cemetery partly reclaimed by thrusting wattles and pines.

The news came on the radio, and they had a grab from the prime minister saying he had full confidence in the authorities’ response to date in searching for the so-called
“Black Widow”. He said that it was, however, necessary that every Australian remained vigilant.

“Vigilant!” snorted the taxi driver. “How’s vigilant help?”

Shortly before the glistening black and grey marble mausoleums—elaborate warehouses of the dead into which the names of rich Italian families were inscribed in bold gilded letters—the Doll told the taxi driver to stop.

On the car radio the morning talkback had started.

“We’re going to get the police minister on the phone,” said Joe Cosuk. “He’s got a lot of explaining to do to the Australian people.”

“Go’im, Joey, thatta boy,” said the taxi driver, as though the shock jock were a hunting dog.

“And if he won’t talk to the Australian people,” continued Joe Cosuk, “and tell us why terrorists can just run round seemingly at will, then I think the Australian people will judge him very harshly.”

“How long you be, miss?” asked the taxi driver. “I can wait if you like.”

“It’s okay, my friend,” said the Doll. “I’ll walk to the train station and get the train home.”

“Don’t catch the train myself, lovey,” the taxi driver said, scratching at his chin once more. “Lebs. They’ll rob you and they’ll rape you, they will. Fucken Lebs. Excuse the French. Where you going? We can agree a price, if you like, switch off the meter. Don’t want to be on a train on a day like today with Lebs.”

The Doll smiled briefly, paid him, closed the door, and turned. As she walked away she heard the taxi slink off. Above her there was no longer sun or horizon. A dirty
gloom filled the baking sky and flattened those beneath it like a hot iron.

The rather miserable piece of land to which she was headed lay sandwiched between the determined uniformity of the Presbyterian Lawn on one side, with its regimented rows of plaques, and the Byzantine opulence of the Greek section on the other. This wretched patch of dust in the middle was called the Baby Lawn. Here the poor and those without religious denomination buried their newly born dead.

An old man and a small girl, no more than five years old, were tending a grave, weeding, arranging flowers, carefully positioning at the grave’s centre a toy football on which was written “ROOSTERS”. Though there was no real wind, clouds of dust occasionally kicked up and blew in little swirls around the girl’s stick legs.

Running along the head of each row of graves in the Baby Lawn was a cracked concrete beam, not much more than ankle height, on which was fixed at regular intervals small bronze plaques of uniform size that served in place of headstones. Some graves were cared for and decorated with flowers, most not: abandoned, their small teddy bears and racing cars and porcelain dolls fading and rotting.

At the end of the newest row was a fresh grave with a small mound of gravelly soil not even a metre long, with some far smaller body lying beneath it. Nearby, beneath a grove of miserable gum trees, the neatly turfed lawn cut from the new grave had been laid in the forlorn hope of getting some grass growing there.

A white-haired woman dressed in black, carrying three
large plastic bags stuffed to the brim, came walking up the road. She halted, and with an odd, thirsty look stared at the old man and the girl for a moment as though she had unexpectedly come upon an oasis in the desert, and then walked on.

The Doll made her way up and down the rows of concrete beams until she came to a small white plastic horse, yellow fissured and brittle from the sun, resting beneath one more bronze plaque and some long-dead flowers.

Though she knew the words well enough, the Doll ran her fingers over the plaque’s raised lettering.

LIAM DAVIES
LOVED SON OF GINA DAVIES
BORN 6 MARCH 2001
DIED 7 MARCH 2001

70

It was a lie. He had been dead inside her long before he was stillborn shortly before midnight. But he had been, she thought, he had been … but then the Doll became all choked up, for what he had been she couldn’t say.

During her pregnancy the Doll had often imagined breastfeeding her newborn baby. Somehow it seemed important to the Doll that she would from the first feed her own child from her own body. After all, didn’t the experts and the authorities agree that it was the best for a baby’s health? But it was not only the baby’s health that made the Doll dream of breastfeeding her child. In her dreams the
child nuzzled into her milk-engorged breasts, found her lush nipples, and suckled a thread of gold out of her body that bound them together; magical golden threads of milk and love that nourished them both. She would love and be loved; she would have her due, no more, no less.

