by Alice Pung
“All I ever do is yell at you.”
“That’s not true.”
“Your father thinks I should stop working and just look after the family,” Mum said. “But besides cook and clean, what else can I do? I can’t help you with your schoolwork. I can’t speak to any of the Lamb’s teachers. I can’t hang around the other parents at school. I’ve been sewing since I was thirteen years old.”
We slowly started to change the patterns of our days. We let more light into our rooms. My father bought an air purifier. My mother spent three days cleaning the house from inside out. Instead of having cardboard boxes around the house, we got plastic laundry tubs with lids from the Stanley gift shop. We got a big playpen so that we could put free-range Lamb in the backyard on sunny days, and he could play in there in full view of Mum’s open garage door while she worked.
I spent all my days with the Lamb, from the moment he woke up till we put him to bed in the evening. The terrible thing that had almost happened to him had jolted me out of my torpor. It was as if I had been drowsy at the wheel of a car, until a last-minute swerve from the road got my nerves and limbs working again, jump-starting my heart.
I dressed him, fed him his bottle and his breakfast, and carried him everywhere. I sat next to him reading books while he napped, and remembered the times he was meant to take his asthma medication. We baked small cakes with a packet mix and iced them with Nutella, sugar and butter. I mixed detergent with water and we blew bubbles through drinking straws.
As he recovered from his cold, I made sure I took the Lamb out of the house every day. Often we just roamed the streets of Stanley. Sometimes we stopped at the mini-mart and I bought him a Kinder Surprise.
I went to the Sunray library and, miraculously, they had Professor Gombrich. I sat in the park with the Lamb and The Story of Art, showing him the pictures. “This is Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles,” I explained to him, as he peeled a mandarin. He glanced at the picture and went back to digging his thumb into the citrus. “Where is the red?” I asked him.
The Lamb pointed to the bedspread.
“Very good, sweet Lamb. What about the green?”
He pointed to the chair cushions. “Now, what about the yellow?” The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheets and pillows very light greenish lemon, Van Gogh had written in 1889. There is nothing in this room with closed shutters. The broad lines of the furniture again must express absolute rest.
As I gazed at the picture, I felt peace, peace I hadn’t felt in a long time. “A waste of a mind,” Chelsea had once scoffed when we saw a well-heeled woman wheeling her pram across the road. But this work brought me some peace, a peace that had been hard to come by since I’d been at Laurinda. Now I understood my mother’s desire that every day would unfurl like the last, with no major dramas.
After my breakdown, and the Lamb’s hospital visit, I did not yearn for excitement. I liked the quiet company of the Lamb and Professor Gombrich. I liked spending time with Mum at home, and doing things that made an immediate difference to our lives: cleaning dishes and doing laundry and cooking a huge pot of stock. There was nothing wrong with this, I thought.
*
“Vince said that his wife told him there was a job as a trimmer at the Stanley seafood plant,” Dad told Mum one evening after we had put the Lamb to bed.
“But are you qualified to do that?” asked my mother.
“You don’t need any qualifications to cut up seafood,” my father said. “And it’s not a job for me. It’s for you. They’re only hiring women. They want to pay the lowest wage.”
“Me?” exclaimed my mother. “But I can’t even speak English!”
“You don’t need to. Anyhow, you’ll learn on the job. It pays pretty well, especially the overtime and late shift.”
“But what about the Lamb? He’s just recovered—”
“He’s the reason I think you should work in a factory,” my father said. “No more dust mites and dirty chemicals to make him sick. We could clear up the garage. We could rid the house of all these boxes. And we’ll never see that Sokkha again.”
“Yes, but who will look after the Lamb, huh?”
“I have been thinking about this,” said my father. “And—”
“I’ll look after the Lamb!” I interrupted. “I will! If Mum works the late shifts, I can look after him when I come home from school.”
“See?” said my father. “Your daughter is smart. That school is clearly doing good things to her brain.”
