The Winds of Heaven (5 page)

‘Do you want the light out?’ asked Mrs Southey, and Fan said, ‘No,’ but she didn’t tell her that she liked the light on all the time and Mum smiled at them both and went out of the room and down the hall towards the bathroom.

Clementine waited. She waited for Aunty Rene’s steps coming from the lounge room, coming to kiss her daughter goodnight. She waited and waited, like she did every night, hoping that this night, this once, Aunty Rene would come.

Aunty Rene didn’t come. She never did. She never
would
, thought Clementine angrily, stealing a quick, furtive glance across the room. Fan was sitting up again, the covers thrown back, picking idly at the hard stained soles of her feet.

How awful to have a mum who never bothered to kiss you goodnight! And a sister who’d run away and a dad who went off shearing God knows where. And how odd it seemed to feel sorry for Fan, who was a whole year older, and beautiful, and hardly scared of anything.

Fan sensed her gaze and looked up. ‘What are you staring at?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing,’ said Clementine quickly, and Fan lay down again and pulled the grey blanket and the raggy old sheet right up past her face.

Late in the night Clementine woke up. Someone had switched off the light, and the house was silent, the kind of silence where you know at once that everyone else is asleep. She twisted and turned beneath the rough blanket, then she knelt up at the window and pulled the curtain across so the big stars couldn’t look in at them. The curtains didn’t meet properly: there was a big gap where the stars could still see inside, and Clementine gave up and lay down again.

Oh, how different from home all this was! How different from thirty-three Willow Street! You could even
smell
the difference: a mixture of sun and dust, wild honey and the smoky tang from the old kerosene fridge on the back verandah. And you could smell feelings, too – Clementine was sure of it: you could smell anger and hatred and disappointment and jagged little fears. The anger smelled like iron and the disappointment smelled like mud. When she thought of Mum’s thick linen tablecloth with the red cross-stitched border and how she’d set the table every evening before Dad came home from work, it all seemed silly up here. The little sense of happiness she used to have, smoothing the creases from the cloth, laying it on the table, getting the edges exactly even, was like a toy given to a baby who had nothing to do but play.

Everything had gone different. Like a changeling, this little room she shared with Fan had stolen the place of her own room back home, where when you looked out the window you saw the park across the road and the lights of the Brothers’ house shining through the trees. This old house had taken the place of their house in Willow Street: instead of Willow Street there were the red unpaved streets of Lake Conapaira with the tiny pieces of glass she’d thought
were diamonds until Fan had told her, laughing, that they were only bits of old broken bottles crushed into the ground. And the heat of the day and the cold of the night, a different heat and a different cold, and the strange winds that Fan called ‘the winds of heaven’, which sprang up suddenly out of nowhere and blew about the vast empty spaces of the sky. Even the sky was different from the one at home.

And the frightening thing was that all of this, so strange in the first few days, was now after only two weeks so familiar that it seemed more real than the home she’d left behind, as if that home had only been a kind of dream. Even her dad seemed like a dream now: when she tried to picture his face she couldn’t remember it clearly.

It wasn’t Dad who had forgotten her, it was she who’d forgotten him. Clementine flung herself back down on the bed.

‘Oh,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, oh!’

‘What is it?’ Fan woke quick like a cat and sat up straight. ‘Are you crying, Clemmie?’

‘No!’

‘Yes you are.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘You were so.’ Fan jumped out of bed and padded across the old linoleum.

‘Are you sad?’ she whispered.

‘No.’

‘Is it the cold? Are you cold?’ She glanced towards the window where the stars in the gap between the curtains seemed even bigger now, as if they had come down closer to the earth. ‘You can have my blanket if you like.’ She dragged it from her bed and tucked it round her cousin.

‘No, you have it!’ Clementine tugged it out and threw it back across the room.

Fan picked it up. ‘’S’okay, I don’t want it. I’m used to the cold.’ She looked down at Clementine. ‘Want me to come in with you?’

‘No!’ cried Clementine. And then she changed her mind and whispered, ‘All right then.’ She drew the covers back and Fan slipped in beside her. They lay close together, so close they were all tangled up, and Clementine could feel the grains of gritty red dust on her cousin’s legs and arms.

‘Soon I’ll take you to see my friend,’ promised Fan.

In a little while they were both asleep, a single hump beneath the thin sheet and worn grey blankets. The old house creaked in the cold and outside the window the big stars grew closer and closer, till they were like cold faces peering through the glass. And the winds of heaven sprang up and blew above the paddocks and rocked in the great spaces of the sky.

Fan marched out through the back gate and began to walk away quickly down the lane, so fast that Clementine had to run to keep up with her.

‘Wait! Wait for me!’

At the end of the lane Fan stopped and turned round. Her beautiful face, which was always so bright and lively, had gone pale and still. Her eyes gleamed with unshed tears.

At breakfast that morning something bad had happened. In Clementine’s house at Willow Street it wouldn’t have been bad, only a little accident which could happen to anyone and didn’t matter in the least.

Fan had knocked over her cup of milk. Clementine’s mum had been sitting next to her, and some of the milk, only a little bit of it, had spilled onto Mrs Southey’s skirt.

Aunty Rene had jumped up from her chair. She was like a match being struck. ‘Get the cloth!’ she’d screamed at Fan. ‘Get the cloth!’

