The Winds of Heaven (8 page)

Now Fan had gone and Clementine could tell she wasn’t in the house: the old green petticoat lay abandoned on the floor, the big drawer where most of Fan’s daytime clothes were kept hung open, trailing hems and sleeves.

She’d have gone to her hidey, decided Clementine, her special place in the grassy hollow by the lake. She jumped out of bed, pulled on her shorts and tee-shirt, thrust her feet into her sandshoes, crept from the house and hurried across the backyard, out the gate and up the lane towards the narrow red road that led towards the lake. Then she ran.

The hidey was empty. Clementine walked round and round it, unable to believe her cousin wasn’t there. Where was she then, if she wasn’t here?

A terrible thought seized hold of her: perhaps, like the people in her stories, Fan had gone to climb up into the sky. Where would you go if you wanted to climb into the sky? How would you find the ladder if you didn’t know where it was and it didn’t come down to you by itself? Perhaps you
needed a magic word, like Ali Baba’s ‘Open Sesame!’ And then Clementine remembered the old black man: they were his, those stories, so perhaps Fan had gone to him.

She ran out from the hidey and into the paddocks. A crowd of cockatoos, busy at their breakfast in the dry tussocky grass, rose up at her approach and whirled off in a raucous cloud.
Bilirr.

‘Where’s Fan?’ she called after them. ‘Where’s Fan?’ But even if cockatoos could speak, she was certain it would be in the language of the old black man, and she wouldn’t be able to understand them.

When she reached the place where he had his shelter, she saw at once that the old man had gone. The sheets of iron lay flat on the ground, the sacking curtain on top of them, folded neatly as a piece of her mother’s fresh ironing on a Tuesday afternoon. The rusty tins had vanished, the pile of rushes had been swept away. There was nothing but the prickly bushes and the spindly gums, the bare earth and the circle of blackened stones.

‘Fan!’ she called. ‘Fan!’ The only sounds that returned to her were the faint rattle of dry gum leaves and the old dog lapping of the lake upon the shore. A wind had risen, and she became aware that the light had changed. When she’d been running along the track to Fan’s hidey, the sun had come up; now it had gone dark again. The sky had clouded over, but not with the shapely white clouds she and Fan often watched beside the lake: this cloud was like a dingy blanket thrown across the whole of the sky, the colour of washing-up water, flecked at its edges with livid dirty foam. Thunder rumbled distantly.

She hurried from the old man’s camp and began to run
across the paddock where the willy-willy had come seething across the land. What if another one was coming? She didn’t know how to judge its direction like Fan. What if she got swirled up into its brown skirts like an old tree branch, and whirled away over the plains? Where was Fan? Where? Had she gone away with her friend? To
Birrima
, the place far, far away? Had they both climbed up into the sky? A sob caught in her throat; she ran and ran and she didn’t know where she was going, she didn’t know anything.

It was all Aunty Rene’s fault. Oh, how she hated her, hated her, hated her! She wished Aunty Rene would die; surely she deserved to die. Yet even as she thought this, Clementine remembered an afternoon last week when there’d been a sudden shower of rain, and Aunty Rene had run out into the yard and stood there with her face lifted to the raindrops: a face that looked unexpectedly young and even gentle, so you could see how once she’d been a different person. The person who’d chosen the beautiful name Francesca for her baby girl.

A great branch of lightning tore across the sky and in its livid light she saw a strange creature hurtling down the narrow road that led away to the hills – a thin, dark, rigid thing that carried some softer, paler shape upon its back.

Clementine didn’t move. Let it get her then! She didn’t care anymore. She didn’t care if it was a hobyah carrying a great big bag, she didn’t care if it leaped on her and stuffed her in the bag and took her home to gobble; because if Fan was gone then nothing really mattered anymore.

Only Mum and Dad. Especially Dad. How would Dad feel if
she
went away?

It was raining now. Big heavy drops fell like coins onto the dust at her feet. She dashed the tears from her eyes,
looked up and saw that the strange dark creature was only a rusty old bicycle, and the shape on its back was Fan.

Fan on her dad’s old bike! How could she have forgotten? Hadn’t Fan told her she’d run away to those hills one day? Hadn’t she planned to go on her dad’s old bike?

Fan skidded to a stop in the middle of the track, a few yards from her cousin. She threw the old bike down and it lay on its side in the mud, wheels spinning, while Fan stood beside it, head down, crying. Clementine ran to put her arms round her. Fan’s hair, escaped from its plaits, felt cold, and it was darker, too, the colour of treacle instead of wild honey, and her face was streaked with red stripes where the dust had muddled with the rain and tears. Even in the gloomy light, Clementine could see the marks from Aunty Rene’s strap on her cousin’s legs, and they made her feel sick. They shouldn’t
be
there – they made you feel the world had gone all wrong.

‘I couldn’t get there,’ Fan sobbed. ‘I couldn’t get there, Clemmie! I rode and rode, and they were still as far away as ever, just like the other time. And then I started thinking how I hadn’t left you a note or anything, and you wouldn’t know where I’d gone, and how you’d worry, like you do, and so – ’ she gave a long shuddering sigh, ‘so I came back again.’ She pressed her face down into Clementine’s thin shoulder and they stood together silently, while the thick cold rain poured down.

‘She shouldn’t hit me,’ Fan whispered.

‘I know she shouldn’t.’

‘Because I’m
Yirigaa
. I’m the morning star, see? And that means I’m – I’m a kind of princess. My friend said so.’

‘I know.’

Fan lifted her head and stared back hopelessly at the elusive hills. ‘I just can’t seem to get there.’

