Laurinda

by Alice Pung

  I had missed my bus back to the station and my train back to Stanley. I came home an hour late, but I couldn’t tell my parents the reason. Can you imagine, Linh? I don’t think Dad even knew what the offending object was, and Mum thought that using one meant you were no longer chaste.

  What I thought about that evening was something strange Mrs Grey had said. She’d called the stunt a vile, despicable act of bullying. But couldn’t students only bully other students? No student was supposed to be able to bully a teacher. But the Cabinet had done just that.

  When things go well at a girls’ school, they go soaringly well. Gallons of self-esteem, girls allowing their comic genius or sporting prowess to shine through, no boys around to make us feel coy. Do you remember, back at Christ Our Saviour, when Zarhar did such a good Elvis impersonation that she was picked to play the male lead in our school production of Grease? We whooped and stomped and clapped at her performance; I think one or two girls even discovered their true sexual orientation watching her perform.

  At Christ Our Saviour, girls were people, not female-impersonator shells of their true selves; they ate with gusto and kept their brothers in line at home; they manned their houses with brooms and mops and whacked any muddy legs in their way.

  There was something creepy about the femininity at Laurinda, something so cloistered and yet brimming with stifled sex that it reminded me of the Victorian whalebone corsets we once saw at the Werribee Park Mansion, which kept everything cramped tight, until the stitches unravelled and out poured mounds of naked pink and white. It was the femininity of tiny éclairs and teacups, crocheted collars and little pearl earrings, the young-girl-to-old-woman transition that skipped sexuality altogether, so that when you saw it – in Gina, for instance – it was as garish as a scarlet A on the chest.

  This was how “niceness” was policed – not through directives about virtue, but through conformity in dress and manners. The result was that anyone who was slightly different, who had a heartbeat that didn’t race at the latest Laura Ashley creation but instead at George-with-the-one-eyebrow in the Auburn Academy soccer team, anyone who liked her colours bold and not pastel, who loved her jokes explicit and not coy – any of those types were automatically cast as sluts, and so became pariahs.

  Gina wasn’t in class the next day. When Mr Sinclair called the roll and there was a silence after her name, you could feel the significance of that sink in. I suppose the detention must have been the worst thing to have happened in Gina’s life so far, Linh. Not being able to impress the object of her affections, and then – worse – getting told off by him.

  As far as Gina was concerned, Mr Sinclair had called the entire class rich bitches, because that was what “insulated by privilege” meant to her. Her wealth and power left no room for nuance. If you had been told off the way we had, you’d feel pretty shamefaced. With the exception of Katie, these girls did not. Or, if they did, they rolled their shame over to expose the softest part of its underbelly, then gave it a swift, sharp kick with their Doc Marten boots. Finished it off once and for all.

  So after Gina’s mother had sat in her Volvo fuming that her daughter was being made half an hour late for ballet practice, and after Gina had bounded out of detention with tears running down her face, they both exploded in hot outrage, and their anger cast a deep shadow over what had really happened.

  Gina’s mother reported Mr Sinclair’s meanness to the ladies at Wednesday mid-morning yoga lessons, then and – get out the smelling salts now, Linh – word began to spread that there was a teacher harassing all the young ladies at Laurinda, shaming them for being who they were.

  This was Gina’s chance to redeem herself, to show that she was an extremely proper young lady who could not stomach rude men. It was also her chance to get back at the object of her obsessions, who, she had found out, was not flattered by her attentions. He had become a disciplinarian, a megalomaniac who couldn’t take a joke. A wounded ego and a wounded heart are the same thing when your love is unrequited.

  Mr Sinclair’s every word was analysed at the Langham Hotel’s Sunday high tea, a treat for Gina from her father to help her overcome the trauma of being unjustly vilified. “He puts the hot girls in the centre of the room so he can watch them more closely,” cried Gina out of a murky mixture of jealousy and wrath. “That Socratic classroom is bullshit.” She wiped away fresh tears. “And during the whole lunchtime detention, he spent at least fifteen minutes staring at us, without even saying anything.”

