The Winds of Heaven Read online

  Judith Clarke was born in Sydney and educated at the University of New South Wales and the Australian National University in Canberra. She has worked as a teacher and librarian, and in adult education in Victoria and New South Wales.

  Judith’s novels include the multi-award-winning Wolf on the Fold, as well as Friend of my Heart, Night Train, Starry Nights, and the very popular and funny Al Capsella series. Kalpana’s Dream was an Honor Book in the 2005 Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for Excellence in Children’s Literature in the Fiction and Poetry category. One Whole and Perfect Day was Winner of the Young Adult Book Award in the 2007 Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, shortlisted in the 2007 CBCA Book of the Year Awards and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and Honor Book in the American Library Association, Michael L. Printz Awards for Excellence in Young Adult Literature 2008.

  Judith’s books have been published in the USA and Europe to high acclaim.

  Also by Judith Clarke

  Angels Passing By

  Night Train

  The Lost Day

  The Heroic Life of Al Capsella

  Al Capsella and the Watchdogs

  Al Capsella on Holidays

  Friend of My Heart

  The Boy on the Lake

  Panic Stations

  The Ruin of Kevin O’Reilly

  Luna Park at Night

  Big Night Out

  Wolf on the Fold

  Starry Nights

  Kalpana’s Dream

  One Whole and Perfect Day

  The Winds of Heaven

  JUDITH CLARKE

  First published in 2009

  Copyright © Text, Judith Clarke, 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photo-copied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Clarke, Judith, 1943–

  The winds of heaven / Judith Clarke.

  ISBN 978 174175 731 6

  A823.3

  Cover and text design by Sandra Nobes

  Typeset in Janson by Tou-Can Design

  Printedand bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Contents

  Prologue: 2009

  Part One: 1952

  Part Two: 1957–1958

  Part Three: 1961

  Part Four: 1962

  Epilogue: 2009

  To the Wiradjuri Country

  Prologue: 2009

  These days Clementine has visions. There’s nothing exotic or heavenly about them: they’re made of the most simple stuffs. A ragged chorus of Happy Birthday is enough to bring back her mum’s young face, bright with love above a pink-iced cake she’s spent all day making. Happy Birthday Clementine is spelled out in tiny sugar flowers.

  A skein of crimson embroidery silk in a craft shop window can make Clementine stop short with a little gasp: she’ll see the bright cross-stitched border of her mother’s favourite linen tablecloth, feel the coolness of its cloth beneath her smoothing hand, hear the sweet sound of her dad’s homecoming bike purring up the side path as her nine-year-old self sets the table for their tea.

  A hot summer day with a certain harsh light in it, dust in the air, an old song of Johnny Cash’s on the radio – any of these will bring back her cousin Fan.

  And however disparate, there’s one quality all Clementine’s visions have in common: the people and places in them are lost and gone for ever.

  Most times these visions come when Clementine is alone, but today she’s with her friend Sarah, walking round the lake in Flinders Park as they do each Thursday morning – two old ladies taking their exercise: three times round with a rest on the green wooden bench after the second lap.

  It’s late January, the very height of summer.

  ‘Hot!’ puffs Sarah. ‘Lord, it’s hot today!’

  They’ve been round only once but already she’s heading for the bench and the shade of the rustling she-oak trees. ‘Early break!’ she grins at Clementine. ‘Can’t take the heat anymore; I’m not as young as I used to be. Sixty-seven next birthday!’ Sarah punches a fist in the air and flops down on the hard wooden bench, flicking a hand at the small black flies that hover round their faces and settle on the shoulders of their tee-shirts like an embroidery of shiny black beads.

  Clementine sits down beside her friend. Sixty-seven! she marvels.

  Sixty-seven is the exact age Fan would have been if she hadn’t gone away. And though it’s almost fifty years ago, the thought of her cousin’s going away fills Clementine’s eyes with tears. Throughout her life, even in the happiest times there’s always been a sadness at the bottom of her heart, like a small cold pebble lying in whispering reeds.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asks Sarah.

