"And what have you been up to this morning?" she responded.
"Not making real estate deals, that's for sure."
"Have you been busy?"
"Yeah," Jonathan's guitar and a pile of note-paper lay on the carpet at his feet. "I've been busy."
Mr Travers has his elbows on the table. Diana sets the phone back onto its cradle, sliding it across the desk of polished granite, as Mr Travers leans forward with his finger-tips pressed together, moving them in a vertical version of what children call a spider doing push-ups on a mirror.
"So," his eyes vibrating above his manicured nails, "we've all been busy. Idle hands do the devil's work. And to be honest, I'd rather do my own. You have been busy I trust?"
"I've given you two."
"Only two?" He leans forward with his elbows on his desk. His hands pressed together, he curls down all but his two index fingers, and taps them gently, rhythmically against each other. Here is the church. And here is the steeple.
Diana looks at his hands, not at his eyes. "Two moons, that is all I have had."
"My darling, of course you have. I'm not forgetting. One life in each of four quarters, that is all I ask. You've done well, my dear. Yes, so far, very well. And if you don't mind me saying," now the lawyer separates his hands to lay one palm flush on the blue lease document that lies on his desk. "If you don't mind me saying, you are doing very well for yourself also."
Diana tries to look into those fidgeting eyes, tries to hold them still, but she can't. There are no clues for her here. "I can remember a man named Ryan, and I can remember the water. Dark water. Oily."
"You see?" He slides the papers off the desk and places them onto the tray at his right. "You're getting better all the time."
She looks down into her empty hands.
"You have strength when you need it, isn't that true?"
"Yes."
He leans back in his chair. "There you are! You should be satisfied." His smile is wide. "What is it The Phantom said - the one in the opera, not the jungle you understand - 'When you sing, you will sing only for me'. You're not thinking of moonlighting I hope. Only those in the cycle, only those who have been touched for death, you understand?"
Diana's gaze slides from her creamy palm, across the polished surface of Mr Travers' desk, up his neck, and is parried by his quivering eyes. "It is not that. It is not what I want to do, it is what I want to know. It is not enough."
"It doesn't have to be. Patience. For you my dear, the sky is truly the limit." He places a pink hand on the document tray. "Others in your position would consider themselves lucky." Again he leans forward, elbows on granite, finger-tips together, his eyes looking across the sharp crescents of his shiny nails. "Now," he says, "how's about a little kiss."
Still sitting by the phone, Jonathan took up his guitar and ran through the first verse:
River mist in the reeds, white moon in the sky
Black time flowing by
Your brand new car, making tracks
I feel that monkey gripping onto my back
You got a new ambition, got a new superstition I know
You got a letter in your hand, a ring down upon your toe
You're gonna come back to town carrying buckets of cash
You've made a big deal, you're gonna make a splash
He leant his guitar against a stack of shelves that he had built himself out of a couple of discarded crates and a pine pallet. It was a source of wonder to him that you could measure out a length on one piece of board, and then on another, and although they were on different pieces of wood altogether, the distances would be the same, and the joins would stick. It was a sign that the world made sense, that things which should happen, could happen. And that's why he liked making songs to rhyme - these words sung by different people in bathrooms, bars or studios, would still fit into place.
He ran the words through his head, and they seemed solid and firm. For the first time in almost a year Jonathan had completed a song all of his own. And it came easily. Still, he would give it a burl with Christine, just to be sure, before letting Diana in on the good news.
The washing had taken hours to complete, Christine pouring buckets of water into her broken-down machine. Hanging out her clothes in the warm sun had given her no pleasure. Her shirts, pegged out with their arms dangling, looked human somehow, and horrible.
She was expecting Bruno's call, but when the phone rang, all she could think of was Jonathan. But why would he call? She did not want to hear from him. Not now. Inside her head there were two voices. On the line there seemed to be two voices also, all mixed up. It took her a while to latch on to what Jonathan was telling her.
"What?" She heard too much. He spoke too quickly.
"Don't be dense, Christine. Voodoo!"
"I what?"
"Christine! You haven't been listening."
"Sorry. I haven't. I got a call from Bruno. He's sick."
"Well, can I come around and play it to you?"
"Play what?"
"My new song ..." Christine tried to listen as he explained that he'd written something new: words, the music, everything, just like he used to do, only this time it was great, he said, great. Christine, worried about Bruno, did not want to hear this. Trying to deflect him, she asked about last night's dinner. What happened after she left?
"Nothing. We went home." He told her he would come by this afternoon to play the song for her. "See you soon." Christine hung up, swallowed hard on a sour taste. Not one question about Bruno.
Jonathan was at the door, and still there had been no word from Bruno. With a greeting of scarcely more than a grunt, her friend pushed past her into her lounge room, taking her guitar from its stand without asking. And he sat, smiling and healthy inside his blue aura. The guitar was cradled in his lap as he picked out a slow blues.
The big print gives, the small takes away
Business works that way
I can still see the blood upon your dress
Still get that sweet, sweet taste of your success
As usual, Jonathan's face flushed as he played - no wonder he didn't perform songs himself. But Christine saw that the redness on his cheek was more than a blush.
White moon, grey light
Something here just is not right
I can see the rising sun
But I just don't know where the night has gone
So long girl, guess I'll be seeing you soon
Till then it's just back to my books and my room
Sure look forward to when I see you again
And you can introduce me to all your flash new friends
"Well?" he said. "What do you reckon?"
