The Unknown Terrorist Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.”

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    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 pokiemachine 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