The Winds of Heaven (20 page)

‘Up?’

‘Yes, Mum’s getting up now.’ She flung the sheet back and swung her legs onto the floor. ‘
You’ve made your bed, now you lie in it
,’ Mum said whenever Fan complained about anything, but enough was enough; you couldn’t stay in bed for ever, no matter how much you might want to do just that. Not when you had a little kid.

Fan stood up and entered the day. She wandered down the hall to the bathroom where she washed her face and brushed her teeth and ran a ratty old comb through her sleep-tousled hair. Then she took yesterday’s dress from the hook on the wall and slipped it over her head. Out in the kitchen she took eggs and milk and butter from the fridge and flour from the cupboard and mixed pancake batter in a big china jug. ‘
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine
,’ she sang, ladling the batter into the frying pan.

‘What’s that?’ asked Cash.

‘It’s a song your great-grandpa used to sing.’

‘What’s a –’

‘Great-grandpa? It’s your nan’s dad.’

‘Nan.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Where?’

‘Down in Coota. You know that’s where Nan lives. With Trev.’

He waved his hands. ‘No, no. Where’s great, great –’

‘Great-grandpa? Gone to heaven,’ said Fan. ‘A long, long time ago. Before you were born. Before your mum was born.’

‘Long,’ said Cash.

‘Long ago,’ echoed Fan, ladling golden syrup onto his pancake and thinking how Clementine used to say their house smelled special, of wild honey and kerosene.

Now she remembered that she’d dreamed of her cousin last night. It had been the oddest sort of dream. Nothing had happened in it; they were simply standing together, side by side, and yet though they were so close she could see nothing of her cousin, or herself, except their feet. Her own left foot, in one of the ratty old black sandshoes she wore around the house, and Clementine’s right foot, elegantly shod in the most beautiful shoe Fan had ever seen, more beautiful even than those red dancing shoes she’d had when she worked down at Mr Chiltern’s. Clementine’s shoe was made of soft green leather with a narrow strap across the instep and a small square heel. And though nothing had happened in the dream, there’d been this feeling of closeness and ease between them which was like a kind of special love. Like being sisters, thought Fan.
Gindaymaidhaany.

She would never get to visit Clementine in Sydney, at least, not for a long, long time; not till Cash was a big boy and
even the baby that was coming had begun at school. Years, that would be, six or seven whole years, and only then if Caro could look after them down at Temora while Fan was away.

And where would Clementine be by then? She could be anywhere. She could have gone overseas, to England or America like lots of Sydney girls. She might even be married herself, with a husband who didn’t care for visits from distant relatives. And Fan would be distant by then; she was distant now. Would Clementine even remember her after all that time? ‘
Thou art lost and gone forever, Dreadful sorry, Clementine
,’ sang Fan sadly as she flipped another pancake over in the pan.

But why should it have to be like that? Perhaps it needn’t be …why shouldn’t Clementine visit
her
? Why shouldn’t she?

A surge of excitement rose in her. It was a long time since she’d been excited about anything, and the feeling was strange to her, like suddenly seeing a person coming towards you down the street whom you’d thought was dead and gone. She turned the gas off under the pan and hurried to the sideboard drawer. She took out the pad and pencil, cleared a space at the table, and began at once to write.

‘What?’ asked Cash, pointing. ‘What?’

‘I’m writing a letter.’

‘To Aunty Caro?’ He clasped his sticky hands together like a little kid in an old-fashioned story book – the kind they used to have at school – a kid from the poorhouse who’d seen someone else’s Christmas dinner on the table. ‘Aunty Caro coming?’ The joy in his voice made her shiver. ‘No,’ she said, ‘No, she’s not.’

She put down the pencil and smiled at him. The letter
was finished, her pencil had flown; she’d drawn three kisses underneath her name.

‘Aunty Caro isn’t the only aunty in the world, you know.’

‘Yes she is!’

‘No she isn’t.’

He scrambled down from his chair, ran round the table and climbed up into her lap. ‘Is.’

‘Isn’t.’ She put her arms round him and rested her cold forehead against his warm one. ‘You’ve got another aunty, Cash.’

He looked up at her, astonished. ‘’Nother one?’

‘Yes. Her name’s Clementine. Aunty Clementine. She lives in Sydney. That’s who I’m writing to, see?’ She showed him the pad with the half page of writing on it, pointed to the neat little row of crosses on the bottom. ‘See these? They’re kisses.’

