Laurinda (26 page)

It was just the second time you’d set foot in the school. I could barely believe it. I had not seen you for so long, but there you were: an ally in the face of adversity! My heart rose. I did not have to battle those bitches by myself. There was no time for introductions.

We turned to face the Cabinet.

These girls knew that bad words were only truly bad if saved for special occasions. If you used them often, they lost their power and became like any other word that expressed annoyance or surprise, the two expressions that now pinched Brodie’s face – although, in her carefully controlled decorum, only her mouth twitched at the corners. Girls like her were always going to judge girls like you, and judge anything you said not by its content but by your Stanley accent – so you gave it to them, as loudly as you could.

“Fuck youse!”

Heads turned. Girls’ jaws dropped. A few parents who were walking towards the gate looked on in horror. The after-school teacher, the poor soul vested with the task of delivering these girls safely to their buses, was Mr Sinclair, and he was striding towards us.

“Excuse me?” Brodie sounded like an English teacher, and for a moment I thought that her shock was at your bad grammar.

“Youse are all sick. The whole fucking lot of youse.”

Mr Sinclair was now standing directly in front of us. “Young lady, we do not tolerate that kind of language here at this school!”

“I don’t give a shit,” you told him. “I’m not part of this school.”

I
did not go to school the next day.

I woke up and decided I didn’t even want to get out of bed. My peripheral vision had shrunk, like the picture on our old television. When you switched off the black and white box, the image grew darker around the edges, and was then sucked into a little black hole at the centre. I spent some time examining my own hands and fingernails, intrigued that such things belonged to me. Pink and brown and many-pronged, they looked like creatures of the sea, like tentacles without a head or body attached.

“What’s wrong?” Mum asked when she realised I wasn’t in the kitchen making myself a sandwich for lunch. “Are you sick?”

I didn’t have a fever, I didn’t have a headache, but my hands felt like they had turned to anemone, my feet to coral.

All year I had tried to keep a low profile, to just get on with things, and you’d ruined it in a few minutes. But you know what? I didn’t care. I didn’t care because that day was the last time I would ever see you. I hadn’t realised it then, in the excitement of the moment, but now it was sinking in.

I wish I could have told you how much talking and writing to you meant to me all year. How you were my bullshit detector. How you listened and kept me true, even when I wanted to block my ears, because you had no filter between your thoughts and your mouth. How you were my best friend, and how it was only because of you that I never felt isolated or a desperate need to attach myself to anyone at Laurinda. But after our moment of triumph, you fled without even looking back, and I knew that even if I chased after you I would never catch up.

You were gone.

What had happened in the span of less than a year? I had gone from being the girl most likely to succeed, the well-liked all-rounder, the one who was smart but helpful and not crazy-competitive like Tully, the one who would make the factory workers of Sunray proud, the one with conviction; to the girl least likely to achieve, the one who would never join any club ever again, who withdrew into herself, who got herself kicked out of remedial English.

“Look at you beautiful girls,” Sister Clarke used to say to us before every parent–teacher interview at Christ Our Saviour. “Look at you all. So strong and full of life, despite the suffering your folks went through. Look at how smart you are, look at how creative you are, look at how kind you are. You are going to make your parents so proud.” And then she would ask us to come along in the evening so we could translate for our parents.

Mr Galloway had once said, half-jokingly, to another teacher, “Watch this one! She’s going to be prime minister one day,” and I had believed him – not that I wanted to become prime minister, but he gave me the faith that if I harboured such a dream and worked hard enough, it would come true. I had believed that hard work would make anything a certainty.

Now I wasn’t so sure.

I knew that the kind of life my father dreamed for me was small, so small, in comparison to the life of culture and art and politics and power that the Cabinet had ahead of them. There was a reason Stephanie Phoung had ended up working as an accountant above her parents’ jewellery store in Sunray. It had probably started when she’d arrived at her new school and quickly learned to keep her head down and do her work, and to block out everything else.

