Inevitably, there was also, ‘No further information is available at this time.’
I crawled along the street into which I’d turned, peering through the wall of water on my windscreen, hoping that Bondi’s petulant parking gods would smile on me – and, finally, they did. I found a spot just big enough for my car, outside a terrace house. It was further away from Surf City than I wanted to be but what could I do? I squeezed in, took the tan jacket off the passenger seat, checked to make sure I had all the equipment I considered necessary to do my job in those days – iPhone, Bible, crucifix, keys – and stepped out of the car straight into a swollen gutter.
Probably I said, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ avoiding blasphemy not being one of my strong suits, then or now. I’d managed to wet my leg up to the knee but I couldn’t afford to take the time to worry about it: I needed to get moving. With the jacket over my head and my pants stuck to my leg, I hot-footed it back to Surf City, ducking behind parked cars when I saw the traffic officers in their dripping caps – not because I thought they’d arrest me or anything like that but because I knew that, if they saw me, wet and dripping, running through the rain, they might decide I was too much of a safety hazard after all, and send me away again.
Having got within striking distance of Surf City, my next goal was to get myself inside. Of course I knew I could simply have called Wolf and asked him to help me through the police barricades that were forming at every entrance but I was sure he’d have enough to do and I didn’t want to bother him. Besides which, I figured that I’d be able to find my own way in. Like most shopping centres, Surf City has got loading bays out the back so trucks can pull up at night and collect all the food that hasn’t been eaten, and take it to the Red Cross or some other charity. I’m talking about fancy chicken sandwiches and tuna and cucumber rolls and leg ham baguettes – good food that it would be a scandal to just throw into the rubbish bin.
I slipped around the back of the complex, in search of a loading bay that wasn’t locked. I knew there would be at least one: staff inside big shopping centres tend to leave at least one of the roller doors open so they can sneak out for a smoke. I tried one, then another, and bingo, up it went. I lifted the door only high enough to enable me to shimmy under it like a limbo dancer and then I let it close again.
The first thing I noticed once that roller door was closed was how quiet everything was inside the shopping complex. It was by then around 10.30 am and, by rights, Surf City should have been heaving at that hour. I had no way of knowing this – not then, anyway – but the entire centre was actually almost empty.
‘I cleared the whole place out,’ Wolf would tell me, later. ‘I didn’t think we had a choice. The situation was so volatile.’
I give him full marks for that. I mean, consider the situation from where he was standing: pretty much as soon as Ali Khan had started running around the atrium, security at Surf City had called the Bondi police to say that a young man was behaving ‘strangely’ on the fourth floor. The operator who took the call wanted to know what they meant, exactly, by somebody behaving ‘strangely’.
The security guard, who happened to be Foto Rama – he’s the brother of the rugby league star Loco Rama – said, ‘I don’t know. I’m watching him on the CCTV. He’s, like, bouncing off the walls.’
The Bondi operator said, ‘Does he appear to be under the influence of anything?’
Foto Rama said, ‘I wouldn’t know. But I don’t like what I see.’
Less than a second later, the walkie-talkie on his shoulder sizzled with static. A second security guard – presumably the one Craig had seen coming up the escalator – was saying, ‘Are you there, Foto? Can you see what’s happening on four? I’ve got people saying there’s a guy with a gun.’
Foto said, ‘He’s got a gun?’
The Bondi operator, who was still on the line, said, ‘You’re saying he’s got a gun?’
Ali Khan didn’t have a gun, but that hardly mattered anymore. Two security guards and now the Bondi police had been told that he did or at least that he might. The Bondi operator said, ‘Do you need assistance?’
All this wouldn’t come out until much later, but Foto didn’t immediately say yes. He said, ‘Maybe.’ When Coroner Hanrahan asked him why he hesitated, given what he thought he knew about the situation, Foto said, ‘Because when the lady from Bondi police asked if we needed assistance, I knew we did, but I didn’t know whether I needed a whole SWAT team or just one or two guys in uniform.’
Hanrahan said, ‘You thought you could handle somebody with a gun in a shopping centre with just a few police in uniform?’
