The Winds of Heaven (23 page)

There was no more room on the line.

‘Oh, we’ll just chuck these,’ said Fan, and she reached up to the stiff, jigging overalls and ripped them from the wire. They fell in a heap at her feet. She kicked them. ‘Bloody Gary,’ she said.

‘Where is he?’ The minute the words were out she knew she shouldn’t have spoken them. Fan’s face went hard in a way Clementine could never have imagined, and her voice was cold and distant when she answered, ‘Out west some place, last time I heard. God knows where.’

‘Oh.’

Fan laughed, a dry little laugh that didn’t sound like hers. ‘Remember when Mum used to say that about Dad?’

‘Say what?’

‘“God knows where”, when anyone asked where he’d gone, and you used to think it was a country, a special faraway place called Gunnesweare.’

Clementine scuffed at the red earth with the toe of her sandal. ‘Yeah.’ She didn’t know if it would be all right to smile, even though her cousin was laughing now.

‘You were a funny kid, all right,’ said Fan. Her face softened and she took Clementine’s hands in hers and gazed at her intently. ‘But look at you now! You’re lovely!’

Clementine pulled away in embarrassment. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘Oh, come off it, of course you are.’ Fan glanced down at her cousin’s feet in their brown leather sandals. ‘Only I thought you’d be wearing green shoes.’

‘Green shoes? Why? To match the green skirt, you mean?’

‘Didn’t even know you had a green skirt, how could I? It was just – ’ Fan swiped at her windblown hair. ‘I had a dream about you a little while back.’

‘Honest? What was it about?’

‘Nothing, I guess. Well, I don’t know – we were just standing together, you know, side by side. Like this.’ She moved up close to Clementine, so close their hips touched,
and their shoulders, too. Fan looked down at their feet. ‘And all I could see was one of your green shoes, right next to these old things of mine.’

‘Green shoes?’

‘Only one,’ said Fan. ‘But it was beautiful, your shoe. It was made of leather and it had a thin little strap across the middle and a square heel. And there was this feeling in the dream, you know? Between us, like – remember when we were kids, and I said I’d be your sister? Your
gindaymaidhaany
?’

‘Yes.’

‘Some sister I turned out to be! Anyway, in the dream it was sort of like that. Being close, in a special kind of way. Perhaps that’s why I wrote and asked you up. At last.’

‘I’m glad.’

The wind was playing a game with Gary’s discarded overalls, twitching at the stiff brown cloth till it looked like a leg was kicking at the air. Fan nudged them with her foot, like you might nudge a lazy old dog to get him moving. Then she hooked them with the tip of her sandshoe and kicked them right across the yard. ‘Ugh!’ she exclaimed, scrubbing the shoe into the earth. ‘Filthy things!’

The wind was really roaring now, ripping and tearing at the washing on the line. Fan shook her head from side to side.

‘You think it’s them,’ she said in a dull voice.

Clementine was bewildered. ‘Who?’

‘
Them
.’ Fan’s voice rose. ‘Your mum and dad. You think it’s all their fault. Making a mess of things, you know – ’ she waved a hand towards the house, ‘fighting and hating each other, like mine did. You think it’s because they’re stupid.’ Her face hardened again and Clementine saw suddenly how
it was becoming the face of a person who might do dangerous things.

‘You think it won’t happen to you,’ Fan went on. Her voice was louder now. ‘You think, “Oh no,
you’re
not stupid like them,
you’ll
know how to choose the right person,
you’ll
know how to – love properly.” You think
you’ll
be loved, and you won’t make a mess.’ The bitter words spilled out of her like dirty water from a pail. Instinctively Clementine stepped back. Fan didn’t notice, she might have forgotten Clementine was standing there. Above their heads the clouds were changing shapes: the big lizard swallowed the three-legged kitten, the skinny white arm threw roses into the sky.

‘But you’re too young, see?’ cried Fan. ‘You have to make these big decisions before you know anything – before you even know you’re
making
big decisions. And, and then you find out it wasn’t only your parents who got into a mess. It’s you – it’s everyone.’

