In Falling Snow

by Mary-Rose MacColl

  Grace looked at her more carefully. The face was vaguely familiar. “I’m sorry. I know you?”

  “Grace Hogan. Oh my God, it is you. I heard you were a doctor. Wow. Grace Hogan. How are you?” The woman smiled. Grace still couldn’t place her. “It’s me, Jennifer, Jennifer Bennetts. I’m Wilson now. We were in high school together.” The woman shifted her weight and took a short breath, holding her belly.

  Once she heard the name, Grace remembered. Jennifer Bennetts, Deirdre Macklin, and Janet Dalton. Year ten, the three girls who’d decided Grace was the “it” for the year. They were the A group, popular, funny, smart. Grace was never one of them. They turned her interest in science and maths, her tall athletic frame, into something abnormal. Lezzo, that’s what they called her, a lezzo. Grace was amazed at how much the description could still make her feel deeply ashamed, as if her body itself was in the wrong. The nickname was taken up by all the other girls for a time and Grace became the class joke. But the initial three fed it and continued long beyond when the others would have stopped. Grace started telling Iris she was sick on school days, but Iris got wise to that. So then Grace took to truancy, changing out of her uniform in the Valley public toilets and spending the day on trains or wandering the city. It was this she was finally caught for. The principal’s office rang Iris and called her in for an interview.

  Before they went to see the principal, Iris asked Grace why she hadn’t gone to school. Grace tried to explain, told Iris the name the girls had called her, how they went through her bag, putting boys’ underpants in there, how they took pictures of her in the change room and drew male genitalia and facial hair on them and put them up on the walls. Iris shook her head and said that life would bring harder things than three stupid nasty girls and when would she learn that women had to be tough to survive. Grace had felt even more at fault.

  And then the principal’s office. She could still remember the tirade. “Your mother was one of our students, and your grandmother. And you are besmirching their heritage here.” Grace always remembered the word besmirching. It sounded like a little bird, the spotted besmirching. She made herself focus on this and not the yelling. And then Iris, asking Grace to wait outside while she spoke to Sister on her own, listening at the door but not hearing exactly what was said, Iris coming out, looking even more furious than she had when Grace was in the room, putting her hand up in a stop sign, saying, “Don’t speak of it. We just won’t speak of it. I’m too angry.”

  Grace had assumed Iris was angry at her, Grace, for playing truant. Not long after, Iris took Grace out of the school and sent her to a smaller school they had to drive to. There were no boys’ schools nearby for her to finish chemistry and physics so she had to have private classes and sit the exams on her own. Grace was sure she’d disappointed Iris terribly.

  “Jennifer.” Grace acknowledged her now, as evenly as she could. “Would you prefer to see one of the other doctors?” For no reason she understood, Grace’s heart was racing.

  “Oh no. That’s fine. I don’t mind at all.” Jennifer smiled, a beseeching kind of smile. Please like me, it said. Grace found it hard to reconcile that smile with the cruel girl Jennifer had been.

  “Okay.” Grace helped her up onto the bed. “You can keep your gear on. You saw Doctor Mastin yesterday for your thirty-six-week checkup. No problems?” Grace was doing a quick physical examination as she spoke. Fundus was low.

  “I didn’t like to say I’m constipated in front of a man,” she said. “So I came back today and saw one of the midwives.”

  “Yes, it says here you’re having trouble with constipation.” Jennifer nodded, looking uncomfortable. “You sure you wouldn’t rather talk with one of the other doctors?” Grace didn’t even think of the fact that she herself would rather not see Jennifer Bennetts.

  “No, it’s fine really, good actually,” Jennifer said. “I’ve often thought of you.” She’d had a habit of screwing up her nose, a nervous tic. It was still with her. “I was terrible to you at school.”

  “Water under the bridge,” Grace said, and did her best to smile. “First baby?” It was. “Constipation’s very common. Nothing to worry about. How long has it been?”

  “Three days. I just can’t seem to go.”

  “We can give you something to help.” Grace thought of doing an internal examination but decided against it. She could have asked one of the other consultants in but she didn’t want to tell them why she wouldn’t do it herself, that she’d spent years feeling somehow wrong in herself as a result of this woman’s ridiculing of her. What she wanted was to get out of the consulting room as quickly as she could and get down to school, to the girls.

