A Lesson for Lina

by Sally Rippin

  ‘Cupcake?’ Lina giggled. ‘You called your Mexican fighting fish Cupcake?’

  Julia grinned and stood up, brushing dust and goat hair off her skirt. ‘Cupcake, Popcorn, Fairyfloss and Sugar. It’s a reverse psychology thing. Dad’s a psychologist and his theory is that if you call people bad things they’ll be bad. If you call them good things they’ll be good.’ She shrugged. ‘My lizard is called Precious. Hasn’t stopped her biting, though.’ She showed Lina some tiny pink tooth marks on her hand.

  Lina laughed. ‘What’s your axolotl called?’

  ‘Magdalena.’

  Lina laughed again. ‘And where’s that name from?’

  ‘It was my mother’s name,’ Julia said simply.

  ‘Was?’ It came out before Lina could stop herself.

  ‘She died when I was a baby.’

  Lina’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh gosh, I’m so sorry! I . . . I had no idea!’

  Julia shrugged. ‘During the war she was put in a concentration camp. Dad, too, but he survived. I was sent away to my grandmother’s village in Russia to hide from the Nazis. When the war was over Dad came back to get me and Babushka, and brought us out to Australia.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ Lina said, feeling suddenly grateful for her own mother. ‘Do you remember her?’

  ‘Not really. But that’s okay. I get along really well with Bron. She’s my wicked step-mother. She only tries to put me in the oven occasionally these days,’ Julia joked. ‘Come on. We should check on my dad before he makes a complete fool of himself in front of your family. How embarrassing was it when he flirted with your grandmother?’

  Julia tugged Lina’s hand and the two of them jogged back inside, their feet making little plumes of dust in the sun-parched soil. By the time they got back to the kitchen, Lina’s father was also there, woken from his nap, and wearing his suit jacket. The whole family were sitting stiffly around the table sipping sweet black coffee and nibbling on Nonna’s biscuits, listening to Alfred tell stories that made his arms swing about in the air.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Lina,’ said Julia. ‘He just makes himself at home wherever he goes. It’s appalling!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Lina insisted. ‘My parents love entertaining. And they probably understand only half of what he’s saying anyway. Besides, they obviously like him. Look, he makes Ma laugh, and that’s no easy task, believe me!’

  Lina decided she liked Julia’s father enormously. It was hard to believe, watching him tell jokes and funny stories, that he had been through so much hardship not so very long ago.

  AFTER Alfred had left, the two girls excused themselves and went to Lina’s room. Lina was relieved to see that Julia didn’t even comment on the fact that she shared the room with her grandmother. Julia only seemed to notice the good things about Lina’s place and none of the bad. They sat on Lina’s bed, and flicked through the Women’s Weeklies that Lina’s mother had given her.

  ‘So, are you going to write any more stories?’ Julia asked, pointing to the fiction page of the magazine on her lap. ‘You could maybe send something in here?’

  ‘Actually, I was thinking of sending something to the Age,’ Lina said shyly. ‘I have an idea for a story about the Olympics. I thought I’d send it to Stella Davis. Do you know her column?’

  ‘Of course!’ Julia gushed. ‘My dad makes me read it all the time because he says she’s the best writer in the Age. And the only woman. She’s great! You’ll be just like her, Lina! I can see it already: Around the World with Lina Gattuso. You should absolutely send something in to her. She’ll love you!’

  ‘Thanks. I think I will.’

  ‘What’s the story about?’ Julia asked.

  ‘It’s about the Chinese boy who wrote the letter to the Olympic Committee. Did you hear about that?’

  ‘I did!’ Julia said. ‘Nobody knows who he is. It’s such a mystery!’

  Lina smiled and looked down at the magazine she had on her lap.

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ Julia said, grabbing Lina’s chin and forcing her to look back up into her eyes. ‘You know him!’

  Lina bit her lip and nodded. ‘He made me promise not to tell anyone his name.’

  ‘Why?’ Julia said, shaking her head in astonishment. ‘He’d be famous! All around the world!’

  ‘He doesn’t want his family to know it was him who wrote the letter. He thinks they won’t like all the attention. He’s shy, too, so I don’t think he’d really want it either.’

