The Unknown Terrorist Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 hadbeen 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