The Winds of Heaven Read online

  ‘Aunty Caro,’ breathed Cash. He was right beside her, she could feel the warmth of his skin; he’d never come so close before. ‘See – that’s Aunty Caro. And Uncle Frank.’ He reached up a tiny hand and outlined his aunt’s face with one finger, then looked up at Clementine.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ said Clementine. ‘And Uncle Frank looks nice too.’

  He nodded fiercely.

  Clementine placed the photograph back in his hands and he bent his head and kissed his Aunty Caro’s face.

  Clementine stood there. She didn’t know what to do next. ‘You sure you don’t want anything to eat?’ she asked again.

  ‘No.’

  He would wait till Fan woke up, as he’d done on the other mornings she’d been here. Fan never got up before eleven; it was like she was sick in some vague kind of way. ‘Just tired,’ Clementine told herself again, remembering her mother’s words. But she knew it was more than that, and the thought of Fan and Cash’s mornings going on and on like this after she’d gone back home made Clementine feel uneasy, even a little afraid. There was something wrong in the house and she couldn’t work out what it was, though she felt it might be a wrongness made up of things that were missing rather than things that were there. She reached out a hand and touched Cash’s soft fine hair. ‘I’ll be outside if you want me for anything,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be in the laundry, okay?’

  She roamed through the house gathering up towels and tea towels and abandoned clothes. ‘Give her all the help you can, love,’ Clementine’s mother had said to her on the platform at Central. ‘It’s hard work bringing up a little kiddie, when you’re that young. And there’s nothing like housework to get you down. Piling up on you…’ Here Mrs Southey had sighed and brushed a strand of hair from her damp forehead, for it had been hot, and Tuesday – ironing day – and when she got home from seeing her daughter off at Central it would be waiting for her, piled right up.

  There was an old washing machine in the laundry of the Palm Street house now, squeezed in beside the copper and the tubs. The copper was huge, like Clementine imagined the witch’s oven in Hansel and Gretel might have been. ‘I hid in there once,’ Fan had confided when they were little, ‘when Mum was chasin’ me with the strap. I crawled in and I pulled the lid down on the top, and it was so-o dark, Clemmie, like you were right down buried in the ground. Mum didn’t find me.’ She’d grinned at Clementine and then her face had darkened. ‘But she did the next time.’

  Clementine had gone cold all over when Fan had told her that, not for the darkness of the copper, or even Aunty Rene’s gleaming strap, but for another picture which had flown unbidden into her head: Aunty Rene slipping through the laundry door without a sound, creeping over to the copper and holding the lid down firmly so Fan couldn’t get out, feeding dry sticks through the little door at the bottom, lighting them, stooping to coax them up into a fine, fierce blaze.

  The old machine rattled noisily through its single cycle. There was no spin like there was on Mum’s machine at home, only a big wringer with a handle almost too stiff to turn. Clementine didn’t bother with that; she piled the wet clothes into the basket and dragged them out to the line, which was empty except for a pair of old fawn-coloured overalls – Gary’s, she supposed. They were stiff and dusty, as if they’d been hanging out there through the storms and dust of summer and winter and summer come back again. Left out in the rain.

  She’d almost emptied the basket when the back door banged. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Fan coming across the yard towards her. The way she walked was different, Clementine observed sadly: it was ordinary, her feet no longer skipped and danced and whirled. She was wearing the same faded dress she’d had on when she’d met Clementine at the station, and in the bright morning sunlight Clementine saw how its pattern of grey urns and branches of purple flowers was almost identical to the pattern of the worn linoleum that had once been in her cousin’s old bedroom. That pattern had only been visible beneath Fan’s bed, another place she’d tried to hide when Aunty Rene came seething with the strap. How many times? wondered Clementine. How many times had Fan had to run and hide? And did she know how the pattern on her dress resembled the floor of one of her old hiding places? Of course she didn’t, Clementine told herself, and yet the idea of this strange coincidence, and Fan’s innocence of it, set up a funny little tingling all along her spine.

