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

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

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.