In the room next door a phone rang and would not stop ringing. The Doll, still unable to sleep, switched on a small Panasonic television that sat in a chipped woodgrain Laminex cupboard. A cable station was showing the perfectly preserved body of a three-thousand-year-old woman. The body had recently been found in a peat bog in Sweden. The fossil woman had been drowned, weighed down with stones tied to a noose around her neck. Her head had been shaved. A ritual death, a German expert said, for some crime that no one could now know.
Still the phone next door rang, and still no one answered.
As the Doll watched the documentary, she felt other women would have been mixed up with it—she could see all the women together, telling tales and getting high and mighty and het up—because they were scared too; scared that if they didn’t accuse someone else, someone else might accuse them. There would have been some kind of crime, of course there would, just like she was called a terrorist now, and maybe back then she’d have been called a witch, but it was all untrue.
She could almost hear them—talking like they did in the club’s changeroom, talking like they did on the talkback, talking about how wrong and how bad that woman had been even as she was drowning. And the worst thing was that the Doll knew she would have been one of those accusing women. She was, after all, a survivor and had done a lot of things to get by; she knew she was capable of far worse if forced.
She changed stations. A news channel was running a story on her by a smiling woman journalist with a vaguely American accent. For the first time she heard her name being used, following on, she guessed, from Richard Cody’s story earlier in the evening. They also had several recent photos of her. And at that moment she felt sick: she didn’t want to be the terrorist on cable; didn’t want to be another bog woman drowning in some shitty swamp; didn’t want to be the French woman she had seen in the book in Moretti’s library with women laughing at her as they shaved her head.
But maybe, thought the Doll as she lay on her miserable hotel bed watching the tv, there was some need people had to hurt others, some horrible need, that hurting one woman in some way might make others feel safe and good and happy, like the smiling French women, like the smiling woman journalist.
And maybe she had to accept that she should be hurt, that maybe these things happen for the common good?
She turned the television off.
No, she thought, she couldn’t accept that she should be hurt, she couldn’t just give in and give up. She didn’t feel hungry, but it mattered that she kept going. She ate a small pack of cashews and a Chokito bar from the bar fridge and washed it down with a Stoli mini mixed with tonic. And though at first her throat and stomach resisted, the nuts and chocolate tasted so very good, better than they should, and her body calmed with even such poor food as this, and the Doll realised how hungry and exhausted she truly was.
At some point long after, she must have drifted into a wretched, skipping sleep. She was vaguely aware of car horns and sirens wailing far below; of cries and shouting, and sometimes of people running.
Her dreams were claustrophobic, she was suffocating, images flickered back and forth in her mind ever more rapidly: the French woman unable to pull her head away from the open scissors; the bog woman screaming into filthy water; flies crawling from between Tariq’s dead lips …
Some force from outside continued to rumble all the way into her room, and she found it harder than ever to breathe, and still a phone kept ringing and what was its message? What was it?