‘Kisses?’

‘Mmm. Like this.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘Mwaa. Only these are on paper, see? So we can send them to Aunty Clementine. Now you make one.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you.’ She turned him round in her lap and placed the pencil between his fingers, closed her hand round his, guided it onto the page. ‘Like this, see? One line
that
way, one line
this
way. There!’

He stared at the kiss for a long moment, then turned to her, beaming. ‘Mine?’

‘Yours.’

They both thought it was the most beautiful kiss in the world.

Clementine was walking home down Leary Street when she saw old Mrs Sheedy leaning over her front gate, peering up and down the road. Old stickybeak! She could keep you hanging there for ages while she found out all your business and told you the business of everyone in the neighbourhood. And Clementine, a crisp brown paper parcel tucked beneath her arm, which held the dark green linen she’d bought at Grace Bros to make a summer skirt, was in a hurry to get home.

‘Clementine! Clementine Southey!’

She’d been spotted; it was too late to cross the road and pretend she was going home by Newley Lane. Anyway, Mrs Sheedy would know she never went by Newley Lane if she could help it – Raymond Fisk lived there. He was thirteen now, and the scourge of Lowlands Tech, which everyone said was the worst school in the whole of Sydney, possibly the worst in Australia. You never actually saw him when you passed his house, but things flew out at you: bricks and sharpened garden stakes, chunks of rusty scrap iron, wet parcels of tea-leaves and ancient mutton fat.

Tom had been taken away. He’d gone to live with his proper parents. Clementine hoped they’d won the lottery and bought a mansion on the harbour; she hoped they’d
taken him to Disneyland for his birthday. She hoped they loved him now.

‘So you’re off to uni, eh?’ Mrs Sheedy greeted her. ‘Off there in March?’

She even knew the month! Clementine would take a bet she knew the very date of Orientation Day as well. ‘Yes,’ she answered.

‘Uni!’ marvelled Mrs Sheedy. ‘Imagine that! I don’t think there’s ever been a girl from round here went to the uni.’ Her round blue eyes took on the distant scholarly expression which told you she was flicking through seventy years of oral research on the neighbourhood. ‘No, wait, I tell a lie. There was a girl called Sally Lomas lived down the end of Irrawong Road – ever heard of her?’

‘No.’

‘She was before your time, I expect; it was well before the war.’

Before the war!

‘But Sally Lomas, she was a Chisolm College girl all right, just like you.’

What was that supposed to mean?

‘And she got this idea into her head of going to the Teachers’ Training College – ’

‘And did she go?’

‘She went all right.’ Mrs Sheedy sucked her teeth and then shook her head sadly as if to imply that no good had come from Sally Lomas’s venture into higher education.

‘What happened to her?’

‘Well, no one knows, do they? And her mum and dad weren’t saying. Off she went to that dreadful teachers’ hotel place in the city – ’

‘Hostel.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a hostel, where the Teachers’ College students live. Not a hotel, not a pub or anything.’

Mrs Sheedy’s plump face mottled with outrage. ‘Well of course I didn’t think it was a pub! Don’t you give cheek to me, young lady!’

‘I wasn’t,’ protested Clementine.

Mrs Sheedy looked her up and down. ‘Big ideas,’ she muttered.

Better than having none, thought Clementine, and began to move away.

‘Hang on, where’s your manners, Miss? I haven’t finished talking yet.’

Clementine sighed and retraced her steps.

‘Now where was I?’

‘Sally Lomas.’

‘Ah, yes.’ Mrs Sheedy settled her enormous bosom more comfortably on the top of the gate and went on with her story. ‘Well, when that young lady took herself off to whatever that place was, that teachers’ hotel, or
hostel
,’ she glowered on the word, ‘that was the last we saw of Sally Lomas round here.’ She sniffed. ‘Home wasn’t good enough, it seems. As for what happened to her, I suppose the little madam became a teacher somewhere. Then again she mightn’t have; for all we know she could be at the bottom of the harbour.’

‘Oh.’

Mrs Sheedy looked suspiciously at Clementine, as if that one small syllable, like a primly dressed Teachers’ College student, concealed more than it showed. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, Clementine,’ she said.

Only one?