  Jennifer was sitting up in the chair again, clearly uncomfortable. Grace was cuffing her arm. “I really am sorry,” Jennifer said, that beseeching smile.

  “We were young,” Grace said. She couldn’t bring herself to be kind. “Your blood pressure’s a bit elevated. You have high blood pressure normally?” Jennifer shook her head no. “Doctor say anything yesterday?” Grace was checking the chart. BP normal at the antenatal visit. Whether Michael Mastin actually checked it was a moot point. Grace couldn’t see which midwife had seen Jennifer. Still, it wasn’t very high and her urine test was clear for protein.

  Jennifer put her hand on Grace’s arm suddenly. Grace had an urge to pull away. “No, I was terrible. Your grandmother wrote a letter to my mother. My mother contacted the other mothers, Deirdre’s and Janet’s, but you’d left the school by then so there was nothing to be done about it. My mother was disgusted with me. I can still remember her asking me if we’d done the things your grandmother said we did and me saying yes as if they were nothing. But when they came out of my mother’s mouth, when I knew they came from your grandmother, I could see what it would have felt like to be you, how I’d have felt if it had been me, and even now, after all these years, I’ve wanted to find you, to say sorry. And here you are.” She looked at Grace, as if forgiveness would be forthcoming.

  “The past is long gone,” Grace said. “I don’t think about you anymore, not ever.” Iris had written to Jennifer’s mother. Grace never knew that. She found herself feeling strangely light in her chest, as if a weight had been lifted. She made herself focus on her patient.

  Grace looked at Jennifer carefully, thought of ordering a twenty-four-hour urine just to be on the safe side but decided it was too soon. “I want you to come back again at the end of the week and have your blood pressure checked. It’s probably nothing but we want to make sure it stays normal. And if you get any swelling in the ankles, headaches, I want you to come back straightaway.” Grace was writing up the file. “And now, I’m going to find a midwife to come in and go through the medication with you. All the best.” Grace left without saying anything more, didn’t even look at Jennifer Wilson.

  As she walked to the desk, Grace thought of Iris. Although she hadn’t let on to Grace, Iris had held the three girls, not Grace, responsible. She’d moved schools not because Grace had failed but because the school had failed. Iris had taken Grace’s part after all. She just hadn’t told Grace as much.

  Grace found one of the midwives in the treatment room. “Can you finish up in Three for me? I have another appointment. You just need to give her a suppository.”

  “Sure. Are you all right?” the midwife said. “You look a bit pale.”

  “Huh? Fine,” Grace said. “It’s just, I once knew the woman. I don’t feel quite comfortable.”

  “Knew how?”

  “We went to school together.”

  “Were you close?”

  “More the opposite.” The midwife, Karen was her name, Grace recalled, walked over and looked into the cubicle and smiled at Jennifer and said, “I’ll just be a minute.” She came back to Grace. “She looks like a thorough bitch,” she whispered.

  Grace smiled. “I guess. I need to go.”

  “Ah
well, you’re the one who’s laughing now. Why don’t we do a manual evac?”

  Grace was horrified. “I don’t think . . .”

  “I’m kidding, Grace. Get a life, okay?” Karen smiled. “See you tomorrow.”

  Milton Road was crawling so she turned off and went up to Birdwood Terrace, beautiful old homes on large blocks looking straight to the city. She thought again about Jennifer and the other two girls in year ten. They had been horrible. But Iris had stuck up for Grace.

  Growing up, Grace had never liked trying new things. She still remembered taking her first ever aeroplane flight at eighteen. She felt silly for being so nervous; other girls she knew had flown without even thinking. But it was all so new and the idea of voluntarily boarding a tin can with wings, as Al had always called planes, made her fearful.