‘You will.’

‘No I won’t.’

‘Yes you will. Why do you think you won’t? When you’re grown up, what’s going to stop you then? You’ll drink
Griffiths Tea
up there one day, I bet. You’ll taste ambrosia.’

Fan didn’t say anything. On the ground beside them one wheel of the old bicycle still spun, a faint sibilant whisper beneath the rain. Fan put out a hand and stilled the wheel with a single fingertip, and then there was only the rain.

‘And when you go there, I’ll come too,’ said Clementine.

‘Would you? Even when we’re grown up?’

‘Of course.’

‘Promise?’

‘Cross my heart.’

Fan stepped back and beamed at Clementine. She gave a little skip, grabbed two handfuls of her cold wet hair and flung them over her shoulders triumphantly. ‘When we grow up!’ she shouted, and her laughter flew up in the air.

The very next morning Clementine and her mother left for Sydney on the diesel train. They were going home a whole week earlier than they’d planned because Mum and Aunty Rene had quarrelled. ‘Can Fan come with us?’ Clementine longed to ask. She didn’t though, because she knew what the answer would be. They were leaving so fast there wasn’t even time for Mum to say, ‘We’ll see.’

It would be almost five years before Clementine saw her cousin again.

When she was thirteen and in her second year at Chisolm College, Clementine had a Geometry teacher called Mr Meague. He was a slight, grey-haired man, soft as a whisper. You wouldn’t think he could frighten anyone.

Mr Meague liked silence. Silence was the element he breathed, he told his class, with that strange little twitch at the corner of his mouth which might have been a smile and might have been something else you couldn’t put a name to: he breathed silence as they breathed air, or fish breathed water down beneath the sea.

Mr Meague caned boys for talking. There were plenty of teachers at Chisolm who used the cane. Boys were always getting whacked – for fighting or giving cheek or smoking in the toilets and round the back of the canteen. No one except Mr Meague caned for talking. The penalties for talking were writing lines, or detention, or the hollow rap of a blackboard duster on the very centre of your skull.

Teachers weren’t allowed to cane girls, but Mr Meague had found his way round this restriction. When he caught a girl talking in his class, he told her to stand up, and then he ordered her to pick a boy. And when she did this, when she chose a name and spoke it out, then Mr Meague would cane the boy she chose.

Most girls picked a Home Boy. The Home Boys came from St Swithin’s, which everyone knew was a terrible place. They were awkward, bony-looking boys, rough and pasty-faced, whose skin and clothing looked like it might be damp to the touch. They were always in trouble for fighting and swearing, always being caned, at Chisolm and at St Swithin’s, where there were far worse things than canes.

So Jilly Norris said, anyway.

Jilly Norris sat next to Clementine in Geometry, and she should know because her mother had a part-time job in the kitchens of St Swithin’s. The kitchen was disgusting, Mrs Norris had told Jilly: cockroaches floated in the soup like big brown shiny dates with legs, and the smell from the fridge when you opened it would knock a strong man down. They used whips at St Swithin’s, Jilly Norris claimed, and special straps with little bits of metal worked into them. And there was a dark cellar like a dungeon where they kept the worst boys chained up to the wall.

Clementine’s mum said Jilly Norris was making it up, but Jilly said you only had to look at the palms of the Home Boys’ hands – they were as hard and calloused as normal people’s feet. Jilly Norris and her friends said it didn’t matter if you picked a Home Boy for Mr Meague to cane; they were used to it, weren’t they? And they were orphans, so there wouldn’t be any bother with mums or dads coming round to your house to complain you’d picked on their son. And they
would
come round to your place, you could bet on it. They wouldn’t go up to the school and complain to Mr Meague or the headmaster, because most of the parents considered that their kids were lucky to get into Chisolm. It was a school for clever kids and had good teachers and opportunities to get on in the world.

And the teachers were forbidding with their aloof stern faces and their long black gowns. You’d never think those faces could once have belonged to children who’d grown up in the very same suburbs the students came from: the drab flat clusters of small fibro houses strung out along the western railway line, suburbs where you baked in summer and froze in winter, and where the grass in the vacant lots burned brown or turned icy white and beautiful, like fields of frost in the cold heart of July. Yet dignified Miss Evelyn, who taught Latin, had grown up in the very same street as Clementine’s mum. ‘Eight children in the family and not a penny to bless themselves with,’ Mum had told her. And everyone knew that Dr Rawson, the headmaster, had been a Home Boy from St Swithin’s.

It wasn’t only the academic gowns and stern faces that made some of the Chisolm parents hesitate to bring a problem to the school. It was more than that, it was hope – they believed Chisolm College offered their children the chance to have better lives than their own. Clementine’s dad always said you made your own chances in life, but she could see that he and Mum had shy hopes of their own for her. She’d noticed how, on Sunday visits to the city, bus-rides through the waterside suburbs, the harbour glittering on one side, the beautiful houses in their long gardens on the other – her parents would grow wistful, even a little sad. It wasn’t for themselves – Mum and Dad didn’t want to live in grand houses, they didn’t want to be rich. They were happy with the house in Willow Street, but if their daughter wanted something grander, they wouldn’t stand in her way. When she was older, Clementine realised that they were modest even in that. She remembered how, as the bus idled round
the tree-lined streets, her mother would point – not to the dazzling white mansions on the harbour shore, but to some small, plain weatherboard, half hidden in its garden, and say, ‘Imagine, Clementine! One day you might live in a house like that! If you do well at school,’ she would add. ‘If you study hard, and get into the university.’ Her voice would go dreamy on that last word.