The Winds of Heaven (13 page)

When Dr Macpherson said she was better, Clementine’s mum and dad didn’t send her back to school right away. There were only a few weeks to go before the August holidays, and they decided it wasn’t worth it. Instead, she was going up to Lake Conapaira. Dr Macpherson said a spell in the dry cold air up there would be just the thing for Clementine’s lungs, it would have them better than new. And Aunty Rene had written that she and Fan would be happy to have her. There was no mention of Uncle Len, who was obviously still at Gunnesweare.

‘But Mum, what about your job?’

‘You’ll be going on your own,’ said Mum.

Clementine’s eyes widened. ‘On my own in the train?’

‘Your dad and I decided,’ said Mum. ‘Seeing as you’re better and Dr Macpherson says the trip will be good for you.’

‘You’re a big girl now,’ said Dad. ‘Second year at high school, getting on for fourteen. The guard will look after you, and your Aunty Rene will meet you at the other end. You’ll be right as rain.’

Aunty Rene. For a moment, Clementine’s happiness
clouded. She thought of her aunty’s fierce black glittering eyes, the bad child’s little pointed teeth. The seething. The strap.

Mrs Southey must have noticed the shadow cross her daughter’s face because she came forward and hugged her close. ‘Things are better up there now,’ she said softly, stroking a damp strand of hair back from Clementine’s forehead.

Clementine’s happiness broke through in a rush. ‘Oh, I can see Fan again!’ she cried. She could hardly believe it.

‘Oh, you and your precious Fan!’ said Mrs Southey, but not unkindly. ‘You just concentrate on getting strong again, that’s all.’

Fan had left school the minute she’d turned fourteen. ‘The very minute!’ she’d told Clementine triumphantly on the night that she’d arrived. ‘I checked up with Mum, see? I asked her what time I was born, exactly, and she said it was round two o’clock in the afternoon. So that day I went to school, and I waited till exactly two – it was right in the middle of old droopy-drawers’ bookkeeping lesson – and I just got up and marched straight out of there! She couldn’t do a thing!’

Their room was the same back bedroom they’d shared on Clementine’s last visit, with Caroline’s old bed pushed up beneath the window and the view of endless moonstruck paddocks stretching away to the hills.

‘
None
of them could do a thing! I just walked out the gate and then I ran and ran and ran!’ Fan had flung herself across her bed in the same old way, shining hair hanging over the edge of it, narrow brown feet walking up the grubby wall, just like she’d done when she was ten. She was bigger now, of course, a whole head taller than Clementine, and beautiful as ever. More beautiful – her lips were fuller, sweeter; her eyes a deeper blue; and her hair had darker tones in it, streaks of rich treacle swirled into that colour of wild honey. Her legs and arms seemed burnished, as if they’d been polished by
the red dust – like the big copper fruit bowl back home that Mrs Southey would shine with a gritty black powder and then hold up to gleam against the light.

Fan was grown up. She was working. She was down serving in Mr Chiltern’s hardware store at the bottom of Main Street, five days a week and half a day on Saturdays. She loved it, she said; yet whenever Clementine thought of the dark little cave of Mr Chiltern’s cluttered store, and the way her cousin’s golden head seemed to shine there like a lamp, a feeling would rise up inside her like a sorrow to which she couldn’t give a name.

Left to herself all through the weekdays, Clementine grew bored – bored with the books she’d brought with her, bored with idling round the lake and wandering the narrow tracks that meandered over the empty common and never seemed to get to anywhere except the paddocks and back to the lake again. The little waves still made their old dog lapping sound amongst the reeds, the winds of heaven blew and the clouds in their fantastic shapes still sailed majestically across the sky. On a lonely day that wide sky and grand sailing clouds could make you feel unreal.

She did messages for her aunty, helped her hang out the washing, and even sat companionably beside her at the kitchen table, peeling potatoes or slicing beans or shelling sweet green pods of peas. ‘You’re a good kid,’ Aunty Rene said unexpectedly one morning – though then she’d gone and spoiled it by adding, ‘Not like that little madam of mine.’

