The Winds of Heaven (24 page)

‘No it wasn’t! Don’t say that! There weren’t any bits left behind! You’re just as clever as me! Cleverer!’

‘Hey, don’t get all upset! I was only kidding.’ Fan kicked on the stroller’s brake so she could put her arms round Clementine. ‘You’re a great kid, Clemmie, and don’t let anyone ever tell you different; don’t let them put you down. Promise me?’

‘Promise,’ whispered Clementine.

‘’Specially not some bloke,’ added Fan, releasing her cousin and grasping the stroller again. ‘Don’t let some thickie bloke put you down.’

‘Of course I won’t.’

‘That’s okay, then,’ said Fan, and they stood for a moment by the water, listening to the lapping of the little waves and the secret rustling of the night-time reeds.

As the train pulled away from the station next morning, as it passed the wheat silo and the crossing gates, as Fan’s tall figure with little Cash astride her hip dwindled and then disappeared, Clementine grasped what she’d failed to see while she was in the house at Palm Street with her cousin. She realised that Fan had asked her to come, not simply
because she was lonely and longed for company, but because she’d wanted her to understand something. And Clementine hadn’t been able to see what that something was. She still couldn’t, not properly, though as the train rattled on through the plains, where the boxy trees stood in their little groups like people whispering, talking, waiting, she caught some faint ghostly sense of it.

Last night she’d walked into the kitchen and found Fan with a book in her hand, one of Clementine’s books that had spilled from the bag she’d tossed carelessly onto the table. Fan was riffling through the pages, pausing for a second and riffling on again, then stopping for a long moment, so absorbed in what she was reading that she didn’t hear her cousin come into the room. She’d jumped when Clementine gently touched her shoulder.

‘Oh!’ Fan had snapped the book shut and dropped it back onto the table.

‘Would you like to borrow it?’ Clementine had asked. ‘Or you can keep it if you like.’

‘Oh no, no,’ Fan had protested, picking up the book again and bundling it hurriedly into Clementine’s bag. ‘I was just looking, that’s all.’ There’d been an expression on her face that Clementine hadn’t been able to identify.

Now she realised what it had been: a hungry expression, the look of someone in a shop who wanted something badly and hadn’t the money to buy. ‘
I was just looking, that’s all.’

‘Oh Fan!’ whispered Clementine. And pressing her face to the dusty window she peered back along the empty railway track. The boxy trees stood waiting, the grey-gold paddocks streamed away, but Lake Conapaira had vanished into the haze of heat and distance, had slipped from sight, was gone.

Fan was out on the back verandah shelling peas. Her fingers worked deftly, mechanically, scooping out the small green fleshy globes, tipping them into the white china bowl on her lap, discarding the pods on the sheet of old newspaper beside her. Her gaze wandered carelessly across the yard, over the bare red earth, the woodheap, the shed and the big gum tree by the gate – she was thinking, trying to remember something.

For three whole days and nights, ever since she’d woken from a dream whose tail had flicked from sight the minute her eyes sprang open, two lines of poetry had been swimming round inside her head:

If a star were confin’d into a Tomb
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when

But when
what
? She couldn’t remember any more of it, though these two lines were fixed so solidly inside her head they seemed like a part of it. She wanted to know the rest, she wanted to know what had happened, what had become of the star. In some way she couldn’t have explained to anyone or even get clear to herself, knowing the rest of that poem, which already she’d come to think of as ‘her poem’, had become important to her.

Where had the lines come from? At first, because she hadn’t read any poetry since she’d been at school, she thought they might have come from one of those poems Miss Langland used to read to them.

In those long double English periods on Wednesday afternoons, Fan had surprised herself by listening and occasionally remembering phrases and whole lines, lines which reminded her of the words the old black man had taught her, because they seemed to bring feelings and pictures to her mind in the same sort of way.

But though it sounded like a poem Miss Langland might have chosen, it also seemed closer than school. It was more like she’d read this poem herself, seen the words printed out on a page. There was even a memory of touch, as if her hands themselves remembered holding the book: a small book, she thought now, a small book with a green cover. But where could she have been, to have a book like that in her hands, if it hadn’t been at school?

If a star were confin’d into a Tomb
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when

At the bottom of the verandah steps, the baby was sleeping peacefully in the big old-fashioned wicker pram that used to be hers and Caro’s.

She had called her Madeleine, the name her cousin Clementine had loved so much when they were kids, and which Fan had promised she’d give to her first daughter. She’d wanted to write and tell Clemmie, and she’d begun the letter – only then she couldn’t seem to get on with it. For weeks and weeks, half finished, the letter had hung about the
house – on the kitchen table, on the arm of the sofa in the lounge room, even on the floor beside her bed – until eventually it had got lost before she’d found the right words to finish. When she discovered it was missing, she simply hadn’t had the heart to start again, and anyway, Clementine had probably forgotten all about that promise. She might have forgotten the name itself, or wondered how she could ever have liked it. She might be embarrassed now to have a little kid given the name she’d liked when she was only thirteen. Fan herself liked it because it reminded her of Clementine.

Gary had laughed like a drain when she’d told him the name she’d chosen. ‘Jeez, why do you want to saddle the poor little bitch with a stupid name like that?’

