The Winds of Heaven (22 page)

‘Fan?’ she whispered now. ‘Fan, are you awake?’

There was no answer. Softly she pushed the door open and glanced inside. Fan was still asleep, sunk deep into the hollow on one side of the huge double bed, one arm flung out across the pillow, her fingers curled like those of a child. She was smiling faintly, and asleep her face looked young and beautiful again; the lips softened, the frown lines eased away.

‘Fan?’ she whispered again. Fan slept on. But that was all right, thought Clementine, she’d have slept longer herself if a curious little noise hadn’t woken her: a small rushing sound followed by a sharp metallic ‘ping’. She’d lain there for ages wondering what it could be before she’d realised the sound was made by Cash playing with his matchbox cars: spinning them across the floor of his bedroom till they crashed against the skirting board. He’d been doing it last night while she and Fan sat talking in the lounge room. He was a funny, quiet little kid who seemed to be able to amuse himself for hours. Too quiet, she knew her mum would say.

She closed the door softly and walked down the hall to Cash’s room.

‘Cash?’

He was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, his back to the door. ‘Cash?’ she said again, and he turned towards her.

‘You want some breakfast?’

He shook his head, one small finger spinning the wheels of the tiny red fire-engine in his hand.

‘You want to come out to the kitchen with me?’

He shook his head again and slid the fire-engine across the floor. Swiiish! Ping. He was shy of her. She thought it possible he might be shy of anyone.

She looked round the room and with an odd little sense of shock saw something she hadn’t noticed before: it was the same room she’d shared with Fan on those earlier visits to Lake Conapaira. She hadn’t realised because the furniture was new – special children’s furniture in pale gold varnished pine – a small bed, a chest of drawers, a little kinder desk and chair. The old linoleum with its pattern of urns and
flowers had been replaced by plain green vinyl tiles; but the pale green curtains drawn back from the window showed the same view outside: the bare backyard, the woodheap in the corner where she’d hidden from Aunty Rene, the rickety paling fence, and beyond it the grey-gold paddocks stretching away to the hills.

It was all so achingly familiar that for a moment Clementine thought she’d slipped back in time. She floundered, disoriented – it might have been years ago, she could have been a child again, and Aunty Rene out there in the kitchen, slamming a pan down on the stove.

Her gaze dropped quickly to Cash’s little desk and the coloured photograph that stood there proudly in its shiny wooden frame: two people, a man and a woman with their arms around each other’s waists.

Cash saw her looking and jumped up from the floor. His face, which seemed too old for him with its high forehead, flat cheeks and large square jaw, had lit up with a sudden eager joy. He ran to the desk, snatched up the photograph and then, his eyes fixed steadily on her face, crossed the space between them and placed it in her hands. Clementine studied it: the man, sturdy and middle-aged, with a freckled face and kindly eyes, was unfamiliar, but she recognised the woman beside him as an older version of the girl with dark plaits whom she’d once imagined running away over the paddocks to Gunnesweare. It was Fan’s sister, Caroline.

‘Aunty Caro,’ breathed Cash. He was right beside her, she could feel the warmth of his skin; he’d never come so close before. ‘See – that’s Aunty Caro. And Uncle Frank.’ He reached up a tiny hand and outlined his aunt’s face with one finger, then looked up at Clementine.

‘She’s lovely,’ said Clementine. ‘And Uncle Frank looks nice too.’

He nodded fiercely.

Clementine placed the photograph back in his hands and he bent his head and kissed his Aunty Caro’s face.

Clementine stood there. She didn’t know what to do next. ‘You sure you don’t want anything to eat?’ she asked again.

‘No.’

He would wait till Fan woke up, as he’d done on the other mornings she’d been here. Fan never got up before eleven; it was like she was sick in some vague kind of way. ‘Just tired,’ Clementine told herself again, remembering her mother’s words. But she knew it was more than that, and the thought of Fan and Cash’s mornings going on and on like this after she’d gone back home made Clementine feel uneasy, even a little afraid. There was something wrong in the house and she couldn’t work out what it was, though she felt it might be a wrongness made up of things that were missing rather than things that were there. She reached out a hand and touched Cash’s soft fine hair. ‘I’ll be outside if you want me for anything,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be in the laundry, okay?’

She roamed through the house gathering up towels and tea towels and abandoned clothes. ‘Give her all the help you can, love,’ Clementine’s mother had said to her on the platform at Central. ‘It’s hard work bringing up a little kiddie, when you’re that young. And there’s nothing like housework to get you down. Piling up on you…’ Here Mrs Southey had sighed and brushed a strand of hair from her damp forehead, for it had been hot, and Tuesday – ironing day – and when she got
home from seeing her daughter off at Central it would be waiting for her, piled right up.

There was an old washing machine in the laundry of the Palm Street house now, squeezed in beside the copper and the tubs. The copper was huge, like Clementine imagined the witch’s oven in
Hansel and Gretel
might have been. ‘I hid in there once,’ Fan had confided when they were little, ‘when Mum was chasin’ me with the strap. I crawled in and I pulled the lid down on the top, and it was so-o dark, Clemmie, like you were right down buried in the ground. Mum didn’t find me.’ She’d grinned at Clementine and then her face had darkened. ‘But she did the next time.’