  Iris and Al took her to the airport and waited with her in the check-in queue. In front of Grace in the queue was a girl about Grace’s age, on the same flight as Grace, who’d lost her ticket. The girl was panicking, Grace could see. When it was the girl’s turn to go to the desk, Grace could heard the airline staff member telling her she’d have to buy a new ticket. “She won’t have the money for that, Al,” Iris said. “It’s just not right.” They watched for a while more, until Iris, followed by Al, marched up to the girl’s side and demanded “to see the station master.”

  Grace’s turn in the queue came and she went to the next available staff member on her own. Iris and Al were still waiting calmly with the girl. They waved Grace off and later, on the plane herself, Grace saw the girl getting on, looking much relieved. It was the essence of Iris to help someone in trouble like that, and to leave Grace to fend for herself, Grace realised now. At the time, Grace had felt hurt that her grandmother had abandoned her. But it wasn’t that Iris didn’t care for Grace. It was that she’d always favour the one in most trouble. Grace was rarely the one in most trouble.

  Iris had been so tough when Grace was growing up. She made Grace do science even though none of the other girls did. When she was at All Hallows’ Grace had had to go over to St. James’s for classes with the boys. When she complained, Iris had said, “You’ll need science to get into medicine.”

  “Who says I want to do medicine?” Grace had said.

  “Of course you do.”

  “Did you do this to my mother too, push her into medicine?” Grace was fifteen.

  “I never had to push Rose to do anything.”

  “No, she was a saint, unlike me.”

  “I didn’t say that. But Rose wanted to be a doctor from the time she was little. She used to help me in the surgery.”

  “I used to help in the surgery too.” Grace had memories of being at Al’s work with Iris, Al called out to a home visit or the hospital and Iris doing all sorts of things with patients, setting a broken bone, diagnosing an illness. Grace was fairly sure Iris had even prescribed drugs, forging Al’s signature. Many of Al’s patients had been coming to the surgery their whole lives. They’d grown up with Iris. Like Grace, they thought that’s what nurses did. Later, it had come as a shock to Grace in the hospitals to see that nurses did very few of the things Iris did in the surgery and to realise that Iris shouldn’t have been doing some of them.

  “Yes, you did help me in the surgery,” Iris had said. “See? Of course you’re going to be a doctor.”

  And Iris had been right. Grace had wanted to do medicine. She just hadn’t known it.

  She arrived at the school at ten past three, pulling into a spot as someone else pulled out. She watched Mia walk slowly towards the car, her bag on one shoulder. “How was your day?” she said.

  “Crap,” Mia said. “And you’re late again, Mummy.”

  “Don’t say crap, Mia.”

  “I hate school,” Mia said. “I want to leave.” They waited until Phil came out, laughing with her friends. Mia was having a tough time with her year two teacher, Mrs. Hilsenstein, who found Grace’s eldest child too smart for her own good, as the teacher had told Grace and David when they went for an interview at the school. Grace had said that she really didn’t know what the teacher meant, how it could be possible to be too smart. Grace was due at the hospital and the meeting with the teacher had run late. David kicked her under the table but she continued.

  “Being smart can only be good. Surely it’s stupidity and ignorance that are the problem here.” The teacher looked confused momentarily and then smiled and went back to the work she was explaining. Grace got up soon after and left as noisily as she could, leaving David stranded.

  “Well, Mrs. Hilsenstein won’t be your teacher forever, Mia,” Grace said to her daughter now. “She just doesn’t know how to manage children. Next year, you’ll probably have a better teacher.”

  Mia was almost in tears. “We had to do neat writing all afternoon,” she said. “Mrs. Hilsenstein said I’m the messiest girl she’s ever met and that I’m too rowdy for a girl. She said I should have been a boy. Because I’m so rowdy, the kids had to stay in from our run. And they were all mad at me.” Mia burst into tears.

  “Oh darling, I’m sorry.” Grace wanted to march into the classroom and scream at Mrs. Hilsenstein. “Well, she’s wrong. When kids are restless and making noise, that just means they need a run. You poor love.” Mia sat sobbing. “Let’s go see Iris after we pick up Henry,” Grace said, hoping to cheer her up. She’d figured she could drop the kids with Iris and go home to call David.

