The Unknown Terrorist (30 page)

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.

The special had already started and at first it was familiar enough to the Doll: a bomb appeared and armed police took up positions; once again there was a bearded man; again Tariq and the Doll hugged; and once more the children’s bodies were laid out in Beslan, where someone dressed in black brandished a machine gun. Twin towers fell. Bali burnt. Madrid bombing. London bombing. Uniformed police officers. Suited politicians. Robed terrorists. The Doll naked. Missiles. Explosions. Blood. The Doll dissolving, smiling a smile that was never hers. An ad break. New cars. Welfare compliance warnings. The special returned with Richard Cody standing on the steps outside the Sydney Opera House, his best side facing the camera.

“The Sydney Opera House,” he said, extending an arm to the scalloped sails behind, “one of our greatest national icons—and one of our most prominent targets for terrorists. But why would an Australian want to destroy it? To answer that question we set out to get to know our unknown terrorist.”

There appeared on the tv a face she recognised: a sickly old man, sitting up in a bed, skin like the cellophane window of a business envelope, tubes running in and out of his nose.

“After Gina Davies’ mother abandoned her daughter, Gina Davies was raised single-handedly by her struggling father,” said Richard Cody in voiceover. “This man devoted his life to his daughter. Yet tonight we can reveal how Gina Davies has not visited her dying father, Harry Davies, for many years.”

A caring Richard Cody was now to be seen sitting at Harry Davies’ hospital bedside, speaking in a gentle, sad tone.

“How many years exactly is it, Harry, since Gina visited?”

“She left at seventeen,” said the old man, with a deep roll in his voice. “Saw her a few times over the next year or so. But since she was eighteen, nothing.”

The Doll could see that what little he had to say might seem to people moving. No doubt, she thought, he would have told the tv crew other things, bitter things, but she knew that they would never be shown.

“And you have a terminal illness, Harry?”

“Yeah. Emphysema.”

“This must be very hard for you?”

“Daughter first a stripper then a terrorist? Well, you know, she was up to no good from the beginning.”

“What do you mean by ‘no good’, Harry?”

“Well, it’s a terrible thing to say as her father, but she was always, well, a cold fish—I don’t think Gina knows how to love.”

As her father went into a coughing fit, the Doll realised he was repeating more or less what he had said to her at thirteen when she asked him to stop touching her between her legs and to stop kissing her with his tongue.

“Have you got a message for your daughter?”

“Yeah, don’t hurt others like you hurt those who love you.”

And that too the Doll recalled him saying, along with his most repeated endearment:

“You little slut … you little slut …”

Harry Davies had drunk more than ever after the Doll left, his smoking grew heavier, and though the charges laid by the Doll’s schoolfriend were dropped for want of evidence and a desire by her foster family to protect their daughter, he never
felt better again. His coughing grew worse, until he was diagnosed as having terminal emphysema.

He sold his pest control business, blaming government regulation for the small price it fetched, and blew his savings in just six months on the pokies. He stayed at home, using what breath remained blaming a mining company for whom he had worked for three months as a twenty-year-old for his declining health. Before long he was hooked up to oxygen bottles, which he only disconnected for a smoke and to blame doctors, nurses, aides, for anything, or to speak in terms befitting a saint of his long dead wife, whom when alive, both before and after she left him, he had blamed for everything.

To his own surprise, and that of all who knew him, Harry Davies did not die but continued living, albeit in ever more dismal ways. His life was miserable, his house increasingly squalid, and when he thought of his daughter, he only thought of her badly, and he would say between coughing fits:

“The little slut … the little slut …”

The Unknown Terrorist
special returned with photos of Troy in his SAS uniform, Richard Cody describing him as “Gina Davies’ partner of two years”, and talking about his tragic death in a training exercise. A retired US Special Forces colonel speculated how this might explain why the Doll first developed her hatred of the state. Richard Cody asked the ex-colonel if the Doll could have acquired knowledge of military tactics from Troy.

“It’s possible,” he replied. “Frankly, you would have to say highly probable.”

And then the Doll shuddered. For Richard Cody was
now standing in the dust of the Baby Lawn, in front of Liam’s grave. Little of what he said registered with her, other than a few phrases such as “emotionally frozen” and “abandoned grave”. The Doll realised he must have been there only an hour or two after her that very day, because the grave was freshly weeded. Yet how strange it looked, for missing were her flowers and the prancing horse, and lying in the dust once more was the bronze plaque bearing her son’s name.

The Doll’s head dropped.

When after some time she found the strength to raise it and look back at the tv, Richard Cody was in a soft voice tracing a line of evil connection that started with Islamist groups in Egypt in the early 1990s. A photo flashed up of what he said was an anti-USA protest in Egypt in October 1991, organised by a group sympathetic to al-Qa’ida. There was footage of a protest in 1994 outside a New York court in support of the 1993 Twin Towers’ bomber.

The profile of a shadowed face appeared, with the caption “Former Senior Intelligence Analyst”. In an electronically distorted voice, he identified one of the men in the photo and the footage as a mullah who, he said, was the uncle of the late Tariq al-Hakim. He made much of the mullah’s influence on the young Tariq when his family visited Egypt in 1996, speaking over what he said was home video footage of the trip. Tariq looked to the Doll just a bored kid. Richard Cody went on to list Tariq’s later travels outside Australia and, before they went to another ad break, ran slow-motion footage of the mullah embracing Tariq as a kid, back-to-back with the security camera footage of Tariq as an adult hugging her.

‘But he was only a boy,’ thought the Doll. ‘Just a boy.’

There were more experts, more opinion, the story of Tariq’s unexplained death, a shot of the Corolla in the alley, more ads, until Richard Cody was once more back outside the Opera House. He dropped his head slightly, brought his hands together so that the outstretched fingers touched, and slowly walked toward the screen, like some kindly, wise teacher pondering weighty matters as he talked.

“We asked eminent psychologist Associate Professor Ray Ettslinger what Gina’s life story suggested about Gina Davies’ personality and motivations.”

“Gina’s case,” replied Ray Ettslinger, standing in front of a bookcase, “certainly fits the classic profile of someone profoundly emotionally damaged and unable to empathise with other human beings. The ability to be a table-top dancer, to see their body merely as a commodity, and sex simply as a commercial transaction, somebody unable even to grieve for her own child, indicates someone unable to feel as normal humans do …”

And on the psychologist went, knitting all the disparate stories into one large untruth: a sad and bitter woman with vengeance on her mind, corrupted by a closet fundamentalist.