I was as hard-working as ever, but it seemed that the other girls were playing a game whose rules they all knew – rules that they couldn’t even explain to me because they were born into them, which left me in the lurch. Not that I was ever a threat, because now I was a creature that slunk against walls, the ghost that walked through corridors, so invisible that I could not even make anyone else feel good. I lacked something in myself.

I lacked you, Linh. And you were never coming back.

It was not like losing my best friend. It was like losing my soul. You would have known what to say if you’d seen girls treat a teacher as badly as the Cabinet had treated Ms Vanderwerp. You would have put them in their place. Yet the triumph of seeing the shock on the Cabinet’s faces had quickly withdrawn into a snail-like shame. In the past, I would never have felt ashamed of you. I would have chased after you.

I felt as if someone was sitting on my neck and it suddenly became hard to breathe. I knew now without a doubt that you were disgusted by my cowardice. I thrashed about in bed, and the feeling moved down to my chest. It was like someone was opening and closing a fist in there.

Oh, I’m a goner, I thought. I’m gone. I can’t even get air in my lungs.

I sat up in bed, clamped my mouth shut and breathed through my nose. I waited until my hands stopped shaking and my breathing slowed. I had to get out of bed. I had to stop being so useless. I had to put my no-good, useless self to good use.

I called up the school to tell them I was sick.

“I’m sorry,” said Mrs Muscat in reception, “but we need your parents to confirm that.”

I stood by the doorway of the garage, still in the old T-shirt and tracksuit pants I’d worn to bed, with the cordless phone in my hand. “Hey, Mum, can you tell the school I’m sick?”

“You know I don’t speak English.”

“Just tell them I’m sick.”

My mother released her foot from the pedal of the Singer and took the phone. “My dawtah she seek,” she called into the phone, then handed it back to me.

“We need a note and medical certificate verifying this, Lucy,” said a very suspicious Mrs Muscat.

I hung up. “Hey, Mum, do you need any help?”

“I thought you were sick?”

“Not
that
sick.”

I pulled up a chair and took up a small pair of snipping scissors to cut the loose threads from the shirtsleeves she was sewing. We worked silently for a long while. The Lamb was still asleep in my parents’ bed, squeezing a rubber skittle shaped like a rabbit.

“Don’t you get sad?” I finally asked my mother, not knowing the word for “depressed” in our language, or if such a word even existed. Our word for “sad” literally meant
pressured heart
. “Being inside this dark garage all day, doing exactly the same thing every day?”

“The garage keeps me out of the sun,” she replied. “Look how white my skin is. I don’t even have to use that Oil of Olay stuff!”

“Mum.”

“And sewing isn’t the same as picking fruit or planting rice or working on machines. Feel how smooth my hands are. These are hands of leisure.”

“Answer me seriously, Mum.”

“Do I look sad?” she said. Then she looked at me, as if she had not seen me for a long time. “I think you’re the one who might be sad.”

“Nah.”

“Sometimes I get anxious, especially when we have to finish an order. But I know that one day we’ll move. It’s going to happen, you know. Look at Robina. She did it in less than eight years. And we are all working very hard in this family.”

My mother’s absolute faith in achieving success in her world made me feel even more miserable. She was content with simple comforts because she had lacked them for most of her life. My mother didn’t know the names of things – red cedar, art deco, Edwardian. Unlike my father, she had never seen the Leslies’ house. To her, a table was just a table; the only accompanying adjectives would be “ugly” or “beautiful”. A 1940s vintage oak table would be “old and ugly” to her, and a plastic white Italian table with gold curlicues would be “new and beautiful”.

Brodie would have called the things in our home “tacky”, the term used by wealthy people to describe the most beautiful things poor people could afford – machine-embroidered bedspreads and plastic flowers in plastic vases moulded to look like crystal. Blouses with multi-layered ruffles. Enormous stuffed toys from Kmart. A plastic fluorescent print of Jesus Christ with a heart that lit up. How could I joke about tacky things without also laughing at my own mother and the way she cared for these possessions more carefully than Amber cared for the Leslies’ Moulinex blender? How could I buy a $3 chocolate croissant without feeling like I had wasted half an hour of her labour?

