by Alice Pung
Oh, I’m a goner, I thought. I’m gone. I can’t even get air in my lungs.
I sat up in bed, clamped my mouth shut and breathed through my nose. I waited until my hands stopped shaking and my breathing slowed. I had to get out of bed. I had to stop being so useless. I had to put my no-good, useless self to good use.
I called up the school to tell them I was sick.
“I’m sorry,” said Mrs Muscat in reception, “but we need your parents to confirm that.”
I stood by the doorway of the garage, still in the old T-shirt and tracksuit pants I’d worn to bed, with the cordless phone in my hand. “Hey, Mum, can you tell the school I’m sick?”
“You know I don’t speak English.”
“Just tell them I’m sick.”
My mother released her foot from the pedal of the Singer and took the phone. “My dawtah she seek,” she called into the phone, then handed it back to me.
“We need a note and medical certificate verifying this, Lucy,” said a very suspicious Mrs Muscat.
I hung up. “Hey, Mum, do you need any help?”
“I thought you were sick?”
“Not that sick.”
I pulled up a chair and took up a small pair of snipping scissors to cut the loose threads from the shirtsleeves she was sewing. We worked silently for a long while. The Lamb was still asleep in my parents’ bed, squeezing a rubber skittle shaped like a rabbit.
“Don’t you get sad?” I finally asked my mother, not knowing the word for “depressed” in our language, or if such a word even existed. Our word for “sad” literally meant pressured heart. “Being inside this dark garage all day, doing exactly the same thing every day?”
“The garage keeps me out of the sun,” she replied. “Look how white my skin is. I don’t even have to use that Oil of Olay stuff!”
“Mum.”
“And sewing isn’t the same as picking fruit or planting rice or working on machines. Feel how smooth my hands are. These are hands of leisure.”
“Answer me seriously, Mum.”
“Do I look sad?” she said. Then she looked at me, as if she had not seen me for a long time. “I think you’re the one who might be sad.”
“Nah.”
“Sometimes I get anxious, especially when we have to finish an order. But I know that one day we’ll move. It’s going to happen, you know. Look at Robina. She did it in less than eight years. And we are all working very hard in this family.”
My mother’s absolute faith in achieving success in her world made me feel even more miserable. She was content with simple comforts because she had lacked them for most of her life. My mother didn’t know the names of things – red cedar, art deco, Edwardian. Unlike my father, she had never seen the Leslies’ house. To her, a table was just a table; the only accompanying adjectives would be “ugly” or “beautiful”. A 1940s vintage oak table would be “old and ugly” to her, and a plastic white Italian table with gold curlicues would be “new and beautiful”.
Brodie would have called the things in our home “tacky”, the term used by wealthy people to describe the most beautiful things poor people could afford – machine-embroidered bedspreads and plastic flowers in plastic vases moulded to look like crystal. Blouses with multi-layered ruffles. Enormous stuffed toys from Kmart. A plastic fluorescent print of Jesus Christ with a heart that lit up. How could I joke about tacky things without also laughing at my own mother and the way she cared for these possessions more carefully than Amber cared for the Leslies’ Moulinex blender? How could I buy a $3 chocolate croissant without feeling like I had wasted half an hour of her labour?
To be a part of the Cabinet, I’d had to keep my true self apart. And there’s only so much of yourself you can hide, Linh, before you start to fall apart.
“Why did your friend come over the other day?” my mother suddenly asked.
“She just wanted to give me some homework I left at school.”
“And she took a taxi out here just to do that?”
What could I tell her? That Brodie had come to suss out where I lived and what my mother did?
“Your father tells me that the girl had a mobile phone.”
“Yes. She’ll also get a new car when she turns eighteen.”
My mother looked at me as if I was trying to rub it in that she and my father were not going to get me a new car when I came of age.
“She’s spoiled,” I said, and I could see my mother’s face sag with relief.
