The Winds of Heaven (15 page)

You knew there’d be someone for Fan. He was promised already in her beautiful face, her soft rounded body and slender brown feet; in the way she danced round the room, her arms spread wide, in her laughter and the sound of her voice when she sang one of her Johnny Cash songs. You knew it in the same way you knew that Daria would one day be a lawyer like her father had been when they’d been rich and lived in Budapest.

Clementine didn’t know if there’d ever be anyone for her. She leaned on the windowsill and gazed up at the sky and there seemed nothing she could grasp or hold. She wasn’t sure of anything. ‘You haven’t got your feet planted on the ground, Clementine,’ Mum was always saying. Except where on the ground were you supposed to put your feet? Where was a firm, safe place? With a funny little blink of memory she recalled the swamp she’d seen from the train window on that earlier trip to Lake Conapaira. ‘If you walked there,’ she’d asked her mum, ‘would you sink? Over your head?’ and all that Mum had answered was, ‘Oh, Clementine!’

Clementine turned from the window, reached under the pillow for her pyjamas and began to dress for bed. Yawning, she wandered down the hallway to the bathroom to clean her teeth. When she opened the door, she found a little kid in there, a skinny little kid with mousey tousled hair and a small freckled face almost wholly taken up by an expression of great surprise. ‘Hey!’ she cried. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Get out of here!’

A full fifteen seconds passed before she realised the startled little kid was her own reflection in the mirror. It was
the pyjamas that alerted her: pale green with a pattern of the gumnut babies, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Granny Southey had bought those pyjamas for Clementine’s eleventh birthday. ‘As soon as I saw them,’ Granny had told her delightedly, ‘I said to myself, I said, “That’s little Clementine all over!” Because I know you just love Snugglepot and Cuddlepie!’

‘But that was years ago!’ Clementine had complained later to Mum and Dad. ‘I had that Snugglepot and Cuddlepie book when I was
five
.’

‘I know, love, but your Granny’s getting a bit forgetful these days,’ Mum had consoled her. ‘They look like they’ll be nice and warm in winter, and anyway, who’s going to see you in them?’

Who indeed?

‘Just thank your lucky stars she got the size right,’ chuckled Dad and then Mum had started chuckling too and Clementine had hated the pair of them. She was grateful for small mercies though; at least she hadn’t been wearing them when Jilly Norris had come to visit.

‘Don’t be in too much of a hurry to grow up,’ Dad was always saying, but this was beyond a joke. Clementine strode into the bathroom and faced the scrawny kid in the mirror: her freckles had got darker in the winter sun of Lake Conapaira, they speckled her cheeks like threepenny bits dipped in chocolate syrup. Her hair, which she’d been trying to grow longer, had been dried out by the winds that Fan still called ‘the winds of heaven’ and it stood out from her head like an echidna’s spines. With a trembling hand she undid the buttons on her pyjama top – her flat chest seemed even flatter now, almost concave, like a dish of mashed potatoes from which some greedy person had taken
an enormous scoop. Oh, it wasn’t
fair
! A sudden tear rolled down her cheek and she brushed it angrily away.

Outside the house a car door slammed. ‘Luv ya!’ a male voice shouted. The motor revved and screamed off down Palm Street – so Fan had come back early after all! The front gate jingled, high heels clattered up the path. Clementine drew in her breath: those soft red shoes Fan had taken from the wardrobe didn’t have high heels. It was Aunty Rene.

She ran back to the bedroom. Aunty Rene rarely came in to check on them, but this seemed the kind of electric night when almost anything might happen. The strap no longer hung on the back of the kitchen door but Aunty Rene could still screech gamely when the mood was on her and Fan got her going; it was better nothing should upset her. Hastily Clementine snatched her dressing gown and an abandoned towel, and moulded them into a rough body shape beneath her cousin’s blankets. A key turned in the lock of the front door. ‘Hidieho!’ a voice trilled out into the hall.

It was the strangest thing how Aunty Rene always sang this out whenever she entered the quiet house after an evening down at the club. Clementine jumped back into bed and listened to her aunty’s footsteps dithering in the hall. They paused at the bathroom door, a moment later the toilet flushed, taps ran, and the footsteps came on again, this way, that way, meandering into silence outside the room where Clementine lay holding her breath in the dark.

