The Doll remained standing in the doorway. She felt a slut; a lousy, stinking slut. She knew she should not have been there. She realised now that even if she had known how to tell Moretti about what had happened, he would not have helped, for clearly he knew a bit of it and his only concern was to cut her adrift.
Yet, not knowing what else to do, the Doll went inside. She passed the grand dining room, saw the dinner party taking place at the far end of the room, but no one seemed to see her. In the kitchen was a cook, the woman with bandy legs and a young woman dressed up as a waitress. The Doll poked around, pretending to search for her lost wallet. Finding nothing, she went into the library, where she could be alone.
A book of black and white photographs lying open on a side table caught her attention. She leant down and looked at a photo of a woman with a shaven head standing in front of a crowd. She turned the page. The photograph was one of a series showing the woman having her hair shaved. The title beneath the first photo read, “COLLABORATOR”.
“Following the fall of Chartres, France, in August 1944, to the Allies”, a caption below the title said, “a young woman who has had a baby to a German soldier has her hair shaven by townspeople in retribution.”
The spectators, most of them women, were laughing and happy. Gleeful children seemed to be enjoying the day. Only the shaven-headed mother looked dejected, her eyes fixed on the baby she held in her arms.
The Doll made her way out. In the entry hall she paused for a moment by the ornate wooden cabinet and looked up at the Miró. What would she do? she wondered as she stared at the man who ate the sun. What could she do? And for the first time she noticed that misting over parts of the picture were small spiders’ webs, and sitting between the print and the glass—just above the little man’s forehead—was a white cocoon. Moretti, she realised, must never look at the picture of which he was so proud. There must be much else, she realised, that he only looked at very occasionally.
From the kitchen she could hear the caterers working; from the dining room came the sharp, dry sounds of a dinner party—glass and china and brittle laughter. She could see no one. No one could see her. She ran her fingers up over the large heads of the hand-forged Moroccan nails, reached up, took down the elephant, and lifted up its trunk.
51
Nick Loukakis looked down at the near-empty bottle of Penfolds Bin 128.
“Is it good?” he asked.
“I don’t think I’d be drinking it if it wasn’t,” said Diana.
Next to the Penfolds Bin 128 was an empty bottle of Coriole Redstone. He realised he hadn’t noticed that she drank every night now, at least a bottle, sometimes, like tonight, more. Perhaps it was because she never seemed drunk, never moved unsteadily, or seemed tiddly in any way. Only ever more angry. Her anger was absolute.
She never said they ought to split. He knew that final decision would be his alone. He felt like the navigator of a burning ship. At some point he would have to admit the fight was unequal, impossible. He would have to say,
“There’s nothing left, it’s over, this is what we must do, this is how we do it.”
But not yet. He still hoped—but for what?
“You’re so fucking petty,” Diana said, “you know that, do you? Just how petty you are?”
It was true. Sometimes he was petty. It was also untrue. Sometimes he was unable to say anything in a way that to her didn’t sound petty. They had lost a way of talking and being. What remained was flint striking steel. Everything rasped, everything hurt, everything caught fire. They lay in bed, him saying, “Please don’t hate me, Diana, please don’t hate me,” over and over.
But she would hate him, she had to hate him, she did hate him. It was the measure of her grief and her pain; it was her right and her only hope of redemption, it was her pride and her dignity that he had always admired in her now determined and needing to smash to pieces this last beautiful thing, to make him understand it was over so that he would finally say,
“It’s over, this is what we must do, this is how we do it.”
Neither understood this. Both knew it perfectly. Both wanted it to end. Both knew they had to wait, and like wild animals in a trap not of their making, they savaged each other, weakened and maimed the other, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Their two sons had bickered and fought all day and nothing Nick Loukakis said seemed able to end it. Before dinner, he brought them both together, held each of them by the wrist and was about to say one more pointless thing, when he felt himself unable to go on. He realised in their pettiness, their hate, their constant backbiting and sniping over the smallest insults, that their sons, who loved each other, were but imitating Diana and him, and that this was now all that he gave his children.