  ‘Who is he? Where did you meet him?’ Julia said, her whole body curling with the thrill of sharing a secret.

  Lina felt herself blush.

  ‘Oh my goodness! You like him!’ Julia squealed.

  ‘Of course I don’t!’ Lina said, trying hard to look serious. ‘Are you kidding? I’m only twelve. And he’s seventeen!’

  Julia rolled back onto the bed in delight, then sprung up again. ‘Is he cute?’

  Lina giggled. ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so jealous! I’d love to have a sweetheart,’ Julia crooned.

  ‘Stop it!’ Lina said, laughing. ‘He’s not my sweetheart, okay? He’s just some boy I see on the bus sometimes. Look, can we change the subject?’

  ‘Only if you promise to invite me to your wedding.’

  ‘You’re an idiot!’ Lina pushed Julia off the bed. She fell onto her bottom and rolled around the floor laughing. There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Julia?’ Lina heard Pierino call. ‘Your dad’s here to collect you.’

  ‘Already?’ Julia said, standing up and flattening her crazy mass of curls.

  ‘Wait!’ said Lina, grabbing Julia’s hand, before she could open the door. ‘Promise me you won’t tell anyone?’

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ said Julia, serious now. ‘You can trust me with any of your secrets, Lina. We’re friends, aren’t we? Maybe even best friends?’

  Lina nodded, her heart soaring. ‘Thank you,’ she replied.

  ‘And here’s a secret in return to prove it,’ Julia said, her face twisting into a grin. ‘I think your brother’s cute.’

  ‘Bruno?’ Lina asked. ‘Yeah, all the girls do. Even at primary school he had about a million girlfriends.’

  ‘No, the other one,’ Julia said.

  ‘Ewww, Pierino?’ Lina said, her face screwing up in disgust. ‘He’s way too old for you. And anyway, he has a girlfriend. I think they’re pretty serious, too. Bruno said he’s going to bring her over to meet the family soon.’

  ‘Oh well,’ Julia sighed. ‘If they ever break up, let me know. I think he’s dreamy!’

  ‘You can have him. In fact, take both of them. They drive me nuts! Come on, your dad’s here. Let’s go find him before he flirts with my grandmother again.’

  The girls found Alfred in the kitchen, hovering by a sputtering pot of tomato sauce on the stove. ‘Oh, that smells incredible!’ he was saying. ‘Is that basil you’ve put in the sauce? How fascinating!’

  ‘Please stay for dinner,’ Lina’s father offered.

  Lina looked at Alfred hopefully. ‘Oh, yes!’ she pleaded. ‘Please do!’

  ‘It does smell unbelievably tempting,’ Alfred said, smacking his lips the way corny Italian actors did in the movies. ‘But I’m afraid my beautiful Bronnie has cooked already – and she’ll have my intestines on toast if I’m not back in time for dinner. But, come to our house! I insist! Next Saturday night. We’ll have Christmas drinks together.’

  Lina saw her parents exchange a look of mild panic. They hadn’t visited many houses on the other side of town, and Lina knew that the idea of drinks with someone they had only just met would terrify them a little. But Lina’s father was too polite to refuse an invitation so he told Alfred that yes, they would love to. Lina felt proud of him.

  ‘Splendid!’ Alfred said, clapping his hands together in such an exaggerated way that Lina had to hold back her giggles. ‘Come at five. All of you. And don’t leave this delightful lady behind, now, will you?’ he said gesturing towards
Nonna, who looked up from the kitchen sink in alarm when she felt everyone’s eyes fall upon her.

  ‘We will all come,’ Lina’s father assured him, and saw Julia and Alfred to the door.

  ‘See you at school, Lina!’ Julia called out.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lina happily. ‘See you Monday!’ She couldn’t wait.

  AFTER waving Julia goodbye, Lina went back to her bedroom to study for her Maths exam. But ideas for her story kept flitting into her head. I’ll just jot them down in case I forget them, she told herself, opening up her notebook, then I’ll study for Maths. But just as Lina began writing, her father poked his head around the door and Lina had to shove the notebook under her pillow.