  ‘Fine,’ answers Clementine, and she leans back and gazes up at the hard, pewter-coloured sky of January. There are no clouds in it, she notices, none of those clouds in fantastic shapes which she and Fan used to watch from the grassy bank above Lake Conapaira. She can’t imagine her cousin being sixty-seven, any more than she and Fan could have imagined such a thing when they were children – in those days even forty was impossibly old to them. It was ancient. Disgusting, even.

  Now she hears her cousin’s voice, quite clearly. It’s hoarse, the voice of a child who’s been crying. ‘She’s forty!’ Fan is spitting out contemptuously. ‘She’s old !’

  A picture comes next, a little vision: Fan is standing in the middle of the small bedroom they shared in the old house in Palm Street, in each hand she holds one of her thick blonde plaits, and with a small quick gesture she lifts them onto the top of her head and twists them into a crown.

  ‘O-old!’ Fan’s voice is mocking now. ‘So old!’

  It’s her mother she’s talking about, Clementine’s scary Aunty Rene.

  ‘She’s got wrinkles! Imagine! Imagine having wrinkles!’ Fan pulls a wrinkly face and lets the heavy plaits fall; they tumble down over her pointed shoulder blades and settle at her waist. She flings herself onto her bed, crosswise, head hanging over the side, plaits sweeping the floor, and walks her small slender feet up the grubby wall. The tops of them are speckled with the red dust of Lake Conapaira, and her soles are stained with it, crimson as an Indian bride’s. ‘I’m never going to get wrinkles,’ vows Fan, and then Clementine hears her own nine-year-old self protest, ‘But everyone gets wrinkles when they get old.’

  ‘Not me,’ says Fan. ‘Everyone else will, but not me.’ The utter certainty in that childish voice, remembered half a century later on this hot summer morning in a suburban park, makes Clementine’s blood run cold.

  A small breeze ripples the sluggish surface of the water; a flock of black cockatoos swoops over the lake towards a bank of trees.

  ‘Bilirr,’ Clementine hears Fan saying now, and at once that other lake swims into her vision, the real one, Lake Conapaira. It’s huge – on hot hazy days like this one you couldn’t see the other side. T
hey’re lying in the grass at Fan’s hidey watching the clouds race grandly over the sky. And then the cockatoos come shrieking and Fan reaches over and lays one fingertip lightly on her cousin’s lips. ‘Bilirr,’ she says again, smiling. ‘Now you say it, Clemmie.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes you can. It’s easy. Go on.’

  ‘Bilirr,’ whispers Clementine, and is rewarded by a memory, so exact it’s almost painful, of her cousin’s laugh, a sound that always made her think of a handful of bright water flung into the air.

  On the green bench beside the artificial lake Sarah turns her head. ‘Belair?’ she asks. ‘Is that what you said? I’m afraid my hearing’s not what it used to be.’

  ‘Bilirr,’ replies Clementine. ‘It’s an Aboriginal word for black cockatoo. Fan taught it to me.’

  Sarah puts her head on one side. ‘Fan?’

  Way down in Clementine’s heart the small cold pebble seems to shift and stir. ‘Oh, Fan,’ she says. ‘Fan was my cousin. My cousin from Lake Conapaira.’

  Part One: 1952

  Chapter One

  ‘Mum?’ whispered Clementine, ‘Mum, when will we be there?’ She was whispering because her mother sat so very still and quiet, her knitting abandoned in her lap, her head resting against the back of the seat, eyes closed. She might even be asleep.

  ‘Mum?’ Clementine shifted along the shiny seat till she was right up close, reached out a hand and lightly brushed her fingers across her mother’s soft cheek. ‘Mum?’ she said again, so softly it was hardly more than a breath. Mrs Southey sighed and moved her head a little but she didn’t open her eyes. She was asleep.

