Diana! Episode 12

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

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

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?"