The Winds of Heaven (10 page)

On the nights before Mr Meague’s classes, Clementine took a long, long time to get to sleep. She lay awake hour after hour, thoughts whirling in her head, fears pinching like cruel fingers, her chest so tight that it was difficult to breathe. Would Vinnie Sloane get the cane again tomorrow? Or on Thursday, two days away? She’d come to hate Vinnie Sloane. She knew none of it was his fault, because how could he help being thin and weak and ugly, the exact kind of boy that girls like Jilly Norris picked on? But although she knew this, she couldn’t stop herself from hating him; she hated him for looking like a silly white rabbit and she hated the squealy blubbery sounds he made when he was caned, and the hunched way he walked back to his desk, head bowed, hands thrust into his armpits, shameful tears running down his pallid cheeks.

Clementine tossed and turned beneath her bedclothes on those sleepless nights. Could tomorrow be the very day when Jilly somehow pushed her into talking? When she would have to stand up and pick a boy? And when she refused, because she wouldn’t, just wouldn’t pick a Home Boy, would Mr Meague call Simon Falls out to the front of the class? And if he did, what would she do then? When he’d picked
Andrew Milton, Annie had given a small sharp cry and then begun sobbing. Mr Meague had ignored her so completely you’d think Annie hadn’t been there.

What if you stood up to him? What if you said, ‘I don’t think it’s right’? What would Mr Meague do then? Clementine pictured his still, pale face, white as a blank sheet of paper no one would dare to write upon. Not one of them had ever confronted him; the very thought of such a thing was somehow shocking.

Fan would stand up to him, Clementine thought suddenly. If Fan lived down here and went to their school, she’d stand up to Mr Meague, and she’d stand up for Vinnie Sloane. Fan was strong. For a reason she couldn’t fathom, and never would until she was very, very old, Clementine had a sudden image of her cousin’s old black bicycle, flung down on the track that stormy morning when Fan had tried to run away to the blue hills: the wheel still spinning, hissing in the rain. She saw Fan’s slim finger reach out and touch it, saw the spinning stop, the wheel go still. When she thought of her cousin, it wasn’t the girl in the back bedroom struggling to get away from Aunty Rene’s strap that she remembered, but the calm girl who’d held her hand when the willy-willy came seething across the paddocks, who’d said with utter certainty, ‘It won’t hurt us. It’ll come close but not right here.’ That was the real Fan, she thought, that was how Fan would be all the time, when she was grown up.

Clementine knew she wasn’t strong like her cousin. She wasn’t whole – she was all bits and pieces. One moment she would think one way, the next moment, in quite another, as if inside her there was a scattering of girls, all with different thoughts and feelings, instead of a single girl who was
sure
.
She was like a tiny candle whose flame flickered and wobbled and faltered at the slightest breath of air. She wasn’t even sure if she
really
liked Simon Falls, or if she’d made the feeling up; from longing, and all the books and poetry she’d read, and the films she saw at the pictures on Saturday afternoons. She was thirteen and no braver or wiser than she’d been on that night when Aunty Rene had gone after Fan, when she’d run out and hidden behind the woodpile with her hands over her ears to escape the sight and sounds of her cousin’s thrashing.

Clementine kicked the bedclothes off onto the floor. Why did some grown-up people have to be cruel? And why did they pick on kids?

She sat up on her bed and pressed her cold nose against the window. It was a very dark night outside: the moon had set and the stars were far away and tiny in the heavens, like a sprinkle of silver glitter on a Christmas card. And as she gazed up at that high cold sky Clementine had a sense of something huge and grand and scary, and knew it was the shadow of the world into which she’d have to go when she grew up. The warm safety of the little house in Willow Street, and even Mum and Dad, who loved her, weren’t for always, or enough.

She peered out over the front garden and the empty park across the road, through the trees to the Brothers’ house where lighted windows shone out into the dark.

‘Why do the Brothers keep their lights on all night?’ she’d once asked Mum.

‘Catholics,’ her mother had sniffed. ‘Who knows what they do?’

