Diana! Episode 8

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.