No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  I know from the coroner’s inquest, however, what kind of shop The Bondi Cruiser was. It sold seriously expensive bikes: not kids’ bikes, and certainly not bikes for cruising lazily around town, but racing bikes, some so light you could pick them up with two fingers. A shop of that nature isn’t going to be very busy. It probably doesn’t need more than one staff member on at any one time. On the day of the siege at Surf City, that staff member’s name was Imogen Jacobsen.

  Unlike Zoe on the front desk, who barely glanced at Ali Khan and remembered nothing about him, Imogen remembered quite a lot.

  ‘I was only working at The Bondi Cruiser because I was saving money to go overseas,’ she told Hanrahan during the inquest. ‘I’d been studying at UTS (the University of Technology, Sydney) but I planned to go to Nepal. I wanted to do work in an orphanage but that’s not cheap.’

  Hanrahan seemed surprised.

  ‘What do you mean it’s expensive?’ he said, but everyone knows: so many Australians are now so well-off, so many can afford to go overseas and donate their time to good causes that the charities have hit on the idea of charging them for the experience.

  Imogen had barely finished punching her employee number into the cash register, ready for the day’s trade, when Ali Khan came skidding into her shop.

  ‘I couldn’t really see his face because he had the hoodie up and it even covered the sides,’ she told Hanrahan. ‘But his eyes were frightened. I was pretty frightened, too. I said, “Hey, what are you doing?” Because I never expected that – to have somebody zooming into the shop first thing, looking so strange.’

  Hanrahan interrupted: ‘When you say strange . . .?’

  ‘He was kind of weird looking, pale, with jeans dragging on the ground and he was swimming in that hoodie,’ Imogen said. ‘And I don’t know if it was because his jeans were so long or because his shoes were wet but pretty much as soon as he skidded into the shop he slipped, and almost fell over.’

  Hanrahan wanted to know if Ali Khan looked like he was running away from something.

  ‘To be honest, I had no idea what was going on with him,’ Imogen said. ‘Because, you know, he’d come in so quick, and then he started to fall and he had to, you know, put his hands out to stop himself. It was like watching a breakdancer almost, because the way he fell, it was backward.’

  Hanrahan said, ‘How did he fall backward?’

  ‘I don’t know but he was bent over completely backward for a minute there,’ Imogen said. ‘He was taking all his weight on one hand, with his palm flat to the floor, and that’s when I noticed that he had something under his hoodie. I mean, the hoodie was loose and zipped to the neck but when he leaned back, I could see it: he had something square under there. But I didn’t think it was anything dangerous. That didn’t cross my mind. I thought, okay, that must be something that he’s shoplifted from another store. He’s stuffed it under his jumper and now the security guards are after him.’

  Hanrahan said, ‘And did he smell at all?’

  Imogen said no, he didn’t smell.

  Hanrahan said, ‘And did you do anything to stop Ali Khan from leaving the shop after he slipped and fell, and after you noticed that he might have something under his jacket?’

  Imogen shook her head.

  ‘There wasn’t time to do anything,’ she said. ‘Even when I said, “Hey, what are you doing?” he wouldn’t have stopped. He was in a panic, like he was petrified of something. I wouldn’t have been able to stop him if I’d tried; he was in the shop and out again before I knew it.’

  The CCTV footage backs Imogen up: Ali Khan was in and out of The Bondi Cruiser in less than thirty seconds. He turned left as he flew out the door, keeping the atrium space on his right, and Imogen followed him only as far as her shop’s front door.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking, oh, maybe I should go and catch him,’ she told Hanrahan, shaking her head from side to side. ‘There was no way I wanted to do that. From my point of view, he looked seriously disturbed. And I figured the reason he was running was, security was already after him.’

  Hanrahan said, ‘So why did you go to the door?’