  Clementine slid back into her own seat. She rested her elbow on the windowsill and stared out at the grey-gold paddocks rushing by: paddocks and paddocks and paddocks and then a single twisty tree, quite grey and leafless, a dry creek bed full of stones, more paddocks, paddocks – ‘Aa-aah,’ yawned Clementine, and stretching her legs out, she began to swing one foot, slowly at first, and then faster and faster until a shoe fell off and plopped onto the floor. ‘Aa-ah-aaah!’ she yawned again.

  Oh, it was such a long way to Lake Conapaira! So long it seemed they’d been travelling for whole nights and days, for weeks and months, like the explorers Mrs Carmody had told them about in History, who crossed the mountains and the deserts and the whole of Australia, from sea to shining sea.

  But Clementine knew it had only been a day. Only a day since Mum had woken her this morning, so early that it had still been dark outside, with the moon down low in the sky, a raggedy old moon that looked as if something wicked had taken a big ugly bite from its side. It was still dark when the taxi came to take them to the station, and the rattling old train that hurried them into the city was well past Auburn before Clementine saw a single lighted window. The window had no curtains and Clementine could see inside a kitchen where a lady in a green dressing gown, with pink curlers in her hair, was putting a kettle on for tea. By the time they reached Burwood there were lots of lighted windows, and the tiny lamps of shift workers’ bicycles coming home along the streets, and at Central a pale light was creeping into the concourse, thin and grey as the gruel fed to orphans in fairy stories.

  The pigeons! Clementine had never seen so many, whole flocks of them, strutting and squabbling, rising with a great clattering sound when a long luggage trolley rattled by, and feathers like grey snowflakes drifting down from a sky that was plainly morning. She cupped her hands and a single feather landed gently on one palm; it felt warm and mysterious, soft as thistledown.

  ‘Clementine! Hurry up! What are you doing, dawdling about back there?’ Mrs Southey was wearing her hot and bothered look, her face flushed and her second-best hat with the bunch of fat cherries slipped sideways on her curls. She frowned at the feather in Clementine’s hand. ‘Put that down, it’s dirty!’

  ‘No it isn’t, it’s new, it hasn’t been anywhere!’

  Mrs Southey snatched the feather and sent it spinning down onto the tracks where it would get run over by a train. ‘Your hat’s on crooked,’ said Clementine coldly, but her mother took no notice. She grabbed her daughter’s hand and tugged her along the platform where the Riverina Express stood waiting, its huge black engine making short sharp spurting sounds, as if it was eager to be off. A long string of carriages trailed behind it, skirts of bright red dust beneath their windows.

  ‘Where’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s in the train. Oh, hurry, Clementine.’

  In the train. A small butterfly of hope fluttered inside Clementine’s chest. ‘Is he coming then? Is Dad coming with us?’

  ‘You know he isn’t. How many times do I have to tell you?’

  ‘So why is he in the train?’

  ‘He’s seeing to the luggage. In you go now!’ Mrs Southey pushed Clementine up three small steps and into a carriage marked Car D. A row of open doors along a narrow passage showed tiny rooms neat as ships’ cabins and Clementine saw her dad in one of them, hoisting their big suitcase up onto the rack.

  ‘Is that our room?’

  ‘Compartment,’ corrected Mrs Southey, stepping briskly inside it, taking off her crooked hat, running her fingers through her mussed-up hair. She opened one of the tall cupboards set into the wall and Clementine caught sight of herself in the big mirror on the inside of its door: a skinny little kid in a tartan frock with tartan bows in her hair, standing in the doorway as if she wasn’t certain whether to stay out or come in. The little room didn’t look big enough to hold three people, though Clementine was so small for her age that people often mistook her for seven, or even six, instead of nine. Her eyes were grey, a dark grey that was almost the colour of charcoal, and there was a faint dusting of freckles over her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Her bobbed hair was the most ordinary sort of brown, so straight and smooth and slippery that the lovely hair ribbons Granny Southey bought for her wouldn’t stay on; they slid down and fell into the dirt and lost their bright new shine.

