Laurinda (18 page)

“On a Saturday?” asked Mrs Leslie, incredulous.

“Yes.” My father did not explain that he was not heading back to the factory, but home to help my mother sew. He did not want to admit this because sewing was not a manly pursuit.

“We could drop Lucy off,” said Mrs Leslie. “She is welcome to stay here as long as she likes.”

“No,” I said. “It’s very kind of you to invite me along, Mrs Leslie, but I really have to get home.”

“But wait – don’t go yet. I have something for you!” She went back into the house. I thought she was going to pack me a Tupperware container of leftover rolls to take home, but instead she emerged with a monumental bunch of flowers, bigger than my torso, wrapped in tasteful bark and brown paper and tied with twine. All the flowers were native plants with furry, bulbous heads and pointy leaves.

“Wow, thank you, Mrs Leslie – these are beautiful,” I lied.

“All Australian stock,” she laughed, as the others came to bid me goodbye.

In Dad’s car, I had to sit in the back because the front seat did not fit both me and the flowers. I couldn’t leave them in the back because they would roll around and smear yellow pollen all over the seats where my father sometimes placed completed rush orders for Sokkha.

“So, no study today, huh?” my father asked, and I was glad to be in the back where I could not see his face.

“No, Dad. She insisted I come over and teach them how to make rice-paper rolls.”

“That’s a good thing.” My father still had the ability to surprise me. “Those girls like and respect you a lot. They probably also can’t cook!”

The latter was true; definitely not the former. Oh, my father, he was still in love with the idea of me joining the three graces, just as Mrs Leslie was. It was as if they were trying to arrange a marriage.

“But what will we tell Mum?” I asked.

“Don’t worry, we’ll all work late tonight because tomorrow is Sunday. As if she will ask you about what you’ve been studying, eh!”

I looked down at the flowers and noticed a card. I pulled it out and opened it, and as I did, I saw $50 nestled in the fold. I looked at the front mirror. Dad still had his eyes on the road. I put the note back in the envelope, and put it in my pocket. I would deal with it later.

*

I came home, and that was when we had our big fight, Linh. You and me, that evening, after my visit to Amber’s house.

I needed to tell you all about Mrs Leslie and Amber and my time at their tense estate.

So, that’s what’s been up with you
, you muttered, sitting on the bed in my room.
I waited for you
. You had the Lamb in your lap. “I didn’t know you were going to come,” I replied, because really, I didn’t. You had a habit of dropping in when I least expected. And every time you did this when my dad was around, he’d get pissed off. Luckily for you, Mum could stand you.

You write me these long, god-awful letters, but never see me anymore.

“I’ve been busy lately. And my letters aren’t awful.”

For months your letters have been filled with wankery like “bulging arsenal of multilingual profanities”, “sordid liaisons” and – my favourite – “flippantly audacious”.

So that was what this was about.

I couldn’t help it if I was trying to practise another language, I wanted to yell, because that was what this amounted to. You were just trying to mock my efforts because you thought it wasn’t “me”. And don’t blame me for “flippantly audacious” – that was Brodie!

But you didn’t even give me a chance to explain, to tell you about my terrible afternoon, to turn it into a funny anecdote, to show you what I thought of these ladies and their daughters. You just let loose.

Oh my God
, you said,
those girls are worse than Katie. What you are doing with them? If they were at Christ Our Saviour, we’d put them in their place. But you do nothing. I know you’re avoiding me because you’re ashamed of the ugliness inside you. So you just sit there sipping their little Italian soft drinks and enjoying their “culture” because they accept it
.

“They don’t accept me,” I protested. “The Cabinet put up with me because of Mrs Leslie.”

I didn’t say they accepted you
, you told me in no uncertain terms.
I said they accepted the ugliness inside you
.

You always told me the truth. By now you were leaving, but before you did, you had to have one last stab:
By the way, your mother thinks those flowers are ugly
.

“Get out now!”

When you left, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to see you again.

T
he next day was a Friday, so after school I took the Lamb to the Sunray Shopping Centre. We stayed away from the basement level, which was where all the people my age hung out, because I didn’t want to run into you. I fed the Lamb a small tub of potato and gravy from Kentucky Fried Chicken; a quarter of it spilled down the front of his overalls and got caught in the buttons. He chuckled with glee, the little grot, and stuck a finger in his buttonhole.

