Cloudwish

by Fiona Wood

  She examined one of the small proofs that Billy Gardiner had a (well hidden) heart. Last term at Mount Fairweather, she’d accidentally overheard him speaking to his sister. She knew it was his sister, because he’d said Sister call to Ben Capaldi later in the day, when Ben asked. Every phone call at Mount Fairweather was newsworthy, because they were so strictly limited.

  She’d been cleaning and packing up her oboe, and he must have been leaning against the wall right outside the practice room, speaking on the school office phone, which you weren’t supposed to take out of the office. Rules and Billy! She was too shy to open the door and walk out past him, so she stayed put. His sister had obviously broken up with a boyfriend. And Billy was – perfect. He was supportive and affectionate. He listened. He acknowledged her feelings, but was confident she’d feel better before too long. He reminded her of the importance of eating chocolate and watching some Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars. And he ended the call by saying, I always knew the guy was a douche, which, she could tell, made his sister laugh, because he started laughing too and said, That’s more like it. And he said, Call me again any time. And he said, I love you, okay?

  She trudged along Albert Street. It also had to be said that Billy Gardiner was smart. The kind of smart that bugged teachers. He appeared to be paying no attention, but then could answer questions designed to catch him out. He seemed to divide his concentration with no apparent effort.

  The heat of the asphalt footpath burned through the soles of her shoes. Occasional delicious wafts of coriander and garlic and lemongrass floated from restaurant doors. She weaved her well-known course, giving the junkies a wide berth, her private-school uniform being a got-some-spare-change-love magnet, and saw someone she knew at least every hundred metres all the way home.

  Walking into the grounds of the flats, she admired the familiar long shadow her building cast into the end of the hot afternoon.

  Great. Nick Sparrow and his friends were in the playground. Most little kids were already inside for dinnertime. And the ones who weren’t buzzed off anyway when the big boys came into their space.

  ‘Chick-ay – chickee, chickee. Chick-ay! Lady want some D.’ Nick grabbed his crotch and gyrated his hips.

  Really? She really had to listen to Nick Sparrow doing a B-grade street thug impersonation from some American crime show? In broad daylight – on her own turf? She looked to see exactly who was with him. Matthew Trần and three other boys she knew from West Abbotsford Primary School. Normally she would have treated them as invisible and walked on. Was it that she was finally in year eleven, the end of school and the beginning of life in sight? Or that she was discombobulated by the bizarre Billy Gardiner treatment? She did not lower her eyes and walk on. She would not let them make her feel uncomfortable. She willed herself to say something. Say anything – now. Right now would be a good time. Put these dummies in their place.

  Nothing came out.

  She turned as crisply as she could on the tanbark and walked off, hoping she at least looked as angry as she felt. Even if she hadn’t managed to open her mouth. What had stopped her saying something? As she walked into the building’s lobby, she felt that she’d let the whole team down: herself, Jane Eyre and Debi.

  The overlocker was thumping away from her parents’ bedroom. Her mother did three or four days a week of piecework sewing these days, which was like semi-retirement compared to when Vân Ước was little. It was baby onesies again, she could tell by the pale blue fabric fibre on the kitchen bench where her mum had unpacked and counted the pre-cut garments. Vân Ước grabbed an apple and headed into her room for a couple of hours of homework before dinner.

  She and her tutor, Debi, had read Jane Eyre at homework club, starting at the beginning of year eight. It felt way too hard at first. The vocab! She still had her lists. Cavillers, moreen, lamentable, letter-press, promontories, accumulation, realms, vignettes, even-tide, torpid, hearth, crimped, stout, lineaments, visage, dingy, gorged, sweetmeats, bilious, bleared, morsel, menaces, inflictions, mused, tottered, equilibrium, rummage, tyrant, pungent, predominated, subjoined . . . and that was just chapter one. The feeling of panic, of ignorance, of despair at ever mastering this truckload of indigestible words! They were not words she heard at home. She was the only one in the family who was ever going to read books like Jane Eyre.

  Debi’s face lighting up as Vân Ước read the first line – There was no possibility of taking a walk that day – was still a vivid memory. Nothing was as contagious as Debi’s enthusiasm for reading.

  ‘I am a complete nut for this book,’ Debi had said. ‘My year eight teacher made us write a chapter-by-chapter summary, and it was a good thing. It made me feel that I owned the book. I knew it inside out.’

  Vân Ước decided that she too would get to know the book inside out. And something miraculous happened when they were about a quarter of the way through reading it. After weeks of ploughing and hesitating, something clicked; she stopped stumbling over the unknown words and long sentences. Words magically started to reveal meaning, most of the time anyway, through context. And the sentences themselves stopped being obstacles and started telling a story. Her eyes were racing ahead; she was comprehending the shape and the rhythm of the language. She was cheering Jane on, and dying to know what would happen next. She suffered all Jane’s indignities and humiliations and, in the end, triumphed with her.

