A minute later, riding through the crowded, sweating city, the Doll had forgotten about the creepy tv man. Around her the streets surged with colour and sound as Mardi Gras got into full swing. The chaos was exacerbated by the presence of security everywhere—cop cars, uniformed cops, dogs, cordons and spot searches of bags. Pedestrians outnumbered cars and cars were moving slower than people as the taxi shoved through the crowds, crawling the short distance to the Doll’s flat in Darlinghurst. The Doll enjoyed the vibrant anonymity of it all. A great city is a great solitude, and the Doll, above all else, liked being alone.
When they became ensnared in a traffic jam, she left the taxi and walked the last block to her flat, past the side lane where an abandoned blue Toyota Corolla continued to accumulate parking tickets as it had done for the past several days—so many that it now looked to be covered by a leaf storm. She turned into the entrance of a dirty and undistinguished brick apartment block.
By the exorbitant standards of the inner city the Doll’s third-floor flat was cheap, but for the same reason that its rent was low—its small rooms, its dilapidated kitchen and squalid bathroom—she rarely let anyone come back there. One day she would have an apartment, a real home that she would bring people back to, and everything would be designer—the Alessi sugar bowl, the La Pavoni espresso machine, the Philippe Starck toilet. Until then, she bought the designer products that mattered—the ones other people saw—and that was clothes.
The Doll put both radio and tv on—she hated the flat silent and found any noise preferable to none—undressed, showered in the crappy shower that dribbled like an old drunk, and then naked, preferring not to towel herself but to stay wet in the heat, the Doll went to her bedroom.
With one foot on her bed between the two Garfields with whom she slept, the other balancing on a precarious pile of Renovating Today magazines that sat on a bedside table, the Doll stretched her arms up to the low ceiling. She peeled a Beyoncé poster off its Blu-tack, revealing a hand-sized hole in the ceiling, from which, not without difficulty, she pulled out a bulging silk bag decorated with batik patterns.
The Doll lay on her bed, undid the bag’s drawstring and took out a fat roll of banknotes bound with a brown rubber band. The Chairman’s Lounge paid well, but they paid cash, and she didn’t want to get caught by the tax office. And so none of her money went where it could be traced, and all of it went into the batik silk bag.
She had learnt to survive by making the most of the small things of life. The Doll wanted what she could hold on to and that was this fat roll of cash—what she knew without counting to be four hundred and ninety-two one-hundred-dollar notes. To that roll she now added five hundred-dollar notes from her Prada Saffiano leather wallet, for it was her way to always keep a grand in her wallet in case she saw something she wanted.
If pressed, if drunk, if unguarded, she might have confessed to longing for dreams, feelings, sensations that never appeared in a catalogue or a magazine and which no one had ever paid cash for. But as to what these things were, she had neither words nor even images; they were as mysterious as the cloud that had entranced her at the beach that morning, about which she could later not recall one detail. No one remembers a cloud. But $49,700—who could forget that?
The Doll was saving for a deposit on an apartment. Her mind was full of dreams as to what it would be like. She imagined she would find something run-down, some overlooked bargain which, through her hard work and imagination, would be transformed as such places were transformed by magic and seemingly within seven minutes on television DIY programs.
And changed as miraculously with it would be the Doll’s life. She would start that uni course; she would ease out of dancing, only doing the minimum to keep up the repayments. Everything was arranged, everything was ready. Because the Doll had no legitimate income, it would be bought in Wilder’s name, and then Wilder would sign it over to the Doll. A few days, a week or two at the most, and the life the Doll had so long dreamt of would begin. Her flat was chaotic testimony to this dream of new order. Scattered everywhere were renovating magazines, furniture and home-ware catalogues, real estate guides with circled ads and pinboards ruffling with fabric samples and cut out pictures.
Each night after work she would play out the same ritual: shower, retrieve the silk batik bag from the ceiling, lie on her bed, and begin covering her naked body with her hundred-dollar notes. For though the Doll counted the notes nightly, she had come to regard the real measure of her savings as the extent to which she was able to paper over her flesh with money.
Three years earlier the notes had only covered her belly. Then they crept up and over her breasts and the last winter they began to spread down over her groin and thighs. Now she had to start at her odd labour sitting up, delicately placing the first notes on her ankles.
As if her body were a large jigsaw puzzle, she toiled patiently, carefully overlapping each note like fish scales, imagining herself a mermaid of money. Come the day the notes completely covered her naked body, then, the Doll told herself, she would stop dancing full time. Then she would have enough money for the deposit on an apartment.
The notes felt damp and slightly ticklish. They felt like purpose, justification, the future. They felt like what makes a life possible and bearable. They felt good, like only possessing a lot of money can. These days, the Doll preferred the touch of money on her skin to the touch of a man. It was all good. On Monday, dancing for Moretti, she would earn the final three hundred dollars she needed to make $50,000, the sum she had set herself for a deposit. She would place the final three notes on herself. She would put one over her mouth, one over each of her eyes. And, her body finally covered, her new life would begin.