The Winds of Heaven (29 page)

And straight after the exams, in the mid-year holidays, she would pack away her books and go up to Lake Conapaira.

Fan’s leaving. She’s leaving the old house at the end of Palm Street, where – except for that brief spell with Gary in the rented house out near the common – she’s lived since she was born.

For nineteen years, eight months, and fifteen days.

‘I’m not even twenty,’ she says to herself again. She’s been saying it for the whole of the past week, ever since that windy night when she and Cash and Maddie struggled back from the Lachlan library, without Cash’s picture book and without her poem.

She doesn’t care about the poem anymore. She’s forgotten it. Even the two lines she could remember have vanished from her head. She made them go. It was stupid to think a poem might help you find out what to do. Stupid.

She’s leaving, yet she doesn’t need to pack. She doesn’t need to sit up at the kitchen table and write out a list of shoes and clothes and little bits and pieces, like she used to do in the days when she daydreamed about visiting Clementine down in Sydney.

All she really had to do was to decide.

And she’s decided.

She doesn’t feel at home anymore. Perhaps she never has felt at home, ever, except for those long-ago afternoons
when she used to sit with the old man who called her
Yirigaa
and he’d tell her stories that made her feel she belonged in the world.

If a star were confin’d –

Her poem’s coming back; Fan pushes it away.

She’s not a star. A star would shine gloriously. It would blaze. Her light, if she has one, is very small. It’s flickering and uncertain; people like her mum and Gary and even Mrs Stuckey can almost blow it out. They can make her feel like she hasn’t a right to
be
.

But it isn’t how
she
feels or what happens to her that really matters.

It’s them. It’s her children, little Cash and Madeleine.

Because what use is she to them?

What kind of mum is
she
?

That man in the shoe shop at Lachlan thought she was no good and he was right.

Look at those times she left Cash alone in the house when he was hardly more than a baby, for no better reason than to walk by herself, round and round the town. Look how late she gets up in the mornings, later and later every day. And how Cash has learned to look after little Maddie, all by himself while his mother lies in bed: to change his baby sister’s nappy, to take the cold off the bottle Fan leaves ready in the fridge by holding it between his small warm hands. Look how he knows how to make Cornflakes and Weet-Bix and even spread jam on the sliced bread. And he’s only just turned four.

Look how she shook him last week, on the way back from the library, right in the middle of the street, and how she didn’t know she was doing it, until she heard her voice
sounding exactly like her mum’s used to do. And look how she hasn’t taken him back to the library yet to get the book of magical kingdoms, even though he asks her every day.

Just because
she
can’t bear the thought of Mrs Stuckey’s disapproving face, and being made to feel like a beggar again. She’s told Cash that Caro will take him there next time she comes to visit; Caro will get the book for him.

She will, too. Caro will walk through the door of the library in her good clothes and high-heeled shoes and with her hair done properly at a hairdresser’s. She’ll walk with a sure and certain step, she won’t sneak in expecting that at any moment someone’s going to call out, ‘And just
where
do you think you’re going?’

Mrs Stuckey will be nice to her. Mrs Stuckey will call her Mrs Waters and ask how Mr Waters is and what the weather’s like down in Temora. There won’t be any bother about taking books out even if Caro has forgotten to bring her proof of residency. But Caro won’t have forgotten; Caro always remembers things like that.

And if Cash is with Caro, Mrs Stuckey will be nice to him as well.

There are marks on the top of Cash’s little arm where she shook him, faint blue shadows of her fingers. He doesn’t hate her for it; he follows her round the house, he’s got sort of clingy since that night. And Fan can remember this from when she herself was very little: how she’d follow Mum around, trying to please her, trying to get Mum to like her, because she was afraid.

Cash is frightened of her. Look how he keeps asking for Caro. Look how he always runs to Caro when she visits, how he’s in her arms the minute she comes in the door. Even little
Maddie smiles when she sees her aunty – when Caro leans over the cot, Maddie crows and holds up her chubby arms. They know Caro is good, that’s what it is. It’s almost as if they can scent the air of a calm, solid world which she carries about with her: the good job she has, and the education (for Caro has done her Leaving Certificate at night school), her lovely husband Frank, the beautiful house in the best street in Temora. When Fan takes them to visit, the children cry when it’s time to go home; they know that beautiful house is where they really belong, that’s why.

How strange the world is! How strange it is that two lovely people like Caro and Frank can’t have children. They’ve done all the tests and the answer has come back, quite plain: they never can.

When Fan caught hold of Cash and shook him on the night they came back from the library, it was the first time she’d ever done anything like that. But she knows it mightn’t be the last.

Things go round and round. She feels scared all the time now, and the thing she’s most scared of is that she’ll turn into a mother like her own mum was: a mum who said every morning as Fan went off to school: ‘One of these days when you get home you’ll find me with my head in the gas oven.’ So that for years and years when she was little, after Dad had gone and Caro moved away, Fan had run up Palm Street from school, her heart bumping like a ball inside her chest, bouncing high up into her throat so that she could hardly breathe, and at the front gate she’d stop dead and whisper the first two lines of a prayer she’d learned in Kinder with old Miss Greely: ‘
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon this little child –
’

She didn’t know the rest of it. She’d never been good at memorising stuff, because how could you keep your mind on school work when all the time you were worrying and worrying about what you might find on the kitchen floor when you got home?