  She and Debi talked about each passage after she read it aloud, and discussed the era in which it was written, the restrictions and expectations imposed on a character like Jane, and on all women, in different ways, according to their strata of society; they talked about the importance of religious faith in the era, the way in which people with mental illness were generally treated – and at the end of the book, Debi said, ‘Never listen to fools who dis Jane Eyre as being a story about a girl who gets her mean man. This is a character who gets what she wants and lives on her own terms by having moral fortitude, intelligence, courage, imagination and a will of iron. And that is one hell of a checklist. Imagine Charlotte Brontë writing this book in 1847. What a powerful story for women living at that time!’

  Vân Ước agreed. Poor Charlotte Brontë had had to use a dude name to get the book published at first: Currer Bell. That was how undervalued women were.

  Vân Ước got into the habit of calling Jane to mind pretty much whenever courage was required or justice denied. She privately used the test: What would Jane do? As if Jane were hanging about the flats. Or trying to fit in imperceptibly – a poor kid at a rich school. She often thought about exactly what Jane would say or do, what she herself should have said or done in various situations. She remembered Nick Sparrow, with a hot flare of annoyance. One day she’d find the guts to say what Jane would in a situation like that.

  Out loud.

  Note to self.

  Promise to self.

  chapter 5

  Her ba, father, had dinner nearly ready by the time she emerged from a trance of non-Euclidean geometry. It was one of his special dishes, fish with pink peppercorns, ginger and coriander. When he cooked this dish, he always said the same thing, ‘Some people pay for this pepper in the fancy shops. But not us.’

  ‘Not us,’ Vân Ước repeated.

  ‘No, we go to the riverbank,’ he said. ‘Because we know –’

  ‘We know where the peppercorns grow.’ She smiled, wondering how many times they’d had this exchange since she was little.

  Her father’s grandparents had been market gardeners and of her parents he was the one who preferred cooking. On any of their walks he always had his eye out for food that could be foraged, onion weed, milk thistle, amaranth and wild rocket along the railway line, lemons and plums hanging over laneway fences, the peppercorn tree on the riverbend five minutes’ walk from where they lived. He had planted rau răm, Vietnamese mint, near the peppercorn tree, and that now grew there in plentiful supply. They
nursed along the more temperamental coriander in pots on the kitchen windowsill.

  By eleven-thirty, her parents had been asleep for nearly two hours, she’d snuck quietly into the kitchen to make a late-night icy Milo (an addiction she’d brought home from Mount Fairweather), and all her homework was finished, except for a polish on the creative writing piece.

  She stirred her drink, smelling the cold malty goodness, letting the ice cubes clink into the side of the glass, staring into the fractured reflection in the window over her desk.

  Because all her common sense told her that Billy Gardiner was likely – veering to certainly – going to act according to the character she had observed for the last two years, and that it was likely-veering-to-certain that he had something mean planned for her, it hit her like a heart attack when she remembered the wish. The ridiculous, frivolous, throwaway wish . . .

  Because . . . because his strange behaviour since that class yesterday – that she had interpreted – was interpreting – as preparatory to some sort of mean joke – could also be interpreted as (gulp) Billy liking her because she had wished that he would. She breathed in some Milo instead of swallowing and almost choked. What words had she used as she made the wish? That he would prefer her to all other girls, find her fascinating? No. No way. It was embarrassing to even let herself entertain the idea for one second. And yet, how else to explain his apparent vehemence on her behalf as he said, she’s Australian . . .? Annoying, of course, because was it such an automatic virtue to be ‘Australian’ – though his intention was to elevate her from ‘refugee’, another annoyance, because of the automatic low-status assumption that always came with that label – but that aside . . .

  She didn’t believe in fairies, zombies, vampires, Father Christmas – or magic wishes. That stuff was for kids. She drank some more Milo, spooning up the cold crunchy bits from the top. She looked inside her pencil case for the umpteenth time. Surely the little glass vial couldn’t have just disappeared. She ran a finger around the inside seam, under the zip, and tipped everything out onto her desk. Still not there.

  Wishes were not a thing.

  They were not.

  Correction.

  Wishes were a thing.

  Wishes that came true were sometimes a thing.

  Wishes that came true because of magic were not a thing.

  To pull her mind back into shape she decided to give herself some free writing; after the refugee conversation today, a little vent on what not to say to Asian kids . . . and some retorts she wished she could occasionally deliver, rather than just think.

  Where are you from?

  Australia, fool, same as you.

  Where are you really from?

  Are you still here? My parents were both born in Vietnam, but they are also Australian citizens.

  Wow, that food looks so interesting and unusual, you’re so lucky.

  It’s just what we eat at my place. Try to peep over that giant Western outlook. A sandwich is not the default lunch for the entire world.

  You’re a ‘hot Asian’. You’re an ‘Asian nerd’.

  You do realise they are dehumanising racist stereotypes, not compliments? No? Well, now you know.

  Do you have a Tiger Mother?

  Sometimes my mother is a tiger; sometimes she’s a moth, fragile and vulnerable.

  Do you get into trouble if you don’t get straight As?

  It’s never happened, but if it did I could lose my scholarship. I don’t have a safety net like you do.

  Do you get sunburned?

  Yes, and I also bleed. I even go to the toilet. Just like a real human. Who knew!

