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 – ’
Clementine did know. You couldn’t get through two years at Chisolm College, not to mention primary school at Merrylands State, without learning the basic facts of life, though there were many little mysteries she still didn’t understand.
‘Why did they tie their skirts over their heads?’
‘So as not to get in the way, of course. And you know what they called it, this tying up of the skirts, and what would happen then?’
‘What?’
Daria laughed. ‘They called it, “turning her into a flower”.’
‘Turning her into a flower,’ repeated Clementine.
‘That’s right. Do you see?’
‘Yes, but – didn’t they mind, those girls?’
‘Mind?’ Daria’s voice was scornful. ‘They were peasants, I tell you. For them, that was life.’ And abruptly, turning her golden head, Daria spat down onto the asphalt at her feet. ‘Peasants!’ she repeated. And then she added softly and quite sadly, as if she had forgotten all about Clementine and was talking to herself, ‘They took everything from us.’
Clementine was crossing the quad towards the library steps when David Lowell came right up to her. One minute there’d been no one, the next minute the Home Boy was there. He asked her to the school dance, which was almost six weeks away, in the middle of July. She saw with a kind of horror that he’d combed his spiky hair flat, with water, so you could see the comb marks in it, like dark wet tracks across his scalp. Clementine turned her head quickly, desperate to get away from the sight of David Lowell. She wanted to run.
‘July the fourteenth,’ he said in his gentle voice. ‘Saturday.’
‘I know.’ Her own voice rose up shrilly on the second word.
He gazed at her. ‘Clementine,’ he said, and his voice lingered on each small syllable, so that Clementine, with some instinct she hadn’t been aware she possessed, knew that he thought about her as he lay in bed at night, and whispered her name to himself, over and over and over.
His narrow Home Boy’s bed. A smelly bed. ‘They wet their beds,’ Jilly Norris had told her. ‘Mum says the whole place stinks of piss.’
Lying there. Thinking of her. The simple idea of it made her cringe, as if he’d touched her with his scabby Home Boy hands. Only they weren’t scabby, she saw, simply ink-stained – slender elegant hands that could have belonged to some other person hidden beneath that drab grey uniform.
‘I can’t go,’ she told him coldly. ‘My grandma’s sick. She’s in an old people’s hospital, we always visit her on Saturdays.’ Her mouth twitched on the lie, but David Lowell didn’t seem to notice.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ There was such genuine sympathy in his voice that she wondered if he, unlike her, really did have a sick grandmother. Did orphans have grandmothers? If they did, thought Clementine irrelevantly, then those grandmothers, whose children must have died, would be sort of orphans too.
‘The dance doesn’t start till eight, Clementine. Do you think – ’
‘Stop saying my name!’ she hissed.
His pale face flushed. ‘What?’
‘Stop saying my name! I don’t like it! And I can’t go to the dance with you! I told you I’m not allowed to go out with boys! And I don’t want to go anywhere with you! Leave me alone!’ Tears spurted brazenly from her eyes. She turned and fled.
This time she ran to the toilets, hid in a cubicle and went on crying. She thought of his hair, combed flat, for her, and a jolt of wild anger coursed through her, like savagery. She hated him for liking her. Oh, it wasn’t fair. Why did it have to be him who liked her, instead of Simon Falls, who barely knew that a person called Clementine Southey existed on the earth?
She dried her eyes. The bell sounded. It was Thursday afternoon. Double period Geometry with Mr Meague.
The class was halfway through, and there was silence, utter silence, when Clementine felt a small sly nudge at her arm. She glanced sideways, where Jilly Norris sat beside her. With her right hand Jilly was copying a theorem from the board; her left, beneath the desk, held a slip of paper, a note for Clementine.
Clementine shook her head – getting caught with a note in Mr Meague’s class was almost as dangerous as talking. Jilly rolled her eyes and loosed her fingers, the scrap of paper fluttered onto Clementine’s lap and threatened to drift to the floor. Clementine snatched at it.
Mr Meague had his back to them, writing on the board. Kids said he had a thousand eyes all over his head, like a fly. Invisible eyes. Beneath the desk Clementine unfolded the note, silently.
I know who you love.
Everything inside her seemed to jump, to squirm.
I know who you love.
The ‘o’s were drawn in the shape of a heart.
Had Jilly Norris seen her with David Lowell? Had Jilly seen her run away, crying, and thought, as Jilly and girls like her always thought, that Clementine was the one who’d been turned down? That she’d asked a Home Boy to go out with her and he’d said no? That even a Home Boy didn’t want her?
Or was it even worse than that? Did Jilly mean Simon Falls? Hadn’t she once said, ‘You like him, don’t you?’ What if she’d said something to Simon Falls? Jilly and her friends were always telling boys that girls liked them, just to see what would happen next. A hot wave of shame flowed through her, she could hardly breathe; it was as if she’d been thrust headfirst into some small hot suffocating space. She had to know.
Clementine did something that even an hour back she’d have thought impossible – she forgot they were sitting in Mr Meague’s class and hissed at Jilly, ‘Who do I love?’
Mr Meague turned round from the board.