  Her father patted her on the hand. “There, there, Reggie baby, it’s all right. I am very proud of you for being so strong through all of this.”

  Finally, the expansive hand gestures Mr Sinclair used to illustrate a point in class were translated by Gina’s mother – through two glasses of champagne and a Peking duck pancake – to mean that he had busy hands.

  When Katie reported this to me, I should not have been surprised to learn that the tale had been stretched out to the very edges of its perversity, like one of those cells we made turgid with blue-black dye and then examined beneath a microscope in Biology.

  Word reached the school administration, and Politics with Mr Sinclair was never the same again. Before the incident, his lessons had been dotted with interesting anecdotes. He once told us, for instance, that our former prime minister had left school at fourteen, and that he’d managed a band called The Ramrods. Some girls cracked up at hearing their hot teacher use the word “ramrod” without irony.

  But then Gina had left that note about playing in his band, a note that probably left Mr Sinclair wondering with cold dread what else he might inadvertently have let slip.

  Now, it was like someone had ripped out all the life from behind his face and replaced it with wires and cogs. Although he was not a teacher who feared us – I think he had too much contempt for us now to be afraid – we could tell that he didn’t trust us at all.

  *

  All teenagers are drama queens inside their minds, even the mousiest of us. We load and reload movies of ourselves in heroic postures and outlandish triumphs, movies that, if they were ever to be played in front of an audience of people we know and love, would cause us to shrivel in shame.

  I had been practising my line, polishing it, making sure I got every word exactly as it should be. I aimed to deliver it flawlessly; it would be a gem of truth, stunning in its brevity. I’d arranged to meet Mrs Grey, even if it meant I might miss the bus and be late home again. I’d stayed quiet during the attack on Ms Vanderwerp, and I wasn’t going to keep quiet a second time.

  When I opened her door, she looked at me and slowly closed her eyes. She looked tired, her skin sallow beneath the powder. She opened her eyes again as I sat down. “What is it, Miss Lam?”

  “Mrs Grey, about the other week in History class . . .”

  “Go on.” She sat very still, waiting for me to dob in the culprits. I remembered how, in Stanley, Ivy’s brother had vowed that when he got out of jail, he would rearrange some faces. “Snitches get stitches,” Ivy used to repeat to us.

  “Well, you know how Mr Sinclair was supervising us during our lunchtime detention,” I began.

  The corners of her mouth dropped. She probably thought that I was as sensitive as Gina.

  I wanted to deliver my line with conviction, but because the Growler was looking at me as if every moment spent on me was a moment she would never get back, I stumbled over it too quickly. “Mr Sinclair didn’t do anything to those girls, and he didn’t say anything that was not true.” Instead of an unassailable declarative statement, it had become an apology.

  “Is that all?” Mrs Grey asked me.

  “Yes, Mrs Grey. I just wanted to say this because Mr Sinclair—”

  She cut me off. “Thank you, Lucy.” But she sounded far from grateful. She sounded annoyed. She heaved a sigh that could have inflated a hot-air balloon, and repeated, “Thank you, Lucy. Other students – Siobhan, Katie and Stella – have already come to talk to me about this.”
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  There was nothing more I could say, except a baffled, “That’s good.”

  She dismissed me by closing her eyes again slowly. In that state, which was not a resting one, her face looked like one at a morgue, a face made up by an artist who had not known the deceased in real life and so had given her green eye-shadow and plum lips. I wondered whether Mrs Grey had been wearing the wrong makeup all her life, or the wrong face.

  I left her office feeling deflated. It seemed as if all my words were a waste of time, and all of Katie’s and Siobhan’s and Stella’s too. The way Mrs Grey treated me in her office, in that two minutes, it was as if she wanted me to keep my nose out of her important business, the adult business of making decisions; the only relevance I might have for their decisions was if I snitched and dobbed someone in.

