The Winds of Heaven (14 page)

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘You go. I’ll be all right.’

‘Oh, dearest, darling Clemmie!’ Fan flung her arms round her cousin and gave her a quick, fierce hug. ‘It’ll only be for a little while. It’s just because he’s got the car, see? I’ll be back early, promise. We’re only going for a ride round the common, just an hour or so, that’s all.’

‘An hour or so,’ mocked Clementine.

‘No, honest! Cross my heart.’

Clementine giggled.

‘Tell you what,’ said Fan. ‘This arvo we’ll go down the lake, eh? Straight after lunch. We’ll go to the old hidey and we’ll lie in the grass and look up at the clouds like we used to do. We’ll see lions and dragons and castles, and – and perhaps we’ll see one shaped like a guitar, or even one that looks like
his
face.’

His
didn’t mean God’s face, or even Geoff’s. It meant Johnny Cash’s. Fan loved Johnny Cash with a passion: the walls of her room were covered with pictures she’d sent away for or cut out from newspapers and old magazines. When she was home the radio played constantly, just in case one of his songs should come on, and when one did,
Fan would stand very still and quiet, one hand to the small of her back as if she could feel the music running down her spine.

‘Want to? Go to the hidey?’

‘’Course I do.’

‘Okay then.’ Fan let go of Clementine’s hand and skipped round the corner into Palm Street. Halfway up she stopped and waited for her cousin to catch up, and when Clementine did, Fan gazed into her cousin’s face and said earnestly, ‘You should have got that boy to ask you out.’

‘What boy?’ But Clementine knew Fan was talking about Simon Falls. She wished she had never told her about him, but they’d been telling secrets in the bedroom, and Simon Falls was the only secret she had. The only good one, that is – she hadn’t Fan told about the Home Boy, or about Vinnie Sloane and how she’d let him get caned. She didn’t want Fan to think her mean and cowardly: Chisolm College was a different world; to her cousin its customs might sound like those of a strange and brutal country where she was lucky not to live.

‘
You
know what boy I mean!’ cried Fan. ‘Look how you’re blushing!’

‘I’m not blushing.’

‘Hah! Honestly, Clemmie, you should have asked him, before he went off to that King’s School place.’

‘Well I didn’t, and I didn’t want to.’

‘Didn’t want to? ’Course you did.’

‘No. I
didn’t.
’

‘Okay, no need to get mad at me, I was only kidding.’ She grinned and murmered in a small coaxing voice, ‘Don’t get mad at me again, little Clementine.’

‘I’m not little. I’m only a year younger than you are!’

Fan was looking at her slyly, and the corners of her mouth twitched as she began to sing, ‘
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine
–’

‘Don’t!’ Clementine pushed at her. ‘You know I hate that song!’

‘
Thou art lost and gone forever, Dreadful sorry, Clementine.
’

‘No, stop!’ Clementine grabbed at her cousin’s sleeve. Laughing, Fan twisted free, spinning out into the middle of the street.

‘
In a cabin, in a canyon
–’

‘Stop!’ Idiotic tears suddenly filled Clementine’s eyes.

Fan saw them and stopped at once. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to – ’

‘It’s a stupid name!’ Clementine burst out. ‘A – a cowgirl’s name.’

‘I think it’s beautiful, like bells ringing.’

‘Bells ringing!’ But Clementine was smiling.

‘If you really hate it so much you could change it to Tina.’

‘Tina!’ Clementine knew she wasn’t a Tina – Tinas were big girls, blonde and small-eyed, all lush curves and rounded languid limbs.

‘If you could choose any name in the world,’ asked Fan, ‘what name would you have?’

‘Madeleine,’ said Clementine firmly. She had loved that name ever since she’d come across it in a book about knights and their ladies. Often she longed to be the Lady Madeleine, in a long crimson gown, crossing the greensward with her greyhound on a golden leash.

‘Madeleine!’ crowed Fan.

‘Yes,
Madeleine
.’

‘Okay, tell you what. When I have my first little girl, I’ll call her Madeleine for you.’

‘Will you?’

‘Cross my heart. And guess what?’

‘What?’

Fan threw her a teasing glance. ‘Promise you won’t get mad at me?’

‘I won’t.’

‘Cross your heart.’

Clementine crossed it.