  ‘I suppose for a bit of a stickybeak,’ Imogen said. ‘It was pretty surreal. Here was this guy, bumping his way down the atrium, smashing into people and bouncing off the brass balustrades. I was thinking, gee, he must have done something pretty bad to be acting that crazy. Maybe he’s on probation or something and if he gets caught shoplifting or doing anything wrong, he’s going to go into juvenile detention. That’s how desperate he looked. I’ve seen shoplifters before. Most of them will try to run but when security goes after them, it’s like they give up straight away. This kid was really trying hard not to get caught.’

  Peering out from the shop door, Imogen looked around for security guards but she couldn’t see any. As far as anyone can tell, that’s because Ali Khan wasn’t actually being chased at that point. Imogen did notice other shop assistants, most of whom had barely had time to open up, coming out of their shops to see what the commotion was about. She exchanged glances with some of them, shrugging her shoulders as if to say, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, do you?’

  ‘I suppose we were all a bit confused because this kid was definitely making a bit of a scene,’ she told Hanrahan. ‘He was running along, but not in a normal way, and there were some shoppers – just a few, not many, it was still pretty early – and they were having to dodge to stay out of his way.’

  One of those who dodged was a man named Craig Moreland. He’s a self-employed Bondi plumber. As it happens, I know Craig. When I moved from my last parish house into the flat in Bondi, he came to tighten the leaky shower and give the hot water a service. I can’t remember how I came to tell him that I was a priest but I remember he said, ‘I don’t get much call to fix a priest’s plumbing,’ and then went beetroot red.

  I said, ‘That’s probably because priests don’t usually use their plumbing,’ and that put him at ease. People forget that priests are people. They can have a sense of humour.

  Craig had gone to Surf City that morning to pick up his new passport from the post office on the fourth floor. Like most of Bondi’s plumbers he’s also a surfer and he likes to spend a few weeks a year in Bali. Craig wasn’t called to give evidence at the inquest into the siege – Hanrahan could hardly have taken testimony from everyone who happened to be at Surf City that day – but I suppose Craig heard around the traps that I had been there and so, when I ran into him a few months back, he asked me, ‘What did you make of all that?’

  I told him, ‘It played on my mind. I don’t think I’ve properly got over it.’

  He looked a bit shocked and I understood that. Priests aren’t supposed to suffer like the rest of mankind; they’re supposed to understand that whatever happens is all part of God’s plan, the detail of which will be revealed to everyone at some later date.

  I asked Craig what he made of it all. He shook his head and said, ‘I wasn’t there for the worst of it but I can still see that kid, Ali Khan, running straight toward me. It was like a scene out of a movie: he was skidding along, tripping over the wheels of prams and, like an idiot, I kind of stopped dead in my tracks. I was thinking, do I run or do I do something else?’

  I asked him, ‘Did you see any security guards?’

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘Not on the fourth floor, where we were. I saw them down on the third floor. You know how you can look down through the atrium and see the other floors? I saw one of them down there, pointing up. And then I saw one on the escalator, coming up. It was one of those big guys – Samoan, Pacific Islander, something like that. I could tell that something serious was happening because he was coming up the escalator steps two at a time and he was shouting something like “Hey!” and “You!” and “Stop!”’

  ‘Did the kid – Ali Khan – did he stop? Could he hear?’

  ‘I could hear it from where I was standing so I reckon he must have been able to hear,’ Craig said. ‘And I noticed that he ki
nd of looked back and he would have seen this security guard coming toward him and that made him run even faster. He was scrambling, skating almost in those old shoes, and at one point, like I said, he was coming right at me. I managed to get out of his way but plenty of other people were being pushed to the side.’

  I asked Craig, ‘Did you at any point start to run?’

  ‘Not me, no. This will sound funny but it was like I was stuck to the ground. And it was like, run where? Back toward the escalators, or around to the other side of the atrium, or where? Because nobody was really sure what was going on. It was just this little guy running and security chasing but then I heard somebody say “He’s got a gun!” or maybe, “Has he got a gun?” I don’t know if they were talking about the security guard or if they were talking about Ali Khan but the word “gun” – it got people into a panic. So you had people running this way and people running that way, and it was in that confusion that the kid slipped and fell down.’

