The Doll jolted awake. She looked across at the clock radio. It was 6.30 pm.
Green button taut beneath her finger, the Doll held out the remote control. She tried to ready her body for what was to come, as if it were about to absorb a punch or a fall, but her stomach was watery and she felt somehow seasick. She was, she realised, terrified. Until two nights before, she had never featured in the media, and the shock of it had quickly honed her responses such that she now scanned every screen, every paper, every broadcast only for mention of herself, and there was more than enough about “the pole dancing time-bomb” in the news to see only herself everywhere, screening out all other matters.
She knew for most watching and listening she was a wonderful story—mysterious, sleazy and sinister—all in the form of an instant celebrity. She was, as Wilder had predicted, going to get voted off soon. Everyone knew it; the interest in the tale was simply when and how it unravelled. Perhaps she, a long-time Survivor fan, instinctively thought that the rules and logic of the show she now found herself in would be revealed if she too just watched carefully and patiently. Maybe then an omnipotent presenter would appear and an immunity challenge present itself whereby she would have the chance to save herself for another week.
But, as yet, nothing had become clear to the Doll. No presenter had outlined the rules of an absurd challenge and handed over a clunky bead necklace in an act of evening salvation. For the Doll was alone in a world without divine saviours, a world without rules, a world in which she could see nothing and everyone could see her. She realised that her life was no longer what she made of it, but what others said it was. For the first time she clearly understood her fate. There was no choice, she had to know, and so she pressed the green button.
The special had already started and at first it was familiar enough to the Doll: a bomb appeared and armed police took up positions; once again there was a bearded man; again Tariq and the Doll hugged; and once more the children’s bodies were laid out in Beslan, where someone dressed in black brandished a machine gun. Twin towers fell. Bali burnt. Madrid bombing. London bombing. Uniformed police officers. Suited politicians. Robed terrorists. The Doll naked. Missiles. Explosions. Blood. The Doll dissolving, smiling a smile that was never hers. An ad break. New cars. Welfare compliance warnings. The special returned with Richard Cody standing on the steps outside the Sydney Opera House, his best side facing the camera.
“The Sydney Opera House,” he said, extending an arm to the scalloped sails behind, “one of our greatest national icons—and one of our most prominent targets for terrorists. But why would an Australian want to destroy it? To answer that question we set out to get to know our unknown terrorist.”
There appeared on the tv a face she recognised: a sickly old man, sitting up in a bed, skin like the cellophane window of a business envelope, tubes running in and out of his nose.
“After Gina Davies’ mother abandoned her daughter, Gina Davies was raised single-handedly by her struggling father,” said Richard Cody in voiceover. “This man devoted his life to his daughter. Yet tonight we can reveal how Gina Davies has not visited her dying father, Harry Davies, for many years.”
A caring Richard Cody was now to be seen sitting at Harry Davies’ hospital bedside, speaking in a gentle, sad tone.
“How many years exactly is it, Harry, since Gina visited?”
“She left at seventeen,” said the old man, with a deep roll in his voice. “Saw her a few times over the next year or so. But since she was eighteen, nothing.”
The Doll could see that what little he had to say might seem to people moving. No doubt, she thought, he would have told the tv crew other things, bitter things, but she knew that they would never be shown.
“And you have a terminal illness, Harry?”
“Yeah. Emphysema.”
“This must be very hard for you?”
“Daughter first a stripper then a terrorist? Well, you know, she was up to no good from the beginning.”
“What do you mean by ‘no good’, Harry?”
“Well, it’s a terrible thing to say as her father, but she was always, well, a cold fish—I don’t think Gina knows how to love.”
As her father went into a coughing fit, the Doll realised he was repeating more or less what he had said to her at thirteen when she asked him to stop touching her between her legs and to stop kissing her with his tongue.
“Have you got a message for your daughter?”
“Yeah, don’t hurt others like you hurt those who love you.”
And that too the Doll recalled him saying, along with his most repeated endearment:
“You little slut … you little slut …”
Harry Davies had drunk more than ever after the Doll left, his smoking grew heavier, and though the charges laid by the Doll’s schoolfriend were dropped for want of evidence and a desire by her foster family to protect their daughter, he never felt better again. His coughing grew worse, until he was diagnosed as having terminal emphysema.
He sold his pest control business, blaming government regulation for the small price it fetched, and blew his savings in just six months on the pokies. He stayed at home, using what breath remained blaming a mining company for whom he had worked for three months as a twenty-year-old for his declining health. Before long he was hooked up to oxygen bottles, which he only disconnected for a smoke and to blame doctors, nurses, aides, for anything, or to speak in terms befitting a saint of his long dead wife, whom when alive, both before and after she left him, he had blamed for everything.
To his own surprise, and that of all who knew him, Harry Davies did not die but continued living, albeit in ever more dismal ways. His life was miserable, his house increasingly squalid, and when he thought of his daughter, he only thought of her badly, and he would say between coughing fits:
“The little slut … the little slut …”
The Unknown Terrorist special returned with photos of Troy in his SAS uniform, Richard Cody describing him as “Gina Davies’ partner of two years”, and talking about his tragic death in a training exercise. A retired US Special Forces colonel speculated how this might explain why the Doll first developed her hatred of the state. Richard Cody asked the ex-colonel if the Doll could have acquired knowledge of military tactics from Troy.