‘Miss Southey?’
Clementine looked up.
‘Miss Southey, would you stand, please?’ He always said ‘please’ to them.
Clementine stood. The seat rattled loudly behind her knees.
She looked away from him, towards the window. Outside in the park an old man was throwing a stick to his dog in the wonderful calm blue day. ‘Good boy,’ he said. ‘Good old fella!’ You could hear every word, almost hear the dry raspy sound of the old man’s hand patting the dog’s rough brown fur.
‘Miss Southey,’ said Mr Meague. ‘Miss Southey, would you kindly pick a boy?’
Clementine said nothing. There was an odd flapping sensation in the top of her skull, as if her soul was trying to get out and fly away.
Mr Meague’s gaze wandered across the room and settled lazily on Simon Falls.
‘Miss Southey?’ he said again.
She glanced over the rows of boys to the desk in the second front row where David Lowell was sitting. She’d vowed she’d never choose a Home Boy, but David Lowell was different, wasn’t he? David Lowell had come after her when she didn’t want him to, he’d stared at her, he’d said her name in that slow lingering way that made you know he thought about her in bed. He’d made her cry.
Out in front Mr Meague was still waiting, his flat gaze fixed on Simon Falls.
‘Da – ’ she began, and then stopped before the name was spoken. David Lowell’s head was bent, she could see the nape of his neck above the collar of his coarse grey shirt: it was w
hite and tender as a beloved child’s.
‘Miss Southey?’
He always called them that. Miss and Master, and the formal titles contained a secret mockery, for who, in his stifling little kingdom, was the master or mistress of anything, least of all themselves?
The blood roared in her ears, she felt hunted, hounded, there was a sudden sensation of falling from a great height, all grace and kindness rushing out from her.
Her lips parted for the name.
‘Vinnie Sloane,’ she said.
Chapter Seven
And then it began to rain. It rained for four days straight, and on the fourth day Clementine got soaking wet on the long walk from the station to the school. She sat all day in her wet heavy tunic, and when she reached home that afternoon she had a cough so small and dry that it didn’t sound human. It was like the cough of some small sick animal hidden beneath the floorboards of their house.
‘You’ve caught a chill,’ said her mother. ‘Fancy sitting all day in those wet clothes! I sometimes wonder about you, Clementine, I really do. You don’t seem to have the sense you were born with, for all you go to that clever school. Why didn’t you ask the teachers to send you home?’
‘Everybody got wet,’ answered Clementine. ‘If they let one person go home, they’d have had to let all of us, the whole school. And no one would come back.’
Which was what Mrs Larkin had said when Jilly Norris asked if she could go home and change her clothes.
Mrs Southey banged the frying pan down on the stove.
‘What’s for tea?’ asked Clementine, though she didn’t feel at all hungry. She couldn’t imagine any kind of food she would actually like to eat.
‘Liver and bacon.’
‘Ugh!’
‘Liver’s good for you.’
Clementine gave another small dry cough, and her mother swirled the onions angrily in the pan. ‘Those teachers! Oh, it’s all right for them! They don’t have to do the looking after when you get sick! They don’t have to do the worrying! Oh no, not them. High and mighty!’ Mrs Southey slid the pan to the back burner, crossed the kitchen and placed a cool hand on her daughter’s forehead. Clementine shuddered: the smell of cooked onions on her mother’s fingers was so overpowering it made her want to be sick. All afternoon her sense of smell had gathered sharpness: the reek of sweat and wet wool in the classroom, of mud and rain outside, even her soaking squelchy shoes had a smell, and the exhaust fumes from a bus outside the station had almost made her faint.
Mrs Southey drew back when she felt her daughter shudder. ‘What’s wrong? Surely that didn’t hurt?’ She peered anxiously into Clementine’s face. ‘Did it?’
‘No.’ Clementine wiped at her forehead. ‘It wasn’t you. I was just – just thinking of something.’ Which was true in a way, because she had just that moment remembered that tomorrow was Thursday, when they would have Mr Meague for a double period again. How could she have forgotten? Why did Thursdays come round so quickly?
‘What kind of thoughts could they be?’ wondered Mrs Southey, astounded.
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Well, at least you haven’t got a fever.’ Mrs Southey winced as Clementine coughed again, and added, ‘Touch wood.’
‘Can I stay home from school tomorrow?’
‘We’ll see how you are in the morning.’
Clementine went to bed early, straight after dinner, and she didn’t eat any of the liver and bacon that her mother had said would be so good for her. She didn’t feel like eating anything ever again. The tomato sauce bottle in the centre of the table seemed suddenly to belong to a different world, one she could no longer get the sense of. She drank two sips of tea and then thrust the cup and saucer aside. Even the dread of double Geometry began to fade: it was as if Mr Meague and Vinnie Sloane and Jilly Norris and David Lowell – even handsome Simon Falls – were far away in that strange world where the tomato sauce bottle had gone, and the milk jug, and the pot that poured out tea. She fell asleep as soon as she got into bed: a sleep that was really like falling, going down and down and down, through the hole in the net she’d dreamed the Brothers had been making, where Fan had danced and her happiness had shone out into the room.