  The dress itself was the kind old ladies wore, a shapeless buttoned shift with no waist and short capped sleeves, light years away from the beautiful tiered skirts and silky blouses her cousin had worn on Clementine’s last visit. It was hard to imagine Fan choosing it, but then there wasn’t much to choose from in Lake Conapaira. The cramped windows of Lindsay’s in Main Street, the only store that sold women’s clothing, displayed dresses of this style. If you wanted something different you had to travel hundreds of miles to a larger town, or choose from the mail order catalogue like Fan used to do in the days when she worked in Mr Chiltern’s hardware store and had money of her own.

  She wasn’t working now. She was married with a little kid and perhaps Gary ‘kept her short’, a phrase Clementine’s mother used for the kind of husbands who didn’t give their wives much money; who spent their wages down the pub or betting on the horses out at Randwick or Rosehill. A wife could be poor, even if her husband wasn’t, Clementine knew that. ‘People don’t wear shabby clothes and live in slums because they choose to,’ she remembered Miss Travers telling them in a social studies class. ‘And it’s not because they’re slack. Don’t any of you ever think that! They live this way because they’re poor and they have no choice. Poverty restricts your choices, I want you all to remember that.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Fan was saying. ‘Sorry I went and slept in again. You must think I’m awful!’

  ‘’Course I don’t!’

  ‘Well you should!’ cried Fan with some of her old vigour. ‘I ask you to visit and you come all this way and you’ve only got a few days and then what do you find? Me snoring my head off half the time!’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘’Course it’s not all right. You always were too soft, Clementine Southey!’

  ‘Me too soft!’

  ‘Doing all the washing! And it’s not even Monday!’ She grinned at Clementine.

  ‘Monday washing day,’ chanted Clementine.

  ‘Tuesday ironing day,’ Fan chanted back. ‘You know, I couldn’t believe it when you told me how your mum used to do stuff like washing and ironing on certain days. Does she still do it?’

  ‘Sure. That’s why she got her job part-time, Wednesday to Friday.’

  ‘You’re kidding me. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. But she still does it Monday and Tuesday. I think it must be carved in stone somewhere.’

  ‘Oh, well. She’s nice, your mum. I used to wish she was mine.’ Fan went quiet for a moment, twisting a lock of her shorn-off hair. Then she said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I think it’s just – I get so tired.’ A kind of bafflement spread across her face. ‘And it’s not as if I’m doing much, all day. Doing nothing, most of it. Nothing days.’

  A brisk breeze had sprung up and set the wet clothes flapping on the line and the clouds running fast across the sky: a cloud like a big lizard, another like a kitten with three legs, a long white skinny arm. Fan looked up at them. ‘The winds of heaven,’ she said.

  ‘Did your friend teach you that?’ asked Clementine. It was something she’d always wondered. ‘The old black man?’

  ‘Teach me what?’

  ‘Those words – “the winds of heaven”.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t remember him ever saying them. They were just there, you know? Sort of in my head. Always.’

  ‘They sound like poetry,’ said Clementine, and she stooped and took the last clothes from the basket: the green skirt she’d worn on the train, a pair of blue child’s shorts.

  There was no more room on the line.

  ‘Oh, we’ll just c
huck these,’ said Fan, and she reached up to the stiff, jigging overalls and ripped them from the wire. They fell in a heap at her feet. She kicked them. ‘Bloody Gary,’ she said.

  ‘Where is he?’ The minute the words were out she knew she shouldn’t have spoken them. Fan’s face went hard in a way Clementine could never have imagined, and her voice was cold and distant when she answered, ‘Out west some place, last time I heard. God knows where.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Fan laughed, a dry little laugh that didn’t sound like hers. ‘Remember when Mum used to say that about Dad?’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘“God knows where”, when anyone asked where he’d gone, and you used to think it was a country, a special faraway place called Gunnesweare.’

  Clementine scuffed at the red earth with the toe of her sandal. ‘Yeah.’ She didn’t know if it would be all right to smile, even though her cousin was laughing now.

  ‘You were a funny kid, all right,’ said Fan. Her face softened and she took Clementine’s hands in hers and gazed at her intently. ‘But look at you now! You’re lovely!’

