The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  Walking beyond the shade of the station, the direct sun enveloped her like a quick-drying treacle, slowing her every movement. Though there was still the traffic and commotion of a suburban main street, no one wanted to be outside. Anyone not working had retreated indoors and taken refuge near their air con vents and in cold beer and chilled wines. Some watched something on television and afterwards couldn’t remember whether it was sport or reality tv or a documentary on Hitler. Some surfed the net looking at porn or eBay. Some hit their wives or screamed at their husbands or beat their kids. Most did nothing. It was difficult to sleep, yet almost impossible to move. It was easy to be irritated about everything that was of no consequence, yet care about nothing that mattered.

  Outside a laundry that doubled as a Sri Lankan video shop, the Doll spotted the unusual sight of a stationary taxi in the suburbs. Grateful not to have to struggle walking a good half hour through the thick heat, she hailed it.

  67

  Wilder had just hung up from talking to the Doll when there was a knock at the door. It was Nick Loukakis. She hadn’t seen or spoken to him since their affair had ended three months earlier.

  He came in, and it was as if he were a door-to-door salesman. Neither knew where to look. Neither knew where to stand or how to hold themselves or what to say. There should have been many things to say, but neither knew how to say even one of those many things.

  Nick Loukakis looked around her still trashed, only partly cleaned up living room.

  “Your friends,” said Wilder after a time. She said it with a double bitterness.

  “Sorry?” said Nick Loukakis.

  “I was the one raided in the middle of the night. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Nick Loukakis looked around at the mess, the pots and pans spread out over the kitchen floor, the broken pictures lying scattered, the books spreadeagled. For a moment he looked as confused as the room.

  “They want you to pump me and tell you what I know,” continued Wilder.

  Nick Loukakis looked up at her and she realised he hadn’t known, but was only now putting it together.

  “I’m just a dumb-arse detective sergeant in the drug squad,” said Nick Loukakis. “If you think they tell us anything other than shit you’re mistaken.”

  Their conversation dried up. She made coffee, and when she brought the plunger to the table she passed him a chair with a padded seat cover to sit on. He smiled. Wilder said nothing.

  Wilder had four bentwood chairs with hard bases that she had bought some cheap padded seat covers for. Nick Loukakis had hated them. They were, he said at the time she bought them, “frumpy”. This annoyed Wilder, but it was really no big deal to her whether they were on or off, and so she had taken them off and put them away. After it ended with Nick Loukakis, she got them out and tied them back on. But now she was angry: angry with what had happened to her in the night, with the mess her home was in, with the Doll for having allowed all this to happen.

  “I like them,” said Wilder, still rankling about the seat covers, about him, about the raid. “Besides, the chairs are too hard to sit on without them.”

  He drank some of his coffee.

  He said, “You know, this is a nice place you’ve got here, Wilder. Stylish. Your style. But those padded seat covers—I dunno. They do let the place down a bit.”

  Wilder said nothing. Wilder knew nothing drove him madder than saying nothing. She changed the topic, knowing that made him angrier still.

  “Why?” said Nick Loukakis after a while.

  “Well, what are you going to do about it, Nick? What exactly are you going to do about it? Go back to Diana and get her wog seats for me? What, Nick? What?”

  She was calm. After everything she was calm. She hated him when he was indecisive, when he gave in to her, when he wouldn’t be the boss. So she goaded him some more about his wife, and the more she goaded him, the more she hated his wife and despised him.

  In the depths of his soul, Nick Loukakis loathed what he saw as her jealousy when it manifested itself as such small-minded spite. But he also felt he had no right to show any anger. And besides, there were other things that mattered far more and he had to swallow it. Finally, in a voice that was somehow quiet but threatening, he told Wilder what he thought the Doll’s real story was and why he needed to find her.

  As he spoke, he tried to avoid looking at Wilder’s breasts. He tried to destroy the memory of gazing up at them when they had fucked, her belly heaving in and out, running his hand through her hair. He tried to forget how much they used to laugh, how much he liked just to listen to her stories.

  “Where is she, Wilder?” he said.

  “Your wife? Diana? Wifey, wife? You should know.”

  He reached across, grabbed both her wrists in a painful hold.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “Gina. Where the fuck is Gina?”

  Wilder pulled her head back, stared at him and said nothing. He got up, and wrenched her off her chair. He held her wrists up so that one was either side of his face, and she was pulled into his body.

  “Let go,” said Wilder. “You’re hurting me.”

  “I can help her, Wilder.”

  “I can’t tell you,” said Wilder, and then immediately regretted the words, for now he would know she knew.

  “You’ve got to tell me, Wilder.”

  She tried to break his grip. She wanted to scream. But instead she smiled, because now he was doing what she wanted him to do to her.

  “Wifey, wife,” she said, smiling some more. “Wifey, wife.”

  ‘I’m worn out,’ thought Nick Loukakis, ‘and I no longer know what to do.’ He let go of her wrists before he did anything even more stupid. He stood, picked up the coffee cups and took them into the kitchen, retreating into domestic routine to calm himself.

  Wilder watched him from behind as he walked away. He had a rugby player’s back. The taste of him, sweet and salty, came back to her mouth as she watched him washing the cups, then drying them and putting them away, an odd act of order in the midst of chaos.

  Perhaps it was for the best, he told himself as he stood over the sink. What good could come of his knowing where she was? He realised he couldn’t help the Doll, it was already too big, and he knew he would inevitably have to tell others, they would know he had visited Wilder, and then her fate would be theirs to decide, not his.

  He came back to the table.

