Vampires and Lovers

Diana! - episode 16. Who's that on my bridge?

2010-11-05T13:25:00.022+11:00

8 Tuesday 13 August – Waxing crescent

Who is that on my bridge?

They checked out the upper levels, trying to figure where the barking was coming from. Christine walked down the narrow concrete path. She was carrying a wrapped package, a gift for Bruno. She stopped, turned around. Jonathan had not moved.
   "The dog's at least two floors up."
   "Two floors up you reckon." The barking continued, high-pitched and hoarse, as Jonathan, looking left and right, followed Christine down-hill. She didn't like the sound either, but it was not the animal she was worried about, it was its owner.
   Bruno's place was in a block of flats above a marina, near the foot of Gladesville Bridge. Whenever Christine travelled over this bridge, it pleased her to think of Bruno underneath, below, like a troll in a kid's story - Hey baby! Who is that on My Bridge?
   The block was five stories high, but only two rose above the street, the rest filled the cavity cut through the steep slope down to harbour-level. Not so much high-rise as low-fall. The stairs were on the outside of the building. Each floor had its own walk-way, guarded by a blotched white gate and a railing. The angry dog appeared to be secure on a floor above them, so Christine, leading the way, opened a gate and proceeded down the stairs towards Bruno's. A cockroach scuttled across their path, and Jonathan did nothing. Christine wondered about this. A change for the better, she thought, but maded no remark. They ducked under some washing, descended another flight.
   Christine knocked on Bruno's door, and they waited for an answer. She peered through the door's glass pane and saw him sitting slouched in a chair, as if asleep. She knocked again, and Bruno lifted his head sharply and strode to the door.
   "Sorry to wake you."
   Bruno squinted in the light of the doorway, looking at Christine as if to decide whether he was going to be cranky. "I was not sleeping. I was thinking."
   "Thinking!" Christine exclaimed. "Sounds bad."
   Bruno grinned a yellow-toothed grin. "Yeah baby, and that ain't good!" His voice boomed as he welcomed them inside, sitting them together on the couch, before he disappeared into the kitchen.
He returned with a couple of beers, and set them down on the table by a glass of mineral water which had gone flat. He loaded a Charlie Parker CD into the player behind him.
   "How are you then?" Jonathan asked.
   "I am back at work. I am okay."
   "Did they find out what it was?"
   "Of course not. They are stupid. My guts went quiet, and they let me go."
   Christine smiled, "You mean, they didn't try to convince you to stay?"
   "What do you think?" He showed his yellow teeth. "I was sick of them and they were sick of me."
   There was a pause while they each sipped at their drinks. Christine felt the unequal pleasure they took from this act. It made her unhappy. Coiled around his glass, Bruno's fingers were stained, as always, yellow, but she noticed he had bitten his nails right back to the skin. Once long and jagged, then hospital-trimmed, they were now eroded hard to the quick where the skin was red and angry.
   "Are you back at work yet?"
   "Friday week. They want me at the taping for Thank God." She searched for his aura, but lacked the concentration to focus. Instead Christine looked down at the spotless ash-tray that sat on the table before her. Bruno set down his water next to it. As Diana said he would, Bruno had made a choice. Perhaps his breakdown, whatever it was, may have been a good thing after all. She remembered the present they had brought.
   Bruno unwrapped the gift and said, yellow teeth nowhere to be seen: "Chocolate. Thanks." And now Christine felt worse. A few months ago they would have bought him Scotch or cigars, or a good Hermitage. She sighed. What do you give a man who has to give up everything? She changed her mind about his illness and the decision it had forced upon him. Where was the good in choosing life if you could not choose what kind of life?
   "Anything big on?"
   "Erh?" Bruno's exclamation was part grunt, part sneer, and part enquiry. One side of his mouth curled away from his teeth, revealing the place where, only days before, a cigarette would have sat smoking. Thank God It's Friday was one of Ten's few big raters. It featured many rude jokes, dopey sound effects, and a segment where volunteers from the live studio audience threw mud at each other. Occasionally, though, it did have a decent band performing.
   "Anyone big on?"
   "Bit shit," he said. "Eye Candy." A bunch of pretty boys with day-glow teeth and strap-on key boards. Their second single, Candy Girls, was doing the business:

Candy girls want candy boxes

but that's OK, 'cause I'm kind of candy too

   Serviceable, disposable pop but, for jazz-loving Bruno, not a whole lot to look forward to. Bruno sighed into the space in their conversation.
   Jonathan, his attention drawn back by the sound, looked up from his glass. "Diana says hi, hopes you're well."
   "Does she. I am very flattered."
   "Come on Bruno," Christine urged, "no need to be rude."
   "Jonathan," Bruno said, "what do you know about her?"
   "Diana?"
   "Her. What do you know?"
   "Not a lot I suppose. We met her at the Cross. She lives out on South Head." He grinned. "She's going to be rich."
   "Then you should be careful. Rich women, baby, do not need poor boys," and Bruno turned to Christine: "or poor girls."
   "She was poor when we met her," countered Jonathan. "So she's got some credentials."
   "Baby," he said to Jonathan. "I get a bad feeling in my guts when I think of her. I don't like her."
   "Keep out of her way then." Leaning back in her chair, Christine watched them. Jonathan leant forward.        "Look," he said, "if you don't like her, that's fine. I just passed on a message.
   "Forget it," he said. "Let's talk about something else."

They talked about something else. Murdoch was out with the rest of the band doing publicity shots at Rookwood Cemetery. The parent company of their recording label had decided to give the Wets a push along. The image-makers had been brought in and the band was to go Gothic. The budget for the video had been doubled.
   "It's great news," said Christine as she finished her beer, "but now the pressure's on for a Hit. With all that money up front, the CD's got to sell about triple what it used to before the company hits the black: then the band gets paid." She put the drink on the table beside her: "The band could actually make more money selling less."
   "Which is the price of fame," Jonathan remarked.
   Bruno completed another pleasureless glass of water. "How much of this big money is for you?"
   "Not much," Christine replied. "Not from the album anyway. But if they choose our song for the single we'll get some royalties. Even then, it won't be much."
   "Still," said Jonathan, his eyes taking on a faraway look, "to get picked as the single: hey!" His eyes sparkled through his grin. "We'd be songwriters!"
   "Take it easy Jonathan. Nothing's happen, OK? We're not even on the album yet."
   "I suppose so," he sighed, bringing his gaze back down to Christine, back down to earth, "You're right. I shouldn't get my hopes up."
   "Jonathan. You can get your hopes up as high as you like, I don't care." Christine wagged her finger at him, teacher-like. "Just don't get my hopes up, got it?" Jonathan laughed, watching Bruno toss her an admiring yellow-toothed smile.
   "More baby?" Bruno reached for their empty glasses on the coffee table, not needing a reply. He picked up two in one hand, one in the other. As he turned to the kitchen, the glass in his right hand slipped from his grasp. In a stroke of luck, it landed on the carpet, missing the low table, and did not break. "Shit!" he said to no-one, as he retrieved it and continued down the hall, "I am getting clumsy."

Diana! - episode 15: the moon is a strange desire

2010-10-22T07:33:00.000+11:00

Here, as in most hospitals, the ancient and run-down was awkwardly coupled with the newest technology, crisp and clean. An orderly walked past, pushing before him a large bin of smelly linen. Christine wondered about the tainted sheets, the contagious ones from sealed wards. They must be incinerated, she thought. And what of the body's busted parts? They must go up too. So how did they decide what to burn and what to keep for burial? What body parts or combination of parts constituted an object worthy of make-up and prayer, and what was simply disposable? There must be a smoke stack somewhere, it occurred to her as she emerged into the sunlight. Now in the car park she looked around, trying to spot a stream of smoke, and wondering what colour it would be.

The moon is a strange desire
There were no lights to be seen on the top storeys of Macquarie Villa. Neither Christine nor Jonathan had been this way after dark - not since the old lighthouse and Christison park had been re-developed. They craned their necks for an early glimpse through the bus windows.
   The glow of the new housing estate, of the lit roads and footpaths, reached feebly up the main tower, which was defined as a grey monolith against the blackening eastern sky.
   Tenants had been found easily enough for the surrounding town-houses of Christison Estate, but for the main structure, built on the site of Macquarie Lighthouse, business was practically dead. The locals called it Macquarie Darkhouse.
   "Thank you, driver," said Jonathan as they stepped down. Jonathan always thanked the driver. Christine wondered whose benefit it was really for - the driver's or hers. But such uncharitable thoughts were swamped by the sudden smell of salt, and the rumble of waves. The single high-rise and its nest of residences sat within a haze of sea-mist.
   Christine and Jonathan made their way into the narrow streets of the new estate, pocked with speed-humps and round-abouts. The paths were lined with banksias and wattle. A fruit-bat clambered from branch to branch among wattle blooms past their prime.
   A car in uniform cruised by, yellow lights circling on the roof, its badge securely planted on the door. It slowed to a stop, waited on the road up ahead. "You find a step," said Jonathan, "and I'll watch it." A German Shepherd stared out at them from the back seat. Christine and Jonathan waved hello as they drew level, and the security car screeched off. Sparks flew as the car's undercarriage hit a speed-hump, and there was a distant, canine yelp.
   Diana's new home obscured the ancient sky before them. Neither Jonathan nor Christine had lived in a building more than three storeys high. Christine had worked in an office block once, but Jonathan associated long rides in elevators with occasional but tedious dealings with insurance houses or government offices: the Rental Bond Board maybe. Diana chose to live in this place.
   Behind the building's hard outline, billows of sea mist drifted up from the breakers. The glow captured in the mist was a domestic yellow, mingled with the blue-white public light of the street.
   As they reached the glass doors, one or two moths were fluttering about the plastic shade. Several black shapes marked the hot surface, shadows of the dead ones inside. Jonathan tried the glass doors, but they would not open. Christine stood back, tasted the air, as Jonathan searched the rows of black buttons. She heard the drone or nearby waves, their never-ending complaint, and it was almost as if there were words in the sound: the peeling hiss, the rumbling undersong. It reminded her of Annabel's choked cry of distress just about a week ago.
   "It's us," Jonathan called into the intercom. They peered into a kind of open box with a circular disc at its centre, mounted on the wall. A light flashed. They blinked. A buzzer went off, and the glass door clicked open. Inside they found the elevator with its doors open, waiting. And soon it was drawing them through twenty-six floors of silence.
   Out in the hall-way, Jonathan felt the distance under his feet. Tall buildings sway in the wind: high up, and invisibly. He had read this in a newspaper. As they moved down the corridor, a diminishing row of numbered doorways, they saw a door up ahead of them, opening. Diana's blue eyes shone from her pale face, her moon-amulet glinting from just above the swell of her breasts. Her hand reached out to them: "Good evening."

"So," Diana said over her plate cleaned of food, "Bruno is to become a new man. No smoking, and no drinking."
   "Yeah, baby!" said Christine, gritting her teeth as she put on a Bruno-voice: "No nothing!"
   Diana's apartment smelled at once stale and clean. Like a new car, Christine thought. Or like the hospitals of TV fiction - not the ones where real people, like Bruno, wait for health which could only be partial, or death that was complete. The walls and skirting boards were painted precisely in apricot and grey. An aluminium air-conditioning grid carried a dull shine. Christine sipped from her glass: here, she thought, is a place where being sick might not be a health hazard. She laughed under her breath. Diana and Jonathan looked at her across the dinner table, and she realised that she was getting drunk.
   With Champagne before dinner, and two bottles of good red during, they had toasted Diana's new home and wished their song success. Christine didn't exactly feel at home, but now at least her belly was full and warm.
   "Bruno will be fine, I think."
   Slurring a little, Jonathan chimed in: "She will be apple as a piece of cake."
   "We all have choices," Diana said. "He needs to make a decision."
   "And some decisions are better than others," Christine responded. "Really, Diana, I don't know how you can live in this place. It's not just The Gap, it's this whole stretch of cliffs - it's suicide city."
   "And not suicide only," said Diana, "fishermen. They scale down Jacob's Ladder - that is what they call it, is it not - such a beautiful name. They tie themselves to bolts driven into the living stone, but not even that saves them. Sometimes."
   "See what I mean?"
   "Not see, Christine. Perhaps I hear what you mean." The bubbles in Christine's glass came from nowhere, rising in spirals to the surface.
   "It's the height that gets me," and Christine lifted her glass to her lips as she watched Jonathan shift closer to Diana. "Can you feel the building sway up here?"
   Diana slipped a glance across at Christine before responding. "Can you?"
   He swayed back in his chair: "Hard to tell."
   "I do not mind being up so high, Jonathan. From here I see the moon rise sooner. It is beautiful. Sometimes, if she rises early, she is blood-red, or an orange equal of the sun. Tonight the moon will rise clothed in darkness. In an hour perhaps we shall see her, her sleeping face turned away from the light." She raised her glass to her lips, then fixed her eyes on the wine's dark and glistening surface. "But when the moon is strong, her light burns a path across the water. When she lies on the horizon, this path of light is like a bridge off the world. Then the moon lifts away, and the path is gone.
   "Sometimes, I believe I do feel this building's sway. But we are all moving, all of us, so fast." Diana watched the wine's surface remain level, as she tilted her glass left then right. She slowly shook her head. "The moon seems to rise, but it is not so. It is the earth that wheels steep and fast toward and away from her, and we fall with it, away and away." She looked up at them again, tossed her head as if trying to wake. Her smile rose and fell. "Sometimes this speed to me is intolerable. I feel it. Then my own movements seem so slow, and the distances I go, so small. What is the purpose?" She turned to Christine, reached across the table and took her hand. Christine felt Diana's strong grip as she opened the bud of Christine's curled fingers, so that the lines of her palm were revealed as pink detail. Diana's hand was white and warm. "The moon is a strange desire. She does not belong in the blue Earth's sky. Yet the Earth leans after her. All the oceans, heavy and earthbound, they will smash themselves to pieces when the tide is strong." Diana began to trace a circle on Christine's palm, as in a child's game. Through the alcohol numbness, Christine felt a sharp tingling on her skin, the orbit of Diana's fingers, the touch of her nails at once sharp and soft. "And what of us? What of our liquid yearnings in our night of dreams?" Diana let go, and Christine's arm remained outstretched, as if hovering, weightless.
   Diana sighed, and rose from her chair. She turned to Jonathan. "Come," she said, "let us watch."
   Last to leave the table, Christine's steps sank into the new, soft carpet. Its slow resistance gave her the illusion of a floating platform, or shifting sand. Between the hall and the lounge room there was a stack of teak shelves, empty, except for a crystal decanter and its clutch of glasses. Through these Christine could see Jonathan and Diana talking in the next room, but she could not hear what they were saying.
   As Christine entered, Diana crossed the floor in an easy, sliding motion, to reach the curtains on the far wall. Drawing on the cord, she unveiled what was almost an entire wall of glass. Jonathan and Christine, side by side, looked out to the see ocean, but they did not see it; they saw their own faces suspended in the black glass. When Diana turned off the lamp, there was only blackness, until the distant stars, the coast-lights shining on the ocean surface below, lured their sight outward. They shared a sensation of falling. And then the room was full of the light of the night sea.
   Diana faced out to the horizon. "The moon is a stranger in our sky," she whispered to her half-transparent face, now all the glass's reflection. "How old is she I wonder. How did she come to this lonely place? Travelling the stars, what radiance must she have seen, having none herself. What reverberations of bright catastrophes must lie inside her, caught and crystallised! That is why we love her - these whispers of silence that she holds and we cannot understand."
Now she turned to Jonathan and Christine, taking their eyes in turn, and she spoke as if confiding a secret. "When the moon drifted into our sky, that was the beginning of what we are, of what we want, and cannot have. The moon is a strange desire. She wants us to want her, but we cannot receive what she wants to give."
   Neither of them noticed her reach for the switch, but they each blinked suddenly, in the new, yellow light. "You see," Diana laughed, "it is a lonely place for our Wandering Queen, but it is she has made it so."

Diana! - episode 14

2010-10-05T14:16:00.001+11:00

One of Harry's blue eyes watered in sympathy
He squinted his blue eyes, and looked away. Turning from the heat and the electric white on the water, he faced the shadow of landfall, closed his eyes, and smelled the dilute tidal salt and the decaying foliage of mangroves. As his sight recovered, he saw the lines of stakes that protruded from the still water, marking off oyster-beds.
        Looking into the green water, he watched his quarry move about amongst the weeds. But seeing them, and getting them to bite, well, they were two different things. Leatherjacket are a greenish grey, and diamond-shaped. Without real teeth they still required careful handling, because of their long, venomed barb on the spine at the base of their skull. With the barb aloft as they swam through weed and water, they looked comical, resembling tiny, toy trams.
        Harry Minter had changed his name, adopting his wife's, a week after she died in fever. To many of his old mates this was an act of genuine madness. But now, along Birch Street at Pearl Beach, and at the jetties of the Hawkesbury, no-one knew about his little piece of lunacy. Which was just as well: they thought he was mad enough as it was, fishing only for leatherjacket. A rubbishy little fish really. But what could he say? He liked the way their mouths were puckered in a permanent kiss. And the threat of danger from their septic spine gave him a sense of excitement, without any real risk.
        Harry liked the place, this eddy in the suburban current - the open waters of Broken Bay to the east; to the west, a tangle of mangrove and estuary.
With the fishing line in one loop over his index finger, he worked at untangling some light gauge stuff from the bottom of his tackle box. He was lucky today, so did not get far into that chaos. The sharp line tightened over his finger. With his feet, Harry dragged a hessian sack closer to him. He would use this to fold away the fish's venomed spine.
        The fish flapped and twisted inside the hand-net, and Harry set his foot onto it to keep it still. It must have really attacked the bait. The hook had passed deep into its gullet, and the tip of the barb had popped out through one of its yellow eyes. One of Harry's blue eyes watered in sympathy as he twisted the hook and tugged it free.

