“These fuckwits who think it’s about the truth, you know where they go wrong?” Jerry Mendes said, neither waiting for nor wanting an answer. “They think the truth has power, that it will carry everything before it. But it’s crap. People don’t want the truth, you know that, Richie?”
Richard Cody knew he was meant to say nothing. He said nothing.
“People want an exalting illusion, that’s what they want. Find that sort of story, ginger it up with a few dashes of fear and nastiness, and you’ve hit gold. True gold.”
This time Richard Cody knew he was meant to say something. He searched for what he hoped was the right note of irony.
“Truth is what we turn into gold, Jerry,” he said.
Jerry Mendes laughed so much his laughter turned to wheezing and then a thin, high-pitched choking noise that was only alleviated by an inhaler he wrestled from a trouser pocket. He sucked on it as if it were a giant lollipop.
“Journalism, Richie,” said Jerry Mendes when he was once more able to speak, his voice now thin and oddly shrill, “is the art of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.”
10
Walking the length of the Nullarbor Plain did not offer a more dispiriting prospect to Richard Cody than staying one more moment at Katie Moretti’s lunch party. And yet, he stayed in order to impress Jerry Mendes that he was a remarkable man who deserved better, so that he would not be thought to be doing what he now desperately wished to do—leaving in a rage. To distract himself he went back to flirting with the graphic designer.
The talk had swung to the mandatory detention of refugees. At first Richard Cody felt compelled—albeit in a qualified manner—to agree that the government’s position was less than praiseworthy, but the graphic designer didn’t seem to be that interested. Then Richard Cody began putting the other side of the argument, at first tentatively, quoting several sources high up in Foreign Affairs.
And when the graphic designer seemed no more interested than before, Richard Cody began inflating several stories he had heard of “dangerous Islamic types” who had been allowed into the country, playing up a few well-known names with whom he had, if he’d been honest, only the vaguest connection.
And though the graphic designer still appeared no more interested than before, slowly the table began to come round to Richard Cody’s views, which seemed like so much common sense from a man who, as a prominent journalist, really had seen something of the world.
“I mean,” Richard Cody said, “it’s not as if we are Nazi Germany.”
“That’s what I keep saying, Ray,” said the Labor Party senator, who had aioli from the crayfish smeared on his jowl and Richard Cody mixed up with Ray Martin. “We’re Australia.”
Others murmured their agreement with the senator. There could be no doubt about it; they were Australia and, looking around Katie Moretti’s grand dining room and its new furniture and its splendid view, it was readily apparent to them all what Australia was, and all of Australia was as splendid as it was obvious—it was them! It was their success and their prosperity; their mansions and apartments! Their Porsches and Bentleys and Beemers! Their getaways in the tropics! Their yachts and motorcruisers! Their influence, their privileges, their certainties! Who could doubt it? Who would question it? Who would wish to change any of it?
The graphic designer finally seemed engaged; she looked Richard Cody’s way, smiled briefly, and leant forward. Richard Cody was relieved. He smiled back.
“Say what you like about the Nazis,” the graphic designer said, and Richard Cody noticed that she had an attractive dark mole on her left breast, “but they understood design.”
She leant further forward as she spoke, and a heavily ornamented crucifix she wore teetered out from the cleavage that Richard Cody found so appealing, then tumbled out of the pocket between the black lace and her breasts.
“Look at that SS uniform,” said the graphic designer. “Now, that’s sex in black jodhpurs.”
For a moment no one spoke. The crucifix swayed like a talisman in front of them all, beating slow time in that empty space, and the more the crucifix swung, the more Richard Cody looked, and the more he looked the more he imagined her breasts underneath and what her nipples would be like erect, and the more he felt compelled to agree. The swastika was great branding, he said, quickly adding that it wasn’t a brand he liked, but that wasn’t the point.
