Laurinda (21 page)

*

“Why weren’t you debating?”

This was a new voice.

You know, Linh, it really doesn’t take long for a fifteen-year-old girl to fall in love. A boy only needs to look at her in the right way or talk to her in the right way. To
see
her in the right way. I had been pretending to carefully examine a portrait of an old man with a monumental moustache, while trying to block out the praise fest going on behind me. I turned around and came face to face with Richard the Lionheart. He was standing close enough that I could see the freckles on his nose. He looked at the painting.

“Ah, the old hat.”

“What?” I knew it was rude, but “I beg your pardon” sounded like a middle-aged person’s reprimand.

“H.A.T.,” he explained. “Hugh Auburn the Third, founder of our august institution. His eyes are popping out because of the strain of holding his bladder in. It was a six-hour sitting. They had to capture every strand of his facial hair.”

Against my will, I smiled. I didn’t laugh because it wasn’t
that
funny, and I didn’t want to sound like a bimbo. You had to be very careful when you talked with boys in public: every sound and movement was magnified, blown out of proportion like a grotesque foil character balloon. One little prick and you were deflated.

“Our debate finished early, so a few of us came to see the Division A teams.”

Earlier, I’d heard debates going on in other rooms that sounded far more fun than ours. One room in particular sounded like one of the parliamentary Question Time sessions that they showed on television at three in the morning.

I didn’t know how to talk to boys who were past the nappy-wearing stage of life. “What did you think?” I asked. “The boys were pretty good, weren’t they?”

“No,” said Richard. “They were tools.”

Then I did something which I had not done too often this year. I laughed. I had not expected such honesty – or such audacity. You could never, ever say something like that with the Cabinet so close by; they had sonar hearing like bats. Fortunately, Aaron and co. were too engrossed in their conversation to hear.

That was another difference between girls and boys: boys were insulted only if you yelled it in their faces. Otherwise, they were oblivious.

Amber was telling them about some old Italian men who had tried to pick her up at the Amalfi Coast last summer. Richard turned his head around to look. I felt a little miffed, but the fact was everyone noticed Amber. She was like the sun: you could pretend it wasn’t there, but you’d still feel its heat.

“Those boys – what kind of tools were they?” I asked. “Screwdrivers or hand drills?”

Aaron would probably have tried to explain the double meaning of “tool” to me, but Richard just smiled. He put his hand on his chin and pretended to muse on this.

“Screwdrivers,” he decided. “Or maybe even sharpeners.”

“Sharpeners?”

“They were so anally retentive that if you shoved a pencil up Aaron’s arse, it would be filed to a lethal point.”

“Hee hee. You could sharpen a few of them and use them as darts,” I suggested. “It would bring new meaning to the term ‘backstab’. You could throw them at people and they’d get a visit from
E. coli
and friends.”

Richard laughed. His laugh was both awesome and embarrassing in its loudness and enjoyment. Someone had found me funny at last. It wasn’t as if I’d been hankering to be the class clown, but I felt like I’d lacked a personality for more than half a year. Finally someone had seen a small glimmer of what I once was – it was a blissful feeling.

“Colon and buddies.”

“Salmon Ella and the Fecal Crew.”

“Hey, that’s a great name for a band,” Richard said.

We were playing a game, and it was very different to the one being played beside us by Brodie and Trisha and Aaron, or by Amber and her fawning young men. Our game was not about demonstrating our intellect or sex appeal, or making mission statements. Our game had started off with having a laugh at another’s expense and had now become a
Simpsons
episode – random and unexpected. This was the first time – the first time! – since arriving at Laurinda that I had felt anything like the spontaneity and fun that I had felt back at Christ Our Saviour with you, Yvonne and Ivy.

“Were you that noisy group in Room 109?” I asked.

“Uh, yes, unfortunately.”

“Well, you sounded like you had more fun than we did.”

“Heh, heh.” He had been in the other room debating minimum wages too, but in Division B, against other Auburn boys. He told me how he knew a little bit about junior wages because his father hired young workers for his footwear shop. Junior wages were the only way that young people in his town got any sort of employment, he had argued, and they made it possible for his dad to keep the business going.

