Winter of Grace

by Kate Constable

  Mum’s memory of the forum night was hazy. She didn’t remember Stella and me screaming at each other; she didn’t believe it had really happened. She nudged me in Stella’s direction. ‘Go and ask her. I think she’d like you there.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong.’

  ‘You won’t know till you do the experiment. Go on.’

  I shrugged and edged toward Stella. She was standing by herself, over to one side of the doors. She was paler than usual, but she wasn’t crying. Paul had cried the whole time; I’d heard him steadily weeping through the service, and he was still blinking through tears now, even as he shook hands and hugged and smiled at people.

  ‘Hi,’ I said awkwardly.

  Stella looked away. ‘Thanks for coming.’

  ‘It was kind of beautiful.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I think Nana would have—’ ‘Loved it?’ Stella turned her cold pale blue gaze on me.

  ‘So many people …’ I faltered. ‘Everyone loved her …’

  ‘You think it’s worth dying to see how many people loved you?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘It’s all right for you.’ Stella’s face twisted. ‘I suppose you think Nana’s up there in a white nightie, playing a harp. But she’s not. She’s nowhere. She’s gone.’ Stella began to cry, tears slipping down her cheeks. ‘I want my Nana back.’

  Mish hurried over and put her arm around Stella, and Stella leaned into her and sobbed. ‘Come on, honey,’ Mish murmured.

  ‘It’s time.’

  I backed away. ‘Mum has to go …’

  ‘Thank you both for coming,’ said Mish. ‘Tell Lisa we really appreciate it.’

  I muttered something incoherent as Mish led Stella away, then I ran back to Mum. ‘Drop me at school.’

  Mum looked at me. ‘Give Stella time. She’s upset.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. It was as if Stella blamed me for Nana dying, as if all the Christians had got together and snatched her grandmother away.

  Mum fumbled in her bag. ‘God, I’d kill for a cigarette.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘Churches make me jittery.’

  ‘I thought it was sort of beautiful.’

  Mum shot me a look. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘Me too.’

  The Catholic church seemed to have a weight to it, a solemnity that Northside lacked. All that tradition, I guess. And it had a poetry, too, that Northside definitely didn’t have. Maybe I could be a Catholic …

  But there was all that stuff Stella and Nana had argued about: the virgin birth and trans-whatever it was, and heaven and hell, and sin and confession. I wasn’t sure if I could make myself believe in all that, or that I could belong to a church that didn’t treat women as whole human beings.

  Didn’t God have any house where I could feel at home?

  We walked toward our car as the hearse, heaped with flowers, glided past. Mum said, ‘It’s funny how people cling to the old rituals. Paul was adamant that he wanted a traditional Mass for Nora, you know. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wants the same for himself, when his turn comes. Funeral parlours can be so unsatisfying. When I die —’

  ‘You’re not going to die!’ I cried, and hugged her tight, right in the middle of the road, and I was crying. She felt so fragile in my grasp, so much smaller than she used to be; we were the same height now. ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you!’

  ‘Well, I certainly hope not.’ Gently, Mum pushed me away and wiped my face with a tissue from her handbag. ‘Not for a long time, anyway. Come on, Bridie, don’t be silly! We’ll be late.’

  But it didn’t feel silly. All that day I couldn’t stop thinking about death, and how it descended without warning, swift as a guillotine, and how vulnerable we all are, how desperate for comfort. And I wished Mum had hugged me back, that she’d told me everything would be all right forever, because that was what I wanted to hear.

  That was what the priest had tried to say, what Pastor Matt preached every Sunday: that everything would be all right, that we were loved, that we’d always be safe forever, even after we died.

  Stella couldn’t believe that, that was one reason why she was so angry now. And I knew Mum didn’t believe it either, so she would never say it, even to comfort me. That cool, clear bravery was what made Mum strong, her ability to face reality without flinching. She’d never needed to tag along behind anyone. Without that strength, she never could have stood up to her parents; she never could have kept me. She wouldn’t have survived. She would never pretend only to make me, or herself, feel better.

  But just this once, I wished she’d tried.