  ‘Lina?’ he said. ‘Can you come back out to the kitchen for a moment? Your mother and I have some news we’d like to share with you.’

  Oh no, Lina worried. Her first thought was that her mother might be pregnant. Lina couldn’t bear the thought of all those months of her getting more and more tired and more and more grumpy again. Or, even worse, losing the baby.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Pa said, when he saw the look on his daughter’s face. ‘It’s good news, Lina. Very good news, in fact.’

  Lina followed her father out to the kitchen. Her uncle and brothers were already there, sitting around the table, and Nonna stood at the stove, stirring the sauce. The windows had steamed up and the kitchen felt as snug and cosy as the cabin of a boat. Lina looked from face to face, searching for a clue, but no one in the room seemed to know any more than she did, except perhaps Ma. Her mother slipped her eyes away when Lina looked at her, a faint smile playing at the corner of her lips. Lina felt her stomach flip.

  ‘Children,’ Lina’s father began, taking his place at the head of the table. ‘Your mother and I have some exciting news for you.’ He took his wife’s hand and she looked up at him lovingly.

  By now Lina’s belly was jumping about like a fish. ‘What? What?’ she blurted.

  ‘So impatient!’ Bruno teased, jabbing her in the arm.

  Lina held back her yell so as not to prolong the wait any more than necessary.

  ‘Well,’ her father continued, his smile bigger than Lina had ever seen it, ‘you know how hard your mother and I have worked over the last few years?’

  The children nodded. Boy, do we ever! Lina thought.

  ‘Well, all our hard work has finally paid off. The Gattusos are now proud owners of their very own home!’

  Lina and her brothers all gasped, looked at each other in shock, then began firing questions at their parents one after the other.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘How big is it?’

  ‘How many bedrooms?’

  ‘Will I have my own room?’

  ‘How will I get to school?’

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ Lina’s father said, laughing. ‘We will go and visit it soon so you can see it for yourselves. It’s not far from here, in Brunswick, but it’s big and it’s modern  . . .’

  ‘And it’s ours!’ Lina’s mother sighed, her eyes springing with tears.

  Lina picked up Enzo and spun him around in the air. ‘A new house, Enzo! A new house of our very own!’

  Enzo squealed loudly.

  ‘And just in time!’ Pierino joked, looking up at a crack in the kitchen ceiling that had been growing bigger and more ominous every day.

  Ma rolled her eyes, nodding in agreement. ‘It can’t come soon enough, as far as I’m concerned. I have had it up to here with falling down old houses and lousy landlords who make no repairs and still put up the rent.’

  ‘Ahem!’ Zio said, frowning and rapping his fingers on the table.

  ‘We’re not finished,’ Lina’s father said, gesturing for them all to sit down again. ‘Zio has some happy news to share, too.’

  Zio smiled and took a deep, proud breath. ‘I have a job.’ He held up his hand to calm all the excited clamouring that followed. ‘It’s not a great one,’ he shrugged, ‘but it’s good money. From next month I will be picking fruit in Mildura.’

  ‘Mildura?’ Lina said.

  ‘Up north,’ Zio explained. ‘In the country. Which means, sadly, I will not be moving into your big new house with you.’

  Lina tried to look disappointed, but she wasn’t very successful. All she was able to think about was having a house where they could use their lounge room again!

  Zio read her face and smiled, understandingly. ‘I know you will miss me,’ he joked, shooting a glance at Bruno in particular. ‘But you can always visit. The best part, though, is that now I have a job I can finally bring my wife out to Australia. She will be coming over in the new year, as soon as I’ve earned enough for a boat ticket.’

  ‘Oh, that’s fantastic!’ Lina gushed, this time sincerely. ‘When will we meet her?’

  ‘Mildura is a long way by train,’ Lina’s father said, ‘but we will make a trip to visit them next year. Maybe at Easter.’

  ‘And I will be back for Christmas,’ Zio grinned, ‘so I might need to borrow your couch for one more night.’

  Lina smiled and hugged her uncle. Gosh! I might even miss him, she realised.