Softer, lower, and worse
Recovering her poise, Annabel grabbed in her jaws her bundle of knotted twine, leaping through the open door and out into the little back yard.
The phone rang again. Christine snatched up the receiver, and was surprised to hear Diana's voice on the line. She was moving to a new place, she had phoned Jonathan, did he tell her? No? She thought he would forget. He didn't mention the dinner invitation either, she supposed. Wednesday. Macquarie Villa, Watsons Bay. Is Bruno all right? He should look after himself better, slow down. Jonathan? No, she said, no, he was fine when they said goodnight. Did he? Then perhaps he should look after himself better, too. Saturday night then.
        Christine returned to the kitchen to tidy the herb shelf. Next she walked next to the bathroom, staring without purpose into the mirror. The hump on her back raised her right shoulder and tended to push her neck a little to the left. She had to do exercises to stop her muscles from stiffening. She stretched left, and right, breathing in, and tried to settle herself. Gradually she identified a sound coming from outside, with the feeling that it had been going on for some time. The sound was not quite, but almost, human. Like a tom-cat's howl of hormonal anguish, there could almost have been words inside that sound: but this was softer, and lower, and worse.
        She followed the sound through the back door into the uneven light of her small backyard. The sound was low and general, hard to locate. Christine tried the sunny spot beneath the trellis, she looked in the shade behind the old dunny. She found the little ball of nylon that Annabel had been playing with lying on the damp bricks beneath the shirts and trousers that were dangling from the line. She followed the trail of one long thread. From between the vegetable pots that lined the grey back fence, she heard her cat's rasping breath and low growl. Annabel looked fine. She picked her up, and the cat hardly moved, pre-occupied with the effort simply to breathe. In Christine's arms, Annabel felt strangely heavy, like a drunkard, like a sleeping child. Her breathing was shallow and painful. Christine looked closer: no wound, nothing in her mouth or throat; she began to feel for a lump - a spider bite, or a tick. Then, hidden within the fur, she found that a length of the hard nylon line had tangled, coiled and tightened around her cat's neck. She inspected the line with her fingers and found the knots and tangles tight and hard. With Annabel in her arms she snatched up the ball of hard thread and ran inside for the scissors. They belonged in the cupboard above the fridge, but sometimes she got lazy and stashed them in the cutlery drawer or the drawer with the big knives. She found the scissors in the third place she looked. Careful not to cut the flesh, she snipped the thread and pulled it free, but the cat was still choking. Her little coughs were short and hoarse. Christine felt closely with her finger-tips, but there was nothing. She felt again, with her nails, and the cat fidgeted. There at last was the final thread, cutting tight and deep, and Christine could not help taking some hair and skin with it as the scissors cut through. Annabel twisted from her grasp, landing on her feet, and shot through the back door, leaping the fence.

Wednesday 7 August - Waning crescent

Little stalactites of clotted dust
Like a child's play-pen, the high bed was bordered by an aluminium rail. This safety feature could be raised to prevent the helpless from falling. It could be lowered to set them free. Christine let her hand rest on the cold metal as she leant forward: "How do you feel?"
        "Baby, I hate it here. I feel like shit. They won't let me smoke."
        Bruno was in for tests. Kidney stones maybe, or some kind of poisoning. He looked silly and pathetic, lying on the hard, high bed with his pyjamas on. No-one ever lay 'in' a hospital bed, Christine observed, you always lay 'on' it - something about the height and the hard sheets. Bruno's lower lip was protruding slightly. His aura was that same dirty yellow, against the mound of white pillows stacked behind him.
Hospitals are unhealthy places. Christine could feel the sickness in the air, a cocktail of bacillus and bacteria, feeding through channels in the ceilings and walls, and exhaled, heavy and cool, from air-conditioning grids. The grid on the wall, close to the ceiling, dripped little stalactites of clotted dust. A tiny moth landed on one, hanging upside down.
        Christine sat in a straight-backed chair pulled up close to the bed. In a vase on the bedside table stood her gift of flowers. With Bruno sitting up, the lower end of the bed was oblong and flat as a graveyard slab. The smell of the flowers reached her, strong and sweet. She leant back in her chair, away from their heavy perfume. Bruno's hand lying on the hard linen carried stains of nicotine-yellow. His nails were still long, but clean, and cut neatly into smooth crescents. "The Wets are recording our song in a couple of weeks. With any luck they'll use it on the album. They might even choose it for the single."
        "Yeah baby, great," he said, sulking.
        "Come on you big sook, it's your song too. We couldn't have done the demo tape without you."
Bruno shifted uncomfortably on the bed. His knees bumped the cross tray that carried the remains of his glass of water and his cold toast. He looked at it and muttered, "Bread and water."
        A nurse, dressed in white and blue, swept in to clear the trays. She leant over Bruno to take the jug from his bedside table. She asked him how he felt: he made no answer, and she did not wait for one. In this way, she cleared the other five beds in the ward.
        Bruno followed the nurse with his eyes, and his voice was right behind her as she left: "They say I cannot smoke, but they all smoke themselves, they all stink of cigarettes." He transfered his attention to Christine, grinning vindictively: "Menthol."
        She laughed, and touched his bony hand. "I've got to leave soon, so you'd better cheer-up, okay? I don't want you to make me miserable for the rest of the night." Leaning forward, she found herself again in the line of fire of the altered scent of the flowers. Now she regretted bringing them.
        "No smoke they say, no drink. They say I have got to stop everything. I tell them I am broken so, shit: fix me! They cannot. They are stupid."
        "You'll be out of here in a little while, you'll see."
        "Erh!" It was a kind of grunt.
        "Now Bruno. You get better. Who're we gonna bludge demos off if you don't get better, eh?" This raised a slow, reluctant smile.
        "Where you going?"
        "Diana's."
        His smile fell. "Her." And he said this with a growl, almost, of hatred. He may have spoken in this way just because he was upset and afraid, but Christine did not think so.
        "What's wrong with Diana?"
        "She is stuck up."
        "How can you tell? You've hardly said two words to her."
        "I can tell. She thinks she is better than us."
        "Come on, she's perfectly fine." Although, Christine thought, this was not quite the right description.
        "The only good thing about her, baby, is that she is not English."
        Christine rocked back in her chair, folding her arms. "She's invited Jonathan and me over for dinner, and I am going, and I intend to have a good time."         Bruno squirmed and tugged at the pillows behind him. There was a pause, then he pulled himself towards Christine, clutching at the side of his mattress, then reaching to her hand by the bed. He squeezed her, just at the wrist, but his grip was weak. Christine saw this register in his face. Bruno did not say what he intended to say.
        "You want to fuck with her, baby?"
        "Yeah," she replied, "I reckon I could be convinced."
        "And Jonathan?"
        "He's not my type," she joked, but continued: "I don't know what he has in mind for her. But then I don't know what she has in mind for him, either. We're friends. We're having dinner together. Forget it."
        "Forget it," Bruno countered. He was in a rotten mood; he was hungry and sick and depressed; he hung on to this, tightly.

Christine heaved a door open with her shoulder; the next opened by itself.

Diana! Vampire of Sydney. Episode 12a

2010-09-22T06:54:00.001+10:00

"And what have you been up to this morning?" she responded.
        "Not making real estate deals, that's for sure."
        "Have you been busy?"
        "Yeah," Jonathan's guitar and a pile of note-paper lay on the carpet at his feet. "I've been busy."

Mr Travers has his elbows on the table. Diana sets the phone back onto its cradle, sliding it across the desk of polished granite, as Mr Travers leans forward with his finger-tips pressed together, moving them in a vertical version of what children call a spider doing push-ups on a mirror.
        "So," his eyes vibrating above his manicured nails, "we've all been busy. Idle hands do the devil's work. And to be honest, I'd rather do my own. You have been busy I trust?"
        "I've given you two."
        "Only two?" He leans forward with his elbows on his desk. His hands pressed together, he curls down all but his two index fingers, and taps them gently, rhythmically against each other. Here is the church. And here is the steeple.
        Diana looks at his hands, not at his eyes. "Two moons, that is all I have had."
        "My darling, of course you have. I'm not forgetting. One life in each of four quarters, that is all I ask. You've done well, my dear. Yes, so far, very well. And if you don't mind me saying," now the lawyer separates his hands to lay one palm flush on the blue lease document that lies on his desk. "If you don't mind me saying, you are doing very well for yourself also."
        Diana tries to look into those fidgeting eyes, tries to hold them still, but she can't. There are no clues for her here. "I can remember a man named Ryan, and I can remember the water. Dark water. Oily."
        "You see?" He slides the papers off the desk and places them onto the tray at his right. "You're getting better all the time."
        She looks down into her empty hands.
        "You have strength when you need it, isn't that true?"
        "Yes."
        He leans back in his chair. "There you are! You should be satisfied." His smile is wide. "What is it The Phantom said - the one in the opera, not the jungle you understand - 'When you sing, you will sing only for me'. You're not thinking of moonlighting I hope. Only those in the cycle, only those who have been touched for death, you understand?"
        Diana's gaze slides from her creamy palm, across the polished surface of Mr Travers' desk, up his neck, and is parried by his quivering eyes. "It is not that. It is not what I want to do, it is what I want to know. It is not enough."
        "It doesn't have to be. Patience. For you my dear, the sky is truly the limit." He places a pink hand on the document tray. "Others in your position would consider themselves lucky." Again he leans forward, elbows on granite, finger-tips together, his eyes looking across the sharp crescents of his shiny nails. "Now," he says, "how's about a little kiss."

Still sitting by the phone, Jonathan took up his guitar and ran through the first verse:

        River mist in the reeds, white moon in the sky
        Black time flowing by
        Your brand new car, making tracks
        I feel that monkey gripping onto my back
        You got a new ambition, got a new superstition I know
        You got a letter in your hand, a ring down upon your toe
        You're gonna come back to town carrying buckets of cash
        You've made a big deal, you're gonna make a splash

He leant his guitar against a stack of shelves that he had built himself out of a couple of discarded crates and a pine pallet. It was a source of wonder to him that you could measure out a length on one piece of board, and then on another, and although they were on different pieces of wood altogether, the distances would be the same, and the joins would stick. It was a sign that the world made sense, that things which should happen, could happen. And that's why he liked making songs to rhyme - these words sung by different people in bathrooms, bars or studios, would still fit into place.
        He ran the words through his head, and they seemed solid and firm. For the first time in almost a year Jonathan had completed a song all of his own. And it came easily. Still, he would give it a burl with Christine, just to be sure, before letting Diana in on the good news.

The washing had taken hours to complete, Christine pouring buckets of water into her broken-down machine. Hanging out her clothes in the warm sun had given her no pleasure. Her shirts, pegged out with their arms dangling, looked human somehow, and horrible.
        She was expecting Bruno's call, but when the phone rang, all she could think of was Jonathan. But why would he call? She did not want to hear from him. Not now. Inside her head there were two voices. On the line there seemed to be two voices also, all mixed up. It took her a while to latch on to what Jonathan was telling her.
        "What?" She heard too much. He spoke too quickly.
        "Don't be dense, Christine. Voodoo!"
        "I what?"
        "Christine! You haven't been listening."
        "Sorry. I haven't. I got a call from Bruno. He's sick."
        "Well, can I come around and play it to you?"
        "Play what?"
        "My new song ..." Christine tried to listen as he explained that he'd written something new: words, the music, everything, just like he used to do, only this time it was great, he said, great. Christine, worried about Bruno, did not want to hear this. Trying to deflect him, she asked about last night's dinner. What happened after she left?
        "Nothing. We went home." He told her he would come by this afternoon to play the song for her. "See you soon." Christine hung up, swallowed hard on a sour taste. Not one question about Bruno.
        Jonathan was at the door, and still there had been no word from Bruno. With a greeting of scarcely more than a grunt, her friend pushed past her into her lounge room, taking her guitar from its stand without asking. And he sat, smiling and healthy inside his blue aura. The guitar was cradled in his lap as he picked out a slow blues.

        The big print gives, the small takes away
        Business works that way
        I can still see the blood upon your dress
        Still get that sweet, sweet taste of your success

As usual, Jonathan's face flushed as he played - no wonder he didn't perform songs himself. But Christine saw that the redness on his cheek was more than a blush.

        White moon, grey light
        Something here just is not right
        I can see the rising sun
        But I just don't know where the night has gone

        So long girl, guess I'll be seeing you soon
        Till then it's just back to my books and my room
        Sure look forward to when I see you again
        And you can introduce me to all your flash new friends

        "Well?" he said. "What do you reckon?"
        "It's..."
        "It needs tom-toms and a key-board wash." Christine looked at him. The mark on his face was definitely some kind of wound or graze. Jonathan rested the guitar against the side of his chair. "Maybe a slide guitar. And no high-hat or snare - you know, like Daniel Lanois did for the Neville Brothers on Yellow Moon."
        Most people with a mark on their face will touch it now and then, or move their hand as if to touch it, but refrain. Jonathan did none of these things. It was not serious, not in the least, but still, under some circumstances, Christine might have suggested a dressing of comfrey.
        "Bruno still hasn't called."
        "He's probably fine then."
        "What would you know?"
        "You still haven't told me what you think of the song."
        "Where did you get that bruise?"
        "What bruise?" Jonathan raised his hand to his face, his finger-tips wandering across the surface before locating the swollen, tender flesh. He touched it, pressed it, and for the first time felt the pain. He told her he couldn't remember how he came by it.
        "Maybe," Christine suggested, "Diana was a little rough with you." And right now she wouldn't mind being a little rough with him herself.
        Jonathan did not stay long: there were some other people he'd like to play his song to. Moving from room to room, Christine had to make a conscious effort not to glance at the phone. Jonathan had not seemed at all anxious for Bruno. It was Jonathan who had introduced them, He was more Jonathan's friend than hers, but Jonathan had not mentioned him at all, not asked after him at all. Christine could not think why he would show so little concern for his friend.

When you were waiting for a job to come through, or for that new woman to ring; when you were waiting to hear from your sick friend - that was when the phone ran hot with everything but the call you wanted. Jonathan was only the first. Pia wanted her equipment back. Margaret had some tour dates. Some bloke asked her if she wanted to participate in a market survey into cat-food. She told him she preferred dog-food, and hung up. Christine would be pacing through her little house. She would click her tongue in annoyance, exasperation, and then the phone would ring. Vetting the calls with the answering machine did no good. The thirty seconds it took for the message to spout was a good twenty seconds longer than she would give the caller anyway - and she already knew who was on the line.
        Things were getting altogether too weird. Almost every time the phone rang these past few days, she knew who would be at the other end. Sometimes when she picked up the receiver she would launch half-way into the conversation she knew she was about to have. Auras. And now this.
        Auras had appeared to her first during the muscular and breathing exercises at her Ninjutsu class. That was five years ago. The colours just seemed to come into focus, like a bud that blooms over night.         Christine closed her eyes. She sees too much, and now she was hearing too much. What had done it this time, she wondered, what had triggered this latest change? Diana maybe: something to do with her.
        From the front step came the unmistakable slap of a newspaper, the Wentworth Courier. Perfect, thought Christine, it would keep her mind off reality. She opened the door, reaching down at her feet, as a twisted shape hurtled past her. She turned in time to see lamp on the coffee table, knocked off its axis, pirouette briefly at an angle before plunging to the floor. Annabel the cat leapt away, as if under attack, spun, spied the length of twine that she had dragged in with her, still caught on her back paw, pursuing it dervish-like. It flew free and she pounced, rolling head-first on the hall carpet, batting and pummelling the length of twine until it formed into a knotted bundle. Closing the door behind her, Christine looked down and laughed. Annabel heard the laughter and returned Christine's stare with bright, brown, disapproving cat-eyes. Annabel was a boy. Christine had given it a girl's name for fun. Some people, people she knew quite well, had found this disturbing. One or two had even expressed a concern for the poor cat's self-image.
        Christine took the paper with her through to the kitchen table where she sat, leafing through it. One thing about this neck of the city - no shortage of crime stories. And it was not only crime committed locally, though there was plenty of that, it was people caught up the Cross, apprehended as they say, after dirty deeds done elsewhere. On page three, a rail worker, described as "known to police" had been found dead on Forbes. "Robbery," it said, "appears to have beed ruled out. The man was carrying a sum of money as well as a quantity of the illicit substance benzedrine. According to sources, the injured man found with him, and thought to be his associate, was unable to help the police in their inquiries."
        She thumbed towards the back. Two paragraphs on page eight told of a suicide from The Gap, one of Sydney's most popular destinations. Not even the murder of Macquarie Lighthouse had ruined its appeal. The classifieds were dominated by sex ads for Asian Princesses, Young Hot & Latin, and the personals which were always good for a laugh. She heard a clatter from down the hall, and she smiled, as Annabel, at the edge of the kitchen, leapt over her ball of string, twisted, lost her back feet on the kitchen tiles, and crashed face-first onto her unsuspecting prey. Girl or boy, Annabel seemed a pretty well adjusted cat to her. Just think of the hard cash that humans will fork out in order to be ambiguous.
        In a staccato stare, Annabel's eyes darted up at her and away. She was off again. Christine preferred her cat's brown eyes to the blue of Diana's. It was certainly Jonathan that Diana was interested in. She could not quite figure it, Diana's attitude towards her. Some women, teases, held out against her advances with an air of seducibility, but it was often a sham, vanity on their part; when push came to heave it turned out they were just straights after all, scared of a little kiss and cuddle. Perhaps this was Diana, talking up to her at dinner, then pissing off with Jonathan. Although, she thought, it was hardly Diana's fault that Bruno had taken sick. She enjoyed being with Diana at dinner. She enjoyed it when their hands lay close together. And her eyes, clear as a cat's, but blue, not like Annabel's - like her father's.