Foto – he’s a big Pacific Islander with tribal tattoos on his upper arms, and about as gentle a nature as I’ve encountered – dropped his head, like he was ashamed.
‘I know, it’s stupid. But I didn’t know whether the little guy had a gun or not. That’s what the other guard told me. That’s what people were saying but I wasn’t sure and it turned out he didn’t have a gun, anyway.’
Hanrahan said, ‘But you had been told that he did?’
‘Yes, but he didn’t.’
‘Yes, I understand that he didn’t, but you’d been told that he did, so why didn’t you tell police, yes, I need a SWAT team down here?’
I couldn’t work out why Hanrahan was haranguing the poor bloke. He obviously felt awful about what had happened that day but, in my view, nothing he did or didn’t do in those first few minutes would have made a difference to the outcome.
Hanrahan kept pressing him: ‘So, after you’ve been told that Ali Khan had a gun, what did you do?’
Foto said, ‘I stayed on the phone with the police. They said they were going to send people. I didn’t take my eyes off the little guy. I could still see him running and I could see other people running, and then I saw him bang straight into somebody and fall down.’
Hanrahan said, ‘Where did he fall?’
Foto said, ‘Outside Cups and Saucy.’
Hanrahan said, ‘Because he’d run straight into somebody?’
Foto said, ‘Right. He’d run into the little girl – the Asian girl, the one with the long black hair – and they’d fallen down. And then another kid – the school kid – came around the corner and he fell down, so it was all three of them, and I was just thinking, “Is he going to get up and try to make a run for it? Should I radio police and let them know he’s down?” when the girl with the bunny ears came out of her shop and pulled them all inside.’
Chapter Four
I can’t say that I’d ever given much thought to the kind of things that are sold in lingerie shops. Maybe, passing by Cups and Saucy, I’d seen the mannequins in the window dressed in sexy Mrs Claus suits at Christmas time and thought, ‘This is what we do now on Jesus’s birthday,’ but then again, maybe I never did that. I was never the kind of priest who got wound up about that kind of thing.
Anyway, the siege at Surf City happened in April, so the two mannequins – each stood in their own tall glass window, flanking the tall glass door – were dressed for Easter. They had on bunny ears and flannel pyjamas, and they were holding wicker baskets with cotton wool and fluffy chickens in their plastic hands.
As with The Bondi Cruiser, there was only one shop assistant on at Cups and Saucy that day. Her name was Nichole Harding, but she was known to everyone on Surf City’s fourth floor as Mouse – not because she’s quiet like one, it was actually the opposite: Mouse has got what people call a ‘big personality’ and she would be the first to tell you that she’s got the boobs to go with it.
Don’t think I’m crude when I say that. I’ve met Mouse a few times since the siege. She’s forever making that kind of joke. She’s old-fashioned jolly and, taking into account that she was barely twenty-five years old when she found herself caught in the siege at Surf City, I’m guessing it was her spunk that enabled her to handle the situation so beautifully.
Mouse had gone to work on the day of the siege dressed in a way that was
completely normal for her: on her feet she had giant furry slippers with fake fabric claws. The rest of her, head to toe, was wrapped in flannel pyjamas printed with images of a cartoon Bugs Bunny saying, ‘What’s up, Doc?’
On top of her head, she had a headband with furry pink-and-white rabbit ears, like the ones the mannequins were wearing. She’d bent the wire on one of them, so it looked like it was flopping over her eye.
Mouse isn’t a little person: by her own estimate, she probably weighs in at around 100 kilograms. Nobody gets to be that size without having some weight problems as a child, which in turns means that Mouse had to put up with a fair amount of bullying at school. She’s pretty resilient. Some people might think, ‘Oh, that’s the happy clown thing; she must be covering up on the inside,’ but I’m not sure that’s right.
‘If I cared about people calling me fat,’ she told me once, ‘I’d eat less, wouldn’t I?’
