The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan Read Free Book Online Page A

because her knees were bruised, she swung back around to being on all fours and once more began swaying her arse, hoping he might return his gaze to her. She swayed, her knees throbbed, her feet burnt, and still she kept on swaying, trying only to see herself striding down a street with her new handbag, imagining how good it would feel, how in control and purposeful she would look.
    She would get him interested again, she would. Then when her turn on the table was finished she’d go and sit with him, go to work on him as she had learnt to work for the last five years, all with the aim of getting him to pay her for a fifteen-minute private show. She would give the patter only when it was needed, two ears open and mouth mostly shut, talking only when she had to, as she did with them all: enticing them to tell her their stories, their lives, their dreams; always getting them to talk about themselves, all their shit just pouring out and over her, and her saying,
    “Yeah? Wow! Really? Incredible!”
    Of late, most said they were mining executives. A few years ago they would have said they were property developers. Before that, dot com entrepreneurs. They were always making money. They always had a major project about to happen. The only constant thing the Doll could ever remember was herself saying, over and over:
    “Yeah, wow, really, incredible.”
    If they ever bothered to ask the Doll about herself, she would tell them that she was just working at the Chairman’s Lounge to help with her university fees, that she was a third-year medical student, single, and that she had never found the right man.
    Sometimes when she danced up on the table and looked at all the lying going on down below, it seemed to her that the whole world was based on deception. Would any of these men go home tonight and tell their wives and girlfriends where they had been and what they had watched and how they were aroused? And yet everyone accepted that men came here and did such things, and that, after, the men would say nothing about it except to each other.
    And so the Doll had come to believe that most of the world ran on such lies and deceptions, pretending to one thing when in truth being secretly desirous of something completely different; and she came to further believe that such deception and lies were perfectly acceptable.
    And when Jodie and Amber at their shift’s end some-times—if the price was right and they felt like it—went with men to a hotel and turned tricks, they would pretend to the men that they were excited, and the men would pretend that the women weren’t pretending, and everyone knew it was all a lie. Deception mounted on deception, people were never who they seemed, told nobody of what they did, felt not what they said, and said nothing of what they felt. And all this was perfectly normal, so normal that when the Doll once raised it in conversation in the change room, Salls looked at her as if she had lost her mind, shook her head, and simply said:
    “It’s all good.”
    But when the Doll returned to the security of the brass pole at the centre of the table and turned back around, the fat suit was gone and it was hard to believe anything was good. The Doll held on to the pole, which at moments like this felt the only solid thing in her world, and slowly twirled around, scanning the room for a loaded man.
    She spied a lone, middle-aged man coming down from the bar toward the tables. He had a short, keg-like build, wore a flash light-grey summer suit—it had to be Italian—and his face seemed somehow familiar. ‘A suit like that,’ thought the Doll, ‘will either tip with fifties or be tighter than a fish’s arse.’

16
    Drink in hand, Richard Cody wandered deeper into the enveloping cavern of the club and found a tub chair close to a table on which a topless brunette was dancing. Her rounded arms and real thighs and splendid buttocks seemed a relief after the exposed musculature of the other women. As he took in