And that day, six years before, she had taken her baby to her swollen breast, brought his prune face and dead lips to her taut nipple and, looking at him, feeling him dead against her breast, she had shuddered with the impossible weight of grief.

They said, “Let him go.” And then they said, “Let him go, you must let him go, we must take him now.” And they would not let him stay and he was not allowed to live—and why? There is no
why
, the Doll thought. There is just
is
. The Doll did what she was told and offered no resistance as they gently unfolded her arms and lifted Liam out.

Only the big-breasted woman with blonde hair whom she had met in the labour ward before the birth was there afterwards. Only she held the Doll. The Doll let the woman hold her—she was past caring what anyone did with her—and in the end the Doll reached out and held on to the woman, a great boab tree in the middle of a cyclone, and the Doll felt that if she held on to her she might not be swept away. For nothing else was solid, nothing else was fixed. Nothing existed beyond her grief and then she would not let go until two nurses dragged her off so that the woman could feed her own son, born one hour before Liam. The woman called him Max. Her name was Sally, but everyone, she told the Doll, just called her by her surname: Wilder.

She thought of how Liam would have been six today, and how she had been nineteen when she had fallen pregnant.
Troy had been thirty-two and married. It was not possible, he told her, for his name to appear on the grave as Liam’s father.

Of the time she had been with Troy it astonished her how little remained: an image of his face and the way he did his blond hair which, at the time, reminded her of certain movie stars she thought handsome, but now simply seemed vain and affected. Troy was an SAS soldier. At eighteen, when she first met him, that had seemed to the Doll something. Really something.

He bought her flowers. Presents. Took her to flash Chinese restaurants and knew how to use chopsticks. He would turn up without warning and leave unexpectedly. He talked mysteriously of places he had been, things he had seen, used phrases like “covert operations” and “the need to know principle, and you, baby, don’t need to know” to explain the ever-growing number of things in his life about which there seemed to her no explanation.

He was a man who had success with women, but even in his thirties his taste for teenage girls seemed to be unchanging and unchangeable. Yet if there were something hopeless and unresolved about his womanising, it was also this that was somehow attractive to the women who fell for him.

She remembered aspects of his muscled body, and his odour, which was pungent and at first strange, for a time exciting, and finally repulsive. There were not even memories of fights and the slow, painful collapse of her love: rather, looking back, she could see it never really even started but had died as suddenly and inexplicably as their son.

And though it was all but over after that, they staggered
on a few months more. He would turn up drunk and scare her, mumble pleas and threats and grab her and shake her and then cry, and fall asleep and wet himself where he sat or lay. She had a restraining order put on him; he kicked her door in, she called the cops, he was locked up for a night.

The news of him having two kids to another woman in Fremantle had shocked but not surprised her in the way his death had, only four months after Liam’s, in a training exercise up near Cairns: his body had seemed destined to outlast and outlive everyone. For a time, his death seemed to the Doll to vindicate his ceaseless womanising and bad behaviour, and she saw him as a man who must have known in some way his time was short and crammed what he could into those few years. But as grief ebbed, so did her sympathy. He was a mindless prick, and that was all.

And the Doll thought how hearts break in so many ways, and how hers was only one.

The Doll looked up at the sky. It had grown darker still. Black cloud clumps raced across its inverted maternal belly. She thought how if they had bothered to look at it, many people would have found the sky that midday glorious, at once moody and enchanting. But when the Doll dropped her eyes again and saw the sorry field of dust in which she had laid her stillborn son to rest, it seemed to her that the sky that day—like Moretti’s beautiful possessions, like all things said to be beautiful—was simply cruel.