  That night after I’d gone to bed, I heard Mum creep out of her study and pick up the phone. There was a long silence, and then I heard her voice. It was muffled. She was crying.

  ‘Hello, Mum? It’s me. It’s Lisa.’

  There was a long pause. My eyes were wide open in the dark. Silently I prayed, Don’t let her hang up.

  And then I heard Mum say, ‘Yes, good. She’s in Year 11 now. Yes, I’m very proud of her.’

  I rolled over and stared into the dark. Thank you, God. Peace wrapped around me like a cloak, and I slept.

  ON THE SUNDAY after Nana’s funeral, I woke so early it was still dark. There was no reason to get up, I could have huddled in bed for hours but I felt completely wide-awake and restless.

  Thoughts batted inside my brain like moths fluttering round a light globe. First there was Elliot. Mum and I had both tried to call him, to thank him for helping us at the forum, but his phone was switched off. That was poetic justice for me. And when Mum rang him at home, they always said he was out.

  Jay had sent me one last text: RU OK?

  I stared at it for a long time, not knowing what to say. At last I texted back, I’m sorry. He hadn’t replied, and I was relieved. Jay and I didn’t understand each other. I didn’t think we ever would. After talking to Elliot, I knew I would never go back to Northside. I was looking for a God large enough to embrace scientific knowledge, not deny it; a God large enough to accept that sadness and anger and doubt were normal, not ‘negative attitudes’; a God who spurred me to strive to be a better person, but who would forgive me if I failed. Northside’s God was too small.

  I kept thinking about what Elliot had said, about how God should open things out, not close them off, and how God was a poem. Sometimes I thought I almost understood what he meant. Since that night, and especially at Nana’s funeral, a sense of the presence of God had come back to me. I could talk to Him; I could pray; I could feel His grace around me.

  But I wanted more. I wanted a place to go where I could feel what I’d felt at Northside in the beginning: the joy of sharing that grace. It was okay to talk to God, all alone in my bedroom, but Northside had taught me that it was even more wonderful to celebrate His presence with a crowd of other people all feeling the same.

  He, Him – Stella was right, making God male bugged me too. But calling God ‘it’ wasn’t right either.

  The thought of Stella gave me a pang. If only she wasn’t so furious with me. Maybe she’d never stopped being angry. Maybe all the time I was staying at her house, her anger had been bubbling away like lava under the crust of our friendship, waiting for a reason to erupt. She couldn’t forgive me. She thought I’d dumped her for God; she wouldn’t be happy till I dumped God and she was the centre of my life again.

  As the dawn light filtered through the window, I threw off the doona and pulled on my oldest trackies and parka. It was foggy outside, and frost glinted on the grass of the nature strip.

  There was no sound from Mum’s room; she was still asleep. I let myself quietly out of the front door. The street was shrouded in white mist. The world was utterly silent. I might have been the only person alive.

  I didn’t want to risk running into Stella. In fact, I didn’t want to run into any Kincaids. So I deliberately turned away from their house, away from the highway and the river, and began to walk in the opposite directi
on, turning corners at random, choosing streets I didn’t know, trying to lose myself in the fog. My runners were silent on the damp footpath. In my dark tracksuit pants and my dark parka, I was a shadow in the mist, a dark ghost slipping through the whiteness.

  If Nana’s ghost came back, she’d sit on the end of Stella’s bed and say, I told you there was life after death, Miss Smarty-Pants. Don’t you roll your eyes at me! I imagined the look on Stella’s face. If only I could ask Nana if she’d seen God; she’d be able to clear it all up for me.

  Everyone I knew seemed to have a different idea about what God was. According to Elliot, God was a poem; to Jay, He was a friend; to Stella, a fairytale. To Randall Martinez, God was an imaginary policeman, laying down irrational laws; to Mum, He was an unforgiving tyrant who ordered her parents to disown her. According to Ryan, God was the creator who made the world; for Paul, He was the world itself; for Mish, He was some vague spirit that could manifest anywhere.

  And what about for me?