‘Teachers’ Training College is one thing – and I won’t deny the teachers do a good job, mostly – but the uni!’ She narrowed her eyes and examined Clementine’s face intently, as if searching for some sign of latent criminality, or rot. ‘There’s never been a girl round here got up to
that
!’

‘Well, I’ll be off then, Mrs Sheedy. Nice to have a chat with you.’

‘Wait on!’

Clementine kept on walking.

‘Posh.’

The single word stopped Clementine in her tracks. She turned round.

‘What?’

‘Posh. Going to the uni.’

Clementine flushed. Lots of people said this. They’d said it five years ago when she’d been accepted for Chisolm College and her mum and dad had let her go. The snob school, they called it, and university was ten times worse.

‘You won’t want to know us,’ said Mrs Sheedy, and the metal curlers beneath her hairnet seemed to gleam with malice.

‘Yes I will,’ protested Clementine, though she would have given a great deal, at this particular moment, not to know Mrs Sheedy. Did that mean she was a snob? Probably, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to be like the other girls in the neighbourhood: she didn’t want to get a job down the bank till she got engaged, or go into nursing because then you might catch a doctor for a husband. Or a rich patient who was too sick to say ‘no’. Jilly Norris had left school at the end of third year and was training to be a nurse at Parramatta
Hospital. Imagine if you got run over and woke up on the operating table to find Jilly Norris leaning over you … No, Clementine didn’t want to be a bank teller or a nurse. She didn’t even want to go to Teachers’ College: Teachers’ College was for old maids, and so was Library School.

‘Now I know you young girls these days don’t like us old chooks putting our oars in,’ said Mrs Sheedy.

Don’t then, thought Clementine.

‘What was that?’

‘Nothing. I didn’t say anything.’

‘I thought you did.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Well, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, though there’s hundreds wouldn’t.’ Mrs Sheedy stared hard into Clementine’s eyes. ‘Now as I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted – ’

‘But you weren’t.’

‘Eh?’

‘I didn’t interrupt you.’

Mrs Sheedy glared.

Clementine went silent.

‘Now,
as
I was saying, the thing about us oldies you young ones don’t seem to realise is that we’ve been round a long time and we’ve seen a thing or two. Come here.’

‘What?’

‘Come up a bit closer and I’ll give you some free advice.’

‘What advice?’

‘Just come here and find out.’

Clementine stayed where she was.

‘What’s the matter?’ demanded Mrs Sheedy.

Clementine blushed. ‘Nothing.’

‘I don’t bite you know. Least no one’s complained to me yet.’

Clementine took a tiny step nearer the gate. She didn’t like being so close to that enormous wobbly bosom, which, beneath Mrs Sheedy’s green polka dot pinny, looked as if it might lead some secret, untrammelled existence of its own. Like Sally Lomas, she thought.

‘What advice?’ she asked again.

‘I don’t think too much education’s good for a young girl.’

‘Why don’t you?’

Mrs Sheedy lowered her voice confidentially. ‘Well, the boys don’t like it, do they?’

‘Don’t they?’

A faint expression of shock passed over Mrs Sheedy’s battered features; her small pug nose twitched as if she’d scented something – not bad exactly, but definitely on the turn. ‘Oh no,’ she said, and then paused for a moment, seeming to study the dust motes dancing gaily in the sunlight between them. ‘Boys like a girl to be – ’ she paused again, and Clementine waited, silently filling in the words she thought were coming: prettier? more stupid? handy with a duster? unable to answer back because they didn’t have the vocabulary?

‘Unspoiled,’ said Mrs Sheedy.

Unspoiled! A hot red rage surged through Clementine’s spoiled veins. What did Mrs Sheedy know? Stuck at her gate all day, hoping for something to happen: the thuds and curses of a good domestic, some careless kid skittled down the corner, some stuck-up little madam passing by, nose in the air, dreaming of going off to the uni …

‘No, you take my word for it, nice boys like girls who know – ’

Their place, thought Clementine.

Mrs Sheedy didn’t finish her sentence, her attention suddenly diverted by the parcel under Clementine’s arm. ‘What’s that you’ve got there?’

‘Just some material for a new skirt,’ answered Clementine. ‘For when I start at university.’

‘A new skirt? For when you go to the uni?’ It was as if Mrs Sheedy couldn’t allow that skirts might be worn in such a place. What else then? wondered Clementine. Not jeans, Mrs Sheedy might not have heard of jeans. Sackcloth and ashes, that was it. Penitential robes.