Laurinda (8 page)

She took the Lamb back in her arms. “Poor little Lamby.” She handed him to me. “Take him to the kitchen and sit him down in his high chair while you do your homework. Give him his bottle too.”

Later, when my mother came out for a coffee break and saw the crumpled letter in the bin, she pulled it out. “Why did you throw this away? What does it say?”

“It’s nothing, Mum. The school just wants us to play sport on Saturdays.”

“Then go if you want.”

“Nah.”

“Aha! You can even take the Lamb with you. Then he won’t have to stay with me in the garage.”

My mum didn’t understand some things, Linh, like the way you couldn’t have a baby on a hockey field or netball court. To her, sport was play, and if I wanted to play with some of the girls in my class, then the Lamb could come too, and the ones who were off the court could look after him. She had no idea that we would have to go to Alberdine Park on Saturday mornings and stay there for four or five hours. There was even a compulsory sports uniform, which consisted of twelve different items, all bearing the college crest: two polo tops and two swim caps (one for school events and one for house events), bathers, spray jacket, microfibre trackpants, leggings, athletic shorts, a netball skirt, a cap, socks and a sports bag.

My mother had no idea how seriously Laurinda took its play.

M
rs Leslie, my remedial English teacher, was the most attractive older lady I had ever seen. She was skinny in a way that women my mother’s age in Stanley weren’t, and the warm lines around her eyes made her even more lovely. All her blouses were silky and pastel, and all her cardigans were the colour of small woodland animals. She came in four times a week,
just for me
. The two of us sat in the corner of the library when everyone else was in normal English class.

I felt very lucky indeed.

She was also Amber’s mother.

We were studying a book called
The Great Gatsby
, which was about a rich man in a pink suit who had huge parties in his house on a long island shaped like an egg. I thought he was possibly gay, with his fashion sense, and that his love for that rich fairy-floss Daisy was fake because all she did was play tennis and complain about the heat. Who Gatsby really wanted to be with was Tom, which is why he killed Tom’s mistress. There was a line in it that said Gatsby would never look at another man’s wife, which supported my theory.

I was really looking forward to sharing my insight with Mrs Leslie. I never spoke up in normal English class but I thought that we’d have deep and meaningful talks since she was the head of the Book Club. But no, in the first lesson she gave me an essay structure to learn (introduction, body and conclusion). She had also come armed with vocabulary lists based on the book.

She told me she liked how I expressed things so concisely and asked if I had read
The Lord of the Flies
.

“No, but I might know him.”

“Pardon?”

“I know the leading distributor of jeans zippers in Australia,” I joked, but she didn’t find it funny. I guessed it wasn’t the time to tell her your joke, Linh, about how Hamlet was the son of Piglet.

So I sat there miserably as Mrs Leslie tested me on words I didn’t know, like “extemporise” and “supercilious”.

Then she read passages out to me and asked me to explain what they meant. I had no idea why she was testing my comprehension as if I were ten years old, so at first I replied with stuff like, “This passage shows that the story is set in New York, which is a rich and cultured part of America.”

“Have you been to New York, Lucy?” she asked me.

“No.”

“Then you can’t make generalisations like that. Not all of New York is wealthy or cultured. Think about the valley of ashes.”

Eventually, I started to cotton on to what Mrs Leslie wanted. My answers became more detailed, and not all about plot. I learned to judge the characters as I’d judge real people. “Nick secretly admires Gatsby but due to his class and circumstances, and also to him being related to Daisy, he can’t openly admit it. To do so would be to admit that he hangs around shady people and condones their dodge,” I would write in my essays. Or: “The green light is supposed to be a metaphor for Gatsby’s hope, because it is far away and flashes and blinks, to emphasise that hope is often elusive. But no one ever speaks about Gatsby’s envy, which the green could also symbolise.”

I had no idea why, but this last comment really did it for Mrs Leslie. Her brown eyes lit up. “You are really engaging with the text and learning the skill of analysis,” she praised. “What do you mean by Gatsby’s envy?”

