Free The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan

of parade and rutting.
    Someone clapped and the Doll realised it was not a float they were applauding, but them. No more was she separatefrom the Mardi Gras, a spectator of others, but now part of the exploding street of colour and noise and music, at one with all that was beautiful and all that was grotesque that evening, the plain and the exquisite, the desperate and the hopeful, the predatory and the innocent. No longer did she dance with care about how she might look, but rather with complete abandon, throwing her head back and laughing, suddenly speeding up moves and then slowing them down, so that the rhythm of the dance grew unexpected and wild. And then it was him following her, and he too had somehow become one with the evening and the Doll could feel the lust of the night and his lust joining, and she glowed with it.
    Everything seemed to slow down and grow distant—their dancing, the noise and music, the countless thousands of other people, the floats, the carnival, even Sydney itself—as she caught his eyes, and then so casually looked into the night sky, casting him and whatever feelings she was arousing within him away as if they were nothing to her, only to return a short time later with another look, another way of letting her body rest on his, an arm, her breasts; the way, when her nose came close to his mouth, she made a point of closing her eyes and inhaling. She thought she heard him say his name was Tariq. But later, when she thought about it, she wondered if she hadn’t got that wrong too.

21
    After the parade ended, the Doll found herself walking through the Cross with Tariq. Heading up Darlinghurst Road, the evening was beautiful, and the Cross seemeduncharacteristically upbeat, as they wandered past the he-males and she-males, the offers of cheap pills, tit jobs and blow jobs and quickies down the lane, the tottering junkies and pissed Abos and passing paddy vans and parading trannies, the schizzos and touts and tourists.
    One spruiker broke from his established patter and yelled out to some passing young men in rugby tops:
    “Carn, boys! Look, gentlemen—” and here he extended an arm toward a dark doorway “—not a great fuck but a cheap one, and I can’t be more honest than that, can I?”
    They kicked on for a while at Baron’s, a pub in the Cross composed of a series of small, oddly angled rooms whose cave-like feeling was accentuated by the dullest of lighting and walls painted a dun yellow trimmed in ochre.
    It was a wild, bizarre crush. The crowd surged back and forth, spilling drinks on each other and the hapless sitting on the red leather Chesterfield lounges. There were weary drag queens, stubbled and sweaty, two fat men in rubber masks drinking blue curaçaos, and a man wearing a string vest and no trousers leaning against the wall with his cock out, smoking, looking at the melee, while another man leant in on him and stroked him in a dutiful sort of way.
    Tariq said if the Doll liked she could come back to his apartment for a coffee.
    “What’s the time?” asked the Doll.
    Tariq lifted his arm and looked at his watch for some moments. It was hard to know whether he was looking at it for so long just to read it, or so that the Doll might see what a beautiful, expensive watch he had, a Bulgari Ipno.
    The Doll looked away and upwards, to where all thatseemed to be preventing the sagging ceiling from collapse was a fan staggering through the smoky babble.
    “It’s Sunday,” she heard Tariq say above the din, “and it’s only just beginning.”

SUNDAY

22
    NICK LOUKAKIS STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of his youngest son’s bedroom, listening to the sound of his breathing as he slept. Nick Loukakis had had an affair. Maybe he meant something by it, or maybe he didn’t. Standing there, he could smell his son’s wild dog-like smell, and it was hard to remember. Maybe he’d wanted a way out of his marriage. Or maybe he just wasn’t thinking. Maybe the affair ended the marriage. Or