Laurinda (2 page)

“I wrote about feeling trapped in an exam that will decide whether my father will disown me,” Yvonne joked. “This is my second go! Sixty bucks down the drain again, just because my dad won’t accept that I’m not a genius like you, Tully. What did you write about?”

“I wrote about Peter Benenson, who founded Amnesty International,” said Tully. “I figured they wanted us to show that we knew about world issues, and they might give bonus credit if we knew about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

“Waahh,” breathed Ivy, and whacked Yvonne on the shoulder. “We’re stuffed, my friend. I wrote about how when my brother Ming went to prison, he missed Asian food so much that in the exercise yard he watched the pigeons and wanted to kill and roast one, like quail.”

I saw the upside-down hook on Tully’s face turn itself the other way.

“What the hell, Ivy?” Yvonne said, laughing. Then she turned to Tully. “Man, Tully, that is what they call a sophisticated essay. You’ve got the scholarship in the bag.”

“Hear me out!” declared Ivy. “I thought that if I wrote about true life in – what did Mr Galloway call it? – an ‘evocative and poignant’ way, those examiners would be amazed by my ability to portray real life
and
feel sorry for me. Two birds with one stone, my friends. Two birds, one massive stone.”

Suddenly, Tully turned towards you. “What did you write about, Linh?”

You just laughed. “Something stupid.”

I noticed that Tully’s eyes were two small, desperate fires, but I didn’t say anything. I stayed quiet. Tully, who had more A’s than a wholesale box of batteries, had been sitting in front of me for the whole three hours, distracting me with her rocking backwards and forwards. Fifty minutes into the exam she had put her hand up for
another
blank writing booklet. Throughout the test, she was practically coughing up her lungs in the near-silent room.

I knew she would get the scholarship. She was like an Olympic gymnast who had been training for this moment her entire life. Nothing else was allowed to matter. She was not allowed to do sports or drama, or take an interest in anything frivolous. She could read about the end of apartheid in South Africa, but she couldn’t read the arts pages of the newspaper if her parents were home. That’s how crazy they were. She could talk about the Geneva Convention but she wouldn’t know how to boil an egg. She certainly wouldn’t know that sleep was something people did to feel rested and more awake.

I felt sorry for Tully. Her parents didn’t let her catch the bus by herself, even though she was six months older than the rest of us. But some hidden part of me also did not like her very much. I didn’t know what to say to her on the days when we finished school late and I walked her to the train station. Afterwards, I would tramp over to my bus stop; by the time I got home, the house and sewing work would have piled up and my mother would be angry.

Before I’d left that morning for the exam, I had gone into the garage. Mum was sitting there at her table, beneath a fluorescent bulb that glowed like an illuminated mushroom. The dust motes rained down on her head like furry spores. “Two hundred before Wednesday,” she told me, slowly turning over a collar-shaped piece of iron-on interfacing in her hands like a manuscript. This was a woman who had never picked up a book in her life; the only literature she looked at was the BI-LO and Safeway ads that arrived in our letterbox every Tuesday. Yet her fingertips could read that piece of polyester fibre like a blind person read Braille.

For some reason, the picture in the exam paper had reminded me of my mother, so I’d written about her. If the other girls had asked, I would have told them. But somehow I did not want to share this with Tully.

“W
hat took you so long?”

My mother was in the kitchen, putting some water on the stove to boil and opening up a packet of Indomie Goreng, when I arrived home. She lived off these dehydrated noodles, a pack every afternoon.

“I had to wait for the bus and then catch a train.”

She wanted to know if the $60 we’d paid for me to take the scholarship exam would be refunded if I didn’t get in.

“No, Mum. Where’s the Lamb?” I asked.

“Lamb’s in his box. Eat first.”

I watched her open the sachet of desiccated onions and MSG and pour it into the noodles, then plonk a fried egg on top. My Chinese mother had a profile that I imagined photographers in
National Geographic
would consider noble: born in Hanoi, she had somehow ended up with darker skin and the bone structure of a Montagnard woman, those highland-dwellers with strong jaws and long eyes.

