The Winds of Heaven Read online

  ‘Mum?’ Clementine grabbed at her mother’s arm. ‘What will Dad have for tea tonight? What will he eat?’

  ‘I don’t know, Clementine.’

  Clementine pulled anxiously at a strand of her slippery hair. She dragged the end of it towards her mouth.

  ‘Don’t chew your hair! How many times do I have to tell you?’

  ‘But Mum, if Dad doesn’t have anything to eat, then –’

  ‘Your father will have plenty to eat. He’s having tea at Aunty Rita’s place while we’re away.’

  ‘Oh.’ Clementine sank back into her seat with a small sigh of relief.

  Aunty Rita and Uncle Jim were Mum and Dad’s best friends; they lived in Randall Street, only one suburb away, in an old house with a big palm tree in the front yard.

  ‘And then will he come back to our house, to sleep?’

  ‘Of course he will.’

  Their house would be dark by then, dark and empty and sitting silent in the street. But that didn’t really matter because Dad wasn’t scared of the dark – whenever Clementine woke from a bad dream it was always Dad who came to comfort her and he never bothered to switch on the light. He sat on the edge of her bed and held her hand in the dark and the dark became soft and friendly and he would stay there till Clementine had gone to sleep, even if that took a long, long time.

  And now uneasiness took hold of Clementine again, like a small cold wave creeping over sand. ‘Mum?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Will he be there when we get back?’

  Because they were going away for a long time, a whole four weeks, and what if he forgot about them, and went away? There were girls in her class whose fathers had gone away: they had gone out the door and never come back again. And Lizzie Owens had never even had a father.

  ‘Who?’ asked her mother, frowning. ‘Do you mean your father?’

  Clementine nodded.

  ‘Of course he’ll be there. Whatever made you think he wouldn’t be?’

  ‘Nothing,’ whispered Clementine.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry so much, Clementine.’

  ‘But I have to ask things, don’t I?’ cried Clementine. ‘I have to know things, so I won’t worry.’

  ‘Yes, but – ’ her mother sighed, leaned closer and placed a soft little kiss right in the middle of Clementine’s forehead, like you might fix a stamp, very neatly and exactly, on a very important letter.

  ‘You’re a funny old thing,’ she said, and then she pushed down the arm of the seat between them, took a big pillow from the narrow cupboard, and made a little bed for Clementine. ‘Take your shoes off, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Try and have a little sleep.’

  ‘But I’m not tired.’

  ‘Just try. You don’t want to be all sleepy and cranky when we get to Cootamundra, do you? When we change trains?’

  ‘No.’ Clementine took her shoes off and curled up along the seat. There was just enough room for her to fit and the pillow was so big and soft and deep that in no time at all she was fast asleep.

  When she woke again, the world outside the window had changed so completely she thought for a moment she was dreaming. The green bushland had gone; in its place were broad paddocks of grey-gold grass and dry cracked creek beds rolling away to a line of distant rounded hills. There were big stones that looked like sheep, and grey sheep that looked like stones, and dead trees that took on fantastic shapes like clouds sometimes did in the sky: here was a big rooster, over there a kangaroo, and leaning against a crooked fence a twisted thing that could have been a hobyah with a bag on his shoulder, waiting to catch a little child. The sky was bigger, it was huge, and the way it arched across above the paddocks made you really see how the world really was round.

  Clementine rubbed her eyes. ‘Where are we?’

  Her mother looked up from the grey cable sweater she was knitting for Dad. ‘Just out from Harden.’

  A sudden patch of oily green appeared beside the railway line, its tussocky grass all spiky like a crowd of porcupines.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A swamp.’

  ‘If you walked there would you sink? Over your head?’

  ‘Oh, Clementine!’

  ‘I just wanted to know. Are we nearly there? At Aunty Rene’s place?’

  ‘Of course we’re not. We’re not even at Cootamundra yet. Do you remember your aunty?’

  Clementine shook her head. She’d only been four last time they’d visited.

  ‘Your cousin Francesca?’

