When the electric doors of the Retro Hotel slid open and the Doll walked in, grateful for the chill damp of the air con, she felt a dim sense of disappointment that there were no police waiting with guns and black uniforms. Nor was there anyone in her eerily empty hotel room.
She had, she realised, no gift for evasion. There was no longer anywhere or anyone to run to. She felt an exhaustion so complete it required a great effort to walk the last few steps across the room. She drew the heavy hotel drapes, and when she switched off the lights the room was darker than any night. She lay on the bed, her head heavy, her limbs without energy, thinking she would simply wait there on her bed for them. Whoever they might be—men with guns, police, soldiers; whatever they might do—arrest her, beat her, lock her away forever, kill her, none of it any longer mattered to the Doll, only that it end and end soon.
But no one came.
She closed her eyes for a long time, waiting, and still there were no police. The Doll felt both relieved and irritated. Where were they? What would she do if they did not turn up? They were a kind of solution, and she had no other.
The Doll now forgot that just three days before, she had been happy, her griefs and worries seeming no better or no worse than what other people had to bear, and she had conducted all her affairs with one single rule in mind—to make and save money—and this rule had seemed to her infallible in pointing her ever ahead in the right direction.
In that complete darkness the Doll wanted to think that somewhere life was good, that truth was not chaos, that the world was not random, that a good person could build themselves a good life … but then these just seemed thoughts with no basis, rooted in nothing. So instead the Doll tried to think of what had been good in her life, and she thought of her friends and she thought of how when she was a child her father used to take her fishing in a little dinghy, and how her father would lose his temper with her for tangling her line, or being scared of a fish being landed, and he’d yell at her and then give up and take the boat back in. And so it was that there was no good memory that somehow didn’t seem to lead into a bad memory: her parents fighting, her mother leaving and the death of someone from Home and Away, Wilder’s friendship and Wilder’s betrayal, Tariq’s kisses and Tariq’s corpse, all her money and all of it gone and the fishing lines and Wilder’s hair all tangled and she could undo none of it, none of it …