I thought of all the people I knew in Stanley who looked at the houses along Ambient Estates with the same metal-rimmed, wide-eyed Eckleburg-yearning as those living in the valley of ashes. I thought of how hard we tried – you, me, Yvonne, Ivy – to look sophisticated with our imitation perfumes and gold buttons and makeup, when true Laurindans never wore such stuff, and how the plainness of their clothes did not conceal the fact that their tops were made of Angora and their shoes of calfskin. I’d only been at the school for a few weeks when I realised we were the ones standing on the shore in our pink suits, suddenly tacky, suddenly left so far behind, and that – unlike Gatsby – most of us could not afford a boat to take us across to the other side. The only way to get there was to do it individually, sink or swim, and of course very few swimmers made it.

“Gatsby wants the status they have, but he can’t get it no matter how rich he becomes, because his wealth is shonky . . . I mean, ill-gotten.”

“Spot on, Lucy!” cheered Mrs Leslie.

Then she asked me how I was settling into the school.

“Good,” I said. “Katie has been a good friend to me.”

“Katie,” Mrs Leslie said slowly. “Is that Katherine Gladrock?”

“Yes,” I replied.

Then she chuckled. “Sweet girl. But awfully dull.”

*

For my first History essay for Ms Vanderwerp, I received thirteen out of twenty. Thirteen out of twenty! A bare pass. She had also written a note: “A good effort, but your argumentative skills need improving. Please come and see me.” And she got my name wrong again. I don’t know how difficult it was to forget “Lucy”, but somehow she did.

Ms Vanderwerp’s office was a small cramped corner thing, bigger than a broom closet but only just. It smelled of Pine O Cleen, and on an overhead shelf she had three cartons of wipes and two boxes of tissues.

“Don’t worry,” she reassured me. “I can see that this is the first History essay you’ve written. It was a good attempt. But you didn’t sustain a consistent argument about what could have caused World War One.”

“My argument is that many things happened to cause the war, and no one thing made it happen.”

Ms Vanderwerp looked at me for a while, then told me that my conclusion was satisfactory but that I had to structure my argument to reflect it. She allowed me to resubmit because it was my first essay. When she returned it with a sixteen out of twenty – a mark that would have made Tully weep inconsolably – I felt like I’d got the hang of things.

So for my next two assignments, I followed the same formula. Many things in history happened to cause X, Y or Z. There was no decisive moment.

“Lucy, your writing skills are vastly improved,” Ms Vanderwerp told me, “but the questions are asking you to choose a side and argue for it.”

“But why do I have to choose a side? There are so many sides to a historical event, as you’ve taught us.”

“Yes, Lucy. But the nature of the task is to write argumentatively. So you have to choose a side, acknowledge the other side and then defeat its arguments. Am I making sense to you?”

She was making sense, but I wasn’t sure whether I should be forming opinions about grave historical events in six hundred words or less. What did an argument I made about who started World War One have to do with anything? I didn’t even get to decide what we’d eat for dinner, or when I could go out, or who I could sit next to in class. Who cared what a fifteen-year-old thought?

When the bell rang, we stood up to leave. I watched Ms Vanderwerp walk away to her next class. There was something slightly blurred about her whole being, as if she were a watercolour painting that someone couldn’t be bothered finishing; not only that, but they didn’t even care enough not to smudge it with their smock sleeve.

*

No one had explained to me why Ms Vanderwerp carried wipes around with her at all times, but after my fourth History class I figured it out. The Cabinet showed me.

One afternoon Amber came to class looking pallid and unwell. She took out a pocket pack of tissues and placed it on her desk. “Are you okay?” I asked. She hadn’t seemed sick that morning.

She nodded. When Ms Vanderwerp was handing out a photocopy about America’s involvement in World War Two, Amber let out a massive, whooping sneeze just as she was near her desk. Ms Vanderwerp jumped backwards, almost falling over Katie. All the beige seeped out of her face as she righted herself. Instead of saying, “Bless you, Amber,” Ms Vanderwerp kept her distance and opened all the windows of the room. “Amber, dear, would you like to go to the sick bay? You look quite unwell.”

“No, I should be right, Ms V.”

Then I noticed Amber’s smile, and how the colour of her face didn’t particularly match her neck. I saw what I hadn’t noticed before – that whenever anyone coughed, Ms Vanderwerp would open a window. Whenever anyone sneezed, she would turn around towards the whiteboard as if she needed to write something, or rub something out.

