Cloudwish (4 page)

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 this, 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.

What the hell was he doing? Her laptop was in there. Her lunch. Her jumper. All her English and maths books. Her precious camera, as good as new from Cash Converters. The day's supply of tampons. Stuff she couldn't afford to lose. She mightn't be able to keep up with Billy, but she was determined not to lose sight of that bag. She followed him at a sprint. She'd kept up her fitness from Mount Fairweather, running at least three times a week still, and was no more than twenty metres behind by the time he arrived at, thank god, the year eleven and twelve centre. And miraculously – yes! – he was heading in the direction of the lockers.

Holly, Tiff and Ava arrived just in time to see Vân Ước apparently chasing Billy Gardiner, panting after him, into the year eleven locker area.

‘Oh, please, that's just pathetic,' said Holly.

‘She can run all she likes, but she won't catch him,' said Tiff.

Ava snorted with derision.

Billy had put Vân Ước's bag down by the time she reached her locker. ‘Aren't you going to ask how I did in my ergo?'

‘How did you do?' Vân Ước and Holly spoke at the same time.

‘Aced it,' he said, grinning, then turned to run back to the sport centre. ‘Six thirty.'

Holly walked up to her, standing too close. ‘He wasn't talking to
you
.' She and Ava burst out laughing at the very thought.

Vân Ước had no illusions about where she sat in the pecking order around here: rock bottom. But one thing, no matter how strange, was clear. Billy had made eye contact with her. He was talking to her, and it was an amazingly good ergo time
.
She wasn't proud that she'd covertly researched Billy's preferred sports. Some days it was as though her fingers had minds of their own when she opened her browser. She unzipped her backpack – still damp with his sweat – and, as she started unpacking her books in a daze, overheard Ava say to Holly, ‘Babe, you would
so
be going out with him if Head of the River wasn't about to happen.'

Vân Ước could tell from Holly's elaborately casual,
oh maybe, I don't know, it's just a couple of friendly hook ups,
how much she wanted it to be the case.

It took her most of the day to resettle; already a difficult task given that her first folio meeting was scheduled after the last period.

Ms Halabi, the art teacher, jumped straight in. ‘Tell me about some work I can't wait to see.'

It meant so much to Vân Ước that the idea of not being able to share her vision for her art was terrifying, almost paralysing. But gradually her racing heart slowed to a normal pace as she talked through some of her concepts and plans for the two years' work, and saw her teacher's enthusiasm.

She showed Ms Halabi a handful of early studies, close-ups. She'd been shooting a secret treasury of small stamped-in pieces of metal that studded the footpaths around where she lived.

How they got there, and whether or not they had some functional purpose, she didn't know. As a little girl, she'd imagined them to be valuable ancient coins working their way up from deep inside the earth: buried treasure. Even now, knowing there were no ancient coins in this land, they still held a magic for her.

Bright beaten pieces of silver, half buried in the blue-black asphalt. Maybe they were council surveyors' markers. Sometimes they were encircled by a spray of paint. Stamped over by a thousand footfalls. Trampled. Modest. Unnoticed. She was going to make a piece of art that showed the iridescent beauty of these faux coins. She had chosen twelve and was patiently shooting them at all hours of daylight, as the sun played across their surface. She would make a grid that looked like a piece of shimmering chainmail. Imagining it was just the beginning. She'd have to shoot and compose one hundred and forty-four images to make a single folio piece.

She planned to apply the same patterning principle to some other materials. The next piece would be made up of photographs of the old, mottled green and purple glass tiles that still survived unobtrusively on some Melbourne city footpaths. They were skylights to the basement level of the Victorian-era buildings and looked like jewels erupting from the seams of buildings and footpaths.

She'd shoot and compose a similar number of these images. The folio would have six pieces in total. She wanted the work to show that the seemingly insignificant could warrant close attention, and the tiniest elements could be made monumental. Indeed, she wanted to invert the whole idea of what was/should be considered monumental.

Seen together, she hoped the pieces in her folio would create a picture of the city she knew – vast, but stitched together from tiny pieces and small moments.

She wanted her art to carry such a load of ideas, and was terrified her ambition would outstrip her ability, and that the work she produced could never quite glean her teeming brain, to borrow from John Keats.

By the time she'd finished trying to share the vision that was so clear in her mind, she could feel her face burning with concentration.

Ms Halabi was nodding. ‘Plenty of nice chewy thematic complexity and technical challenges to keep you busy for the two-year program. I can't wait to see more. I want you to keep in mind that image of these pieces as a suite as you proceed, because this work is also going to drive you truly crazy at least half a dozen times. You'll need to remind yourself how magnificent it will all be once realised.'

‘I know. It's fiddly.'

‘I'll leave you with two thoughts: one practical, one theory-based.' The art teacher held up one paint-stained finger. ‘Five minutes spent cleaning a disc with a rag and some methylated spirits might save you two hours of photoshopping.' She raised a second finger, also ingrained with paint. ‘And – consider the meaning of these images. Every time you're working with them, ask yourself: what do they mean? And, even more important, what do they mean
to me
? The more specific and personal something is, the more its universality emerges.'

The more specific and personal
. . .

Fine.

Personal
and
specific
were not muscles that got a lot of flexing in her family. But she'd try. Another solo flight. It's not like she wasn't used to that.