  “I better go,” he said. His voice was different now. “Sorry about this,” he said, gesturing vaguely at the room, as though he were to blame. He went to give her a farewell kiss, quick and perfunctory.

  But their arms went around each other and he could feel her breasts and she his back. They didn’t drop to the floor; they didn’t fall on each other in a frenzy amidst the upturned furniture, the strewn books and magazines and pictures littering the floor. They just stood there, holding each other awkwardly, as if their bodies were porcelain, as though the slightest movement might shatter whatever small thing was left into a million fragments.

  To sleep in Wilder’s arms, thought Nick Loukakis. That was all he wanted. To sleep!—to fall asleep holding and smelling her and her holding him and he at last at peace. Peace, how sweet it suddenly seemed to him, how he longed to rest. But it wasn’t possible and he didn’t know what to say.

  For all her desire, Wilder had made up her mind that she would never sleep with him again. Something had left her. It was over. Unless he spoke, thought Wilder. Maybe then it would be different. If only he spoke, then one of the two ideas at war inside her head would vanish—that she didn’t want him, that she wanted him more than ever. So Wilder told him about the Doll. She made believe that her telling him was fated to be. She tried not to think that she told him just so that he might say something to her, anything.

  Nick Loukakis kept on holding her, longing to be at peace. He didn’t know what to say. He wished she hadn’t told him. He felt her hair in his fingers. He tried not to think of his sons. Of Diana.
He didn’t know what to do. He wished they had anything to share but this. He kept on holding her, the noise of the traffic, of Sydney, beginning to rise around them. He thought he would scream. He didn’t know what to say and how he wished she hadn’t told him.

  68

  “Just get in,” said the taxi driver. His bead seat cover clacked as he waved an arm at the open door, seeming to resent the draught of hot air that accompanied the Doll into his cab. He was an overweight man whose red face was covered with crusty patches and his blue shirt with flakes of skin, like the scales of a fish.

  “Rookwood,” said the Doll. “I’ll direct you.”

  Inside the taxi a radio announcer declared that they were “now going direct to the press conference being given by Police Commissioner Ben Holmstrom”. The taxi driver turned on the meter and pulled out. On the radio a voice coughed, and then said:

  “Well, I can confirm that we found a large sum of cash in the flat, along with a small amount of cocaine.”

  The Doll wanted to ask him to change the station, but didn’t dare. She wanted to be invisible. She didn’t want him to look at her, think about her, remember her. So she had to keep listening, as there arose a confusion of shouts from the media pack.

  “Do you believe there is a connection between Islamic terrorism and drug running?”

  “We are pursuing all avenues of enquiry and working with the appropriate government agencies,” said the voice the Doll guessed belonged to the top cop.

  “Is it true that this was the flat of the woman the media are calling the Unknown Terrorist?”

  “The flat was rented in the name of Gina Davies.”

  “Is Gina Davies the same woman who works as a lap dancer at the Chairman’s Lounge under the aliases Krystal and the Black Widow?”

  “That is our understanding, yes.”

  “So there is a link, Police Commissioner? Can you confirm that the cell was financing its terrorist activities through drug running and the sex industry?”

  “I can only repeat what I said a moment ago. But clearly these are disturbing developments.”

  The driver mumbled bitterly, as if all this were somehow personally directed against him, while at the press conference a different, distant voice rose above the clamour to ask:

  “How much money did you find?”

  In the all-pervasive heat even the air in the taxi was a clammy torment. The Doll tried to focus on the hoarse whisper of the car’s air con vents battling a world that could no longer be cooled down. But when the cop said, “Close to fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar notes,” she was unable to ignore the radio any longer.

  “Stop!” she suddenly called. “Here—just pull into that hardware store there and wait for me.”

  The Doll stood for a moment on the street, trying to calm her breathing.

  ‘My money! My money!’ thought the Doll—and she knew it was all gone. Wilder had not got there in time and now could never retrieve it. It was all her savings, and she would never ever get it back. She could not prove she had earnt it legally and they would claim it had been obtained illegally. All those shitty, never-ending nights she had suffered for it; all those arseholes she had smiled at and cooed to; all that crap she had swallowed; all that money with which she had, bill by bill, slowly sought to put an end to her nakedness, all of it had been for nothing!

  She felt giddy, made herself walk into the hardware store though the floor was rising and falling away at the same time. For gone with the money was her dream of a home, and with the home, her dream of leaving dancing and starting a new life.

  Then, as she searched up and down the aisles with a plastic shopping basket in her hand, she tried to find solace in her new situation. As she put a kitchen knife into her basket, as she took down a tin of Brasso and found a scrubbing brush, she tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, that she could start again. She stopped and steadied herself by leaning against a Makita power tools display.

  Perhaps, she thought, if she gave herself up, told them everything—including how the money had been made, how she had worked hard and honestly for it—then they would understand, clear the mess up and give her money back. She entertained this idea for some minutes; her desire for her money and the idea that the money was freedom was so strong that it for a short time overrode her fear. At the counter she added a bouquet of flowers to her basket, paid, then walked out and got back in the taxi. But as the taxi drove on, the Doll knew all that she was thinking was just so much dog shit.

  “Grew up not far from here,” the taxi driver said, as he spun the steering wheel, and the taxi swung off the highway and past a sign advertising the largest cemetery in the southern hemisphere.

  “Seven hundred acres of it,” the taxi driver said, scratching furiously at his raw chin. The Doll tried not to notice the pieces of his face falling away. “They called it Necropolis then. City of the dead. Like something out of a frigging Batman movie.”

  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 b
ronze 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.