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'.