Diana! Episode 12

2010-06-28T21:21:00.004+10:00

16 "It would be illegal."

Diana opens her eyes. The moon has set. The sun remains hidden in the east. Perhaps, she thinks, nobody is watching. Not on this street anyway. She turns up the stairs into the Court House Hotel, through to the Judgement Bar. Her heels press into the damp carpet. Finding a seat at the counter, she orders a Bloody Mary. At a table behind her, Diana hears three men talking. She looks down at her hand, how strong it is around the fragile glass. Then she feels its coldness on her skin, feels the coldness stretch up along her arm like a lengthening shadow. And she shudders. Weakness. Strength.

A dog will track a stain on the air. A night bird is bound to a trail of distant stars. What Diana had followed tonight was a series of rumours, precise and misleading as canyon echoes.

Tonight, Diana had asked questions at the doors of all-night strip shows, at hot-dog stalls and Yeeros stands, at soup kitchens, at the Wayside Chapel. She had struck up conversations in front of the smudged mirrors above hair-clogged sinks, and people had spilled their guts. It made her sick - having to ask.

She looks into the mirrors that line the back of the bar. At the table behind, in front of her through the mirror, a man drops half a schooner down his throat, slips something into his pocket, says cheers, and heads for the street. Her ears are buzzing. Tom Jones, seemingly immortal, sings from The Lead And How To Swing It. Next to her at the bar a couple of men discuss their next venue. "The Taxi Club," says one. "No," says the other, "too sleazy. How about my place?" Diana hears the smile in the voice that replies: "Didn't we decide against sleazy?" In the far corner a large group of twenty-somethings speak in tumbling, conflicting sentences, contesting tales of conquest on the tables of the pool and techno bar Q. The women gleam throats and cleavages, the men's baggy shirts still hang heavy with sweat. One sporting a crooked goatee, with a last bravado grin, leaves the group for the table of the two men.

Diana watches over her shoulder as their greeting progresses from silence, to gestures, to words, then she turns to the bar-mirror in time to see a man in marbled denims coming her way. He begins to settle into the stool next to her. At her first glance, his leaning body leans away. At her second, he leaves the stool empty. There is another woman seated at the corner.

The two men offer the third a seat. As rituals tend to do, this one repeats itself. The third man soon finishes his drink, says thanks, pockets something, before returning to his friends, who are pleased to see him. The two men reach for their glasses.

"What did I tell ya," says the one most directly facing Diana, flashing a gap-toothed grin, "you gotta spend some money to make some money."

A scuffle attracts Diana's attention. A great big guy in a dinner suit, with wide rolling eyes, yells, "Out! That's it. You've gotta treat this place with respect. Respect!" A woman sits at the circular table looking up through her fingers. Her short, dark hair is brushed flat with a single lock curling forward to encircle each ear. A stud shines from her nose. Two fresh drinks stand on the table before her. Her partner does not scratch his designer stubble, instead fingering his Che Guevara tie as he argues: "We've just bought a drink. I hear what you're saying."

The big man's voice slips into a higher register: "No sitting on the table. No sitting on the table! You're out. Get it?" he pokes him two-fingered in the chest. "Piss." Poke. "Off!" So they leave. Diana watches her two men watch them. She sees them check out the room as people return to their conversations, their drinks, the indeterminate air they stare into. She watches the two of them shift, settling at a new table, wrapping their fingers around the abandoned glasses.

Across Oxford, on Taylor Square, a grey-haired man in a brown great-coat snips through the hard pink tape which binds his newspaper bundles. He thinks it over for the millionth time: 'pink or light blue: why is that?'

The traffic island, Gilligan's Island, with its grass and palm trees, is littered with brown-paper bottles and the usual cast of cast-aways. The lights change with a shriek. Looking up from his bundles, the grey-haired man pays no attention to the two men who jaunt towards Bourke Street in the direction of Darlinghurst. He looks past them though to the regular pace of Diana's smooth legs. Craning his neck to follow her with his eyes, checking out the shape of her backside through her black skirt, he shakes his head and mutters: "At my age!" as she disappears around the corner.

The men laugh and stumble, occasionally pushing each other, shoving, punching one another with affectionate, school-ground viciousness. Gap-tooth heaves his partner against a wall in a mock tackle. "Did you see him?"

"See him!"

"And the smell!"

"What had he been eating?"

Beneath the greying sky Bourke Street carries the tiniest fraction of the traffic that will descend upon it within the next two hours. But what it lacks in quantity, it makes up in velocity. Cars and semis, with their lights still on, fizz past, urgent to make it through the square before the lights turn.

"And that Bitch..." Gap-tooth spots an opportunity, dashing through the traffic mid-sentence. The other starts after him, but, too late, has to jump back quick-time, his teeth rattled by the sound and shudder of a Mac truck. He shifts his weight from foot to foot, ready for the next break.

"The Bitch from Hell!" he yells across the bitumen, still looking, still sharp.

Diana walks closer, running her hand along the wall at the place the two men had collided in their boisterous play. She withdraws her hand from the brick, feeling on her skin the tiny grains of grit, rolling them between thumb and finger-tip. For a moment she stops to look down at her hands. She clenches her left fist then her right, weighing their capacity and strength, how much remains. Both voices come now from across the road. Reunited, the two men walk up-hill along Burton Street. Guessing correctly that they are making for the more tranquil Forbes Street as their best way back to The Cross, Diana simply lengthens her stride.

Gap-tooth sniffs. "Two-Bob was always water at the pinch, eh?" A badly cut rock of speed lodges down the back of this throat. It tastes like the rail yard. When he gets back home, he'll do it properly, do himself properly. Take the day off - a mental health day, he's heard it said. "Hey!" his voice hurtles down the street, busy only with echoes. "I'm gonna take a mental health day, but it's not gonna be mental health day," he says, "it's just gonna be mental!"

Mick laughs as he fends a few feather blows from his sparring partner. "We should have taken her, what d'ya reckon?"

"Two-Bob dropped his cutter, the fuck-wit."

"Dropped his load!" And they laugh again, sparring with open palms, like kids in a tickle-fight.

The classrooms of the private girls' school SCEGGS rise on their left. Gap-tooth halts in front of the sign, Mick following suit. "Snot-nosed … " He begins. "Snot-nosed Cunts … Eating … Girls … " But runs out of ideas. The light of William Street, just beyond where the road dips and the stairs begin, is still distinct before dawn. They cross St Peters Street, nearing the old church, now converted to the Crossroads Theatre. They reach the open gate as, from behind the gate, two strong hands reach for them. Their hair is yanked almost clean out of their heads. Two skulls smack against the stone wall. The two men look into the swirling dark.

The world wanders - now you see it, now you don't. And now it sees you. Diana stands in her own shadow. Mick sees her face emerge through his damaged focus. Gap-tooth, Zak to his mates, who are few, sees the light in her eyes. "The Bitch!" His voice cracks.

"That's right," replies Diana with mocking pleasure. "The Bitch from Hell."

The two men shoot wide-eyed panic at each other. How could she know? How could she know they said that? They look back at her, struggling with this proof of her sorcery. Mick makes to run, but Diana fells him with a crack across the jaw. Gap-tooth takes the chance, lunges at her neck from behind, digging with his fingers, but she spins through his grasp to face him. He claws at her eyes. She lands one, smack, flush on his jaw. His head jerks, hands fall. He staggers back. The church wall leaves him nowhere to go. He runs at her, but she catches his face, like a ball in a mitt, and throws him back against the sandstone slab. His head is loose on his neck. Blood drips onto the collar of his shirt. Diana steps forward. She reaches out. He looks into her eyes. His scrotum shrinks against her touch.

"Ask me nicely."

"What?" he asks in a voice he has not used for decades.

"Say squeeze them harder. And ask nicely," and the pressure now is crushing, growing, and gap-toothed Zak begins to cry, not with the pain, but with the effort of trying to see. "Go on." Her mind is floating, giddy, flying. Free. "Go on. You can do it. I know you can. I can feel it. Say squeeze them harder: Please."

His voice is gummy now, heavy with thick spit. "Don't kill me."

"I am not going to kill you." But she says it without belief. She says it with her mind in the black clouds of her future. "I am not allowed to," pouring her breath over him. "It would be illegal. Don't you know?" He doesn't know. He doesn't know anything. "Say it."

"Please," and he does not recognise this voice, the only one that he can find, "squeeze hard," he asks. "Please."

"All right." Diana smiles. "Since you asked nicely."

Zak's balls burst. He falls in a heap. Diana shifts her weight to her left, looks down over at the other man, Mick, who crouches, his jaw cradled in his spread fingers. Diana steps over fallen Zak for the second man, crouching over him. He looks up at her with milky eyes, guiding the movement of his head with his shaking hand. She hears from beneath his skin abrasive rubbing, clicking sounds. It is like a sack of rocks.

"You say nothing," Diana whispers. And the man obliges. She turns back to the other. His breathing is shallow, a series of quick shudders almost empty of air. She turns from him, without speaking. The sky above The Cross begins to burnish with the first direct rays of the sun. Diana leaves the church yard. Her attacker is dead by the time she reaches the top of the Forbes Street steps. The sun rises as she descends.

Tuesday 10 August
Fourth Quarter

17 "The cards were face-up on the table."

Christine was trying to steady her mind with house-work. It was a clear day, and light streamed in through the kitchen window. This was a time of year between seasons: it could be spring one day and winter the next. Now it was spring, though even in a day the change could come. She pulled the plug from the sink and removed her gloves. The loud suck of the drain followed her into the living room.

She put on a CD, without really looking, and adjusted once more the photograph of her mother on the shelf. After a few minutes she came to recognise the song she had selected, came to hear it as notes and words, rather than merely a vague sensation. It was an old Zombies number, She's Not There, a song Wet Money covered, though, from Jonathan's report, they did it too fast, trying to get too close to the original. The music drifted back as Christine stared into the frame that her hand still held. In the picture, the cards were face-up on the table; there was only one that could be made out for certain. On the Eight of Cups, the sun was in partial eclipse, and the covering moon watched a figure walking alone on the shores of a rocky estuary. In the foreground, the eight cups were empty, arranged in an incomplete pyramid that would make up twelve. The traveller searched alone for the missing cups of her life. She was looking towards the moon, and the moon, likewise, looked to her. They could offer each other no comfort or company.

A sad picture. Christine sighed, and looked away. Bruno was really sick this time, she knew it. She could feel it and, like an unwelcome emotion, it made her throat constrict. When she had phoned him that morning, he needed no convincing to see a doctor. So he knew too, but that thought had given her no comfort. He promised her he would call after the appointment, and she tried to keep her mind off it till then.

18 "My dear, the sky is truly the limit."

"So that's settled. Next Wednesday at eight."
Jonathan smiled as he heard the thin voice through the wire. He did not take her cue to hang up. He wanted her to talk some more. It gave him a good feeling in his guts. He left her a space to talk into.

Diana! Episode 11

2010-06-16T14:45:00.002+10:00

14 "And kissed her cheek."

The glowing letters spelt WAIT, and a sound like a quick heart-beat or some demented summer insect issued from the casing of the pedestrian button. The traffic was sparse, but it had the randomness distinctive to the small hours of the Cross. Cars were turning onto William Street from Bourke and Forbes. Taxis made their pick-up, and were gone. Bomb cars or polished sports jobs lurched out of parking spaces. Even so, Jonathan would not normally haved waited for the lights, preferring a dash to the median strip, and then another to the footpath. But he was still shaken, still troubled at his partial memory and at why he had refused when Diana had invited him inside. The beat of the electronic signal continued, and he waited.

Diana's flat was the lower storey of a two-storey tenement, one of only a handful left on Victoria Street. At her door she had asked him inside. But he was tired, he told her, and his head ached. All he wanted now was sleep. She looked at him then, and he did not move. He understood that he did not mean what he had said. He felt afraid, and a little cold. He looked down at Diana's hands, and in the doorway, hesitated. One of those hands reached out to him, holding him behind the neck to draw his face towards her.

She smiled at him. He felt the heat of her. "Don't worry." She kissed his cheek. "Forget it." She let him go, and he rocked back on his heels. "Forget it Jonathan. Have a good night. See you next Saturday, in my new apartment. Give me your number and I will let you know if things work out."

He began searching for a pen, but she told him she would remember. "See you then," he had replied, and retraced his steps along Victoria Street. He passed the trees planted in the footpath one by one. At the stairway, where it dropped steeply into the darkness, Jonathan had tried to remember all that had happened there, but he could not put the pieces together, not in any order that made sense. It was not so much the space they occupied, but the time. The moments he saw were partial - a face, a look; but not what gave rise to that look; a shape of moving, but detached from body. These bits of memory, pieces of circumstance, they circled each other like motes in air, around and around, kept apart by their own action.

A few blocks further, and he reached the paving beneath the gigantic conglomerate of cheap, nasty city housing: the ugly monster that had made Juanita Nielsen disappear. Once, he had been inside that labyrinth, working as a courier, delivering a package to a door with a number. The corridors had little pockets inset for the doorways; the doors were arranged in threes, in a half hexagon, and that shape repeated and repeated itself as the corridors lengthened. Within these halls children ran, with parental commands hurrying after them; old women in pairs made their way, walking on leashes tiny dogs that stank.

Jonathan had been glad to get out. This night, he had walked quickly through light shining from the entrances of the Victoria Street Development Project. He passed 202, Juanita Nielsen's house, with its purple window sills colourless in the night, its dark windows blank-eyed. Her famous house, like her infamous killer - a survivor. Now he stood, resting against the pedestrian light, feeling and hearing the warning signal: WAIT. The signal shrieked and the beat that followed was quicker now, and at a higher pitch. By the time he reached the far side of William Street, he found himself humming a simple tune.

15 "She is not too proud to beg."

When she began to find herself alert at four or five in the morning, it was as though a new youth had descended upon her. Although at eighty-two, her days might be short, it seemed the long, wakeful nights were adding hour upon hour before the final night fell. But it was a trick, a betrayal. She soon found that two hours dozing in front of the TV was an almost daily occurrence: a nap after shopping; a lie-down with a book after dinner, each time retrieving the book from the floor where it had fallen. Older and wiser, she wakes from shallow sleep, paces through the darkness that her apartment holds, grits her teeth, and mutters.

It happens slowly, but for this woman, too soon. She will give everything to keep it from happening.

Her brittle bones ache; one is already broken: the Radius; she knows their names. This has been her body. It is old and creased, but, like a ten dollar note, good as mint, and it is hers: she will not let it go.

In her pocket there is a 30-day train pass only two days old. It belongs to her. Her pension cheque will arrive tomorrow. Nothing can stop it.

She moves both arms to claw the air. She can feel the air under her nails like skin or dough. The scream and panic in her brain squirms against her grasp. But she holds onto it firmly, she cradles it and comforts it, with a whisper: 'not now', she croons, 'not now' and 'tomorrow I can afford a surprise'.

There is a telephone that might help. She is facing death. There is a world outside her door. Death.

She is not too proud to beg. In the Thirties she was beautiful and got by without the dole; in the Seventies she served in a tobacco booth between a sex shop and a cafe: cash. She got along, asked no favours. But she is a sensible woman - this is different.

She begs. Damned if she doesn't.

'Take the silver' she says, and 'come tomorrow' and 'I will give you everything'.

Diana! Episode 10

2010-06-15T14:01:00.009+10:00

Diana and Jonathan descended the damp steps from upper Forbes Street. They crossed William Street, which was bright and wide and busy. A bunch of boys in peaked caps and white muscle-shirts passed by them, off clubbing. Diana watched as they headed up hill. "Why do they wear their caps backwards?"

"It confuses the predators," and they edged through Woolloomooloo, along Forbes and Cathedral, into lower Kings Cross. Diana walked beside him, with the escarpment rising on her right. "So, that would be the harbour end of Victoria Street?"

"Yes," and Diana ran her fingers along the sandstone containing-wall. "I normally take the second stairs."

