The remote wasn’t in either of the two tub chairs, nor under the bed with the dust balls and a popped Viagra card.
“In a prepared statement, the attorney-general described the issues the nation was addressing as being of the utmost seriousness. He went on to say that the government did not have the time or resources to be playing games.”
Then the Doll saw the remote, on top of the television, lost in the shadow of the television cabinet. It had many different coloured buttons, and in her panic she could remember the meaning of none of them. There were just coloured buttons, like little lollies.
Why listen to what wasn’t true? If she saw and heard no more, perhaps her life of only a few days ago might return, her griefs and sadnesses might stay hers alone, and she would once more be able to pursue her hopes and her dreams.
The Doll hit several buttons, the television made a squelching noise as it turned off, and the newsreader disappeared.
The Doll went to her hotel room door and opened it, to escape if only for a moment, to breathe, to not feel trapped. A tunnel-like corridor, brown and not overly pleasant to smell, pocked with identical doors, came into view. The Doll felt something with her toes, and looking down saw a newspaper. The headlines read:
TERRORIST DEAD
ASIO RAIDS REDFERN TERROR HQ
But it wasn’t that which caught her attention. It was the date. It was 6 March.
64
The Doll left the Retro Hotel in a rush. She headed down Pitt Street at a brisk pace toward the city centre. The sun had gone, and the sky had dulled off to the colour of a filthy pavement. Yet the lack of sun brought no relief. The cloud was a brown, prickling rug that seemed only to make the humidity and the heat even more unbearable. The smog spread a gritty fug over the windless city and left a burning taste in the Doll’s mouth.
Everything was still, as if waiting.
She felt wretched with tiredness; her body at sixes and sevens with itself; one moment too hot, at another too cold; somehow slimy within and itchy and dry on the outside. Her head ached, and she felt a slight queasiness that was also a giddiness. As she walked the streets, her senses seemed at once dulled and overly sensitive, so that she was slow at registering that a traffic light had changed, yet nervously jerked her head around when behind her a mobile phone rang.
After a few blocks the Doll escaped the heat into the welcome chilled bowels of air conditioned shops.
A voice said: “Today only. On special.”
A voice said: “Get to the red light now.”
A voice said: but what did any voice say? There were so many voices now, so much being pushed, so little worth knowing, and the Doll, once so attuned to the white noise of the city, like a smart radio receiver able to find just what band related to her, what frequency she needed to hear, no longer heard any of it.
Such was her urgency that she walked into a Sportsgirl store, quickly picked out and changed into three-quarter khaki cargo pants and a white midriff singlet, and without getting back out of them handed over two of the four hundred-dollar notes she had left, got her eighty-six dollars change, and dropped her stinking Prada dress in a garbage bin not far from the shop.
As the Doll came closer to the Town Hall train station she found herself swimming against a growing tide of rush hour commuters, and she had to turn her body sideways to make her way through them. She bought a ticket from a machine for her trip and a can of Red Bull and a pack of Impulse mints for breakfast.
Then she descended several levels to the underground platforms. There were transit cops everywhere, armed with pistols. A sniffer dog snuffled at her legs. The Doll caught the dog handler’s eyes and with a look that they both understood as fear stared at him.
“Don’t worry, miss,” said the dog handler, pulling the leash hard to bring the dog to heel. “There’s a high level security alert out for mass transit. But we’ve got it covered.”
Men in suits continued to read financial papers. Telco to Make Play. All Ordinaries Sink on Terrorist Fears. Banks to Report. Women twiddled with mobiles as they once did cigarettes, nervously. Kids watched the particular nothingness of it with an odd intensity. The Doll drank the Red Bull, ate two mints and threw the rest of the pack away.