When she woke it was the middle of the night. ‘Huf,’ came the small dry cough in her throat, like a little animal caught in there, struggling to get out. ‘Huf, huf, huf!’ The blankets were heavy on her body and yet they had no warmth in them: they felt damp and shivery as a Home Boy’s skin. She climbed out of bed and crept down the hall to the living room, where she switched on the small electric fire and lay down on the floor beside it, studying the shadows on the ceiling and the faint red glow the heater cast between them. Her chest had gone hard, as if it was made from some ungiving substance that had nothing to do with breath. ‘Like the tomato sauce bottle,’ thought Clementine dazedly, and then she fell asleep so suddenly it was as if someone had turned out a light.
When she woke again she thought she saw three tiny, ugly goblins crouching on the heater’s glowing bars, but they couldn’t be goblins, could they? There were no such things as goblins, or fairies, and Santa Claus was only a man dressed up in a red suit and a fat false beard. Or might there be such things, in that world where the tomato sauce bottle and everything else had disappeared? She blinked and the goblins vanished but when she sat up her head felt swimmy and she was hot now, so very hot – ‘Mum!’ she called. ‘Dad! Daddy!’ but her voice wouldn’t come out properly, only the little cough that went ‘Huf! Huf! Huf!’
Slowly, very slowly, because her whole body felt heavy and strange, a body that might have belonged to someone else instead of her, Clementine crawled back to her room and fell across the bed. She struggled to sit up so she could look out through the window and see the lights of the Brothers’ house. She wanted to tell Fan that the Brothers hadn’t finished their net and there was a hole in it right near where she was dancing – but her back felt all crumbly and her legs wouldn’t move at all. She couldn’t get up to the window, she couldn’t even sit up. ‘Huf!’ went the little cough again and then something stabbed deep and hard inside her chest and there was a pain so bright she could almost see the colour of it: a fierce wild crimson like a big, amazing flower.
Clementine didn’t remember anything more until she woke up in the hospital. Inflammation of the lungs, they called it, and she had to stay in hospital for days and days and days. As she lay there she remembered how her friend Allie had once been in hospital. It had happened when Allie was very small, only three years old, and she’d needed to have her appendix out, only Allie hadn’t known that because her parents had told her she was going on a holiday. Although she was so little, Allie had felt it was strange how when they got to the place they told her was a holiday hotel, her mum had undressed her and put her into bed in a long room that was full of other children. Then they’d left. ‘We’re just going to get you an ice-cream,’ they’d told her, ‘and then we’ll be straight back.’
Except they didn’t come back. Allie had got out of bed and waited at the window while the afternoon faded and the evening came on – waited and waited and waited for her parents and the ice-cream that never arrived. And even though they’d come next day at the visiting hour – ‘I’ve never trusted them since then,’ Allie had confided.
Allie was gone now. She and her family had moved to New Zealand at the end of primary school and Clementine had never found a new best friend. She had her cousin, a cousin who’d promised to be her sister, her gindaymaidhaany. Only she never saw her. Fan wouldn’t know she was sick, not for a long time, and if she were to die she would never see Fan again.
Clementine stayed in hospital for ten whole days and her parents visited every evening. Then she was allowed to go home, where she had to stay in bed for three weeks more. She didn’t remember much about the first week except for one morning when she woke just after sunrise, knelt up at her window to look out at the world again, and there in the park she saw David Lowell. He was sta
nding quite still, gazing across the road at her house, and despite the distance between them she could swear he saw her at the window. She could feel his eyes lock on hers.
He still liked her then. She’d got Vinnie Sloane caned, she was as bad as Jilly and the rest of them, and yet he still liked her. How tall he looked, standing there, almost as big as a man. He must be nearly fourteen, and Home Boys always left school when they turned fourteen. David Lowell was clever, but all the same he’d leave because he had to get a job and then she wouldn’t have to see him anymore.
He wouldn’t come to the park again either, she knew. This was the only time.
‘Go away,’ she whispered, and as if he’d heard her, the Home Boy snatched his eyes from hers and began to walk away. As he crossed the park, sunlight flashed suddenly from the windows of the Brothers’ house and glinted on his spiky hair so it looked for a moment as if his head was rimmed with fire.
When she was starting to get better, Jilly Norris came to visit her. Clementine was surprised. Jilly wasn’t really a friend.
‘You look awful,’ said Jilly, plonking herself down on the edge of the bed, staring at Clementine’s thin white face.
Clementine didn’t reply. There wasn’t all that much you could say to a remark like that.
‘Honest you do,’ said Jilly. ‘You look like something the cat dragged in.’ She moved farther up the bed, till she was sitting right next to Clementine’s sore flat chest. ‘Guess what?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Mr Meague’s left.’
‘He has?’ Clementine should have been overjoyed, but Mr Meague and everything else at Chisolm College still seemed very far away. Even her glimpse of David Lowell in the park might well have been a dream.
‘Aren’t you glad?’ urged Jilly. ‘Aren’t you glad that old creep’s gone?’
The Winds of Heaven Page 8