After her bad dream, the Doll summoned the energy to get out of the bath, dress in Wilder’s batik dressing gown and make her way down the dark, toy-littered hall to where Wilder was standing at the door of Max’s bedroom, gazing inwards.
“Sometimes I stand here for an hour or more,” Wilder said softly, without turning to the Doll. “Just looking and listening.” They both watched over Max lying curled up on his bed, his flesh the thinnest of coverings over a question mark of a body, the hush of the room occasionally broken by the snuffles and slight sounds, almost yelps, he made in his sleep. “It’s my happiest time of day,” Wilder said. “There’s a peace in it.”
The Doll said nothing. She put her arm in Wilder’s. As they stood together in the half-light of the hall, watching a child sleeping, the Doll hoped for this moment—that would soon be forgotten and unknown and mean nothing—never to end.
“They have no words for it,” said Wilder finally, still without turning to look at the Doll. “No one can name it and no one can take it from you.”
“They can take everything from you, Wilder,” the Doll said, sensing that for a second time she was going to consciously disagree with Wilder. She spoke in a hush, so that Max would not be woken. “They make these things up, they take something innocent about your life and say it proves you’re guilty, they take a truth and they turn it into a lie. How can they do that? Like, there’s this guy today at the ferry terminal, reading these lies about me in the paper, and he’s shaking his head and swearing about me. I knew he believed them because up until yesterday I was like him, just hanging around, waiting for this or that, swallowing all the crap I read and heard, and then just puking all the crap back up.”
And as parts of her day began coming back to her—the politician on the radio saying terrorists needed to be eliminated; the sight of Cody on the telly at Moretti’s saying he knew who she was; the way on the plasma screens at the shopping centre they made her look like something off a porn movie—the Doll’s voice began rising.
“But it’s not true, Wilder. It’s not true. And now, every hour, it’s growing, like slobbering dogs they are, and now it’s not even—”
The Doll was about to say Tariq’s name, but then it all came flooding back—the phone, the alley, the Corolla and the tinkly Chopin and the vibrating flies and the boot lid bouncing and the stench rising, that stench that seemed to be welling back up in her nostrils now, and she couldn’t bear to tell Wilder what she had seen. Once more, panic was gripping her.
“It’s all changed,” the Doll said. “Can’t you see? It’s me they’re after, Wilder.” And then she cried out, “They’re going to kill me!” and the Doll could no longer hold back her sobbing.
“Don’t be stupid,” Wilder said, pulling the Doll’s face into her shoulder to stifle her so she wouldn’t wake her sleeping son, and bustling her out of the doorway and down the hall. “That sort of thinking is good for nothing.”
“It’s good for this—” the Doll said, pulling her head away from Wilder, “now I understand life. People aren’t good or bad, Wilder, they’re just weak.” And with that, she dropped her gaze to the floor and repeated the word as if it were one she had never heard before. “Weak?” she said, “Weak … weak …”
Then the Doll’s mind seemed to clarify and she looked back up at Wilder and, her voice now louder and clearer, said: “They go with power—you understand me? What else can they do? What the fuck else can anybody do?”
She scruffed hold of Wilder’s shirt and pulled her in so tight and so close that Wilder could feel her shouting as damp wind on her face. Wilder tried once more to quieten her, running her hand through the Doll’s freshly cut bob as if she were a child. The Doll jerked her head away.
“No, Wilder, no. You’ve got to listen to me,” she continued, her voice edgy and brittle. “People like fear. We all want to be frightened and we all want somebody to tell us how to live and who to fuck and why we should do this and think that. And that’s the Devil’s job. That’s why I’m important to them, Wilder, because if you can make up a terrorist you’ve given people the Devil. They love the Devil. They need the Devil. That’s my job. You get me?”
But it was clear Wilder got none of it. For her there was goodness and only goodness, and the Devil didn’t exist in her view of the world, and any talk of him or evil was just so much superstitious claptrap.
By now the Doll was hysterical. She had never thought such things before but having said them they seemed at once inescapably true and terrifying, and she felt as if some evil force were burning up her veins.
“I’m the Devil!” she was crying, and tendrils of hot snot ran out of her nostrils and rose back up with her sobbing breathing. “I’m the Devil, don’t you get me?”
Wilder tried to calm her, saying it was all right, that everything would be all right, not listening to what the Doll was trying to tell her.
But nothing was all right anymore. Part of the Doll wanted to say to Wilder that it was all too late, that this was some sort of reckoning. She wanted to say that she did not disagree with such a reckoning or object to its justice or its injustice, its truth or untruth; no, the Doll realised that now all she wanted was to escape, but it was not clear how that might happen. And that was when she broke down completely and told Wilder that Tariq was dead.