Her scream flew into every little nook and cranny, exactly as Clementine had imagined when she was coming up in the train. It got into things and made them weak: you felt that if you picked up your cup it would shatter, a spoon might give off an electric shock.

‘Get the cloth!’

Fan got to her feet. Usually sure-footed, she stumbled now, as if the scream had sucked her balance away.

She brought the wrong cloth, the dirty dish one from the sink instead of the clean tea towel, and it made greasy streaks all down Mrs Southey’s skirt. ‘It doesn’t matter, Rene,’ Clementine’s mum had protested when Aunty Rene began shrieking some more at Fan, telling her she was a dummy and a retard, a thing that should never have been born. ‘It’s only an old skirt, no harm done. And Fan didn’t mean to – it was an accident, Rene.’

‘Nothing’s an accident with that little madam!’ Aunty Rene’s eyes had glittered. ‘They say she’s backward up the school.’

Backward. There’d been a kind of triumph in the way she’d spoken that word; she’d licked her lips on it as if it was chocolate, rich and sweet. A wave of bright crimson had flooded Fan’s cheeks, so quick and sudden you barely caught it before it was gone again and Fan’s face turned pale as milk. She’d dropped the cloth on the floor and run out of the room, and Clementine had run after her, out of the house, across the yard and out into the lane.

‘Wh-where are you going?’ Clementine asked this silent, angry Fan.

Her cousin said nothing for a moment. With the big toe of one bare foot she drew a curved shape in the red dirt of the lane. Then she drew lines around it, like the rays of the sun.

‘I’m going to see my friend.’

‘Can I come?’

Fan took a long time making up her mind. Clementine could have said, ‘You promised!’ but she knew today was
different, the kind of day when you didn’t remind people of the promises they’d made.

Fan raised her eyes and looked at her cousin. She studied her.

Clementine stood very still.

‘All right,’ said Fan at last. ‘You can come.’

The house in Palm Street was on the very edge of town. At the end of the lane real country began. On their left lay blazing paddocks, to their right a narrow red road that led towards the steely sheet of water that gave the town its name. Lake Conapaira.

‘This way.’ Fan turned onto the red road. It was hot. There was a sky like a brass band. From here the lake seemed far away, yet glittered so fiercely you had to narrow your eyes to look. It was so bright the sun might have fallen down beneath the water and be lying on the muddy bottom with the leeches and little fishes, the rusty old tins and jagged stones. The lake was dangerous; however hot the day was, you could never swim in there.

A dust-filled shimmer hid the farther side. ‘What’s over there?’ asked Clementine. She wanted her cousin to talk; she wanted her to be the Fan she knew again.

‘The land,’ replied Fan, and her voice lingered on the word, so that it seemed to come out in two falling syllables,
la-and
, like part of some mysterious song.

‘Oh,’ said Clementine.

They turned off the red road onto a clay track between tall banks of reeds. Water gurgled in amongst them, and Clementine heard small quick scurrying sounds, and then a single, heavy ‘plop’. A line of black ants crawled in single file along the dry edge of the track.

Clementine stooped to pick up a small white pebble. It felt warm and smoothly perfect in her hand. ‘Look,’ she said to Fan. ‘Look what I found.’

Fan took the pebble and examined it closely, turning it this way and that, holding it up to the light. ‘Reckon it might be one of those teeth them bad spirits lost,’ she said at last.

Clementine dropped the pebble onto the track. She shuddered.

‘Hey!’ Fan touched her arm. ‘It’s all right, I was only kidding.’ She picked up the pebble and began tossing it from hand to hand. ‘Those teeth didn’t fall down here. It was some other place, honest, miles and miles away.’ She held out the small white stone and Clementine took it and thrust it deep into the pocket of her shorts.

Fan was kind, reflected Clementine. And she was clever, too, no matter what Aunty Rene said, or those kids who sang stupid songs in the street. It didn’t matter that she read badly and had to repeat at school, you could tell from her face and the things she said that she was clever. She knew all the secret tracks and places round the lake, and words from another language, and stories other people didn’t know. And she was clever with thoughts and feelings, too: she grasped things no one else could see. When Clementine had told her about the
Griffiths Tea
signs, Fan had understood exactly how Clementine had imagined the jewelled palace and the tea that tasted like ambrosia, and the way she’d felt when she’d missed the place and begun bawling like a little kid.

Even Mum hadn’t understood about
Griffiths Tea.
She’d told Clementine it was just an ordinary old tea you bought in an ordinary grocer’s shop and the signs along the railway
line were only advertising. ‘You haven’t missed a thing, sweetheart,’ she’d said. ‘There’s nothing to cry about.’

But Clementine thought there was, and Fan had agreed with her.

‘You were crying for
gadhaang
,’ she’d said.

Gadhaang.
It was the kind of word you just knew meant something important.

‘That’s happiness,’ Fan had explained. ‘Proper happiness.
Serious
happiness. That’s what you thought
Griffiths Tea
might be.’

Serious happiness. Even Clementine’s best friend Allie wouldn’t have understood so well, and as for girls like Lizzie Owens and Christa Jorgensen, if Clementine had so much as breathed a word to them about
Griffiths Tea
they’d have said she was barmy and the green cart would be coming to her house that very night to take her to the loony bin for ever and ever, amen.