The Unknown Terrorist (7 page)

The Doll was saving for a deposit on an apartment. Her mind was full of dreams as to what it would be like. She imagined she would find something run-down, some overlooked bargain which, through her hard work and imagination, would be transformed as such places were transformed by magic and seemingly within seven minutes on television DIY programs.

And changed as miraculously with it would be the Doll’s life. She would start that uni course; she would ease out of dancing, only doing the minimum to keep up the repayments. Everything was arranged, everything was ready. Because the Doll had no legitimate income, it would be bought in Wilder’s name, and then Wilder would sign it over to the Doll. A few days, a week or two at the most, and the life the Doll had so long dreamt of would begin. Her flat was chaotic testimony to this dream of new order. Scattered everywhere were renovating magazines, furniture and home-ware catalogues, real estate guides with circled ads and pinboards ruffling with fabric samples and cut out pictures.

Each night after work she would play out the same ritual: shower, retrieve the silk batik bag from the ceiling, lie on her bed, and begin covering her naked body with her hundred-dollar notes. For though the Doll counted the notes nightly, she had come to regard the real measure of her savings as the extent to which she was able to paper over her flesh with money.

Three years earlier the notes had only covered her belly. Then they crept up and over her breasts and the last winter they began to spread down over her groin and thighs. Now
she had to start at her odd labour sitting up, delicately placing the first notes on her ankles.

As if her body were a large jigsaw puzzle, she toiled patiently, carefully overlapping each note like fish scales, imagining herself a mermaid of money. Come the day the notes completely covered her naked body, then, the Doll told herself, she would stop dancing full time. Then she would have enough money for the deposit on an apartment.

The notes felt damp and slightly ticklish. They felt like purpose, justification, the future. They felt like what makes a life possible and bearable. They felt good, like only possessing a lot of money can. These days, the Doll preferred the touch of money on her skin to the touch of a man. It was all good. On Monday, dancing for Moretti, she would earn the final three hundred dollars she needed to make $50,000, the sum she had set herself for a deposit. She would place the final three notes on herself. She would put one over her mouth, one over each of her eyes. And, her body finally covered, her new life would begin.

19

After a time the night seemed hotter than ever. The noise of mozzies cut the thick heat in an unpleasant way. The Doll sat up, the dollar notes falling away from her body and fluttering to the floor. She collected the money, counted and rolled it and stowed it in the silk bag, and hid the bag back in its hole.

The Doll stared at the accordion folds of her tightly packed wardrobe, deciding what she might wear. Before she
had begun saving, all of her money that wasn’t needed for rent and food and a little fun had gone on clothes. Now the Doll proudly told her friends,

“I’m on a budget.”

Being on a budget meant the Doll restricted herself to $2,000 a month for clothes. Another grand went out on rent each month, and she allowed herself two grand for living, most of which disappeared on taxis and restaurants. The rest she tried to put away, aiming to add four thousand dollars worth of notes a month to her body. To achieve that the Doll needed to earn nine grand a month.

Sometimes she worked six or even seven nights a week, spent less on clothes and living, and she was able to make her target. Mostly, though, she didn’t. Mostly she blew out somewhere or other, or just couldn’t be bothered dancing that much and, instead of four grand, it was at best one or two grand or plain nothing that she saved. And so instead of one year it had taken her three years, but still, over time, the money accumulated, and now the Doll and the blue Corolla were competing to be the first covered in paper.

As for the two grand reserved for clothes this seemed to her miserable enough and economy indeed, for in her early years as a dancer the Doll had developed a taste for the best European designers, and so some months her two thousand dollars, even with the most astute shopping, would only be enough to buy two or three things.

Though some of the other girls teased her about her expensive tastes, it was a simple matter for the Doll: she became someone else. No one would imagine that she had ever been other than beautiful, privileged, one of the elect
who belonged not in the mortal world, but came down from the world of the gods—the billboards and women’s magazines, the films and ads—to walk among mere mortals. It was a fix, like blow, and like blow it always wore off too quickly and left you wanting that feeling back.

