by Alice Pung
“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 asse
mbly 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.”
*
At recess that day I could not join the Cabinet because Mrs Grey wanted to see me. I sat on the bench outside her office, next to a tiny girl with a face too small for her large features. Even though she had beautiful big eyes and lips like pillows, the disparity made her look a little clownish. She was picking miserably at the hem of her blazer.
After a few moments of silence, I tried to make her feel more at ease. “What are you here for?”
She looked down, and at first I thought she was extremely shy, until I saw that she was pointing to her feet. Then I noticed that her socks were not the regulation anklet length, but long and white, even though they were now pooling at her ankles. Like her face, her legs seemed to be covered with scaly acne.
“I forgot to get a uniform pass,” she whispered. “I didn’t think I needed one because of my psoriasis, but Mr Abraham noticed them and sent me here.”
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her, “it’s not a big deal.” Secretly, I knew better.
“Nadia Pinto,” called Mrs Grey’s secretary, and the girl stood up and disappeared behind the door.
Ten minutes later she came back out with red-rimmed eyes. Nadia Pinto didn’t look at me as she walked back to class.
It was my turn.
Mrs Grey’s eyes were the colour of pickled onions, shot through with hair-width strands of red. Her cheeks were etched with lines to match. The girls were saying she was a closet alcoholic.
“I’m concerned about your performance, Miss Lam,” she said as soon as I sat down.
“But I’m working hard, Mrs Grey.” I racked my brain to see where I had gone wrong. I’d had good results for my midyear exams. “Maybe I could go back to remedial English with Mrs Leslie?” I offered disingenuously.
It turned out she wasn’t talking about my academic performance.
“It seems to me, Miss Lam, that you’ve become uninterested in what Laurinda has to offer. You’ve become lacklustre. Insipid.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs Grey, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Not taking advantage of all the remarkable opportunities here for you. You have not attended any Saturday-morning sports.”
“I thought they were voluntary . . .” I began and trailed off, immediately realising it was the wrong thing to say.
“You did not come to our Constitutional Convention in Term Two.”
Of course not, I wanted to tell her. I’d have had to stuck toothpicks in my eyes to prop them open.
“You did not get involved in drama or music.”
“But I did some debating,” I protested feebly.
“You attended the debating finals. That is not the same thing. The truth of the matter is that you are not becoming the well-rounded individual that we envisioned when we accepted you into this college. Do you think that is a fair assessment?”
No, I wanted to say. It’s crap.
“The letter from your former principal said that you were involved in the school choir and Tournament of Minds, and that you started a book club.”
Ah, the halcyon days of youth, I wanted to say to her. Alas, my mind is not as sharp as it once was. Actually, this would not have been far from the truth, because I was feeling exhausted all the time now, and I didn’t do half as much as before.
I forced myself to look Mrs Grey in the eye in case she thought I was being evasive. I didn’t see myself reflected back. Instead of a human being, she seemed to see me solely as a human doing, and all my doings had to add to the prestige of Laurinda. At that moment I felt nothing but repulsion as I looked at the white orbs of pearl hovering above her neckline. Someone who wore the remains of sea molluscs strung around her neck and would make a thirteen-year-old cry over wearing the wrong socks was not someone I respected.
“We may need to have a word with your parents,” she said. “The letters we sent home don’t appear to have been read.”
Good luck with that, I thought. Maybe you can courier them to my father at the carpet factory.
“I understand you have become friends with Brodie Newberry and Amber Leslie.” For some reason she left out Chelsea. “These girls demonstrate the Laurinda spirit,” she said. “Particularly Brodie.”
Brodie’s a dickhead, I thought.
The truth was, Linh, this school sucked you in. It demanded every part of your life and mind. In order to be a Laurinda girl, you had to dedicate every waking moment to doing its bidding. I had to make myself “deserving” of the scholarship; at the moment I was blocking its march Forward in Harmony. I had to be one of those girls in the brochures: holding a test tube in the science lab, or laughing with manic glee on the sporting field. I had to be the well-adjusted student whom the school could tout as its equity and access success. That was why I was allowed to be so close to the Cabinet, when everyone else had to orbit like distant planets. They were the sun bringing life to my barren earth; they were civilising the beast in me.
“I’m afraid that if you don’t get your act together,” Mrs Grey was saying, “you might not be an appropriate cultural fit for this college.”
She knew exactly how to get to me. The only way I could be that girl was if I gave up my family – if I stopped working in the garage with Mum, and stopped looking after the Lamb.
“Academic results aren’t everything, you know, Miss Lam.”
We sat in silence. Then Mrs Grey reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a brochure.
“There’s a conference in a month’s time, at the University of Melbourne,” she said. “Dr Markus will be presenting on behalf of our school.”
Dr Markus was the Latin teacher and History coordinator. He had got his PhD for research into the use of the comma in contemporary English translations of traditional Italian children’s books circa 1965–85. Some girls claimed he was an even worse teacher than Ms Vanderwerp, but the school board thought Laurinda was lucky to have enticed such a learned scholar to publish papers and represent it at conferences.
She pushed the document at me. “Equity in Education,” I read. “Approaching the Twenty-First Century.”
“Some schools will also have student participants,” she continued. “For instance, Meredith Grammar is sending three of its Indigenous access students along to do a dance.”
I waited for Mrs Grey to continue.
“We want you to give a short speech on behalf of the school,” she concluded. “So get your act together. We are trying our best to be inclusive, Lucy, but we need you to cooperate.”
Now I understood what all this was about. I suppose I should have shown more gratitude, or jumped at the opportunity to speak at the conference. But I felt like a puppet, and I didn’t want to have my strings pulled.
Nothing escaped the Cabinet. At lunchtime, when we found our usual spot near the rose garden and sat down, they started in on me.
“I hear you’ve been asked to speak at the Equity in Education conference next term,” enthused Brodie.
/> How did she know about this?
“How exciting. How lucky for you, Lucy! You get to put yourself out there.”
“It’s only for ten minutes,” I said.
“But there’ll be university staff there, and professors, and lots of important people. Wow, what an honour.”
“What do you think you’ll talk about?” asked Amber.
“Well, since it’s about equity, I might talk about fairness.”
“Oh, you mean equal access, and getting into this school on a scholarship because you’re so smart, that kind of thing?” asked Brodie.
I did not fall for her flattery.
“No,” I said slowly. “Maybe how different schools cultivate different cultures of fairness. For instance, at my old school we had a student representative council—”
“But you’re not meant to be talking about your old school,” interrupted Chelsea. “You’re representing Laurinda, remember?”
“Hmm,” mused Brodie. “How about you focus on the two schools’ different academic standards and extracurricular activities? Do you think that would be a good approach?”
“I’m not sure about that,” said Amber. “The last time I spoke outside of school was at Poppy King’s Red Lipstick Luncheon. Those ladies liked hearing personal stories of motivation and success.”
“I think what Lucy is doing is very different,” said Brodie.
“You’re right,” I said. “Maybe I will talk about how povvo my old school was and how it’s a hundred times better here.”
“We didn’t mean it like that!” protested Chelsea, with her sensitive-offended look. She paused and pouted so that I could apologise, but I ignored her.
I hadn’t meant to blurt any of this out. I wanted to keep my cards close to my chest, but once I got started I couldn’t contain myself. “I suppose I’ll also mention our culture of fairness and respect towards teachers.”
I watched a vein in Brodie’s temple throb as she tried to work out the best way to deal with this unexpected revelation: that while I was sitting there with them, silent and smiling, I was thinking all the time, and I was judging them.
