Our Australian Girl

by Alice Pung

  When her mother left, she walked towards the kids and they cheered. ‘Woohoo, Marly! So did you do it? Did you earn ten bucks?’

  ‘Yeah,’ muttered Marly. ‘I did it.’

  Marly tried to walk into the school building, but the other kids stopped her. ‘Come on,’ they urged. ‘We all brought along our cards! We wanna see yours! We wanna do some swaps.’

  ‘I don’t have them here,’ Marly replied. She wished they would all stop bugging her. She was feeling rubbish enough as it was and just wanted to forget all about it.

  ‘What?’ Kane sneered. ‘Ha! I knew it. I knew she was lying. She’d never make ten dollars in two days.’

  ‘I did too, Kane, you moron!’ shouted Marly. She hated being called a liar. After all, it was her mum who had lied, not her. ‘I worked all Saturday! I ironed a hundred collars, and I got paid ten bucks.’

  ‘Then show us your cards,’ Kimberly shouted back at her. ‘How come you don’t have them with you?’

  ‘We didn’t go to the milk bar,’ muttered Marly. She looked at all the faces waiting for an explanation. What the hell, she thought, I may as well tell them the truth, otherwise they’re just going to keep pestering me. ‘Mum made us go to Kmart instead,’ she cried angrily, ‘and she made me spend my ten dollars on this!’ Marly held out her umbrella for all to see – her bright yellow, sensible, boring, ugly men’s umbrella, which she hated more than anything else in the world.

  ‘An umbrella?’ laughed Tiffany. ‘Are you for real?’

  Marly wished she could whack Tiffany one with the umbrella. She felt fed up and cheated and embarrassed. Worst of all, she knew that if the other kids didn’t stop hounding her, she was going to cry. She felt a lump rise in her throat, and wet prickles of water behind her eyes waiting to leak. In fact, she wished she could whack all the gawking kids standing around her.

  Instead, she pushed open her umbrella and thrust it forward like a shield. She ran into school, heading straight for the loos – she didn’t want to be a sook in front of these idiots.

  AS the school day dragged on, Marly did  her best to ignore the mean kids like Kane, who flicked scratched Donkey Kong cards in front of her face, and teased her with sneery comments.

  At lunchtime, Marly sat on the green bench near the school field, eating the pork floss sandwich her mum had made her. She missed her cousins, who had left the school last term to go to one close to their new home. They hadn’t cared about what the other kids thought of them. And when she was with them, Marly hadn’t cared either. She wished she didn’t care so much today. She tried not to let it get to her, but she hated the idea of the other kids laughing at her, or, worse, thinking she was a liar.

  Marly didn’t like how she drifted in and out of different groups from week to week, and how being accepted in a group depended on whether she had the latest toys. Her cousins had included her because she was fun!

  Marly always carried some rolled up elastic in her pocket – a present from Rosie – just in case anyone felt like a game. But no one ever did, because the whole school was now into Donkey Kong. Marly hoped that this fad would fade away soon, just like yoyos and Masters of the Universe toys had. She was fed up with always watching others play with new stuff and being left out. Sometimes, she was able to convince kids to give their old stuff to her instead of the bin. But no one wanted to play the old games with her.

  Marly was lost in her thoughts when a ‘Hey there!’ made her look up. A tall girl stood in front of her. She had curly, dark brown hair, and skin the colour of a chocolate Big M.

  ‘Hi,’ said Marly, surprised and a little bit suspicious, in case this was another kid coming to tease her.

  ‘I’m Yousra,’ declared the girl.

  ‘I’m Marly.’

  ‘I know,’ Yousra laughed. ‘I heard about you.’

  Great, thought Marly. She knows I’m the idiot kid whose mum made her buy an umbrella with the ten bucks she earned.

  ‘I’m new this year, and I’m in Mrs Smiley’s class,’ Yousra told her. Mrs Smiley was the Grade Five teacher, which meant that Yousra was a whole grade above Marly. Marly didn’t know what this older girl wanted, and wished she’d go away and leave her alone.

  ‘Let’s have a look at your umbrella, then.’