“But what if she fails because of me?” Mum persisted. “What if she fails and loses her scholarship?”
“I won’t fail,” I promised. “I won’t, Mum. The Lamb doesn’t bother me. How is this any different to what I’ve already been doing? I’ll work on my schoolwork inside, or in the backyard, in my bedroom, wherever. I’ll keep a good eye on the Lamb.”
My mother was still unsure. She didn’t want to leave what she had been doing for so many years, but she knew she could not continue either. It was making us sick.
“Let me tell you something, Quyen,” said my father. “Do you know how much the penalty rates – the rates for working the late shift – are per hour?”
“But nothing is going to be worth leaving the house, leaving Lucy with the Lamb—”
He told her.
I watched the amazement spread across my mother’s face. How magical that number seemed, and those words, per hour! She would still be here during the day with the Lamb. Sure, she wouldn’t get much sleep, but she had never slept much anyway. She was always up at daybreak and working late. “This is going to work out, Mum, this is really going to be a good thing!”
“Quyen, listen to your daughter,” said Dad.
“How soon do they want someone to start?” Mum asked, scrunching the bottom of her shirt in her hands.
“As soon as possible.”
And it was sooner than we thought. My mother had not worked in a factory before. She was scared on her first evening, Linh, but my father drove her to the factory early and spent her orientation shift with her as her translator. Then he went to his own shift at Victory.
When both my parents came home the next day, they didn’t look tired at all. “I can’t believe how kind they are,” Mum kept saying to us. “I can’t believe how easy the work is, how much slower the pace is than sewing.” The most wonderful thing of all, of course, was how much she was getting paid for the overnight shift.
We began eating like kings, because Mum got an employee discount on seafood: calamari, prawns, flake, sometimes even salmon. I missed the live fish, though. The garage was shut, but we did not sell the sewing machine or the overlocker. We kept those for security, in case we needed to do some emergency work.
I was spending whole days with the Lamb because I was still on term break. They rolled by gently, as I did my holiday homework with him playing on a mat next to me. Or I’d sit in the bathroom reading The Story of Art while he splashed in the bath until his fingers looked like dried raisins.
*
Soon, it was the last weekend of the holidays. I would be back at school in two days’ time. Every time I thought about going back, I felt like I had live spiders in my stomach. Saturday was one of those unexpectedly hot days near the end of the year, a day of blue sky and wattle scent. “Maybe you should take the Lamb to the shopping centre,” Mum suggested. “It’s clean and cool there.”
We caught a bus to Sunray, and I parked the Lamb’s stroller out the front of the Plaza. I went into the supermarket carrying him in my arms. I loved supermarkets. You didn’t need to travel outside your suburb to see the world in one place, each state’s and each country’s produce stacked neatly on shelves and racks: bananas from Queensland, dates from the Middle East, kecap manis from Indonesia, nougat from Italy, prawns from China, and frozen dinners from America.
The Lamb and I spent a long time in the lolly aisle. “You can only have one, Lamby,” I said to him. “Only one, so choose ca
refully.” A Chupa Chup would last until the way home, but it’d rot his teeth. The Freddo Frogs seemed like they either had their hands in their pockets or up in the air, as if a police officer were going to shoot them. Even the Caramello Koalas looked sad: they were trying so hard to look dignified in their overalls, but eventually they would be eaten, head-first. The Lamb pointed to the Caramello.
At the checkout I balanced the Lamb on my hip. I decided I would take him to Wendy’s to get a Funny Face cone. I didn’t care that they cost $3.30. This would be a special treat. I knew I was behaving like a typical Stanley teen mother, but I now understood how their days would stretch on for ages and then suddenly snap back because of an emergency, and how much of this seemed beyond their control, so they could only think about the next thing to do to make their babies happy, and then the next thing after that.