Clementine had asked Brian Keenan up the road. He went to the Catholic school. ‘Daffy Brian’, the kids in the
street called him, but his mother said he was simply a little slow. ‘He’ll catch up,’ she told everyone cheerfully. ‘There’s a day coming when our Brian will surprise us all.’

When Clementine had asked him why the Brothers kept their lights on all night, Brian’s brown eyes had grown serious and round.

‘They say prayers.’

‘All night?’

‘They pray the Hours,’ he’d replied mysteriously. Clementine didn’t know what he meant but she liked the sound of the phrase: it made her think of Fan telling the old black man’s stories, the way her face had looked when she’d explained how the magic child had sung the tree.

‘And the prayers keep the sun up, and the moon, and the stars,’ Brian had gone on, ‘and if they stopped everything would fall down.’

‘Would it?’

He’d nodded solemnly. ‘They keep the world in place.’

It seemed a strange idea to Clementine that the Brothers – ordinary homely red-faced men despite their long black robes, whom you could hear shouting at the rowdy Catholic boys whenever you passed the school, or meet any day in Jimmy Lee’s shop buying tobacco and packets of Minties – could ever do anything so grand as keep the world in place. And yet their steady, lighted windows were so consoling in the awful reaches of the night that Clementine almost felt it might be true: that inside the old house the Brothers were watching over the world, keeping it safe, seeing that everything would be all right. And then Mr Meague would go away and Vinnie Sloane wouldn’t be caned ever again; she’d never have to pick a boy, and Simon Falls would never be called to the front
of the room. And that Home Boy, that David Lowell, he’d forget about her and never ask her out again. Everyone would be rescued, even Jilly Norris and her gang. And all the little bits and pieces that fluttered round inside her would become whole. And soon she’d see Fan again.

One night Clementine dreamed of Fan. She dreamed she’d crossed the park and gone into the Brothers’ house and found them sitting silently in a circle in a big high-ceilinged room. They weren’t saying prayers; they were sewing with big thick needles and long lengths of heavy thread, making a big net, a kind of safety net like the one Clementine had seen at the circus, stretched beneath the trapezes and the high wire. And in the very centre of the net, in a red dress and soft red shoes, was Fan, dancing.

Then Clementine noticed that the Brothers hadn’t quite finished sewing: there was a big hole in the net, right beside Fan’s dancing feet. ‘Fan, watch out!’ she cried. ‘Fan, stop! Jump off!’ But though she heard her cousin, Fan didn’t stop dancing; she only waved and smiled. She was so happy that every little bit of her was shining, as if a million bright candles were lit beneath her skin. ‘Hello, Clementine!’ she called in that laughing voice that was like water thrown up in the air. ‘Hello, little sister! Hello,
gindaymaidhaany
!’

Gindaymaidhaany.
Clementine had quite forgotten this word and how it meant ‘sister’, and now, when she woke from the dream here it was again in her possession, to keep, like the small white pebble she’d found beside Lake Conapaira. She still had that pebble. She kept it in a small blue box in her dressing table drawer, and sometimes she took it out to look at, and hold in the palm of her hand. Like the Brothers’ lighted windows, it gave her a fleeting sense that everything would be all right.

In Clementine’s English class there was a girl called Daria, who reminded her of Fan. Perhaps it was Daria’s long corn-coloured hair, which she wore plaited and pinned up on her head like a crown, or her high cheekbones and long almond-shaped blue eyes – or a certain way she had of standing, with her chin lifted defiantly and her head held very high. Or it might have been because Daria was strong.

Her family had come from overseas. The kids at school called her ‘The Balt’, but this didn’t seem to worry Daria; she would look them in the eye and say in her slow, proud voice, ‘I am not from the Baltic, I am Hungarian.’ Nothing about Chisolm College seemed to worry Daria; it was as if she was outside it, already grown up, a person from some older, more experienced world.