We always called my baby brother the Lamb because of our surname, Lam. His real name is Aidan, because Mum wanted a word that our grandmother in Hanoi could pronounce, even though he had never met her. Mum kept saying she wanted to go back, but in thirteen years she had been there only once, and that was to bury Grandpa. “Life gets in the way,” she sighed whenever I asked, and then she would stare into the distance like a blind person remembering sight. Because I was so young when we left, I don’t remember much about my grandmother except that she smelled like aniseed rings and incense.

The Lamb slept in my parents’ bedroom, but during the day spent most of his time in the garage with Mum. There were babies with faces like apples and bodies like small blimps, and then there was the Lamb, who looked more like a dried tamarind. Brown and skinny, he even sat in an enormous fruit box waiting to be picked up. The Lamb was never the sort of baby who’d make it into a Target catalogue – he’d more likely be the poster child for Compassion Australia – but he was a healthy and cheerful little pup. His box had cushions and toys, and it was very cosy. We didn’t have air conditioning in our house, but we had a unit in the garage because that was where Mum spent most of the day, and sometimes a big part of the evening too. Sometimes my father helped out, because along with a sewing machine, there was a second-hand overlocker for denim and polar fleece.

“Hello there, Lamby.”

Looking at the piles of orange tracksuit pants, I wondered who would ever buy such ugly attire. Then I looked down at the Lamb: with the leftover fabric remnants, Mum had sewn him an orange polar-fleece tracksuit, complete with hood. He looked like a miniature pimp in the making.

“Lamby, we’re going to have some noodles now.”

The Lamb looked up with his round, unblinking eyes. He bunched his hand into a small fist with one finger sticking out, and as I leaned down to pick him up, he stuck that finger in my eye.

“Owww!”

The Lamb was beginning to explore the world through his hands. For months it had been his mouth. He put everything he found in it to test it out, including the plastic backs of Roll-Up fruit sheets and a powdery dead moth, whose re-emergence caused my mother grave alarm.

As I washed my eye out at the sink, the Lamb crawled into the kitchen and rubbed his own eye. Lately he had learned to stand. He was standing now, with one hand splayed on the wall for balance, the index finger of his left hand pointing straight up towards the ceiling and the other fingers balled into a little fist, as if having a eureka moment.

“Come here, Lambface.” I hoisted him onto my lap.

“He’s been in the garage all day,” Mum told me. “After you finish your noodles, take him outside for a walk. But don’t be too long, because I need you to help me iron a box of shirt sleeves.”

The largest box from each new shipment Uncle Sokkha brought over became the Lamb’s new playpen, which was just as well because by then he would have decorated the last one with scribbles. Mum only thought to buy him a packet of washable textas when one day he made his open-ended circles with a red permanent marker across a pair of beige shorts she had just sewn.

Uncle Sokkha wasn’t our real uncle. He had a moustache and a Cambodian afro – a Cambofro. I’d never seen one on an Asian man before. He liked patterned shirts and gold chains, and looked like he should be selling Sunkist soft-drink on television, except for three things:

1. He didn’t speak English;

2. He had a scar running from the left corner of his mouth to the edge of his nose, which puckered his lip up a bit at the end so that it looked as if he was constantly snarling at some sick joke; and

3. He didn’t have the sort of chilled personality required of a soft-drink promoter.

Besides his shonky lip-curl, which I didn’t think he could help, I’d never seen him smile. Whenever he delivered a new batch of clothes to my mother, he always stressed that it was
urgent
, like a Triad master directing a hitman. Then he’d drive away in his white panel van, only to reappear two weeks later with a new batch.

I carried the Lamb outside on my hip and took him to have a look at the Donaldsons’ front yard. He pointed to one of the gnomes hiding behind the gerberas and squealed with delight. He also scrambled around in my arms, trying to get down, but I held on tight. I didn’t want him trespassing in the neighbours’ garden. This was not Ramsay Street. As friendly as the Donaldsons were, in our neighbourhood we all knew our place.

W
hen the letter arrived in the mail a few Fridays later, my first thought was just to throw it in the bin and not tell my father. After all, the envelope felt so thin. But then I thought, what the hell, I’ll have a look to see what polite rejection they’ve come up with, and then call and congratulate Tully. I ripped one end open so carelessly that I ended up tearing off part of the letter.