‘Well, one day, in about, mmm, can’t tell how many years, but
one
day, for sure, there’ll be this girl, see? This girl about thirteen called Madeleine, and she’ll be hating her name and saying it’s a cowgirl’s name and wishing she could be called Anne, or Jean, or even plain old Fan – ’

‘Get you for that!’ cried Clementine, lunging towards her.

But Fan was too quick. Dodging her cousin’s outstretched arm she ran away up Palm Street, and as she ran her blue skirt flared out and the ribbon fell from her ponytail and her hair came tumbling down, curling and falling all down her dress. She was laughing, and the sun was shining, and Clementine thought that Fan, in the bright day, was like some sweet and everlasting song.

‘Which do you like best?’ Barefoot, in her white rope petticoat and silky black top, Fan held up a deep green skirt with frilly tiers, and then a full black one with a pattern of tiny red flowers.

‘That one. The one with the flowers. It goes better with your top.’

Fan slipped it over her head and fastened the zip at her waist. Then she took a narrow red ribbon from her drawer and skipped over to the big wardrobe with the speckled mirror on its door. She gazed into it for a second, smiled at her reflection and then began to braid the ribbon into her hair, all the while singing happily to herself.

A Johnny Cash song, of course, noted Clementine sourly.

She leaned her forehead against the cold windowpane. It was dark out there, but a big rising moon silvered the paddocks and the far-off hills. ‘Hey, did you ever get to go to the blue hills?’ she asked idly. Her cousin turned from the mirror and Clementine saw a strange little flicker pass across her face, as if the child Fan had been five years ago had suddenly come running after her, tugging at the hem of her skirt.

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Guess I grew out of that, eh?’

Like Clementine had grown out of the imagined splendours of
Griffiths Tea;
of the palaces and peacocks and the princesses and grand ladies drinking ambrosia from cups so fine the light shone through. She’d meant to watch out for those signs on the way up in the train, but she’d been so excited to be travelling on her own that she’d forgotten all about them.

‘And did the old man ever come back? You know, that old black man who was your friend?’

‘No, he didn’t. I waited and waited. I used to sneak off to his camp all the time to see if he’d be there. But he never came.’

‘Oh.’

‘It was ages ago. I was a kid then.’ Fan’s words were careless but her voice sounded sad. ‘I missed him,’ she said tremulously. ‘I missed him like anything. More than – more than
anyone.
’

‘Oh! I’m sorry,’ whispered Clementine.

‘S’okay. Nothing to be sorry about. I’m still here, aren’t I? Still around!’ She turned back to the mirror, lifted the ribboned braid and pinned it across the crown of her head. ‘There!’ She danced across to Clementine. ‘How do I look?’

She was shining, everything about her was shining: the lovely clothes, her golden hair, her clear open face, her burnished skin – she looked just as she had in Clementine’s dream where she’d danced on the great net the Brothers hadn’t finished making.

‘Like – like an angel,’ said Clementine.

Fan laughed. ‘An angel! Come off it! I don’t think Geoff would have much use for an angel! Not him! Oh, Clementine,
he’s so
sexy.
’ She stooped and took a pair of soft red shoes from the bottom of the wardrobe.

Like the shoes in the dream, thought Clementine with a little shiver of fear. They’d been exactly like that. Coincidence, she told herself. Hadn’t their maths teacher, Mrs Campbell, told them that coincidence was more common than most people supposed? ‘Mathematically, more likely than not,’ she’d said. ‘Nothing spooky about it.’

‘Do you know what French kisses are?’ Fan asked suddenly.

‘Of course I do.’ Clementine’s voice was sharp. She felt stung by the way Fan seemed to think she mightn’t.

‘Bet you don’t.’

‘I do so!’ Hadn’t she been forced to listen while Jilly Norris told her, over and over again? ‘And what’s more – ’

‘Well, go on!’

‘I bet I know something you don’t know.’

‘What?’

And Clementine told Fan the story Daria had told her in the playground at Chisolm: how the peasant boys in her grandmother’s time had chased the girls over the fields of sunflowers and then pulled their skirts up, tying them over their heads, making them into flowers.

‘Making them into flowers,’ echoed Fan dreamily, and you could almost see the images from Daria’s story floating across the shining blue of her eyes.

And then she did something astonishing. In that narrow space between their beds, in her rope petticoat and black skirt with the pattern of red flowers, Fan threw her hands up in the air and her whole body flowed into one single, perfect cartwheel. And as she rose out of it, bare feet slapping on
the floor, she stretched one arm towards Clementine, hand held out, palm open, as if she was presenting to her cousin on that uplifted palm everything marvellous she might ever do in the world.