  Clementine pulled away in embarrassment. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, of course you are.’ Fan glanced down at her cousin’s feet in their brown leather sandals. ‘Only I thought you’d be wearing green shoes.’

  ‘Green shoes? Why? To match the green skirt, you mean?’

  ‘Didn’t even know you had a green skirt, how could I? It was just – ’ Fan swiped at her windblown hair. ‘I had a dream about you a little while back.’

  ‘Honest? What was it about?’

  ‘Nothing, I guess. Well, I don’t know – we were just standing together, you know, side by side. Like this.’ She moved up close to Clementine, so close their hips touched, and their shoulders, too. Fan looked down at their feet. ‘And all I could see was one of your green shoes, right next to these old things of mine.’

  ‘Green shoes?’

  ‘Only one,’ said Fan. ‘But it was beautiful, your shoe. It was made of leather and it had a thin little strap across the middle and a square heel. And there was this feeling in the dream, you know? Between us, like – remember when we were kids, and I said I’d be your sister? Your gindaymaidhaany?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Some sister I turned out to be! Anyway, in the dream it was sort of like that. Being close, in a special kind of way. Perhaps that’s why I wrote and asked you up. At last.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  The wind was playing a game with Gary’s discarded overalls, twitching at the stiff brown cloth till it looked like a leg was kicking at the air. Fan nudged them with her foot, like you might nudge a lazy old dog to get him moving. Then she hooked them with the tip of her sandshoe and kicked them right across the yard. ‘Ugh!’ she exclaimed, scrubbing the shoe into the earth. ‘Filthy things!’

  The wind was really roaring now, ripping and tearing at the washing on the line. Fan shook her head from side to side.

  ‘You think it’s them,’ she said in a dull voice.

  Clementine was bewildered. ‘Who?’

  ‘Them.’ Fan’s voice rose. ‘Your mum and dad. You think it’s all their fault. Making a mess of things, you know – ’ she waved a hand towards the house, ‘fighting and hating each other, like mine did. You think it’s because they’re stupid.’ Her face hardened again and Clementine saw suddenly how it was becoming the face of a person who might do dangerous things.

  ‘You think it won’t happen to you,’ Fan went on. Her voice was louder now. ‘You think, “Oh no, you’re not stupid like them, you’ll know how to choose the right person, you’ll know how to – love properly.” You think you’ll be loved, and you won’t make a mess.’ The bitter words spilled out of her like dirty water from a pail. Instinctively Clementine stepped back. Fan didn’t notice, she might have forgotten Clementine was standing there. Above their heads the clouds were changing shapes: the big lizard swallowed the three-legged kitten, the skinny white arm threw roses into the sky.

  ‘But you’re too young, see?’ cried Fan. ‘You have to make these big decisions before you know anything – before you even know you’re making big decisions. And, and then you find out it wasn’t only your parents who got into a mess. It’s you – it’s everyone.’

  There was a silence, except for the wind. A tea towel flipped off the line and sailed away over the fence. Clementine moved to go after it but Fan grabbed at her arm. ‘Let it go,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t want to live here.’ She caught sight of her cousin’s stricken face. ‘Oh! Oh, Clemmie, you’re crying!’

  ‘No I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are.’ Fan took a grey hanky from the pocket of her old lady’s dress and dabbed at her cousin’s eyes. ‘There you are. I’m sorry, Clemmie. I shouldn’t have said all that stuff. I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘No it’s not. But I didn’t mean you, you know. I didn’t mean you’d get into that sort of mess. Because I know you won’t. You’ll choose properly, and someone will love you, someone lovely, I bet, and – ’

  She broke off. Beyond their clamour, the screen door had burst open; Cash came running towards them across the yard.

  It was plain that while Clementine had been in the laundry, Fan had bathed and dressed her little son. The winds of heaven ruffled his clean hair into feathers, his face shone. He wore small blue jeans and a finely knitted sailor’s jersey – beautiful clothes you could never come by in Lake Conapaira and which Clementine knew at once his Aunty Caro must have bought for him, just like she’d bought the new furniture for his room. In one hand he held a shape made from bright red Lego blocks, a shape that was recognisably a car. ‘Mum!’ he shouted. ‘Mum! Look!’