‘Hidieho?’ the door creaked open, Clementine’s grey eyes met her aunty’s black ones in a bright shaft of light from the hall.

Aunty Rene’s blithe permed curls encircled her sharp
face like teddy-bear wrapping paper round a dangerous toy. She wore tall high-heeled boots and a tiny little dress with leather fringes along the shoulders and the hem.

‘Hidieho!’ she exclaimed again. ‘Still awake, eh?’

‘Um, yes.’

Aunty Rene’s eyes drifted towards the other bed, flickering over the clumsy shape beneath the blanket, which Clementine now saw looked nothing like a human being. She waited tensely for the shriek of rage, but Aunty Rene’s gaze seemed hazy, unfocused. ‘Home for a change, eh?’ she murmured to the shape, and then turned back to Clementine.

‘Can’t get to sleep?’

‘No.’ Clementine wished she’d go away.

Aunty Rene lingered, holding onto the door knob, gazing sadly at her niece. In her tiny cowgirl’s dress and shiny boots she soughed and sighed, and then said softly, ‘I was like you when I was young.’

‘Oh!’ gasped Clementine, horrified, stifling an urge to cry out: Oh no, no! You couldn’t have been!

‘Well, nighty night!’ With another vague glance in the direction of Fan’s bed, Aunty Rene let go of the door and retreated down the hall, warbling her favourite old song, ‘
Irene, goodni-i-ight, Irene goodnight, goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene, I’ll see you in my dreams!
’ The door of her bedroom slammed. Clementine wriggled down beneath the blankets and closed her eyes.

It was much later when Fan came home. ‘Are you asleep?’ she whispered, leaning over Clementine’s bed, a tall silver girl in the moonlight flooding through the gap in the curtains, her
hair all loose and tumbled, the pair of red shoes swinging from one hand.

Clementine didn’t reply, she kept her eyes shut tightly and gave the kind of tiny sigh people make when they are asleep.

Fan stepped back. The shoes dropped from her hand. There was a rustle and slither as she took off her clothes and left them lying in a silky puddle on the floor.

‘Sorry,’ she said softly, ‘Sorry I’m late, Clemmie.’

Her bed creaked as she climbed into it. Clementine opened her eyes the smallest fraction and peered across the room. Fan was lying on her side, watching her. ‘I knew you were awake,’ she said.

‘No, I’m not.’

Fan laughed. Who wouldn’t? She lay down and pulled the blanket up and stretched her arms out straight above her head.

‘Oh, Clemmie,’ she whispered.

‘What?’ said Clementine sulkily. But she knew what had happened to her cousin that night. Of course she did.

‘Oh, Clemmie, I’m so happy, so happy! And I’m always going to be! For sure! And you too – ’ Fan turned on her side again and through the darkness Clementine could see the liquid shining of her eyes, could almost feel the warmth of her gaze across the space between them. ‘You’ll have, have – ’ Fan’s voice stumbled sleepily.

‘Have what?’ whispered Clementine.

‘
Gadhaang,
’ answered Fan.

‘
Gadhaang
? What’s that? Why can’t you talk properly?’ she demanded.

‘I was. That
is
talking properly.’

Clementine didn’t reply.

‘All right, if you’re so cranky, I’m not going to tell you.’ There was another small rustling sound as Fan pulled the blanket up over her head and then there was silence in the room.

The silence went on and on.

Clementine couldn’t bear it. ‘What’s
gadhaang
?’ she whispered. She knew Fan had told her that word before, but she’d forgotten.

‘Happiness,’ answered Fan, who had the kind of sweetness in her which made it impossible to keep up a fight. ‘Serious happiness. Happiness for
you.
’ Then she leaped from her bed and danced across the floor to Clementine’s.
‘Oh my darling,’
she was singing,
‘Oh my darling Clementine! Thou art lost and gone forever, Dreadful sorry, Clementine!’

Every day she looked for a letter.