‘Things have changed up there,’ Mum had told her, and the biggest change was in Aunty Rene. She wasn’t so scary now; the seething had gone out of her, her voice had lost the little scream inside it, and the leather strap no longer
hung beside the kitchen door. Uncle Len’s name remained unspoken; and somehow you knew now he’d never come back from Gunnesweare. But one thing had stayed the same about Aunty Rene: most nights she went out after tea.

‘Where does she go?’ Clementine asked her cousin.

‘Down the club to try her luck.’

A picture of the church fete swam into Clementine’s mind, and her dad saying, ‘Think I’ll try my luck.’

‘You mean they’ve got a chocolate wheel down there?’

Fan burst out laughing. ‘I mean, she’s looking for a fancy man.’

‘Ah.’ Clementine knew about fancy men: Mrs Garrick in their street had one; it was what you called a boyfriend when you were middle-aged.

‘Can you imagine?’ Fan giggled. ‘At
her
age?’ And then she’d stood on her toes and spun round like a dancer and her full blue skirt had flared out perfectly around her slender dancer’s legs.

Fan wore beautiful clothes now, clothes she chose from the mail order catalogue and paid for with her own money from the job at Mr Chiltern’s store: rope petticoats and tiered skirts in brilliant colours, blouses in fabrics so soft and silky they made you want to touch. Her long hair was gathered in a ponytail or twisted in a thick plait braided with narrow satin ribbons and pinned up on her head.

Sometimes Fan went out at nights too. Secretly. Clementine would be woken by the soft tap of the bedroom door closing, a drift of sweet perfume in the air, and she would look across the room and see Fan’s bed empty, the sheet trailing on the floor. When she got back it might be almost light. ‘Don’t tell,’ she’d whisper, putting a finger to her lips.

‘Don’t tell’ was because Aunty Rene didn’t like Fan’s boyfriend, Geoff. Clementine had never seen Geoff because Aunty Rene wouldn’t have him in the house. Before Geoff there’d been a boy called John, and one called Charlie when Fan was still at school.

‘No-hopers every one of ’em,’ Aunty Rene told Clementine. ‘Boy-mad, that’s what she is. And we all know where it’s gunna end.’ Aunty Rene tossed her head and her new frizzy perm crackled with electricity. ‘But she’s too big to be told, isn’t she?’

‘I don’t know,’ Clementine mumbled miserably.

‘Well, she’ll get what’s comin’ to her one day, mark my words,’ declared Aunty Rene, adding mysteriously, ‘We make our bed and then we have to lie in it.’

Boy-mad. Back at Chisolm, Mrs Larkin called Jilly Norris and her gang boy-mad, but Clementine could see they were different from her cousin. Jilly and her friends didn’t have boys of their own like Fan did, or Annie Boland or Mattie Gaskin, and Clementine understood that this was why Jilly’s gang talked about boys all the time and hung round boys’ places, like football games and cricket matches and cadet parades. It was why they read the boring sports pages of the
Telegraph
and the
Daily Mirror
, so they would have something to talk about with boys. They were searching for boys of their own and they wouldn’t stop searching until they found one. And when one of them did, then that girl would peel off from the gang, like Annie Boland had done when she started going round with Andrew Milton. It was a bit like
The Farmer in the Dell
, thought Clementine. Everyone got taken, one by one by one.

With Fan it was different. She didn’t have to do any searching; it was the boys who were looking for her, one by one by one.

It was the tail end of Saturday morning and Clementine’s very last day. By this time tomorrow she’d be on the diesel train, halfway to Cootamundra and the Riverina Express; by this time the day after tomorrow she’d be home in Willow Street. This time Tuesday she’d be back at school. School seemed unbelievable.