  To celebrate their happy news, Lina’s father opened a bottle of homemade wine and sliced up some pieces of salami. He filled up glasses for all the adults and even the children had a splash of wine in water – the older they were, the bigger the splash.

  ‘Nonna!’ Pa sighed. ‘Stop working for a moment and come and join us, would you? It’s not every day your daughter’s husband and his brother have such tremendous news to celebrate.’

  Despite grumbling about how they would already be eating late, Nonna turned off the sauce and joined them at the table. There, the whole family sat, drinking wine and chewing on hard little slices of salami and slippery olives, laughing and telling stories and imagining aloud all the excitement of their new lives, spilling out fresh and bright ahead of them, until the night had well and truly crept into the kitchen, enfolding them in its velvet cloak. The chickens weren’t put away and the goat was left to roam the garden. The Lygon Street trams ceased their rattling, the neighbours stopped yelling. Soon the narrow alleyway grew quiet. Only the Gattuso household rumbled with noisy happiness long into the night.

  LINA woke early, her head full of ideas. Creeping out of bed, she opened the curtain a crack so as not to wake her grandmother but just enough for a shaft of light to spill over her bedclothes like lamplight. Then she pulled her notebook out from under her pillow and found a pencil in her bedside drawer. Sunday mornings were a good time to write because everyone slept in and there was no rush to go anywhere except for church, which didn’t start until ten. If she woke up early enough she could often get in a good two hours of writing sitting up in bed, before Nonna began to rumble and stir.

  Lina wrote down the whole story about meeting John, and their talks on the bus, and the letter he had written, and how he had changed the whole future of the Olympic Games. It took her most of the morning, including copying it out neatly in pen. I wish I had a typewriter, she thought, holding the pages out in front of her to assess the neatness of her handwriting, but she was still pleased with the end result. She folded it in half and tucked it into her school bag.

  The next morning, Lina caught the early bus and arrived when the school grounds were still empty, her favourite time of day. The main building gleamed white in the soft morning light and the only sounds came from the warble of the magpies swooping from the gum trees and the crunch of her shoes on the long pebbled driveway.

  Sister Rosemary’s face broke into a warm crinkly smile as Lina stepped through the doorway of the library.

  ‘Lina! It’s been a while. I thought you might have forgotten your old friend, now that you’ve become a celebrity!’

  Lina grinned and leaned on the desk, across from the old nun. There was a small pile of school magazines beside her. ‘It looks great, doesn’t it?’ She brushed her fingers across the glossy cover. ‘We couldn’t have done it without your help, th
ough.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Sister Rosemary shrugged. ‘You and Sarah seemed to be working together pretty well, considering the amount of stress you were both under. Hopefully next year you will have more time to put it together. And you can get a bigger team of helpers, perhaps?’

  Lina flicked through the magazine while she thought about what to say next. ‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m not sure if I want to do it again next year. Sarah and I  . . . don’t really get along that well anymore.’ She looked up at Sister Rosemary, waiting for the frown or the look of disappointment. But instead, she was surprised to see a twist of a smile appear on her face.

  ‘Oh, that is a shame,’ Sister Rosemary said with an exaggerated sigh, ‘to lose both of you at once! Sarah has already come in to say she doesn’t want to work on the magazine next year. And the Mother Superior was very keen to retain at least one of its original editors.’ She smiled and winked at Lina. ‘I suggested I might be able to persuade you to stay on if you were able to choose your own editorial team. I have heard Julia Goldbloom is quite a fine writer  . . .’

  Lina giggled. ‘How is it that you know everything about everyone when you never even seem to leave the library, Sister Rosemary?’

  ‘I am the eyes and ears of this school, my dear,’ the sister said, tapping her nose. ‘The eyes and ears of this school.’ She stood up stiffly and began to shuffle over to the desk behind her. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve made me a Christmas present yet?’ she called out over her shoulder. ‘I’m rather partial to gingerbread. If you need a recipe, do let me know.’

  Lina laughed. ‘A recipe would be great, thanks. And thank you for mentioning me to the Mother Superior. I’d love to work on the magazine with Julia. I’ll ask her today!’ She watched curiously as the nun leaned over to open a drawer in the wooden desk and pull out a package wrapped in Christmas paper.