The Winds of Heaven Read online

  She sat there for a long time, staring at nothing, while the traffic roared by along Broadway and passers-by glanced at her curiously, then she got up from the low brick wall and hurried up the road towards the university.

  She meant to write, of course she did, only she kept putting it off. And when she did try, sitting at the small desk in her room, pen poised over a blank sheet of paper, she couldn’t think of anything to say. She would begin awkwardly, write one or two rubbishy sentences, crumple the page and toss it into the wastepaper basket. Then she would sit there, chin on hand, and puzzle over why her last visit to Lake Conapaira seemed so very long ago.

  It was because so much had changed for her, she decided. Yes, that was the reason, surely. In these last fifteen months she’d moved beyond the small world of Chisolm College and her parents’ house in Willow Street. She was a second year arts student now and her world had become that of the university, of lectures and tutorials, of student parties and long earnest discussions in the little cafés of Glebe and Camperdown and Chippendale. She even had a boyfriend – Phillip Massinger – a third year law student who took her to cricket matches and dinner at the Malaya, to law school parties and once, last month, to afternoon tea with his widowed mother in her big white house on the north shore.

  And all of this was a long, long way from Lake Conapaira. Beautiful though it was, and however painfully its images – the grand sky and the endless paddocks, the red grains of its soil – might stir her heart, it had now become part of the landscape of her childhood; it was left behind. And Fan? She hardly ever thought of her cousin these days, and she never dreamed of her. The closeness, the feeling of being like a sister, had melted away. This was the reason she couldn’t think what to write in her letter.

  I suppose Cash is quite big, she began, and then crumpled the page again, because she thought it sounded patronising, and anyway, she couldn’t remember how old Cash would be, now. And she couldn’t write anything about the new baby, because Caro had asked her not to mention that she’d written – and how else could Clementine have known there was a baby, now Mum and Aunty Rene weren’t writing to each other anymore?

  But though she couldn’t write the letter to her cousin, Fan lingered now in Clementine’s mind. Once she even thought she saw her. It was a rainy Monday afternoon and Clementine was hurrying down a long dark corridor in the Old Arts Building, on her way to a philosophy tutorial in room thirty-four, and there, at the shadowy end of the passage, she had a sudden glimpse of a tall girl with dark blonde chopped-off hair. A girl in a faded blue-grey dress with the hem half coming down, who vanished round the corner the moment Clementine caught sight of her.

  ‘Fan?’ whispered Clementine. ‘Fan, is that you?’ And then more loudly, almost shouting, running to the end of the hallway, peering down the narrow passage where the girl had disappeared, ‘Fan! Fan! Fan!’

  The passage was empty. Even if there had been a girl there, Clementine told herself, surely it could never have been Fan. If her cousin had come to the city looking for her, she’d have gone to the house in Willow Street first, and waited for Clementine to come home. She’d never have come to the university, a place she didn’t know, which she’d only seen on her neighbour’s television. She wouldn’t have known how to get there; Fan had never been to Sydney, and Clementine guessed that she might be shy of asking city strangers, and shy of the city itself. And if she had somehow managed to find the way, why had she run off the moment Clementine had appeared?

  It had been some other girl, it must have been. It was only because she was tired that she’d thought it was Fan, because she’d stayed up so late the night before, trying to write the letter and finding nothing she could say.

  Only she’d thought the hem of that girl’s dress was coming down. Fan’s hems were always coming down; she wore her skirts too long, her heel kept catching at the cloth…

  Simply to walk through the quadrangles now, or along the shady cloisters, past ivy-covered buildings and tall spires, brought Fan to Clementine’s mind: Fan saying shyly, ‘I saw it once,’ and then confiding how her glimpse of the university had reminded her of those magical places she’d imagined waiting for her up there in the blue hills. It’s not fair! thought Clementine childishly. It wasn’t fair that a beautiful person like Fan should be stuck in that old house in Palm Street, while she, who’d never once longed to be in a different world, had entered one so easily.