"Victoria Street. You go for the development sites then." Jonathan brushed back his fringe, which was obscuring his view of Diana's neck, the ridge of muscle along her shoulder. "At least no-one was murdered defending Macquarie Lighthouse." In the Seventies, he told her, Victoria Street was graced with terraces and an avenue of trees. When developers moved in, the locals put on a stink. It was quite a show for a while: headlines, pickets, evictions. The developers had won, easily in the end, and publisher and local hero, Juanita Nielsen, disappeared: kidnapped, murdered. In those days the term was 'Underworld Figures'. The Victoria Street Development Project now stretched in big red-roofed clumps the length of the escarpment, clotted in knots, like old blood. "No wonder," he said, "you want to leave."

The ridge of the Cross rose on their right, the sandstone cliff reinforced by slabs of convict stone cut and lugged from who knows where. Their shadows slid across a mass of graffiti. In white paint, someone had written: 'God hates homos'. In green paint beneath read the reply: 'But does he like tabouli?' A little further ahead a set of stairs sliced through the sandstone. As they turned up into it, a man barred their way, asking for one dollar. Then they were aware of two others, standing behind them. Jonathan felt his hands tingle and sweat. He looked towards Diana, but in the darkness her face was obscure.

"Money, quick!" said the first man in a hoarse whisper that was urgent and confident. Jonathan tried to take up space. He spread his elbows as dug for his wallet, opened it to show the notes inside, then handed the money over. "You too!" Diana stepped back. Jonathan turned. Diana pressed herself flush against the wall, and now the light revealed her cool, still face. Full of mobility, the man's face smiled. "Pretty!" His voice changed as he examined his knife's naked blade. Diana did not move. "Give us your money, bitch!" She pressed her back against the damp, cold stone.

One of the others joked about credit. The third said, through wide-spaced teeth: "Maybe we'll have to take the hairy cheque book." All three laughed as the first man moved in on Diana.

Jonathan's lunge did not even get started. The robber at his back kicked his leg out, the crook of his knee. Collapsing onto the steps, he copped another in the face which knocked him flat and left him struggling with consciousness.

Time drifts. Through the smoky haze that seems to surround him, he hears: "Jonathan." Jonathan hears Diana say: "You did not need to do that," all in a whisper, soft with breathing, quiet and controlled. He is vaguely surprised to see her standing there on the far side of the stairway as three men, in a purse-string arc, draw closer.

The first man came forward, stepping out of the line. He sucked a sharp breath and launched his knife at Diana's face. But his bright eyes moved more than his bright steel did. Diana had him caught at the wrist. His arm was stuck mid-air. The others laughed, paying Jonathan no more attention: they were spectators to something new.

The man bared his teeth with a kind of growl. His knife, this time, would cut deep.

It. At his command his forearm only shuddered. He looked at her, wondering. It. Her grip tightened. Hurts.

He could not comprehend, this man, as his knees callapsed under a wave of pain. And Diana did not let go.

From behind the two who stood by enthralled and motionless, Jonathan saw the robber on the ground, his raised arm still held at the wrist, and Diana, in light and darkness, standing over him. He saw the man's face lose its blood. His growl, again between clenched teeth, was now sick, and sickening, with pain. There followed two distinct cracks: one, and in a second, another. The man's head jerked. Spew slopped through his rubber lips. He passed out, sliding on his belly down the stairs. Diana shot a glance, knife-bright, at the other two, and they bolted.

"I am sorry, Jonathan." Her voice was rich and dark with care. "Are you well?"

"I'll live." Jonathan knew his words sounded weak and slurred, and he felt humiliated that just two syllables could come out wrong. His eyes began to focus. "I'll live." Better.

Jonathan held out his hand and Diana grasped him by the arm. She raised him, straightened him against the wall. Blood trickled from his mouth. She wiped it away with her thumb, pressed her thumb against her lips.

"Yes," she said, now that her lips were free, "I think you will." Diana waited while Jonathan gained his feet. She retrieved his wallet from the mouldy step, and together they resumed their climb to Victoria Street. Jonathan had forgotten about the man below, but as they reached the top he heard a moan from the darkness, and remembered. "Shouldn't we ring an ambulance or the police or something?"

Diana turned to him. "Why?"

Diana! Episode 9

2009-11-22T09:30:00.001+11:00

12 "When the moon is full and the tide is strong."

You could never tell with Bruno. Jonathan and he had been friends for ten years at least, but the slightest criticism could set him off, hurling hybrid insults as if their friendship had simply vanished. Another time, he might go all quiet and hurt; he could sulk, smoulder for days. And just as easily, he could be as open and generous as the hungry earth: 'Sure baby, is no problem! I do it again. It will be beautiful!' It was a lottery. Jonathan had not tried to keep the satisfaction from his voice when he informed Christine that the new mix, minus the celestial orchestra, would be ready by Monday night. Beautiful.

Walking down Palmer Street in the evening angles of shade and light, Jonathan neared a small park shadowed by the overpass of the Eastern Suburbs Line. Even in good weather old men sheltered here, and drank from paper bags. One man sat with his back to the wall, his head between his knees. He grasped his bottle in both hands as he rocked back. The liquid fell into him, thick and sweet as blood. He placed the bottle on the grass, slowly, deliberately, carefully.
Jonathan walked past, seeing the man smack and savour his wine-stained lips. Turning aside, the bitumen beneath his feet was replaced by an area of brick paving closed to traffic.
Diana had looked good this morning. The little illness must have gone that seemed to be troubling her that night at the Cross.
Kids swerved close to him, riding skateboards, bicycles, roller-blades. A woman was calling for a child to come home, while in another house a television boomed the football replay.
'Perhaps all you need is the right kind of inspiration'. Jonathan thought about it over and over, as his steps led down the shallow slope, towards the water. Christine was the real force behind the songs they had written. Sometimes he thought she had broken up with Carrie merely to provide him with material. When he tried to write about his own life, all the supposedly important stuff, the hurt and desire, seemed to float away as if gravity were thrown into reverse. Those songs of his were smart and empty, and sometimes not even smart. But Christine goaded him. She loved her life, loved digging around in it, and was only too happy for Jonathan to join in. The melodies she came up with seemed to carry the words with them. Still - he missed that childish feeling: 'all by myself'.
Diana liked him, he was sure. It was she who had suggested they have lunch together, while Christine was fetching her shout at The Rose. She seemed to think he could write, although how she figured this out he didn't know. He turned over some ideas in his mind, but they were dead ones. The melodies he hummed broke and dissolved, and came to nothing.
The trees high on the north side of the harbour caught the failing sun. Even in the lingering daylight, the moon had a sharp radiance, full and white. 'It's all down hill from now on,' Jonathan laughed to himself; not like the new moon that had hung around Diana's neck at lunch: a tiny sliver growing into form.
Jonathan came to the Harbour's edge, down by Woolloomooloo Bay. He leant over the iron rail and looked down amongst the city refuse. The water was high against the containing wall and the pillars of the finger-wharf. A brown froth rose and fell at the agitated join of water and stone, as if the harbour were fraying, like rope.
Jonathan could see a metre or two into the green water. A trail of bubbles rose from the invisible depths, spiralling to the surface. The rotting on the harbour bed is continuous. Here lived bacteria that thrived on minimum light and air. But at each digestive moment, a tiny bubble formed, scarcely to be seen. And another.
The light had now left the hill-top on the north shore. The water and all the land were in shadow. Behind Mosman, where the rich maintained their Harbour Views, the sky was deep and blue, the moon clear, big, and alone; Jonathan admired its steely brightness. Not dressed for night-time, he began to feel cold, and he considered returning home before full dark fell.
A power-boat disturbed the evening quiet, breaking the rhythm of the harbour swell. Quick ripples became noisy and insistent, and Jonathan watched as the froth was beaten and grew.
In piercingly cold European lakes, thousand-year-old trees are said to lie slowly rotting in the sediment. Within their spongy flesh form pockets of vapour. These remnants of extinct forests, at times when temperatures change, at dawn or sunset or when the air pressure falls, when the moon is full and the tide is strong, they rise, they breach the surface like sea-beasts, exhaling their stinking gas. Then they will sink again, heavy and deep and invisible.
Jonathan saw that the street lights had come on automatically in the increasing dark. They cast white pools onto black water. A red Alfa, shiny and new, took a corner hard, its tyres shifting just enough not to screech. Headlights sliced through a stream of mist that rose from a storm-water pipe. Like a visual echo, this recalled to him the sunlight on the smoke blown from Diana's lips across the white-washed brick of the cafe: white on white. He walked on, humming an uncertain tune.

Monday 29 July 1991
Waning gibbous

12a "This was the way Bruno always ordered food."

They ditched the joint at the doorway of Alfresco's. Bruno claimed their seating for six as if it were reconquered territory.
"Couple of bread for everybody, ah, a couple of beer, couple of cheese. Entree. Everyone want entree." This was the way Bruno always ordered food. "Feed us with some pasta and salad and bread. Some wine. And a couple of bowl of chilli." The waitress looked to the rest of the table for help, but they were celebrating, busy talking: Murdoch, Annie and Jonathan; Diana and Christine.
"Is that your order?" the waitress asked, getting desperate. Christine looked up. "Is that your order?" she repeated hopefully, now that someone besides Bruno was acknowledging her.
Christine raised her voice above the general din: "Okay if we start with salad and bread and plonk?" The others nodded. Bruno dragged at his Camel, sucking hard through his teeth. Christine beckoned to the waitress whose eyes had lost that panicky quickness, "We'd like three of the garlic bread, and two plain..." Bruno stabbed his cigarette into the ash tray as he leant over to Annie, taking her attention: "Restaurant you should be able to say 'feed us' and they feed you, and you pay!" Annie agreed, trying not to stare at the lumpy brown cigarette stains between his teeth. Christine continued: "A carafe of red, and a white. Just give us a few minutes to decide on the rest." Bruno breathed into Annie's face: "They don't know shit about service in this country." She agreed with this, too.
The wine was already running low as the baskets of bread arrived. Annie, her hair cropped short and bleached almost invisible, turned to Murdoch. He was wearing black leather trousers and a white T-shirt, ridged by a singlet underneath - exactly what he wore on stage, minus the singlet. He was trying to attract Diana's attention, but she was deep in talk with Christine.
"Red or White?" Annie enquired to the back of Murdoch's neck.
"What?" He replied, not turning around.
"Wine. Red or white?" Annie repeated to the back of his head.
"White."
Annie ordered red.
Diana was wearing an all-purpose little black number, showing off her neck and shoulders for the first time that Christine could recall. A medallion of a crescent moon rested on her skin above the black fabric. A perfect throat to go with her perfect back, Christine observed. Her waist tapered until it was obscured by the edge of the table. And Christine asked: "How's the knee?"
"It is very fine. And, you see, no make-up on the forehead." Diana rubbed her finger lightly across the place where the bruise had been. "Where did you learn to do these things?"
Jonathan leant across the table. "Her mother was your all-round psychic and white witch, purveyor of medicines and potions."
Christine shut him up with a look. She did not like it when someone answered a question directed at her. "My mother was a professional fortune teller."
Murdoch chimed in: "Crystal ball?"
"Yes. Crystal ball, tarot cards, palm reading, all that stuff. But they were only the props. That's just the sort of thing the punters expect." Fixing Murdoch with her eyes: "Rather like leather trousers, don't you think?"
Annie laughed. Murdoch did not. He turned to Diana, smiling at her with his crooked canines, asking if she had seen his band, and did she know there was an album in the pipe-line, and a tour of the USA, and, who knows, after that....
Diana turned away from Murdoch as if he were not there: "You said your mother was: is she dead?"
"Yes."
"And your father?"
"He lives out on the Hawkesbury River. Gone Fishin'."
Annie's carafe of red arrived. She looked into it, troubled for a moment. The mouth-red, the gum-red. That is the problem with dinners, so many mouths to feed. Her last lover, her man of three years, when they split he kissed her hard, stabbing, goodbye, because they hadn't kissed in almost two. She poured a glass for herself, the red liquid folding, collapsing into itself, settling flat. She reached over, thumped the carafe on the table beside Murdoch. He took the wine without looking at it and leant toward Diana, trying to connect with her eyes.
"White wine?" he said, proffering the carafe.
"No thank you," she replied, taking it, "I prefer red." Murdoch looked down at the carafe in her hands, opened his mouth, but said only: "Um". When Diana had finished pouring, Annie leant in front of him to take her wine back. On Murdoch's left, Diana had resumed her conversation with Christine; on his right, Annie was inviting Jonathan to drop in during their recording session. Murdoch poured himself a glass of water. Swallowed it.
Bruno was talking to the waitress, who smiled fixedly. He was ordering more wine and finding out what brand of Cognac they stocked. This is a very important occasion, he told her: Jonathan and Christine were going to be famous. Their song is going to be on a CD. "I am a little pissed, and I want to have a good time, okay?" The waitress said that was fine by her, and walked quickly for the kitchen door.
Murdoch eyed the last piece of garlic bread lying in its cane basket, lined with a red paper napkin. Diana's fingers reached down to encircle it, drawing the bread towards her mouth. Placing it between her teeth she squeezed it slightly, cracking the crust. A little of the yellow juice ran down between her fingers, and she slowly licked them clean. Christine noticed this, and Jonathan. Annie looked away. Murdoch readjusted in his seat.
They ate and drank, and Bruno always wanted something from the far side of the table. He asked the waitress for a bigger glass. Murdoch invited Diana to tonight's gig at Blue City, telling her that he would put her name on the door.
"Some women..." he said to Diana, "some women think blokes in my business have this gigantic sex drive, you know, that we're always rootin', but I reckon I only get it about four or five times a week, tops."
She replied: "Do you want to have sex with me?"
"You bet I do."
And she said: "That is a pity."
"Hey baby!" Bruno offered, "you want some more sauce?"
A new bunch of customers came through the door, and something flew in with them. It landed on the table in front of Christine and started its run for the shadow underneath a basket of crumbs. Jonathan was quick on the draw. With the cloth napkin in his hand he made the table rattle and spilt some of Bruno's wine. A small, barbed leg stuck out quivering from beneath the white linen. Christine rolled her eyes. Murdoch said 'yuck'.
"You see, Diana, Jonathan has these bad habits." Christine reached over the table, resting her hand near Diana's. "I, however, manage to combine a wild unpredictability with a mild humour and extreme tolerance of divergent opinions." She pulled back and jabbed Jonathan with her finger: "Don't I!"
"Christine," he said, rubbing his wounded shoulder, "you're the light of my life."
"Yes," she retorted, "and you're the light relief of mine."
Jonathan laughed, turning to Diana, "She's a ball-breaking bitch, you know."
"That's right, Diana," said Christine, "I am." Then she cast Jonathan a dead-pan stare: "Too bad it's wasted on you though."
"Well you can go and get fucked!" Jonathan was a little surprised that there was actually some hurt in his voice, that he had taken some genuine offence, and he snatched up the napkin, depositing it into the potted plant behind him, while he recovered his humour.
After watching him, with a smile wiped on her face, Christine once more leant towards Diana to whisper: "And he's foul mouthed too."
Jonathan turned to Annie, feeling that, for the moment at least, Christine had won their tug of war for Diana's attention. Annie covered her mouth as she spoke to him, so her words were hard to make out, and Jonathan did not pay close attention.
"I think I told you," Christine continued, "I need someone to move in to my place. Do you know anybody?"
Diana shook her head: "I know very few people in this city."
"Then what about you? You're not thinking of an escape from the wilds of Kings Cross yourself are you?" Diana smiled, her hand wandering to the amulet on her neck. "What do you think?" Christine continued. "The peaceful suburban life-style of Darlinghurst might be just what you need. A new scene. Recharge the batteries."
"You think we would be compatible?"
"Oh yes! I think we could be very pattable."
"It is true, Christine, that I am thinking of moving, but I am too used to living alone. I have lived that way ... a long time. I will probably find a place to myself." Her hand left the piece of jewellery, rested lightly on the table. "I am like Jonathan you see, I have some very bad habits."
"Oh well," said Christine after polishing off another glass, "if you change your mind you know where I am."
"Yes," replied Diana, "I do."
When it was time for coffee, Bruno ordered Cognac, and complained that the nip was too small. The waitress explained that it only looked small because the glass was so big.
The conversation turned to the night ahead. Annie invited them all to the Blue City, the band's last gig before studio rehearsals began. Jonathan, his attention caught by a faint crackling, a kind of scratching sound, looked around the table for its source. Bruno was keen to go: yeah, yeah, baby, The Hub, (which played after Wet Money) did this hot Ray Charles set. "Drink up, baby, and we go." He took a gulp of his Cognac. The others sipped their drinks, except Diana, who merely rested her finger-tips on the rim of her glass. The wine reflected red upon her skin. Maybe it's the creaking of the table joints, thought Jonathan, or the floor-boards. Diana's left hand slid from her glass to the linen serviette in her lap. She dabbed her lips with the cloth as Bruno knocked back the last of his brandy.
Bruno felt the brandy's warmth deep in his stomach, but his smile did not last: a stab of pain in his guts stopped him short. His fingers went numb and cold. He tried to hide behind the long breath that he drew. As he looked up he saw that Diana was watching. Annie glanced at him a moment but, seeing his lips turn white, turned away. Bruno looked for Jonathan, but Jonathan was paying him no attention. Christine too had her mind elsewhere, her eyes upon Diana. Diana's white serviette lay lightly crumpled inside her left hand. Bruno saw her smile. Diana turned away, and said to Christine: "I think that your friend has become unwell."
In the dim light, Christine could not see Bruno's aura, but she did not need to. His face was suddenly lined and old, stony-pale. "Let's pay the bill mate," she said to Bruno from across the table. Jonathan could not get the sound out of his mind, the crackling, the scratching, a kind of dragging sound. Now it seemed that it was coming from behind him. "We'll share a cab, eh?"
"No," Bruno said, "I'll go by myself. You can stay."
"Don't be a dill, we'll come with you. Jonathan, you right?"
Bruno looked from Christine to Jonathan, who now had his back turned. In the confusion, Diana's face had retained its smile. "No," he said, as the pain came again, and he failed to keep the shock of it from his voice. "By myself."
Christine stood. "Hey Jonathan! Bruno isn't feeling too good," and she poked him where she was sure it would hurt, "let's split." Jonathan looked up this time, but Christine could see that he did not know what had been going on, and that the sharp little pain she inflicted had just added to his confusion. Another groan forced its way through Bruno's throat. She turned to him: "Gimme thirty bucks." Bruno stared back at her. "We're gonna pay. Come on. I'm not a charity. Thirty bucks!" Christine peeled off thirty of her own, slapping it onto the table in front of Jonathan. "See you later," she said. "You've been an inspiration." As Jonathan turned to watch them leave, he saw through the corner of his eye a white blur, down to his right. In with the potted plant was the white napkin he had used to crush the cockroach, the linen stained with the brownish juice of the insect's insides. One leg was moving back and forth, back and forth, its barbs catching again and again on the tight weave.