  It’s possible that my interest in what went wrong during the Surf City siege had reached the point of obsession but I couldn’t help but ask Craig, ‘Can you tell me how that happened? How he fell down? I mean, exactly how it happened?’

  ‘Sure. He was right outside the lingerie shop,’ Craig said. ‘There was a little girl – Asian looking – coming toward him from the opposite direction. He wasn’t watching where he was going. He was looking back over his shoulder, maybe trying to keep an eye on the security guard. So he didn’t see her, and bang, he smashed right into her and both of them fell down in a big heap on the floor. And then, before they could get up, another kid – the school kid – came around the corner, and he wasn’t looking where he was going either, so he tripped over the two people already on the floor so then it was the three of them sprawled there, outside Cups and Saucy.’

  Chapter Three

  People say that news travels fast these days, and that must be right, because Ali Khan can’t have been locked in Cups and Saucy for much more than about thirty minutes when I got the call from Wolf asking if I could come down. I mentioned a bit earlier that I pretty much jumped straight in the car and by the time I’d turned on the radio, every station was already reporting the news.

  That said, most of the reports were pretty light on detail. As for actual updates – how Ali Khan had ended up inside the shop, and what exactly he was doing in there – I didn’t hear any explanation for any of that. In fact, the whole time I was in the car – which turned out to be for quite a while – the reports stayed much the same: ‘A young man is reported to have burst into the Surf City shopping complex down at Bondi Beach and he’s believed to be holding hostages.’

  The commentators were also saying, ‘Stay away from the area, if you can.’ Obviously sound advice, except for people like me who were trying to get as close to Surf City as possible. It was proving somewhat difficult: I’d pulled out of the Bondi Beach car park with the aim of heading straight down Campbell Parade but what I hadn’t counted on – what I should have counted on – was that the main road into the Surf City car park was completely stalled with traffic.

  In and of itself, that was situation normal: one thing I’d discovered since moving into Ruth’s old flat was that Bondi has a traffic problem. On this particular day, it was being made worse by the fact that New South Wales police were directing people away from the main roads. I could see two of them through the windscreen: young men who probably went into the force to fight crime, standing in the rain instead, water pouring off the shiny brims of their hats, poking their heads in the open windows of all the stalled cars, trying to explain to each and every driver that the road was closed, and Surf City was closed, and no, there’d be no exceptions.

  I waited as patiently as possible for my car to reach the head of the queue. For a good ten minutes I barely moved. I thought about leaving the car and hoofing it to Surf City – it wasn’t more than a kilometre away from where I was stalled – but I couldn’t abandon the car in traffic, not with so many other cars stalled behind me. There was nothing to do but sit and wait my turn. Finally, it came. I rolled down my window to talk, ready to explain who I was and why I wasn’t wearing my uniform (it was at the Bondi police station; I was wearing what I’d worn in the soup kitchen the night before). I said, ‘I’m Father Paul Doherty. I’m a police chaplain.’ I also handed him my business card, with the police coat of arms.

  The young constable looked at the card, turned it over, and said, ‘What’s a chaplain?’

  It was a question with which I was familiar. I said, ‘It’s like a priest, but for police.’

  Still doubtful, he said, ‘If you’re a priest, where’s your . . .?’

  I said, ‘My collar? I don’t have it with me. Superintendent Wolf Boehmer of the Bondi LAC called me. He said to come in a hurry.’

  In fact, I often failed to wear the collar, even when I had a parish. It’s probably a sin but I was in the habit of telling people that I’d simply forgotten to put it on when the truth was, I never felt comfortable in it. I can’t say for certain why I was so ambivalent about it: on one hand, I knew that some people simply believe that you’re not really a priest unless you’ve got the collar on, but I couldn’t help thinking that people liked me to wear it because it made them feel good about themselves: ‘Look, here’s my friend, he’s a priest: I must be a good person!’