He had hoped love would be enough. He wanted to tell his two sons this. That this was what he had hoped for. But it wasn’t enough. It had never been enough.
“Please don’t cry, Daddy,” said Nick Loukakis’s younger son. “It’s not worth crying over.”
52
As the Doll walked, her mind steadied. Unable to flag a taxi and unwilling to use her stolen phone to call one after she had left Moretti’s, she had caught the last ferry back to town. She hung back after disembarking at Circular Quay, loitering on the jetty until it was empty, walking to its edge as if admiring the harbour views of a night. Reaching down, she took out her own phone and switched it on.
The phone told her she had twenty-three missed calls. Thirty-six text messages. That the memory was full. She didn’t even bother scrolling through the call numbers and messages. She flipped the phone shut, hid it in the cup of her hand, and squatted by the edge of the jetty as though she were looking at something in the dark, littered water below. And then she let the phone slip out of her hand and into the harbour, to sink to where so many other secrets of Sydney lie hidden. She stood up and, for the second time that day, started heading by foot up into the airless city.
She was making for the Retro Hotel at the top end of Pitt Street. She knew nothing about the hotel, had only seen its shattered Perspex sign many times when riding in taxis, forever broken and never repaired. She wanted to stay there and not the hotel Wilder had booked, because for no good reason she felt safer in a dive in the CBD than in Double Bay. It wasn’t the plan, but maybe, reasoned the Doll, it was better. She would ring Wilder sometime the next day and arrange to pick up her money.
So far, she consoled herself, there had only been some very grainy security camera footage, a few old and blurry happy snaps from a few years ago, and a crappy video of her dancing. None of the images looked much like the Doll in life even when they had been taken, and now with Wilder’s haircut she felt it would be difficult for anyone to recognise her at all. But she had eyes and ears only for those who might recognise her, people who might want to turn her in, police who might want to shoot her. And so she avoided people’s eyes, walked quickly and kept her head down.
Yet everywhere the Doll looked, there was the Doll. She was in snatches of conversation overheard in the street, as a statuesque woman leaving a suits’ bar chirruped into the choking night air, “I haven’t had the time to follow this pole dancing story properly at all.” The Doll turned sideways as the woman brushed past her, and the smell of her perfume and the greasy stench of some effluvia from a nearby restaurant kitchen followed in her wake, a smell of hot fat and dirty dishwater and Chanel No 5. “I just hope they get her before she gets us.”
The city, which she had formerly felt and known only as freedom, now seemed to be closing in all around her—the heat, the infernal traffic, the police sirens, the rumble and scream of building works that never seemed to stop—why was it that everything now appeared to her to be so oppressive and full of foreboding?
She looked up and saw a man wearily packing up his convenience store for the evening, taking in the wire-caged newspaper banners that yelled TERRORIST CELLS and TERRORIST LOVERS and IS SYDNEY READY FOR THE WORST? Seeing her looking at him, he rasped a
hello. Then his gaze became a stare.
“There’s something about your face,” he said. “Can’t place it. Is it … you’re on television or something, right? You’re famous. I’m so sorry, I just can’t place it—is it Big Brother?”
“I wish,” said the Doll, smiled, and walked on.
Nothing was as it had been. Martin Place, where once she had happily browsed fine designer shops, now appeared to her as empty and strange as the ruins of an ancient city that somewhere, sometime long ago, stopped making sense. For a moment she stood surrounded by colourful bunting and beautiful images that communicated nothing. Dolce & Gabbana. Louis Vuitton. What did any of it mean? On vertical banners pushing a designer label, models, no more than kids, were reproduced with their strange unfocused gaze, as if they had witnessed a massacre or horror they still could not comprehend. Versace. Gucci. Armani. The Doll had the fleeting sense she was looking at the remnants of some great lost civilisation that had become indecipherable, like the temples at Angkor Wat that Wilder had once visited and shown her photos of, extraordinary places, magnificent buildings, beautiful objects, wonderful art that only had purpose and meaning as long as everyone agreed it had purpose and meaning.