Across the railway line was a large screen running the latest news. Something about a bombing—was it Israel? Was it Iraq? Was it here?—vanished and like perfectly drilled soldiers the green dots leapt into another pattern that now read:
EXTRA RESOURCES BEING CHANNELLED
INTO SEARCH FOR TERRORISTS
She looked in her handbag. All the Zolofts were gone. There was a rush of air, the noise of brakes, and as a train bound out of the city swept into the station, the video screen disappeared behind a silver ribbon that unravelled into brightly lit cabin windows. The train doors wheezed open, a few passengers alighted, a few more, including the Doll, boarded. The train was half empty. She found a seat by herself.
The train rushed through dark tunnels. It screeched and shuddered with the terrible force of tonnes of linked iron and steel. A man sitting two rows in front was reading a newspaper. From where the Doll sat she could see the front page. She could make out that the big photo splashed across much of the page was a still from the footage of her the night she had dressed up in a veil and stripped for the American sailors. A large caption above the photo read:
OUR BLACK WIDOW
Opposite the Doll sat a young Vietnamese man with earphones that dangled like a necklace. He held a digital camera out at arm’s length from himself, gazed up into it, and was snapping a photo of himself sitting in a train carriage taking a photograph of himself when the Doll’s stolen phone rang.
65
She pressed the talk button but said nothing. Then she heard Wilder’s voice.
“Gina,” Wilder said. “Have you heard?”
The Doll said she had.
And then Wilder told the Doll how she thought she had been flying and about the raid and how they wouldn’t stop trying to tell Wilder that the Doll was a terrorist.
“Gina?” said Wilder. “Gina, are you still there?”
The Doll said she was, and then Wilder told her how they had taken her to some police office in town. “We’re walking down this long corridor and one of the cops says to me: ‘Listen, lady, your slut mate is in shit like you can’t believe. It’s not soliciting or joke offences. This is terrorism we are talking about.’
“I say: ‘She’s not a terrorist and she’s not a slut.’ He just shakes his head and leads me into this big room in which seven or eight suits are sitting, waiting. At one end was this fat old silver-haired bloke.
“‘I’m the presiding authority,’ or something like that, he says, and then he waffles on for ages, legal stuff, I didn’t really follow it. They were videoing everything, it was so creepy, like, no one gave their name, each suit just said that, ‘I’m here representing ASIO,’ and then the next one, ‘I’m here representing ASIO,’ over and over, except for one who was a Fed. I tried to be tough and pretend I thought it was all crap, but inside I felt so sick and I was shaking so bad.
“‘You can’t detain me if you’re not going to arrest me,’ I say. ‘What am I charged with?’
“‘ASIO has a warrant,’ says the old bloke, who was sleepy and yawning a lot. ‘It authorises them to detain you for up to one hundred and sixty-eight hours without charge.’
“‘Since when can they hold people without charge—’ I started saying, and he just said since the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act was amended.
“‘The what?’ I say.
“‘The ASIO Act,’ he says and he yawns again, and they all keep on talking about this Act and each time it feels like a wall collapsing on me. ‘As amended in 2004 and 2005 means they can,’ the old man goes on. ‘And one hundred and sixty-eight hours means seven days. ASIO has the power to detain without charge if it has reason to believe that you are likely to commit an offence, or if we think you have information about
terrorist activity.’
“‘What are you talking about?’ I say. ‘What reason? You have no reason—’
“‘You are a friend of Gina Davies?’ says a spook, a tall guy.
“‘What about my son? What’s my son got to do with this?’ I say. It was like an insane dream, Gina, and you know you shouldn’t be there, but you are. They said Max was fine and that he was being looked after.
“‘But I have to tell you, Ms Wilder,’ the tall spook says, ‘your son is of security interest. Young people can easily be of security interest. Overseas, for example, attacks have often been carried out by young people.’
“‘He’s five years old, for Christ’s sake,’ I say. ‘What can he know?’
“The tall spook looks down at me, as though there was something so bloody obvious I had forgotten, something so simple I couldn’t see it.
“‘He knows Gina Davies,’ he says.
“I didn’t know where to look. What could I say, Gina? ‘You don’t know her,’ I kept saying.
