by Alice Pung
She actually used the words “all and sundry”, Linh.
“Oh yeah?” demanded Gina, but her voice was fearful. “Who told you that?”
“It doesn’t matter who told who what.” That was Chelsea – she was less articulate. “If you have a problem with any of us, you should have the guts to say it to our faces.”
“Yeah,” said Amber. “I thought we were friends.”
Gina looked stunned: she’d never so much as contemplated the possibility that the Cabinet would consider her a friend.
“I’m hurt that you’ve been backstabbing me, Gina,” said Amber. “I thought that, as friends, we could joke around about stuff like that. I didn’t mean it! If anyone is the slut, it is obviously me.”
Gina was even more flabbergasted.
“Come on, who was the harlot who came back with the tacky pen?” Amber pulled it out and waved it around for emphasis.
“Yeah,” Chelsea added. “Imagine all the tricks Amber had to turn to get her cheap materialistic thrills.”
“She has no shame,” added Brodie.
Gina cracked a tentative smile. Then, seeing it was okay by the Cabinet, she started to laugh.
Amber flung an arm around Gina’s shoulder. “Here, my fellow ho.” Then she did something that took Gina completely by surprise. “Have this.” She handed Gina her flashing pink pen.
“Oh,” stammered Gina, “Oh . . . are you sure?”
“Of course! Chicks before dicks!”
After they left, Gina was in shock. “Oh my god, Amber just gave me this!” she said, as if Katie and I hadn’t just witnessed the whole thing. But I knew that Amber’s enthusiasm over her gift was all a show. She had only pretended to be proud of the thing to heighten its value, before she offloaded it. Gina had pen envy, and the Cabinet knew just how to fuel it.
“I feel so bad,” confessed Gina. “I was a backstabbing bitch to her over some stupid joke.”
“Yeah, that was real nice of them,” said Katie wistfully, and I looked at my friend, stunned.
After school that day I got off the train at Sunray and headed for the indoor market. “Bring meat home, four hundred grams of beef,” my mother had instructed me the night before. “Don’t pick the pieces that are brown, and don’t loiter.”
At Vinh and Robina’s Meats, Tully’s mother greeted me as I walked in the store. “Wah, look at you, Lucy, so smart in your uniform!”
At school I may have looked like a try-hard, super-polished version of everyone else in my immaculate uniform, but in this neighbourhood I stood out like a beacon, a sign to small business owners and factory workers that the next generation would belong to a different class. This was an outfit not made for messing up, or for hacking away at cow carcasses, or for hiding in back rooms threading needles. This outfit was made for a seated life, a life of air-conditioning, long lunches and weekends away in semi-rural cottages.
“How are you finding the work at the school?” asked Tully’s mother.
“Okay, Mrs Cho,” I answered. “There’s a lot more of it than at Christ Our Saviour.”
“Of course there is!” she exclaimed. “Those good schools always give you more work. It’s how they get students used to working hard at university. Afterwards, when they all become professionals, they have good work habits and get promoted sooner.”
Tully’s mother didn’t just talk to you; she lectured. She also had a pretty warped idea of how the world worked.
“So what subjects did you pick this year, Lucy?”
I listed them, one by one. Mrs Cho’s eyes widened when I finished. “No advanced maths?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m no good at it, Mrs Cho.”
“But how are you going to get into university without taking an advanced subject?”
I didn’t dare tell her that I also intended to drop most of my science subjects when I got to Year Eleven next year, Linh. She would have had a heart attack and collapsed on her tray of duck livers. Instead, I smiled, because within our community a smile often seemed to be the right answer to anything if you’re a girl. “I don’t want to be a doctor or anything like that.”
“What do you think you will do, then? Law?”
“No,” I confessed. “I’d like to get into teaching.”
“Wah! What a waste, with you being so smart. Aiyoh, such a waste. So much smarter than Tully!”
I didn’t take the bait. “Not sure about that.”
