The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan Read Free Book Online

her cry, swung back around and headed home. She never saw Fung again.
    The following night she heard that Fung had left the club with Mr Moon. A week passed and Fung had still not returned to work. A case of Johnnie Walker Blue Label arrived for Ferdy, a gift from Mr Moon. When some months later Fung’s body turned up in a cemented wheelie bin in the Hawkesbury River, everyone was both sad and a little terrified, not least the Doll.
    But with the Doll, sadness was also a fear that somehow they would find Fung’s murderer and through him Mr Moon and through him back to her—to her who had saidnothing. And mixed with her fear of the police, of Mr Moon should she ever see him again, was shame and anger. For in her heart the Doll felt she had somehow betrayed Fung and she could not stop thinking that she had cemented Fung in that wheelie bin as surely as whoever had thrown her into the Hawkesbury.
    Then she would argue with herself that this was nonsense; that Fung might not have listened anyway. Or that maybe it had nothing to do with Mr Moon. Or that Mr Moon would have caught her come what may. That it was all absurd, for she had done nothing—yet wasn’t that exactly her crime?
    But no one ever said anything, no police came, no questions were asked and nothing happened. Ferdy shared the Johnnie Walker Blue Label with special guests and a new Asian girl, and every time the Doll saw that bottle being brought out on a tray she felt queasy. For in her heart the same words— You killed Fung! —kept playing over and over.
    The Doll only saw Mr Moon once more. He was on the tv news at an election fund raiser. He was shaking hands with the prime minister.

15
    As she started pushing her buttocks further up and out and opening her legs, the Doll calculated she had made only four hundred dollars so far that evening, and that was including tips. Over her shoulder she caught the eye of a fat suit wearing Bono shades. Maybe he was an anal man, she thought, an idea that was quickly lost in a new calculation.
    To make the night worthwhile she still needed anotherprivate show. With some luck she would get the customer to extend it into a second fifteen-minute session and pay the extra, thought the Doll, pressing her knickers in on her anus with a finger. That would give her that extra hundred bucks and, she felt, salvage the night.
    “ Ooooh ,” moaned the Doll.
    The room smelt like drying ammonia. Her lower back ached and her feet were on fire in the slut shoes all the girls had to wear—hot enough, as Salls used to say, to barbie a T-bone. The Doll turned, going from all fours to kneeling in front of him, trying to keep his wanky Bono shades fixed on her and only her. She slowly squeezed her own breast until her fingers closed on a nipple. She pinched it to make it tauten.
    The fat suit extended a trembling hand toward her in which was a folded club tipping dollar. ‘Fuck all,’ thought the Doll, who was now up very close to him, saying,
    “Why, thank you.”
    She paused, counted three beats like the good professional she was, then in a lower voice said:
    “You’re different. You’re a gentleman. I like dancing for gentlemen.”
    The Doll spread her legs very slowly and, finally, with a knowing, complicit look that she sealed with a smile, lowered her gaze to her hand that she had begun running between her legs, while all the time thinking of a Louis Vuitton handbag she had seen spectacularly reduced to six hundred dollars. She could buy it tomorrow if the fat suit fell for her. It would make this shitful night worth it.
    She let out an almost inaudible moan, a bizarre sound,really, but it often seemed to do the trick, and then pushed her hand underneath her knickers. She looked up, aiming to start reeling the suit in. But the Bono glasses were no longer fixed on her. Instead, they were focused on the next table, where Jodie was dancing.
    The Doll wouldn’t give up. There was a Louis Vuitton bag at stake. Though it hurt,