Cloudwish (9 page)

chapter 17

Vân Ước tidied up
the little kids' area after homework club. She liked the routine; putting the pencils back into their jars, stacking the unused paper, clipping the lids on the plasticine containers, tidying the books away into the book bins and making sure the gym mats where the kids lounged about and read were free of any sticky spills.

She took her time more than usual just to make sure that Billy would be long gone by the time she headed home. She sprayed and wiped down the tables (not even her job) before she got her bag, said goodbye to the church warden, Serena, who locked up each week, and opened the door into the still-hot afternoon.

Oh, great. Billy was sitting on a swing, texting. He looked up at the sound of the door, came over and started unlocking his bike. Vân Ước kept walking.

‘Wait up, I'll walk you home.'

‘I can get there by myself.'

He wasn't that easily put off. He walked along beside her, wheeling his bike, ignoring the periodic buzzing of his phone. ‘Which way are we heading?'

‘I only live about five minutes away; I really don't need . . .'

‘You were great in there,' he said. ‘You know every kid. How long have you been doing this?'

‘Just since last year.' Despite having done what Jess suggested, and let him come along to see her in her natural habitat, he had no real idea of who she was. It was time to take the plunge. This would be sure to get rid of him. ‘Before then, I was a student here. I've been coming here every week since year five. My parents hardly speak any English. We live in the high-rise housing commission flats, like most of the kids who come here. Tutors, like you are now, go home to Toorak. Students, like I was, go home to the flats.'

Billy stared at her. ‘Cool. So at least I know I'm heading in the right direction.'

Huh? He hadn't skipped a beat. Did he already know? She glanced at him. He was wandering along, appearing not to have a care in the world. His phone buzzed again. He took it out of his pocket, read the screen and sighed.

‘Are you going to Tiff's tonight?'

‘Ah – no. We're not friends.'

‘Yeah, I don't want to go either. Only it's her birthday drinks. So I should. I guess. But why? Why do I have to do all this stuff?'

‘Because she's your friend?'

‘Yeah, but not really. And I have to be up at five.'

‘So, maybe – go home now?' He really stuck around like glue, and didn't take a hint.

Billy smiled at her. ‘But this is the best part of my day so far.'

‘You must have had a pretty ordinary day.'

‘Can we go back to your place and hang for a while?'

Vân Ước looked at him. He did not seem to be joking. ‘No. We can't. My mother's not well.'

‘Hey, I'm sorry. What's wrong?'

‘She . . . I'm not sure that she'd want me talking about it.'

‘No, cool. I'm sorry. Hope she feels better soon.'

They were at the gates of the flats. ‘Okay, bye,' said Vân Ước.

‘See you on Monday,' Billy said, wheeling his bike away with a plausible impression of regret as Matthew walked up, wearing his ever-present, genuine – as he was keen to point out, though who cared – French beret, whistling tunelessly between his teeth, and greeting Vân Ước with a familiar
yo
.

Jess broke up a block of Turkish delight chocolate, her confectionery mew, looking very stern.

‘Billy. Huh. What an arrogant, up-himself dick,' she said. ‘He was strutting around like he owned the place. First visit!'

‘That's typical behaviour.'

‘Well, I can't see why he's your mew guy.' Jess ate a piece of chocolate. ‘Except for he's magazino handsome.'

‘Yeah.'

‘And cut. He must do nothing but work out.'

‘He's the stroke of the first eight.'

‘Which means?'

‘It means when he's not studying, he's training. It's the top position in the school's best rowing crew.'

‘Right.'

‘Which he holds in year eleven – so, he's the king of rowing a year earlier than you might expect.'

‘So, he can
row very quickly?
Big deal. He's not good enough for you.'

‘What did you think? I mean, did you get a sense of what he thinks about me?'

‘He's besotted, you idiot. You have won the heart of one very hot dickhead.'

Frowning to hide her annoyingly automatic thrilled response, Vân Ước pressed play on their Friday movie,
Clueless
, which they hadn't seen since last year. ‘That was way harsh, Tai,' she said.

‘Not even a quarter of the harsh he deserves. Seriously, we couldn't be friends if you went out with him.'

‘Our friendship is safe.'

Vân Ước reached for a piece of the Turkish delight chocolate, which made her think of Narnia, of bewitchment, and of little glass vials.

chapter 18

Saturday morning started with
a long riverside run.

A shower, hair wash.

Fifty minutes of oboe practice. Gah! A couple of annoying duck squawks.
Round
the
sound
.
Round
the
sound
. Her new reed was still too tangy – it needed some more breaking in. She knuckle-jiggled her face muscles against her teeth.