“Ah, that Tully!” Mrs Cho sighed. “Uncle says she’s lazy and, well, you know, that kind of ding-dong way she has – so helpless and impractical. We despair. What will she ever make of herself? She’s not as stable or as hardworking as you are, Lucy Lam.”
Even though I didn’t really like Tully, it seemed unfair that her own mother would talk about her like this.
“Ay, ay,” she said, waving me closer. “I know why Tully did not get into the school. Her English is not as good as yours. I remember now, Lucy, you won the Year Eight poetry competition! Yes! You!”
I smiled again, although by now my jaw was beginning to feel sore.
“Maybe you can come over and give Tully some lessons in English, huh?” she asked. I said yes to be polite, knowing that the last thing Tully needed was tutoring from me.
Mrs Cho handed me the bloodied block of steak in a plastic bag with a knot tied at the top. “Well, pass on our regards to your mum and dad. They must be very proud of you.”
“Yes, I will. Thanks, Mrs Cho.”
*
There was a letter from the school in our mailbox when I arrived home.
Dear Mr Lam,
It appears that your daughter is not participating in Laurinda’s extracurricular Physical Education Programme. We stress the importance of physical education for the overall health of every student, and for the beneficial effects of teamwork.
Lucy has been signed up for netball but has not attended any games this term. Please ensure that she . . .
I dropped the letter in the kitchen bin and went to the garage, where I found the Lamb in his cardboard box. He listlessly banged his rattle and one-eyed terry-towelling duck together.
“Yo, Lamb,” I said, picking him up. “What have you been up to today?”
His nose was running, so I tore a sheet from a roll of toilet paper Mum had left nearby and wiped his face. A streak of blue stained his cheek. That was strange, I thought; I hadn’t seen textas in his box today. Then I looked at the wad in my hands and realised that the tissue was also daubed blue. I looked back at the Lamb, and wiped his nose again. His snot was the same blue that a Toilet Duck cube would turn the water after you flushed.
“Ma!” I yelled. “Ma, come and have a look at this!”
“Coming, coming. No need to yell the house down.” My mother came back into the garage with Lamb’s bottle and set it down next to her overlocker. “What is it?”
“His snot is blue!”
“Let me see.”
I showed her the tissue, and as she took it from me I noticed that her fingertips were the same blue. After examining the tissue, she looked at the pile of denim jeans by her sewing machine. “Oh, crap,” she sighed. “He’s breathing it all in.”
She was right: the Lamb had been inhaling the floating blue-dyed dust motes whenever my mother shook out a pair of jeans or trimmed their edges in preparation for the overlocker. I imagined the branches on the tiny trees of his lungs overhanging with blue threads. Enough time and breathing, I imagined, and each organ would be encased in a little knitted blue pouch.
“Aiyoh,” my mother sighed. “We need to find a better place for him to sit during the day.” Then she added, needlessly, “Don’t tell your father.”
She took the Lamb back in her arms. “Poor little Lamby.” She handed him to me. “Take him to the kitchen and sit him down in his high chair while you do your homework. Give him his bottle too.”
Later, when my mother came out for a coffee break and saw the crumpled let
ter in the bin, she pulled it out. “Why did you throw this away? What does it say?”
“It’s nothing, Mum. The school just wants us to play sport on Saturdays.”
“Then go if you want.”
“Nah.”
“Aha! You can even take the Lamb with you. Then he won’t have to stay with me in the garage.”
My mum didn’t understand some things, Linh, like the way you couldn’t have a baby on a hockey field or netball court. To her, sport was play, and if I wanted to play with some of the girls in my class, then the Lamb could come too, and the ones who were off the court could look after him. She had no idea that we would have to go to Alberdine Park on Saturday mornings and stay there for four or five hours. There was even a compulsory sports uniform, which consisted of twelve different items, all bearing the college crest: two polo tops and two swim caps (one for school events and one for house events), bathers, spray jacket, microfibre trackpants, leggings, athletic shorts, a netball skirt, a cap, socks and a sports bag.