But a boy named Eamon had declared that Richard’s dad was too tight to pay proper legal wages and was exploiting the kids. Then the third speaker for the affirmative had concluded with, “Richard here is as mincing in his words as he is with the shoes he tries on in his dad’s shop when no one is watching!” The room had exploded in laughter, although a couple of boys – Richard’s mates – had yelled, “Low! Low!” and “His store sells
runners
, you morons.”

“Such idiots,” laughed Richard with genuine amusement. “That’s private schools for you. My dad thought he was sending me to
Dead Poets Society
. ‘O captain, my captain’ – my arse. Look at these ferals. Here come some more now.”

Harshan and an Asian boy named Anton approached – the same one Amber had thought would make a good boyfriend for me. This was Richard’s gang, I realised.

“We have to go now, Lucy,” Chelsea was saying to me. Then she saw Harshan and gave him a glare.

“See you,” Richard called after me. “Pass on my regards to Ella the Salmon.”

“Dork,” muttered Chelsea.

I loved Richard the Lionheart, I decided. I loved all his little trio.

“I
thought today was delivery day?” I asked Mum when I arrived home, eyeing the boxes of folded and ironed shorts in our living room.

There was something comfortingly chaotic about home. Things didn’t necessarily make more sense than the crazy order at school, but they were at least so random as to be reassuring. For example, after spending an afternoon trying to do quadratic equations, I might come home to see our cordless phone iced with toothpaste, or find a sock stuffed with crushed lamington. In the Lamb’s world, all sorts of combinations were possible.

“No, Sokkha didn’t come today,” my mother replied. “There’s a letter for you. I think it’s from the school.”

It was another reminder about participation in Saturday sports.

“Can you watch the Lamb?” my mother asked. “I’m going to chop up some hunks of bony meat on the kitchen floor. I don’t want him coming near the cleaver. Give him a banana.”

I picked him up and patted his back. In more than half a year, he did not seem to have got any heavier. I sat him down on the sofa and peeled a banana. Then I cut slices off for him. In the centre of each slice was a sort of face, the features formed by the black seeds. Each slice had a different expression. “Look, Lamby! Look at this!” He squealed with delight.

While he was eating his banana pieces, I took out the letter from the school and cut it in half. Then I folded two leaping frogs. I put one on the floor and pressed its back. It sprang forward. The Lamb thought it was magical. I gave him one and we had a paper frog race, though after a while his frog was all sticky with banana mush.

Dad returned from work and took the Lamb to the park, leaving me to finish cooking dinner with Mum. We laid out newspapers on the floor in front of the television. We had never used a dining table. When we had guests, they were usually the type to sit on the floor as well. At the end of the meal, we just scrunched up the newspaper and chucked it in the bin. It had never bothered me before, but now I understood just how uncivilised we were. We were like animals in a kennel, except that we cleaned up our own litter.

Things like this had begun to appal me, things which had never bothered me before, like the way my parents slurped their soup. When I say slurped, imagine the loudest and most obscene sucking sounds you can think of, sloppy chewing and gulping like cartoon characters. That sort of eating. But of course, even though it frustrated me no end, I could never tell them this.

I remembered that a few years ago, a friend of Dad’s from the factory, Jimmy Macintyre, had invited our family over to his house for dinner. I could see that Mum and Dad were trying to do their best, in unfamiliar surroundings, to behave with a different sort of decorum. Even holding a knife and fork properly took a lot of effort. It was not that they couldn’t do it – my parents were not clumsy imbeciles – but there was a graceful technique to scooping food into your mouth that was different from simple eating. And there was one thing they did glaringly wrong – they always ate with their mouths open. Chewing like cows.

It was a very uncharitable thought to have about your parents, but there it was, and once I thought it I could not undo what it was doing to my face. I was ashamed not of them, but of myself, because their kind of rudeness was not deliberate and had the same unselfconscious quality as a child picking its nose. Their rudeness was not directed at anyone, unlike the way Amber spoke to her mother.