An attempt at an art journal entry.
What does it mean? What does it mean to me?
She wrote a response to the sequence in the film
American Beauty
where the boy next door has filmed the plastic bag blowing around in the wind. A mundane object imbued with a balletic beauty. Fragility. Vulnerability. Hmmm. It felt a bit bullshitty, but that was probably okay, given the playground/laboratory instruction. The journal was a place to explore. It was a relief to have a place like that, away from the land of rights and wrongs.
What does it mean to me?

She created a new page border by repeatedly writing out a quote from Picasso –
Art is a lie that tells the truth
– and filled the page by writing a response to it as it pertained to her work. Little things combining to show us something new, something larger.

She did an image search of footpath and pavement council surveyor marks from around the world, and bookmarked a few images to print at school.

She image-searched some photography of metal surfaces and old glass.

Good to get so much ticked off the list before eleven am.

Because
the early bird catches the worm
.

Those old wacko English proverbs and idiomatic sayings were great. It was one of the things she and Debi did in year five, in their first year together at homework club. They weren't forms of English she ever heard at home.
It takes one to know one
.
A storm in a teacup. A stitch in time saves nine.

Her mother used occasional mystifying Vietnamese equivalents, like,
If you put in the work to sharpen the steel, it will one day turn into needles.
Laugh at others today and tomorrow others will laugh at you.
And others that were simply a variation on study hard:
The hand works, the mouth is allowed to chew. A good beginning is half the battle.

After a couple more hours of homework, it was time to collect Jess and go to work. Five hours of making rice paper rolls at Henry Ha Minh Rolls on Chapel Street. Seating for twelve only, and the rest was takeaway, the long queue a permanent fixture. The kitchen was as big as the seating area. Six people covered Saturday's prep and rolling. You had to work fast.
Fast and Fresh
: that was the simple sell.

Henry had two other small but equally popular places: Henry Ha Minh Dumplings and Henry Ha Minh Barbeque. He was a hard-line minimalist. One perfect, tiny range at each outlet. His signage was all typeset in lower case Courier. And each cafe was painted in blackboard paint so walls became a changing artwork/message board for the day. Today, he'd written:
The object of art is to give life a shape
. . .
Jean Anouilh.
His girlfriend, Tiên, was an interior designer and as much of a perfectionist and control freak as Henry. When he did the occasional pop-up stall with rolls, buns and barbeque – Henry Ha Minh Pops Up – social media wet itself with excitement.

She and Jess were a fabulously efficient production line. Vermicelli noodles, finely shredded lettuce, then either chicken, two strands of chives and two Vietnamese mint leaves, perfectly positioned on a just-overlapping diagonal, or roast duck with hoi sin sauce and spring onion, or tiger prawn with julienned green paw paw and coriander leaves. Roll, roll, roll. Working so hard, with such concentration, even on a menial task, the time went pretty quickly. Vân Ước was surprised when Gary came over and told them to take their break. Vân Ước and Jess had decided long ago that all Gary's wardrobe contained was black T-shirts, black jeans and his signature red bandanas. They could never decide how many he had of each. Cam and Bec, who had been prepping, took over the rolling.

If it was fine, she and Jess always went outside for their break. Eyes needed the relaxation of a more distant horizon after looking closely at rice paper rolls, twelve up, for two hours. They were in the laneway beside the cafe, sitting on the milk crate and cushion seats that were dragged out on the first break of the day and stacked and packed up at closing time. Gary's preferred music of the moment filtered out: Dionne Warwick singing Burt Bacharach songs.

‘I love this one,' said Jess. It was ‘Trains and Boats and Planes'.

‘Me too.'

‘I think of this album as basically an instruction manual for life.'

‘Really?' asked Vân Ước, in a vagued-out trance.

‘Unless you think that the moment I wake up I say a little prayer for an unspecified other, before I put on my makeup, when you know I don't even wear makeup, no, not really. I was being stupid. For humour.'

‘I haven't
studied
the lyrics, okay?'

‘Yeah, well, they don't really bear examining.' Jess opened a bag of Cheezels, her current break snack favourite. ‘Does it ever occur to you that we should look for other work?'

‘How come?'

‘We are Vietnamese Australian girls making rice paper rolls as our casual work.'

‘So?'

‘Well we haven't exactly spread our cultural wings.'

‘What do you want to do, flip burgers?'

‘Yuck, no, because, smell.'

‘Work in a shop?'

‘Yuck, no, subservience.
Have you found everything you need today? Can I help you with that? It really looks great on you
.'

‘Then what?'

‘No, I'm happy – I'm just saying, just
noting
, that we're living quite the cliché.'

