The Unknown Terrorist (34 page)
Read The Unknown Terrorist Online
Authors: Richard Flanagan
As the snakehead gets out of his car she looks up, and her body shudders. Driving past in the opposite direction is a shiny black BMW four-wheel drive with two men she knows sometimes work for Mr Moon. The two men go to the wharves, and from there steam out to sea in an old prawn trawler loaded with twelve corpses that need to be dumped, while police paddy wagons work the Cross, and the fallen and the wretched, the hopeful and the hopeless, those who need compassion and those who need to give compassion pass the evening in that run-down strip mall that bears too big a name for suffering so everyday.
Everything takes its accustomed course even when life is at its most terrible, and people know, they always know, but life goes on and the excuses for doing nothing other than going on with it are made. Near the fountain, ten policemen
circle one bearded man in a crumbling bomber jacket who brandishes a blunt Wiltshire kitchen knife. Tragedy happens while an order is placed for an Oporto flamed chicken burger, as twelve corpses dully slide into the sea, as ten policemen wait, as one woman beneath a blue neon light with bruised white legs and iced veins asks, “Hey, you want some fun? If you don’t want
that
fun, do you want to score?”
And the men after something else again pass her by, on their way to the Chairman’s Lounge where the women wait, all of them creatures shaped by another light, the red light of blood—the blood that will never be completely steam-cleaned out of the still-damp carpet and tub chairs below; the blood that’s colouring the sky and flowing in rivers and filling the seas.
They know only without understanding that they now must belong to some place, to some idea, to something; they understand without knowing that not far away, on an ever rising sea, the scattered corpses of those that don’t belong float for the shortest time like storm-tossed kelp leaves, before disappearing forever.
Ferdy, his hair brighter than ever, looks up into the lights and for a moment can see nothing, neither the semi-naked women, awkward and waiting above him, nor the clothed men, relaxed and comfortable in the death-shadowed darkness below. Then he fixes his face into a smile for all to see and claps his hands together.
“Dance,” Ferdy says.
Though he speaks in little more than a whisper, everyone hears his order.
“It’s time we all got back to dancing.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte, Bobbi (Bobbi’s Pole Studio), Larry Eaton, Arabella Edge, Brian Edmonds, Donald Graham (NSW Police), Wayne Hayes, Terry Hicks, Jo Jarrah, Sally Jooste, Sam Jooste, Aphrodite Kondos, Kate Law, Peta Murphy, Sally Novak, Paul ‘Canada’ Richardson (NSW Police), Deborah Rogers, Meredith Rose, Sarina Rowell and Geoff Smith; and make particular mention of my publisher of ten years, Nikki Christer, to whom I, along with many other Australian writers, owe much.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
I took this novel from everywhere—ads, headlines, gossip, bar talk, along with the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks—no-one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better. While the bones of the plot I owe to Heinrich Böll’s
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
(1974), the sub-plot of stripping for a rich man though recognisable from Paul Cox’s
Man of Flowers
(1983) comes not from that film, but life, a story a woman once told me.
Though art is mostly theft, larceny is no guarantee of worth. Whatever resonance this tale possesses, if any, must be rightfully attributed to those men and women who have created our own times. As Shakespeare—who rarely invented his own plots and so well quarried such sources as Raphael Holinshed’s
Chronicles
—wrote in
Henry V
:
“Wisdom cries out in the streets, yet no man regards it”,—a most beautiful line lifted from Proverbs.
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