"You can see the moon rise. The sound of the waves is like voices." Annie and Murdoch had split for their gig on Oxford Street, leaving Diana and Jonathan to finish the last of the wine. She confided her plan to move away from Victoria Street. A place was virtually secured, she told him over a full glass, in a new high-rise overlooking the cliffs of South Head. "It will be perfect for me. That is, if the lease comes through."
"Where is it exactly?"
"It is right on the edge. Macquarie Villa. It was once a lighthouse."
"I know it, down by The Gap - luxury apartments on a site like that - it's a disgrace."
"It looks out to the sea."
"And now it's up I suppose it might as well get lived in. Have you got enough money for a place like that?"
"My solicitor says I do. My uncle had more assets than the family knew."
"And you've got it right away?"
"No. I have borrowed on my expectations."
"Is it safe to do that?"
Diana smiled indulgently, looking down into her wine, her white fingers rosy with reflected light. "It may not be safe, of course. Things can go wrong. But I am confident that my solicitor's advice is good."
"So... Spectacular ocean views! Do I get to see?"
"Of course. Next week, I hope. I would like you and Christine to come for a house-warming dinner. Can you come?"
They drank to it, and Diana accepted Jonathan's offer to walk her home.

Diana! Episode 8

2009-11-17T06:42:00.000+11:00

Chapter 11 cont...

Taking her place opposite, beneath the shade of a Cinzano umbrella, Diana reached at once for the menu, smacking her bright lips. "So. What will you be eating?" Jonathan ordered an open sandwich with turkey, in honour of the band, while Diana chose a small salad and a chicken-liver pate.
She was wearing the same burgundy pullover from the night they bumped into each other at Raphael's. And the gold chain too, he noticed, although attached to it this time was a kind of small, shiny disk. In the cool sunlight, the little amulet flickered, sparkled. At first sight, the medallion had seemed entirely black, but Jonathan now caught the faintest glimmer of a gold thread marking a part of its circumference.
"That's beautiful," gesturing with his eyes.
Holding it away from her chest, she looked down at it briefly, before returning her attention to Jonathan. "Thank you. It is a beautiful thing."
And now Jonathan reached out. He felt the faint caress of the outmost fibres of Diana's sweater against the hairs of the back of his hand. The medallion was strangely heavy in his finger-tips. "What is it?"
"I believe it is the new moon. The Queen of Heaven."
"Well, she's lookin' a little thin."
"Not thin. Young."
"Sorry," Michael said. "Is it some sort of good luck charm, then?"
"I hope so. It is an heirloom, but it only came into my hands today. Through my lawyer."
"I never heard of a lawyer working on the Sabbath before. Why's a law abiding citizen hanging about with lawyers anyway?"
"Family business. This little charm belonged to my uncle, apparently, and when he died, he left it to me."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"There is no need. He died many years ago. It is just that his lawyers could not find me, hidden away here in Australia. They say he has left me some money. I don't suppose the sum is very large, but there is no way of telling precisely. Not until the estate is settled."
"Were you close?"
"Not close. I wrote to him once a long time ago. In Austria. The last time I saw him I was a little child, so young. All I can remember is his beard and his big face, and the smell of tobacco." As if reminded, she took out a cigarette, "Do you mind?"
"No, not at all, although I forgot my lighter today."
In the glass ash-tray there was a book of matches stamped with the cafe's insignia. She used this, and returned it to the table, blowing smoke into the open air. In a moment, the sun broke clear above the branches, the light becoming heavy and intense. Jonathan's hangover reasserted itself, and he took his sunglasses from his breast pocket, sighing with relief as the light softened. His scratched Ray Bans, repaired with glue and a rubber-band, rested unevenly on his nose.
"Wouldn't it be great to be the one who invented these things," he said with a smile, leaning back and glancing toward the friendly sky, "just to go through life knowing that you were the one who made the world a darker place in which to live."
When their food was served, Diana tucked right in, digging one cracker after another into the creamy liver paste. Jonathan, though, had over-estimated his powers of recovery, and could only manage a nibble at some parsley.
"I enjoyed that song of yours last night." He looked up at her, spinning the green stalk in his pale fingers. "It made me laugh." Jonathan tried unsuccessfully to recall Diana laughing during his song, but she continued: "How many songs have you and Christine written?"
"About a dozen. But only about four good ones."
"How do you know when a song isn't good?"
"I don't know how other people tell, but when Christine doesn't want to go over it about a hundred times, I know it isn't worth saving."
"How did you tell before you started working with her?"
"I didn't. I just kept writing them and trying to palm them off on bands. I don't think I wanted to write good songs, so much as just be a song writer."
"And Christine, she wants to write good songs?"
"I think that's it."
"I don't know if I could work in a partnership of that kind. If you like something - a word or a note, and she does not. Who has the final say?"
Jonathan had to think about this one: "I don't know. No-one. It depends on who feels most strongly."
"And who normally feels most strongly?"
"Christine I guess. I don't know. Sometimes it's me, but she might give you a different answer. We just do it as it goes along."
Jonathan tried to look Diana in the eye, but she was looking past him, into the distance. There was a distance, too, in her voice. "I think true partnerships are very rare. Someone will always dominate."
"Sure. As long as it isn't always the same person."
"Have you thought of writing by yourself again?"
"I don't think I could."
She lit another cigarette and took a long drag, releasing the smoke in a slow stream.
"But there is the freedom. You do what you want, and when you have done it, it is yours." Although he rarely found cigarette smoke appealing, Jonathan was taken by its clean whiteness as it drifted into the daylight, how it caught, how it contained the rays of sun-light that speared through nearby trees. In the weak breeze, the smoke-cloud hung together as it drifted from them, breaking, like slow surf, against the white-washed building. He yanked his attention back towards Diana, hoping he had not been rude by gazing too long into space.
"Then there's the responsibility to consider."
"But you have done it before," she insisted.
"Yeah," grinning, "and look where it got me - I have the admiration and respect of Young Turkeys everywhere."
"Perhaps, Jonathan, all you need is the right kind of inspiration."

Music faded to nothing. "So?" She was mad at him. She wanted him in no doubt about this.
"Um, it's good." He looked across at her but her smile was flat and uncommunicative. "It's nice. But don't you think the strings and the choir are, you know, a bit much?"
"I think it's good." She had a plan. "I think it fills it out."
"But Wet Money doesn't use synthesisers."
"Perhaps they should."
"Christine, we've got to be serious about this."
"If you wanted to have your say on the mix-down, you should have been here." Jonathan had told Christine that he had slept in. When she rang he must have been in the shower.
"But it doesn't sound anything like the Wets."
"That's their job." Christine unloaded the cassette deck. "They're the fucking band, they know what they sound like."
"If we don't make the song sound like them, they'll be insulted. And if they have to make changes, they'll stuff it up. Or worse, they'll get scared and won't try it for the album at all. We've got to give it to them perfect, so all they have to do is learn it. You know: follow the bouncing ball."
"Ring Bruno at work then. Tell him you don't like it."
"Well," said Jonathan, looking away, his aura all a flutter.
"I thought we had to be serious about this."
"Okay, I will." Making no move.
"Go on then."
"Fine." He sat back in the arm chair and sighed. "It's not that it's bad. It's good. But it could be better."
"That's right, John baby: you tell him." Christine allowed herself a smile; Bruno would re-mix the tape the way they wanted it, and it wasn't she who had to break the news. "I'll make something to eat while you're on the phone - want anything?"
"No thanks," said Jonathan, "I've eaten."

It took about five minutes of health, weather and drug anecdotes, before Jonathan managed to broach the subject of a new mix. Christine would have preferred a little of that old Bruno hysteria, just to make Jonathan squirm a little, but as far as she could hear from the kitchen, Bruno hadn't minded at all. Oh well. Soon after, Jonathan had left with that 'I've been a good boy' bounce in his step. Christine did not blame him for this. Not exactly.
Sunlight on her lumpy neck, she dug up the earth surrounding a batch of newly planted chilli seedlings, turning up the roots of the weeds to let them choke in the sun. A twinge in her shoulder told her that gardening was over for the day. Her knees clicked as she rose. "Annabel!" she called, and she waited until the cat had slunk through the door before she went inside. It was not safe to leave a cat out while seedlings were new and the soil freshly turned.
The muscles of her arm tightened under the cold water from the laundry tap, and the high part of her shoulder cramped uncomfortably. She reached behind her neck with her left hand, and probed with her fingers the hard lump of bone and skin. It felt ugly, and now, as though the feeling were contagious, the pleasure she usually took in her body began to drain from her.
In the small, age-spotted mirror, she looked herself over, her short straw-coloured hair, her hazel eyes, nondescript. Her father had eyes of blue, though over the years the whites had become yellow and watery from drinking. Her brown hand kneaded the muscle above her shoulder. That lump on her back was ugly, and it was hard to forget an ugly thing. Although she had ceased to be self-conscious in the childhood sense of hiding or fighting, she knew that this hump was not what people wanted to see, and that even some of her friends disliked the look and touch of it. She felt the aversion in their embrace. They preferred lovely, straight backs. Like Diana's.
When does a person feel beautiful? she wondered. After good sex? But that was more a feeling of cleverness, of almost shocked pride, shared or otherwise. When the weather was cool, she thought, and the air was clear and the sunlight rested easily on your skin; when you woke from a long sleep and a dream, and there was nothing to do but remember it. She laughed at herself: 'these are a few of my favourite things'. Her mother had possessed that knack of making her feel beautiful, even more than her father had, her father who had called her beautiful, used that word, often. Christine once again probed her shoulder massaging some of the tension out of the hard, twisted muscle.
Her mother had read fortunes for a living. She told her young daughter stories of ugly lines within beautiful hands: hands she had seen and read in canvas tents beside any number of country highways. These lines, she said, could speak of violence and hate. Men would ask if they were soon to be rich and she had replied, invariably, yes. Ugly stories inside beautiful books. But, she would say, holding Christine's palm face-up inside her own, the story is the book, and ugly is as ugly does. It was one of her sayings, like 'In this world there is a place for everything - except blowflies'. This she would repeat while pacing the dirt floor, red swatter poised, in pursuit of some heavy-laden beast with only moments to live. Christine could hear even now the thick buzzing in the muffled heat, and her mother's scratchy voice: The problem isn't that they exist, she would say, stalking through the hot tent that was their home, it's that they still exist. Whack! It occurred to Christine that maybe here was a reason she had teamed up with Jonathan, the Cockroach Crusader.
Country shows smelled of horse-shit and fairy floss, and it was at one of these that Christine's mother had met the man who was to become Christine's father, or step-father, to be precise. Christine had turned eight and had just completed her first season as mistress of the cash-box. After six months she could snap, count, and bundle notes with the best of them.
Standing now at the laundry tub, Christine looked down at her fingers and remembered the stain of country money, the smell of it, and how at the end of the week's count she needed to wash her hands twice before the soap would lather: hard water, dirty money. Christine's new dad was a shop keeper from town. Her mother told her she had seen their marriage in the cards. Christine knew somehow that this was not true, and this had troubled her twice-over: How did she know it wasn't true, and Why would her mother lie?
In a few months the two were married, and in a few months more Christine's mother died of an infection late in her pregnancy. Perhaps it was one of those occasions, as in the myths of Greece, that seeking to avoid her fate, she had turned aside onto the path that led her there. Like Christine herself with Carrie's two-timing, fear of something created that thing. In any case, Christine had been left with a good father, and the memory of a mother who had that knack of making her feel beautiful.

Diana! Episode 7

2009-11-08T20:57:00.001+11:00

10 "For months at a time, the memory of pain was enough."

Christine smacked down the telephone handset, and the bell inside rang in a kind of whimper. No answer at Jonathan's. "No point waiting I guess," and she took from the coffee-table the cassette that Bruno had given her. She slipped it into the player. In the double couch opposite, Bruno, two fingers in his mouth, tapped his cracked nails up against his yellow teeth, as the music began.

Who drank from that cup?

Were the sheets ruffled on the bed?

The telephone. Who was that ringing up?

Suspicion.

His other hand held a glass containing a few sips, or perhaps one gulp, of red wine. Bruno's nails were longer than men usually kept them. They were stained and jagged, but he found them helpful in turning the tiny screws used in electronics, for opening packages, and he liked the way they would catch onto things. Last night, while Christine and Jonathan had been at The Rose, he had worked on the mix-down, sneaking some time in the Channel Ten multi-track studio.

I go through your drawer,

Hate myself just a little more.

You step out, honey I'm walking the floor,

Suspicion.

Christine clicked her tongue against her teeth and did not care if Bruno heard. Behind their basic recording of guitars and drum machine, he had added computer-generated harmonies and strings. This was not the sound they had discussed for the song she and Jonathan hoped to sell to Wet Money. How many chances did you get in this kind of business? A flat 'No' was daily currency, or that glazed, pained look, accompanied by: "Send me a tape", which generally meant the same thing. Christine did not want song-writing to be her life, but she wanted it.

Bruno sat within his yellow aura. It was darker than usual: a smoky, mustard colour. What this meant, Christine did not know. Auras are not like fingerprints; they change continually, so comparisons were risky. Then there was the complication that each aura is seen through your own aura. So: who had altered, Christine or Bruno, or perhaps the air between them? Who could say? Christine was no expert. She saw her first aura only a couple of years back. At first, bemused, she had consulted books like The Etheric Double by AE Powell, CW Leadbeater's Invisible Helpers and Annie Besant's Man And His Bodies, but they all seemed to be based on the pre-Freud hocus pocus of the nineteenth century: please find enclosed diagrams of the spirit, road maps for the soul. As if Freud wasn't bad enough.

Bruno's knees poked up out of the too-soft two-seater. He reached over to rest his almost empty glass on the arm of the couch, but it wouldn't balance. He leant down to place the glass on the floor, but found that he could not quite reach. So he was left cradling his glass in his sunken lap.

I'm digging a hole, I'm digging my own grave,

When you know it's only you that I crave.

Who's gonna save me from suspicion?

Christine gave it some more thought. The mix would have cost them a couple of hundred bucks at least. Bruno had done it as a favour; he had to have some fun. If it was going to be a team effort, well, a team effort it had to be. The poor bugger spent most of his working hours riding the fader of a single microphone as the voice-over man delivered lines like: 'And Neighbours returns at the same time next week' and 'What happens when a group of crazy teenage boys and some naughty private school girls wind up at the same ski resort??....' And then there was the colour of his aura: that smoky, mustard yellow.

There's a stranger in the house we don't want to be.

I know he looks a little like me.

I can't seem to get myself free of suspicion.

Bruno, in his rough multi-European accent, broke in over the last orchestral crescendo: "So baby! You like?" She just wanted the song to sound the way it should.

"It's great. But... do we really need the strings and the choir?"

"Oh baby," he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice, "I couldn't help it."

"Um." All that potential on the studio's processor and sampler, going to waste. Bruno's teeth were yellow as he looked up at her. "Thanks:" she cracked. "Thank you very much. I love it, Bruno. It's great."

She rewound the cassette, listened to the wheels turn as she sat in the best chair, now joined by her cat, Annabel. She ran her fingers through the cat's slippery fur. Bruno drained his glass and leant back into the couch, smiling, sitting with his bum down and his knees up. Christine would not give him his dope or the brandy just yet, because he would be insulted. Bruno was easily insulted - his duty as Temperamental Europe's representative on Earth. Born in the Italian Alps, of French and German parents, he pronounced catastrophe 'catastroff' and said 'for all intensive purposes'. He liked to make an impression.

Christine would keep the presents in reserve until Bruno was about to leave. He was expecting the dope, but the Cognac would be a surprize. Maybe she would wait just long enough for him to wonder if he should remind her about the green stuff. Make him shuffle a little at the door. If he was going to call her 'baby' all the time, he had to expect something in return.