To be a part of the Cabinet, I’d had to keep my true self apart. And there’s only so much of yourself you can hide, Linh, before you start to fall apart.

“Why did your friend come over the other day?” my mother suddenly asked.

“She just wanted to give me some homework I left at school.”

“And she took a taxi out here just to do that?”

What could I tell her? That Brodie had come to suss out where I lived and what my mother did?

“Your father tells me that the girl had a mobile phone.”

“Yes. She’ll also get a new car when she turns eighteen.”

My mother looked at me as if I was trying to rub it in that she and my father were
not
going to get me a new car when I came of age.

“She’s spoiled,” I said, and I could see my mother’s face sag with relief.

“You don’t have to be the best at this new school,” she told me. “You don’t have to be the smartest. You don’t have to be like that girl with the phone. All you have to be is a good person. I see everyone around me getting the things they want in life. Robina and her husband with their business, Tee with her son at university, Ngo with her new house at Ambient Estates. And every time I go over to one of their houses, they always talk about it. But that proud talk soon turns into a list of complaints. The local butchering business is being seized by supermarkets these days, Tee’s son comes home really late at night and she has no idea where he’s been, Ngo’s builder cheated them out of $7000.”

My mother sighed. “And I have to sit there and tell them, well, sister, at least you’re rich. At least you’re successful. At least your boy is in university now. But do you know what I
never
do? I never tell them about us. I never tell them that your father often works in the garage with me after his shift and we talk. That we made a tent out of netting for the Lamb. That I sometimes let you stay home with me when you’re not sick.”

I couldn’t look at my mother, but I could sense her looking at me. She always figured my excuses out.

“I never tell them about our lives. You know why? It is not because I am ashamed. It is because some things are just
good
, too good to be judged.”

I knew my mother was telling the truth, because she never lied. She didn’t even understand white lies. She just stayed silent if she didn’t agree with someone. And I understood now why I had been so enraged when Brodie came over to our house uninvited. I could cope when I kept my two worlds separate, but Brodie had seen the most precious part of me, and she’d trashed it.

*

I didn’t go to school for the last three days of Term Three. There seemed no point. I woke up haggard, my eyes circled by darker and darker rings. At night I couldn’t get to sleep, even though I was working all day with Mum in the garage. My mind was infected with a kind of virus, and I felt a sickly miasma hover around me. The Lamb began sleeping in my bed. Only with him there could I get some rest, next to his sweet, milk-scented face.

But something was happening to the Lamb, too. No longer did he have his eureka moments. He would sit for long stretches of time in his box, just looking out the window or listlessly tearing scraps of paper. Perhaps he was missing Dad, who had been working the late shift for the past couple of days.

I sliced bananas for the Lamb. I even let him hold each one in his hand and see the little expressive face made by the black seeds in the centre. But he didn’t put the pieces in his mouth anymore; he didn’t even hold up each banana segment to look at it. He just held it in his fist until it got mushed up. Just as well, I thought, when I realised that each seedy face looked worried and anxious, the deeper I cut into the banana.

“Give him his bottle,” my mother told me. But the Lamb kept turning his head away.

“Hey, Mum,” I called. “Mum, the Lamb is not well. He’s not drinking from his bottle. He’s coughing, too.”

“Oh, no,” said my mother. “Try to pat him to sleep.”

Every time I tried to put him down in bed, he kept grizzling and sitting up. He wanted to be upright; when he was lying down, his nose was blocked and he found it hard to breathe. There was also a strange rasping sound coming from his chest, which scared me.

I propped up some pillows so he could have a rest sitting up, holding onto the pillows like a koala to a tree. I patted his back until he fell asleep. Then I had a little nap next to him. Even though I was anxious, I was also exhausted.

The Lamb woke me up with a massive gasp that shook his whole torso, as if his chest was a maraca filled with rice grains. “Lamby,” I cooed. “Sweet Lamb. Did you have a bad dream? Did you give yourself a fright?”