Richard Cody was draining another glass of the ’97 Moorilla Pinot Noir when the graphic designer got up to leave, and though everyone protested, none more so than Richard Cody, she was going, and going with her was her black lace and her swaying, taunting crucifix and her black-moled breast and her now unknowable nipples. Richard Cody realised that all through that impossibly long lunch she had been bored with them all, not least him.
Richard Cody refilled his glass, determined to make the most of the day, but once the graphic designer was gone so too was whatever small spark had sputtered through the afternoon.
The table talk slowed, then moved on to how terrorism—when it happened in other countries—had such a positive effect on Australian real estate prices. Richard Cody found himself staring out at the harbour.
“Since nine eleven the Americans love Sydney, because we’re beautiful and safe,” he heard Katie Moretti say. “But whatever will they think of us now with those awful bombs?”
11
Richard Cody turned around. Something about Katie Moretti’s inane chatter had captured his attention. With a very real outrage at the graphic designer’s complete lack of interest in him, and intent on impressing the table and shaming Jerry Mendes, Richard Cody began talking with passion of the atrocities committed in London, at Beslan, in Madrid and Bali. And as he talked, Richard Cody could feel his anger happily refuelled by the resentment he felt at the people he was sitting with, who thought of terrorism only in terms of their property prices. He felt himself more and more moved by his own unexpected emotion, found himself speaking about the end of innocence and the shocking destruction of the ordinary lives of good people, and somehow the fate of people killed by terrorist bombs and his demotion by Jerry Mendes and his rejection by the graphic designer were all one and the same, and all the wounds of the world were his.
“You won’t believe this,” Katie Moretti said, “but there’s a very sexy Syrian man who comes to our Latin American dancing classes. He’s a computer programmer or something. We call him Salsa bin Laden. He’s pretty gorgeous, whatever he is.”
Richard Cody felt momentarily confused, as if he had been given a cricket bat to go surfing.
“Well, if you think the death of innocent people doesn’t mean anything, say whatever you like,” said Richard Cody, who liked saying whatever he liked, and who—if others spoke when he had things to say—experienced a strange sensation that was at once rage and jealousy.
“The era of sentimentality is over,” he continued. “Our civilisation is under attack—why, even an afternoon such as this would be illegal under the new barbarians—neither wine, nor women allowed to dress as they wish, nor dancing…” and on and on he went, not that anyone had danced or would get the chance while he continued talking.
Richard Cody then argued for the necessity of torture, properly managed. Proper management, sensible policies, agreed procedures—it was possible, after all, to civilise something as barbaric as warfare with the Geneva Convention, and now we needed a Geneva Convention on how we might conduct torture in a civilised fashion.
Sometimes Richard Cody shocked even himself with his opinions and the violence with which he forced them on others. What was even more shocking to him was how other people tended to agree meekly with him, not, he feared, because they thought he was right, but only because he was stronger, louder, more aggressive. People, he felt, merely went where they sensed power.
Still, at first, winning would bring him a feeling of pleasure in victory so acute his face would flush and his nostrils flare. But soon after, Richard Cody would realise he didn??
?t really believe anything he had just so passionately said. Worse, he had only argued because he felt it important that his view, and his view alone, prevail. And then everything he said seemed to him so full of hatred and ignorance, intended only to hurt and to impress, and he despised the way no one would rise to his challenge and call him the fool, the bully, the buffoon that, in his heart, he feared he was.
And because no one ever did, and because he was at once enraged and relieved that they didn’t, because they invariably shut up, because no one had the courage to speak the truth or, like the graphic designer, they simply left, Richard Cody would keep on talking and it was hard to know when, if ever, he might stop.
“This is a good world,” Richard Cody heard himself saying. “We have prosperity, beautiful homes”—here he held out a hand indicating Katie Moretti’s house, recently featured on a magazine home-decorating show on the Six Network—“some more beautiful than others”—here there was laughter—“but there is irrational evil lurking out there.”