  It drove my mother mad, the fact that I didn’t like to wear it. I like to think I am a good son and, back when she was well, I would often go to visit her in the afternoons. She’d invite half the neighbourhood, mostly because she liked to show off about having a son who was a priest. They’d all be in what Mum called ‘the good room’, awaiting my arrival, with china cups and saucers on their laps. I’d walk in, looking like any one of their sons, and Mum would have to leap to her feet and say, ‘Oh, here’s Paul. He’s the priest.’ They’d look at her doubtfully. If I was a priest, why was I wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt? Mum would sense that, and she’d look at me and say, ‘Where’s your collar, Paul?’

  Sometimes I’d say, ‘You know I don’t like to wear it,’ but that seemed to upset her, so more often, I’d kiss her on the forehead and say, ‘Sorry, Mum,’ instead of giving an answer. Then, sometimes, after everyone had gone, when it was just the two of us, she’d say, ‘Why don’t you wear the collar, Paul? It’s a sign of respect.’

  I was raised not to argue with my mother but I couldn’t accept her logic. If there’s a god, and that’s a proposition that I still do believe, I don’t think he cares how we dress. To me, the collar was more like showing off. I could name half-a-dozen priests who wear theirs mainly because they know that, when they do, it will immediately make them the most important person in the room. It’s hard to stay humble when people treat you like that. The priest gets a seat at the head table at most weddings, and he’s always offered a refill when he sticks his empty teacup out.

  There’s a flipside: I’ve been spat on while wearing the collar. I’ve been called a ‘kiddie-fiddler’.

  I was thinking about some of those things when the second of the two young traffic officers came over to my car window, perhaps to see why I was holding up traffic more than was necessary. I went to show him my business card but he said, ‘Oh, I recognise you, Father Paul. I’m inclined to let you through but it’s a serious situation we’ve got here.’

  ‘I’m not sightseeing,’ I said. ‘Superintendent Boehm – your boss, Wolf – called me and asked me to come down. He’s worried about what’s going on inside.’

  The second officer said, ‘Our instructions are not to let anyone through.’

  I’d turned the radio down to have this conversation. News of the siege was still seeping through the speakers. I said, ‘Can you call Wolf on his mobile and get him to give you permission to let me through?’

  The officers looked at each other and I think they probably would have agreed to that but then one of those ‘I’m in a bigger hurry than you’ blokes in the queue behind me started hon
king his horn. He honked once, then twice, which prompted another bloke, further back, to give his horn a toot, and before long, it was toot-toot, toot-toot.

  The first of the officers said, ‘Look, Father, why don’t you just park up here somewhere and then walk up. I can’t let you get your car any closer.’

  I said, ‘Not even to park?’

  ‘Not at Surf City.’

  ‘Well, tell me where to go.’

  The officer pointed with his baton through the rain to his right, saying, ‘We’re supposed to be directing everyone that way,’ meaning he wanted me to go on a big loop up through North Bondi and Dover Heights toward the old golf course and into New South Head Road, which was about as far from Surf City as I’d been when I started.

  I put on my indicator and headed off, making like I had every intention of following that route. In the rear-view mirror, I saw the ‘I’m in a hurry’ bloke behind me stopping to roll his window down.

  ‘Oh, right,’ I thought, ‘you didn’t have time for me to argue with the police but you’re prepared to have a go yourself. Good luck with that.’

  I drove about 100 metres but, as soon as I was sure that neither of the young traffic officers was still watching, I took a quick detour right, into one of the side streets, my plan being to dump the car and sprint back to Surf City. I was hoping that whatever Wolf had feared might happen had not yet happened and, if the radio reports were accurate, nothing had. The commentators were still saying:

  Well, that major operation in Bondi appears to still be underway . . . if you’ve just tuned in, police were called to the Surf City shopping centre in the popular beachside suburb of Bondi shortly after 9.30 this morning after a young man apparently barricaded himself inside an underwear shop.

  Police have formed a perimeter around the complex – the entire centre has been shut down and roads around Surf City are closed. So, if you are in that area, try to avoid the shopping centre if you can. It’s absolute chaos out there.