The minute she came in from school she would ask her mother, ‘Any letters for me?’

As the weeks passed by with no reply, Clementine became embarrassed, as much for the silent Fan as for herself. She stopped asking her mother and tried not to let her eyes stray too eagerly towards the kitchen sideboard where the day’s post was kept. She would go into her room and unpack the books she needed for her homework, then she would come out to the kitchen again and sift carelessly, nonchalantly, through the mail, as if it didn’t matter whether there was anything for her or not.

She made up explanations. Excuses. Perhaps her letter had been lost and Fan had never received it. Letters
did
occasionally go astray. Kay Dimsey at school was always telling this story about how she mightn’t even have been born because her dad’s marriage proposal to her mum had been lost in the mail and he’d thought she couldn’t even be bothered to answer it. ‘Pity it wasn’t lost,’ Jilly Norris had sneered.

The first time Jilly said this, Kay Dimsey had cried for ages, because it was always awful to hear that someone thought you were useless on the earth, even if that someone was Jilly Norris. But after the first time Kay had simply tossed her head and taken no notice of Jilly.

Clementine wrote again and still there was no reply.

And yet Fan had
wanted
her to write. As Clementine’s train pulled away from the station Fan had run along the platform beside it, hair flying, her smoky warm breath plainly visible in the freezing morning air as she called out, over and over again, ‘Don’t forget to write to me! Don’t forget me, Clemmie.’

As if she ever could!

Fan was busy, that was it, of course. She had her work down at Mr Chiltern’s hardware store all week and Saturday mornings too, and when she wasn’t working there was Geoff, and jobs to do around the house for Aunty Rene. She didn’t have time to sit down and write letters like Clementine did, to muck about with writing pads and envelopes and leaky pens – Fan wasn’t a schoolgirl anymore. She
would
answer, one day when she had the time, Clementine was sure of it; and meanwhile she herself would keep on writing, faithfully.

And she did. She wrote and told Fan about the dancing lessons they’d begun in Thursday gym periods; and how Mr Andrews, the boys’ PE teacher, had to whack the boys to make them ask the girls to dance. And how awful it was dancing with them: how their hands felt hot and clammy, how they trod on you with their heavy feet, and how even the cleanest boy seemed to smell of mud and sweat and something strange and sharp that Clementine couldn’t identify.

She told her how Mr Simkin, the Geography teacher, had taken a fancy to Ba Purcell and kept calling her out to the front to sit beside him at the teacher’s table while he went through her homework. And how when Mrs Larkin had sent Ba to the staffroom with a message, Mr Simkin had come out and said, ‘A little bird told me it’s your birthday today. How old are you?’

‘Sixteen,’ Ba had innocently answered. She was older than the other kids in her class because she’d once missed two whole years of school.

‘Sweet sixteen and never been kissed!’ Mr Simkin had exclaimed, and then his big red face had swooped down towards Ba’s little one – only then Mr Leyland had come up behind him and said, ‘Can I have a word with you, please, Wally?’

Wally!

Ba had come back to the classroom with her eyes all red from crying. ‘What’s wrong, dear?’ Mrs Larkin had asked, but Ba hadn’t told her. It was too embarrassing to tell a teacher. Mr Simkin (Wally!) was old and balding with a big stomach which wobbled over his trouser belt; there was absolutely no glamour in such a person having a crush on you. But she told her friends; she couldn’t help it, she was too upset to keep quiet.

‘How did he know it was my birthday?’ she kept asking them over and over. ‘How?’

‘He must have looked it up in the records,’ said Kay Dimsey, and then they’d all gone quiet, thinking about this.

‘He could find out all about you there,’ said Jilly Norris. ‘Anything he wanted, your telephone number – ’

‘We don’t have a telephone.’

‘Where you live – ’

‘Oh no,’ Ba had whispered, ‘Oh, no, no!’

Then Jilly Norris had begun singing.
‘Baa baa blonde sheep,’
she’d crooned to fair-haired Ba,
‘Have you seen your Wally? Creeping up your own street, Looking for his dolly …’

‘Shut up, Jilly,’ said Kay Dimsey. People were always telling Jilly to shut up.