"Another glass?"

"Of course another glass." He leant forward and his stomach rumbled. Bruno's insides were not in good shape, so red wine was often off the list. For weeks, sometimes for months at a time, the memory of pain was enough to keep him from drinking, but when he did drink he acted as if he had never thought of giving up. It was a blow to his pride to have to say no to anything. He lit a Camel and the smoke rose. Christine allowed him to continue. She walked over with the bottle of wine. From down amongst the bent cushions, Bruno held his glass aloft, and Christine poured.

"Oh baby, this is beautiful!" His body was not made to endure the things that he loved. Could he help this?

"Jonathan is supposed to be here."

"He is probably with some chick."

"He's just weak. He leaves me with the decisions so he can complain about them after."

"He will love it, ain't no worry. She'll be apple as cake." Bruno had his little ways. He spoke French perfectly, Italian, and three German dialects; but in English, which had been his day-to-day language for twenty years, he absolutely refused to become proficient. To him the language was tainted and deserved to be brutalised. Like his body, Christine wondered.

11 "The Queen of Heaven about to be reborn."

Nursing a slight hang-over from The Rose, Jonathan asked for a glass of water with his cappuccino. He adjusted his sunglasses against the early light. Jonathan had come early so he could drink a cup alone, giving him time to settle his nerves. How would Diana like him? What would he say? What if it all went horribly wrong? Time to himself, it now became apparent, was the last thing he needed. He let his eyes wander across the tables, the moving figure of a black and white waitress, the open courtyard and the reclaimed colonial brick of Hyde Park Barracks. It was all wrong. He should have suggested some place he knew, some place in Darlo. He had heard the sandwiches here were good. Stacked. They had better be.

Jonathan's doubts heated up as his coffee cooled down, but it was not long before Diana arrived, mercifully on time. In the courtyard of Hyde Park Barracks Cafe the quartz pebbles squeaked under the pressure of her footfall. Jonathan squinted as he removed his glasses, smiling as broadly as he could manage against the onset of pain. Before he could say much more than hello, she excused herself for the toilet. On returning, her lips had become red and shiny with new lipstick.

Diana! Episode 6

2009-11-04T06:47:00.000+11:00

7 "Becoming darker, better defined, and closing in."

The sun set two hours ago, and in some parts of the city, on the western horizon, the black sky relinquishes itself to a deep violet. But not by the harbour at Woolloomooloo Bay. Which waits, a black surface, for a certain man on a certain occasion.
This man does not go for after dinner walks. As a rule. His body is protesting. His day at work had been no harder than usual, but after sitting in front of the TV, and at dinner, his hips are stiff and his calf muscles hurt; as he walks he feels uncomfortable, awkward: he hopes that nobody is watching.
He and his wife and his three bits of trouble share a government town house four blocks behind him. Among the Abos and the Arabs. And this is where he is going to stay. There was a ministerial announcement last month: Who to? he wonders, because he only heard about it last week, and he only got the letter yesterday. There's been a policy change, and he has been taken off the waiting list for That Bigger Place he and Jane had hoped for. The kids will just have to make do with the one room. Katie and Andrew will just have to stop fighting. He tells himself: 'I will have to put a stop to it'.
The moon had been climbing the firmament since late afternoon. From the windy scaffolding he had got a good look at it, and it at him. Its darker regions dissolved into pale blue. But the sky is dark now and the white moon is big and grinning and bright. He gets a good look at it from the harbour wall, and it gets a good look at him.
He sees the harbour flotsam. There are blue plastic bags and white ones. Leaves and sticks, cigarette butts, and a plank with a nail in it. The slight harbour swell pushes this rubbish up and against the sandstone wall. Some pieces stick to the sea slime and are picked up again by the next surge. Up and down, against and away, like breathing.
He hacks and spits into the water. His spittle is white and holds together like sperm, and the tide guides it gently in amongst the rubbish. There is a sound overhead, a leathery, thumping sound, and he looks up to see a fruit-bat, one of several, making through the haze to feed on the giant figs of Sydney's Botanical Gardens. Light-posts mark the path ahead. As he walks this man has two shadows: the one in front of him which lengthens and becomes dimmer, and the one behind him, becoming darker, better defined, and closing in.
This man's certain death comes as no relief. He would just as soon it not have come. But now that it is here, well, what is he supposed to do? He struggles. Anyone would. He feels the pain as its grip tightens. Out of love perhaps, this man will not force his body to continue: his body, which is tired, stiff, sore, and soon gives up.
Water is all surface. Everywhere it touches you is where it begins. Like despair. There is so much of it inside him now that he sinks down and down. And now the sticky mud has hold of him and is washed across him and over him.
He is cold, remembers nothing. It will bury him.

8 "I have something that belongs to you."

A knot of blokes near the bar divided and reformed as Diana passed through. "Am I too late?"
"No," Christine had to yell, "they don't play it until the last set." Diana pulled up a chair. "Diana, this is Jonathan." Diana's handshake was good and firm. He liked that.
"Pleased to meet you again. Oh yes. I have something that belongs to you. Here," and she handed him his little plastic joint-lighter. Jonathan laughed as he tucked it away into a pocket. "And," she said, turning to Christine, "pleased to see you again also."
Christine reached for Diana's hand. Drawing her closer, she kissed her cheek.
Diana leant back into her chair and returned a smile. Christine licked her lips before taking another drink. She tasted something. Salt. But now the cold beer had washed the taste away.

Sunday 21 July

9 "It will suit that chain you're wearing."

Mr Travers' big lips separate from Diana's, then, separating, smile. "You must be feeling better. I'm happy for you." Diana takes a step back and Travers retains his hold on her hands before letting them fall. "Oh yes my dear, and I have something for you. Part of your inheritance." And he laughs quietly as he crosses the floor, taking a set of keys from his pocket and opening the lowest drawer of his desk. Inside, a circular shape, like a coin, lies upon a closely-typed contract that carries Jonathan's name and Diana's signature, still glistening and damp, in black ink.
She has barely changed position by the time Mr Travers is again before her, proffering his open hand. Without touching his skin, Diana picks the object from inside his pink palm. She inspects the little item of jewellery: a medallion slightly smaller than a twenty-cent piece, a polished disk of unadorned ebony.
"Thank you," turning it in the light, looking into its darkness.
"It will suit that chain you're wearing beautifully, don't you agree?" When she fails to answer, he continues: "I hope it doesn't make that boy of yours jealous. But it's not a gift you understand, it's simply what is due to you. You'll explain this to … to … "
"Jonathan."
"Jonathan, of course. Where was I now? Yes, my dear, this little trinket is simply what is rightfully yours, now that you have given me what is mine."
Diana presses her new possession against her lips, feeling its hardness and its coldness on the spongy warmth of her skin. She looks up. "You know it then. Last night. The first."
"Not the first, surely," he says through his fat smile, "but yes, the wheel is turning. Like the clock - four for the quarters …"
"Like the clock. I suppose."
"And look, dear girl, already your life is evolving as it should."
Diana follows his gaze down to the object in her hand. She had thought the disk was plain, blank as shut-in darkness, but now she sees, catching in the light, a slender gold thread, fine as the hair of a child, tracing a portion of the medallion's outline.
"The new moon," says Travers.
"The Queen of Heaven," whispers Diana.
"Waiting to be born."
Diana closes her fingers over the sliver of brightness, sliding the medallion into her pocket.
"You'll see him again soon? Jonathan?"
"This morning."
"Good," Travers says with finality, as he returns to his desk. Settling into his chair, leaning his head back, he draws his fingers through his close-cropped hair. The sound of it is brittle, abrasive. His Adam's apple, round as an egg, rises and falls as he swallows.
"Mr Travers?"
He looks across at her, brow creased in mock inquiry. "Yes, Diana. Is there something else?"
"It's just … " She takes a breath so that she can say, steadily, "I still cannot remember."
"What is it my darling, what is it that you cannot remember?" The word 'cannot' he twists with contempt.
"Everything. My life," Diana replies. "What have I done?"

The door closes behind her. Diana steps out into the street. The harbour wind hurries through the shadowy canyon of Bent Street. A tree has been transplanted into freshly dug earth at the entrance of a row of offices, tarted-up terraces, once the refuge of the crazed, the drug-crazed, and the hungry. As Diana walks by, she looks up at the highest branches that reach into the daylight. The tree sheds a dead branch, and Diana watches it clatter its way earthward. She picks it from the ground, rolls it in her hand, seeing that it is about twice the width of her thickest finger. The wood is grey and dry, and she feels its hard surface and its strange, sapless buoyancy.
A fluke gust pushes back Diana's black hair, and she squints against the dust. There is a crack as the branch snaps, and Diana looks down at the two pieces she now holds, and lets them fall. As she walks towards Macquarie Street the word she mutters under her breath is probably: 'Yes'.

Diana! Episode 5

2009-10-25T14:54:00.000+11:00

(Chapter 5 cont.)

The rose hip tea tasted sweet and sharp, and, by now, comfortably warm. Christine saw her fingers red, felt them warm, as she withdrew the cup from her mouth.
Diana had her back to the window. Flowing past her and into the room, a steady orange sunlight was interrupted by the occasional white flash reflected from the traffic outside.
"You have a nice house. You are here alone?"
"Sometimes."
"I mean, there is someone who shares the rent."
"I know. I'm just being difficult."
"That mean streak of yours."
"I suppose." Christine tried not to react, but this piece of perception, if you could call it that, pleased her. "I used to share with a lover, but that's been over for months." She exaggerated. It had been only a matter of weeks since Carrie had left her, but Christine did not want to frighten Diana with the prospect of a freshly injured heart. "I'll stay here by myself for a little while. I might clear out the spare room and get someone in. I might find another lover." Diana smiled, rising easily from the deep chair. Christine followed her with her eyes. "But I'll probably move out - I can't afford it much longer." Diana took a few paces across the carpet, and Christine saw that the talk and the tea had done her good.
Without looking at the Man Ray shot that most people could not keep their eyes off, Diana crossed the room. Her short, black coat rested evenly across her shoulders, then fell in a line where her spine curved inward, leaving the pleated hem to rest on her blue-jeaned buttocks. A lovely, straight back Christine thought.
Diana examined the stack of records. Nearby on the shelf was the picture that had attracted her attention earlier, a photograph of a middle-aged woman with straw coloured hair; she had some cards splayed on the table before her, and she was looking out of the frame and into the world. Diana flipped through the records, and in the process turned the photograph aside: "And your no-longer-lover is not that man you were with last night?"
"No," Christine laughed. "God no. I don't have male lovers. Not since I discovered women." Diana continued filing through the records. For Christine, it was hard to know what this non-reaction meant. Some women were shocked when she told them about her sexuality, and some were shocked and then ashamed of their own reactions, then made excuses to get away. Some women thought they'd be raped. Others were simply interested, and some women, gay or straight, became very interested indeed. Christine was proud of her ability to spot a dyke. She looked at Diana and could not make up her mind. Then again, she thought, there are dykes and dykes.
Diana took out a record. "Do you mind?"
Christine recognised the Brahms piano trio. "Go for your life."
Diana looked over the amplifier, the little mixer. Christine's knees clicked as she rose to help.
"No need," and her muscles formed a defined column up her neck as she turned her head. "I am rather good with technical things. It is just Input and Output, is it not?" Christine watched as Diana turned on the amp and the mixer, chose the correct turntable and settings. Soon, the first sliding, gentle notes of the piano were answered in layers by cello and violin. Like coloured lights overlaid on water.
Still standing, Christine tried to get a focus on Diana's aura, but the music-colour distracted her. Diana moved closer, stepping into a square of strong light cast from the window, and Christine's eyes were slow to readjust. A truck went by, like a shutter.
"So what is this fellow's name?" Diana asked, returning to her chair.
Christine sat again as well, with the feeling that she had somehow been permitted to do so.
"Who?"
"The fellow you were with last night."
"That's Jonathan. He writes lyrics."
"And you write music."
"That's right. If we stick together we could be small."
"You are not ambitious?"
"He is, in a meandering kind of way. I guess I am too. Writing songs is fun, and I reckon we'll find a few bands around town who'll play them. Fame and fortune is a bonus, that's the way I see it. At the moment we're just concentrating on getting that first band. Shit!" She remembered. "Pia, she's a friend, she's expecting me to pick up some gear. Are you all right?"
"Yes. I'm sure."
"Jonathan and I have some recording to do. I just..."
"I am fine, fine. I'm sure."
"Good, 'cause I'd really better get going. I'll ring you a cab."
"I only live in Victoria Street. I can walk."
"Walk my arse! You'll wreck my good work. I'll ring a cab."
"Thank you. You have been very kind to me."
Now Christine realised that she had moved too fast. Diana could be gone for good. The business with Pia could wait; she had not intended to mention it. Having let it out, she had backed herself into a corner. "Listen," she thought fast, "the Young Turkeys are doing one of Jonathan's old songs Saturday at The Rose. I was thinking of going. He'll be there too. Would you like to come?"
Diana smiled: "I would love to."
After half an hour the cab tooted out front. They had hardly left their seats before the horn peeled out again, long and loud. On the footpath, Christine felt the hardness of Diana's grip as they shook hands goodbye. Christine looked into the black centre of her eyes, but did not get a second glance. Diana squeezed her hand sharply, and Christine's hand relaxed, retreated in response. Diana slid into the back, and was gone.
The memory, the nerve-echo of her grip, lingered on her skin - those hard, fine bones, hard as the door handle she now twisted open, and clicked shut. She walked across to the stereo, returning the Brahms to its sleeve. She straightened the stack of records, and restored the picture of her mother to its usual place on the shelf. Christine's reflection on the glass shielding hovered above her mother's image. The photograph was an arm's length away, her fugitive reflection was twice that - an arm's length to the glass and an arm's length beyond, at once before and behind the image of her mother. Christine's eyes adjusted and re-adjust as her focus shifted. Her hand on the frame began to perspire, and she released the picture, examined the faint sheen of her palm, then wiped it dry on the back of her jeans.
When she and Diana said their goodbyes, Christine had looked into Diana's perfect eyes. There were lots of things about eyes that could make you want to look closer - clarity or milkiness, colour or penetration, or Jonathan's knack of being big-eyed and squinty-eyed at the same time. None of these things matched Diana. Christine had become aware that her gaze was deepening into Diana's black pupils. Something.
Christine felt a warm, damp sensation about her ankles. The softness slid across her shins and between her legs.
"Hello Annabel," reaching down to scratch beneath her cat's up-help chin. "Now. Where have you been?" Annabel, looking sideways, towards the closed door, said nothing.

Saturday 20 July 1991
Moon: Waxing Gibbous

6 "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."

The head Turkey said 'two' into the microphone as Christine set down a schooner for Jonathan and one for herself: the all-important second beer.
"Do you think she'll show?"
"Why shouldn't she?" Christine said, craning her neck and leaning forward to get a look at the stage gear.
"Would you like me to leave early?"
"No need," glancing back at him. "I think it's you she's interested in anyway. Although, frankly, I can't see the attraction." And she twisted on her chair to inspect the hardware, a smile upon her face.
"Did you get Bruno organised?" she asked, this time without turning back.
"Gave him the four-track," Jonathan rolled his schooner glass between his palms. "This week some time, he reckons. Whenever the studio's free. Tonight if we're lucky."
"Right," and she glanced back again. "Tonight then. I feel lucky."
"Beautiful. It's good to at least feel lucky." Christine snorted, returned her attention to the stage set-up.
The 'stage' was a wooden wedge raised about half a metre off the floor, jammed into a corner. The Rose was an old pub and the bar took up far too much room, built so a battalion of bar-staff could contend with the six-o'clock swill. From her table, sitting back in her chair, Christine could see a stack of speakers and the profile of the singer, but not much else. The other side of the pub was for dancing or for standing. Out the back there was plenty of room, among the pool tables and the card machines, but if a glimpse of the band was to be had from there, it was a wild accident, not to be counted on a second time.
The Young Turkeys were a punk/country/surf outfit. They regularly played Jonathan's first publicly performed song: "Since You Left Me, You 'Bin Gone", written before he had struck his partnership with Christine.
Christine and Jonathan had met through her old day job at the Bondi CES. This was a highly seasonal operation, and she liked to think of it as the new agriculture. Business would begin to build through spring, reaching a frenetic peak by February. Then winter set in, the full-time jobs returned to the market, and the seasonal clients migrated north.
In December, tempers and temperatures vied for supremacy, and it was one December that Jonathan's telephone enquiry was mistakenly put through to her. His dole had been cut off due to his tremendous earnings as a full-time song writer and part-time exam supervisor. Christine listened as he complained bitterly, although, really, it had nothing to do with her: she was doing him a favour just by taking the call. When she told him so, he told her a thing or two. She said she was a public servant, not a public slave. He said, right, I'll see what I can do to make your life easier, make a few calls, pull a few strings. She told him he was a fucking idiot and should piss off and bother some other poor sucker. He said 'don't you abuse me over the phone', and she said he could come on in and she would abuse him in person if he preferred. He said, right, that was fine by him. It was fine by her. Right. Right. And so they became friends.
Christine and Jonathan each felt on their fingers the air's moisture, condensed to liquid on the hard glass, as they drank: Christine, in long, slow draughts, Jonathan at a quick gobble. A kind of harmony of consumption. They wanted something to do besides wait.
"Another?"
Behind the black speakers, the drummer hit his sticks for the beat. On 'three' the bass slid down an octave, on 'four' the kick drum got a belt, and on 'one', the Young Turkeys launched into "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance".