  If this girl was trying to make fun of her, Marly wouldn’t let her. As if she’d be stupid enough to carry the umbrella around at lunchtime like a sissy! ‘It’s hanging on the rack next to my bag in the corridor,’ said Marly. ‘You can go and have a look at it if you want.’

  Yousra stayed where she was. Marly had to crane her neck to look up at her.

  ‘Wanna hear a funny story?’ asked Yousra.

  Not really, Marly thought. She didn’t like the teasing tone in this older girl’s voice.

  Yousra didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I made thirteen dollars at my job by working all day last Saturday.’

  Show off, thought Marly.

  ‘I was hoping to get some Fimo. We used that stuff in art last year and I made a ring. It was really cool ’cause I’m really good at art. Mrs Stubinger said that it should be in a gallery, it was that good.’

  She really is a huge show-off, thought Marly. She remembered using Fimo in art, too. It was a sort of modelling clay that you put in an oven to set.

  ‘I really, really wanted some Fimo because I knew I could make grouse things,’ Yousra continued. ‘But when I took the money home to my parents, they only let me keep fifty cents!’ Yousra’s eyes widened. ‘You can’t even get half a packet of Fimo with that. So I was smart about it. I asked them for ten cents more.’

  Marly began to find this story interesting.

  ‘So my mum gave me the extra ten cents,’ said Yousra. ‘And I bought three packets of Hubba Bubba bubblegum. Grape, Original and Strawberry flavours. Three different colours. I chewed up the bubble gum until it lost its flavour  . . .’

  Marly stopped listening. What a pointless story, she thought. No wonder this girl doesn’t have any friends her own age. She talks on and on without giving the other person a chance to say anything!

  ‘Hey! Are you listening to me?’ Yousra demanded. ‘I know that Hubba Bubba goes really, really hard if you leave it in the sun. Have you ever felt underneath some of our tables at school? Anyway, I figured that I could make my own Fimo with the bubblegum  . . .’

  Blah blah blah, thought Marly, as she nodded her head, pretending to listen to Yousra carry on.

  ‘. . . and I made little animals with it. I left them on the windowsill so they would get hard.’

  Marly wondered where all this was leading. She felt her eyes glaze over with boredom.

  ‘But when I came home from school, my purple elephant was missing!’ Yousra cried. ‘Then my mum came into the room and, for no reason, smacked me on the bum!’

  ‘What?’ asked Marly, jolting to attention at the mention of being smacked.

  ‘All because my stupid three-year-old brother Awi had got to the elephant and nearly swallowed it. “I had to force him to spit it out,” my mum said. “He could have choked!”’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Marly.

  ‘But you know what the worst part was? My mum chucked out the rest of my bubblegum! All three packs!’ Yousra sighed as she sat down on the bench next to Marly, shoulders slumped. ‘I guess that wasn’t such a funny story after all,’ she said. ‘But I had to tell someone.’

  Marly suddenly felt much better about the umbrella. At last, another girl had a mum like hers! ‘Mums, they can do mean things,’ Marly said.

  Yousra looked over at Marly’s lunch. ‘Hey, what’s that in your sandwich? It looks like sawdust.’

  ‘It’s pork floss.’

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘Pork fried for hours and hours in a pan so it becomes like fairy floss,’ Marly explained.

  ‘Ooh. Can I have some?’

  ‘Um, sure.’ Marly pulled off a piece of her sandwich and gave it to Yousra. She watched Yousra eat it and waited for her
to wrinkle her nose and spit it out, like the other kids would have done – well, if they’d even dared to try it. But Yousra did neither of those things.

  ‘Hey, this is good,’ she said.

  Marly smiled and started to relax. When they finished eating, Marly thought about taking the elastic out of her pocket. She worried Yousra might think it was daggy, but there was still half an hour of lunchtime to go and she missed having someone to play with. ‘I’ve got an elastic,’ Marly said shyly, showing Yousra.

  ‘Cool!’ Yousra said. ‘I’m really good at elastics. I can show you a few tricks.’

  Marly discovered that Yousra was fun and fearless, and didn’t care what other kids said or thought. They started hanging out together, and Marly began to enjoy lunchtimes and recess, because she was able to be herself again.

