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.