  Francesca. Clementine felt a jolt of sheer astonishment at such a lovely name. It was so beautiful you wouldn’t expect an ordinary person to have it. ‘Francesca,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes,’ said her mother. ‘Only everyone calls her Fan. Don’t you remember her?’

  Clementine closed her eyes to concentrate. She concentrated on the single thing she could remember from that long-ago visit: the shady back verandah of her aunty’s house, and the screen door that opened onto its smooth wooden boards. She held this picture in her mind, waiting to see if someone would come through the door.

  And someone did. ‘A big girl with black hair?’

  ‘That’s Caroline, Fan’s big sister. Fan is fair, and she’s only a year older than you.’

  ‘Fan is fair.’ As soon as her mother said this, Clementine saw her younger cousin’s face exactly: a pale oval where everything – her eyes and nose, her fine flyaway eyebrows and delicate rounded lips – was quite perfect, like a dish full of precious gifts. She remembered Fan – Francesca – standing in the sunlight and how the silky hairs escaping from her long fair plaits had glittered round her head like golden wire. She was as beautiful as her lovely name.

  ‘Oh!’ She’d remembered something else. She heard it: someone calling Fan’s name in the kind of scream that meant someone might get hurt, that made you want to run away somewhere safe where the screaming couldn’t get inside you, into every little nook and cranny. She put her hands up to her ears.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked her mother.

  ‘I can remember someone screaming.’

  Strangely, because the memory was so scary, Clementine’s mother smiled. ‘That would be Fan all right; your cousin can be quite a handful when she wants to be.’

  ‘It wasn’t her. It was someone else.’ Clementine gazed at her mother with big frightened eyes. ‘A – a lady. Someone yelling at Fan.’ A small spiky lady, Clementine remembered suddenly: all sharp edges, with a long thin nose and little pointy teeth that might have belonged to a bad child. Small black eyes you felt might burn like coals if they rested too long on your skin. ‘Aunty Rene,’ she whispered. ‘Aunty Rene was screaming at Fan.’

  Her mother frowned and looked out the window, tapping her nails on the armrest of her seat. ‘Ah well,’ she said at last, mysteriously, ‘your Aunty Rene has had a lot to put up with.’

  ‘What? What has she had to put up with?’

  ‘Never you mind.’ Mrs Southey’s voice was low and serious. ‘Now listen, Clementine. I want you to be especially good while we’re at your aunty’s place.’ She reached out a hand and retied the tartan ribbon that was coming loose, as if a little neatness might actually be the start of good behaviour. ‘And it might be best if you didn’t mention your cousin Caroline.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, Caroline left home last year.’

  ‘You mean she ran away?’

  Although Mrs Southey didn’t know about it, Clementine and her best friend Allie Lewis had run away only a few weeks ago. They’d taken Mrs Lewis’s big white china fruit bowl out into the yard to make a swimming pool for their family of tiny pink plastic dolls, and the bowl had slipped from Allie’s hands and broken into pieces on the bricks beneath the garden tap. ‘Oh!’ Allie had gasped, and without even thinking of it, they’d simply joined hands and run away, down Walpole Street and Gisbourne Avenue, over the canal to the back of the cement works, where they’d hidden inside a big grey concrete pipe. But when the aftern
oon began to fade and the pipe got cold and creepy, they’d decided to go home again. No one had even missed them. ‘Oh, that old thing,’ Mrs Lewis had said, when they’d told her about the broken bowl. ‘You’re late,’ was all that Clementine’s mum said when she’d walked in through the door. ‘Hurry up and set the table; your dad will soon be home.’

  Somehow – perhaps it was something to do with the spiky lady’s scream – Clementine knew her cousin’s running away would be of a different, more serious kind. She stared out through the window at the empty paddocks racing by. How could you run away up here? You wouldn’t know where to go, because everything looked the same.

  ‘Of course she didn’t run away,’ her mother said sharply. ‘Whatever gave you that idea?’

  Clementine looked down at the floor. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that at all. Caroline’s a lot older than Fan, and she left because she found a good job in a bigger town. That’s all.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Mrs Southey pursed her lips, and added very quietly, as if she was talking to herself, ‘But all the same, your Aunty Rene wasn’t very pleased.’

