The sun pressed on the Doll’s face, at first curious, then insistent, and finally with a hard heat that felt like a burning flame. She got up, trying to stay asleep, and went to the bedroom window. The glass of the Deutsche Bank tower block was reflecting the rising sun as a golden fireball straight into Tariq’s bedroom. It was blinding. It was as if the sun had fallen to earth and Sydney was being consumed by a brilliant gold flame.
With screwed-up eyes and groggy hands the Doll groped around until she found a toggled cord and somewhat awkwardly dropped what turned out to be Venetian blinds. She flopped back into bed and rolled onto her stomach. Even through the blinds she could feel the sun’s power pressing into the room, only now it was a pleasant sensation, falling onto her back and warming her weary body, and even without Temazepam she quickly fell back asleep.
When the Doll next woke and looked across the bed there was no one there. The room was unpleasantly warm and airless. Perhaps there had been no one there before. It was hard to know. But it was clear now: she was alone in the bedroom.
“Tariq?” the Doll said and then, a little louder, so that he would hear her wherever he was, she called, “Oh God, Tariq. What a night.”
There was no reply.
The bedroom was an inferno. The Doll found her watch. It was almost midday. Her mouth felt furry. She could feel the dull, unpleasant sensation of dried sweat on her skin. The sheets smelt. She smelt.
The Doll got up. Naked, she wandered through the large apartment. There was no one anywhere. There was nothing personal anywhere. It was featureless, as if it had only just been moved in to. Or borrowed. It added up to nothing beyond an idea of taste.
Unlike her flat, in Tariq’s apartment everything was new, and the appliances were all of the best quality. Everything was white, as white as sugar. The walls were white. The wooden Venetian blinds were white-limed. The furniture, the fittings, the frames of pictures were variations of white: ivory, chalk, bone. On a white dining table there was an artfully placed vase with chocolate-coloured roses, but it was as if this was only there to accentuate the whiteness of everything else.
The apartment seemed made not for life, but for photographs in decorating magazines of the type that cluttered the Doll’s flat in teetering piles. The apartment was everything the Doll desired, but it no longer seemed to her desirable at all. It felt, if anything, slightly weird. Still, she told herself, disturbed at how all that she wanted now seemed somehow so offputting, it’s a cool place.
“It is, it is, it is,” she muttered to herself; but deep within her heart—which had fallen and risen with the dramas of a hundred renovating makeovers and a thousand special magazine features—there arose a new unworded suspicion that taste might just be an evasion of life.
She needed to think of something else and she found it in a note that had been left on a smoked glass table. It read simply:
Back soon.
T xxx
She washed in an ornate white-tiled bathroom beneath an elaborate shower that had not one but multiple heads nippling a long pole, so that water flowed in tender thrusts from several angles over her weary body.
After, she went out on the small balcony. There were several grey navy ships berthed in Woolloomooloo Bay, their PAs occasionally sounding a desultory sentence, rasped and choked, that twanged around the bay like a rubber band. She looked out over Sydney Harbour, and thought how it really was a beautiful city, and she felt lucky to live where she did. But she couldn’t rid herself of an odd unease.
She went back inside.
“Tariq?” she called. “Tariq?”
She felt a little jumpy. Below Tariq’s note the Doll wrote:
Had to fly. Call you soon.
And following his example she signed herself simply with the capital letter of her name:
Gxxx
Though it was hot she shivered. She found her handbag, stashed the coke away, and to steady herself dropped a Stemetil and a Zoloft. It was all good. Then the Doll dressed and left.