  It seemed to me that God was a kind of magnet that kept pulling me toward Him even when I tried to pull away; a force that dragged my compass back and back, no matter how hard I resisted. I clambered up the hill, away from the river. My legs ached, and I was starting to feel hungry. A main road was up ahead, lined with shops. There would be cafes open there, but I hadn’t brought any money. A man in a long velvet skirt gave me a smile. Startled, I smiled back. He wandered on, vanishing into the fog, another ghost on this ghostly morning.

  I crossed over the main road and through a park. A wet slide loomed against the white sky. Swings hung limp and still. There wasn’t much traffic on the streets; the houses were blind and silent. The whole world was empty and sad, and the only person moving in it was me – me and the guy in the velvet skirt.

  I walked for hours past Edwardian cottages and California bungalows. When Stella first decided to become an architect, we taught ourselves the names of all the house styles and she used to test me on our walks. Thinking about Stella made me sad again. I crossed a bridge over a creek, and another wide highway, and walked along random deserted streets, the fog dissolving around me.

  Then I heard the music.

  It was a Zita Mariposa song, one of my favourites – Flame – but it wasn’t Zita Mariposa singing. It sounded like a group of voices, not far off. I hurried after the sound, around a corner and down a hill, and then I realised that I was almost back where I’d started, a couple of blocks from my house. And I knew where the song was coming from. It was drifting from the little ramshackle weatherboard church on the corner of Enid Street. The tiny carpark beside the church was lined with cars, and someone had parked a motorbike on the footpath. The church door was open, and the words of Flame wavered out into the winter morning, carried by an unsteady choir of men and women and children all singing together. It wasn’t the massive soaring choir of Northside, there couldn’t have been more than about twenty people singing, but there was a purity and a warmth and a gladness in the voices that held me there, listening.

  I was just in time to hear the end of the song. As I hovered on the footpath, a middle-aged woman darted out to close the door. She saw me and smiled.

  ‘Bit chilly,’ she said. ‘Want to come in?’

  I hesitated, then shook my head. The woman smiled again and said, ‘Well, if you change your mind, just push it open.’ She vanished back into the church.

  I sank down on the steps, suddenly exhausted. I couldn’t hear the service inside, just the low murmur of voices and an occasional ripple of laughter. I leaned against the shabby weatherboards, somehow comforted to know that on the other side there were people talking to God, and thinking about Him, even if I wasn’t with them.

  I closed my eyes, bowed my head and buried my cold hands deep in my pockets. Gradually my tense body started to relax. I began to be aware of the sounds around me: distant traffic, the chatter of birds, the rumble of a bus, the rhythm of my own breathing, and the low, steady rise and fall of the voices inside the church. The thoughts that had been frantically chasing round my head gradually slowed down, and melted away.

  New thoughts took over, still circling, but slowly now – sad thoughts about Stella, and whether we’d ever be friends again; memories of the peace rally, when we were so full of hope, and how our hopes had drained away like blood in the streets of faraway, dusty cities. I thought about Mum, and how scared I was of losing her, but how, at the same time, I kept feeling this impulse to push her away. I thought about my grandparents, and whether I wanted to see them again. I thought about Nana Kincaid, wherever she was, and about Elliot and Jay and the mess I’d made of it all. I hoped Jay knew I hadn’t meant to hurt him. Eventually, the warm, constant murmur of the service seeped through the walls of the church and folded around those thoughts and carried them away.

  And then I was left with God.

  I hadn’t known it was possible to pray without words. That a prayer could lie in silence.

  I realised I was crying. Sobs rolled up and out of my throat, tears shuddered through me. I knew I should get up and leave, that the congregation inside would hear me, but I couldn’t move. I was paralysed, blinded by tears. I covered my face with my hands and let it all out, all the formless, wordless sorrow and confusion and yearning of this strange winter. The churning anger I felt toward Stella and Jay and Elliot and Mum, and God, too. Everything I’d been trying to squash down dissolved and washed away, until I was weeping – not happily, exactly, but with relieved exhaustion. I was wrung out and limp.