  Mia smiled through her tears and nodded. Phil started hip-hurraying and leaned over to hold her big sister’s hand. The girls loved Iris. She always had something fun to do and she was endlessly patient with them. Was she like that when Grace was small? Grace couldn’t remember. Craft, she did remember doing craft with Iris in the front room at Sunnyside, the light coming through the timber slats on the verandah onto their work. Grace had wondered what the point of craft was. She remembered Iris trying to teach her to sew too, but Grace had no interest in that either. The girls loved everything about Iris, even the floppy skin that hung under her arms, Mia told Grace once. “It’s soft like when Henry was a baby,” Mia confided. “It makes me think Granna’s not very strong.”

  “She’s all right,” Grace had said, “just old,” although Grace had been in the room when they’d seen Mark Randall, more like a chorus of angels than a heart murmur, he’d said. It took Grace a while to understand what he meant. Mia was right. Iris wasn’t strong.

  When they got to Henry’s day care Grace went inside, leaving the girls in the car. Henry was still lying on his cot from rest time. Grace asked one of the workers if he was all right. “He’s just tired,” the girl said. “He sometimes stays asleep.”

  Why hadn’t they told Grace this? She thought back. How long had it been since she’d picked Henry and the girls up? Two weeks? Four? David often started early so he did the pickup, or Mrs. Franklin, who babysat if David and Grace were both at the hospital. Still, they should have phoned Grace, surely. “Do other kids stay in bed after rest time?”

  The girl looked at Grace. “Sometimes. He’s just tired, I think.” The girl was all of seventeen. What would she know about paediatrics?

  Grace went over to Henry and gathered him up. “You tired, honey?” He nodded, half asleep. He was wearing the Superman suit over his clothes. “Well, come on, Superman, let’s get you home.”

  Grace put him in the back with his sisters. Mia recognised immediately that he wasn’t quite awake. She put her arm around him. “There there, Henry,” Mia, all of eight, said. “We’ll get Granna to fix you up with some nice biscuits and a drink of milk and you’ll feel like new.” Henry smiled. Thank God for Iris, Grace thought, not for the first time. Where would we be without her?

  Iris

  The children came up the stairs, the middle one in front, what was her name, the eldest, Mia, behind, helping the little one, Henry. I called out to Mia to let Henry come up by himself and held out my
arms. “Come and hug your granna.”

  “Where’s the sugar glider?” the middle one said after a perfunctory hug, her eyes wide. Phil, that was it. Phil was the easy one, Mia already much too serious, just like Grace, bursting with opinions, argumentative. Phil was full of joy, just like my brother Tom at six, wanting to experience everything now.

  “Come quick,” I said at the top of the stairs. “It’s time to wake him up.” Phil was there first. “Ooh,” she said. “Can I hold him?”

  Mia wasn’t far behind. “No, Philomena, they’re dangerous.” Phil looked at me and rolled her eyes as if she’d learned to expect this from her big sister.

  “Who told you they’re dangerous?” I said. “They’re not dangerous, Mia. They’re just creatures like you and your sister.”

  Mia looked at me as if I were a slightly naughty child. “Granna, you shouldn’t touch wild animals. I would have thought you’d know that. Of all people.” When she’d been little, I’d been to the school to talk to Mia’s class about life on a farm. The children, all around six years old I suppose, couldn’t believe you might only need to go to a shop every couple of weeks to buy rope or oil, that everything else you’d be able to find or make on your own land. They stared. I think they saw me as something akin to a dinosaur exhibit at the museum. It was all they could do not to poke or prod me to see if I roared. When she thanked me afterwards their teacher told me it was really important that children knew where food came from. I suggested she might start a vegetable garden and she looked at me as if I wasn’t all there.

  Henry was at the top of the stairs finally. “See, Mia, he can make it on his own. He just needs encouragement.” But the poor boy looked exhausted. What was it Grace had said about him? “Young Henry, shall we go and find the sugar glider?” He nodded enthusiastically, catching his breath. “Do you feel all right?”

  “Yes please,” he said. He smiled. Henry has the red curly hair and blue eyes from my mother’s family but his smile belongs to my brother Tom and I had a moment where I couldn’t quite place him, where instead of Paddington and Grace’s children, I was at Risdon and Henry was Tom.