The Lamb spotted more Caramello Koalas at the checkout counter, and he grinned with recognition and pointed. He was squirming on my hip and I was trying to stop him from grabbing at them when he lunged and almost fell out of my arms. For balance he grabbed the hair of the lady behind, who was leaning over to take a roll of Soothers.
“Ouch!”
When I turned back to apologise, the woman’s head was down and she was rubbing her hair with both hands. I noticed her groceries on the conveyor belt: a small tub of strawberry ice-cream, a single-serve gnocchi heat-and-eat meal, and a block of rum and raisin chocolate. Small treats for a single older lady. How terrible that the Lamb had marred her day.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, hoping that she would not be one of those horrible git-lost-we-were-here-first welfare women, the type to say, “Teach ya son to keep his paws to himself, whydoncha?”
But when I looked up from the groceries and saw the woman’s face, I recognised her. Her cheeks were more concave, her hair was greyer and longer, but it was definitely, unmistakably her.
The last person I expected to see.
“Ms Vanderwerp!”
She looked at me through eyes that squinted a little, as if trying to see through a thick fog. I bet she doesn’t even remember me, I thought. I bet she wants nothing to do with that school, that class, forever and ever.
Recognition lit up her goldfish-bowl glasses.
“Linh?” she asked me. “Linh Lam,” she repeated. “Is that you?”
She could never get my name right.
And then, embarrassingly, in the middle of the checkout line, I started to cry.
After Ms Vanderwerp had run her groceries through (and paid for mine as well), after we had collected the Lamb’s stroller from the front of the Plaza, after she’d taken the Lamb to the newsagent to get a stuffed wombat while I went to the toilet to wipe the tears and snot from my face, she led me to the food court.
We sat on the white plastic benches. She had collected some refresher towels from Kentucky Fried Chicken and gave the table a good wipe down with three of them. Then we both sterilised our hands with the remaining wipes and shared a box of chips.
I told her how sorry I was to be part of the class that had tormented her. I began to sniff again, but knew I had no right to be such a sook. I was in the wrong, and I had been cowardly that day.
“You had nothing to do with it, sweetheart,” she said.
She was trying to make me feel better, but this wasn’t some historical moment she was teaching me about. This was stupid teenagers messing with her life. When she called me “sweetheart” it made me even sadder. She told me that kids pulled pranks all the time, and that she had been in a vulnerable state back then.
“I shouldn’t have reacted like that,” she said. “I gave some of you poor girls a good scare, didn’t I?” She tried to make light of it, though she could tell I wasn’t convinced. “I’ve been a teacher for a while, Linh,” she said. “I’ve taught in tough state schools, large Catholic colleges and one or two private girls’ academies. In no other place have I encountered such disrespect and nastiness, from top to bottom. I’m not blind. I saw how those girls treated Katie, how they ignored you. I saw how they imposed their will on the other students. But they were clever about it.”
It was like being bitten by a spider, I thought, with venom you couldn’t squeeze out because you couldn’t locate a raised red welt. No one would believe it if you told them, because the spider had left no evidence. Only when the toxicity spread through your body would anyone realise what was happening, and by then it would be too late. That was how it was at Laurinda with the Cabinet running the show.
Ms Vanderwerp smiled a strange and sad half-smile. “The funny thing, Linh, was that of the three girls, the prefect was the one who’d mostly been indifferent towards me. She never seemed to join in while the other two carried on and mucked about. But when I gave her that B+ for their assignment . . . well, sometimes still waters have piranhas beneath.”
She told me that Brodie’s sleek, seething mother had gone straight to see the Head of Middle School. Ms Vanderwerp had been called into the meeting. “Don’t you think you are blowing things a little out of proportion?” she had asked. “Students get B grades all the time.”
Mrs Grey had opened up Brodie’s school file and pointed to the neat columns filled with identical alpha symbols. “Look, Martha. The mark you’ve given seems a little inconsistent with Brodie’s other marks, don’t you think?”
“But a B+ hardly constitutes failure,” replied Ms Vanderwerp.
