She pressed the talk button but said nothing. Then she heard Wilder’s voice.
“Gina,” Wilder said. “Have you heard?”
The Doll said she had.
And then Wilder told the Doll how she thought she had been flying and about the raid and how they wouldn’t stop trying to tell Wilder that the Doll was a terrorist.
“Gina?” said Wilder. “Gina, are you still there?”
The Doll said she was, and then Wilder told her how they had taken her to some police office in town. “We’re walking down this long corridor and one of the cops says to me: ‘Listen, lady, your slut mate is in shit like you can’t believe. It’s not soliciting or joke offences. This is terrorism we are talking about.’
“I say: ‘She’s not a terrorist and she’s not a slut.’ He just shakes his head and leads me into this big room in which seven or eight suits are sitting, waiting. At one end was this fat old silver-haired bloke.
“‘I’m the presiding authority,’ or something like that, he says, and then he waffles on for ages, legal stuff, I didn’t really follow it. They were videoing everything, it was so creepy, like, no one gave their name, each suit just said that, ‘I’m here representing ASIO,’ and then the next one, ‘I’m here representing ASIO,’ over and over, except for one who was a Fed. I tried to be tough and pretend I thought it was all crap, but inside I felt so sick and I was shaking so bad.
“‘You can’t detain me if you’re not going to arrest me,’ I say. ‘What am I charged with?’
“‘ASIO has a warrant,’ says the old bloke, who was sleepy and yawning a lot. ‘It authorises them to detain you for up to one hundred and sixty-eight hours without charge.’
“‘Since when can they hold people without charge—’ I started saying, and he just said since the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act was amended.
“‘The what?’ I say.
“‘The ASIO Act,’ he says and he yawns again, and they all keep on talking about this Act and each time it feels like a wall collapsing on me. ‘As amended in 2004 and 2005 means they can,’ the old man goes on. ‘And one hundred and sixty-eight hours means seven days. ASIO has the power to detain without charge if it has reason to believe that you are likely to commit an offence, or if we think you have information about terrorist activity.’
“‘What are you talking about?’ I say. ‘What reason? You have no reason—’
“‘You are a friend of Gina Davies?’ says a spook, a tall guy.
“‘What about my son? What’s my son got to do with this?’ I say. It was like an insane dream, Gina, and you know you shouldn’t be there, but you are. They said Max was fine and that he was being looked after.
“‘But I have to tell you, Ms Wilder,’ the tall spook says, ‘your son is of security interest. Young people can easily be of security interest. Overseas, for example, attacks have often been carried out by young people.’
“‘He’s five years old, for Christ’s sake,’ I say. ‘What can he know?’
“The tall spook looks down at me, as though there was something so bloody obvious I had forgotten, something so simple I couldn’t see it.
“‘He knows Gina Davies,’ he says.
“I didn’t know where to look. What could I say, Gina? ‘You don’t know her,’ I kept saying.
“He says: ‘Have you ever thought maybe it’s you who doesn’t know Gina? You ever thought she might be trained to never tell or breathe a word to you?’
“I say: ‘Oh yeah? You think an Islamic fundamentalist is going to work at a lap dancing club? You’re crazier than I think.’
“He says: ‘The best cover is sometimes no cover.’ And they laugh. They thought that was real good.
“He says: ‘Has Gina Davies made contact with you at any time in the last two days?’
“I say: ‘No.’
“He says: ‘You’re lying. We know you’re lying because your son has confirmed that she stayed with you the night before last. And that you two slept together.’
“Everything I had said up till then just sounded like a story after that. Even what was true didn’t sound true anymore, somehow everything had become a lie.
“He says: ‘Has Gina Davies phoned you in the last two days?’
“I say: ‘I don’t have to talk to you.’ I say, ‘I’m allowed to say nothing. You can get fucked.’
“Then I got scared, so scared, Gina. I thought they were going to hit me. But they didn’t do anything like that. One looked like a politician, bit tubby, with a baby face. He just spoke real quiet, like. He says, ‘You have no right to silence under the ASIO Act.’