These were grand words, and Richard Cody felt himself grand speaking them. And then he changed his tone, spoke more quietly, took them into his confidence and told them dark tales of terrible plots foiled, of the mass poisonings and bombings and gassings planned and, through vigilance, averted, offering vivid descriptions of how Australians might otherwise have died en masse in the very heart of Sydney.
Richard Cody could feel the fear take hold. He sensed the pull of a story, the power of its telling, as the table went quiet, their imaginings now hot-wired to his images of conspiracy, fanaticism, horror. He could feel himself cheering up. He was on to something, were it not for the fact there was no new story other than three unexploded homemade bombs at Homebush Olympic stadium.
When the taxi arrived, Richard Cody apologised for leaving early, but lied that he had a shoot at dawn the following morning. That, he said, not looking at Jerry Mendes, was “the truth business”.
“A little journalist is a dangerous thing,” said Jerry Mendes after he was gone. “Invaluable, really.” And once more he laughed until his laughter turned to wheezing, and once more he had to reach for his inhaler.
As the taxi swung out and down the street, Richard Cody leant back into the clammy grey vinyl, took a small bottle out of his coat pocket and sprinkled some fluid onto his hands. It was all a racket, thought Richard Cody as he wiped his hands clean of the germs and bacteria he had picked up at lunch—Six, the media, journalism. He would show them who was the master of such things, he would find the ways and means to restore his standing. He would get a story up that no one would forget. As he reminded himself of his resilience, he wrung his hands, finally clean of Jerry Mendes’s slimy touch and the overly moisturised farewell handshake of Katie Moretti, the hand of a mortician, cold and somehow congealed.
His mind returned to the three unexploded bombs and the way he had, for a short time, held the table—prophesying how here in their home town they might yet die wretchedly in some evil cataclysm. But it was hopeless: at a certain point the story petered out. Still his mind raced in circles and the only thing that seemed pleasant to ponder was his memory of the graphic designer’s breasts.
Richard Cody leant forward and said to the taxi driver:
“We’re going to the Cross, mate.”
12
On the table the Doll spun, the Doll hugged the brass pole, sat on her arse, spread her legs, worked the floor, walking on her hands and knees over to first this sorry fuck, then that one, then over to a group of suits, dropping her head low so that her hair came close to them, so that they might smell the cheap scent she used solely for work, saying over and over, dragging every word out in a low voice that was almost an orgasmic groan:
“Hi, I’m Krystal.”
As though it meant something or everything, so that they would feed her money, the Doll tried to entice them to tip, to persuade them that they needed to see what it was that a woman had beneath her knickers, to pull her knickers away so that they could look, but everything the Doll did, every word she said, every gesture she made, everything she revealed and the many more things she so carefully hid, all of it, she told herself, was about money, to get and to keep money, for all the things that money could buy and for all the things that money made her feel.
And every man, as soon as he entered the Chairman’s Lounge, was being measured by every girl only in terms of this—how much money he might have. Every man would be accepted and wanted, flattered and courted, teased and indulged—but in exact proportion to how many dollars the Doll and the other girls thought they would be able to fleece off him.
The long light raking down from far above that highlighted her body kept everyone else enveloped within the darkness. If any employee had been so foolish as to risk their job and turn the lights up, there would have been revealed an outrageous if rather timid cast of characters assembled beneath the dancing naked woman.
They came from corporate towers, building sites, warehouses, flats. They were fleeing, if only for an hour or two, the vertiginous suburbs of the west, the tyrannical taste of the inner city; the striving homes of the north, the self-satisfied eastern suburbs. A few came from other places and other countries. But as part of the blackness, they were—no matter how rich or powerful—now nothing. The woman wrapping herself around the brass pole, dropping the see-through top and cupping a breast with her free hand, squeezing her nipple—that woman had, for the briefest moment of illusion and truth, become everything.