Clementine had gone cold all over when Fan had told her that, not for the darkness of the copper, or even Aunty Rene’s gleaming strap, but for another picture which had flown unbidden into her head: Aunty Rene slipping through the laundry door without a sound, creeping over to the copper and holding the lid down firmly so Fan couldn’t get out, feeding dry sticks through the little door at the bottom, lighting them, stooping to coax them up into a fine, fierce blaze.

The old machine rattled noisily through its single cycle. There was no spin like there was on Mum’s machine at home, only a big wringer with a handle almost too stiff to turn. Clementine didn’t bother with that; she piled the wet clothes into the basket and dragged them out to the line, which was empty except for a pair of old fawn-coloured overalls – Gary’s, she supposed. They were stiff and dusty, as if they’d been hanging out there through the storms and dust of summer and winter and summer come back again. Left out in the rain.

She’d almost emptied the basket when the back door banged. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw Fan coming across the yard towards her. The way she walked was different, Clementine observed sadly: it was ordinary, her feet no longer skipped and danced and whirled. She was wearing the same faded dress she’d had on when she’d met Clementine at the station, and in the bright morning sunlight Clementine saw how its pattern of grey urns and branches of purple flowers was almost identical to the pattern of the worn linoleum that had once been in her cousin’s old bedroom. That pattern had only been visible beneath Fan’s bed, another place she’d tried to hide when Aunty Rene came seething with the strap. How many times? wondered Clementine. How many times had Fan had to run and hide? And did she know how the pattern on her dress resembled the floor of one of her old hiding places? Of course she didn’t, Clementine told herself, and yet the idea of this strange coincidence, and Fan’s innocence of it, set up a funny little tingling all along her spine.

The dress itself was the kind old ladies wore, a shapeless buttoned shift with no waist and short capped sleeves, light years away from the beautiful tiered skirts and silky blouses her cousin had worn on Clementine’s last visit. It was hard to imagine Fan choosing it, but then there wasn’t much to choose from in Lake Conapaira. The cramped windows of Lindsay’s in Main Street, the only store that sold women’s clothing, displayed dresses of this style. If you wanted something different you had to travel hundreds of miles to a larger town, or choose from the mail order catalogue like Fan used to do in the days when she worked in Mr Chiltern’s hardware store and had money of her own.

She wasn’t working now. She was married with a little kid and perhaps Gary ‘kept her short’, a phrase Clementine’s mother used for the kind of husbands who didn’t give their wives much money; who spent their wages down the pub or betting on the horses out at Randwick or Rosehill. A wife could be poor, even if her husband wasn’t, Clementine knew that. ‘People don’t wear shabby clothes and live in slums because they choose to,’ she remembered Miss Travers telling them in a social studies class. ‘And it’s not because they’re slack. Don’t any of you ever think that! They live this way because they’re poor and they have no choice. Poverty restricts your choices, I want you all to remember that.’

‘Sorry,’ Fan was saying. ‘Sorry I went and slept in again. You must think I’m awful!’

‘’Course I don’t!’

‘Well you should!’ cried Fan with some of her old vigour. ‘I ask you to visit and you come all this way and you’ve only got a few days and then what do you find? Me snoring my head off half the time!’

‘It’s all right.’

‘’Course it’s not all right. You always were too soft, Clementine Southey!’

‘
Me
too soft!’

‘Doing all the washing! And it’s not even
Monday
!’ She grinned at Clementine.

‘Monday washing day,’ chanted Clementine.

‘Tuesday ironing day,’ Fan chanted back. ‘You know, I couldn’t believe it when you told me how your mum used to do stuff like washing and ironing on certain days. Does she still do it?’

‘Sure. That’s why she got her job part-time, Wednesday to Friday.’

‘You’re kidding me. Aren’t you?’

‘Yeah. But she still does it Monday and Tuesday. I think it must be carved in stone somewhere.’

‘Oh, well. She’s nice, your mum. I used to wish she was mine.’ Fan went quiet for a moment, twisting a lock of her shorn-off hair. Then she said, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I think it’s just – I get so
tired
.’ A kind of bafflement spread across her face. ‘And it’s not as if I’m doing much, all day. Doing nothing, most of it. Nothing days.’

A brisk breeze had sprung up and set the wet clothes flapping on the line and the clouds running fast across the sky: a cloud like a big lizard, another like a kitten with three legs, a long white skinny arm. Fan looked up at them. ‘The winds of heaven,’ she said.

‘Did your friend teach you that?’ asked Clementine. It was something she’d always wondered. ‘The old black man?’

‘Teach me what?’

‘Those words – “the winds of heaven”.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t remember him ever saying them. They were just there, you know? Sort of in my head. Always.’

‘They sound like poetry,’ said Clementine, and she stooped and took the last clothes from the basket: the green skirt she’d worn on the train, a pair of blue child’s shorts.