Laurinda (13 page)

“Miss Lam, it seems to me that you have been remedied, so to speak.”

“Pardon, Mrs Grey?”

“Mrs Leslie tells me that you’ve shown marked improvement. As a result, you will move back to your ordinary English classes. No more remedial English. Do you feel ready, Miss Lam?”

“No.”

She had not expected this answer.

“Mrs Leslie feels you are ready. Why do you believe that you aren’t?”

“I’m not.” I spent almost every other class with the Cabinet and Katie. My time with Mrs Leslie was a refuge from the madness.

“Why do you insist on lying, Miss Lam? Did your Catholic school not teach you the Ninth Commandment?”

“But I’m not lying, Miss,” I replied. “I still don’t know whether . . .”

She stared so hard and long at me that I stopped talking and looked away.

“Let me tell you something, Miss Lam.” She leaned in close. “From the very beginning I sensed that you were displeased to be doing remedial English. We organised that for your benefit, so you would be able to catch up. You have been resentful, and now not only have you progressed to wasting Mrs Leslie’s valuable time by talking about things other than the texts, you have also presumed a familiarity with staff that is disrespectful.”

“That’s not true. I really like Mrs Leslie.”

“I have known Mrs Leslie for decades. I know she has a tendency to be soft on students. That woman will make a girl feel she is her greatest champion and confidante.” She paused. “She will be very upset with me about this, but I am not gentle like her, so let me tell you, Miss Lam, that she is not there to gossip with you about the goings-on of your teachers.”

I suddenly wanted to be out of there, away from the searing eyes of Mrs Grey. I knew now that Mrs Leslie had mentioned – most likely in passing, most likely innocuously – my concerns about Ms Vanderwerp.

“Here is what will happen this term,” she told me. “You will move to the regular English class. You will no longer have lessons with Mrs Leslie.”

This was not how it was supposed to happen. Mrs Grey had let me win a Pyrrhic victory: I was in the regular English class not as an acknowledgement of how good I was, but as a punishment.

*

At lunchtime I would go to the library before anyone could find me. Some days the world seemed too full of people, and I would tuck myself away in the back corner where the larger folio books were, the books about art and architecture that didn’t fit on the ordinary shelves, and I would pull one off the shelf and look through it. I saw from the date stamps that the last time some of them had been borrowed was before I was born.

One day I discovered a stack of Laurinda yearbooks. I’d seen the long row of navy-blue spines every time I went there, but they didn’t have any writing so I had assumed they were useless old journals. They dated back to 1902 in that format; there were also older ones, which were smaller and had black cloth covers.

I spent quite a few lunchtimes leafing through these yearbooks. I would usually get through about ten – a decade’s worth – in the hour, before I got hungry and had to go to my locker to get my sandwich. They were mostly dreary, identical images of grinning girls in sports uniforms, the same cute pictures of kindergarten students painting, the same reports on the Red Cross Appeal. Yet after looking through so many of them, I noticed that certain faces seemed to repeat: a freckle-faced girl named Claire from 1971 would reappear in a plumper form as Cecilia in 1979, but they would not share the same last name.

Each decade had its own look – the long, straight hair and the part down the middle in the seventies, the pouffy underskirts in the school plays of the fifties, the feathered haircuts in the eighties. The most fascinating period for me was the early nineteen-hundreds. Even then, more than a hundred years ago, if you looked carefully, you could detect the differences between the girls. All fourteen girls in the 1903 photograph were wearing white gloves, but while most girls had just plain ones, some had gloves with three or four pearl buttons down the side. Those girls also had the best seats – in the front, on either side of the teacher in her long, dark dress, while most of the group were left standing.

One afternoon, when Mrs Leslie was returning some books to the library, she spotted me getting a yearbook from the shelves. I quickly shoved it back and pretended to look at the spine of a book about Caravaggio.

“Lucy!” she called out, walking. “It’s so wonderful to see you!”

I smiled.

“You’re in Amber’s English class now! How are you going there?”

“Good.”

“I’ve missed your insights,” she said. “You must be studying
Emma
now. How I love that book! How far into it are you, Lucy?”

“The very beginning.”

