Laurinda (27 page)

That evening my mother suggested she take Lamb to bed with her because he was sick. I reluctantly handed him over after dinner. The Lamb had been making noises all evening, as if he was whistling under his breath very softly, even though he wasn’t even old enough to whistle yet, and his mouth was closed.

He woke up whistling at two a.m, my mother later told me. He refused to lie down again, even when Mum held him in her arms to make him go back to sleep. There was something wrong. When the skin of his neck started to look like a vacuum cleaner was inside his throat sucking it in each time he inhaled, she panicked and shook me awake.

“Call your father at work!” my mother cried. I looked at the Lamb in her arms; his lips and nose were a strange bruisey colour.

Picking up the phone, I rang the factory. “This is an emergency,” I said. “Please put Warwick Lam on the phone.”

I heard the man at the other end yell out, “Oi, Warwick!”

By now my mother was wailing in the kitchen, clutching the Lamb.

“Why are you calling me at work? What’s wrong?” my father asked when he reached the phone.

“The Lamb is not breathing,” I told him. Dad didn’t even say anything – he just dropped the phone. I went into the kitchen.

The Lamb’s breaths were coming out short and grunting. His nostrils flared and his eyes were open with panic. I called triple-zero and asked for an ambulance. Then I ran to the Donaldsons’ house, ignoring the barking of their Dalmatian, and knocked on their front door. No one answered. I knocked until the porch light came on, but still the door remained shut. I stood at the centre of the front step so they could see through the peephole that I wasn’t some crazy hooligan come to mug them, and at last the door opened.

It was Mrs Donaldson, groggy with sleep, in blue and yellow pyjamas. “Who is this?”

“It’s Lucy Lam from next door,” I told her. “Please help us! My baby brother is not breathing!”

“Do you know why he’s not breathing?” she asked me.

“No!” I cried.

She then went back inside her house, and I was so angry and panicked that I wanted to charge in there and drag her back out. But soon she emerged with an asthma inhaler. She and I went back to our house, to my mother in the kitchen, and to the rasping, gasping Lamb.

“For heaven’s sake, sit him upright,” commanded Mrs Donaldson. “Sit him upright so air can get into his lungs.”

I showed my mother what to do, with my hand supporting the Lamb’s skinny back.

“What’s that?” my mother asked me, as soon as she saw Mrs Donaldson’s inhaler.

Mrs Donaldson shook it and then placed it at the Lamb’s lips. She pressed the top of the inhaler just as the Lamb took a breath in. He started to cough.

“It’s killing him!” yelled my mother. “What is that stuff? It’s going to choke him to death!”

I patted the Lamb on the back, hoping to help ease his cough. What if my mother was right, I thought in panic. What if this medication was only for adults?

“Don’t pat his back, rub it,” instructed Mrs Donaldson. “It will calm him down.” She rubbed the Lamb’s back in circular motions, quietly telling him, “There, there, sweet pup. Just have a little rest. Just take it easy.”

The ambulance arrived at the same time as my father. The paramedic took the Lamb into the back of the van and sat him up on the stretcher. They put a face mask on him, which was attached to a machine. “That’s a nebuliser,” explained the paramedic.

The colour slowly came back to the Lamb’s fingers, lips and nose.

“This little fella’s had an asthma attack,” said the paramedic. “You’re very lucky he was given a dose of Ventolin to tide him over.”

“Oh, I was so worried!” cried Mrs Donaldson, peering in through the back of the ambulance. “It was Harold’s inhaler, but I thought the baby might have been having an asthma attack. Harold has bad lungs, you know, from years of living behind these factories. But I didn’t know whether you could give adult Ventolin to a small baby. I just had to give it a go.”

“You’re very lucky to have such good neighbours,” the paramedic told us.

“What could have caused this, Doctor?” asked my father.

“Well, hard to say, really. Has the little tacker had a bit of a cold recently? Or maybe something in the house triggered an attack.”

“Like what?”

“Chemicals, maybe, cleaning products. Dust mites. That sort of thing.”

To be on the safe side, the paramedics wanted to take the Lamb to the hospital. I wanted to go too, but Mum said I should get some sleep and that Dad would go. I gave the Lamb’s fist one last squeeze and clambered out of the back of the vehicle.

Mrs Donaldson was still standing there, waving them off.

“I’m very sorry to have woken you, Mrs Donaldson,” I told her.

“Nonsense, child. He’ll be all right, the wee lamb.” She turned and walked back to her house.

W
hen the Lamb arrived home the next morning, he had some pink in his cheeks. “He’ll be okay,” my father told me. “He just needs to rest and recover and take his medicine.”

The one thing I wanted to do was hold him again. I had to wait a long time, though, because Mum would not let go of him. She would not put him down, and she patted him until he fell asleep. When he woke up I made him a special treat of mashed apples, and spent all afternoon in the house with him. Mum kept checking on him every twenty minutes.

That afternoon, another letter from school arrived in the mail.

Dear Lucy,

Due to your unexplained absence from school and our inability to contact you, we regret to inform you that we must withdraw our invitation for you to address the Equity in Education conference.

I didn’t give a toss now – it was one less thing to worry about – but I thought of Ms Vanderwerp, how the Cabinet had weeded her out. We were all equal at our harmonious school, but those who stumbled and fell face-first were just an embarrassment. How ghastly! Ladies, avert your eyes! How horrid, like the man who had the gall to die on an aeroplane mid-flight!

