Authors: Alice Pung
But Dad was taking this unexpected miracle of a scholarship so seriously that he got some time off work.
*
My father parked his Camry beside the only other car at the school, a silver BMW. The college was deserted, but the wooden front door of the main building opened when I pushed it. A stained-glass window depicting the college crest took up an entire wall. On the mahogany reception desk was a vase of heavy flowers, the likes of which I’d never seen in Stanley – they looked as if they’d been plucked from some heady Brazilian rainforest. Behind the desk was a framed oil painting of a woman staring myopically into the distance; she was wearing an academic gown and a hat that looked like a deflated jester’s cap.
“Where do we go?” my father asked. I had no idea. Perhaps we were meant to sit on the dark-brown leather chairs and wait. Then we heard a door open somewhere down the corridor. There were footsteps and a tall, broad woman stepped into the reception. “You must be Lucy Lam.” She smiled at me as if she wasn’t used to smiling, her white eggshell face cracking, her features scrambling around. Then she turned to my dad. “And you must be Mr Lam. Welcome to our school.”
Mrs Grey had short hair dyed the colour of rust, and wore a wasabi-coloured blouse. She towered over us, so I got a clear view of the sharp pyramid of her nasal cavity and also her mouth, with the maroon lipstick seeping through her tiny lip-wrinkles. As she led us down a corridor of polished wooden doors, all closed, I felt like I was going to confession: against the wall outside each door was a wooden pew long enough to seat three girls.
The first thing I noticed on entering Mrs Grey’s office was how empty it was. There was a small shelf of books against one corner of the room, a fireplace in the other, and an enormous shiny desk in the middle that seemed to be made of a single slab of wood picked up off a forest floor, sandpapered and polished. Mrs Grey sat down behind the desk, which was completely bare except for a silver penholder. My father and I each took one of the two brocade-upholstered chairs on the other side.
Mrs Grey told my father that my results for the exam were very good, and that my essay was outstanding. “You must be tremendously proud of her.”
“You are too kind,” my father said, “but my daughter Lucy here, she really isn’t so smart. We never knew she had smarts in her. We didn’t even think to get her extra tutoring. That’s why we were so surprised that she won the scholarship. Hah!”
“At Laurinda, we are looking for well-rounded students,” explained Mrs Grey. “And we frown upon coached students.”
My father looked confused, and I knew he was wondering why I had been chosen if they preferred untutored fat girls.
“At Laurinda, we pride ourselves on our diversity, hence this new Equal Access program,” Mrs Grey continued. “We are looking for natural talent and leadership potential. A student who goes to cram school and rote-learns things to pass exams does not meet the criteria.”
I was beginning to feel pretty good about myself.
“We are very pleased that you will be joining our college, Lucy,” she told me. “In your letter with your application, you mentioned that you were very involved in voluntary activities, and that your hobbies include fashion design?”
I did not tell her that this was because Mum sometimes sent me to church on the Sundays when she couldn’t make it, and that she made me do kitchen duty and visit the older ladies in the neighbourhood who didn’t have grandchildren who could help them translate their mail. Or that by fashion design, I meant helping Mum translate the designs of Coast & Co. fashions into tangibles that could be made for below minimum wage.
“You also mentioned,” Mrs Grey continued, “that you were a representative on your student council last year.”
I looked down at my hands.
“Here, we don’t have a student representative body, as we feel there is no need for one. The girls are engaged in all types of enriching activities – debating, music, theatre, musical theatre, sport. We do hope that you will be able to partake in many of these activities while you are here.”
I nodded, hoping to indicate that I would be an upstanding Laurinda citizen.
She told us about the history of the school, how it was one of the oldest ladies’ colleges in the state, and how it was a Christian institution, so we would have to go to church once every term.
Once every term! Back at Christ Our Saviour, church was once a week. There we studied Needlecraft and Home Economics, but here the girls studied Latin and Art History. I had come too late to learn the latter, Mrs Grey told me, but it was something I might have liked.
She handed me a navy-blue book and matching folder. “This is the student handbook, and in it you will find all you need to know about Laurinda,” she announced, as if the school itself were a great lady I was supposed to study up on. “And in this folder is our uniform list. Note that we only have one supplier, Edmondsons.”