Mouse grew up in Sydney’s south-east. I know the area quite well; before I became a police chaplain, I was assistant priest at some parishes there. I don’t believe that I ever saw her in church. Mouse isn’t religious. She’s what people these days call ‘spiritual’. It was only her and her mum; she’s got no idea who Dad is. They lived in a commission house in La Perouse. As far as I can tell, Mouse’s mum has been on a disability pension for more than twenty years. She has bad knees, which probably comes from the extra weight she carries.
Mouse left school at age sixteen and got her first job in retail shortly thereafter. She didn’t look at it as a dead-end job. Mouse decided pretty early on that she wasn’t going to be one of those girls who sulked behind the cash register, texting and refusing to serve the customers. She was going to make it fun, and she was going to work her way up the tree.
‘No way am I ever going to work in a shop for the rest of my life,’ she told me. ‘I have bigger plans.’
Mouse’s first job, ten years ago, was in what used to be called a music shop. Do they still exist? I’m not sure they do. They were an extension of what older blokes like me used to call record shops but, of course, by the time Mouse graduated from school to the workplace, there were no records anymore, there was only music on CDs. Now it’s all digital, I don’t suppose they have music shops at all. Still, it was the perfect place for Mouse to get started on her lifelong ambition to be allowed to wear things that weren’t ‘butt ugly’.
‘My big worry was, if I start in a shop, are they going to make me wear thing that are fugly, schmugly, butt ugly?’ she told me. The music shop let her wear what she wanted. She started with 1950s swing skirts with tulle underskirts, like the girls would wear around the jukebox on Happy Days. After two years, she switched completely to punk: torn fishnets and safety pins, including one in her nose.
‘I was a bit worried when I started at Cups and Saucy. I thought, okay, I’ll take this job but not if I have to wear a white polyester blouse and a knee-length skirt,’ she said. ‘At the interview, I said, “Can I wear the merchandise?” You should have seen the look on Carol’s face. (Carol Mueller owns Cups and Saucy; she was one of the first on the scene when she heard that Mouse was trapped inside.) I said, “I don’t mean the crotchless knickers! I mean the pink and purple pyjamas.” That’s what we were selling, weren’t we? And it’s bloody comfortable, going to work in flannel pants with an elastic waist.’
Wearing pyjamas to work would for most people be statement enough but most people aren’t Mouse.
‘You have to accessorise,’ she said. Depending on the mood, she might wear tinsel antennae with bobbing stars from the Royal Easter Show; she might wear the fluffy slippers than made her feet look like animal claws; she might wear a top hat; she might wear a giant onesie, shaped like a baby dinosaur.
‘Carol used to shake her head like I was mad,’ she said, ‘but you try selling lingerie. Blokes like to pretend they’re all brave, but you ask them, what size bra does your girlfriend take? They’ve got no idea. They can’t even look you in the eye. You’ve got to do something that makes them feel like you’re okay with anything.’
As far as Carol was concerned, Mouse was one of the best shop girls she’d ever had. She never took a sickie, and she never fiddled the till, two things you wouldn’t take for granted if you’ve ever had to hire staff. She had permission to display as much of the merchandise on her frame as she wanted.
‘Within reason,’ Mouse told me, ‘which I took to mean, “You can wear the pyjamas but maybe not the white lace corset. We don’t want to give anyone a heart attack.”’
A fair percentage of the customers in any lingerie shop are always going to be men. The secret to Mouse’s success in getting them to buy as opposed to bolt out without making a purchase was, she said, to ‘embarrass them into getting the good stuff’.
‘I was always saying, “You can’t get your girlfriend that! You’ve got to get her something special, like this!”’ she said. ‘And I’d lead them over to the expensive stuff. They’d say, “How can something so small cost so much?” or else they’d joke, “Why should I spend so much on something I’m going to be ripping off in ten seconds!”’
She’d flick them with a G-string, saying, ‘Don’t be so cheap; is this girl special or not?’ and because she’d be wearing pyjamas and mouse ears, they’d think of her like a sister or a best buddy, and they’d laugh. She’d talk them into getting the set – the robe, the suspenders, the stockings, all of it packed in a silky box – and send them out feeling like young studs. She was just as good with the female customers, urging them to try things they hadn’t gone in to buy, saying, ‘You look HOT! You go, girl! Sister, that’s amazing!’ Part of the reason for her enthusiasm was that she’s basically a good person, but of course she was also on commission – most retail girls are – and she was saving hard to go on an overseas holiday.