  ‘AWW no! No, don’t do that!’ Yousra yelled.  ‘Don’t scratch that circle, that’s not where the birthday cake is hiding! Do you want fifty extra points or not? Then scratch that other one to the left. Believe me, I know, I watched Rory play the exact same card just the other day!’

  Marly watched Yousra lean over Kane and Kimberly as they duelled with their scratch cards.

  ‘Bugger off, you abo!’ Kane shouted.

  Marly looked at Yousra, wondering what her friend would do. She knew that ‘abo’ was a bad word for an aboriginal person. Marly hadn’t realised that Yousra might be aboriginal. But then again, Kane had often called Marly a Jap, and she wasn’t Japanese, so that idiot had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘Oi! My family’s from Egypt,’ Yousra declared.

  Egypt! thought Marly. Until now, she hadn’t realised that she had a friend from the land of Pharoahs. She could see Yousra was ready for a fight, and so she pulled her away from Kane and Kimberly, leaving them to bicker over their cards. But Marly was surprised and proud that her friend had stood up to the bullies. When Marly had been teased, she’d just walked away and tried to ignore them.

  ‘Like, pyramids and mummies and stuff? That Egypt?’ Marly asked Yousra.

  ‘Yeah.’ Yousra held her chin high and proud.

  ‘But you don’t look Egyptian,’ Marly replied.

  ‘Oh yeah? What’s an Egyptian supposed to look like?’

  ‘Umm  . . . I don’t know,’ admitted Marly, not wanting to confess that all she knew of Egypt was from pictures she’d seen in books: flat paintings on walls of tombs that showed brown people with heavy eye make-up and lots of gold jewellery.

  But before Marly had a chance to reply, a large woman wearing a long brown robe and black headscarf walked through the school’s front gate. Everyone in the playground stopped what they were doing and stared. Some of the kids snickered. Marly heard Yousra groan next to her as the woman walked over to where they were standing. ‘Oh, Mum,’ sighed Yousra.

  The woman was not how Marly thought an Egyptian mum would look. Marly had imagined a Cleopatra fringe, pleated white dress and sandals.

  Yousra’s mum was carrying a tin bowl. Inside it was rice, macaroni and beans. She said something that Marly didn’t understand, while handing Yousra a spoon, and Yousra replied in the same language. It sounded like Yousra and her mum were telling each other off in quiet hisses. Yousra’s mum turned to leave, and Yousra explained, ‘My mum only speaks Arabic.’

  As Yousra’s mum walked out the gate, some of the kids sniggered and hissed after her.

  Yousra sat down on a bench and quietly ate her lunch. Marly could tell that Yousra was really embarrassed by what had just happened. She’d never seen her friend care about what the other kids thought before, but she could see that they were getting to her now.

  Yousra turned to Marly. ‘I wish my mum would stop bringing me lunch. How hard is it to pack a sandwich?’

  Marly felt sorry for Yousra. She knew what it was like to have annoying parents, but at least hers had never brought her a cooked lunch to school.

  ‘Pwoah!’ said Kane and some other kids as they came over to have a look at Yousra’s lunch. ‘It smells gross. Something must have crawled in your bowl and died.’

  ‘Shut up, Kane, it’s just the garlic sauce,’ replied Yousra.

  ‘I think it smells quite tasty,’ said Marly. She liked garlic – her mum used lots of it in cooking.

  To make her friend feel better, Marly told Yousra about the time her cousins brought her Coco Pops for lunch. Yousra laughed her usual loud chuckle that sounded like a firecracker going off. Marly was pleased to see that she was back to her usual happy self. It’s good to share embarrassments, she thought.

  Two weeks later, after Yousra’s mum had brought her lunch in again, Marly confessed to Yousra that her real name was Marlin.

  ‘That’s a great name,’ said Yousra. ‘Why are you so embarrassed by it?’

  ‘It’s not a girl’s name.’

  ‘Yes it is.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Marly insisted. ‘Before I came to Australia, I was called MyLinh. When we got here, I heard a band on the radio called the Jackson Five. They were the best thing I had ever heard. Their music made me want to get up and dance like crazy. One of the singers was named Marlin. I thought that she must have been the lead singer because she was the girl. Turns out, none of the band are girls. One of them just sounded like a girl because he had a high voice. They were five brothers, and one of the brothers was named Marlon, with an ‘o’. So I’d got the name wrong in the first place. But anyway, I named myself after a member of the Jackson Five.’

