As the Doll walked, her mind steadied. Unable to flag a taxi and unwilling to use her stolen phone to call one after she had left Moretti’s, she had caught the last ferry back to town. She hung back after disembarking at Circular Quay, loitering on the jetty until it was empty, walking to its edge as if admiring the harbour views of a night. Reaching down, she took out her own phone and switched it on.
The phone told her she had twenty-three missed calls. Thirty-six text messages. That the memory was full. She didn’t even bother scrolling through the call numbers and messages. She flipped the phone shut, hid it in the cup of her hand, and squatted by the edge of the jetty as though she were looking at something in the dark, littered water below. And then she let the phone slip out of her hand and into the harbour, to sink to where so many other secrets of Sydney lie hidden. She stood up and, for the second time that day, started heading by foot up into the airless city.
She was making for the Retro Hotel at the top end of Pitt Street. She knew nothing about the hotel, had only seen its shattered Perspex sign many times when riding in taxis, forever broken and never repaired. She wanted to stay there and not the hotel Wilder had booked, because for no good reason she felt safer in a dive in the CBD than in Double Bay. It wasn’t the plan, but maybe, reasoned the Doll, it was better. She would ring Wilder sometime the next day and arrange to pick up her money.
So far, she consoled herself, there had only been some very grainy security camera footage, a few old and blurry happy snaps from a few years ago, and a crappy video of her dancing. None of the images looked much like the Doll in life even when they had been taken, and now with Wilder’s haircut she felt it would be difficult for anyone to recognise her at all. But she had eyes and ears only for those who might recognise her, people who might want to turn her in, police who might want to shoot her. And so she avoided people’s eyes, walked quickly and kept her head down.
Yet everywhere the Doll looked, there was the Doll. She was in snatches of conversation overheard in the street, as a statuesque woman leaving a suits’ bar chirruped into the choking night air, “I haven’t had the time to follow this pole dancing story properly at all.” The Doll turned sideways as the woman brushed past her, and the smell of her perfume and the greasy stench of some effluvia from a nearby restaurant kitchen followed in her wake, a smell of hot fat and dirty dishwater and Chanel No 5. “I just hope they get her before she gets us.”
The city, which she had formerly felt and known only as freedom, now seemed to be closing in all around her—the heat, the infernal traffic, the police sirens, the rumble and scream of building works that never seemed to stop—why was it that everything now appeared to her to be so oppressive and full of foreboding?
She looked up and saw a man wearily packing up his convenience store for the evening, taking in the wire-caged newspaper banners that yelled TERRORIST CELLS and TERRORIST LOVERS and IS SYDNEY READY FOR THE WORST? Seeing her looking at him, he rasped a hello. Then his gaze became a stare.
“There’s something about your face,” he said. “Can’t place it. Is it … you’re on television or something, right? You’re famous. I’m so sorry, I just can’t place it—is it Big Brother?”
“I wish,” said the Doll, smiled, and walked on.
Nothing was as it had been. Martin Place, where once she had happily browsed fine designer shops, now appeared to her as empty and strange as the ruins of an ancient city that somewhere, sometime long ago, stopped making sense. For a moment she stood surrounded by colourful bunting and beautiful images that communicated nothing. Dolce & Gabbana. Louis Vuitton. What did any of it mean? On vertical banners pushing a designer label, models, no more than kids, were reproduced with their strange unfocused gaze, as if they had witnessed a massacre or horror they still could not comprehend. Versace. Gucci. Armani. The Doll had the fleeting sense she was looking at the remnants of some great lost civilisation that had become indecipherable, like the temples at Angkor Wat that Wilder had once visited and shown her photos of, extraordinary places, magnificent buildings, beautiful objects, wonderful art that only had purpose and meaning as long as everyone agreed it had purpose and meaning.
And then the sense was gone: it was once more a street at night, nothing other than a place to scurry through and leave, as she resumed her journey to the Retro Hotel.