When she first started, the Doll had expected the clubs to be exotic and erotic, and at first she felt she was simply working in a club with no class. Only over time did she come to realise that all this mundanity was in fact highly honed; that the cheapness and the bad taste was not an error but a precondition; that the same music over and over, the absurd platform shoes that seemed to have come out of some seventies movie, and the hideous, equally ridiculous gauzy outfits, all served a purpose.
That in the club there was nothing of any note or interest was for a reason: only the women’s bodies were to be of note and interest. But to remain noteworthy and interesting, the women’s bodies needed to be fed money as regularly as a pokie machine and, like a pokie machine, they offered ongoing small payouts—a tongue appearing, a thigh rubbed, a breast proffered—for each sum dropped into the slot of the hand, the garter, the knicker elastic. If ultimately the grand payout always seemed to be somebody’s else’s good fortune, at least, as in a pokie joint where the wheels never stopped spinning or the music playing, so too did the bodies here never cease writhing and the music thumping. Because here everything had been reduced and simplified to this: the house spending as little money as possible in order to extract as much money as conceivable from the customer.
And so after a time the absurd outfits, the ludicrous shoes, the ridiculous dance moves no longer seemed absurd and ludicrous and ridiculous to the Doll, but as appropriate and as sensible as scissors to a hairdresser, or an apron to a waitress—simply what was necessary to get the job done and to ensure the customers kept coming. But exactly what they were coming for was less and less obvious to the Doll.
One night a man paid her for two hours of private shows in a row, and she spent the entire time on her knees while he stared up her arse with the solemn intensity of a gynaecologist. Still, as Wilder said, for six hundred and forty bucks you would want to view arses that seriously. Another man paid her over a grand for three and a half hours worth of private shows, in which she sat with him and listened to him talk, until finally, his face swimming in tears, he stood up, and walked out into the night.
Whoever, whatever: they rarely mentioned wives, girlfriends, kids. Except to say they didn’t exist or didn’t understand or sometimes, when pissed, both. But then, as Ferdy had told the Doll when she had taken the job, the Chairman’s Lounge was a theatre in which everyone had a role.
The girls all had false names and their own act: there was Melissa, whose eyes weren’t quite right, and Amber, w
hose head wasn’t.
“You know what I’d really like to be sometimes,” Amber said one night. “I’d like to be a man wanking on a woman.” And Amber, who rarely smiled, burst into a mysterious smile that no one could fathom. “That must be really something,” Amber said, “eh?”
There were some suburban mums and a few students; Jaqui with the breasts, and Maria, who idolised celebrities and who always managed to see celebrity where others failed—whether it was the aspiring actor who had a walk-on in a Cherry Ripe ad on tv five years earlier, or a reserve that never quite made it playing for the Roosters three seasons back—and every time Maria would say:
“Such a lovely guy, and famous too.”
There was Rebecca from Adelaide, whom everyone inexplicably called Salls, and who would almost nightly assure the Doll, generally with a sigh, that she was getting out, that she had had enough and was buying a bed and breakfast in Tasmania, or a boutique in Port Douglas. But Salls, who had been there even before the Doll started, never left.
And then there was the Doll herself, who hadn’t been there as long as a few, but who had been there longer than most. Like Salls, she had a plan. Unlike Salls, she was close to making it work. She just needed to make a few more hundred dollars.
13
“I knew all her stories,” Ferdy would later say to the newspapers, “but not one single thing about her—not even where she lived.”
He knew her real name, though, and he knew too why she had been given her nickname, because Ferdy was the bestower of names: hers; the club’s; the cocktails—both the old favourites, the Orgasmatron and the Viagra Rocket, and the passing fads such as Schapelle’s Sister—along with the girls who worked for him there, Amber and Salls; Jaimee and Maria and Danni and Jodie. To Gina Davies he gave the working name Krystal and, after a few months, the nickname the Russian Doll. For, as he would come to tell the cameras, “whoever you thought you knew, there was always another, different person the next time you met her”. But the Russian Doll was too long for a nickname and soon, to the other girls and staff, she was simply the Doll.