There probably weren't two words that pushed her harder towards the gaping holes in her life. Gaps and question marks all over the place.

chapter 7

Every year, around this
time, for as long as Vân Ước could remember, her mother got sick. It was as though she just disappeared, curled up inside her shell like a snail poked with a stick.

She'd realised a couple of years ago that it wasn't as simple as her
ba
made out: her mother was more than just tired. Eventually it clicked that her mother's slump time coincided with the time of year her parents had left Vietnam. They got the diagnosis last year: relapsing post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. This year it was getting treated properly. Not just the symptoms, either. This year things would be different. Fingers crossed.

It's complicated
(that Facebook cliché) was in fact the perfect description for her relationship with her parents. It was the same for all the first-generation Vietnamese Australian kids she knew.

The deal with parents who'd survived the sort of horror you didn't even want to know about was that you shared the weight of all the risks they'd taken (for you), all the suffering they'd gone through (so you wouldn't have to suffer), the deprivation they'd signed up for (so you would want for nothing), and all the terrifying dislocation they felt (so you'd have a home, feel at home). It was pretty tough, really. For all concerned.

If only the love and irritation could merge into a calm neutrality, but they didn't. They were like oil and water. Each with a determined integrity. One or the other. No blending. No blanding.

Debi had helped give some context to that pressure to be happy, to be successful. Her mother had been a Holocaust survivor, which was right up there with the worst anyone's parents might have endured.

This was everything she'd heard directly from her mother about her parents' exodus from Vietnam to Australia:

From when she was little, she'd asked questions. When had her parents moved from Vietnam to Australia? Her father told her they'd left Vietnam by boat, arrived in Malaysia, and been transferred to Australia. She'd stirred that up in her mind with Noah's ark for a few years, but it clarified over time into the less poetic reality.

Her parents were ‘boat people', though when they arrived in Australia the expression wasn't so venom-coated.

Her mother was twenty-one years old when they left Vietnam in 1980. Her father was one year older. Her auntie, Hoa Nhung, who apparently lived in Sydney but whom they never saw, was on the boat with them. She was nineteen when they left. And why did they never speak to her? Why had she never visited?

Years after their eventual arrival in Darwin (via the mosquito-infested Malaysian island they felt so blessed to have landed on), after relocating to Melbourne (first stop Lansdowne Hostel), after compulsory but inadequate language classes, after settling for work in their second language that was less than it might have been, after the allocation of public housing, seventeen years after all that, Vân Ước was born.

So her parents were also old, on top of everything else.

Was her name, Vân Ước – Cloudwish – connected to the time no one would speak about?

Why the long wait?

Did her parents have fertility problems?

Did they not want a child?

Did they change their minds?

Was she an accident?

And who were the two little girls in the photo she'd found, snooping through her mother's chest of drawers when she was twelve, and which she took out periodically to re-examine in secret? If it was her mother and Hoa Nhung, why was it hidden away? Why wasn't it out in a frame, like Vân Ước's horrible grade six graduation photo? Or her even more horrible First Holy Communion photo?

What was the story?

Because of her parents' reticence it had become unthinkable to broach any of these questions with them. Her
ba
only ever said:
Don't ask your mother about it. It was a hard time. A bad time.

Vân Ước had eventually stitched together some possibilities – just what she'd gleaned from her own research. She only unfolded that ugly little garment – still full of missing stitches – in private, trying to understand exactly what her parents might have survived.

How was she supposed to feel about it? Proud? Fearful? Ashamed?

When she looked at her parents watching
MasterChef
on TV in a tired trance at the end of the working day, she could not connect the very ordinariness of them to what she'd read.

What they had experienced was obviously unspeakable. But didn't they realise the extent to which not speaking made them strangers to her? Why couldn't they imagine how odd it might feel to see your parents through the wrong end of a telescope?

She thought of demanding that they tell her their story, asking the difficult questions, but her courage always failed. She imagined Jane Eyre, stern-eyed, tapping her polished boot impatiently.

How did their experience fit with her life now? Across this unspoken gulf, where so much was implied but never spelled out, was it really all down to her to justify the effort, the sacrifices? To make it worthwhile? How could she ever do enough, achieve enough? Be enough? To compensate for – what, exactly?

So the boat story morphed from abstract fairytale to abstract horror as her understanding grew over the years.

She imagined an even more protracted horror story had come before the boat journey: a war, and the aftermath, living under the Communist Party regime following the fall of Saigon. And she was grateful she hadn't thought to find out about that till years later.

She had read about it all now. Like the irresistible pain of wriggling your own loose tooth, she'd found it impossible to stop searching once she started. Every time she found something newly frightening, she challenged herself, with an adrenalin rush, to read it. Many accounts of that time reported grotesque brutality. Her parents were barely out of their teens when they fled. How had they coped with losing everything, with uncertainty, fear, violence?

How would she have coped?

Not well.

But would she have had the ingenuity and the guts to escape?

Not likely.

So, frustrating though her gentle parents were, demanding though they were, dependent though they were, they were also her heroes, her superiors in every sense, and she would rather die than disappoint them. Even if it killed her.

Gaps and question marks were only part of the problem.

How was she ever going to convince her parents that having an artist for a daughter would not be a complete disaster? At least she wouldn't have to face that conversation till next year. What a wimp. She could virtually hear Jane tsk tsk-ing in annoyance.