  This sense of luck and privilege made the letter even more difficult to write. ‘It’s not my fault,’ she said one day, walking across the quad, speaking her confusion out loud. Phillip, who was walking next to her, leaned closer. ‘You’re talking to yourself, do you know?’ he whispered. ‘First sign of madness, that.’ He tweaked at a strand of her hair. ‘What’s not your fault?’

  So she told him about Fan and Lake Conapaira.

  He waited till she’d finished and then he said briskly, ‘Of course it’s not your fault. Don’t be silly, Clementine.’

  She hated it when he said stuff like that. He was handsome as Prince Charming and her mum thought he was wonderful, but she hated it all the same.

  ‘Why is it silly?’

  ‘You worked hard to get here, didn’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You suppose so?’ Phillip’s reedy voice was incredulous. ‘Of course you bloody did. While that little cousin of yours –’ he paused, his elegant nostrils flaring with distaste.

  ‘My little cousin what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. But Lake Conapaira sounds a good place to keep away from.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Clementine. ‘The lake, the red earth – you should see it, Phil! And at night, the stars! They’re so big, they look like faces shining through the windows.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘The situation, Clementine,’ he said. ‘That’s what I was referring to: teenage mum with two kids, all on her ownio – it sounds a good situation to stay away from.’

  ‘But – ’

  ‘Write her a letter by all means, but I don’t think it would be wise to go up there and get involved. You can’t go now, anyway; it’s only a week till the mid-year exams and then there’s the camping trip straight after.’ He frowned. ‘I hope you’re not thinking of reneging on that?’

  ‘I – ’

  ‘Bob’s girlfriend won’t go if you don’t come along too.’

  Clementine hadn’t really been planning to go up to Lake Conapaira, not right away. But when Phillip spoke in this manner she felt mutinous, almost tearful. He always sounded so cool and sensible, yet with him she sometimes got the feeling that being sensible could be an excuse for not doing the more difficult thing.

  ‘She was my gindaymaidhaany,’ she said in a low trembling voice.

  ‘What? What’s that when it’s at home?’

  ‘It means, like a sister. It’s an aboriginal word. When Fan was little she had this friend who was aboriginal – ’

  ‘Figures,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Those kind of girls, they always get mixed up with Blacks.’

  She didn’t ask what kind of girls. ‘He was an old, old man,’ she said coldly. ‘He told her stories, that was all. He was kind to her; her dad and sister had gone away, and her mum – ’ Clementine faltered. ‘She didn’t get on with her mum. There wasn’t really anyone to care.’

  Phillip didn’t reply. They walked on in silence, down a shadowy cloister, over lawns and through gardens, and out by a small gate into the busy road. It had been a heavy grey winter’s day in the city, but now, in these dying minutes of the afternoon, the sun pierced through the clouds at last.

  Clementine turned, straining against Phillip’s hand, and gazed back at the university, which had caught this extraordinary light and become a golden city, the kind of place where she and Fan had imagined the pair of them might sit and drink Griffiths Tea. ‘It just doesn’t seem right,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ grin
ned Phillip. ‘Who are you to judge what’s right or wrong, little Clementine?’

  ‘Fair then,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem fair.’

  ‘Life isn’t fair,’ he replied smugly. ‘However,’ he leaned closer and kissed her on the corner of her mouth.

  ‘However?’

  ‘Write your little cheer-up letter by all means. Can’t do any harm.’

  Clementine didn’t write. She still couldn’t think of anything to say.

  At one of the parties given by Phillip’s friends, Clementine saw Daria, the Hungarian girl from Chisolm College, who was now doing second year law. There was another person from Chisolm Clementine occasionally glimpsed around the university – the Home Boy, David Lowell. He was in med school, a scholarship student like Daria and Clementine, and when she saw him it was always at a distance, across a street, in a crowd at the station, going up the steps of the library. He never came and spoke to her. Catching her glance, and one uncertain smile, David Lowell looked away. He was taller than he’d been at Chisolm, and thinner too. She wondered where he lived now. She never saw him at parties or other student gatherings.