  The whole meeting had left me feeling vulnerable, too, as if I’d exposed something about myself that I had not meant to. From then on, I wasn’t sure whether it was my paranoia or whether Mrs Grey started to appraise me differently, but she definitely took more notice of me.

  Maybe she had believed at first that I was a detached high-achiever out to milk this scholarship for all it was worth academically so I could get into a good university and become a dentist, but now she knew that there was more to me than that. Mrs Grey had seen I was more involved in the happenings of the school than she gave me credit for, and I suspected she might not have liked this kind of involvement.

  Beneath my despair, I also felt a sense of solidarity. If Katie, Siobhan and Stella had each gone to see Mrs Grey, then there were some girls at this school who thought the same way I did. I vowed I would talk about it with Katie the next opportunity I got.

  I waited for the right moment but she was always in a different class, or talking to others at her locker, or in crowded spaces like the canteen. After a week I understood that a shift had occurred. It was true that Katie would talk to anyone – she was the sort of girl you could imagine in a decade’s time being a nurse, and then in two decades a round, friendly housewife with two small children, and then in five decades a jolly old granny. Once I had seen her grandmother come to pick her up from school; they both had the same way of smiling like contented housecats.

  But that week I noticed Siobhan and Stella were hanging around Katie’s locker more and more. Then, in Politics class, the three of them sat in a row near the front. That was when I knew they’d formed a trinity – and triangles, the most stable shape in geometry, were impenetrable. So there was no way I could talk with Katie about my time in Mrs Grey’s office now. To speak to Katie alone would have been a debrief; to talk in front of all three girls would have been a declaration. The three of them had already done their debrief, and I was stranded.

  I noticed the three of them exchanging glances in Politics, smug in their knowledge that they had done the right thing, allies helping Mr Sinclair in his hour of need. I felt sadness for them, knowing that no one really gave a stuff about their actions, or mine for that matter. Like me, they weren’t in the Cabinet but were gathering dust in some bottom drawer. No one cared what they said.

  They had no important parents to back them up. Katie lived with her elderly grandparents; Siobhan’s mother was a librarian, and her father a public servant; Stella’s father was a church minister. They had no skills or talents that brought special honour to the school, although they were all pretty decent students. These were girls who enthusiastically sang in the choir even though they would never get solos, who volunteered for Clean Up Australia Day, who happily played the piano by rote to entertain their relatives at Christmas – Nice Girls in a little bubble of goodwill.

  I didn’t dislike them. I just saw right through them, and through all that niceness. “How could Gina do that to Mr Sinclair?” I could imagine them exclaiming over their lunches of vegemite and cheese sandwiches and orange Primas. “It’s just so mean.” Of course, they would never use the word “bitch” or call Gina a slut. But I knew they thought things like that – we all did.

  I was beginning to understand more about this insular world of Laurinda. And the more I saw of it, the more disquieted I felt.

  You know how, back at Christ Our Saviour, it was okay to drift in and out of friendship groups, so long as you weren’t a backstabber or someone with an annoying habit like a tendency to squeal in a high-pitched voice or lie pathologically about your boyfriends? Remember the self-contained satellites like Carol who would occasionally join us for recess, but could be just as happy playing chess in the library with other girls?

  At Laurinda it didn’t happen like that. Floaters didn’t exist here: you had to attach yourself to the bottom of some massive Friend Ship like a clinging barnacle, and if you were at the bottom of the ship, you had to go wherever that ship sailed.

  Well, I was sick of it all, Linh. I was going to detach myself, and see if I would sink or swim.

  TERM TWO

  Dear Linh, How strange high school is, that our reputations are in the hands of people we barely know, people we see every day and even sit close enough to that we can smell their sweat and see their bra straps falling from their short-sleeved summer uniforms. At Laurinda, what made a girl popular or unpopular wasn’t wealth (otherwise, some of the Mediterranean students would have reigned) or attractiveness (Tharusha was possibly the most beautiful girl at the school, but you barely saw her face because she was so shy) or talent (as I’d seen from the muted response when Trisha played the piano). Popularity – and power – was based on things that could not be seen or felt – on ideas planted in other people’s minds.