“Perhaps you might want to consider a . . . re-evaluation?” suggested Mrs Grey.
Ms Vanderwerp then turned and spoke directly to Brodie’s mother. “With all due respect, Mrs Newberry, if Brodie believes a B+ is tantamount to failure, perhaps Brodie needs to learn how to fail a little.”
After Brodie’s apoplectic mother left the meeting, Mrs Grey shook her head. “That mark is going to cost us a $50,000 donation.”
“It seems petty,” Ms Vanderwerp replied, not heeding the warning, “to withdraw a donation just because your daughter got a B+.”
“Gloria Newberry will make it seem like you’re the petty one, Martha.” Yet Mrs Grey had no choice but to let the lower mark remain.
“And then, a few weeks later, that incident in our classroom happened,” Ms Vanderwerp concluded. “So you see, Linh – it was between them and me.”
Yet I knew the old Linh Lam would have spoken up in that classroom.
But the old Linh had allies, and the old Linh knew she had a place at her old school. It’s so much easier to be a hero when you know you belong.
Now Linh was no more, because over the past three terms I had turned into a stranger named Lucy.
Ms Vanderwerp had no idea how close I’d got to the Cabinet, or of the explosive end to our time together. I didn’t want to tell her about any of that, so instead I told her all about the Lamb, while he dozed in his stroller and she patted my hand. She murmured kindly about what a hard time it must have been for all of us.
“You know, I understand how you feel, Linh. My father was in hospital earlier this year.”
No wonder she had been so anxious at school. When the Lamb was sick, it had consumed us: the check-ups, visits to the pharmacy, the nurse looking over our house.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “Is he okay now?”
“No, dear. He passed away.”
I didn’t know what to say – it was too sad. I started to cry again, but she said, “It’s all right, Linh. He was eighty-nine.” She sighed. “Boy, but those last few years were really, really tough. Endless hospital visits and chemotherapy, and everything had to be sterile because his immune system was so weak.”
Her eyes blurred behind the glasses, but they did not spill. Drawing her shoulders back and composing herself, she said, “Well, Lucy, what happened to me with those girls was a blessing in disguise. I got to spend the last weeks of my father’s life by his bedside. It put me at ease to know he was not alone at the end.”
When we parted, the kindest farewell I could give Ms Vanderwerp was a wave. I had bee
n crying into a tissue, and she probably did not want to be hugged.
*
The encounter left me disturbed and agitated. I could not stop thinking about the rottenness of Laurinda. The thought of going back for the final term made my heart palpitate the same way it had before the Lamb went to hospital.
“Maybe it’s a good idea for me to stay home for a few more days, to make sure the Lamb is fine,” I said to my mother on the final Sunday of the holidays.
“He’s already fine.”
“But just for a few more days . . .”
“We have an air purifier now,” Mum said. “I don’t know what happened at that school to make you afraid to go back.”
“Nothing!”
“Then you must return. Return and do your best. That’s all I ask of you.”
“You don’t get it, Mum,” I protested. “I’m trying my best in my studies. But this school isn’t just about study. It’s a hard place. Girls are judging me all the time.”
“People have their own business to mind. I don’t believe they are all watching you to see what you’re doing.”
My mother did not have the remotest understanding of high school.
“Take my new job,” she said. “When I started, I was scared to death of the machines, and it smelled so bad. My fingers weren’t used to the cold. I thought the foreman would surely fire me after the third day. But I plodded on.”
“Yes, Mum, but you’ve never been around people like this. They’re watching me, waiting for me to mess up. All the time.”
My mother sighed. “Why can’t you just ignore it? Ignore it and keep your head down and work hard, like Tully did.”
“I’m not Tully!” I protested. “I’ll never be Tully.”
“But you’ll also never be like that tall girl from your new school,” Mum said. “The one who came over. I know this has something to do with her.”
My mother, she didn’t miss a thing.
“Keep your head down and soon she’ll stop bothering you,” she said.