And then the sense was gone: it was once more a street at night, nothing other than a place to scurry through and leave, as she resumed her journey to the Retro Hotel.
53
Richard Cody sat in front of the monitor in the Undercurrent editing suite, a broom closet of a room with an oversized air con duct that blew an unpleasant smelling draught onto his aching head. It was so very late. Todd Birchall, the young editor, spooled back and forth. It was hopeless, thought Richard Cody. He lacked a skewer to run all the titbits of interviews together. He had less than twenty-four hours to get his special up on the lap dancing terrorist and he had nothing that made this a story.
Todd Birchall was regarded as a hot cutter. He was unfazed by the way connections had to be created, leaps made with cuts that perhaps there wasn’t always a complete story to justify. “WHATEVER IT TAKES”, as the motto inscribed on his baseball cap had it—the cap which, no matter the weather or situation, was always on Todd Birchall’s head. But even Todd Birchall was at a loss what to do. He clacked his tongue stud against his front teeth.
“Maybe it’s like maybe,” he said, “just a fucking fuckup.” As he thought on the problem, Richard Cody methodically tore an envelope to pieces. “I mean, she sleeps with a guy,” Todd Birchall continued, “and then gets blamed for everything from the Twin Towers to Kylie’s cancer. It’s weird. I mean, why would someone like her want to be a mass murderer?”
Todd Birchall was starting to annoy Richard Cody. After all, he did not say to himself, ‘Given there is no real evidence this woman has ever done anything wrong, I will create an image of her as a monster.’ No, because that would have been a disgraceful act of cynicism, and no true cynic can afford to be anything other than genuine in his opinions. Rather, Richard Cody began imagining an adult woman somehow so traumatised that she was incapable of feeling, a woman without empathy who could easily commit the most callous acts of cruelty. He felt quite overcome with fear at the thought of a monstrous woman out there, a human without emotion, capable of killing hundreds of people. But Todd Birchall’s question remained: why?
And again, in his irritating way, Todd Birchall tapped his tongue stud on his front teeth, as though he expected Richard Cody to make something up there and then. Richard Cody was affronted. Todd Birchall, perhaps sensing an unease in the cutting room, went out to find some beer.
Richard Cody despised journalists who made things up. He hated the phrase “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story”, for the art of journalism—and Richard Cody, who had won several Walkley awards and whose hobby as recently featured in a lead article in the Women’s Weekly was watercolour landscape painting, firmly believed that in its highest incarnation journalism was most certainly an art—was to use the truths you could discover to tell the story you believed to matter.
And so, when he got on the phone and tracked down Ray Ettslinger at a Byron Bay conference on the parapsychological aspects of modern corporate management, Richard Cody was keen to hear Ray Ettslinger’s answer to his question whether such a grotesque absence of emotion could fit with a profile of a terrorist bomber.
Ray Ettslinger paused because he was drunk, looked out through the open walls of the restaurant in which he sat, past some Aboriginal beggars to the beautiful Australian sea beyond and, before agreeing, put his hand over the mouthpiece of his sticky-taped Motorola, and to the other academics at the table, hissed:
“Media.”
He rolled his googly eyes as though this were a wearying aspect of his daily life, rather than the only exciting prospect in his world at that moment.
Ray Ettslinger was a psychologist Richard Cody had last used for a story on poltergeists in the Sydney Opera House. Richard Cody loved using Ray Ettslinger: he was such wonderful talent. He had the biggest nose Richard Cody had ever seen, wild eyes, and a manner at once slightly pompous and completely authoritative. He took direction well, and never minded how Richard Cody cut him. Ettslinger understood.