“It’s possible,” he replied. “Frankly, you would have to say highly probable.”
And then the Doll shuddered. For Richard Cody was now standing in the dust of the Baby Lawn, in front of Liam’s grave. Little of what he said registered with her, other than a few phrases such as “emotionally frozen” and “abandoned grave”. The Doll realised he must have been there only an hour or two after her that very day, because the grave was freshly weeded. Yet how strange it looked, for missing were her flowers and the prancing horse, and lying in the dust once more was the bronze plaque bearing her son’s name.
The Doll’s head dropped.
When after some time she found the strength to raise it and look back at the tv, Richard Cody was in a soft voice tracing a line of evil connection that started with Islamist groups in Egypt in the early 1990s. A photo flashed up of what he said was an anti-USA protest in Egypt in October 1991, organised by a group sympathetic to al-Qa’ida. There was footage of a protest in 1994 outside a New York court in support of the 1993 Twin Towers’ bomber.
The profile of a shadowed face appeared, with the caption “Former Senior Intelligence Analyst”. In an electronically distorted voice, he identified one of the men in the photo and the footage as a mullah who, he said, was the uncle of the late Tariq al-Hakim. He made much of the mullah’s influence on the young Tariq when his family visited Egypt in 1996, speaking over what he said was home video footage of the trip. Tariq looked to the Doll just a bored kid. Richard Cody went on to list Tariq’s later travels outside Australia and, before they went to another ad break, ran slow-motion footage of the mullah embracing Tariq as a kid, back-to-back with the security camera footage of Tariq as an adult hugging her.
‘But he was only a boy,’ thought the Doll. ‘Just a boy.’
There were more experts, more opinion, the story of Tariq’s unexplained death, a shot of the Corolla in the alley, more ads, until Richard Cody was once more back outside the Opera House. He dropped his head slightly, brought his hands together so that the outstretched fingers touched, and slowly walked toward the screen, like some kindly, wise teacher pondering weighty matters as he talked.
“We asked eminent psychologist Associate Professor Ray Ettslinger what Gina’s life story suggested about Gina Davies’ personality and motivations.”
“Gina’s case,” replied Ray Ettslinger, standing in front of a bookcase, “certainly fits the classic profile of someone profoundly emotionally damaged and unable to empathise with other human beings. The ability to be a table-top dancer, to see their body merely as a commodity, and sex simply as a commercial transaction, somebody unable even to grieve for her own child, indicates someone unable to feel as normal humans do …”
And on the psychologist went, knitting all the disparate stories into one large untruth: a sad and bitter woman with vengeance on her mind, corrupted by a closet fundamentalist.
“Is it true that this profile fits with someone who could execute a major attack on civilians,” Richard Cody asked when Ray Ettslinger finished, “and have no feeling for the loss of innocent life?”
“Sadly,” said Ray Ettslinger, “yes.”
“It is, of course, Professor Ettslinger, a large leap from a profile to a terrorist—is it not?”
“Of course. We need to recognise this is not a mad-woman. These are the rational acts of a rational human being. In understanding one woman’s history we can better understand why these terrible atrocities occur.”
“But in your professional opinion such a woman could become a terrorist?”
“If that is the form she wished to channel such sociopathological behaviour.” Ray Ettslinger paused. The Doll thought she caught his lips counting two beats like a good professional. “And it does appear that is the direction she wishes to go.”
“Is Gina Davies our very own black widow?” Richard Cody asked.
Before he could answer, the Doll changed stations.
A man with a mike was walking back and forth in front of a studio audience, with the happy authority and plasticised hair of a tv evangelist.
“And tonight,” he said, “we’ll be using the Worm, a line running across the bottom of your screens which rises when you feel frightened, and falls when you feel reassured.”
Two SMS numbers appeared at the top of the screen, one titled “NOT FEARFUL”, the other, “FEARFUL”, and the screen cut to people crying outside the forever burning Sari Club in Bali.
“Let’s start,” he said.
It was as if some invisible force were ripping open the heavens and splitting the earth and leaving everyone somehow outside of themselves, unknown to each other, frightened of shadows on cave walls. And shaping the lightning bolts breaking the world apart were the new gods—the pollies and journos, the spinners and shock jocks and op page parasites—playing with the fate of mortals, pointing at shadows of fear and hate on the wall to keep everyone in the cave.
The chorus of radio and television, the slow build of plasma image and newspaper and magazine photograph, the rising leafstorm of banners and newsflashes not only made any error impossible to rectify, they made errors the truth, the truth became of no consequence, and the world a hell for those whom it randomly chose to persecute.
The Doll pressed the remote.
She pressed it and pressed it and kept on pressing it.
But the next channel was the same, and the channel after, and after that, everywhere, all the Doll could sense was the same darkness amplified a millionfold, unavoidable, a mud-slide of binary signals brought on by the ceaseless rain of fear. All the Doll knew was that they had taken not only her money, but stolen her very soul, and all the Doll could see were more bombs armed police Tariq’s apartment block bearded man Tariq the Doll children’s bodies man woman black machine gun the Doll naked New York Bali Madrid Beslan London Baghdad Sydney the Doll dancing uniforms suits missiles robes blood dead children’s bodies herself disintegrating, smiling a smile that was never hers.