Richard Cody sat in front of the monitor in the Undercurrent editing suite, a broom closet of a room with an oversized air con duct that blew an unpleasant smelling draught onto his aching head. It was so very late. Todd Birchall, the young editor, spooled back and forth. It was hopeless, thought Richard Cody. He lacked a skewer to run all the titbits of interviews together. He had less than twenty-four hours to get his special up on the lap dancing terrorist and he had nothing that made this a story.
Todd Birchall was regarded as a hot cutter. He was unfazed by the way connections had to be created, leaps made with cuts that perhaps there wasn’t always a complete story to justify. “WHATEVER IT TAKES”, as the motto inscribed on his baseball cap had it—the cap which, no matter the weather or situation, was always on Todd Birchall’s head. But even Todd Birchall was at a loss what to do. He clacked his tongue stud against his front teeth.
“Maybe it’s like maybe,” he said, “just a fucking fuckup.” As he thought on the problem, Richard Cody methodically tore an envelope to pieces. “I mean, she sleeps with a guy,” Todd Birchall continued, “and then gets blamed for everything from the Twin Towers to Kylie’s cancer. It’s weird. I mean, why would someone like her want to be a mass murderer?”
Todd Birchall was starting to annoy Richard Cody. After all, he did not say to himself, ‘Given there is no real evidence this woman has ever done anything wrong, I will create an image of her as a monster.’ No, because that would have been a disgraceful act of cynicism, and no true cynic can afford to be anything other than genuine in his opinions. Rather, Richard Cody began imagining an adult woman somehow so traumatised that she was incapable of feeling, a woman without empathy who could easily commit the most callous acts of cruelty. He felt quite overcome with fear at the thought of a monstrous woman out there, a human without emotion, capable of killing hundreds of people. But Todd Birchall’s question remained: why?
And again, in his irritating way, Todd Birchall tapped his tongue stud on his front teeth, as though he expected Richard Cody to make something up there and then. Richard Cody was affronted. Todd Birchall, perhaps sensing an unease in the cutting room, went out to find some beer.
Richard Cody despised journalists who made things up. He hated the phrase “don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story”, for the art of journalism—and Richard Cody, who had won several Walkley awards and whose hobby as recently featured in a lead article in the Women’s Weekly was watercolour landscape painting, firmly believed that in its highest incarnation journalism was most certainly an art—was to use the truths you could discover to tell the story you believed to matter.
And so, when he got on the phone and tracked down Ray Ettslinger at a Byron Bay conference on the parapsychological aspects of modern corporate management, Richard Cody was keen to hear Ray Ettslinger’s answer to his question whether such a grotesque absence of emotion could fit with a profile of a terrorist bomber.
Ray Ettslinger paused because he was drunk, looked out through the open walls of the restaurant in which he sat, past some Aboriginal beggars to the beautiful Australian sea beyond and, before agreeing, put his hand over the mouthpiece of his sticky-taped Motorola, and to the other academics at the table, hissed:
“Media.”
He rolled his googly eyes as though this were a wearying aspect of his daily life, rather than the only exciting prospect in his world at that moment.
Ray Ettslinger was a psychologist Richard Cody had last used for a story on poltergeists in the Sydney Opera House. Richard Cody loved using Ray Ettslinger: he was such wonderful talent. He had the biggest nose Richard Cody had ever seen, wild eyes, and a manner at once slightly pompous and completely authoritative. He took direction well, and never minded how Richard Cody cut him. Ettslinger understood.
In Byron Bay, Ray Ettslinger got up from the table and walked outside. He was, he told the Motorola, tired. He drearily complained about his back, his shoulder, his bowels and his students. But when Richard Cody mentioned the pole dancing terrorist, Ray Ettslinger was like a hard drive booting up. Richard Cody felt he could almost hear the low whirring of magnetic disks, of fans cooling Intel chips now processing the necessary information to arrive at the correct result.
Ray Ettslinger’s Centre for Excellence in Executive Culture at UTS’s western Sydney campus was not drawing the same student numbers as it had a few years earlier. He had just finished with his third wife and hadn’t been offered a promotion since he turned down a chair at the University of Tasmania, because, he had joked to friends, he could never decide whether the position was promotion or transportation. His two ex-wives were back into him for more alimony, and his once profitable sideline in corporate management consultancy was no longer the lucrative joke it had for so long been. He needed money and he understood that to gain money he needed attention. He had written a well-received paper on “Cognitive Dissonance and the Suicide Bomber” for a conference in Stuttgart and was angling for a newly established chair in terrorist studies at the Australian Defence Force Academy. A pole dancing terrorist?
“Of course,” said Ray Ettslinger. “It all fits.”
And indeed it did.
Much as his fellow academics derided the commercial media, Ray Ettslinger knew it counted far more than any of them dared admit. And here was Undercurrent offering him a small but significant and, Ettslinger suspected, ongoing part in a national drama. It was irresistible.
“Predictable,” said Ray Ettslinger, his tone now as bright as a new LCD monitor. “Who can really say what makes anyone want to blow themselves up other than some terrible emotional trauma?”
“How so, Ray?” asked Richard Cody. “She just seems, well … ordinary.”
“Family?” asked Ray Ettslinger.
“Divorced. Also ordinary. Mother dead, car crash. No criminal records.”
“Interview the father,” commanded Ray Ettslinger. “And then film me viewing the tape of the interview, commenting. Either he hates her, or is estranged from her—what better explanation for her terrorist sympathies?”
“A fuckup at the edges,” said Richard Cody, beginning to tune in to Ray Ettslinger’s thinking, which wasn’t so difficult, given that he was merely developing an idea Richard Cody had suggested in the first place.
“Islamist ideology is irresistible for such a profile,” continued Ray Ettslinger, who knew almost nothing about Islam. “It offers both a secure identity and the mechanism for revenge. Alternatively, her father loves her and dotes on her and she’s spoilt—the Patty Hearst syndrome.” Ray Ettslinger knew almost nothing about Patty Hearst either.
“An angry fuckup at the edges,” said Richard Cody.
“Right,” said Ettslinger. “Either way, she’s a fuckup. Either way, I can make it work for us.”
Richard Cody loved the “us”. Ray was such a team player. And on and on Ray Ettslinger went, giving Richard Cody all he needed. And because nothing excites people more than sharing an aim, no matter what that aim may be, both were now far more animated. They agreed a time for the interview the following day.
“It’s like Sudoku,” said Ray Ettslinger before hanging up. “You just have to make the numbers fit.”
Todd Birchall returned with a six-pack of Tooheys New. His cap was off.
“It’s still so fucken hot out there,” he sighed, offering Richard Cody a stubby.
Uncharacteristically, Richard Cody accepted, though he still wondered who else might have touched that bottle and what bacteria lurked on its seemingly clean surface. But he felt he now had cause to celebrate—a story, a program, a comeback. He would wash his hands later.