Diana! Episode 4

2009-10-20T06:57:00.000+11:00

5 "Christine's key slid easily into the lock."

Christine emerged from the shadow of the David Jones building on Elizabeth Street. Keeping to the sunlight, she passed the buildings of the Supreme Court. She had begun to feel quite cold: her toes especially, in her canvas shoes, each aerated by a fraying hole at big-toe level. A car passed close and she felt the slip-stream on her neck. The hump on her shoulder was sensitive to chills, so she gave it a rub. Further along, brass plaques announced: Solicitor, Solicitor. One said: 'Lawrence, Ferguson, Gass and ass'. She snorted: "Lawyer territory."

Christine would not usually choose the morning after a late night to hassle around for equipment, but last night, tired as she was, sleep had eluded her. She had given up trying by about six. By eight her eyes had been sore from reading, by nine her washing hung from the line, and by ten her dishes were stacked drying by the sink. After a second breakfast, she began stretching a few friendships with Sunday morning calls.

The first to relent was Pia. It's hard to know whether ex-lover status qualified you for lesser or greater leeway as far as favours go. This morning at least, Pia had been in no mood to make light of inconvenience, making it clear that she wanted no visitors until twelve at the absolute earliest. So Christine had decided to walk the few kilometres to the Wynyard buses.

Christine exhaled condensation onto the polished brass plaque riveted to the convict-brick wall. With the tip of her finger she drew a pair of crescents joining tip to tip, then a smaller pair inside, to create the shape of a cunt. Before walking on, she watched her art-work slowly vanish.

By the time she reached the corner of Market St, her armpits were becoming moist, though her toes were still numb. She thought of heading down to the GPO Building to check out the gargoyle Queen Victorias that ringed the façade. They were supposed to represent the conquered peoples of the world. Christine liked particularly the Indian Queen Vic - the one with a nose-ring. The Empire had a dyke for a Queen - no doubt.

She was about to turn off Elizabeth when, almost before knowing why, she halted. Stiffened. There is something about the squeal of tyres. Sweat had risen from deep within her, quick and hot, before the echoes faded. Her skin itched. That sound must be in our racial memory, she mused; like the wail of an infant it will unravel the nerves; it will not be ignored. With her nerves all a-jangle, she could not tell if the sound of impact she seemed to recall was real or imagined.

She did not have long to wait. On the corner ahead, Christine walked into a crowd of about a dozen. Even on a Sunday, this end of town was lawyer territory. A couple of suits jockeyed for position. Through the knot of people, talking, speculating, comparing stories, Christine heard: "Thank you. I am all right now." A man stood in the way. She bent at the knees, lowering her centre of gravity as she had been taught in Ninjutsu classes, and shoved him hard in the back: next, a little kid, who said 'fuck off'. She saw a taxi stopped in the street at a strange angle. Then she saw a woman prone on the bitumen, or rather she built a woman's form from a compilation of glimpses snatched through the shifting crowd - a bare calf, the glint of jewellery, the creamy arc of a neck, a hand held palm outwards. It appeared the woman was trying to get up. A man reached out to help her, and another reached to restrain him: "Let her lie still. Give Her Air!" Somebody else was holding a large coat in front of her matador-style, while the taxi driver alternated between apologies and insults. At last Christine's jostling and the crowd's movement conspired to give her a clear view of the victim. The woman on the ground fixed her blue eyes onto Christine: alone, bewildered. "Get me out of this! Please."

The woman from Raphael's appeared thinner and sicker in the sunlight. "Get me out of this." People tugged at her, casting their black shadows over her. She looked as if she wasn't too far from screaming, her eyes growing brighter, more urgent and more blue. Christine took pity on her distress. A man in a suit tried to push past, proffering a small white card, but Christine steadied herself again and with her elbow gave him a good hard jab into the cavity beneath his ribs.

"What's wrong?" She beat him to it.

"I was only knocked to the ground."

Christine touched the red mark on the woman's pale forehead where her skin was slightly roughened and broken. Although the flesh was swollen, and meaty red, there was no blood to speak of. Taking Christine's hand, the woman rose to her feet. When she tried her weight on her left leg, she hissed through clenched teeth. "It is just the knee. It will warm up, I am sure. Please," speaking low, holding Christine tight by the hand, and now the elbow: "get me out of this."

The cab driver was still pressing his apologies, and his abuse. "Shut-up," Christine said and, as he took a breath to continue, "get us to Darlo." His mouth snapped shut, opened, and snapped shut again. "You going to drive or what?" Christine gave the driver her address and they made their escape.

"Do you think you should go to Casualty, see a doctor or something?"

"No!" the woman said quickly. "Thank you. I hate doctors. I never go to doctors. I am fine, honestly. I was just knocked to the ground."

Christine slipped her arm from under her seat-belt, stretching to touch the woman's forehead, where a pink mark now showed beneath a lattice of scratches. "You hit your head. Are you sure you didn't black out?"

The woman looked into Christine's eyes, steadily, like a knocked-down fighter trying to stay in the ring. "No. I am sure. I have had a fright, that is all."

"Then you need to rest a bit. You can have a cup of tea at my place if you like."

"Thank you. I would like that. You are very kind."

The taxi took them through the Cross and into Darlinghurst, dropping them off outside Christine's. The driver dipped his head to look across at them through the passenger window. The fare read $8.20. "You've got to be joking," said Christine.

The cab spun its wheels. Christine revised her thoughts on tyre-squeals - that one felt just fine. She smiled: she had a mean streak. She liked this about herself.

Christine took the woman by her elbow, but the she leant no weight into Christine's grasp as they crossed the footpath. "It's okay. I've got you," Christine reassured. The pressure on her arm increased slightly, but Christine suspected this was mostly for her own benefit. Together they took the three small steps up to the doorway. Christine's key slid easily into the lock. Inside the brass casing, the tumblers made slick contact. The door slid open across the inside rug, and Christine stepped back for her guest to enter. Taking the step, the woman bit back on a cry of pain and her injured knee buckled. Christine caught her, heavy this time, by the elbow, guiding her over the threshold.

"My name's Christine, what's yours?"

"Diana. Diana White." Her voice was heavy and distant. Christine cast her eye about for the best chair. As usual, her cat Annabel had herself coiled right there. The cat had no favourite chair, but seemed to know in advance where you wanted to be. Fussy cat. As Christine began to calculate how she could best leave Diana in order to shovel Annabel aside, the cat looked up milk-eyed towards her mistress, then across at her guest. And scrammed.

"There you go," Christine laughed, as she helped Diana forward, "you can have the best seat. Annabel must like you." Christine leant a hand on the back of the couch, which had a tendency to engulf the unwary. When she entertained mixed company Christine liked to arrange it so that a bloke or - even better - two blokes, sat on the couch. They looked funny: their knees up in the air, their crotches sunk out of sight. That mean streak again. But today she had given Diana the best chair, out of hospitality. Christine thought briefly of the pool of cat-warmth that Diana's bottom was about to settle into and looked in vain for a sign of pleasure or distaste.

"Well! Diana White," clapping her hands, trying to lighten the air, "would you like Earl Grey, chamomile or rose hip?"

"Rose hip please."

"Good choice. Very warming after a shock."

Christine left the room, and Diana looked the place over. The three arm chairs, including the one she was sitting in, bore absolutely no resemblance to one another. A two-seater with concave cushions backed against the wall that joined the flat next door. On the wall opposite, above the bricked-in fire place, hung a Man Ray print of a woman's bum. Records, CDs, and books on shelves. One stack of shelves was devoted to stereo equipment: two turntables, a CD player, a cassette and a reel-to-reel; a mixer, amplifier, and a tuner. On the shelf among the records rested a small framed picture. Diana was about to leave her chair when Christine returned with a tray of provisions.

"So, what's the damage?"

"Please?"

"Give me a look at you." Christine set down two cups of tea, a large bowl of warm, fragrant water, and some bandages and cotton balls. She pushed back Diana's cool, soft hair, and tilted her head so she could inspect the injury. Her forehead was yellow around the red-raw centre, but there was only a slight grazing. In an hour or so there would be a nasty lump. But it was the skin around the wound that bothered Christine: pasty, almost grey, the blue veins showing through. Her cheeks showed no colour, but this was as you might expect after a shock. Her lipstick had been rubbed mostly away and, on her lower lip, there was a small cut where her skin had been torn.

Christine tried to keep her mind on what she was doing. "This'll sting for a bit, but in two days you won't see a thing." She began to press the warm, soaked cotton lightly onto Diana's forehead, cleaning it first, then gently massaging to stimulate the circulation. She enjoyed holding Diana's head in her hands. Diana looked up, and Christine held her glance for a long moment. Perfect eyes. Deep black pupils, clear blue and sharp white. The tiny red blood vessels were beautifully defined and healthy. She had not expected this. Perfect.

"Now, what about your knee? How does it feel?"

"It is a little stiff," flexing her leg back and forth. "It does not hurt."

"I can look at it if you like, but you'll have to take your dacks off."

Without speaking, Diana slipped off her black shoes. A little awkwardly perhaps, but showing no pain, she stood and turned side-on to Christine, unzipping and removing her jeans. Her legs were skinny, and not very pretty. She sat again in her chair, while Christine took her by the leg, holding her in the crook behind her knee. "Stretch out now. Good. Does pressure here hurt at all?"

"Not very much."

She lifted Diana's leg gently by the calf. "Put your foot against my shoulder. Good. Now, push against me. Anything?"

"No."

"Not much wrong here. Just be kind to yourself for a couple of days. Ms White: you may re-robe."

Again Diana turned to the side, the same side, as she pulled up her jeans. Christine found this modesty attractive.

She returned to her place in the two-seater. Opposite, Diana took up her tea as she reclined in her chair. She cradled her cup in both hands, the steam lingering about her face, then drew in a long mouthful. Reaching for her own cup, Christine didn't notice the rising heat until the liquid seized her skin, scalding the tip of her tongue. She hissed, snapping her head back, then stared suspiciously into her tea's shiny surface. Beneath the moving light the liquid was a deep and rich red. Christine leant back into the couch and took another sip, small and cautious. "So, Diana," she said after swallowing, looking up, "what happened?"

"The lights said walk. I walked. The taxi turned the corner and must not have seen me, at least not straight away. He braked, so by the time he actually hit me, he was not travelling fast. I am sore from hitting the road. I fell awkwardly." Diana had an accent that she could not trace.

Diana! Episode 3

2009-10-11T15:11:00.000+11:00

3 "Her little house was empty."

In the orange light of her doorway she separated her house key from all the pad-lock keys she used at the theatre. They felt cold and sharp, and Christine thought of Jonathan's opening lines to their new song:

I fit the key in the door

Of the little house that we share

She should get around to oiling the lock. The key stuck. She had to jam it it, twist it hard. Her door closed on the light behind her. Her little house was empty. She switched on the hall lamp as she walked through to the kitchen for a glass of water.

Why do I feel someone was here before?

Suspicion

Christine didn't mind Jonathan borrowing from her life: it was her life or his, so, obviously, he had made the best choice. She took a glass from the draining tray and turned on the tap. It was all over now anyway. She had played the part of jealous lover with her usual flair. The problem was that Carrie had played the unfaithful bit even better. It was strange how a fear of something could create that thing. Her fear of being left alone had sent Carrie ever further from her. Her anger over Carrie's imagined unfaithfulness meant that Carrie had begun to lie for no reason, and then for good reason. Suspicion. Now, if she could only make this song a success, it would all have been worth it. She looked into the misty liquid inside the glass: "Sure!"

Christine took one gulp and poured the rest down the drain. Carrie had been gone for three weeks, maybe four. She refused to count the days.

The window above the sink was black, and she sung softly to her own reflection: "I'm there when you come home at night, a little after dark, and as you reach out for that light: Suspicion...." She was not completely happy with the melody. And she crossed to the chair by the kitchen table, trying to think of a way to persuade Jonathan to change a line or two, to fit a rhythm she had in mind.

We got two small rooms and a share backyard

Hardly room to swing a cat

If there's no room for this

There's no room for that: Suspicion

The early verses were fine, but the last definitely required surgery. It was not until she found herself absent-mindedly flipping through her message book, with the song still in her head, that she again recalled Carrie, and her real-life suspicions. 'Work,' she thought, 'work.'

She reached for her address book, turning the pages, tallying the ownership of recording equipment against favours given or owed. Pia would be the best bet. She was another ex, but over the last couple of years their friendship had lost its ex-lover awkwardness. There was every chance she would still be awake, but Christine decided to leave it till morning.

From amongst the open envelopes and reminder notes, Christine took a letter post-marked 'Melbourne' from about a week ago: Margaret. The paper was pink, its top edge torn where it had been ripped from the kind of ultra-cheap note-pad that Margaret always used. Christine ran her eyes over the scratchy hand-writing. Margaret's band was making a move north, so they would be in and out of Sydney for a couple of months at least. She smiled, leant back, recalling the caresses of a long ago drunken night: you could never tell. She might get lucky. And Christine's chair squeaked across the tiles as she headed for the calendar stuck to the far wall - to count the days.

Sunday 14 July

4 "Sincerely, 'Welcome'."

The mat says, sincerely, "Welcome"; but the heavy, green door is closed. The woman presses a red button, speaks a name, and the door opens for her. She walks across the wooden floor which has been polished until it is smooth and shiny and hard. Her steps echo in the space created by the wide flight of stairs and the high ceiling. Each sound is hard and polished, surrounded by silence. Mr Travers' chambers are on level three. His receptionist, forty, with a narrow mouth and hard, red nails, not too long, asks her if she has an appointment. When Diana replies that she does not need one, the woman does not betray her contempt. Mr Travers, she says, will attend to you soon. Wait.

Diana settles into one of five black leather chairs. There is a colour travel magazine on the coffee table, and a copy of the Financial Review, but she gives no thought to either. Although she can smell it brewing, she is not asked if she wants coffee. Inside her pocket, her fingers coil around a plastic lighter. She withdraws her hand and wipes the perspiration onto the leg of her jeans. Diana breathes in and out, a long deep breath. When the door opens, she fills her lungs again before she stands.

"My dear girl," he says, ushering her past. He leaves her standing while he makes for his desk. Mr Travers is a large, pale man with orange, receding hair cropped close to his skull. His eyes are a milky grey, and they quiver in their sockets: a condition know as Nystagmus that distorts his vision past the distance of two long paces. Their incessant vibration ceases only during moments of extreme drunkenness or stupor. He wears a double-breasted suit, pin-striped, with silver buttons. Coarse hair from under his shirt protrudes a little over his white collar. At his gesture, Diana sits opposite. He sits likewise, smiling with large, shiny lips. His eyes too, vibrating, smile. "My dear girl, how pleased, how very pleased I am to see you."

Mr Travers' desk is large and black: the desk-top is dark with the bright flecks, like stars, of mica and quartz. His hands hover above spotless blotting paper as he twists a thick fountain pen around and around in his clean fingers. Diana sees the frame of the window behind him, looking out across Bent Street; the window pane is invisibly clean. The room itself, a lawyer's office with book-shelves, a grey filing cabinet and a computer, has a smell which resembles a dentist's.

"I have an offer. I have found someone." And her voice is steady.

"Ah!" He leans back in his chair which swivels and contours without squeaking. "Straight to business."

"Business. I am not here for my health."

"My girl. Are you not?"

"Will you help me?"

"Of course." Laying down his fountain pen, the lawyer leans forward, pressing his hands on the desk. "If you are sure." Splayed out on the polished surface, his finger-tips create little haloes of vapour.

Diana reaches into her hip pocket. In taking each breath, the diaphragm, the wall of muscle beneath the lungs, pulls away into the stomach cavity and the air pressure within the lungs decreases. As the air pressure inside falls, there is space created for the outside air to escape, briefly, from the weight of the tonnes of atmosphere that press forever down upon the earth. Diana feels all this as she breathes in again and, with effort, exhales, withdrawing the lighter from her pocket as she does so.

"If you are sure, Miss White."

She is not sure. How can she be sure?

"If you prepare the papers," she says, "I will sign."

The lawyer Mr Travers watches as Diana places the lighter upright on the polished desk. "Yes," he says. He takes the lighter from the desk. For a moment the plastic lighter disappears inside his fleshy palm. "And is there a name?"

"Not yet."

"I can help, of course."

"No! No need. I know where to find him."

"Ah!" Mr Travers looks at Diana a moment, then his eyes slip from her, to the little lighter in his palm. "You know best, of course." He rolls the lighter between thumb and forefinger. A spark flies from the flint and the gas ignites, the yellow flame dancing in the moisture of his eyes. "I'll hear from you soon then."

"Soon."

The flame is extinguished, and Mr Travers slips the lighter into a drawer at his right. "Then, my dear, it will be my pleasure to prepare our contract." By the time Diana has fully risen from the chair, the man is already approaching from behind his desk. He takes her hand. "I am delighted that things have worked out for you." He wraps his arms around her waist and draws her to him. "You will be wanting a little something, I am sure. Just to tide you over?"