  ‘Ha!’ laughed Yousra. ‘So funny.’

  ‘But you know what? The lead singer, the one who sounded so much like a girl, do you know who he is?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Yousra.

  ‘Michael Jackson. He was, like, only about twelve then.’

  ‘No way!’ Everybody had heard of the singer Michael Jackson. Thriller was the biggest-selling album of all time – everyone knew that. ‘That’s so cool!’

  Marly smiled. She was glad that Yousra thought Michael Jackson was cool too. ‘Hey Yousra, I want to show you something.’

  Marly had been practising for a while, and she knew the whole routine for Michael Jackson’s song, ‘Billie Jean’. Pulling her socks up high, she showed off a few dance moves. She made her arms into robot arms, bending them at the elbow and moving her hands up and down. She leapt and twirled across the asphalt, bobbing her head forwards and backwards.

  ‘Woohoo!’ cried Yousra. ‘Man, you rock. I can’t believe you can dance like a machine. You’ve really got to show everyone else. Oi, youse!’ hollered Yousra to some kids in the schoolyard. ‘You guys got to see thi  . . .’

  ‘No!’ shouted Marly. ‘No, Yousra. I’m not showing it to them!’

  Marly was touched that her friend was so proud of her. Her family just laughed at her, or told her to stop messing about. She didn’t dare imagine what the other kids in school would say if they saw her dancing! They would make fun of her forever, she bet.

  Yousra looked surprised. ‘But you’re so good at it.’

  ‘I was only showing you,’ said Marly, ‘because you’re my best friend.’ The moment Marly said the words, she knew that they were true.

  ‘Aww, thanks Marly,’ said Yousra. Then, when four little kids from Grade Three gathered around them to see what the fuss was about, Yousra said to them, ‘Get lost. Nothing to see here.’

  Marly knew then that she had finally found a loyal friend at this school. She got the feeling Yousra felt the same way – why else would a Grade Five girl want to hang around with someone a year younger? That made Marly feel terrific.

  ‘SO what is your job anyway?’ Marly asked Yousra as she chewed on a Redskin in the canteen. Once a week, Yousra came to school with forty cents and treated them both to sweets. Marly knew that Yousra earned this money from her job, and she wanted to find out how she earned it, and to be part of the action.

  ‘It’s a secret,’ smiled Yousra. ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘That’s not fair!’ cried Marly. ‘I told you all
about my awful job ironing collars. Do you work at home with your mum?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you work for a relative?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you work in a factory?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I’m eleven years old. How would I get a job in a factory?’

  ‘Do you work in a shop, then?’ Marly was getting frustrated.

  ‘Sort of  . . . Hey, do you want to hear something my brother Awi did? This is really funny, all right?’

  Marly knew Yousra was just trying to change the subject with a story about how her baby brother had peed in an empty shampoo bottle, left it on the side of the bathtub as a joke, but ended up with it on his head when his mum washed his hair.

  ‘Hah! He had meant to get me, but he got a taste of his own medicine!’ Yousra chuckled away, and didn’t seem to notice that Marly wasn’t enjoying the joke as much as she was.

  Every day, Marly would bug Yousra about her job. But every day, Yousra just smiled and changed the subject. The more Yousra kept her job a secret, the more irritated Marly felt. They were supposed to be best friends! Well, thought Marly, if she won’t tell me and doesn’t trust me, I’ll just have to find out for myself.

  ‘Mum, can I stay behind today after school to play on the play equipment?’ Marly asked, when her mum walked her to school that morning. The school was only a ten-minute walk from their house, and so Marly was sometimes allowed to stay back to play, but only if there were other kids around, too.

  But today, Marly was not going to stay behind. She knew she shouldn’t lie to her mother about where she was going, but she had to find out where Yousra worked. Marly was angry that she had to be so sneaky, but this was Yousra’s fault, she told herself. If Yousra wasn’t so sneaky, then Marly wouldn’t have to secretly follow her after school.

  ‘How many kids will be there?’ her mother asked.

  ‘A few,’ Marly lied again. ‘So can you pick me up at half-past four instead of the normal time?’