She asked if I was enjoying it, and I lied. This was what I was learning at Laurinda, Linh: in order to be nice or polite, you had to lie. Back at Christ Our Saviour, you could come out and tell a teacher straight out that you did not like a book, so long as you didn’t use swear words. But here I felt I was constantly tiptoeing around egos like they were eggs, and one clumsy step could mean someone’s self-esteem would come leaking out.

“I have the BBC collection of
Emma
and
Pride and Prejudice
,” Mrs Leslie told me. “Amber just adores Mr Darcy. Perhaps you could come over after school one day and watch it with us?”

I marvelled at the naivety of Mrs Leslie, Linh, a grown-up who thought she could put her daughter and me together to watch a few videos and we would become best friends while she brought us out milk and cookies.

“Sure, Mrs Leslie,” I said. “That sounds like fun.”

A
s you know, my mother never did anything slowly. She gulped down her coffee. She slurped up her food, even laying down sheets of newspaper on the table when she was eating so that the splatters could just be scrunched up and tossed in the bin. She’d eat grapes from a bowl next to her sewing machine with a wet towel folded beside her to wipe her fingers on, so that they wouldn’t stain the denim or polar-fleece pieces.

When she was pregnant with the Lamb, she had bad morning sickness; once she ate a bowl of
pho
and vomited it back out again within half an hour. I had to clean it up, and in the sick were long, white tendrils of noodles and beef slices that were still disc-shaped. My mother barely even chewed her food. If her sewing machine was a car, she’d constantly be driving way past the speed limit, her foot jammed down flat on the accelerator pedal.

Mrs Leslie did everything as if she had all the time in the world. She waited for me patiently after school in her dark-blue BMW, just as she said she would. The seats were warm, as if the car had been sitting in the sun on a thirty-degree day, except that it was fifteen degrees outside. She saw me touch the leather. “Oh, they’re heated,” she explained. When I gave her a blank look, she told me that if I pressed a button to my left, I could turn it off.

She was taking me to her house for a cup of tea and a catch-up. When I had told my father about it last week, he had just about been ready to take the day off work and drive me there himself. That was how excited he was, Linh. “Make sure you ask her lots of questions about things you are stuck on,” he advised me.

As Mrs Leslie started the car, I asked, “Where’s Amber?”

“She has band rehearsal. She’ll catch the school bus back at five.” The school had four buses to ferry students to and from their after-school activities, although they never went as far as Stanley.

I felt relieved that it was just me and Mrs Leslie. I felt more comfortable with her than with her daughter. While she was driving, she asked me the usual questions about school and whether I felt I had now adapted. “It’s never easy, is it?” she sighed. “You’re very brave, Lucy. Amber’s been at Laurinda since kindergarten. Sometimes I wonder whether we did the right thing by her.”

She paused, and I knew she wanted me to say something affirming, but I had no idea what that might be. “Amber’s nice,” I reassured her.

Linh, what has become of me? I lied to fill in a moment of silent awkwardness, becoming a simpering people-pleaser, when I could have stayed quiet.

“But she’s so insular. I wish the two of you could be friends, Lucy. You’d open up her world – I dare say even open her eyes to her self-centred ways.”

Where was this heading, Linh? I thought only Asian mothers did this kind of thing.

“I worry about her,” Mrs Leslie confided. “She’s always been so sensitive, but never that sensible. She’s been friends with Brodie for so long that sometimes I feel the friendship has held Amber back from becoming her own person.” She paused. “Now, I do think Brodie is a very talented young woman, but she is so brilliant that Amber seems to get lost in her shadow. I think she doesn’t try very hard because she feels there’s no way she could ever measure up to Brodie.”

It felt strange, being privy to this. It was a bit like when Mrs Cho started running down Tully to me. Yet this time I wasn’t sure that Mrs Leslie was aware she was speaking aloud – she almost seemed to be talking to herself.

“But you, Lucy,” she concluded, “you’re just such a hardworking, self-contained little hive of industry. You never let things get you down.”