  Daria was sitting on a sofa, a glass of white wine in her hand, and when she saw Clementine with Phillip, she smiled a narrow, cat-like smile. Later in the evening, as Clementine was searching for her coat in the jumble of clothes left on someone’s bed, Daria came up to her. ‘I see you have found someone,’ she observed.

  Clementine flushed, and Daria stood silently, watching the colour mount and then fade in the other girl’s cheeks. ‘You will get married, I think,’ she said, and Clementine knew from her cool dispassionate tone that what Daria really meant was, ‘You’ll only get married.’ Get married to Phillip and live in a big house on the north shore or in the eastern suburbs, the kind of houses she and her parents had passed by on those long-ago bus trips through the city. They would have two children, who would attend private schools, and Clementine would go to coffee mornings and play tennis in the afternoons.

  ‘No I won’t,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’ Daria glanced down the hall to where Phillip stood talking with a friend. She gave her cat-like smile and waited.

  ‘I don’t really like him,’ said Clementine unexpectedly. The words had rushed from her lips before she’d thought them out; she hardly knew where they’d come from. And yet now that they were there, spoken aloud to someone else, she saw that she meant them. Oh, she might like having Phillip for a boyfriend, she might like going out with him, even like him making love to her in his cautious, prudent way. But she didn’t like him. She didn’t like the way he’d criticise her clothes: ‘That dress doesn’t really suit you.’ She didn’t like the way he bossed her round: ‘Time to go, I think,’ he’d say at parties, without asking her if she wanted to leave. Most of all, she didn’t like how he never seemed to understand anything she really cared about. He hadn’t understood about Fan and the place where she lived, she could see he thought her feeling for them was childish and ridiculous. It was the same when she tried to share some discovery she’d made in her reading, or in a friendship; he’d brush it aside, like he’d done with Fan. ‘Nothing to get excited over,’ he’d say. ‘Nothing to get all worked up about, little Clementine.’ And he would put his arm round her and murmur softly, smiling into her hair, ‘You’re a little bit crazy, do you know that? My crazy little Clementine.’

  She didn’t want to be his crazy little Clementine.

  ‘Don’t let some thickie bloke put you down,’ Fan had said on their last walk round the lake. ‘Promise me.’

  She had promised.

  ‘You will have to do something then, I think,’ murmured Daria now, and she brushed a light cool kiss on Clementine’s hot cheek and said, ‘Good luck to you, my darling.’

  She would have to tell him. She would have to break it off. He would be angry, of course he would be. He’d accuse her of leading him on. There wouldn’t be an engagement after all. Mum would be disappointed, but Clementine knew she could count on Dad. ‘Ah, there’s plenty of time yet,’ he’d say, and she knew he’d say the same thing if she was pushing seventy.

  She would wait till after the exams, Clementine decided. And she wasn’t going on that camping trip with his mates and their snobby girlfriends. She hated them. She hated him. And when it was all over she’d write to Fan. Fan was better than him – better in a way Clementine couldn’t put into words. How could you? It would be like comparing one of Shakespeare’s sonnets to an article in Phillip’s Financial Times.

  And straight after the exams, in the mid-year holidays, she would pack away her books and go up to Lake Conapaira.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Fan’s leaving. She’s leaving the old house at the end of Palm Street, where – except for that brief spell with Gary in the rented house out near the common – she’s lived since she was born.

  For nineteen years, eight months, and fifteen days.

  ‘I’m not even twenty,’ she says to herself again. She’s been saying it for the whole of the past week, ever since that windy night when she and Cash and Maddie struggled back from the Lachlan library, without Cash’s picture book and without her poem.

  She doesn’t care about the poem anymore. She’s forgotten it. Even the two lines she could remember have vanished from her head. She made them go. It was stupid to think a poem might help you find out what to do. Stupid.

  She’s leaving, yet she doesn’t need to pack. She doesn’t need to sit up at the kitchen table and write out a list of shoes and clothes and little bits and pieces, like she used to do in the days when she daydreamed about visiting Clementine down in Sydney.

  All she really had to do was to decide.

  And she’s decided.

  She doesn’t feel at home anymore. Perhaps she never has felt at home, ever, except for those long-ago afternoons when she used to sit with the old man who called her Yirigaa and he’d tell her stories that made her feel she belonged in the world.

