The Unknown Terrorist Read Free Page A

the brightness and the stinging salt, and then only a few metres away she saw him, similarly blinking and tossing his head, the young man who had so bravely rescued Max.
    He smiled. She smiled. He raised an arm out of the water and waved. On impulse, she swam over to where he was treading water, put her arm around his neck and kissed him on the lips. It was a gentle, affectionate kiss, and though neither of their lips opened, her legs washed around his for a moment, and the Doll felt her body tingle.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    And then the water began pulling them apart, a wall of water bearing down and pulling them backwards. They began rising with the wave like sea creatures, and she just had time to give a small smile before she made the split-seconddecision to catch the wave. She jackknifed and threw herself into the wave’s wall the moment before it broke. She felt it lift and hurtle her in its wild aerated force back towards the beach. She seemed to be in the wave for the longest time.
    When the wave’s power was almost spent and she could feel it bottoming out, agitated sand swirling around her skin, she stood up, gulped a few times, and with smarting eyes searched the glaring sea around and behind her. The slender young man was nowhere to be seen. She half-expected him to surface out of the water and grab her unawares. But he had disappeared. Though the Doll would not admit she was disappointed, she spent some time scanning the waves and wash for his lean body before giving up and going in. She went back up the beach and lay with Wilder and a now subdued Max. The sun beat down on them, she slumbered a little, and when she woke, it was time to leave and get to the Chairman’s Lounge to start her early shift.

7
    How the Chairman’s Lounge held on to its reputation as one of the most upmarket pole dancing clubs in Sydney was an achievement not easily explained. Though it had twice won Eros Foundation awards for “Hottest Naughty Nite Spot (NSW)” and once been awarded an impressive five breast rating in Hustlaz.com Adult Almanac , such gongs meant nothing to anybody other than on the award evening, and, as the Doll herself pointed out, who didn’t win prizes these days?
    But like much else, the puzzle of its prominence was entwined with the mystery of money. By the straightforwardexpedient of charging twice the admission price of the other clubs and an even more exorbitant mark-up on drinks, the Chairman’s Lounge kept its status bolstered and its punters happy, because they would not throw away such money unless it was one of the best clubs in Sydney and therefore worth every vanishing dollar.
    Each day at noon the head bouncer, Billy the Tongan—a large man inevitably clad in an immaculate white tracksuit, gold chains and knock-off Versace sunnies—created the entry to the Chairman’s Lounge by rolling a length of grubby red carpet out of the ground storey of an old hotel into the border country that bestrode Kings Cross and Darlinghurst.
    Here seemed to be the perfect position for a business that specialised in pompous cock teasing. The city centre was only a short walk distant, while a block away were the brothels and sex shows and streetwalkers of the Cross—an area chiefly known for a dying retail line in old world sleaze, its major feature being a run-down strip mall that parted the hillock on which it sat like a bad mohawk. Here the junkies and the pros, the pervs and the homeless, looked out over their daily shrinking atoll with as much bewilderment and as little hope as the inhabitants of some South Seas micro-nation, knowing whatever the future might hold, it held nothing for them.
    Around them, washing up from the gentrified tenements and newly built designer apartments of Darlinghurst and the ceaselessly refurbished mansions of Elizabeth Bay, rushed the incoming tide of property values and inner-city hypocrisy, rising as inexorably and as pitilessly as the nearby globally warmed Pacific