“‘What do you mean?’ I say.
“‘You can go to jail for up to five years for not answering our questions.’
“The fat old silver-haired man had fallen asleep for a moment, started snoring, then he jolts back awake. The Fed smirked. But not the politician spook. He leans in real close across the table and he says: ‘I don’t think you understand the seriousness of your situation, Ms Wilder. This is not a normal criminal investigation. This is a terrorism investigation. If new information is forthcoming we may seek to have your warrant renewed for another week. And who knows? Perhaps we may face the same situation the week after that. You can see what this means, Ms Wilder. We can just continue renewing the warrant. But if you continue to refuse to answer our questions, you can go to jail for five years. If you lie to us, same deal. Jail for five years.’
“Then he leans back and says: ‘Did you receive a phone call from a mobile phone yesterday at approximately 2.24 pm?’
“I say: ‘Can you be any more approximate?’
“They say: ‘Answer the question.’
“I say: ‘I don’t know. I don’t keep a record of all the calls I get.’
“They say: ‘Telephone records show that you were rung yesterday at 2.24 pm on a mobile phone that had been stolen approximately half an hour earlier. The woman who owns the phone went back to retrieve it and has given police a description of a woman she saw walking away from where she had left it. The description matches Gina Davies.’
“And all the time I was worrying, Gina, about Max, about how he was. I mean, the poor little bloke has armed men smashing around his house in the middle of the night and he’s screaming and screaming. And they take us both to some police station, and separate us, and I’m imagining Max is crying and then I’m crying too, I’m so upset, and I say that I’m not talking until they put us back together. But they won’t.
“I look up at the old fat man but he’s nodded off again. I can see he’s even dribbling a little bit. I beg the spooks. ‘Can I see my son, please?’ I say.
“They say: ‘Later.’
“I say: ‘When? When do I get to see him? He’s my son and he’s terrified.’ I told them I would go to the media and make a scene, tell them everything about invading my house, doing to Max what they did.
“‘Tell them what?’ they say. ‘Lesbian lover denies terrorist link?’ They laugh, and then the quiet one who looked like a politician, he says:
“‘You talk to a journalist about this, any of this—tonight’s raid, this, these questions—you go to jail for five years. Under the ASIO Act that’s Australian law too, now. You breathe one word about your arrest, this interrogation, to a neighbour, your sister, your best friend, you go to jail for five years. Besides,’ he says, ‘under the ASIO Act the media isn’t allowed to run any story about your arrest and detention or they go to jail for five years too.’
“He seemed a bit tired—it was like, I dunno, maybe six in the morning—and I think he was disappointed and bored with me because I guess I wasn’t, you know, much of a terrorist.
“‘Unless, of course,’ he says, ‘we authorise the story. I hope I’ve helped make your position clear.’
“Then they went on and on, like some weird court it was, and when the interview was over they woke the old bloke, he said some more things and then they all left except a cop to guard me. Some time later the baby-faced politician-looking one came back. He said I could see Max now and that we were free to go. He was all friendly, the smart arse.’
“‘Someone’ll find out,’ I say.
“‘No,’ he says. ‘No one is ever going to find out. Those miners trapped down that gold mine in Tasmania a few years ago—you remember? Well, your situation is worse. Imagine nobody is ever, ever allowed to find out what happened to you while you were down that hole. And imagine all the things that can happen to people lost in dark holes.’
“And then a woman cop came into the room with Max, and Max runs to me and this creep smiles and, can you believe this?—he rubs Max’s head with his hand.
“‘Nice kid,’ he says, and he looks up and he’s still smiling. ‘Imagine,’ he says.”
The Doll didn’t feel safe sitting on a public train listening as Wilder continued talking. But she kept on listening anyway.
“But I didn’t tell them, Gina, I didn’t tell them anything, I swear to God, I’m sure they’re watching me, hanging me out as bait. Don’t come here, Gina, don’t come back.”