‘
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild
,’ she’d whisper, and then she’d push the gate open and tiptoe up the path (as if a dead mother might hear) and up the steps to the verandah. There she would stop again, take a deep breath if she could, and push the screen door open, gently, slowly, with one fingertip, little bit by little bit (as if a dead mother might jump out at you) and then she’d creep on down the hall and edge into the kitchen with her eyes screwed up tight. ‘
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon this little child –
’ And she’d open her eyes and there Mum would be, sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper or calmly slicing vegetables for tea.

Fit as a fiddle. Right as rain. As if she’d never said that stuff to you in the morning before you left for school, as if that had been another person altogether. And Fan knew that if she’d asked Mum about that other person, Mum would have shrieked at her, ‘What? Who? What are you talking about?’

For a little while you might feel safe.

Only you could never feel properly safe, could you? Because then there was the next day, and the next. ‘
One
day when you come home from school,’ Mum would say, and
one
day, well, that could be any day, couldn’t it?

That’s why she’d stolen Mrs Stuckey’s little zebra, Fan realises suddenly. The soft little felt zebra she’d called Clementine and hidden beneath her pillow. It was because she had to have
something.

Oh, imagine saying that sort of thing to Cash! Imagine, in a year’s time, saying to him as he went out the door in the morning, his little schoolcase in his hand: ‘One day when you come home from school – ’ Imagine if it was poor little Cash running up Palm Street, heart clenched in his chest like a panicked fist, terrified of what he might find in the house.

She’d never say stuff like that to him – she wouldn’t, never, never, never, cross my heart.

Only you can’t ever really know what misery might make of you, over years and years. Even Mum had been nice once. Caro had told her this. She’d said, ‘Mum was nice once, when I was little and Dad was here.’

No, Fan doesn’t want to get like Mum. She doesn’t want to pass her sorrows on to Cash and little Madeleine, like Mum had passed hers on to Fan. And she doesn’t want to pass on her beggary. She doesn’t want her lovely children turned into beggars like her. And it will happen, she knows. Because it wasn’t only her Mrs Stuckey had treated like a beggar in the library, she’d done it to Cash as well. She wouldn’t have treated him that way if he’d gone in there with Caro. Caro would have seen that his hands were clean before he touched a book. Back at the house, before they left, she’d have noticed he wasn’t wearing shoes.

It’s time for Fan to leave. Cash will be starting school next year. She doesn’t want the teachers picking on him because he’s hers, because he’s that awful Fan Lancie’s child. ‘Another no-hoper from that lot in Palm Street,’ that’s what they’ll say. And the things that had happened to her would start happening to him, and then to Maddie, and later on to their kids, on and on and on. It’s like a wheel, she thinks,
going round and round, spinning senselessly because no one knows how to stop it. No one’s game.

She has a sudden flash of that rainy morning years ago when Mum had given her a belting and she’d tried to ride away to the blue hills on Dad’s old bike. Only she couldn’t get there and when she came back Clemmie was waiting for her in the middle of the paddocks, bawling her eyes out in the rain. She’d been bawling too, and she’d chucked the bike down on the track to run to Clemmie, and its wheel had gone on spinning, hissing in the rain. And she’d put out her hand and stopped it with a finger. She’d been strong in those days…

If Cash and Madeleine belong to Caro, no one will put them down. They won’t even be going to Fan’s old school, they’ll be going to some school in Temora that Fan has never seen. She may not have seen it, but Fan can imagine Cash quite plainly, going through the school gate on his first day, in his new clothes and with his little kinder case, clutching tight to Caro’s hand.

A terrible anguish rolls over her. She gets up from her chair. It’s time to go.

‘It’s only for tonight, Mrs Darcy,’ she begs, standing on her neighbour’s doorstep with the two children, a small cold wind from heaven tugging at their hair and clothes. ‘My sister will be here on the morning train.’

Though it had been difficult with Caro.

‘But what’s the matter, Fan? Why do you need me there at such short notice? Is Maddie sick? Cash?’

Caro’s voice goes tender on their names.

‘No, they’re fine. It’s – ’

‘It’s what?’

‘It’s me. I’ve – I’ve caught some kind of bug, Caro. It’s just come on, and I can tell it’s going to get worse by tomorrow. That’s why I came out now to ring you, while I could still get down to the phone box.’

‘You’re down at the telephone box? Where are the kids? You haven’t left them in the house alone, have you?’

The telephone box is down in Main Street, outside the bank, a good ten minutes walk from home.

‘No, no, of course not. They’re here, with me. Cash is outside on the bench, minding Maddie in the stroller. I can see them from here. Caro, look, I know the bus has gone, but can you come tomorrow, on the morning train?’

Caro grumbles a bit, and ums and ahs about how the train comes through Temora at three o’clock in the morning and she’ll be up all night, but the thought of Cash and little Maddie with only a sick Fan to care for them wins her round, as her sister knew it would. ‘I’ll be there in the morning,’ says Caro. ‘I’ll be on the train. Look, go home and feed the kids and take some aspirin and all of you go to bed, okay?’

‘Okay,’ says Fan.