Clementine turned the corner into Main Street: she was on her way to meet Fan after work. At the baker’s she stopped to buy some bread for Aunty Rene. ‘Two loaves,’ Aunty Rene had told her. ‘One white and one brown. Can you remember that?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good.’ Aunty Rene had opened her purse and dropped a clutch of coins into Clementine’s hand. ‘And no pickin’ the crust off to eat on the way home, eh?’ She’d smiled at Clementine, a rusty sort of smile which showed her teeth, still small and pointy but somehow no longer those of a bad child.

Though it was a cold day, inside the baker’s shop there was a smell of dust and summer beneath the scent of baking bread. It was the same in all the shops of Lake Conapaira, even Mr Chiltern’s dark little hardware store, as if, despite the frosty paddocks and the ice on puddles in the morning, summer never truly went away. It was hiding, seeped into the walls and floorboards of the shops and houses and the chilled red earth, waiting for the winds of heaven to bring the sun round again. ‘Two loaves of bread, please,’ she
asked Mrs Ryland behind the counter. ‘One white and one brown.’

‘Righty-o.’ Cheerful Mrs Ryland took two loaves from the rack and slipped them into a big brown bag. ‘How’s your aunty today?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘Fan’s doin’ good down the hardware store, I hear. Old Mr Chiltern thinks the world of her.’

‘I know,’ said Clementine.

‘She’s a lovely girl, your cousin. It’s a pity that – ’ Mrs Ryland broke off, twirling the ends of the bag into neat little brown paper ears.

‘That what?’

‘Oh, nothin’.’ She handed the bag across the counter. ‘It’s none of my business, old busybody that I am. You just tell her to mind that Geoff Peterson, right? He’s the type who’s only after one thing, and we all know what that is, eh?’

Clementine blushed.

‘Oops! Sorry, love,’ said Mrs Ryland. ‘Never know when to keep me big gob shut, do I?’

As Clementine reached the front of Mr Chiltern’s store, Fan came bursting out of it, her face lit with such happiness you’d think that in the gloomy depths amongst the hardware some miracle had occurred.

‘Guess what?’ She grabbed hold of Clementine’s hand and danced her up the street.

‘Watch out! The bread!’

‘Bread!’ Fan reached into the bag and tore off a chunk of warm brown crust.

Clementine snatched the bag away. ‘Stop it! Your mum said not to!’

‘Who cares!’ Fan let out a joyful whoop. ‘Don’t you want to know what happened?’

‘What?’

‘Geoff came into the shop this morning, and – ’ She whooped again, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet.

‘And what?’

‘He’s got a loan of his mate’s car! Just for tonight.’

Clementine knew what was coming. ‘But it’s my last night!’ she protested.

‘I know. I
know
it’s your last night and I know I said I’d be staying home, and I was, honest, Clemmie, I really meant to. Don’t be mad at me.’

‘I’m not mad.’

‘Yes you are, and I don’t blame you. But I love him, Clemmie, I really, really do. I think he might be
the one.
’

Clementine rolled her eyes. ‘One what?’

‘The one I’m gunna marry, that’s who.’

Clementine remembered what Mrs Ryland had said in the baker’s shop. ‘But – ’ she began, and then stopped, like Mrs Ryland had done, because how could she tell Fan something like that? ‘You’re still only fourteen,’ she muttered.

‘So what? When I wear make-up and put my hair up, I look at least sixteen. Eighteen, even.’ Her voice went soft and wheedling. ‘Clemmie?’

‘What?’

‘If I don’t go tonight, just for a bit, Geoffie’s going to think I’ve gone off him and there’s this girl called Jeannie Harper fancies him like anything and he knows it too. He’ll
go over her place and – ’ Fan’s blue eyes were suddenly glossy with unshed tears and Clementine had an uneasy perception that even if you were as beautiful and strong as her cousin, love might let you down. The thought was like a cold puddle she’d stepped into, expecting dry, safe ground. Love with the wrong person, she corrected herself, anxious to keep her own dreams. Love with the wrong person might have menace at the back of it, like Aunty Rene’s old strap hanging behind the kitchen door. She looked at Fan’s dancing feet and sighed.