‘He should stand up for himself, that boy,’ she observed coldly when Clementine told her about Mr Meague and how Jilly Norris and her gang kept picking on Vinnie Sloane. ‘And he should not
cry
.’ Daria’s voice was stern. ‘I will tell you this, Clementine: never, never should one cry.’ She leaned closer, and it seemed to Clementine that the Hungarian girl’s clear blue eyes grew darker as they fixed upon her listener’s face. ‘And now let me tell you something else – ’ she paused, and her broad face took
on the considering expression of a person making up her mind.

‘What?’ whispered Clementine.

Daria sighed. Slowly, neatly, she began to fold the square of brown waxed paper in which her unfamiliar sandwiches had been wrapped.

‘What?’ asked Clementine again.

Daria leaned down and placed the neatly folded paper in the school case that she never left in the locker room like other kids, but carried with her all the time. She clicked the shiny brass catches shut, smiled at Clementine, and began her story.

‘I come from Hungary. You know this, of course.’

Clementine nodded.

‘Back there my grandparents had been landowners, you see, quite rich.’ She frowned again. ‘Do you believe this – that we were rich?’

Clementine swallowed. Her eyes fixed on Daria’s long fingers pinching at the faded cloth of her shabby tunic. ‘Yes,’ she said, because somehow, despite the second-hand tunic, it wasn’t hard to imagine Daria being rich.

‘Good,’ said the Hungarian girl. ‘And so when my father grew up, when he finished school, then my grandfather sent him away to Budapest, to the university, to become a lawyer.’

‘And did he?’

‘Of course he did. An important lawyer, a big – big-time man, as you might say here. Budapest is where I grew up, in a beautiful house, beside the river, the kind of place you have never seen, Clementine. Only then – ’ Daria’s face clouded, the almond eyes went still.

‘Then what?’

‘Trouble came. We lost everything. We were driven – we had to – ’ Daria looked up and gazed around her, at the grey asphalt of the courtyard, the benches round the wall, the slender young gum trees in the park outside the fence. She closed her eyes.

‘Daria? Daria, are you all right?’

The blue eyes snapped open. ‘Of course I am all right. So – where was I?’

‘Um. Um, you said, “trouble came”.’

‘And so it did.’ The Hungarian girl sighed softly and went on with her story. ‘We had to come here. And
here
, my father mends the roads. Can you imagine this, Clementine? This man who had been, in his own country, like a – like a prince? And here, he has the pick and shovel, and the roads. When he comes home in the evenings, he is – ’ Daria sprang up suddenly from the bench where they were sitting and in a single violent movement twisted her back sideways and drooped her head, so that she looked, for a moment, tired and even old. ‘You see?’ she asked Clementine.

‘Yes.’

Daria sat down again. ‘At weekends,’ she continued, ‘he lies in his bed very much, and is silent, as he never used to be back home. But I tell you one thing, Clementine, one single thing, the most important – he never, never cried. When we left our country, when we were in the camp, my mother cried, and I cried too, because I was young and knew nothing, but my father, never once did he cry.’ Daria tossed her head back proudly. ‘I am going to do well in this school, you know, Clementine. And when I leave it I will go
to university, and become a lawyer like my father was.’ She tossed her head again. ‘You will see.’

Clementine didn’t doubt it for a moment. She could see this future as if it had already happened. It was there in the determined tilt of Daria’s chin, the bright tearless shine of her eyes. Nothing and no one would stop her.

It was a bright winter’s day, warm as springtime. The grass in the park was a deep dense green, the sun shone down from a flawless sky. On the other side of the courtyard Clementine could see Annie Boland and Andrew Milton; they stood very close together, close yet not quite touching, and the thin line of light in the space between them was bright as a blade. They gazed into each other’s faces, wordlessly.

Daria glanced across at them and smiled. ‘In my country, in my grandmother’s time,’ she said, ‘the peasant boys would chase the girls in the fields – fields of sunflowers, little Clementine, can you picture this? And when a boy caught a girl, he would pull up her skirts, so that she was quite naked, down here’ – Daria brushed at the lap of the faded tunic – ‘and then they would tie those skirts up over her head, and then they would, you know – ’