Outside, farther down the street, a car horn sounded. Fan’s eyes blazed. ‘It’s Geoff,’ she said joyfully, and without a backward glance, she ran out of the room.

The front door banged. Clementine was left on her own. She stared down at the floor. The linoleum was a greyish-blue colour, the pattern long worn away, and so thin that in patches it was no more than a blackish net of threadwork above the wooden floor. But beneath Fan’s bed, where Clementine had once crawled to retrieve a kicked-off shoe, the lino was as good as new, and you could see its pattern: grey fluted columns and stone urn-shaped vases spilling out great branches of purple flowers. Clementine tried to imagine a younger Aunty Rene choosing this pattern in a store, perhaps accompanied by Uncle Len, before he’d gone to Gunnesweare. She couldn’t picture it. She had never seen her uncle, not even in a photograph, and Aunty Rene didn’t seem like the kind of person you’d find in a shop that sold home improvements.

Fan’s pictures of Johnny Cash stared down mournfully from the walls all round her. Some showed him full length, in concert or posed against a wall with his guitar, but most of them were only of his face – a face that made Clementine uneasy, with its girlishly curved lips and dark unsettling eyes. And on lonely nights like this one, when Fan was out and Aunty Rene was trying her luck down at the club and the house was empty except for her, those eyes seemed to follow her about the room.

There was something about Johnny Cash that reminded her of the Home Boys; you felt his skin would be damp to the touch. You could see the comb marks in his hair, like she’d seen them in David Lowell’s that awful time he’d asked her to the dance. An image of David flashed into her mind, standing in the park that day when she’d been ill, staring across the road at the window of her room. Had that been real, or a dream? She remembered how their eyes had caught, and how he’d walked away. ‘Good riddance then,’ muttered Clementine now, and she jumped up from her bed and went to the chest of drawers where her handbag lay ready for tomorrow and the journey home. She pressed open the catch, took out her ticket and stared at it. How grown-up she’d felt on the journey up to Lake Conapaira, travelling all on her own, with only the guard to peep into her compartment now and then and check she was all right. She’d kept taking the ticket out to look at her name on it: Miss Clementine Southey, Sydney Central - Lake Conapaira. It was like a certificate, a certificate that she was an adult at last. As long as you avoided those two small words stamped across the bottom: Half Fare.

Half fare was right for her, thought Clementine angrily, because she wasn’t grown up in the least. How could she be, sitting here and sulking like a baby just because Fan had left her behind? She couldn’t take her little cousin along when she went out with her boyfriend, could she? How stupid could you be? She didn’t
know
things like Fan did: she lived in a world of lessons and homework and exams and daydreams and stuff that wasn’t real. She was growing up so slowly she hardly seemed to be moving at all, like a dawdling old train in a dark tunnel where you saw nothing
except sudden inexplicable flashes of light that revealed no more than the walls of the tunnel and the shadow of the train going on and on as if it would never reach the bright new country outside.

‘Don’t know whether I’m comin’ or goin’,’ Granny Southey used to say in the year before she died, and that was how Clementine felt now. And she was only thirteen, and had a whole long life to go! Oh, it was so awful to be thirteen!

She thrust the ticket back into her purse, crossed the room, wrenched the curtains back from the window and looked out into the night. The full moon hung in the centre of the sky now; beyond the back gate the silver sea of paddocks stretched endlessly away. How strange it seemed that there was this little house, on that empty land under that vast black sky, a little house with a little room full of pictures of Johnny Cash and with Clementine all by herself at the window. It made her think of the address she and Allie Lewis used to write in their exercise books back in primary school: Clementine Jane Southey, 33 Willow St, Merrylands, Sydney, NSW, Australia, Southern Hemisphere, the World, the Milky Way, the Universe, Infinity…

Soon she wouldn’t be here. She’d be far away, back in her own room in the house in Willow Street with the lights from the Brothers’ house shining across the park. There’d be no trace of her in this room; Fan would take the spare bed back out to the verandah, and you wouldn’t be able to tell Clementine had ever been in this place. And one day Fan would also be gone. She’d get married, to Geoff or some other boy, perhaps a boy whose name she didn’t know yet, a boy who at this very moment might be sleeping dreamlessly
in a house Fan had never seen. How strange it all was! How mysterious when you really thought about it…