Yet the more clothes the Doll bought, the more the Doll spent, the more the Doll was reminded of who she was, where she lived and how she made her money. And after a short time every Bulgari accessory, each Versace shirt, and all the D&G skirts and jeans and Prada shoes only reminded the Doll of one thing: that she was less.

And then she would have to go shopping again.

She would roam the beautiful shops with their beautiful décor and beautiful shop assistants, their exquisite, thoughtful interiors marred only by their awful customers: the rich Asians she resented, the fat rich Australians she despised, the anorexic rich Australians she pitied, the poor rubbernecking westies she hated. So much beauty in service of so much that she found so ugly, so much that was hideous seeking cover, and in all the shoppers she saw only a different aspect of herself: wounded animals desperate that no one else see and know their fatal hurt.

Finally, the Doll put on matching La Perla knickers and bra, beautiful pale green lace embroidered with small pink flowers picked out in Swarovski crystals—how she loved that sweet feeling of them against her skin, so hidden, so secret. They felt like walking around with $49,700 wrapped around her body. Then she wrestled on her favourite rhinestone-studded Versace jeans, draped a gold chain belt around her waist, and over her top slid a little black singlet brightly
emblazoned with what, for the Doll, were the most magic of letters: D&G.

Then she headed back out into the night and the Mardi Gras. The scene was much as ever, the same burning smell of Asia: food, crowds, piss, smog. She passed the Aborigine who always slept naked in a driveway just around the corner; the familiar ice addicts; the old men cruising; the same beggars, one of whom even waved to her; a dead cat’s skin rippling with the maggots moving beneath.

Her foot rolled and she nearly fell when she trod on a syringe.

“Eh,” a voice said. “I know you.”

The Doll steadied herself and looked back up to see a beggar standing in front of her, who, in spite of the heat, was wearing an old brown bomber jacket.

“You and the other girls,” the beggar said, his head twitching as he spoke. “I see you coming out of the club. You get the rich boys. You girls understand. Couple of bucks ain’t much for you.” He stank, his skin was scabby and filthy, but his eyes were the brilliant blue she had seen below frozen water on tv documentaries. “My brother fucked me up the arse,” he continued. “Twelve, I was. Fucked me so I’d have AIDS, like him. Some brother, eh? I won’t lie, I need a hit. Help me, please.”

“Twelve?” the Doll asked.

“Twelve,” the beggar replied, somewhat taken aback. “That’s right. But even a fiver’d do.”

The Doll opened her purse and handed him a hundred-dollar note.

Somewhere, the sun was setting.

20

The hot night sky hung over the wild carnival like a damp, filthy rag dripping sweat on the hundreds of thousands squashed in below. The streets were crawling with cops, but everyone appeared resigned to the need for such security after the bomb scare. For nothing, it seemed, could dampen the spirit of the biggest gay parade in the world.

The sticky stench of desire and poppers and spilt beer rose like an intoxicating incense as float after float of near-naked dancing men and women came rolling down Oxford Street. There were men waxed and honed, muscled men with guts of corro and breasts of rippling beef, delicate men in tight silver Lurex; and punctuating the floats were formations of fairies and marching boys and dancing pharaohs and open-chapped cowboys line dancing. There was the roar of the Dykes on Bikes and cheering for the Scats with Hats, and weaving the whole together was a thumping cacophony of cheap fireworks and trilling whistles and a thousand shreds of music, trance and techno and rap and the ballads of beloved gay divas.

Long before she arrived, the Doll sensed the growing vibration of the large crowds massing along the parade’s route, milling between the buildings and the barricades like netted shoals of fish, twisting and writhing but largely failing in their desire to move. Some had come to gawk at freaks, some to sneer, some to marvel and some to perv, and some, like the Doll, for a good time. Everyone strained for a view, save for a short weedy man racing through the mob selling stolen milk crates as viewing platforms for a tenner each.

As the Doll worked her way closer to the street and the
spectacle of the parade, she began glimpsing between jammed bodies the sight of sashaying queens with opera house hair, glomesh bags dangling; strutting grizzlies in leathers and chains with harbour bridge moustaches; men dressed in elaborate plumage like fallen birds of paradise.

And then there was the float she had come to see: Dykes with Dicks. Framed between jostling shoulders she saw Wilder topless, waggling a huge black strap-on penis, her great breasts bouncing up and down as she danced.

