THE DOLL AWOKE to a warm, slightly sour smell. It was Wilder.
“Oh God,” Wilder said.
Wilder sat up in the bed, and the Doll felt the heat of her body billow up from the wrinkled sheet that lay over them. Wilder was beautiful waking, like a cobra disturbed, her broad head darting up on her long neck.
The ageing air con rattled on above the bed like an old friend that had travelled through the long night with them, and with them somehow making it through the darkness. The Doll felt rested and safe. It was some minutes before the events of the last two days began to trickle into her mind, a slight headache that could be ignored.
“Ten past seven,” Wilder said, and with that she was out of the bed and gone from the room.
The Doll dozed for a few minutes, but beneath the air con’s asthmatic whir she could feel the vibration of peak hour traffic rising through the room and summoning her. She got up and followed the sound of a radio to the small galley kitchen where Wilder was getting Max ready for school.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Wilder, as she stirred the porridge she insisted on making for Max even in the middle of a heatwave, “you’re right. You should go to the police this morning. I’ll come with you. Clear this shit up. It’s ridiculous.” And then she smiled. “It’s funny, though. Gina the terrorist!” And they both laughed, and when Wilder handed her a coffee, the Doll could feel that already the morning and life itself were once more turning out to be good and pleasant.
The Doll’s thoughts swung to her day. She had her weekly private with Moretti that morning, and there she would earn the last three hundred dollars she needed for her deposit.
“D-Day,” the Doll said. But then the news came on the radio, Max yelled for his mother from the bathroom, and Wilder left the Doll with the task of making Max’s lunch.
The radio rumbled on with reports of more deaths from another suicide bombing in Baghdad. There was the crash and squeal of a garbage truck outside, Max was crying in the bathroom that he didn’t want to go to school, and the radio newsreader was talking of how police were seeking the companion of the suspected Middle Eastern terrorist who was photographed by a security camera entering his apartment two nights earlier, before eluding a police raid.
The Doll stopped buttering the bread.
“A police spokesman said they needed the woman to assist with their investigations,” the radio continued. “He refused to speculate on rumours that the woman was also part of the terrorist cell that planted the three bombs at Homebush Olympic stadium on Saturday.”
The Doll looked up from Max’s sandwiches and saw Wilder staring at her.
“These terrorists are subhuman filth,” a politician was now saying over the radio. “The government needs to be doing more to ensure they are hunted down and eliminated.”
“Oh, Gina,” said Wilder. That was all.
For as long as the Doll had known her, Wilder had been a landscape gardener. Wilder dealt with palettes of pavers, trucks of concrete, tonnes of loam, acres of grass, irate electricians, crazed dogs, cuts by power tools. She transformed stubborn elements of clay and plant, rock and debris and wood, into forms and shapes and shades and colours and sounds that would bring pleasure and arouse admiration. It wasn’t in Wilder’s way to be intimidated by life.
But when the Doll, margarine and Vegemite-smeared knife in hand, looked at Wilder that morning, as the radio went on about how unnamed security sources had linked the family of the male terrorist to Islamic fundamentalist groups in the Middle East, Wilder, for the first time that the Doll had ever known, looked frightened.
“What were you saying?” asked Wilder.
“I’ve got Moretti this morning,” said the Doll, who had been saying nothing. Her mouth had gone oddly dry and words rolled around in it like marbles. “I’ve got to do it. I’ll go and see the cops after.”
Wilder seemed uncharacteristically confused.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.” That was all. No strong opinions or plans or certainties. Just “okay okay”.
The Doll went to the bedroom, found her Gucci handbag, downed a Stemetil, her last two Zoloft and a Valium 5 all together. Even so, it was several minutes before the shaking stopped.
When she came back to the kitchen the news was over.
“Why?” the radio asked. “Because you’ve worked for it. Because you deserve it. Talk to your BMW dealer today.”