In Byron Bay, Ray Ettslinger got up from the table and walked outside. He was, he told the Motorola, tired. He drearily complained about his back, his shoulder, his bowels and his students. But when Richard Cody mentioned the pole dancing terrorist, Ray Ettslinger was like a hard drive booting up. Richard Cody felt he could almost hear the low whirring of magnetic disks, of fans cooling Intel chips now processing the necessary information to arrive at the correct result.
Ray Ettslinger’s Centre for Excellence in Executive Culture at UTS’s western Sydney campus was not drawing the same student numbers as it had a few years earlier. He had just finished with his third wife and hadn’t been offered a promotion since he turned down a chair at the University of Tasmania, because, he had joked to friends, he could never decide whether the position was promotion or transportation. His two ex-wives were back into him for more alimony, and his once profitable sideline in corporate management consultancy was no longer the lucrative joke it had for so long been. He needed money and he understood that to gain money he needed attention. He had written a well-received paper on “Cognitive Dissonance and the Suicide Bomber” for a conference in Stuttgart and was angling for a newly established chair in terrorist studies at the Australian Defence Force Academy. A pole dancing terrorist?
“Of course,” said Ray Ettslinger. “It all fits.”
And indeed it did.
Much as his fellow academics derided the commercial media, Ray Ettslinger knew it counted far more than any of them dared admit. And here was Undercurrent offering him a small but significant and, Ettslinger suspected, ongoing part in a national drama. It was irresistible.
“Predictable,” said Ray Ettslinger, his tone now as bright as a new LCD monitor. “Who can really say what makes anyone want to blow themselves up other than some terrible emotional trauma?”
“How so, Ray?” asked Richard Cody. “She just seems, well … ordinary.”
“Family?” asked Ray Ettslinger.
“Divorced. Also ordinary. Mother dead, car crash. No criminal records.”
“Interview the father,” commanded Ray Ettslinger. “And then film me viewing the tape of the interview, commenting. Either he hates her, or is estranged from her—what better explanation for her terrorist sympathies?”
“A fuckup at the edges,” said Richard Cody, beginning to tune in to Ray Ettslinger’s thinking, which wasn’t so difficult, given that he was merely developing an idea Richard Cody had suggested in the first place.
“Islamist ideology is irresistible for such a profile,” continued Ray Ettslinger, who knew almost nothing about Islam. “It offers both a secure identity and the mechanism for revenge. Alternatively, her father loves her and dotes on her and she’s spoilt—the Patty Hearst syndrome.” Ray Ettslinger knew almost nothing about Patty Hearst either.
“An angry fuckup at the edges,” said Richard Cody.
“Right,” said Ettslinger. “Either way, she’s a fuckup. Either way, I can make it work for us.”
Richard Cody loved the “us”. Ray was such a team player. And on and on Ray Ettslinger went, giving Richard Cody all he needed. And because nothing excites people more than sharing an aim, no matter what that aim may be, both were now far more animated. They agreed a time for the interview the following day.
“It’s like Sudoku,” said Ray Ettslinger before hanging up. “You just have to make the numbers fit.”
Todd Birchall returned with a six-pack of Tooheys New. His cap was off.
“It’s still so fucken hot out there,” he sighed, offering Richard Cody a stubby.
Uncharacteristically, Richard Cody accepted, though he still wondered who else might have touched that bottle and what bacteria lurked on its seemingly clean surface. But he felt he now had cause to celebrate—a story, a program, a comeback. He would wash his hands later.
54
The red Perspex sign, partly shattered, revealed the neon tube that illuminated the wording:
THE
RE RO
HOTEL
The Doll followed a small monsoon of Asian tourists pouring into the hotel’s lobby, the eye of their storm a woman with a long stick topped with a plastic sunflower. When the Doll finally reached the desk and handed over Wilder’s credit card, the receptionist never even looked up at her face.
“Have a nice day,” she said to the desk, handing back the card and with it the room key.
The Doll squeezed into an old lift jammed with more Asians. As it shuddered upwards, their heads rolled below her like industrial ball bearings.