“He says: ‘Have you ever thought maybe it’s you who doesn’t know Gina? You ever thought she might be trained to never tell or breathe a word to you?’
“I say: ‘Oh yeah? You think an Islamic fundamentalist is going to work at a lap dancing club? You’re crazier than I think.’
“He says: ‘The best cover is sometimes no cover.’And they laugh. They thought that was real good.
“He says: ‘Has Gina Davies made contact with you at any time in the last two days?’
“I say: ‘No.’
“He says: ‘You’re lying. We know you’re lying because your son has confirmed that she stayed with you the night before last. And that you two slept together.’
“Everything I had said up till then just sounded like a story after that. Even what was true didn’t sound true anymore, somehow everything had become a lie.
“He says: ‘Has Gina Davies phoned you in the last two days?’
“I say: ‘I don’t have to talk to you.’ I say, ‘I’m allowed to say nothing. You can get fucked.’
“Then I got scared, so scared, Gina. I thought they were going to hit me. But they didn’t do anything like that. One looked like a politician, bit tubby, with a baby face. He just spoke real quiet, like. He says, ‘You have no right to silence under the ASIO Act.’
“‘What do you mean?’ I say.
“‘You can go to jail for up to five years for not answering our questions.’
“The fat old silver-haired man had fallen asleep for a moment, started snoring, then he jolts back awake. The Fed smirked. But not the politician spook. He leans in real close across the table and he says: ‘I don’t think you understand the seriousness of your situation, Ms Wilder. This is not a normal criminal investigation. This is a terrorism investigation. If new information is forthcoming we may seek to have your warrant renewed for another week. And who knows? Perhaps we may face the same situation the week after that. You can see what this means, Ms Wilder. We can just continue renewing the warrant. But if you continue to refuse to answer our questions, you can go to jail for five years. If you lie to us, same deal. Jail for five years.’
“Then he leans back and says: ‘Did you receive a phone call from a mobile phone yesterday at approximately 2.24 pm?’
“I say: ‘Can you be any more approximate?’
“They say: ‘Answer the question.’
“I say: ‘I don’t know. I don’t keep a record of all the calls I get.’
“They say: ‘Telephone records show that you were rung yesterday at 2.24 pm on a mobile phone that had been stolen approximately half an hour earlier. The woman who owns the phone went back to retrieve it and has given police a description of a woman she saw walking away from where she had left it. The description matches Gina Davies.’
“And all the time I was worrying, Gina, about Max, about how he was. I mean, the poor little bloke has armed men smashing around his house in the middle of the night and he’s screaming and screaming. And they take us both to some police station, and separate us, and I’m imagining Max is crying and then I’m crying too, I’m so upset, and I say that I’m not talking until they put us back together. But they won’t.
“I look up at the old fat man but he’s nodded off again. I can see he’s even dribbling a little bit. I beg the spooks. ‘Can I see my son, please?’ I say.
“They say: ‘Later.’
“I say: ‘When? When do I get to see him? He’s my son and he’s terrified.’ I told them I would go to the media and make a scene, tell them everything about invading my house, doing to Max what they did.
“‘Tell them what?’ they say. ‘Lesbian lover denies terrorist link?’They laugh, and then the quiet one who looked like a politician, he says:
“‘You talk to a journalist about this, any of this—tonight’s raid, this, these questions—you go to jail for five years. Under the ASIO Act that’s Australian law too, now. You breathe one word about your arrest, this interrogation, to a neighbour, your sister, your best friend, you go to jail for five years. Besides,’ he says, ‘under the ASIO Act the media isn’t allowed to run any story about your arrest and detention or they go to jail for five years too.’
“He seemed a bit tired—it was like, I dunno, maybe six in the morning—and I think he was disappointed and bored with me because I guess I wasn’t, you know, much of a terrorist.
“‘Unless, of course,’ he says, ‘we authorise the story. I hope I’ve helped make your position clear.’
