The Winds of Heaven (19 page)

‘Mummy?’

Fan took the sheet from her face. Cash was standing beside the bed, his hands behind his back, staring at her solemnly. How long had he been there? She hadn’t heard him come into the room; but sometimes the thoughts inside her head could be like a storm, shutting out any sound from the ordinary world. He was wearing his pyjama top but no bottoms, which meant he’d been on his little potty chair by himself; he knew how to pull his pants down, though he couldn’t manage to get them up again. Fan smiled at him and moved farther back into the hollow of the mattress, patting the place beside her for him to climb up and have a cuddle.

‘Up?’ he asked, and she struggled out from the hollow and reached towards him, thinking he wanted to be lifted,
but he shook his head and stepped back from her arms. ‘Up?’ he repeated and she knew that what he wanted was for her to get up from bed.

‘In a little while,’ she told him. ‘Mummy’s having a little lie-in. Are you hungry, sweetie?’

He shook his head.

‘Thirsty?’

He took one hand from behind his back and waved his feeding bottle, beaming at her; it was still half-full of the apple juice she left beside his small bed every night. ‘Tell you what, sweetie,’ she said, leaning towards him so she could kiss the top of his head, the blond hair that was still downy as a baby’s. ‘Why don’t you go and play with your cars for a little while, and then when Mummy gets up, she’ll make you pancakes for breakfast, eh? How’s that, then? Pancakes – your very favourite!’

‘With gowden syrup?’

‘With gowden syrup.’

He beamed again, showing tiny pearly teeth. ‘When?’ he asked.

He wanted to know how long.

The yearning for more sleep rose in her like a flood.

‘When, Mummy?’ His dear little fingers touched her arm.

‘I’ll show you,’ she said, picking up the small clock from the bedside table. It was later than she’d thought: it was eight fifteen. Nine, then. She’d get up at nine. Sometimes it was nearly afternoon before she could get herself going properly. She gathered Cash closer to the bed and showed him the hands of the clock. ‘See these? The hands?’

‘Arrows,’ he said.

‘Okay, arrows. Well, when this one, the big arrow, is up here on twelve, and the little one down here, on nine, you come and get me, all right?’

‘Asleep?’ he said doubtfully.

‘Even if I’m asleep. Wake me up.’

He gazed at her, frowning. ‘Twelve?’ he said. ‘Nine?’

He didn’t understand. She’d forgotten he didn’t know numbers. When she’d been his age, Caro had taught her how to tell the time in this way, long before she went to school. Caro had taught her numbers, and the letters of the alphabet, so school should have been easy for her when she started – only it hadn’t been, and Caro had left home by then.

Fan took Cash’s small hand in hers and placed his index finger on the clock’s smooth face. ‘When the big arrow’s up here,’ she said, ‘that’s twelve, see? Those two numbers at the top? Twelve. And here, this is nine – where the little arrow will be. Nine. Like this, see?’ She held thumb and forefinger up at right angles: ‘That’s nine o’clock.’ She tousled his hair. ‘Understand?’

Cash nodded solemnly. He was such a serious little boy. She traced the sweet curve of his lips with her fingertip. ‘Now you take this,’ she said, placing the clock in his small hands, ‘and off you go and play. And when it says nine o’clock, then you come back, okay? And wake me up if I’m asleep.’

‘And then pancakes?’

‘Pancakes.’

His smile was so joyous it hurt her to see. ‘Off you go.’

And after all that, of course, she couldn’t get to sleep again. There was no escaping; the day was here to stay and so was the feeling the day brought with it.

‘Fan, you confound me,’ her old headmaster had once remarked, and that was the word for the feeling that took hold of her these days; that was it, exactly. She was confounded. Sometimes, when the endless hours of the mornings slipped into endless afternoons and then into evenings which would bring night and then morning all over again, she couldn’t stand to be in the house one moment longer. She’d bundle Cash into the stroller and go walking – up and down the streets of the town she went, or round the lake, or over the bumpy tracks that crossed the common. ‘I want to get out!’ Cash would occasionally protest as the stroller rattled over ruts and stones, but Fan couldn’t stop. She felt she didn’t have the time, that she had to go faster and faster, though there was nowhere in particular to go. There was this feeling that she had to have something: she didn’t know what that something was, only that if she walked fast enough she might find out. And if she didn’t hurry then it might disappear for good, dissolve into the endless paddocks and the wide empty sky.

Nothing was like you expected, was it? She’d always imagined she’d be a good mother – not like Mum, never like her – and when Cash was born and the nurse at the cottage hospital had placed him in her arms for the very first time, she’d vowed she would never do anything to harm him.

And yet here she was doing stuff no proper mum would do. Last Friday night when she couldn’t get to sleep because the feeling of restlessness had been so strong it actually hurt her, like a rope pulled tight and chafing round her body, she’d gone out and left Cash alone in the house. Sure, she’d checked that he’d been sleeping soundly, and she’d only meant to be away a few minutes, and she wouldn’t go out of
sight of the house – except once she was through the gate and walking, she forgot all that.