There was a silence, except for the wind. A tea towel flipped off the line and sailed away over the fence. Clementine moved to go after it but Fan grabbed at her arm. ‘Let it go,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t want to live here.’ She caught sight of her cousin’s stricken face. ‘Oh! Oh, Clemmie, you’re crying!’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Yes you are.’ Fan took a grey hanky from the pocket of her old lady’s dress and dabbed at her cousin’s eyes. ‘There you are. I’m sorry, Clemmie. I shouldn’t have said all that stuff. I shouldn’t have.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘No it’s not. But I didn’t mean you, you know. I didn’t mean
you’d
get into that sort of mess. Because I know you
won’t. You’ll choose properly, and someone will love
you
, someone lovely, I bet, and – ’

She broke off. Beyond their clamour, the screen door had burst open; Cash came running towards them across the yard.

It was plain that while Clementine had been in the laundry, Fan had bathed and dressed her little son. The winds of heaven ruffled his clean hair into feathers, his face shone. He wore small blue jeans and a finely knitted sailor’s jersey – beautiful clothes you could never come by in Lake Conapaira and which Clementine knew at once his Aunty Caro must have bought for him, just like she’d bought the new furniture for his room. In one hand he held a shape made from bright red Lego blocks, a shape that was recognisably a car. ‘Mum!’ he shouted. ‘Mum! Look!’

Fan bent down to examine it. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she said.

‘It’s for you!’

‘Thank you,’ said Fan. ‘It’s exactly the kind of car I’ve always wanted.’ She raised it to her lips and kissed it loudly. ‘Mm-mwaa! It’s so good I want to
eat
it.’ She opened her mouth.

Cash squealed with delight. ‘No! No, Mum, don’t!’

‘Okay, I won’t then. I’ll put it in here, right?’ She slipped the toy into the pocket of her ugly dress. ‘So then I can take it out and look at it when I want to – all day!’ She rolled her eyes at Cash and he giggled joyously. Then she turned to Clementine and said, ‘Clemmie, I’m really truly sorry for upsetting you.’

‘It’s all right, honest.’

‘No. I don’t know, something sort of comes over me sometimes.’ She smiled shakily. ‘Don’t take any notice of me, okay? Because there are lots of good things, lots.’ She bent
down and swooped Cash up into her arms, kissing his cheeks and the ends of his feathery hair. ‘And this is my best, special,
great
good thing!’

On Clementine’s last evening Fan strapped Cash into his stroller and they set out for a walk around the lake. ‘For old time’s sake, eh?’ she said.

They went slowly along the track, where the tiny pieces of glass still glittered in the red earth, and the water made its familiar old dog lapping sound among the reeds. ‘So you’re going to university,’ said Fan, and Clementine noticed how she used the whole word, instead of saying ‘uni’ like everybody else. ‘Soon?’

‘Next week.’

‘Not long,’ said Fan, and after a few second’s silence she added, ‘I saw it once.’

‘Saw what?’

‘The university.’

‘You did?’ Clementine heard the note of surprise in her voice and realised how snobby she must sound: as if she thought even a glimpse of such a place was impossible for a cousin in Lake Conapaira. She flushed. ‘You mean,’ she floundered, making things worse, ‘you saw it on a school trip or something?’

Fan laughed. It was a laugh without bitterness or offence in it and might even have held a kind of sympathy for Clementine’s embarrassment. ‘They didn’t have trips at our school, not back then, anyway – it’s too far from anywhere. I didn’t mean I actually
went
there; I saw it on the telly, at Mrs Darcy’s place. It looked really – ’

Posh, they all said. Fan didn’t.

‘Beautiful,’ she said. ‘It was like one of those places I
used to think might be in the blue hills.’ She snatched a quick sideways glance at Clementine. ‘You’re lucky,’ she said, and there was no envy, she was simply stating a fact.

Clementine didn’t know how to reply. The idea of her luck, of – of privilege, made her want to sit down on the pebbly track and weep. It wasn’t
fair
. Instead she looked out towards the horizon, where the colour of the sky was fading and the hills showed darkly against it, their primitive humped shapes seeming to possess a strangely living quality. They might have been huge prehistoric creatures asleep on the edge of the plain.