She looks up at him and prepares to smile, but she does not need to. He pulls her closer, and she leans into him without resistance. He kisses her with his big lips, and she groans faintly, with pain. She takes hold of his wrist, as if to steady herself, pressing her thumb against his blue, pulsing veins. His eyelids slide closed and open, and his glance for a moment is steady and hard. A small trickle of blood slides from between her lips as she eases away from him and he relaxes his grip. Diana wipes away the blood with her finger.

"Be careful," the man calls after her, "on your way home."

Inside his office, Mr Travers holds the lighter up to the sunlight, examining the shadow of the fluid-level within. He rolls back his sleeve. Entering the atmosphere's weaker pressure, the trapped liquid turns to gas, which a spark ignites. Mr Travers holds the yellow flame against the pink skin of his wrist. His nostrils flare as he draws the rich smell, in an easy stream, into his lungs.

The woman steps down onto the footpath. She turns, half on her toes, in the direction of Chifley Square, feeling better already.

Diana! - Episode 2

2009-10-04T15:15:00.000+11:00

Saturday 13 July 1991. Moon: Waxing crescent

Christine disappeared left around a corner. Just beyond the intersection, a man broke away from his bunch of friends and stumbled off the curb, trying to hail a ride. It was late, taxis were getting choosy, and the driver took only one look. These boys were on the piss and off the prowl. They wanted out. Another taxi passed, so they turned for Kings Cross station, swaying and shouting, and kicking at walls.

Jonathan followed as Christine threaded her way through the narrow street lined by cars parked with two wheels up on the curb. Jonathan saw that her black T-shirt and blue denim jacket did not hide the slight hunch of her back beneath her right shoulder. Her path blocked by a wall of paint-splattered brick, she turned. Drawing now within a pace or two, Jonathan pulled a crushed Benson and Hedges packet from his shirt pocket took from inside a fat joint, its only contents, and stuck it in his mouth. Catching Christine's eyes, Jonathan smiled; seeing Jonathan forced to shove his bottom lip out to catch the joint from falling, she laughed.

The joint hung there unlit while Jonathan searched his pockets. "Fine host you are!" She had a lighter of her own in the top pocket of her jacket, but let Jonathan go on looking. He looked funny with the unlit joint drooping from his lips, his brow furrowed, his fingers searching, not finding. Finally he looked up with a grin, empty-handed. As he shrugged, his eyebrows rose with his shoulders, and his ears moved too, just a little. "My guess ... " She had to repeat herself to draw his attention, "My guess is someone at the pub is one lighter richer. It's OK though," she slipped a yellow disposable from her jacket pocket, "I came prepared." When Christine smiled, her gums showed. Jonathan had a sort of double smile: the first was a simple grin, squinty and broad, then from inside, from behind his eyes, came a second brightness, direct and personal. Christine wasn't big on bloke's smiles, but she liked Jonathan's. It was a smile, and she pondered this as she handed him her lighter, it was a smile that was somehow - grateful. "Thanks," he said, through the sparks that flew from the flint. He snapped back his head as a few strands of over-grown fringe caught and fizzed.

He pushed his hair precariously back, and this time the rising flame merely reflected in his eyes as the joint crackled. Christine received the joint between thumb and fore-finger but didn't toke on it immediately, waiting instead to watch Jonathan's eyes flutter against the sting of lagging smoke. Jonathan caught her watching him, and his laughter choked to a cough. "I'm..." Between gulps "so..." he managed "sophisticated."

At last Christine took her turn. "How was the show?" she asked with an intake of breath.

"Good crowd. The band did well. I think those guys could be good for us." A cockroach flew into the light, striking the wall then falling at Jonathan's feet. He stomped on it and dragged his shoe across the asphalt to wipe the splatter from his sole. It made no difference in the greater scheme of things but, by his reckoning, if you see a cockroach you should at least make an attempt to kill it. Christine on the other hand didn't mind sharing her city - even with creatures that had wings, six legs, and ate shit. Jonathan looked up from the scene of destruction. The joint he reached for had returned to Christine's mouth. She peered through the haze and the orange glow and took a long, slow toke.

"I didn't get much time to talk with Murdoch," Jonathan said as he watched the joint growing smaller, "but I gave their manager an earful during the breaks. Annie says he'll sing anything she gives him, so it's only her we need to impress."

"Well?"

"She's heard of you. Thanks ... She saw Across The Line and liked your sound-track. She wants a demo."

"The one we've got won't do. We'll need a new one. Ta ... "

"But she wants it next week."

"Shit! Why?"

"They're taking a break before summer to work up some new material. She's putting together a studio deal, maybe an album: that's what she says. If we want them to use our song, we'll have to be quick." He toked on the joint which she had again relinquished: "They're slow learners."

Wet Money had played that night at the Hopetoun and a friend of Christine arranged for Jonathan to meet them for a couple after the show. His shout. Jonathan was better than Christine at the promotional stuff. Christine tried not to be suspicious or jealous of his flair for these situations -- his ability to say things like 'You guys are Hot' and 'These songs are fresh and original' and 'Loads of grunt' whilst maintaining an earnest yet innocent facial expression. It was beyond her. She looked down at his brown, round-toed shoes, their thick black soles. All he needed now was some dress sense.

"Do you reckon we can get Bruno to operate?"

Jonathan passed her the joint. "If we supply the refreshment."

"Brandy maybe. What do you think?"

"Beautiful!" Jonathan watched the joint between the fingers of Christine's right hand light up her flesh as she inhaled. With her free hand she reached up to massage the top of her right shoulder, then high on her neck below her ear, worrying at the tight muscles.

"Thursday then. Want a go at this?"

Jonathan held out his hand to receive a small, soggy piece of paper. His eye-brows creased: "Seems like a dead one." Having held her lighter all this time, Jonathan went to pocket it, but looked up sheepishly as Christine cleared her throat.

She pushed his hand away: "Don't worry, you keep it." She had about half a dozen of his in her cutlery drawer alone.

Now they picked their way along Darlinghurst Road, making for their regular cafe. "Raphael's" was plastered in big, red letters across the plate window. The best table was directly under the letter 'p'. Tonight, although it was set for four, someone was sitting there alone. The woman made no use of the view across the footpath, sitting instead with her back to the street.

Christine and Jonathan found a table beneath a poster of James Dean. Their red-headed waiter was new on staff, but he wound past the tables with ease, with grace almost, calmly evading a thrown out elbow, a chair suddenly thrust back. Smiling, he took Christine and Jonathan's order for a cappuccino and a short black.

Past Jonathan's right ear, Christine could see the woman at the best table. As Jonathan began to speak, Christine's eyes shifted from his face to the woman behind him. "Wet Money have got this big, hard bass sound, like early Stranglers." The woman was stirring her coffee, around and around. Looking into it. She laid down her spoon. Leant back into her chair. "But it's a fretless, so its funkier than them, jazzier." A thin, gold chain rested on her tight burgundy jumper, occasionally catching the light. She was wearing a short black skirt. Her bare feet were pressed into high shoes. "And that should suit 'Suspicion' pretty well."

Jonathan was interrupted as the coffee arrived. Prizing her attention from the lonely woman, Christine glanced about the cafe, conjuring the sound of a fretless bass for their song "Suspicion". Two black-haired men wearing black leather jackets were smoking and arguing - or at least, using loud Italian. A woman and a man leant toward each other across their table, their legs symmetrically pushed back under their chairs. Past a table of six, and through into the next room, Christine could make out a couple of sex workers wearing long, dark coats over their bright street clothes. Christine recognised one of them from a party about a month back. She had a sense of humour, Christine recalled: her real name was Yvette, but for work she called herself 'Pam'.

Christine looked at Jonathan's face and the blue outline of his body. Around his head and around his hands she saw his blue aura flutter. The aura of one of the Italians was also blue; the other's, orange. The waiter's aura was the colour of his hair, orange rusting into red. She didn't know his name, but she could pick him easily in a crowd because his aura contained dark spots, like on the face of the sun. Christine liked this about him. The woman at the table had her back to the busy street and the blue and red neons of the bars on the far side. The lights made her aura hard to make sense of. Some days auras shone better than others, even for people with good sight, like Christine.

Jonathan's blue aura turned green. He was drinking from his cup and looked a little cross-eyed as he stared into it. He didn't know that his aura had changed colour; and he didn't know that it was now becoming, in places, a yellow roughly the shade of the disposable lighter. Christine made for him a little hat of aura-light, and put a blue feather in it.

"What are you laughing at?" Jonathan had heard that laugh before.

"Nothing." And the denial.

"What are you doing?"

"I've made you a hat, that's all."

"Well I hope it suits me." He pretended to adjust the rim - but he had in his mind a hunting cap, the kind with ear-flaps, whereas, since Christine's distraction, it now resembled an ill-used Akubra, and the feather was no more. Looking up at Jonathan, Christine's smile was teeth and gums. She laughed again, and he enjoyed the sound. The lights of his aura swirled and flashed with one last flourish. Sitting at the best table, the woman with the gold chain around her neck lifted her head slightly and looked up at Jonathan through long lashes. Christine's focus shifted again. Watching the woman's eyes engage, she could see only their whites, like two crescent moons. Christine got a feeling she didn't like and shook it off.

"And how about you?" He had to ask again. "How was the play?"

"Fucking lousy."

"Did you get the moon up in time?"

"Of course I did. And it wasn't my fault last time. That rotten queen left out about a page of dialogue before the moon speech. How was I to know? At least it got a laugh, which was a small mercy."

"I was thinking of seeing it next week."

"You do, and I'll arrange an electrical accident."

By the time they had finished their second coffee, Christine had been through their preparations again: Thursday; Bruno; mics, tapes and a four-track reel-to-reel. She was pulling things together, marshalling their resources, glad, even light-headed, that at last their project was gathering momentum. She was glad, simply, to have company. The clientele had turned over in the last hour or so. Except for the woman, still sitting under the letter 'p', which was a 'q' from their side of the window.

They pushed back their chairs, headed for the counter. Waiting by the register, Christine saw the woman, half obscured by Jonathan, rising from her seat. The woman's ankles gave, just a little, as she walked across the tiled floor. Her hair was flattened with sweat against her temples, and her skin was grey and dull.

'Smacked-out,' Christine thought, but, as the she drew closer, Christine saw briefly the colour of her eyes. The woman's eyes were blue and clear, not the smoky, pin-pupiled black of a user. Her eyes were bright, but not as some are, reflections of the brightness around them. Their brightness seemed to come from elsewhere. Christine recognised that interested, evasive, isolated stare, and stepped back to allow her to reach the cash register ahead of them. The woman repeated the cashier's tally: "Two dollars," and Christine noticed how she pronounced both 'l's, cutting the word in two.

The red-headed waiter took her money with an open smile. The woman watched her own slim fingers as she slipped her change into a tiny purse, snapped it shut, then placed it into her black leather handbag. She turned, looking past Christine to Jonathan.

"Excuse me. Do you have a light please?"

Jonathan's eyes darkened before he remembered Christine's disposable in his pocket. "Yeah, sure." He felt Christine's gaze upon him, knowing that she would not approve of what he was about to do. Boys lighting cigarettes for girls - not the kind of cultural message she went for. His composure suffered a further blow when the lighter refused to catch. Without a word, the woman took it from his hand. The sound of the flint was like the snapping of a branch. Soon the yellow flame was lost in the clear eyes of her tired face. Her high cheek-bones warmed to the light, but the warmth drained as the flame was extinguished.

She withdrew the smoking cigarette from between her lips. "Thank you," she said. As she handed back the lighter her heel slipped again on the tiles and Jonathan caught her by the arm.

"You right?"

"Yes." She looked up at him. "Thank you." She pronounced each syllable separately, as if the words were unfamiliar. "I am just tired. I am only tired." And she sounded it. She steadied herself, without speaking again, turned and left Raphael's. It was Christine and Jonathan's turn to pay.

"Jonathan!" He had to wrench his attention away from the empty doorway.

"What?"

"She nicked off with my lighter."

He knew she was right, but his hands automatically went for his pockets. "Not your lighter." He looked up. "You gave it to me, remember?"

"Then you should be more careful. Now you'll have to cope with the remorse of losing the gift of a valued friend."

"Oh well," he engaged his squinty grin: "No great loss." Christine left ahead of him.

The Coca-Cola sign was four storeys high. Above it, concealed within the light and the city haze, hung the waxing crescent moon slowly opening like an eye.

Diana! Episode 1

2009-09-20T15:28:00.000+10:00

Saturday 13 July
Moon: Waxing crescent

1 "Wet tyres, on bright roads, hiss."

She walks in space between constituents of light. She is not the darkness, but she walks in darkness, and the light has no other word for her. If the bulk of an atom is emptiness, she is in that space; if most wavelengths of light are invisible, this is where she will live. She is the sound between the sounds when you speak your name, or your best friend's name, or when you cry for help.
A car passes. The shadow of a lamp-post wheels across her, rippling over her face: a perfect fit. The rain has ended and wet tyres, on bright roads, hiss.
Some say that each atom and every hot beast of the sea is a syllable of the Word of God, an instant in the brief thought that is creation. And inside lies the silence that precedes creation, the appalling hush which shuts to sound, and opens, like a black rose, when that sound is ended.
She turns left into a lit corridor. She can hardly bear her body's weight. To her, tonight, her flesh is thick and heavy and strange. She looks left and right. Finding a table, she sits in silence, allowing her eyes to fall slowly closed. Nothing is worth seeing.
Soon though, soon, she will see the light she has been searching for, and she will be mistaken - a mistake that she, but not only she, will come to regret.

2 "Her back to the street."

Jonathan squinted against the glare of a Legion Cab, his eyes sore from cigarette smoke, the flash of rock'n'roll lighting, and the shifting reflections on Darlinghurst Road, slick with dead rain. Walking on the footpath a few paces ahead, Christine raised her hand to touch the moisture clinging to the leaves of a council gum. As Jonathan passed beneath the gum tree a single drop slipped from the still-swaying limb to find its way down the back of his collar: "Shit!" and he bit back the word, not wanting her to hear. Direct hit.

Heat

2009-01-31T07:17:00.000+11:00

Heavy Helen is weeping amphetamine tears. The ‘Empire Stallions - Dawn ofa new day’ race at the Albury track, formerly known as Brown’s Paddock, has been rescheduled to a night meeting because of the heatwave that’s also playing merry hell with the Australian Open.

In her hand, instead of the TAB receipt she'd anticipated, is an ancient hardcover of The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm.
She had retrieved it from the Viceroy bookshelf, where it was being used as a kind of paperweight to keep copies of the City Hub from southerly-buster dismemberment.

It’s Heavy Helen's custom never to wipe tears from her cheeks. She is proud of them. She lets them dry, leaving on her plump flesh, once the Cumbersome heat has done its work, faint vertical steaks of the finest white powder.

Across the road the Turkish barber is closing his daughter's shop. Aziz once had two men and three women working for him.

Two years ago, a stack of those space helmets once used to set a perm sat pushed into the back corner, but in full view, as if waiting to return to life. The long walls, north and south, were tiled with mirrors. And Aziz walked up and down this corridor of unnatural light, with the past behind, and the present - one scant-haired middle-aged Turk on one of three porcelain based Koken barber chairs - before - and behind and before and behind.

Then Aziz's daughter, Aysu, having graduated from TAFE and worked five years in a salon in Brighton-Le-Sands, bought him out.

"She is the boss now," he says to me as he lights a pinch of cotton wool, dipped in metho and fastened with glue to a Phillips head screw driver, and flicks the flame into his palm to get the feel of it.

"And she bought this! This for me to work with!" The chair I'm sitting on is black plastic. The cushion is grey plastic. The stack of drawers on the floor beside it is black and on wheels, but to wheel them or open them would court disaster.

And with his right hand he flicks the yellow flame into my ears, singeing and curling the tiny hairs, while with his left he pats down any flamey outbreaks.

Aziz then gives me a gentle shoulder massage before Aysu takes my money at the register. The shop is empty as I leave - except for love.

At the Indian diner, Nandita, now 10 and doing her homework, discovers that her mother can add, divide and multiply, but simply cannot subtract. It’s a concept that completely eludes her.

Back at the Viceroy, some blow-in graduate of Our Lady of the Morons, St Peters, has put on the juke box the world’s stupidest song - There’s no aphrodisiac like loneliness by the Whitlams. How’s this for a song? “Darling I miss you so much I want to go out and fuck someone else...”

And the pity and sorrow that so many people who write or sing about love, or feel themselves to be in it, or seek to be so, have not the faintest clue about it, bares down on Heavy Helen like a January heatwave.

Heavy Helen reads about a book a day. The first chapter on The Art of Loving (six pages in the paperback edition I have since bought) would have taken her to read no longer than the Empire Stallions to run.

Love is an art, says Fromm. Love is not a prize to be won, nor even a state to be reached it’s a faculty to be cultivated.

And all the while we’re searching for someone to love, and someone to love us, with our efforts fixed on seeking the loveable, and making ourselves loveable enough to be part of a reasonable exchange.

In our daily lives we expend our energies on everything - learning to read, to count, to drive, to dress - but so little on learning to love. And Helen weeps her amphetamine tears, and lets them dry in powdery stripes on her cheeks in the Viceroy hotel, because it doesn't have to be that way. And she, and her super-hot girlfriend, know it.