“You don’t have to be the best at this new school,” she told me. “You don’t have to be the smartest. You don’t have to be like that girl with the phone. All you have to be is a good person. I see everyone around me getting the things they want in life. Robina and her husband with their business, Tee with her son at university, Ngo with her new house at Ambient Estates. And every time I go over to one of their houses, they always talk about it. But that proud talk soon turns into a list of complaints. The local butchering business is being seized by supermarkets these days, Tee’s son comes home really late at night and she has no idea where he’s been, Ngo’s builder cheated them out of $7000.”
My mother sighed. “And I have to sit there and tell them, well, sister, at least you’re rich. At least you’re successful. At least your boy is in university now. But do you know what I never do? I never tell them about us. I never tell them that your father often works in the garage with me after his shift and we talk. That we made a tent out of netting for the Lamb. That I sometimes let you stay home with me when you’re not sick.”
I couldn’t look at my mother, but I could sense her looking at me. She always figured my excuses out.
“I never tell them about our lives. You know why? It is not because I am ashamed. It is because some things are just good, too good to be judged.”
I knew my mother was telling the truth, because she never lied. She didn’t even understand white lies. She just stayed silent if she didn’t agree with someone. And I understood now why I had been so enraged when Brodie came over to our house uninvited. I could cope when I kept my two worlds separate, but Brodie had seen the most precious part of me, and she’d trashed it.
*
I didn’t go to school for the last three days of Term Three. There seemed no point. I woke up haggard, my eyes circled by darker and darker rings. At night I couldn’t get to sleep, even though I was working all day with Mum in the garage. My mind was infected with a kind of virus, and I felt a sickly miasma hover around me. The Lamb began sleeping in my bed. Only with him there could I get some rest, next to his sweet, milk-scented face.
But something was happening to the Lamb, too. No longer did he have his eureka moments. He would sit for long stretches of time in his box, just looking out the window or listlessly tearing scraps of paper. Perhaps he was missing Dad, who had been working the late shift for the past couple of days.
I sliced bananas for the Lamb. I even let him hold each one in his hand and see the little expressive face made by the black seeds in the centre. But he didn’t put the pieces in his mouth anymore; he didn’t even hold up each banana segment to look at it. He just held it in his fist until it got mushed up. Just as well, I thought, when I realised that each seedy face looked worried and anxious, the deeper I cut into the banana.
“Give him his bottle,” my mother told me. But the Lamb kept turning his head away.
“Hey, Mum,” I called. “Mum, the Lamb is not well. He’s not drinking from his bottle. He’s coughing, too.”
“Oh, no,” said my mother. “Try to pat him to sleep.”
Every time I tried to put him down in bed, he kept grizzling and sitting up. He wanted to be upright; when he was lying down, his nose was blocked and he found it hard to breathe. There was also a strange rasping sound coming from his chest, which scared me.
I propped up some pillows so he could have a rest sitting up, holding onto the pillows like a koala to a tree. I patted his back until he fell asleep. Then I had a little nap next to hi
m. Even though I was anxious, I was also exhausted.
The Lamb woke me up with a massive gasp that shook his whole torso, as if his chest was a maraca filled with rice grains. “Lamby,” I cooed. “Sweet Lamb. Did you have a bad dream? Did you give yourself a fright?”
That evening my mother suggested she take Lamb to bed with her because he was sick. I reluctantly handed him over after dinner. The Lamb had been making noises all evening, as if he was whistling under his breath very softly, even though he wasn’t even old enough to whistle yet, and his mouth was closed.
He woke up whistling at two a.m, my mother later told me. He refused to lie down again, even when Mum held him in her arms to make him go back to sleep. There was something wrong. When the skin of his neck started to look like a vacuum cleaner was inside his throat sucking it in each time he inhaled, she panicked and shook me awake.
“Call your father at work!” my mother cried. I looked at the Lamb in her arms; his lips and nose were a strange bruisey colour.
Picking up the phone, I rang the factory. “This is an emergency,” I said. “Please put Warwick Lam on the phone.”