Dear Lucy,

As we approach a new century, we must equip our students to become leaders in myriad far-reaching social, economic and cultural fields. Laurinda is proud to introduce and embrace experiences of diversity in our strong tradition.

It is with great pleasure that I write to inform you that you have been awarded the inaugural Laurinda Equal Access scholarship.

It was signed by an E. Grey, Head of Middle School, with instructions to call the school to arrange for an interview. I think I must have made a noise that sounded like
eeeek, eeeek, eeeek!
because Mum came rushing into the house thinking the smoke alarm had gone off. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

I told her.

In an American family sitcom, Linh, this would be the moment when the mother and daughter jump and hug each other and shed some tears. The mother would tell the daughter how proud she was, and then they would joyfully get in the car and go shopping.

“That’s good,” said Mum. “We don’t need to get the refund.”

“It was never a refundable deposit, Mum.”

In the same sitcom, the mother and daughter would probably sit down over a cup of brewed coffee (and perhaps some cupcakes) to talk about the future. Half a year ago, my mum had bought a tin of Nescafé on sale. For her, happiness was hoarding seventeen tins of sweetened condensed milk in the cupboard. We drank our coffee in silence.

“You’d better call your dad,” she said finally.

So I did. By the time he came home that evening, he had told his workmates and his friends, and they had passed on the news to their wives and children.

“Lucy Lam!” they were probably exclaiming. “Who would have thought?”

A day later, everyone knew.

As people started calling to congratulate me, at first I felt pride and anxiety in equal measure. They were pleased for me, but not even old Mrs Giap hid her surprise. That weekend she was coming for a toenail trimming – and even if I was the scholarship winner, my mother would not let me off this task.

“Keep still, Grandma Giap,” I told her as I wedged her brown foot between my knees. It reminded me of a mummy’s foot, all brown and dry and crumpled in strange places. When I clipped her toenails, I had to close my eyes and mouth because the pieces would fly hard and fast.

“Ah, my girl, you have done more schooling than I ever have in my seventy-eight years,” she sighed, and then told me that she had assumed Tully would get the scholarship. “She works harder than you. She’s probably smarter than you too.” Those Asian old folks had clearly never heard of the white lie. “But she didn’t deserve it.”

White lies be damned, sometimes I loved the truth.

I thought of Tully, and how her father had got her baptised just so she could get into a Catholic school. He’d called on Mrs Giap to be her godmother, as if Mrs Giap’s faith were a single-use instrument like a syringe. The difference between Tully and me wasn’t our smarts or our parents. The difference, I recognised, was that I was well liked and Tully wasn’t.

That didn’t alleviate the guilt I was feeling. I’d never thought I would get into Laurinda, and had even supposed that after Tully left Christ Our Saviour, things would be less tense without her panic attacks and tears. The only reason Tully had missed out on getting into the state selective school was because she’d been down for a week before the exam with the flu. I had never imagined Tully being left behind.

*

The following Monday, the start of school holidays, I called the number at the end of the letter.

“Laurinda Ladies College, Eunice Grey speaking.”

This was the first time I had spoken to someone from the school, and I was nervous. I introduced myself and she replied, “Ah, yes, Lucy, I was expecting your call.” Then there was a pause, as if she’d forgotten something she was supposed to say. For a moment I thought she’d got me mixed up with Tully. Then she remembered: “Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

She told me that I needed to come in for an interview next week with my parents, and we’d also sort out a few administrative things.

“Okay.”

“Tuesday at eleven?”

“Okay.”

“I look forward to meeting you then.”

“Okay.” Then I added again, “Thank you.”

It was only after I hung up that I realised I had not thought to check with my father to see if he was working a shift then. Mrs Grey had spoken so authoritatively that I presumed our meeting time was set. If my father couldn’t make it, I decided, I would go alone.

I was used to sorting out phone billing errors, insurance claims and doctors’ appointments for my parents. Sometimes, to avoid the hassle of explaining that I was acting on their behalf, I simply pretended to be my mother over the phone. She even let me forge her signature on forms. I’d never understood the brats on television who threw tantrums when their dads missed their soccer matches, as if the world of adults revolved around their games. If the Lamb grew up to be one of those boys who resented our father working on Saturdays and missing his school footy finals, he’d get a slap on the bum from either Mum or me for his selfishness. That was the way things were with our family.