Then I took him to the Postman Pat carousel, which had three seats – one shaped like Pat’s mailbag, one like his mail van and one like his black and white cat. You had to put a gold coin in a slot to make the seats move up and down for two minutes but Mum would never let us operate it – she said you might as well throw away money. Luckily, the Lamb thought that sitting on one of the special seats
was
the ride.

I placed him on the black and white cat, even though he wanted to sit on the mailbag, because there was already another kid there, a little girl with a tutu and fairy wings over her pink tracksuit.

“Git lost – we was here first.”

I looked up and saw a dinner-plate sized version of the little girl’s face, massive and scowling. Her mother.

“Have you got a dollar?” Before I had a chance to reply, she said, “Coz I’m not putting in a dollar for you too.”

To her, people like us existed to supply people like her with the cheap and lurid-coloured Chinese takeaway food they loved so much, or the $2 T-shirts they bought from Kmart every few months. In fact, the Postman Pat carousel had probably been made by people who looked like me. Maybe that’s why the seats were so small – to seat pert little bums like the Lamb’s, not the wide load of her poor junk-food-fed pup.

And it was then that I understood my attachment to Laurinda. I was wearing my uniform, and this woman – who lived on welfare and fast food – would never be part of that world. She thought that people like us were going to steal her kid’s job in the future, just as she thought we were trying to steal a free ride now.

It was cowardice that made me leave the carousel, not contempt – the contempt came later. In that moment there was only a flash of anger. I knew what you would have done, Linh, what you would have said. But you weren’t there. So I could only do what I could do. I took the Lamb off the carousel, and he started to grizzle, and then cry.

In the past, stuff like this would have got me all wounded and teary, but now it didn’t matter. Now I felt better than them, the whole lot of them in Stanley. You may not have minded being stuck there, but I was different. Now I could see a future where I didn’t have to fight such petty battles all the time.

As I felt the woman’s power over me shrink, I also felt something expanding in me – not empathy, but condescension. Before, I had accorded any adult automatic respect because that was the way I was brought up. But Laurinda had shown me that just because a person was an adult, it didn’t necessarily mean you had to respect them.

Now I understood that these people were bogans, and being a bogan was not a point of pride. It was disgusting, in a squint-faced, cement-mixer-voiced way, that a grown woman would buy herself cigarettes from Safeway and a moment later decide to deprive her child of a ride on a Postman Pat carousel just because another kid was also sitting on it. That was the kind of petty mentality they had, the sense that everyone else had it better.

“Don’t worry, Mr Lamby,” I said. “We’ll find you something more fun!”

I took him to Toys “R” Us and let him ride on all the scooters and three-wheeled tots’ bikes they had. I bought him a Push Pop. I gave him a spin through the air as we walked towards the bus stop. He was so tired his head rested on my shoulder, drooling on my blazer, but I didn’t care.

*

On the train back, some blonde girl was using her boyfriend’s lap like an armchair, and his chest like a pillow. Remember how we used to look down on girls like that, Linh? The skanks who got with the first St Andrew’s boy who looked at them?

This boy was all angles, and he had an Adam’s apple like an origami corner, but his hair was dyed the colour of salted caramel and he had warm brown eyes. The girl’s hands were clutching the sleeves of his denim jacket, her face burrowed in his shirt the same way a sick person would burrow their face in their bedding.

From the back, you’d think she came from the warmest, sandiest beaches of Bondi. She lifted her face from her boyfriend’s chest to get some air. Her eyes were swimming-pool blue and rimmed with black kohl. They lasered down at my uniform and settled on my droopy socks with their over-stretched cheap nylon hem, then quickly rose up again. Then she flashed me a smile.

She had spotted me straightaway, but it took me a while to recognise her beneath the peroxide and contacts. “Tully?” I tentatively asked.

“Hi!” she exclaimed, and introduced me to her boyfriend. “This is Alonzo.”

“Hi,” I said to him.

“Hi.”