“Then they went on and on, like some weird court it was, and when the interview was over they woke the old bloke, he said some more things and then they all left except a cop to guard me. Some time later the baby-faced politician-looking one came back. He said I could see Max now and that we were free to go. He was all friendly, the smart arse.’
“‘Someone’ll find out,’ I say.
“‘No,’ he says. ‘No one is ever going to find out. Those miners trapped down that gold mine in Tasmania a few years ago—you remember? Well, your situation is worse. Imagine nobody is ever, ever allowed to find out what happened to you while you were down that hole. And imagine all the things that can happen to people lost in dark holes.’
“And then a woman cop came into the room with Max, and Max runs to me and this creep smiles and, can you believe this?—he rubs Max’s head with his hand.
“‘Nice kid,’ he says, and he looks up and he’s still smiling. ‘Imagine,’ he says.”
The Doll didn’t feel safe sitting on a public train listening as Wilder continued talking. But she kept on listening anyway.
“But I didn’t tell them, Gina, I didn’t tell them anything, I swear to God, I’m sure they’re watching me, hanging me out as bait. Don’t come here, Gina, don’t come back.”
66
The train shrieked out of the dark and into the shock of daylight and sped past tin warehouses, railway sidings, stuccoed apartment blocks, under overpasses, past a suburban railway station at which three veiled Muslim women in dark clothes stood together and labourers in orange vests worked apart, and everywhere outside the Doll could see the terrible heat moving in visible waves, like some radioactive force. She took a Stemetil and her last two Valium 5.
She watched an African mother sitting at the carriage’s end with a tired baby whose hair, the Doll noticed, was done in the prettiest plaits tied with red and yellow ribbons. The rails’ comforting beat rocked the child to sleep as the train continued past green goods trains, shopping centres as bleak as penitentiaries, rusting corro roofs, concrete walls weary with graffiti, billboard after billboard brightly showing a huge face which in its geometric angles and gladwrapped smile appeared to have had the work done on it not with a scalpel but a power planer. Next to this bizarre face was a radio station’s name and frequency, and the slogan “JOE COSUK IS SYDNEY”.
Stretching away seemingly forever in the smoggy heat, the Doll could now see the west coming at her, an ever spreading delta of suburbs?
??Bankstown, Revesby, Panania, Macquarie Fields, Campbelltown.
The baby began to cry and her mother held her close. She was whispering in the baby’s ear, and fanning her with a newspaper. ‘Hold her,’ the Doll thought. The newspaper had a photo of the Doll on its cover. ‘Hold her and never let her go.’
It wasn’t the Doll’s way to go back in anything; all her life was a striving to go forwards. Family, home, memories: to the Doll they were all just a bucket of dust. She knew from the soaps she used to watch that such things could matter; the truth, she had discovered, was that they only mattered in the soaps. She had no home, no family, and there was no way back. Her childhood had been about little, how could it mean anything more now? But she wished she had more Valium 5, wished she had Zoloft, wished that she didn’t feel so anxious, so uptight, so strung out, just because she was sitting on a train riding back into the burbs.
The baby had fallen back asleep, and the African mother stroked her plaits absent-mindedly while looking out of the window. This absent-minded look the Doll understood as that slightly complacent, slightly stupid, completely undeniable look of love.
The love the African mother had for her child was the same love the Doll had for so long repressed in herself and which now, despite her best efforts, suddenly rose up inside her as a huge anger. She wanted to rush up and seize that sleeping baby and throw it out the doors, dash it to death on the siding as the train rushed along. At that moment she hated that African woman, hated her blackness, hated her seeming lack of awareness that love is not enough, and she knew the only way the African woman would understand this was if her sleeping baby was cruelly and terribly taken from her forever.
And then the Doll realised the train had halted. She leapt up, panicked in case she missed her stop, and because she felt frightened of herself, fearful that her love might take over, horrified that out of love she had the momentary desire to kill somebody. She got off just as the doors began closing. Only as the train began to shunt away did the Doll realise that she was one stop too early.