But now, sitting on the floor, watching my parents became almost intolerable. I readied myself to make a simple request, to ask them to be less uncouth even though they would not see the point because we were at home, but still. As I opened my mouth to speak, my mother suddenly said, “The fabric cutter sliced the top of Sokkha’s middle finger right off. That’s why he didn’t turn up today. His wife just called to tell me.”

In a different household, this might have been met with exclamations of, “Oh, how awful,” and, “I hope he’s okay.” But my father simply asked, “Would you like me to do the delivery, then? Do you think he will be able to work again?”

“He’ll be back at it in a week. It’s only the first joint of his middle finger.”

“That’s good. Good for him, and good for us.”

*

“You have the hots for Richard Marr,” declared Brodie the next day. So that was his surname. She had saved me from having to look it up in the Auburn yearbook.

“Aww, how sweet, Lucy has a crush!” mooned Amber.

Richard and I were private, I thought, but I knew I had no right to think this. Nothing at this school was private. They had seen us talking together.

“He’s all right,” conceded Chelsea, “but his friends are really offensive.”

“What did he say to you?” asked Amber. “We heard you guys laughing about something.”

“Bacteria,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“We were telling jokes about bacteria.”

“Oh, wow, he’s perfect for you, Lucy!”

It was the first time that the attention of the Cabinet had focused on me alone. It was a nice feeling, actually. It was as if my “crush” – which I had neither confirmed nor denied – was showing them that I was a little like them, that I too could feel this way towards a boy. But my glory was short-lived.

“You know what?” added Chelsea. “That’s exactly the sort of pickup line I can imagine a geek like Richard using. To an Asian girl, no less.”

“Yeah, some people love Asian girls – and I’m not just talking about bacteria boys, either,” Amber declared bitterly. “My mum has a thing for Asian kids. She reckons they all listen to their parents and finish their homework and do whatever their mums and dads say without whingeing.”

That wasn’t fair! I thought. As if we wanted to go home to open buttonholes or iron collars or prepare stinking pig’s hocks for dinner, or boil eggs or wash floors or wipe the bums of babies or any of the other dozen jobs we had to do. It had nothing to do with us feeling self-righteous or better than anyone else.

“Well, well, well, Lucy, what can we tell you about Richard Marr?” asked Brodie. “We keep a mental file on him, as we do most of the Auburn boys. He sure comes from some bad blood.”

“What, he has AIDS?” I asked.

“No! No, no, no!” replied Brodie, taking me literally as usual. “Oh, dear. No. Just bad relations, bad
associations
.”

The Cabinet exchanged a look. They didn’t tell me what was so wrong with Richard, but they’d let it be known that they would not deign to be around such a person, and that there was something wrong with me if I chose to. I did not know what their
look
meant, but I knew that I wasn’t their friend, after all. I was their prop.

*

When Term Three began, Trisha was back on the piano at assembly. She was becoming a regular – it was her third performance this year.

A fortnight later, when Trisha walked offstage once more, Brodie turned to Amber and shook her head slowly. Amber understood and nodded. It was just too much. “She’s getting way up herself,” muttered Chelsea, who was always their ventriloquist’s doll. “Stage hog.”

The fifth time we saw Trisha MacMahon at the piano, the Cabinet decided it was time to deal with her.

“Now, Trisha, we understand that you are monumentally talented,” said Brodie one morning, “but maybe at assembly we could hear something other than Beethoven or Tchaikovsky?”

They formed a tight circle around Trisha so that the teachers would think they were just having a little chat as we walked to class.

“Oh, yes, of course,” nodded Trisha enthusiastically. “I’ll tell Mrs Grey I’ll play Rachmaninoff next week.”

What was worse than Trisha not picking up on Brodie’s polite cease-and-desist was the Cabinet finding out that Trisha herself was organising all these performances. She had probably volunteered for the Auburn assembly too.

“Geez, I’d hate to be up myself,” muttered Chelsea.

“Pardon me?” asked Trisha.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, I heard you.”

“Don’t you think that the opportunities at Laurinda should be shared?” queried Amber.

“But everyone likes my performances!” protested Trisha.

“Stop it, please, Trisha,” Brodie said quietly. Her quiet voice could stop arguments in their tracks. “Stop it before you embarrass yourself.”