She’d walked for miles that night; all the way out to the common and then down round the lake to the place where her old friend’s camp had been.
Yirigaa
, he’d called her. Morning star. Some morning star she’d turned out to be! And where was he now, that old man who’d said he was her
miyan
? Was he still alive, wandering over the old countries in his stories, or was he dead long ago, gone back into the earth, or climbed up into the stars? She’d sat there for a long time, her arms clasped round her knees, listening to the water lapping amongst the reeds, calling up the words he’d taught her as if they might somehow bring him back, or make her spirit strong again. ‘
Guriyan
,’ she’d whispered. That was lake, and
magadala
was the red earth, and
wir
was the sky, the air, where the winds of heaven blew.

Then a fox had barked out on the common, and she’d jumped to her feet and begun to run, along the shore, down the track towards Palm Street, panic swelling inside her, because how long had she been away from the house? How long had she left Cash by himself? What if he’d woken up and found her gone? She pictured him wandering through the house looking for her, peering into all the rooms, unable to find her, thinking she’d gone for ever, tears on his cheeks, his little mouth square with grief.

She’d heard the sound of his crying when she was still only halfway down the track, long before she reached the house. And she’d run faster, the panicked breath crashing round her heart, afraid he might have hurt himself. When she’d turned into Palm Street she’d seen someone standing at the gate, an adult figure, a woman with a small child on her
hip, so she knew Cash was all right, at least. Half blind in her panic, she’d thought the woman was Mrs Darcy from next door, but as she came closer she’d seen it was her sister Caro – an angry Caro clutching a bawling Cash, his eyes red slits from weeping, holding out his arms the very second he saw Fan. She’d grabbed him from her sister and held him close to her thumping heart. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ she’d whispered into his hair, which was warm and damp with sweat.

‘Sorry?’ Caro had hissed at her. ‘What do you think you’re doing, Fan? How could you go out and leave him all alone in the house? Anything could have happened! Where have you been?’

‘Nowhere,’ Fan had replied. ‘I just went for a walk.’

‘A walk! Do you know what time it is?’

It was one o’clock in the morning; she’d gone out at ten. And she’d totally forgotten how Caro had been coming on the late bus to spend the weekend with them. She forgot a lot of things these days.

In the room next door, Cash’s cars still swooshed across the floor and pinged against the wall. ‘I’m only seventeen,’ Fan whispered into her pillow. She had to keep reminding herself, because all the forgetting was starting to make her feel old. Older than Mum even, because when Mum wrote a letter describing her latest ballroom dancing costume, she sounded like a kid of fifteen. The whole thing was crazy: it was like she and Mum had changed places, or Mum had gone backwards in a time machine. There were girls of seventeen who were still at school – her cousin Clementine, for one. Though she’d never got round to writing that letter about the old shop she’d seen in the hills, with its tattered sign for
Griffiths Tea
up in
the corner of the window, and though Clementine had long since given up on her, Fan often thought of her cousin. She daydreamed about visiting Clemmie in Sydney one day, and some nights when she couldn’t get to sleep she’d make up lists of clothes in her mind; clothes she would buy, and then pack in her suitcase, for visiting Clementine. One night she’d got up and gone out into the kitchen, taken the writing pad and a pencil from the sideboard and written the list down.

One dark green skirt with patch pockets

Two pairs pedal pushers (one red, one pale blue)

One blue shirtwaist dress (circular skirt)

One white sleeveless blouse…

She hadn’t had clothes like that for a long time, not since she’d been working down in Mr Chiltern’s hardware store. There wasn’t the money, for a start, but perhaps one day things might be different, they
might
. No one said they couldn’t be, no one said that for ever and ever she would have to be like she was now.

‘Nine o’clock!’

Cash was back beside the bed, the clock clutched tightly in his hand. He held it out to her. ‘Nine,’ he repeated, tracing the hands with a small finger. ‘See? The big arrow’s on twelve.’

‘Hand.’ This time she corrected him, because she wanted him to get stuff right, even though he’d only just turned two. Once you got to school, they thought you were dumb if you didn’t use the right words for things, or if you didn’t think in the same way as them. They’d thought she was dumb, except for Miss Langland in second year, who had wanted her to stay on at high school, at least until she’d done the Intermediate.
Stay on! As if she would have! As if those other teachers wanted her! She was a loser, that’s what they thought, a no-hoper from a no-hoper family. That sort of thing repeated itself, so that she knew Cash would cop it too, the minute he turned five and went through those bloody gates into the playground and the red brick building with its smells of chalk and milk and squashed banana and something unnameable which made you feel you couldn’t breathe.

No one was going to get a chance to call Cash a no-hoper, not if she had anything to do with it. No one was going to say that he was dumb. ‘They’re called hands, not arrows,’ she told him gently. ‘The big
hand’s
on twelve, and the little
hand’s
on – nine.’

‘Hands,’ said Cash, and smiled at her.

‘You’re my clever boy,’ she said.