Fan followed her cousin’s gaze. ‘The blue hills,’ she said softly. ‘We went there once, me and Gary. Remember how I used to think any place you could dream of might be there?’

‘Of course I do. What was it like?’

Fan shrugged. ‘Just a small town, a bit like this one. Mostly trees, and rocks, and then more rocks and trees.’

‘
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course
,’ recited Clementine, ‘
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
’

‘What’s that?’

‘Oh, nothing. Just a bit of this poem we had at school.’

‘Say it again.’

‘
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.
’

‘What’s “diurnal” mean?’

‘Sort of “on every day, for always”.’

Fan gazed thoughtfully across the darkening water of the lake. ‘It was a bit like that up there,’ she said. ‘So quiet you could feel the earth going round and round, for ever.’ She paused and peered over the hood of the stroller to check on the sleeping Cash. ‘It snows up there sometimes, you know? And I thought how when the snow fell on
those treetops it would be like a big fat white quilt you could jump into and pull right over your head and snuggle down to sleep.’

‘Cold.’

‘Soft,’ said Fan. She touched her cousin’s hand. ‘And guess what? I saw a sign for your
Griffiths Tea
.’

‘On the way there, you mean? Along the road? They aren’t by the railway line anymore. I looked coming up in the train, but they’d all gone.’

‘It was in the town. In a tea-shop window – only it was closed, the tea-shop, boarded up ages ago by the look of it. Remember how you thought if you could find that tea it would taste like – what was it?’

‘Ambrosia.’

‘That’s right. The nectar of the gods.’

‘Metaphors,’ sighed Clementine. ‘That’s what they were, the blue hills and
Griffiths Tea
. Our metaphors.’

Metaphors. How bookish and prim the word sounded out here. Useless.

‘Like in poetry, you mean? Oh you needn’t look so surprised; I did listen to some things at school. We had a good teacher in second year, Miss Langland. She found out I could read.’

‘What?’

‘They thought I couldn’t, all of them. Because when I had to read out loud in front of people, I couldn’t do it – not with everybody waiting to see if I could. You remember – remember how Mum used to make me read those messages? And I couldn’t?’

Clementine nodded.

‘But I could read in my head all right, when no one was around. As good as anyone. Only after a while I didn’t want
them to know. Miss Langland was the only one who ever worked it out.’

‘Good,’ said Clementine. ‘I’m glad she did. I’m glad there was someone.’

‘She wanted me to stay on at school, Miss Langland did, but I couldn’t stand the thought of it, not back then. Three more years of school! That place seemed like a prison to me. Only now I think – ’

‘What?’

‘Oh nothing.’ Fan peered over the stroller’s hood again. ‘He’s really sound asleep.’

‘Perhaps when he starts school you could – ’

Fan cut her short. It was as if she didn’t want to hear what Clementine thought she could do. ‘Funny, isn’t it,’ she said, changing the subject quickly, ‘how your
Griffiths Tea
was in the blue hills? If we’d been born thirty years ago, when that shop was open and everything, we could have gone up there like we said we’d do, and drunk
Griffiths Tea
in the blue hills, and it wouldn’t have been a metaphor then. It would have been real.’

They came to the spot where the old man’s camp had been. Even the blackened stones were gone now, but there was still something about the shape of the land that made you know it was his place.

‘Remember when you took me to see him, that time? And he was asleep, and you said not to wake him up, because his spirit had gone walking?’

‘Did I? He was a magic man – that’s what he said, anyway. Reckon he put a spell on me, eh? It would have been a good spell though, because he liked me, you know. He thought I was good.’ She smiled. ‘Bit of a laugh, that, eh?’

‘No, it isn’t. You
are
good.’

‘Come off it. Even good spells wouldn’t work on me. You know what? Sometimes I feel like I didn’t get through into the world properly, like other people. That I left a bit behind, up there.’ She waved a hand at the dusky sky, where the stars were beginning to show, like pale faces looming behind a screen. ‘Some really important bit of me, and I’m no good without it.’ She nudged at Clementine’s arm. ‘Reckon it might have been my brain, eh?’