My mother had no idea how seriously Laurinda took its play.
Mrs Leslie, my remedial English teacher, was the most attractive older lady I had ever seen. She was skinny in a way that women my mother’s age in Stanley weren’t, and the warm lines around her eyes made her even more lovely. All her blouses were silky and pastel, and all her cardigans were the colour of small woodland animals. She came in four times a week, just for me. The two of us sat in the corner of the library when everyone else was in normal English class.
I felt very lucky indeed.
She was also Amber’s mother.
We were studying a book called The Great Gatsby, which was about a rich man in a pink suit who had huge parties in his house on a long island shaped like an egg. I thought he was possibly gay, with his fashion sense, and that his love for that rich fairy-floss Daisy was fake because all she did was play tennis and complain about the heat. Who Gatsby really wanted to be with was Tom, which is why he killed Tom’s mistress. There was a line in it that said Gatsby would never look at another man’s wife, which supported my theory.
I was really looking forward to sharing my insight with Mrs Leslie. I never spoke up in normal English class but I thought that we’d have deep and meaningful talks since she was the head of the Book Club. But no, in the first lesson she gave me an essay structure to learn (introduction, body and conclusion). She had also come armed with vocabulary lists based on the book.
She told me she liked how I expressed things so concisely and asked if I had read The Lord of the Flies.
“No, but I might know him.”
“Pardon?”
“I know the leading distributor of jeans zippers in Australia,” I joked, but she didn’t find it funny. I guessed it wasn’t the time to tell her your joke, Linh, about how Hamlet was the son of Piglet.
So I sat there miserably as Mrs Leslie tested me on words I didn’t know, like “extemporise” and “supercilious”.
Then she read passages out to me and asked me to explain what they meant. I had no idea why she was testing my comprehension as if I were ten years old, so at first I replied with stuff like, “This passage shows that the story is set in New York, which is a rich and cultured part of America.”
“Have you been to New York, Lucy?” she asked me.
“No.”
“Then you can’t make generalisations like that. Not all of New York is wealthy or cultured. Think about the valley of ashes.”
Eventually, I started to cotton on to what Mrs Leslie wanted. My answers became more detailed, and not all about plot. I learned to judge the characters as I’d judge real people. “Nick secretly admires Gatsby but due to his class and circumstances, and also to him being related to Daisy, he can’t openly admit it. To do so would be to admit that he hangs around shady people and condones their dodge,” I would write in my essays. Or: “The green light is supposed to be a metaphor for Gatsby’s hope, because it is far away and flashes and blinks, to emphasise that hope is often elusive. But no one ever speaks about Gatsby’s envy, which the green could also symbolise.”
I had no idea why, but this last comment really did it for Mrs Leslie. Her brown eyes lit up. “You are really engaging with the text and learning the skill of analysis,” she praised. “What do you mean by Gatsby’s envy?”
I thought of all the people I knew in Stanley who looked at the houses along Ambient Estates with the same metal-rimmed, wide-eyed Eckleburg-yearning as those living in the valley of ashes. I thought of how hard we tried – you, me, Yvonne, Ivy – to look sophisticated with our imitation perfumes and gold buttons and makeup, when true Laurindans never wore such stuff, and how the plainness of their clothes did not conceal the fact that their tops were made of Angora and their shoes of calfskin. I’d only been at the school for a few weeks when I realised we were the ones standing on the shore in our pink suits, suddenly tacky, suddenly left so far behind, and that – unlike Gatsby – most of us could not afford a boat to take us across to the other side. The only way to get there was to do it individually, sink or swim, and of course very few swimmers made it.
“Gatsby wants the status they have, but he can’t get it no matter how rich he becomes, because his wealth is shonky . . . I mean, ill-gotten.”
“Spot on, Lucy!” cheered Mrs Leslie.
Then she asked me how I was settling into the school.
“Good,” I said. “Katie has been a good friend to me.”
“Katie,” Mrs Leslie said slowly. “Is that Katherine Gladrock?”