  If a star were confin’d –

  Her poem’s coming back; Fan pushes it away.

  She’s not a star. A star would shine gloriously. It would blaze. Her light, if she has one, is very small. It’s flickering and uncertain; people like her mum and Gary and even Mrs Stuckey can almost blow it out. They can make her feel like she hasn’t a right to be.

  But it isn’t how she feels or what happens to her that really matters.

  It’s them. It’s her children, little Cash and Madeleine.

  Because what use is she to them?

  What kind of mum is she?

  That man in the shoe shop at Lachlan thought she was no good and he was right.

  Look at those times she left Cash alone in the house when he was hardly more than a baby, for no better reason than to walk by herself, round and round the town. Look how late she gets up in the mornings, later and later every day. And how Cash has learned to look after little Maddie, all by himself while his mother lies in bed: to change his baby sister’s nappy, to take the cold off the bottle Fan leaves ready in the fridge by holding it between his small warm hands. Look how he knows how to make Cornflakes and Weet-Bix and even spread jam on the sliced bread. And he’s only just turned four.

  Look how she shook him last week, on the way back from the library, right in the middle of the street, and how she didn’t know she was doing it, until she heard her voice sounding exactly like her mum’s used to do. And look how she hasn’t taken him back to the library yet to get the book of magical kingdoms, even though he asks her every day.

  Just because she can’t bear the thought of Mrs Stuckey’s disapproving face, and being made to feel like a beggar again. She’s told Cash that Caro will take him there next time she comes to visit; Caro will get the book for him.

  She will, too. Caro will walk through the door of the library in her good clothes and high-heeled shoes and with her hair done properly at a hairdresser’s. She’ll walk with a sure and certain step, she won’t sneak in expecting that at any mome
nt someone’s going to call out, ‘And just where do you think you’re going?’

  Mrs Stuckey will be nice to her. Mrs Stuckey will call her Mrs Waters and ask how Mr Waters is and what the weather’s like down in Temora. There won’t be any bother about taking books out even if Caro has forgotten to bring her proof of residency. But Caro won’t have forgotten; Caro always remembers things like that.

  And if Cash is with Caro, Mrs Stuckey will be nice to him as well.

  There are marks on the top of Cash’s little arm where she shook him, faint blue shadows of her fingers. He doesn’t hate her for it; he follows her round the house, he’s got sort of clingy since that night. And Fan can remember this from when she herself was very little: how she’d follow Mum around, trying to please her, trying to get Mum to like her, because she was afraid.

  Cash is frightened of her. Look how he keeps asking for Caro. Look how he always runs to Caro when she visits, how he’s in her arms the minute she comes in the door. Even little Maddie smiles when she sees her aunty – when Caro leans over the cot, Maddie crows and holds up her chubby arms. They know Caro is good, that’s what it is. It’s almost as if they can scent the air of a calm, solid world which she carries about with her: the good job she has, and the education (for Caro has done her Leaving Certificate at night school), her lovely husband Frank, the beautiful house in the best street in Temora. When Fan takes them to visit, the children cry when it’s time to go home; they know that beautiful house is where they really belong, that’s why.

  How strange the world is! How strange it is that two lovely people like Caro and Frank can’t have children. They’ve done all the tests and the answer has come back, quite plain: they never can.

  When Fan caught hold of Cash and shook him on the night they came back from the library, it was the first time she’d ever done anything like that. But she knows it mightn’t be the last.

  Things go round and round. She feels scared all the time now, and the thing she’s most scared of is that she’ll turn into a mother like her own mum was: a mum who said every morning as Fan went off to school: ‘One of these days when you get home you’ll find me with my head in the gas oven.’ So that for years and years when she was little, after Dad had gone and Caro moved away, Fan had run up Palm Street from school, her heart bumping like a ball inside her chest, bouncing high up into her throat so that she could hardly breathe, and at the front gate she’d stop dead and whisper the first two lines of a prayer she’d learned in Kinder with old Miss Greely: ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon this little child – ’