  ‘Why wasn’t she?’

  Mrs Southey shrugged. ‘Forget I said that, just don’t mention Caroline.’ She gave a final pat to the shiny tartan ribbon. ‘There.’

  Clementine leaned her elbow on the sill and gazed out over the paddocks where Caroline had run away. Because she knew Caroline had done just that, whatever Mum said. Fan’s big sister had run away from Aunty Rene and that’s why she couldn’t be mentioned, because – because if Aunty Rene even heard Caroline’s name she’d scream and scream and scream.

  The paddocks were perfectly flat and the pale gold colour of the grass made you think it would be soft to walk upon, like fur, but Clementine knew it would have been hard and prickly beneath her cousin’s feet. Dotted across the paddocks were strange boxy trees with straight trunks and crowns of deep green leaves, like trees in a little kid’s drawing. They stood singly or in little groups of two or three, like people waiting for someone. Waiting for Caroline, thought Clementine, and how creepy it would be alone out there in the paddocks at night, where the trees might come alive and whisper to each other – much more scary than the big hollow pipe at the back of the cement works.

  In the middle of the afternoon they reached Cootamundra and changed into the small diesel train that would take them farther west. Once inside it, the day seemed truly endless, the sun bright as ever on the paddocks, the small stations trundling by so slowly: Stockinbingal, Temora, Barmedman. And now her mum had gone to sleep and there was no one to ask how much longer it would be till they reached Lake Conapaira; they had been the only people in the carriage since the big man in the tight blue suit had got out at Stockinbingal.

  Bellarwi, Narriah, Rankins Springs – ‘Rankins Springs,’ sang Clementine softly, and then, more loudly, ‘Rankins Spri-i-ings,’ but still her mother didn’t wake. Outside the window the shadows of the boxy trees grew longer, thinner; the grass became a softer gold, the rounded hills in the distance were blue instead of brown.

  And then the signs began to appear again, nailed to trees or fences and gates beside the railway line: green signs with big black letters that told you how many miles it was to Griffiths Tea. Clementine had seen them on the other side of Cootamundra. Looking up from her comic she’d spotted the first one, which had said: 65 Miles to Griffiths Tea, and a little while later there was another: 50 Miles to Griffiths Tea, and then it was 35, and 20, only then, absorbed in the comic, she’d missed it, she must have, for the next sign she saw said: 200 Miles to Griffiths Tea.

  ‘What’s Griffiths Tea?’ she’d asked her mother, but Mum had reached a tricky bit in Dad’s cable sweater. ‘Not now,’ she’d said, looping wool around her needle. ‘Not now, Clementine.’ And then they’d arrived at Cootamundra and Clementine had forgotten about the signs.

  Now here they were again. ‘50 Miles to Griffiths Tea.’ Fifty miles wasn’t far; this time she wouldn’t take her eyes from the window, she was determined not to miss Griffiths Tea, because it must be special. Why else would they have all these signs, as if the only point in all those miles and miles the train swallowed up was that they took you closer and closer to Griffiths Tea? It would taste like ambrosia, decided Clementine, ambrosia which Mrs Carmody said was the nectar of the gods. And you would drink ambrosia from thin blue painted cups, in a special, beautiful place: a jewelled palace, with great halls of silver and gold, with peacocks in the gardens, and a lake with white swans…

  30 Miles to Griffiths Tea. And now the sky was changing, its bright blue grown dimmer, almost pearly grey, and at its edge there were bands of different colours: smoky purple, apricot and palest apple green, like a layer cake, the rainbow one Mum had made for the Christmas fete at school.

  5 Miles to Griffiths Tea.

  A little further and the train slowed at a tiny station. Goolgowi, read Clementine, and she watched as a small, white-haired old lady stepped out from further down the train and was instantly surrounded by a ring of smiling people, men in big-brimmed hats and ladies in print dresses, little kids in pyjamas, all ready for bed when they got home. They stepped forward one by one to kiss the old lady, and Clementine thought it looked like they were taking part in a dance.