I heard Brodie snigger behind Ms Vanderwerp’s back while she busied herself writing on the board, and I realised that what Amber had done was all an act – an act of talcum powder torture, carefully timed to churn up Ms Vanderwerp’s worst fears.

*

That same afternoon, when I returned home, Mum had fixed the Lamb’s blue snot problem. She had caught a bus to Sunray Spotlight and bought five metres of very, very fine bridal netting, which she hemmed at the top and passed a drawstring through. At the bottom she had sewn an enormous circle of stiff copper wire. She gathered the drawstring at the top and hung the contraption from a ceiling beam, trapping the Lamb’s box inside like a butterfly net over a bee.

“Mr Lamb, look at you!” I squealed. “You have your own little hideaway!” I squatted on the floor and lifted up the circular base to peer at him.

“Gah!” he said, dribbling. He was eating one of those iced cakes in plastic wrappers, the cakes that never went bad.

“He only stays in here with me during the day while you are at school,” Mum told me. “Take him into the kitchen and give him some mashed soup from the pot on the stovetop. Then let him walk in his baby walker while you are doing your homework.”

Although Lamb had recently learned to walk, we often put him in his frame to prevent him bumping into boxes or sharp corners or crawling towards dangerous objects, like the fabric cutter or the ironing board.

I lifted the Lamb from his box, and he was still holding onto his one-eyed duck. But the moment I set him down on my lap, he decided to pee on my blazer.

“Oh no! Crap, Mum!”

“What happened?” My mother was panicking. “Did he fall?” She came rushing towards us. Then she noticed the rivulet running down my pocket, collecting in dark droplets on the concrete floor.

“Why didn’t you put a nappy on him?” I shouted.

“He has a rash on his bum.” She picked him up and showed me.

“Eww, I don’t need to see that!”

“It’ll come out with a wash,” she said, patting my damp sleeve with her hand, but that only made me angrier.

“You can’t put something like this through a machine! You have to dry-clean it!”

I had forgotten that I was talking to a textiles expert, and my mother had had enough of me. “For the last six months, all you have been going on about is your clothes,” she yelled. “Summer dress this, winter kilt that. How do you think a $300 uniform will help you study better, huh?” She washed the sleeve of my blazer with Imperial Leather soap, then dried it with a hairdryer. It did not shrink.

The truth was that I’d always felt grottier than most of the girls at Laurinda, even before the Lamb peed on me. I felt grotty because Stanley was a grotty place, Linh. When the wind blew the wrong way, you knew how foul the fumes of the Victory Carpet Factory could be.

*

Not long before, Mrs Leslie had made me write about a childhood memory which evoked a sense of place that no longer existed except in memory. I wrote about being a really young kid and standing next to my grandma in Hanoi, helping her sell boiled eggs. Of course, I didn’t remember very much except the way the market smelled, and how there were sometimes runaway chickens on the ground.

“I cried when I read this,” she said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “Was it that bad?”

“Oh, no! No, no, Lucy!” she insisted, not getting that I was joking. “No, darling. It was just too beautiful. It was just so special.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what was so special about using a cute toddler as a cheap marketing tool, Linh, but hey, it seemed to push Mrs Leslie’s buttons in a good way. I was glad, because although I had mixed feelings about her daughter, I really liked Mrs Leslie.

T
he boys had their sports. Every weekend they would play tennis and cricket against the other schools in their league. Their sport was serious, a way for them to exercise their competitive streak, for that streak to burst into glowing colours for the school and smear their rivals. If an Auburn boy played particularly well, he was celebrated by his team. An individual skill or talent brought them all a step closer to victory.

We had sports too, but our sports always seemed an inferior imitation of the boys’ – they had cricket, we had softball. They had basketball, we had netball. Girls wanted to play the former; no boys wanted to play the latter. While some of the girls went to see the boys play, none of them ever came to Laurinda games. And then some of the girls had ballet, which was more a daily practice in perfectionism than a sport.

If we tried to do four or five star jumps to warm up before class, we would be met with, “Girls, don’t be silly. You’re in senior year.” The gym was the only place for that kind of behaviour, and we only had gym once a week for two hours. The girls had to get their kicks another way.