"It's..."
"It needs tom-toms and a key-board wash." Christine looked at him. The mark on his face was definitely some kind of wound or graze. Jonathan rested the guitar against the side of his chair. "Maybe a slide guitar. And no high-hat or snare - you know, like Daniel Lanois did for the Neville Brothers on Yellow Moon."
Most people with a mark on their face will touch it now and then, or move their hand as if to touch it, but refrain. Jonathan did none of these things. It was not serious, not in the least, but still, under some circumstances, Christine might have suggested a dressing of comfrey.
"Bruno still hasn't called."
"He's probably fine then."
"What would you know?"
"You still haven't told me what you think of the song."
"Where did you get that bruise?"
"What bruise?" Jonathan raised his hand to his face, his finger-tips wandering across the surface before locating the swollen, tender flesh. He touched it, pressed it, and for the first time felt the pain. He told her he couldn't remember how he came by it.
"Maybe," Christine suggested, "Diana was a little rough with you." And right now she wouldn't mind being a little rough with him herself.
Jonathan did not stay long: there were some other people he'd like to play his song to. Moving from room to room, Christine had to make a conscious effort not to glance at the phone. Jonathan had not seemed at all anxious for Bruno. It was Jonathan who had introduced them, He was more Jonathan's friend than hers, but Jonathan had not mentioned him at all, not asked after him at all. Christine could not think why he would show so little concern for his friend.
When you were waiting for a job to come through, or for that new woman to ring; when you were waiting to hear from your sick friend - that was when the phone ran hot with everything but the call you wanted. Jonathan was only the first. Pia wanted her equipment back. Margaret had some tour dates. Some bloke asked her if she wanted to participate in a market survey into cat-food. She told him she preferred dog-food, and hung up. Christine would be pacing through her little house. She would click her tongue in annoyance, exasperation, and then the phone would ring. Vetting the calls with the answering machine did no good. The thirty seconds it took for the message to spout was a good twenty seconds longer than she would give the caller anyway - and she already knew who was on the line.
Things were getting altogether too weird. Almost every time the phone rang these past few days, she knew who would be at the other end. Sometimes when she picked up the receiver she would launch half-way into the conversation she knew she was about to have. Auras. And now this.
Auras had appeared to her first during the muscular and breathing exercises at her Ninjutsu class. That was five years ago. The colours just seemed to come into focus, like a bud that blooms over night. Christine closed her eyes. She sees too much, and now she was hearing too much. What had done it this time, she wondered, what had triggered this latest change? Diana maybe: something to do with her.
From the front step came the unmistakable slap of a newspaper, the Wentworth Courier. Perfect, thought Christine, it would keep her mind off reality. She opened the door, reaching down at her feet, as a twisted shape hurtled past her. She turned in time to see lamp on the coffee table, knocked off its axis, pirouette briefly at an angle before plunging to the floor. Annabel the cat leapt away, as if under attack, spun, spied the length of twine that she had dragged in with her, still caught on her back paw, pursuing it dervish-like. It flew free and she pounced, rolling head-first on the hall carpet, batting and pummelling the length of twine until it formed into a knotted bundle. Closing the door behind her, Christine looked down and laughed. Annabel heard the laughter and returned Christine's stare with bright, brown, disapproving cat-eyes. Annabel was a boy. Christine had given it a girl's name for fun. Some people, people she knew quite well, had found this disturbing. One or two had even expressed a concern for the poor cat's self-image.
Christine took the paper with her through to the kitchen table where she sat, leafing through it. One thing about this neck of the city - no shortage of crime stories. And it was not only crime committed locally, though there was plenty of that, it was people caught up the Cross, apprehended as they say, after dirty deeds done elsewhere. On page three, a rail worker, described as "known to police" had been found dead on Forbes. "Robbery," it said, "appears to have beed ruled out. The man was carrying a sum of money as well as a quantity of the illicit substance benzedrine. According to sources, the injured man found with him, and thought to be his associate, was unable to help the police in their inquiries."
She thumbed towards the back. Two paragraphs on page eight told of a suicide from The Gap, one of Sydney's most popular destinations. Not even the murder of Macquarie Lighthouse had ruined its appeal. The classifieds were dominated by sex ads for Asian Princesses, Young Hot & Latin, and the personals which were always good for a laugh. She heard a clatter from down the hall, and she smiled, as Annabel, at the edge of the kitchen, leapt over her ball of string, twisted, lost her back feet on the kitchen tiles, and crashed face-first onto her unsuspecting prey. Girl or boy, Annabel seemed a pretty well adjusted cat to her. Just think of the hard cash that humans will fork out in order to be ambiguous.
In a staccato stare, Annabel's eyes darted up at her and away. She was off again. Christine preferred her cat's brown eyes to the blue of Diana's. It was certainly Jonathan that Diana was interested in. She could not quite figure it, Diana's attitude towards her. Some women, teases, held out against her advances with an air of seducibility, but it was often a sham, vanity on their part; when push came to heave it turned out they were just straights after all, scared of a little kiss and cuddle. Perhaps this was Diana, talking up to her at dinner, then pissing off with Jonathan. Although, she thought, it was hardly Diana's fault that Bruno had taken sick. She enjoyed being with Diana at dinner. She enjoyed it when their hands lay close together. And her eyes, clear as a cat's, but blue, not like Annabel's - like her father's.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
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 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.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
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'.
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'.
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