The Doll thought how Wilder didn’t dance the way they did at the club, and it fascinated her how the less Wilder tried to dance the stupid way that was supposed to be about sex, the more sexy she seemed up there on the float. At the club you danced for money, and you danced because you were Krystal or Jodie or Amber. The one thing you never dared dance was yourself.

The Doll was trying to get closer to the barriers so that she could wave to Wilder, when she accidentally knocked a beer a woman was carrying over the side of a man in front of her. The woman swore. The man turned.

He was dark and good looking—too good looking, thought the Doll, to be anything other than gay.

The woman shook her head, swore again, and disappeared into the crowd. The Doll apologised to the man, then pointed to Wilder with her huge, shiny black cock, as if it were an explanation. When the man looked confused, the Doll said as brightly as she could:

“My friend—on the float—my friend.”

Rather than being angry, he laughed:

“So—you’re the dyke without a dick.”

He had the correct pronunciation of a foreigner, yet he seemed somehow familiar. Perhaps it was for that reason, or simply because she was relieved he wasn’t furious with her, that the Doll laughed back.

“No, not a dyke. Just a friend. But no dick.”

Only then did she recognise him as the man who had rescued Max.

“Compared to her,” he said, plucking his soaked shirt out from his hip, “nor have I.”

Flustered, the Doll took a handkerchief out of her handbag. When, with a futile gesture, she went to dry his shirt with it she felt her fingertips touch his.

“I’m sorry,” the Doll said. “I think we’ve—”

A float of Dusty Springfield drag queens glided by, and the music was so loud that she could neither finish her sentence nor hear his reply, but it was clear from his expression that he too now recognised her. He mimed a little boy crying and himself swimming in a comic way. She laughed again, and as some men next to them began dancing to the float’s music, he put out his hand, smiled, and the Doll, still laughing, took it, not because she really wanted to, but because she felt bad that she had ruined his night soaking him in beer.

And so they began to dance there on the street. At first, they were cramped in their movement, and did little more than an awkward shuffle. But as they continued, he manoeuvred them away from the barriers and the parade to the rear of the spectators. There it was less crowded and people gave them more space. The Doll realised he knew what he was doing as he began leading her into a merengue. They spun
and turned, and he pulled her in and let her go right out before tensing his fingers in her hand just slightly, the merest hint of a resolute power, and then she flew back in to him.

As they danced, the Doll found herself looking up at the street lamps spangling the night sky, and her lips formed the easiest of smiles as they swung first this way and then that. As he spun her outwards, she pursed her lips and blew him the softest, gentlest of kisses, and he laughed, and then he pulled her in, somehow twisted her around, bounced her buttocks off his buttocks and sent her spiralling back out.

At first he held the Doll gently and politely: when their bodies touched, they merely brushed against each other as the move demanded they ought. But then she felt her hand being slightly squeezed by his, and she squeezed back. Outwardly their dance remained the same, but the next time he ran his hands down her side, it felt a caress rather than a move, and when he spun her so that she finished with him standing behind her, bodies together, she could feel pressing into her lower back for the briefest, most electric of moments, the firmness of his cock.

The city was like an oven. Around the Doll were not only the floats, the parade, but the endless procession of men and women caught in the mirage of passion, eyeing off thighs, buttocks, waxed skin, walks, head turns, smiles, all alive with the anticipation of what pleasure the evening might yet bring them. The air was taut with desire so animal, it felt to her like some extraordinary annual natural event where hundreds of thousands gathered for one night of parade and rutting.

Someone clapped and the Doll realised it was not a float they were applauding, but them. No more was she separate
from the Mardi Gras, a spectator of others, but now part of the exploding street of colour and noise and music, at one with all that was beautiful and all that was grotesque that evening, the plain and the exquisite, the desperate and the hopeful, the predatory and the innocent. No longer did she dance with care about how she might look, but rather with complete abandon, throwing her head back and laughing, suddenly speeding up moves and then slowing them down, so that the rhythm of the dance grew unexpected and wild. And then it was him following her, and he too had somehow become one with the evening and the Doll could feel the lust of the night and his lust joining, and she glowed with it.