‘Suits me. Work's work. Henry's great. And we get food.' Vân Ước bit into a prawn roll.

Jess had put on her Cheezel fingers. They were still wearing their paper hygiene hats, so should probably at least have put their backs to the laneway in case anyone they knew walked by, but Vân Ước felt too work-zonked to care.

‘Why do you think it is that I don't like actual cheese, but I love Chee
zels
?' asked Jess.

‘Because there's no actual cheese in Cheezels?'

‘Though there is the thing called cheese powder,' said Jess, looking at the ingredients list on the pack on her knee, nibbling the Cheezel from her left-hand little finger.

A group of girls tumbled across the laneway, laughing, carrying Henry Ha Minh takeaway bags. One of them was Holly. She spotted Vân Ước and Jess, and pointed. Laughter spurted from the group. Vân Ước froze. She didn't want to give them the satisfaction of looking embarrassed or apologetic.

‘Who or what are they?' asked Jess.

‘Just girls from school,' said Vân Ước.

Another gale of laughter issued from them as they walked off.

‘Are they friends of
his
?'

‘Yes.'

‘The case against him just got stronger.'

chapter 19

Cleaning the flat with
her mother took up a couple of hours every Sunday morning. When her mother was sick, her father took over. The place might not be glamorous, but it was spotless. She didn't think all families would run a damp cloth along every single freaking skirting board every week, for instance. Or have such sparkling plugholes. If only they could get some air through the place, though. The windows didn't open far, and there was no cross ventilation. Heavy mesh security grilles covered the windows that looked out into the shared public hallways, and those windows didn't open at all.

She packed her camera after the bleach-fest and went down to take some midday-light photos for her folio. In the foyer, she crossed paths with Jess, who was on her way in. They headed outside together, wandering over to their favourite outdoor garden area, the bench under a stand of ghost gums.

‘I forgot to ask yesterday – how's your mum going?' said Jess.

‘Not great. I'm tablet-counting, though, so I guess she'll feel better one of these days. Where've you been?'

‘School. We're doing the toy and book drive.'

A pang of school-homesickness hit her. Her old school did a massive toy drive every year to gather, sort, clean up and distribute toys for asylum seeker resource centres to send to the detention centres. How relaxing it would be to be back with her old friends and old teachers. Even after a couple of years, it was still exhausting being in aspiration land at Crowthorne Grammar. ‘I wish we were little again, sometimes.'

‘Not me. I'm not doing any more kid time than I have to.'

‘All that pushing our parents have done. Do you think they get the irony that the more we do what they want, the less we can connect with them?'

‘Pushing us to succeed is pushing us out of their gang?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I'm pretty sure my parents don't know what irony is,' said Jess.

‘And we don't know the Vietnamese word for it.'

‘I mean, it is irony, isn't it?'

‘Yeah, I think that would come under the situational irony umbrella.'

‘It's kind of sad.' Vân Ước opened her camera case and swapped lenses.

‘We're transitional.'

‘Band name?
Transitional Mews
.'

‘Mmm, an oboe and a violin. I'm not seeing it.'

‘There are kids not much younger than us whose grandparents came on boats. They're a whole generation in. Parents with proper jobs and perfect English.'

‘Like we'll be.'

‘Our kids won't be able to keep us in the dark like we can with our parents.' Jess got up and stretched. ‘I feel kinda sorry for them.'

Vân Ước headed for the street as Jess turned back towards the building. ‘Yeah, well I feel kinda sorry for us.'

Her father had a chicken ph
ở
on the stove.

Vân Ước emerged, starving, from her bedroom, after a massive load of maths homework and an intense ‘what's with Billy?' wondering session.

Her
ba
smiled at her, gave her a significant look and pointed at the closed bedroom door.

‘Please chop the herbs now,' he said.

Vân Ước started cutting up the coriander and Vietnamese mint he had ready on the chopping board. ‘This smells SO DELICIOUS,' she replied, playing along.

‘And very healthy food. So good for you.'

‘Just what you need when you've been feeling sick.'

‘Now the noodles, and then we can eat.'

Her mother opened the bedroom door. She looked tired, but had a small smile on her face. ‘Why don't you two just come into the bedroom and shout at me while I'm lying down.'

‘Mama, perfect timing!'

‘It does smell good. I'll sit up and eat a little bit.'

Watching her father happily draining noodles, arranging the bowls, ladling in stock, Vân Ước felt relieved. Out of bed. Out of the bedroom. Eating. Good signs.

Her father believed his strategy of luring her mother from her bed with tantalising food smells had worked. And her mother, the most obstinate woman imaginable, let him think it.