She put both hands on her desk and stood. “Now I will show you around.” I noticed that her nails were painted the same colour as her lips.
“The rendering is very beautiful,” my father commented as we stood in front of the main building. “My Italian nephew Claude is a renderer on the Gold Coast.”
Dad was taking the “displaying diversity” part too far, I thought.
“It’s actually sandstone,” explained Mrs Grey. “Sydney Basin Hawkesbury sandstone. Very few buildings in Melbourne around the turn of the century were built with this material, which was imported from New South Wales.”
It was only much later that I realised sandstone was not the same as a rendered façade – back then I was just as lost as my father, and we stood there willingly being edified by a being who knew so much more than we did.
“We have three campuses at Laurinda,” Mrs Grey told us as she led us away from the main building. “The junior school is down the road. This is the middle school campus, for Years Seven to Ten. Next year, when Lucy is in senior school, she will go to the campus on Arcadia Avenue.”
We stood in the small lawn at the centre of the school, and Mrs Grey pointed up. The bells in the tower, she explained, were shipped from London in 1886. They stood in the Barry Wing, the oldest part of the school, named after Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who had sentenced Ned Kelly to hang.
She shuttled us down some more corridors, all the while continuing her commentary: in this wing, Dame Nellie Melba once had dinner with the attorney-general. In that wing two weeks ago, the vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne had held a meeting about the future of tertiary education with the leaders of the nation’s other top five universities. “It was an honour to host that delegation,” said Mrs Grey, with as much reverence as the nuns at Christ Our Saviour would have shown had a flock of archangels descended to announce the second coming.
She then showed us the new Performing Arts Centre, a massive spherical affair made of glass and metal that could seat five hundred people, and the seven individual rehearsal rooms, each containing a different set of musical instruments. My father made the appropriate wide-mouthed sounds of awe.
After the tour, Mrs Grey took us back to the main wing. “We’re looking forward to having you join the Laurinda community next year, Lucy,” she said to me, and then shook my father’s hand.
A
nd so, Linh, my final term at Christ Our Saviour went by very, very quickly. If I had known how quickly it would pass, I would not have spent so much time in class daydreaming about when my new uniform would arrive. I would not have walked around comparing our school’s rented pale-green three-bedroom cement music house across the road with Laurinda’s Performing Arts Centre. I would not have looked at our teachers and thought, geez, Mr Galloway is really nice but he spelt
liaise
wrong on the board. And I would not have been miffed when Ivy and Yvonne kept riling me. “We will miss you sooo much,” Ivy said. “Don’t forget us when you go to your rich school, bitch!”
But you kept bringing me back to myself, Linh, forcing me to notice those moments. You’d laugh like a mad person at Ivy’s awful jokes.
“What’s the definition of a smartarse?” she’d ask.
“I dunno,” you’d reply.
“Someone who can sit on a tub of ice-cream and tell you what flavour it is!”
“Ha! I have a better one. What’s brown and sticky?”
“Gross . . . we don’t want to know.”
“A stick! Ha!”
When old Mr Warren wore shorts to school, you said, “Hey, Sir, nice legs! You should be on a catwalk!”
“Linh, you watch it, or one day you’ll have a harassment claim against your name,” he retorted, but then he did a mock sashay with one hand on his hip and wiggled his bum. Those teachers, they cracked us up.
Tully sat quietly and miserably in our group, occasionally smiling like a moribund old lady who wanted relatives to think she was going to be okay. When we got our end-of-year science test back, you could see that Tully had got near full marks again. “Wow, Tully, you’re the smartest person I know,” you told her.
“Piss off, Linh. I don’t want to hear your bullshit!” She got up and left.
