1001 Nights Cast

“Hello. It’s Paul from Readings Bookstore here. Could I speak to Marjorie…?“

‘Speaking.’

‘We’re ringing all our customers with orders for The Peaceful Pill Handbook by Philip Nitschke. I am not sure if you’re aware, but unfortunately that book was banned from sale within Australia at the weekend. We did finally receive some copies at the end of last week, but now we’re going to have to return them. So, you see, we won’t be able to fill your order. I do apologise for the inconvenience.’

‘Oh. Yes. Oh. Well, thank you.’

Marjorie put down the phone.

She swore. ‘Bugger. Blast.’

She’d been waiting on that book—hopefully—for a couple of months. What was she going to do now? She had tried to do things herself. Well, sort of. But it was very difficult. And she didn’t really feel she knew what she was doing.

She was just sick of the whole damn thing. She had led I would say, she would say, an ordinary life. That was the whole point of it—that it was ordinary. Did her training, became a nurse, got married, had children, got old, got cancer, and now she wanted to die. An ordinary sort of expectation, an ordinary sort of event. But no, it was taking forever. And she was just sick of it, and everything. Especially, sick of her children. They acted like it was no big deal. If one of them died it would be something. But her dying, well that was ordinary. Well, fuck them. Busy with their kids? I hope their kids think it’s ordinary when they die.

Anyway, what was she going to do now? They were doctors—all four of them. But they weren’t going to be any help.

Then she had an idea. Quite an extraordinary one—for someone as ordinary as Marjorie. Hmmm. Could give it a shot.

How would she get in there? That was the question. There wasn’t a radical mosque in Carnegie, as far as she knew. Where would she even start? And she was certainly not in any condition to do training in Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever—that was out, at this stage. But she thought, you can’t need much training to be a suicide bomber. It must be pretty easy. Straight forward. Press the button, pull the string, whatever. You would just need to want to do it. That would be the hardest part. But not for her. She kept musing. Yes, well, that would be the way to go. They’d supply the wherewithal…but, she wouldn’t want to hurt anyone else. Although, that would serve them right—the Jihadists. She could skive off somewhere. She liked the symmetry. Suicide bombers pretend to be ordinary people. She was an ordinary person, who would pretend to be a suicide bomber. Yes, perhaps the library.

Marjorie got on her disabled persons’ scooter and scooted down to the library, and onto the internet.

She typed ‘terrorist cell’ and ‘melbourne’ into Google search.

The results were surprising. Certainly, to Marjorie.

34,700 results. On the first page, at the top of the list were news reports relating to extremist Islamic groups: ‘Police investigating Melbourne terrorist cell claims’. But going down the list…she found links to the web pages of a plethora of groups she had no idea about that identified themselves as terrorist organisations: The Blackburn South Sharps, East Malvern Doctors Insurrectionist Collective, Older Women Against…It was the last of these that caught her attention.

The newsletter she read online seemed to suggest they were against anything and everything. There had been actions in past years against: The Big Day Out, Moomba, The Grand Prix, Channel 7’s coverage of the Australian Tennis Open, the Subway fastfood chain, and Ikea. Some of them violent. Marjorie didn’t remember anything about this on the news.

She was excited. And best of all, they met in the Murumbeena Uniting Church Hall, which meant she could get there on the scooter.

The next six weeks went by very fast for Marjorie. She did note that peculiarly there were a number of men of Middle Eastern appearance, who were not only accepted in the group, but appeared quite active. But Marjorie didn’t ask any questions. And they didn’t ask any questions of her. At only her second meeting, she was conscripted into the suicide brigade for an upcoming action involving the Myer Christmas windows. Marjorie had always liked the Christmas windows, she had fond memories of taking the kids. But, what the hell, she thought.

The day came. All the others—Doris, Ange, Hilda and Mahmoud—had gone in one cab. Marjorie was on her own in the disabled cab with her scooter. But rather than having the taxi drop her off at Bourke Street to rendezvous with the others as planned, she got the cab to continue up Elizabeth Street, and drop her at Royal Park. She headed into the centre of the park, and came to a stop on the rounded bare crown of the hill. At 12 noon, precisely, Marjorie’s head, severed cleanly from her body at the neck, sailed up into the sky, a small smile playing around the edges of her mouth.