  With a single mournful hoot, the train pulled out from the station. The evening was deepening; the rainbow-cake stripes on the horizon had vanished and in their place was a scattering of big pale stars. But there was still enough light to make out the sign on the fence a little way out from the station, the sign that read quite plainly: 250 Miles to Griffiths Tea.

  She’d missed it. She’d missed the jewelled palace where princesses and grand ladies drank ambrosia from cups so fine the light shone through. Griffiths Tea was gone.

  Her mother had woken and was sitting up straight, pushing damp curly hair from her eyes. ‘How much farther is it to Aunty Rene’s place?’ Clementine demanded in a furious choking voice.

  Mrs Southey yawned. ‘What was that last station we passed? Did you see?’

  ‘Gool, Gool – ’

  ‘Goolgowi.’ She smiled at Clementine, mistaking the rage and sorrow on her daughter’s face for tiredness. ‘Not much farther now.’

  Clementine kicked at the seat. ‘I don’t care!’ And all at once she was crying – crying and crying like a little kid in Infants instead of a big girl in fourth class – great splashy tears that rolled down her cheeks and fell with a plop onto the front of her tartan frock and the worn shiny fabric of the seat.

  ‘Sweetheart! What’s the matter? Are you feeling sick?’ Mrs Southey put her hand on her daughter’s damp forehead, and Clementine pushed it away. ‘No, I’m not sick!’

  ‘Then what is it? Are you tired?’

  ‘No, I’m not tired!’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘It – it’s the Griffiths Tea!’ wailed Clementine, flinging herself against her mother’s chest.

  And it really did seem like that: how it wasn’t the long long way to Lake Conapaira that was making her cry, or the strange dark roaring at the windows and the silent country outside; it wasn’t the way her dress felt damp and sticky and her eyes stung and her skin itched with gritty red dust; it wasn’t the scary memory of Aunty Rene screaming or Fan’s big sister running away across the prickly paddocks – it wasn’t even the thought of Dad coming home to the empty house and how he might forget them and go away. No, it really was because she’d missed Griffiths Tea, and the beautiful jewelled palace with its halls of silver and gold, and the peacocks in the gardens and the lake with white swans. It was as if a great wonder, a world more beautiful than you could ever imagine, had been coming closer and closer all the long day, till it was so very near you could reach out and touch, and then – she’d gone and missed it. She’d missed it.

  And now she would never see it, and she would never taste ambrosia, never – ‘Never ever!’ shrieked Clementine.

  Her mother held her c
loser and kissed the top of her slippery hair.

  ‘Oh, Clementine!’ she sighed. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

  Chapter Two

  They shared Fan’s room at the end of the hall, a small room with two beds, a battered wardrobe and an old chair squashed in beside the chest of drawers. Clementine’s bed was beneath the window, Fan’s up against the wall, and the space between them was so narrow they could hold hands.

  Fan’s room. But it had once been Caroline’s room too. Clementine hadn’t asked Fan about her sister, though she longed to know if Caroline had run away. She hadn’t asked because Fan never spoke of Caroline, and this seemed strange to Clementine, who’d always wanted a sister and knew that if she’d had one she’d never stop talking about her, like her friend Allie never stopped talking about her big sister, Meg. Perhaps it was different if you had a sister who’d run away.

  Fan told stories. She was in the middle of one now, spinning round in the cramped space in the centre of the room while Clementine sat cross-legged on her bed, listening hard, because she’d never heard stories like these.

  ‘And then,’ Fan cried, flinging her head back so that her two thick plaits bounced and swung against her shoulder blades, waving her arms dramatically, ‘then, well, the magic kid, he sang the tree – ’

  ‘He sang to it?’ asked Clementine. ‘He sang a song to a tree?’

  ‘No, not sang to it. He sang it.’ Fan stood still for a moment. ‘That’s a kind of magic,’ she explained. ‘It’s making things. It means he made the tree be there.’ With small quick hands she shaped a tree growing, spreading the roots wide and deep, raising the trunk, stretching her arms out to make a thick canopy of leaves and branches, her movements so sure and tender that Clementine wouldn’t have been surprised if a real tree had suddenly sprung up through the floor. You could feel a tree.