The Winds of Heaven by Judith Clarke Page B

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 frontof 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.

Chapter Six
    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