Before her macchiato was ready to take away, the police had begun arriving. At first the Doll wasn’t really aware of anything loud or dramatic but the opposite: a lessening of noise, of traffic—an eerie, spreading peace. The radio in the café, formerly a burr lost in the noise of the city, seemed to be growing in volume.
The radio said: “Can anyone explain why we let them in? Can you?”
The Doll was humming “Crazy in Love”, and her belly gave a little flip when she thought back on Tariq’s head between her legs. She closed her eyes: she could smell his musky odour, even feel him sweetly pressing inside her still.
“Short mac!” a waiter cried. Her eyes jolted open to see police swarming around the apartment block where she had spent the night with Tariq, and blocking off the street between the apartment building and the café in which the Doll now waited.
Outside no cars moved. Uniformed police were running up barricades of fluttering blue and white plastic streamers. Paddy wagons, trucks, a police bus had appeared as if by magic. Men in black uniforms with helmets and bulletproof vests and automatic rifles were running into positions behind parked cars, skips, the corners of buildings. It was like a war. Whoever the enemy was, it was clear they were in the apartment block the Doll had just left.
Inside the coffee shop, people were at first excited, and also a little frightened, particularly after a cop came in and spoke to them. He told them that no one was to leave until they were given the all-clear. He said there was nothing to worry about, but that everyone had to keep away from windows. Well away.
The cop turned on his heel and left. There rose in his wake a low murmur of speculation. A waiter claimed to have heard from friends in the force that a man had taken his family hostage and was threatening to kill them. The Doll overheard a woman say it was well known that a prominent drug dealer used an apartment in the building, and that this was some sort of bust. A few were convinced they had found more bombs and some moved as far back into the bowels of the café as they could in case one went off. An older man turned to the Doll and said it was a terrorist they were after.
“They should shoot the bastards,” the Doll said, because it’s what you said, and in so far as she thought about such things, it was more or less what she thought. But all she could feel was Tariq’s flesh on her flesh, his arms around her body, his smell and his touch and his sound. It was as if his body had imprinted itself so strongly on the Doll’s that he was still there with her.
Finally people grew bored. Some began talking once more about the Mardi Gras and what they had got up to. Others went back to reading another of the endless supplements that fell like so many dead foetuses out of the Sunday papers. The Doll found the takeaway menu in her handbag and went to call Tariq to see what he might know, but his number rang out to a voicemail box that had no message, only a bleep. She hung up.
The Doll sat down at a table, drank her coffee, ordered another and drank that too, while flicking through a news paper that was lying there. She skipped past the front pages linking the bombs at Homebush with an al-Qa’ida website threat to bomb Sydney, ignored a story on a gruesome child murder, a feature about another attempt to bomb the Australian embassy in Jakarta, a found dog, a lost British backpacker, until at last she stopped at a spread about Princess Mary and her son.
The Doll looked up and, though sitting deep in the coffee shop, she could see men in combat black creeping along the top of the tower block with rifles, sights occasionally glinting, flickering in and out of the bright sunlight.
She went back to the paper. According to sources close to the Danish royals, the Doll read, Princess Mary was a wonderful hands-on mother, and the young prince was a favourite with everyone at the palace.
‘Lucky bitch,’ thought the Doll. She dropped another Zoloft to make up for the one she didn’t have the day before and read on.
A quarter of an hour later, the same cop came back into the coffee shop, spoke into a walkie-talkie mounted on his shoulder, then asked everyone in the café for their attention.
“The situation,” the cop said, “has been successfully neutralised. We thank you for your help with all matters of national security.”
No one was sure what he meant. The cop was back on his walkie-talkie, head cocked to the side. Somebody asked if it meant they could leave.
He turned, annoyed at the question.
“Christ,” he said. “Haven’t I already told you that?”