Free The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan Page B

something had broken and he knew neither how to fix it nor end it. They had continued living together, losing themselves in the dream that is life, because they didn’t know what else they could do. The world was large, their troubles insoluble, and they waited together as strangers might huddle together in a shelter biding their time until a storm has passed. He hoped for a sign, a gesture, a moment.
    He discovered things he had not known about himself: that after twenty-five years he now preferred to sleep alone; that after half a lifetime of his wife with a sound of frustration pushing away his foot, thigh, hand, he no longer wanted to be rejected every night. The sex was absurd, pointless; an affirmation only of what they didn’t have—the affection, tenderness, hope and dreams that had once been theirs. It was a dismal affair of penetration and her body moving only where it was shoved by his thrusts. But the absence of sex he could adjust to as a price, a penance, perhaps. It was the absence of touch, of warmth, of animal connection. She had not let him kiss her for over ten years. When he held her, embraced her, cuddled her, she pushed him away. And yet he knew she loved him and would always love him.
    How was it possible to live with another human being so closely, to eat with them, sleep with them, smell their breath, and yet be so unspeakably alone? She rarely talked. She would say:
    “That’s just me. Take me or leave me.”
    And if he drove her to talk, she would grow enraged and anguished. She would tell him to go and live with Wilder, because, she would yell,
    “That’s what you want!”
    Never knowing what he wanted, what he craved, what he had not known for so many years was company, the warmth and stimulation of sharing the everyday, a sight one recalled, an idea, a story, a joke—the comfort of intimacy. He came to realise little, perhaps nothing, about him now gave her pleasure and much about him drove her to a silent contempt.
    Her passions were her work as an accounts manager at a medical centre, and their two sons, whom she showed all the warmth that she withheld from him. He envied them and he admired her; they were a picture, a beautiful picture in which he did not exist. Outside he knew there was horror, corpses floating in the harbour, bones mortared into dank flats’ walls, flesh raked with gunfire; outside there was violence and evil, people waiting to hurt each other, hurting each other at that very moment. As a policeman he had learnt that. It was inescapable. It was unstoppable. In his working life as a detective sergeant with the Kings Cross drug squad he embraced the evil, the horror. He believed it would make him feel better to meet and deal with people whose problems were worse than his own. It didn’t. For the same reason, he read books about Hitler and Stalin, about genocides and totalitarian states. That didn’t help either.
    Policemen, he came to believe, were just the journalists of evil; they described it with reports, photos, videos, forensic reports; they were to their horror what the historians and biographers were to the Holocaust and Hitler. They couldnot change anything. He could only keep his family safe, while outside, wolves roamed.
    He wandered the small house late of an evening when everyone was sleeping, standing in the doorway of each of the bedrooms, listening to the sound of his wife breathing, of his sons breathing, gently, in and out, praying, hoping; waiting for a sign, a gesture, a moment, listening to the human sound of breathing. He was trying not to think that he was falling, that everything was turning to white; trying not to think that the wolf might already be inside, waiting, hoping, listening.

23
    Only after she saw him dead did the Doll realise that she had never asked Tariq who he worked for, or where he worked. He had seemed in some way fundamentally bored by what he said he did: talking about it the way students do a subject the night before an