  Fan bent down to examine it. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said.

  ‘It’s for you!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Fan. ‘It’s exactly the kind of car I’ve always wanted.’ She raised it to her lips and kissed it loudly. ‘Mm-mwaa! It’s so good I want to eat it.’ She opened her mouth.

  Cash squealed with delight. ‘No! No, Mum, don’t!’

  ‘Okay, I won’t then. I’ll put it in here, right?’ She slipped the toy into the pocket of her ugly dress. ‘So then I can take it out and look at it when I want to – all day!’ She rolled her eyes at Cash and he giggled joyously. Then she turned to Clementine and said, ‘Clemmie, I’m really truly sorry for upsetting you.’

  ‘It’s all right, honest.’

  ‘No. I don’t know, something sort of comes over me sometimes.’ She smiled shakily. ‘Don’t take any notice of me, okay? Because there are lots of good things, lots.’ She bent down and swooped Cash up into her arms, kissing his cheeks and the ends of his feathery hair. ‘And this is my best, special, great good thing!’

  On Clementine’s last evening Fan strapped Cash into his stroller and they set out for a walk around the lake. ‘For old time’s sake, eh?’ she said.

  They went slowly along the track, where the tiny pieces of glass still glittered in the red earth, and the water made its familiar old dog lapping sound among the reeds. ‘So you’re going to university,’ said Fan, and Clementine noticed how she used the whole word, instead of saying ‘uni’ like everybody else. ‘Soon?’

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘Not long,’ said Fan, and after a few second’s silence she added, ‘I saw it once.’

  ‘Saw what?’

  ‘The university.’

  ‘You did?’ Clementine heard the note of surprise in her voice and realised how snobby she must sound: as if she thought even a glimpse of such a place was impossible for a cousin in Lake Conapaira. She flushed. ‘You mean,’ she floundered, making things worse, ‘you saw it on a school trip or something?’

  Fan laughed. It was a laugh without bitterness or offence in it and might even have held a kind of sympathy for Clementine’s embarrassment. ‘They didn’t have trips at our school, not back then, anyway – it’s too far from anywhere. I didn
’t mean I actually went there; I saw it on the telly, at Mrs Darcy’s place. It looked really – ’

  Posh, they all said. Fan didn’t.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘It was like one of those places I used to think might be in the blue hills.’ She snatched a quick sideways glance at Clementine. ‘You’re lucky,’ she said, and there was no envy, she was simply stating a fact.

  Clementine didn’t know how to reply. The idea of her luck, of – of privilege, made her want to sit down on the pebbly track and weep. It wasn’t fair. Instead she looked out towards the horizon, where the colour of the sky was fading and the hills showed darkly against it, their primitive humped shapes seeming to possess a strangely living quality. They might have been huge prehistoric creatures asleep on the edge of the plain.

  Fan followed her cousin’s gaze. ‘The blue hills,’ she said softly. ‘We went there once, me and Gary. Remember how I used to think any place you could dream of might be there?’

  ‘Of course I do. What was it like?’

  Fan shrugged. ‘Just a small town, a bit like this one. Mostly trees, and rocks, and then more rocks and trees.’

  ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,’ recited Clementine, ‘With rocks, and stones, and trees.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Just a bit of this poem we had at school.’

  ‘Say it again.’

  ‘Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.’

  ‘What’s “diurnal” mean?’

  ‘Sort of “on every day, for always”.’

  Fan gazed thoughtfully across the darkening water of the lake. ‘It was a bit like that up there,’ she said. ‘So quiet you could feel the earth going round and round, for ever.’ She paused and peered over the hood of the stroller to check on the sleeping Cash. ‘It snows up there sometimes, you know? And I thought how when the snow fell on those treetops it would be like a big fat white quilt you could jump into and pull right over your head and snuggle down to sleep.’