“Yes,” I replied.
Then she chuckled. “Sweet girl. But awfully dull.”
*
For my first History essay for Ms Vanderwerp, I received thirteen out of twenty. Thirteen out of twenty! A bare pass. She had also written a note: “A good effort, but your argumentative skills need improving. Please come and see me.” And she got my name wrong again. I don’t know how difficult it was to forget “Lucy”, but somehow she did.
Ms Vanderwerp’s office was a small cramped corner thing, bigger than a broom closet but only just. It smelled of Pine O Cleen, and on an overhead shelf she had three cartons of wipes and two boxes of tissues.
“Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “I can see that this is the first History essay you’ve written. It was a good attempt. But you didn’t sustain a consistent argument about what could have caused World War One.”
“My argument is that many things happened to cause the war, and no one thing made it happen.”
Ms Vanderwerp looked at me for a while, then told me that my conclusion was satisfactory but that I had to structure my argument to reflect it. She allowed me to resubmit because it was my first essay. When she returned it with a sixteen out of twenty – a mark that would have made Tully weep inconsolably – I felt like I’d got the hang of things.
So for my next two assignments, I followed the same formula. Many things in history happened to cause X, Y or Z. There was no decisive moment.
“Lucy, your writing skills are vastly improved,” Ms Vanderwerp told me, “but the questions are asking you to choose a side and argue for it.”
“But why do I have to choose a side? There are so many sides to a historical event, as you’ve taught us.”
“Yes, Lucy. But the nature of the task is to write argumentatively. So you have to choose a side, acknowledge the other side and then defeat its arguments. Am I making sense to you?”
She was making sense, but I wasn’t sure whether I should be forming opinions about grave historical events in six hundred words or less. What did an argument I made about who started World War One have to do with anything? I didn’t even get to decide what we’d eat for dinner, or when I could go out, or who I could sit next to in class. Who cared what a fifteen-year-old thought?
When the bell rang, we stood up to leave. I watched Ms Vanderwerp walk away to her next class. There was something slightly blurred about her whole being, as if she were a watercolour painting that someone couldn’t
be bothered finishing; not only that, but they didn’t even care enough not to smudge it with their smock sleeve.
*
No one had explained to me why Ms Vanderwerp carried wipes around with her at all times, but after my fourth History class I figured it out. The Cabinet showed me.
One afternoon Amber came to class looking pallid and unwell. She took out a pocket pack of tissues and placed it on her desk. “Are you okay?” I asked. She hadn’t seemed sick that morning.
She nodded. When Ms Vanderwerp was handing out a photocopy about America’s involvement in World War Two, Amber let out a massive, whooping sneeze just as she was near her desk. Ms Vanderwerp jumped backwards, almost falling over Katie. All the beige seeped out of her face as she righted herself. Instead of saying, “Bless you, Amber,” Ms Vanderwerp kept her distance and opened all the windows of the room. “Amber, dear, would you like to go to the sick bay? You look quite unwell.”
“No, I should be right, Ms V.”
Then I noticed Amber’s smile, and how the colour of her face didn’t particularly match her neck. I saw what I hadn’t noticed before – that whenever anyone coughed, Ms Vanderwerp would open a window. Whenever anyone sneezed, she would turn around towards the whiteboard as if she needed to write something, or rub something out.
I heard Brodie snigger behind Ms Vanderwerp’s back while she busied herself writing on the board, and I realised that what Amber had done was all an act – an act of talcum powder torture, carefully timed to churn up Ms Vanderwerp’s worst fears.
*
That same afternoon, when I returned home, Mum had fixed the Lamb’s blue snot problem. She had caught a bus to Sunray Spotlight and bought five metres of very, very fine bridal netting, which she hemmed at the top and passed a drawstring through. At the bottom she had sewn an enormous circle of stiff copper wire. She gathered the drawstring at the top and hung the contraption from a ceiling beam, trapping the Lamb’s box inside like a butterfly net over a bee.