I heard the man at the other end yell out, “Oi, Warwick!”
By now my mother was wailing in the kitchen, clutching the Lamb.
“Why are you calling me at work? What’s wrong?” my father asked when he reached the phone.
“The Lamb is not breathing,” I told him. Dad didn’t even say anything – he just dropped the phone. I went into the kitchen.
The Lamb’s breaths were coming out short and grunting. His nostrils flared and his eyes were open with panic. I called triple-zero and asked for an ambulance. Then I ran to the Donaldsons’ house, ignoring the barking of their Dalmatian, and knocked on their front door. No one answered. I knocked until the porch light came on, but still the door remained shut. I stood at the centre of the front step so they could see through the peephole that I wasn’t some crazy hooligan come to mug them, and at last the door opened.
It was Mrs Donaldson, groggy with sleep, in blue and yellow pyjamas. “Who is this?”
“It’s Lucy Lam from next door,” I told her. “Please help us! My baby brother is not breathing!”
“Do you know why he’s not breathing?” she asked me.
“No!” I cried.
She then went back inside her house, and I was so angry and panicked that I wanted to charge in there and drag her back out. But soon she emerged with an asthma inhaler. She and I went back to our house, to my mother in the kitchen, and to the rasping, gasping Lamb.
“For heaven’s sake, sit him upright,” commanded Mrs Donaldson. “Sit him upright so air can get into his lungs.”
I showed my mother what to do, with my hand supporting the Lamb’s skinny back.
“What’s that?” my mother asked me, as soon as she saw Mrs Donaldson’s inhaler.
Mrs Donaldson shook it and then placed it at the Lamb’s lips. She pressed the top of the inhaler just as the Lamb took a breath in. He started to cough.
“It’s killing him!” yelled my mother. “What is that stuff? It’s going to choke him to death!”
I patted the Lamb on the back, hoping to help ease his cough. What if my mother was right, I thought in panic. What if this medication was only for adults?
“Don’t pat his back, rub it,” instructed Mrs Donaldson. “It will calm him down.” She rubbed the Lamb’s back in circular motions, quietly telling him, “There, there, sweet pup. Just have a little rest. Just take it easy.”
The ambulance arrived at the same time as my father. The paramedic took the Lamb into the back of the van and sat him up on the stretcher. They put a face mask on him, which was attached to a machine. “That’s a nebuliser,” explained the paramedic.
The colour slowly came back to the Lamb’s fingers, lips and nose.
“This little fella’s had an asthma attack,” said the paramedic. “You’re very lucky he was given a dose of Ventolin to tide him over.”
“Oh, I was so worried!” cried Mrs Donaldson, peering in through the back of the ambulance. “It was Harold’s inhaler, but I thought the baby might have been having an asthma attack. Harold has bad lungs, you know, from years of living behind these factories. But I didn’t know whether you could give adult Ventolin to a small baby. I just had to give it a go.”
“You’re very lucky to have such good neighbours,” the paramedic told us.
“What could have caused this, Doctor?” asked my father.
“Well, hard to say, really. Has the little tacker had a bit of a cold recently? Or maybe something in the house triggered an attack.”
“Like what?”
“Chemicals, maybe, cleaning products. Dust mites. That sort of thing.”
To be on the safe side, the paramedics wanted to take the Lamb to the hospital. I wanted to go too, but Mum said I should get some sleep and that Dad would go. I gave the Lamb’s fist one last squeeze and clambered out of the back of the vehicle.
Mrs Donaldson was still standing there, waving them off.
“I’m very sorry to have woken you, Mrs Donaldson,” I told her.
“Nonsense, child. He’ll be all right, the wee lamb.” She turned and walked back to her house.
When the Lamb arrived home the next morning, he had some pink in his cheeks. “He’ll be okay,” my father told me. “He just needs to rest and recover and take his medicine.”
The one thing I wanted to do was hold him again. I had to wait a long time, though, because Mum would not let go of him. She would not put him down, and she patted him until he fell asleep. When he woke up I made him a special treat of mashed apples, and spent all afternoon in the house with him. Mum kept checking on him every twenty minutes.