She smiled up at Alonzo. “This is my friend I was telling you about – the really smart one who got into Laurinda.”

“Oh, Tully, don’t be stupid. You’re the really smart one.” I was aware of how ridiculous that sentence sounded only after it came out.

“But you’re the one who got in! Alonzo, I swear this girl was one of the smartest girls in our school.”

“Tully is going to be dux of her school,” I told Alonzo. “I’m mediocre. I’m just going to fade away.”

“Dux of a shitty school,” murmured Tully. “And only get into a crappy uni through a povvo scholarship where they bump up your score out of charity.”

“Aw, come on, Tully.”

“You know it’s true!”

Since Alonzo was there, I couldn’t offer Tully any polite consolation, or express my guilt about getting the scholarship, or even praise her Filipino boyfriend’s cuteness. I wasn’t sure how much she had revealed about herself, or even what kind of person she wanted to be with him, and I didn’t want to blow it for her by mentioning her studious ways if he thought she really was the bad girl she was pretending to be.

But in the space of a few moments we had assessed each other and understood just how different our lives were going to be. Tully had resigned herself to doing VCE at Christ Our Saviour, with the Spanish girls whose parents would cheer at their TAFE hairdressing graduations, and the Vietnamese girls whose mums and dads wanted them to marry the young accountants in Sunray. The moment she didn’t get the Laurinda scholarship was the moment Tully felt her chance had passed. Smart people won things, and went places, and got out of Sunray. And she was still here.

Everyone thought that I was headed for bigger things, but I wasn’t trying to make Tully feel better when I told her that I was mediocre. At Laurinda I was average, at best. I had no outstanding talents.

She shifted about on Alonzo’s knee so that she would be more comfortable, although she was so thin that she was probably sitting on bone. Tully had always been skinny, but now she looked like she’d just stepped off the boat. And I could not stop staring at her creepy electric-blue eyes.

“How are Yvonne and Ivy?” I asked.

“Good. Ming’s out on parole and trying to stay clean. I think the family sent him back to Vietnam so he could be away from the wrong crowd.”

“I heard that.”

She looked a little surprised. “So you still keep in touch?”

“Yes,” I lied.

The truth was, I didn’t know much about how my old friends were doing, beyond the occasional talk with you, Linh. And I wasn’t sure whether those talks would be happening anymore. This conversation was making me feel very uncomfortable, and there were still twenty minutes to go before we reached Stanley.

“Hey, nice trousers,” I said to her, and meant it.

That was one of my greatest achievements at Christ Our Saviour. I had a real connection to that uniform, even though the blazer pocket was just velcroed on. In my Laurinda blazer, with its embroidered and immutable crest, I felt like an imposter.

A
t lunchtime the next Monday I was in my usual corner of the library, having a look at a Caravaggio book. Chelsea came bounding up to me like a deranged filly. “Hey, Lucy, Lucy, hey! What are you doing?” I held the book close to my chest. “Just looking at something.” It was a painting called
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas
, which showed some guy poking his finger into the ribcage of Jesus.

“Why don’t you come and join us for lunch?”

“Oh, okay.” What else could I do? Admittedly, I was curious about the Cabinet. I wanted to know whether Katie was right about them. I’d seen Amber at home and she hadn’t seemed that impressive. In fact, all three Cabinet members, from my limited interactions with them, seemed petty and kind of boring – but maybe that was because they were with their parents. They were the sort of girls who acted one way towards adults and another towards people their own age.

I walked with Chelsea to the Cabinet’s bench. When Amber and Brodie saw us coming, they patted the seat next to them. They wanted me to take Chelsea’s usual spot.

This was even more awkward than being in Mrs Grey’s office, or that afternoon with their mothers. It was some little game, I guessed, and I wanted nothing to do with it. “It’s okay, I’ll sit on the grass.” I didn’t want to stay for long.

“Well, then, we’ll all sit on the grass,” decided Brodie.

I knew that it was not my mum’s rice-paper rolls that had got me into their secret society, but something else. I was interested to find out what they talked about among themselves, and how it was that they had the whole school in their thrall. What I was most curious about, though, was why they had suddenly decided to take an interest in me.