The Winds of Heaven Read online

  ‘Oh!’ she’d gasped, because he was singing about a girl from a far country, a girl with long hair that curled and fell all down her dress. Like Fan’s hair used to do, once upon a time.

  How Fan would have loved that song, and how bitter it had seemed to Clementine that Fan had never got to hear it.

  Never, never, ever.

  David Lowell had taken her to that party. It was the first time they’d gone out together. He’d seen the shock bloom on her face when she’d heard that song.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he’d asked her. And she’d told him about Fan and he’d put his arms around her and whispered, ‘Your poor cousin.’

  ‘And you keep on thinking,’ Sarah goes on, ‘you keep thinking, if only one little thing had been different.’

  Oh, yes! Clementine has puzzled over this so many times: if she’d written that letter to Fan, would it have made a difference? Or had it been too late, even then? Would Fan have left it lying unopened on the kitchen table, or never even taken it from the post box, already too far along on her last mistaken journey to the blue hills?

  Would it have been different if Fan had grown up in the city, instead of far away at Lake Conapaira?

  Or if she’d had a different family?

  If she’d married someone else instead of Gary?

  If things had gone better at school?

  If the old black man hadn’t gone away?

  There were so many ‘ifs’ – ‘ifs’ beyond number, countless as the stars that peered in through the window of Fan’s old bedroom, or the grains of red earth that made up the land. The closest Clementine can come to any reason is something Fan said herself, on that last evening by the lake: ‘Sometimes I feel like I didn’t get through into the world properly, like other people, that I left a little bit behind – ’

  Clementine had protested, thinking Fan was putting herself down, but perhaps she’d been right after all. Perhaps there was a little piece missing, something hard and thoughtless and self-serving, which most people needed to survive and which Fan didn’t possess, or bother to call out and use. The only thing that would have saved Fan for sure was this: quite simply, if she’d been a different kind of person.

  If she’d been a different kind of person, then Fan would have lived. If she’d been more cautious, less defiant, less sure that happiness would come to her, less eager for life, then she’d probably still be here.

  But then she wouldn’t have been Fan. There’d have been no Fan ever on this earth, no sweet Fan, Francesca, Yirigaa, the morning star.

  ‘Ah, it can be a difficult old place, this life,’ grumbles Sarah, and as she says this Clementine has a sudden unaccountable image of the Brothers’ house across the road from her childhood home, and remembers how she used to sit up on her bed and lean her elbows on the sill and gaze across at the lighted windows, long into the night. She remembers how she dreamed that the Brothers were seated round a table busily sewing their big net and how Fan was dancing in the centre of it, close to the weak place they hadn’t finished yet.

  ‘You missed her,’ Clementine silently accuses the industrious Brothers. ‘You let her fall through.’

  It’s strange how some dreams stay with you all your life, so that when you’re old they seem as real as the actual people and places that you’ve known. Clementine can still see, quite plainly, the soft red dancing shoes Fan had been wearing as she danced up and down, happiness shining out of every little bit of her.

  ‘What beautiful shoes!’ Caro had exclaimed on the day after the funeral, as Clementine was packing to catch the train back home.

  They were green shoes, like the ones in the dream Fan had told her about that morning when they’d hung the clothes out together: green leather shoes with a slim strap across the instep and a small square heel. A few months after she’d come back from that last visit to Lake Conapaira Clementine had seen them in the window of a shoe-shop on Broadway. ‘I should have written and told her,’ she thinks now, almost fifty years later, as she and Sarah make their way through the last stand of dusty eucalypts. And then, suddenly: ‘That’s what I could have said in that letter I didn’t know how to write. I could have told her about the shoes!’

  They turn into the car park. Only two cars remain there now: Sarah’s blue Datsun and a battered green Toyota with a thick band of red dust along its sides. As they approach, the Toyota’s driver’s door swings open and a young girl leaps out, a tall girl, with hair in two thick braids the colour of wild honey. She rushes forward and stops abruptly just in front of them, lifting the braids in both hands, twisting them into a crown on top of her head. Then she lets them fall, tossing them back over her shoulders. ‘You’re late, Aunty Clementine!’ she cries. ‘You’re late, but I forgive you. Seeing as it’s so hot, and you’re so ancient!’

  ‘This is Fan,’ says Clementine to Sarah.

  ‘Fan?’

  ‘My cousin’s grandaughter. Cash’s child.’ Clementine laughs at the amazed delight on Sarah’s face. ‘She’s staying with us for the holidays. Before she goes back to university.’

  ‘Ah,’ breathes Sarah, and she stands quite still, gazing steadily at Fan, like someone gone quiet before a painting where it seems some rare and lovely truth of life is unexpectedly revealed. ‘So,’ she says, clasping her hands together. ‘So.’ She smiles at Clementine. ‘There are good things after all, eh?’

  Clementine takes Fan’s thin brown hand in hers and holds it fast. ‘There are great good things,’ she says.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks to friends and helpers:

  Erica Wagner and Sue Flockhart

  Margaret Connolly and Jamie Grant

  Frances Floyd and Frances Sutherland

  Laurie Mooney and Marnie Kennedy

  Cathy Jinks and Kathleen Stewart

  Robyn Barlow and Roswitha Dabke

  Tracey and Tyrone Johnstone

  Reis and Nima Flora

  Allan Baillie and Graham King

  Wendy Dickstein and Brian Gray

  And to the librarians of Lithgow, Blackheath, Katoomba and the Lachlan Shire.

  And to Dr Jo Tibbetts of Active Computer Support (for many rescues).

  Fan’s poem in Part Four and the Epilogue is the eighth stanza of Henry Vaughan’s poem, ‘They are all gone into the world of light!’

  The lines Clementine recites to Fan in Chapter thirteen are from William Wordsworth’s ‘A Slumber did my Spirit Seal’

  The custom described by Daria in Chapter six is related in Henri Troyat’s biography, Gorky

  The poem Clementine reads in the school library in Chapter five is A.E. Housman’s ‘Into my heart an air that kills’

  The song ‘Oh My Darling, Clementine’ is a folk song from the American gold rush

  The story Fan tells Clementine in Chapter two is ‘Revenge of the Magic Child’ (Bidjandjara) – collected in The World of the First Australians, by Ronald M. and Catherine H. Berndt

  Words of the Wiradjuri language from A First Wiradjuri Dictionary, compiled by Stan Grant Senr. and Dr John Rudder (Language copyright Wiradjuri Council of Elders)

  To find help for depression, visit www.beyondblue.org.au or phone 1300 224 636.