The Winds of Heaven by Judith Clarke Page A

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 pickedAndrew 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 thestreet 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