‘It’s not stupid; it’s beautiful,’ she’d said, and he’d gone on and laughed some more. But in spite of all the laughing, the big joke he made of it, Gary hadn’t tried to stop her giving the name to Maddie. She knew now that had been because he was all ready to take off for good and he didn’t give a shit what his little daughter was called.

Clementine would be nearly eighteen now. She’d be in her second year at university. Gary was at Gunnesweare.

Clementine! Fan’s fingers stilled suddenly above the bowl of peas. Of course! That small green book of poems had belonged to Clementine. She’d brought it with her on her last visit. The night before she went back home again, she’d left her big cloth bag of books lying on the table in the kitchen and the small green book had spilled out, and Fan had picked it up and riffled idly through it, and her poem had been there, at a place where the page had fallen open easily. She’d begun to read it, first carelessly without even noticing what she was reading, and then eagerly, because there was
something about this poem which was both mysterious and achingly familiar. She’d
recognised
it, like a long-abandoned child, grown up, might recognise his unknown mother walking towards him through a crowded room.

Then Clementine had come into the room and Fan had dropped the book back onto the table as if it had set her fingers alight and they burned.

It wasn’t that Clementine had minded her messing about with it, in fact she’d offered to lend the book to her, even give it to her for keeps. But somehow Fan hadn’t wanted her cousin to see how much she’d longed for it. That longing had seemed a shameful thing to Fan, shameful because she’d had her chance, hadn’t she? She’d had her chance and thrown it right away. Not that she’d ever put this feeling into words. It was more like a poison running through her blood, all mixed up with the teachers at school and then Mum saying over and over, ‘You’ve made your bed and now you have to lie in it.’

So when Clementine had held the book out to her, Fan had shaken her head and refused. ‘I was just looking,’ she’d said.

If a star were confin’d into a Tomb
er captive flames must needs burn there;
But when

How could she find the rest of it?

She didn’t know anyone who had proper books, especially books of poetry. And she wasn’t going up to the school. How the teachers would look at each other, slyly, gloatingly, to see Fan Jameson, Fan Lancie that was, come up there begging for a book!

And there was no library in Lake Conapaira.

There was one in Lachlan. It was new, opened only last month. Caro had told her about it; she’d said it was a pity they’d built the new library in Lachlan instead of Lake Conapaira, because it had a children’s section and Fan would have been able to get picture books for Cash. It had never for a second entered Caro’s mind that her sister might want to get books out for herself.

‘Mum?’

Behind her, Cash’s bare feet padded across the verandah. ‘Mum, what are we having for lunch?’

‘Just a minute,’ said Fan. ‘I’m thinking about something.’

‘You’re
always
thinking about something.’ There was no accusation in the little boy’s voice; he sat down beside Fan companionably, picked up a pea pod and began to shell it into the bowl. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go on thinking, Mum.’

Lachlan was seventy miles down the highway. There was a bus, the bus her next-door neighbour travelled on when she went to visit her married daughter. Fan knew from Mrs Darcy that it passed through Lake Conapaira at a quarter past twelve, and took one and a half hours to get to Lachlan. If they went today, if they caught that bus, they could get there, she and Cash and Maddie, just on two in the early afternoon. Fan glanced up at the sun, a pale winter globe high above the branches of the gum tree, which meant it would be around eleven now. She jumped up and the bowl fell from her lap, scattering the peas.

‘Mum!’ Cash began gathering them up.

‘Not now, Cash,’ she said. ‘We’re going somewhere.’

‘But – ’ he pointed to the scattered peas. He was such
a tidy little boy, so
orderly
; she didn’t know where he got it from. Not from her, certainly. Not from Gary.

‘It doesn’t matter, sweetie. We’ll pick them up later. There isn’t time now. We’re going out.’

‘Out?’

Energy streamed through her like a sudden sunlight. ‘No one can help you if you won’t make an effort,’ Caro was always saying. Well, she was going to make an effort now. She ran down the steps and scooped Maddie from the pram. The baby woke without a sound, her limpid blue eyes opening widely, fixing upon her mother’s face. She smiled. ‘Oh, little one,’ whispered Fan.

How come she had such lovely kids? How come they had
her
? ‘You’ll be all right,’ she whispered into Maddie’s tiny ear.

The baby needed changing for a start, before they could go anywhere – and clean clothes; her pink knitted dress with the rosebuds on the bodice that Caro had made for her, and her little parka, because it was cold –

Cash was tugging at her skirt. ‘We’re going out? Down the shops?’

‘No.’

He stared at her. ‘Where?’

‘We’re going on the bus.’

‘On the bus? You mean we’re going to Aunty Caro’s place?’ His voice trembled with joy. He loved Caro.

‘No,’ she said, and tried not to see how his face fell with the disappointment of her reply. ‘We’re going to Lachlan.’

‘Lachlan?’

‘There’s a library there, Cash.’

‘What’s a library?’

‘It’s a place with lots of books.’

She looked him over. His jeans were grubby, but they would have to do; his other pair was in the wash. His fluffy blue pullover was new, another present from Caro.

‘Go and get your parka,’ she said. And catching sight of his small dusty feet she added, ‘and put on some shoes. Your good black ones. And socks.’

‘I hate those shoes. Can’t I wear my sandshoes?’

‘No. Not when we’re going to the library.’