Near the end of her pregnancy, the Doll noticed that the kicks had stopped. For some days she hadn’t worried, but then she went to the hospital. The doctor reassured her, but when they did an ultrasound they could find no heartbeat.
She was induced the following day. No one spoke in the hushed birth theatre.

After that day the Doll hated hush, quiet, silence. She had imagined such joy and such excitement at the birth, and, after, a home full of sounds: crying, laughing, cooing, singing, toys and stories and calls for help and calls of joy. But there was only pain and silence. After that day she preferred noise, any noise, to silence.

They told her the baby was macerated. He did not look like she had imagined. He did not look perfect. They told her she could hold him. They told her that some people chose to dress their child, to take photographs so that they would have memories.

She held him. His eyes were wide open. They were large and terrible, a dull blue. She brushed her hands over his eyes to close them and his eyelids fell off. He would not stop looking at her. He was hers. She was him. Dead. She did not dress him. She did not take photographs. He was dead, and she had her memories and she was him. She kissed his damp, stony face, his skin puckered like a prune. At that moment she was revolted by him. At that moment she loved him. He would not stop looking into her.

71

“You must have thought Mum would never come,” the Doll said, squatting in the dust of the Baby Lawn. She spoke quietly, as if he were still in her arms and able to hear her very breathing. “Let’s fix this up, then,” she said as if talking about a child’s untidy bedroom, squatting down and setting to work
cleaning up the grave. The very dust was so hot she thought it might scorch her skin. Liam had not been good looking when he was born, yet within his prune-like face she had seen another, the face of a young, handsome man.

“My ugly Liam,” she whispered as she cleaned the weeds out from around her son’s small piece of crumbling concrete beam. “My ugly, beautiful boy.”

With the new kitchen knife she had bought at the hardware store she cut away the tufts of dead grass encroaching on that half-metre of concrete beam that in her mind belonged to her Liam. She pulled out a lantana seedling that had risen almost level with the plaque.

She had photos of herself pregnant with Liam and kept them in a special album. No doubt the police had the photographs now. What would they see? What does anyone see? What did the suits in the Chairman’s Lounge see when they peered so intently up between her legs? Eyes without eyelids that also couldn’t stop looking?

After Liam’s stillbirth, the Doll went to Melbourne. She told those around her that she was “going to find a better city”. She found the same city, the same streets, the same dead stares, the same filth, the same indifference, the same grand decay, the same hive-like energy, bursting and building, killing and destroying, robbing flowers and fertilising flowers for no point other than to continue. She found all this and only the weather was different, and she knew every city henceforth would be the same for her, be it Berlin or Manhattan or Shanghai.

She returned to Sydney after a year, determined to change not towns anymore, but herself. ‘I will begin again,’ she
thought, ‘that’s what life is, all it is, having to start over and over.’ She remembered finding a job at a Qantas call centre, hating it, having every toilet break timed, and then seeing the ad asking for dancers at the Chairman’s Lounge. She worked there for a weekend and never went back to the call centre.

Lap dancing didn’t seem to involve either humiliation or pride. It offered money, and that was enough. And for a time—looking back she realised it had been a very short time—it made her feel somebody, feel proud, seem wanted. Instead of just taking it day after day from people over the phone, copping crap from the supervisors, she was up there looking down on others, and they admired her, they thought she was beautiful, they told her about their lives, all these men in their suits, all these older men who had for so long lorded it over her. She only had to put her hand between her thighs, push her arse into their faces, and they were lost; she could taunt them, have them hard and wanting her and only her and if they so much as touched her anywhere security would throw them out on their ears.

Really, thought the Doll, she didn’t fool men, she just let men fool themselves. She was a goddess, unobtainable, better than them, beyond them, and they were nothing, not the Lebanese gangsters, not the television and music celebs, not the corporate executives, not the rich north shore boys out on a buck’s night. It had been something, it so had, it had been like a party every night at which she was the centre of attention. Everyone came to the clubs, the dollars flowed, and without trying she was pulling over three grand a week, all of it black.