The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  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 fro
m 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.

  And the Doll felt she was finally going somewhere. She wasn’t exactly sure where, but for a time it felt good. Even the shock of her friends felt good. She was making real money, and she was proud, so proud. She looked better. With the exercise every night toning her right up and the clothes, the beautiful clothes and shoes and bags she could now buy, she looked like a movie star. Only sometime later did it become clear. She wasn’t a movie star. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was a lap dancer and she was falling.

  Then the authorities banned lap dancing, and it was only tips from pole dancing or fifty bucks for a fifteen-minute private show, and somehow the clubs were no longer the thing, the place to go, but an embarrassment, and all the girls were sad, and all the men were mean, and you had to work twice as hard to make half as much. She was a lap dancer, no matter what she held on to nothing held, everything was collapsing and she was falling.

  For a time the Doll worked elsewhere: a club in Perth where anything seemed to go; she lasted there three weeks until she was asked to do a full body soap slide. Apart from not wanting to do it anyway, it just seemed too ridiculous. For a few months she had flown to the Gold Coast to work weekends at a club there. Then she came back; tried to be proud once more. She was a dancer, an erotic dancer. It was an industry, not a game. She went back to the Chairman’s Lounge: it was near where she lived, and that was enough of a reason.

  ‘I am beautiful,’ the Doll said to herself over and over, and men paid to admire her beauty and the way she displayed it. But in her heart the Doll felt otherwise. In her heart the Doll felt that they were paying for something else, and the more they paid, the more distant became that thing they sought. The Doll could now see that she had been no different from the men, that all the time the dollar notes had been rising over her body she had been falling further and further from what she really wanted—friendship, trust, serenity, love—that she had been falling and no one had said anything and everyone had known.

  And as the Doll danced above the suits, their shirt tongues hanging out, she knew the men had to imagine she was thinking about fucking them, fucking anything, imagine that she existed in a state of sexual desire so absolute even they could enter it, a sexual desire that did not need another human being with a name, a past, a life, but just an assembly of flesh.

  The Doll had to imagine other things. She imagined a life in which she had an apartment and an education and a job that people admired, a life in which she amounted to something, and her imagining became the plan, and the plan became the dream of dollar notes papering her body.

  And once more, the Doll persuaded herself she was going somewhere, when all the time she was falling. She had always been falling but now she knew nothing ever changed. People lived, people died. There would always be women stripping for rich men, there would always be men paying to look at women, she would continue falling until death, and a month or two after her death only a few people very close to her, like Wilder, would remember her, and after a few years more even Wilder would have trouble recalling her face or her laugh, and out of her only lantana would grow.

  The day of Liam’s funeral had been a beautiful winter’s day of the type that makes Sydneysiders smile and say:

  “It’s the best place on earth.”

  The air seemed full of joyful noise to the Doll. Everywhere were the sounds of children playing, of people laughing, pleasant music rising—and it was clear to the Doll that death was of no concern to such a world, where life was good and cheerful, and the appearance of suffering was an embarrassment, where she was falling and out of the dead only lantana grew.

  72

  Near where the Baby Lawn ended and the Greek cemetery began was a tap from which the Doll filled her bucket. As the water ran, the Doll saw two large Greek women and an older, small Greek man in an ancient cream linen suit set up in front of an ornate, beautifully kept Greek grave. They were sitting on director’s chairs beneath an umbrella, chatting away as if it were a barbie.

  One woman reached into a plastic bag, pulled out two salad rolls, passed one to the other woman, and they began eating. The man leant back, as though taking a break from some arduous task, reached into his pocket, and took out a metal cigarette case. He opened it and took out a cigarette, tapped it top and bottom on the case, then lightly ran it along the length of his moustache before putting it between his lips and lighting up. He leant even further back, looking very satisfied to be sitting in the city of the dead on such a splendidly hot day. And though they seemed somehow comic to the Doll, she envied them their ease. With them death had a place.

  Then she made her way back to Liam’s grave. The old man and the small girl were gone. The Doll thought how the Baby Lawn was a place where deaths were less easily digested, life not so readily understood, and people fragmented rather than came together. No one set up director’s chairs. No one ate salad rolls. No one smoked. No one chatted. People came, remembered a few sad things, and then left.

  The crack of a seed pod exploding open in the heat brought the Doll back from her thoughts. Reaching into her plastic bag, she pulled out the scrubbing brush and the detergent. But when she began scrubbing the plaque, it came away from the concrete and fell into the dust. A cemetery gardener drove past on his mini-tractor, dull plastic kegs of poison jogging in their brightly coloured lift-up tray.

  “Good times, great value!” said the tractor radio. “Barbeques Galore.”

  The Doll looked at the wet plaque now lying filthy on the ground, the dust turned to damp dirt. She felt her heart grab, but she would not let this get on top of her, could not let it get on top of her: she would do as she always did, as she felt she always must—she would start again, turn disadvantage to advantage. She picked the plaque up, put it in the bucket and scrubbed it until it was cleaned only in order, she knew well enough, to be tarnished and dirtied once more.

  The Doll had nothing with which to refix it to the concrete beam. She had some chewing gum in her bag, so she got it out and, while polishing the plaque with some Brasso and her handkerchief, chewed the gum, then pressed it down on the concrete and pushed the plaque onto it, fixing it back into a position as best she could.

  She put the dead flowers away in the plastic bag and arranged the already wilting fresh flowers in front of the cleaned and refixed plaque, then propped the plastic horse against the concrete beam.

  A crow swore from a nearby tree.

  She gathered her brush and detergent and litter into the plastic bag, and began walking back to the railway station in the stinking heat. She cut through an older part of the cemetery with its broken graves and fallen headstones, inscriptions lost to the erosion of wind and rain and sun. Berry bushes, pines, wattles, and lantana thrust up through graves, pushing aside railings, cracking concrete capping, slowly flattening headstones, gently, inexorably destroying with life the last attempts to pretend death wasn’t forever.

  The Doll thought of how Liam would never send her letters. Never text or email her. Never bring home a girl who would become a woman who would bri
ng grandchildren to visit the Doll. Never hold her old unheld body and feel it soft in his strong young embrace. Never tell her stories, sing, make her smile with his laughter. Never kiss her thin unkissed lips, her wrinkled and papery cheeks. Never let her know she loved and was loved.

  Beneath a stunted gum tree with low, sweeping boughs, the Doll saw a broken wooden cross lying on the ground. Tiny ants toiled in its rotting splinters. She looked up and saw Homebush Olympic stadium in the distance. When it was being built for the Olympics and she was a teenager, its wings had reminded her of angels. Now she could see there was so much that was more amazing than any angel, but that there was nothing left to believe. People put all their energy and brilliance into making things more extraordinary than themselves, only to have it make them feel that they were, in the end, less than nothing.

  And somehow the ants in the cross and the people of Sydney with their Olympic stadium became the same thing in the Doll’s mind, everyone doing what they did because they had to, and yet everything that was done seemed to serve no greater point, not ants toiling to make a nest out of decay, nor people labouring to make great cities and an Olympic stadium. And maybe that was why they wanted to be frightened of her, thought the Doll, so that they might think being like an ant was a good thing to be. But there seemed something wrong in this, or in her thinking, and then it all got too hard to hold in her head, and when her stolen phone rang for the second time, the Doll answered it instinctively, gratefully, and only after she had it to her ear did she wonder whether this was wise or not.