  Term Two began with a massive infusion of the Laurinda spirit – such an enormous shot of it that we’d feel too sick and dizzy to get up to no good. This concoction was the idea of the Growler, of course, in league with the Cabinet.

  At our chapel service, Reverend White delivered a sermon about compassion – Ephesians 4:32: “Be kind and tender-hearted towards one another.” Then Brodie walked up to the front of the church and stood at the altar. I could not believe it, Linh. Brodie, of all people! She was going to make a speech.

  “Compassion,” she began, “is a rare quality that must be demonstrated to those who are less fortunate than us.” She paused. “We are aware of the immense privileges that being a student at Laurinda brings, but with great power comes great responsibility.” Pause. “We must be responsible for how our words and actions affect others.” Pause. “We must lead by example.” Pause.

  These pauses were part of her speaking technique, I realised, probably to let the profundity of her words sink in, as though she were Dr Martin Luther King.

  “We must reach out to others!”

  And as she said this, she did something so stupid that I almost burst out laughing, Linh – she extended her right arm, fingers splayed, her school colours flashing on one sleeve. Then I noticed she was looking directly at me. She was extending her helping hand to me! And she wasn’t even winking. I looked around and could see the Growler smiling.

  “Our school was one of the first ladies’ colleges in the state,” Brodie continued, “and we uphold a strong tradition of supporting the rights of women in a nurturing environment.” On and on she went, until she turned towards the Growler. “If I may be so flippantly audacious – and I hope you will indulge me here, Mrs Grey, as you do such an excellent job providing pastoral care to girls – while other private schools are hierarchical and based on a top-down approach, we are like this cup of wine at the table” – and she pointed to Reverend White’s goblet – “open and giving, and open to giving.”

  She extended both arms again, like Jesus summoning his flock, and continued: “You could even say that instead of adopting a hard and rigid phallus model of leadership” – and here she pretended to grasp something in her hand, and even moved her fist up and down a couple of times! – “we have adopted a receptive chalice model” – and now she cupped her hands. “This is the Laurinda spirit!”

  The girls whooped and applauded, and some ev
en stamped their feet. In church! I sat there, my hands clenched tight beneath my kilt. You had to hand it to Brodie: she knew how to play it both ways. Just when you thought that her speech was going to become so toadying that you would have to chuck a cushion onstage for her genuflecting knees, she compared the school to a dick and a fanny, a move so unexpected that a ripple of orgiastic hilarity flowed through the crowd. The applause was deafening.

  Brodie had pulled such a swift one that even the teachers were applauding her ability to imbue four hundred girls with the Laurinda spirit. Some – the weaker ones – were chuckling, even though they found the joke distasteful, to show that they had a sense of humour. Others laughed outright, convinced it was just another example of student high jinks.

  Mr Sinclair had a grimace on his face, the look you’d have if you were watching someone embarrass themselves by telling a very unfunny fart joke. Mrs Grey’s expression was one of carefully contrived neutrality, giving nothing away. The person who was least impressed was Reverend White, standing there in his robes.

  We did not see Ms Vanderwerp in Term Two. “Maybe she’s topped herself!” Gina suggested, with no small amount of vicious glee.

  Although the staff never spoke about it, we knew Ms Vanderwerp had gone away on stress leave. Mr Abraham took her place, a towering man with an Easter Island face and grey hair in his ears. He walked into the classroom and gave us a look as if to say, go on, try the tampon trick on me.

  But we would never have done it to a male teacher, Linh. There would have been shame in pulling something like that on a man – but not a shame about hurting him, because men aren’t hurt that way. They are the ones who bond over poo-and piss-themed road-trip movies, after all. It was the stigma of being female. We’d have been too embarrassed to hear a man rail about how disgusting our bodies were.