  And then the door creaked open above me, and someone put their arm around my shoulders and led me inside. It was the woman who’d spoken to me before. I stumbled up the steps and let her sit me down on a bench at the rear of the church – not the part where the service was being held, but a kind of annexe where morning tea was laid out on a long table, and an urn for hot drinks steamed. At the front of the church, a man with a beard and glasses was reading from the Bible. Children squirmed round to peer at me over the backs of long benches.

  The woman sat down beside me, still with her arm round me. She nodded in the direction of the urn and mouthed Tea? I smiled gratefully, groping in my pocket for a hanky. She brought me a steaming mug of hot, sweet tea and I gulped it, feeling its warmth spread through my chilled body. The man reading from the Bible shot a glance in my direction and gave me a half-smile, which I was too embarrassed to return. I stared down at my mug. I couldn’t imagine what these people must think of me. But at the same time, it was so calm and peaceful and friendly that I knew it didn’t matter.

  ‘Let us pray,’ said the man at the front, and with everyone else, I bowed my head. For a few moments we prayed in silence, and the circle of strangers held me safe, in a warm, breathing silence that was a kind of love.

  Then the bearded man said, ‘We thank you, Lord, for bringing us together in your presence to worship you today, whether we are joyful or in distress. We welcome old friends and unexpected visitors, and we pray for your blessing on us all.’

  Then there was silence again. And it struck me that Elliot was half right about God being a poem. Because it seemed to me that God was somewhere else, too – in the spaces between the words, in the silences. And wherever a group of people gathered to be with Him, there He was. And I was glad to be here, with Him, and with them.

  The middle-aged woman smiled at me. ‘Biscuit?’ she said.

  I HEARD THEM COMING long before I saw them.

  Spring had officially started a week ago, but it was still freezing there on the beach, before sunrise, with the icy breeze blowing off the sea. I was warm enough inside my parka, but my face and ears tingled with cold. I hoped Mish had persuaded Stella to rug up properly. Maybe not: I could hear Stella’s voice raised in complaint, as their feet thudded down the wooden steps.

  ‘I’m cold. This was a dumb idea. What’s wrong with walking by the river? Then we could have brought Tim. Let’s go and get a coffee. I’m freezing.’

  I stood up, hand
s jammed into my pockets. The morning star hung bright in the navy blue sky, and a crack of light had appeared between the dark blocks of sea and sky, wedging them apart.

  Two shadowy figures were silhouetted on the walkway, one in a striped beanie, one in a parka with a furry hood. ‘But look, Stella. Isn’t it beautiful?’ I heard Mish say.

  ‘I guess,’ said Stella grudgingly, and sent the curtain of her hair flick, flick, back over her shoulders. Then she saw me.

  She stopped dead, staring, not sure in the dim light if it was really me. Mish prodded her onward, and slowly they descended the remaining steps and tramped across the sand to the clump of rocks where I stood.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘You knew she’d be here!’ Stella said to Mish.

  ‘Well, der,’ said Mish. ‘Hi, Bridie.’

  ‘Mum’s waiting in the car.’ I gestured back to the top of the cliff. ‘She’s got coffee.’

  ‘Ooh, good.’ Mish rubbed her hands. ‘See you later, girls.’

  ‘Mum!’ said Stella.

  Mish turned back. ‘Haven’t you two got things to talk about?’

  Stella kicked at a rock. ‘This is a conspiracy. I should have known.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Stell,’ I said. ‘Sit down and watch the sunrise.’

  I lowered myself back onto my rock, and after a minute Stella arranged herself gingerly on a rock nearby, jiggling her knees in the cold. We both stared out to sea as the waves crashed and hissed onto the sand.

  The line of light along the horizon grew wider, deepening into gold, and the inky blue of the sky gradually faded, the colour receding before the sun. A dazzling spot appeared on the horizon, too bright to look at. The flecks of faraway cloud were tinted pink and gold and amethyst. It was so bright we had to shield our eyes. When we looked again, the sun was up, a ball of white fire tossed into the air and hanging there, breathing gold all over the world.

  I let out a deep breath.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Stella. ‘That was pretty nice. But it doesn’t prove there’s a God.’