I knew Mrs Leslie was itching to remind me how proud my parents must be and what a great contribution to this country we refugees made. I felt awkward because she did not know the real us; I wondered how she’d feel about Ivy’s brother Ming, with his prison time. Her naivety was a beautiful thing, I decided, because it meant she would always see the best in us. Although Ming’s parents would probably never be able to excuse his vices and habits, there would always be someone like Mrs Leslie, far away from our lives, who would.

Luckily, we had arrived at our destination. Their house was really something, Linh. The first thing I noticed was the wooden floors. “Wooden floors are what villagers have,” my father had said when we ripped up our dark and grotty carpets five years ago and discovered the old floorboards. “Let’s tile over them.” And so he and cousin Claude had spent a week and a half mixing cement and grouting, aligning the little plastic plus symbols to keep the corners of the white tiles even, and cutting ceramics to shape.

Not only was Amber’s house uncarpeted, but the floorboards were bare. They were so shiny that you could almost see your reflection, your face lost in swirls of wood-grain waves in the timber ocean.

There was a polished wooden sculpture in one corner of the living room that was like a tree branch kissing the floor with its wider end, an invisible tap pouring a puddle of wood onto the ground. I was afraid to ask what it was in case it was phallic, but Mrs Leslie caught me looking at it.

“Oh, that’s a didgeridoo,” she said, almost as if we were back in remedial class.

I told her I’d never seen a didgeridoo like that before.

“It’s a pared-down one.” Mrs Leslie laughed in an embarrassed way, though I didn’t understand why she felt embarrassed. Somehow I knew that there was another, more complicated name for it, or for that style of art. There was no way Mrs Leslie would buy a random “pared-down” hollow tree branch.

“Where does it come from?” I asked.

“An art gallery in the city,” she replied.

“What’s the gallery called?”

“Oh, Lucy, it’s just a little art gallery in the city,” she said with a small laugh, and I felt ashamed to have sounded so pushy, although really I was only thinking that if I passed it one day I could go in and have a look. But I suspected the art would be heart-stoppingly expensive.

“Would you like a cup of tea, Lucy? We have oolong or jasmine.”

“Black tea is fine with me, Mrs Leslie.”

She went into the kitchen and, not knowing what else to do, I followed. Her kitchen looked like something from a magazine, all granite and pure white cupboards and stainless steel. I noticed small things, like the soft paper towels that they wasted wiping spills – the sort of thing, if we had them, we would use to wipe the Lamb’s face after a meal instead of pilfered McDonald’s napkins or plain old toilet paper.

There was a cabinet where all the nice plates and bowls were on display, some on special stands so that the pictures on the plates faced you like paintings. What awed me most about her house was that Mrs Leslie had all this expensive stuff lying around. My mum and dad always told me to hide our valuables if any visitors came around.

On the kitchen bench, next to a cordless phone, I suddenly spotted a familiar object – a blue notebook. No, I thought, that can’t be the same Silverchair signed article. Because this one had pages torn out and phone messages scrawled all over it.

*

“What’s she doing here?” Amber asked when she arrived home at five-thirty and saw me sitting at the Leslies’ dining table, drinking tea from a cup on a saucer. A little plate next to me was filled with Tim Tams.

“I beg your pardon?” For a moment Mrs Leslie sounded scarily like a teacher.

“
Sorry
. Lucy, what are you doing here?” she asked me.

I didn’t know what to say. This was embarrassing, but I wasn’t sure why. All I knew was that, somehow, my presence was annoying to Amber.

“Lucy and I are having a little catch-up,” said Mrs Leslie. “Would you like to join us?”

“Oh, I see,” said Amber. “Well, she’s not going to disappear, because she’s in my English class now.”

“Yes, I know,” replied Mrs Leslie.

“So she’s not like Zi Wei or June Moon.” Amber turned towards me. “Two Asian girls that came here on exchange a few years ago. They went back home to China and Korea, back to their rich mums and dads, but my mum here – you should have seen her carry on. It was as if the girls were going back to kneeling on broken glass or something.”

“That’s enough, young lady.”

“You’re not supposed to have favourites, anyhow. You’re a teacher.”

“Enough!”

Amber ignored her mother and busied herself making a snack. I noticed how she used half a dozen utensils to make a sandwich.

“Hey, Amber, you have an interesting-looking jotter,” I said.