‘Before all this happened, I really wanted to go to Bali,’ she told me. We were eating chocolate pizza at Max Brenner, a chocolate shop in the city that has liquid chocolate pumping through clear pipes, up the walls and across the ceilings, just like in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. (Mouse had picked the place, saying, ‘I want to come and talk to you, but I can’t go back to Surf City.’)
I said, ‘You can’t let something like this stop you from living your life.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been watching those AAMI ads, the ones with Rhonda and Ketut – people reckon you can get a foot massage for five bucks. Mum keeps telling me, go, go, lie on the beach, let them put beads in your hair. But the whole thing with Ali Khan, it’s kind of left me scared. I’d be worried: what if somebody has put a bomb on the plane? Because, you know, I still see him sometimes, pulling that hood off, showing the big scar on his head and that box on his chest. Some days, I can still smell it.’
She started to cry.
‘Let it out,’ I said.
‘You’re going to think I need a shrink,’ she said. ‘I don’t need a shrink. It’s good of you to come and see me. I’m grateful to you. But I just need to, you know, forget. But I can’t forget – I feel guilty, Father Paul.’
‘Because you walked out of there?’ (That’s not an unusual consequence; psychologists call it ‘survivor’s guilt’.)
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I feel guilty because I was the one who dragged Ali Khan into the shop. If it wasn’t for me, he never would have been in there.’
I had not thought of that. I don’t think it mattered to the outcome but Mouse needed to talk about it.
‘I thought it was going to be a normal Thursday,’ she said. ‘Maybe a bit busier than usual because of Mother’s Day coming up. It was raining. I remember that. I’d had to get the bus and then the train. I was wearing my cartoon pants and they got filthy around the bottom. I wanted to get into work, go out the back and get a new pair out of the plastic.
‘Carol never cared about me taking pyjamas out of the packets. She wanted me to get into the spirit of the shop. Fun. There was a place I used to stop on the way to work
– I used to get my coffee there, a muffin or a cake. But there were heaps of people in the queue, and my pants were all wet and flapping so I didn’t stop. I got to Cups and Saucy a bit early. As soon as I got there, I noticed the man standing by the door. The man in the suit.’
I knew who Mouse was talking about: Roger Callaghan. I’ll get to him in a minute. In the meantime, here is Mouse’s first impression:
‘I thought, right, he’s not here to get something for his mum. He’s the kind of guy who wants to buy a red bra and a G-string. He’s going to pretend it’s for his girlfriend but it’s for him. He wants to see her in it. I had to tell him, “We’re not open. I have to get the lights on, open the till before I can help anyone.” He hassled me a bit, saying, “Oh, please, I’m in the doghouse, and I’m in a hurry. Help an old guy out, won’t you?” and I’ve got to admit, he was all charm. I said, “Alright, come in,” and, just like I thought, he went straight to the back of the shop where we keep the racy stuff.’
Mouse went over to the counter. She shoved her handbag into the bottom drawer, and locked it in there. She’d had her wallet pinched from an open handbag left under the counter once before. She was in the process of opening the till to check the float when, bang.
‘I looked up and two people were, like, sprawled on the floor outside the shop. I didn’t know it but it was Ali Khan and the little girl from the nail salon. They were rubbing their foreheads, looking kind of stunned,’ she said. ‘I could see what must have happened. They had smacked into each other, and fallen down. So it wasn’t like, “Oh (she flicked one shoulder forward), sorry, didn’t mean to knock you.” It must have been a real bang or else I wouldn’t have heard it, and they wouldn’t have fallen down.
‘I thought, I’d better go and find out what’s going on. But then when I got closer to the door, I saw other people – shoppers and that – running around the atrium and some of them were yelling, and I was getting a bit scared, and I was thinking, okay, what is going on?’
No Place Like Home Page 3