On my last day, the teachers took us Year Nines to the Botanical Gardens for a picnic. Even Sister Clarke came along. It was one of those days where the sky was all one bright shade of blue and stretched high, as though you’re living inside a balloon, warm and giddy. The sunshine slowed our heartbeats down bit by bit as we sat on the grass in our small satellite groups, but close to one another. Even the popular girls – Alessandra, Toula and their gang – were huddled nearby. Of course we had a hierarchy, but on days like this, when we shared all our food, and when Mr Warren and four other girls were strumming soft classics like “Stand By Me” and “More Than Words” on guitars they’d lugged from the music house, I was reminded what a nice place this was. The only break in the mood was when Alessandra turned to Yvonne and said, “Hey, nice blouse, Yvonne. Is it from the eighties?”
Yvonne just shrugged, but you replied, “I heard that the 1980s are coming back into fashion, Alessandra.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean the 1980s,” Alessandra said, “I meant the
1880s
.”
Before you could think of a comeback, there were five loud claps and we looked up to see Sister Clarke calling for Tully and me to stand up. Bewildered, we did. “I would like us all to congratulate these girls, your elected student representatives, for the superb job they have done this year.” People cheered. “Not only have they been tireless and enthusiastic in organising the Red Cross doorknock appeal, the Tournament of Minds team and the ‘Meet the Year Sevens’ barbecue, but they have successfully petitioned for the introduction of trousers as part of your uniform, so next year you’ll be warm during winter!”
Loud cheers erupted. Tully smiled at me wanly.
For years, we had been trying to get out of wearing ridiculous woollen skirts that kept our legs cold no matter how many pairs of tights we had on. Tully and I had argued that it was sexist and old-fashioned. The compromise we had reached with the school was that we would be allowed to wear woollen pants, but the school would also introduce blazers. Otherwise, in our all-grey woollen jumper and trousers combo, we’d look like a prison work gang.
Until then, the entire school had only had twelve black blazers of different sizes, which students borrowed whenever we had to do out-of-school presentations or debating. But every girl next year would have her own smart new jacket. With no trimmings on the sleeves or collar, and a detachable college logo on the pocket, our blazers could also double as suit jackets for job interviews. For mothers who could sew, they could be made from Butterick’s pattern no. 6578. All they had to do was buy and attach the embroidered Christ Our Saviour crest. My mother had made a mock-up of the jacket, and Tully and I had advocated for it in student–staff meetings.
Sister Clarke brought out a surprise cake. It was only a Safeway mudcake, and she had six more in plastic bags on the barbecue bench for the whole of Year Nine, but this one had white lettering on it that someone had done with an icing pen. “FAREWELL,” it said, with my name below in cursive.
“It has been a wonderful three years having you at our college,” Sister Clarke said. “You have contributed so much to the school, not only by being involved in so many activities, but also through your strong friendships with your classmates. You will be dearly missed. We wish you all the very best at your new school. Remember, you will always be welcome here at Christ Our Saviour . . .”
“Woah!” you interrupted, because you didn’t want me to sook in front of the class – that’s how good a friend you were, Linh – “this cake is awesome! Mr Warren, you’d better not stand too close, because the knife’s coming out and the first cut is the deepest!”
When the buses dropped us back at the school to collect our bags, we saw a group of St Andrew’s boys loitering near our fence.
“Ooh, Yvonne, your lover boy is here!” teased the girls.
“Shut up,” said Yvonne.
We all knew that one of the boys, Hai, had the hots for Yvonne. When we grabbed our bags and headed towards the gate, he and his mates were there to greet us, every one of them dressed in black T-shirts and jackets and jeans. “Yo, Yvonne, check this out, me and mah homies are going to sing you a song, baby gurrllll.”
“Oh my god, so embarrassing,” said Yvonne, covering her face with one hand.
All his mates made gangsta gestures, pointing towards him like he was a South-East Asian Nick Carter, and he started to belt out “Quit Playing Games (with My Heart)” – but
in Maltese
. As the only Viet kid in a class full of kids from Malta, he spoke Maltese better than he spoke English. When he finished serenading Yvonne, we all clapped, and then Hai dropped to one knee and asked if Yvonne would be his girlfriend.
She squealed and laughed and said, “Oh, you are too embarrassing,” and of course we egged her on until she eventually said yes, which was what she had wanted to do in the first place. Hai jumped up and squeezed Yvonne in a massive bear hug and then kissed her cheek, and all the while she was shrieking, “Eww, gross!”