That afternoon, another letter from school arrived in the mail.
Dear Lucy,
Due to your unexplained absence from school and our inability to contact you, we regret to inform you that we must withdraw our invitation for you to address the Equity in Education conference.
I didn’t give a toss now – it was one less thing to worry about – but I thought of Ms Vanderwerp, how the Cabinet had weeded her out. We were all equal at our harmonious school, but those who stumbled and fell face-first were just an embarrassment. How ghastly! Ladies, avert your eyes! How horrid, like the man who had the gall to die on an aeroplane mid-flight!
A few days later the council healthcare nurse came over, and I translated for Mum. “This is his Ventolin inhaler, spacer and face mask,” the woman explained. She was a woman in her mid-forties, with hair dyed red and braided like liquorice. She then asked to look around our house.
“What for?” Mum asked me warily.
“She just wants to make sure that the places the Lamb spends his time will not trigger any more attacks.”
Mum was reluctant, but we showed her the bedrooms – my parents’ and mine. She suggested we open the windows to let the dust mites out and the sunshine in. “Sunshine has antiseptic qualities,” she told us. Then she pointed to a corner. “What are these boxes?”
Clothes, I told her.
“You can’t have half a dozen boxes in each room like this. Clear these out into the garage!”
Finally, she asked to see our garage.
“No!” said Mum. “She’ll dob us into the government!”
“Don’t worry, Mum, it’s okay.”
I had the feeling that this nurse had probably looked in more garages than a mechanic; I think she already knew what she would find. The first thing that would hit her would be the smell, the smell of treated synthetic fibres, the urine-like odour of the fabric preservatives and sprays applied to keep bugs out when the rolls were being imported from China.
She showed no surprise when she entered the dark, windowless space, a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. She looked at the sewing machine and the overlocker, the stacks of fabric in loose piles. A blanket on the floor and a pillow, for times when Mum wanted to take a nap. And, in the corner, the Lam
b’s cardboard box, graffitied with scribbles and smeared with banana-mash.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Is this where he stays during the day?”
“Yes. But it has netting around it.”
“Good grief! Don’t you realise this room is filled with dust mites?”
No kidding, I wanted to retort. How I wished you were with me then, Linh.
“Let me be honest with you. If an animal were kept in a pen like this all day, we’d call the RSPCA. This needs to be fixed immediately.” She looked at my mother with unblinking disapproval. “I will be back in two weeks’ time. This needs to be gone.”
My mother cottoned on to what the nurse was saying, even though she couldn’t understand the language. “Tell that demon-head I want the Spanish nurse from the hospital,” Mum whispered to me. “The Spanish nurse doesn’t come into people’s houses and judge them.”
Poor Lamby. We had caged him and tried to keep him satisfied with sweets and scraps of paper, so that Mum could work on her machine and I could complete 500-word essays about the Bolsheviks. We put him in his walker, even though he was probably too old for it, so he would not reach out and touch dangerous things. We were so distracted by getting ahead that we didn’t think to make him happy, because he was already such a smiley baby who delighted in little things.
After the nurse left, Mum started crying. “They’re going to take away my work.”
“No, Mum, they won’t. They’re just a hospital. Anyway, we can live on Dad’s salary.”
“No! On that pittance? When they keep changing his shifts and not giving him a permanent position? If I don’t work, what will be my purpose then?”
Mum could not read books to the Lamb. She could not entertain him. That was my job. Mum did love him, but she could not do “fun”. Back in Vietnam, village kids were left to find their own fun. Kids like me started working for the family at eight. Kids like me sold paper fans at the marketplace with a baby balanced on one hip, or found factory work.
“I don’t know how to be a mum,” she told me.
“You’re a good mum,” I reassured her. It was true. She had helped raise her three younger siblings, who were now scattered across the world, and by the age of five she had known how to burp a baby.