  How much for the Asian schoolgirl double act?

  Do you realise we are actual schoolgirls, old-loser-guys-calling-out-from-cars? Probably pretty much the same age as your own daughters. We are not on an excursion from a brothel.

  Are you going to do law, or medicine?

  Neither. (But don’t tell my parents.)

  Do your parents own a restaurant?

  My mother does piecework from home, and my dad works in a food-processing factory cutting up chickens into portions. Do your parents own a restaurant?

  You look like Lucy Liu.

  An actor who is old enough to be my mother? Because we both have long black hair? Or because all Asians look alike? (I don’t.)(And we don’t.)

  Select All. Delete.

  Swallowing a laugh, she imagined printing it out and distributing it.

  It felt brilliant to bash things out in black and white.

  Thank you, Ms Bartloch.

  chapter 6

  Walking to school, early on Friday morning, Vân Ước decided that she was in-waiting every bit as much as Jess was. She wasn’t at all interested in any of the boys she knew from primary school. And Billy Gardiner would never be interested in her, despite recent aberrant behaviour.

  If she had to be in unrequited love with someone, which seemed annoyingly to be the case, surely logic should have pointed her in the direction of Michael. Kind, brainy, handsome, and his own endearing brand of very odd. Because he himself was in unrequited love with Sibylla Quinn, Michael would be a perfect unavailable person with whom to be in unrequited love.

  It was mystifying and annoying being attracted to Billy.

  Just yesterday he christened their perfectly nice physics teacher, Mr Hodge, ‘Pigman’. Pigman Podge. True, he did have a piggy nose and some unfortunate food spillage on his button-up vest front, but really . . .

  Billy had even once said, unbelievably, that sylph-like Sibylla Quinn danced like a spastic tarantula. No doubt about it, he had a nasty streak. He got away with plenty because he made people laugh. But he had his enemies. And he could be a bully. He seemed to despise weak people. That meant he was probably afraid of whatever his own well-hidden weaknesses were. Billy’s best friend was Ben Capaldi, who strategically sought to stay on everyone’s good side, but hid it so well that no one seemed to notice.

  But nature clearly didn’t understand logic. When she thought about Billy, she was selective. She let the meanness shrink and the kindness grow. She considered the balance and symmetry and physical ease he so effortlessly embodied, the strong twist of desire that tightened within her whenever they accidentally stood close together, the hard beauty of his face, which always called to her mind the words fallen angel.

  And, irresistibly appealing though this was, nothing was quite as intriguing as the thing he was hiding. She might be the only one who stood quietly enough, looked closely enough, to see it. Flickering almost imperceptibly around the edges of him was a restlessness, or dissatisfaction. It reminded her of the moment just before the Incredible Hulk started hulking.

  She entered the school grounds through a side gate and as she skirted the back of the gym building, she was startled by a large, sweaty boy throwing himself through the doorway, bending over and vomiting violently. It was Billy Gardiner, clad only in bike shorts. He straightened up, panting, spitting, and groaning in pain.

  She looked the other way, earbuds in, and kept walking.

  Billy called her name; she pretended not to hear him.

  He must have been doing ergos. Places in the first eight rowing crew were constantly assessed. One expectation was that the rowers would exert themselves to the utmost in the regular training tests on the ergometers, the fixed rowing machines. Only the fittest, with exactly the right body type – long, strong, lean – could even think about signing up for the privilege of this much discomfort and pain. And then having to prove over and over again their fitness and commitment. On the river at ungodly hours for much of the year. In a cycle of competition with the other private schools that had become bizarrely fierce, and saw the training season lengthen to the point where all the rowers were risking their backs with the sheer brutal repetition the sport now required.

  Despite th
is, a queue of contenders shadowed the girls’ and the boys’ first crews, nanoseconds off the pace, all putting their hands up for places in the top crews.

  Vân Ước had zero competitive spirit when it came to sport. But among the elite rowers, it was intense; there was a belief that if you didn’t vomit after your ergo, you hadn’t really tried. That seemed all kinds of weird to her. What did it really matter if your crew rowed one fraction of a second faster or slower than another school’s crew? Deep in speculation of this imponderable, alien behaviour of her adopted tribe here at Crowthorne Grammar, she nearly jumped out of her shoes when Billy clapped his hand on her shoulder to get her attention.

  ‘Sorry.’ He registered her startle with an apologetic grimace.

  ‘That’s okay.’ Vân Ước readjusted her book-heavy backpack.

  Seeing her uncomfortable shrug seemed to prompt Billy. He took the pack off her back in a swift, unexpected move, and started walking along beside her, still bare-chested, carrying it.

  She could see him chucking it over a fence, dumping it in the boys’ toilets, or opening it and emptying its contents across the oval they were crossing. ‘Can I please . . .?’ She reached over to take it back.

  ‘This weighs a tonne.’ Billy looked at his watch. ‘Shit. I still have to shower – we’ll talk later.’

  Vân Ước was still holding out a hand for her pack, trying not to show the panic brimming up inside her.

  ‘I’ll drop it at your locker.’ He took off at a run across the oval, her bag on his back.