  Mr Southey pushed the big suitcase as far back on the rack as it would go. Then he turned round, wiping his hands down the sides of his trousers, and said to Mum, ‘When you get to Coota, make sure you call the guard to get it down for you. Don’t want to start your visit with a strain.’

  A strain sounded awful to Clementine. ‘What if the guard doesn’t come?’ she blurted. What if he didn’t come and they couldn’t get the suitcase down and Mum got a strain and then they got carried on past Coota to other places where they didn’t want to go?

  ‘You’re such a little worrier, Clementine,’ said Mrs Southey, but her dad winked and said cheerfully, ‘Of course he’ll come! No doubt about it!’

  She took a small step into the compartment. Outside a sharp whistle blew and the pigeons rushed up in a clatter. ‘Better be off then,’ said Dad, kissing Mum on the cheek and catching Clementine up in such a fierce hug that she could feel the buttons on his shirt press hard into her skin. Before she’d got her breath back he was gone. He was outside on the platform smiling in at them, a beautiful smile that had a kind of sadness in it, as if she and Mum were going away for ever instead of only for the summer holidays. The train began to move and his face disappeared from the window like a light that had been turned out. She pressed her nose against the cold glass and saw him standing amongst the pigeons and the empty luggage trolleys and the little groups of people waving, getting smaller and smaller and farther and farther away, until the platform vanished, and the station itself, and the railway workshops – and they were rushing past the dark little houses of Redfern with their cluttered yards and skinny cats and sooty, sickly trees.

  And after Redfern came Macdonaldtown and Newtown and Stanmore, their narrow streets bathed now in soft buttery light, with whole crowds of men on bicycles riding off to work, and a green bus pulling away from the stop outside Ashfield station. Croydon and Burwood, then Strathfield where their train stopped to take on more passengers – all these were places whose names were familiar to Clementine, stations t
hey always passed when she and Mum came in to do shopping in town. Homebush and Flemington, Lidcombe, Auburn and Clyde. Granville and Merrylands – that was theirs, that was home – and how strange it seemed that the train didn’t stop there, but raced on swiftly by as if the place where they lived was nothing special after all.

  She could see The Avenue, and the big house on the corner, with its glassed-in verandah, where all day long old Mrs Cowper sat in the sun and waved to passers by. And there was Carlyle Street, and the Catholic school, and the old wooden house where the Brothers lived, and behind it the tops of the big trees in the park, and across from the park – though you couldn’t see it – was Willow Street, where Clementine and her parents lived at number thirty-three. And all of this passed in such a narrow moment there was barely time to clap your hands: you looked, and it was gone. The train rushed on through Guilford and Yennora, places that were still familiar because Yennora was where Granny Southey lived, but then it was stations whose names Clementine didn’t know, and orchards and market gardens and thick green bushland that went on and on and on. If the train stopped and they had to get out, how would they ever find their way back home?

  ‘Mum, do you know how to get home from here?’

  Mrs Southey glanced carelessly out of the window. ‘I suppose so, at a pinch,’ she said.

  ‘Will Dad be home?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Mrs Southey consulted her little watch. ‘He’ll be at work by now.’

  Work was why Dad couldn’t come with them to Lake Conapaira. While they were away at Aunty Rene’s he would go to the factory in the mornings the same as any day. He would make his own sandwiches in the kitchen like he did when Mum had been sick with flu, cutting the bread too thick and the corned beef raggy, then he would ride off on his bicycle, and in the evening he would come home again. He always came home at the same time, five-thirty, and as she set the table for tea Clementine would listen for the soft tick-tock of the chain as he wheeled his bicycle up the path, past the kitchen windows and down towards the shed. He would come home in the same way tonight only there would be no one to listen for him: the kitchen would be all shadowy when he walked in through the door and the table wouldn’t be set because it was Clementine who always did this, smoothing the creases from the tablecloth with the red cross-stitched border which Mum had made for her glory box when she was a girl, laying out the placemats and the knives and forks and spoons. Tonight the table would be bare and shiny, and there wouldn’t be anything for tea.