A few days later the council healthcare nurse came over, and I translated for Mum. “This is his Ventolin inhaler, spacer and face mask,” the woman explained. She was a woman in her mid-forties, with hair dyed red and braided like liquorice. She then asked to look around our house.

“What for?” Mum asked me warily.

“She just wants to make sure that the places the Lamb spends his time will not trigger any more attacks.”

Mum was reluctant, but we showed her the bedrooms – my parents’ and mine. She suggested we open the windows to let the dust mites out and the sunshine in. “Sunshine has antiseptic qualities,” she told us. Then she pointed to a corner. “What are these boxes?”

Clothes, I told her.

“You can’t have half a dozen boxes in each room like this. Clear these out into the garage!”

Finally, she asked to see our garage.

“No!” said Mum. “She’ll dob us into the government!”

“Don’t worry, Mum, it’s okay.”

I had the feeling that this nurse had probably looked in more garages than a mechanic; I think she already knew what she would find. The first thing that would hit her would be the smell, the smell of treated synthetic fibres, the urine-like odour of the fabric preservatives and sprays applied to keep bugs out when the rolls were being imported from China.

She showed no surprise when she entered the dark, windowless space, a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. She looked at the sewing machine and the overlocker, the stacks of fabric in loose piles. A blanket on the floor and a pillow, for times when Mum wanted to take a nap. And, in the corner, the Lamb’s cardboard box, graffitied with scribbles and smeared with banana-mash.

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Is this where he stays during the day?”

“Yes. But it has netting around it.”

“Good grief! Don’t you realise this room is filled with dust mites?”

No kidding, I wanted to retort. How I wished you were with me then, Linh.

“Let me be honest with you. If an animal were kept in a pen like this all day, we’d call the RSPCA. This needs to be fixed immediately.” She looked at my mother with unblinking disapproval. “I will be back in two weeks’ time. This needs to be gone.”

My mother cottoned on to what the nurse was saying, even though she couldn’t understand the language. “Tell that demon-head I want the Spanish nurse from the hospital,” Mum whispered to me. “The Spanish nurse doesn’t come into people’s houses and judge them.”

Poor Lamby. We had caged him and tried to keep him satisfied with sweets and scraps of paper, so that Mum could work on her machine and I could complete 500-word essays about the Bolsheviks. We put him in his walker, even though he was probably too old for it, so he would not reach out and touch dangerous things. We were so distracted by getting ahead that we didn’t think to make him happy, because he was already such a smiley baby who delighted in little things.

After the nurse left, Mum started crying. “They’re going to take away my work.”

“No, Mum, they won’t. They’re just a hospital. Anyway, we can live on Dad’s salary.”

“No! On that pittance? When they keep changing his shifts and not giving him a permanent position? If I don’t work, what will be my purpose then?”

Mum could not read books to the Lamb. She could not entertain him. That was my job. Mum did love him, but she could not do “fun”. Back in Vietnam, village kids were left to find their own fun. Kids like me started working for the family at eight. Kids like me sold paper fans at the marketplace with a baby balanced on one hip, or found factory work.

“I don’t know how to be a mum,” she told me.

“You’re a good mum,” I reassured her. It was true. She had helped raise her three younger siblings, who were now scattered across the world, and by the age of five she had known how to burp a baby.

“All I ever do is yell at you.”

“That’s not true.”

“Your father thinks I should stop working and just look after the family,” Mum said. “But besides cook and clean, what else can I do? I can’t help you with your schoolwork. I can’t speak to any of the Lamb’s teachers. I can’t hang around the other parents at school. I’ve been sewing since I was thirteen years old.”

We slowly started to change the patterns of our days. We let more light into our rooms. My father bought an air purifier. My mother spent three days cleaning the house from inside out. Instead of having cardboard boxes around the house, we got plastic laundry tubs with lids from the Stanley gift shop. We got a big playpen so that we could put free-range Lamb in the backyard on sunny days, and he could play in there in full view of Mum’s open garage door while she worked.

I spent all my days with the Lamb, from the moment he woke up till we put him to bed in the evening. The terrible thing that had almost happened to him had jolted me out of my torpor. It was as if I had been drowsy at the wheel of a car, until a last-minute swerve from the road got my nerves and limbs working again, jump-starting my heart.

I dressed him, fed him his bottle and his breakfast, and carried him everywhere. I sat next to him reading books while he napped, and remembered the times he was meant to take his asthma medication. We baked small cakes with a packet mix and iced them with Nutella, sugar and butter. I mixed detergent with water and we blew bubbles through drinking straws.

As he recovered from his cold, I made sure I took the Lamb out of the house every day. Often we just roamed the streets of Stanley. Sometimes we stopped at the mini-mart and I bought him a Kinder Surprise.

I went to the Sunray library and, miraculously, they had Professor Gombrich. I sat in the park with the Lamb and
The Story of Art
, showing him the pictures. “This is Van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles,” I explained to him, as he peeled a mandarin. He glanced at the picture and went back to digging his thumb into the citrus. “Where is the red?” I asked him.

The Lamb pointed to the bedspread.

“Very good, sweet Lamb. What about the green?”

He pointed to the chair cushions. “Now, what about the yellow?”
The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter,
the sheets and pillows very light greenish lemon
, Van Gogh had written in 1889.
There is nothing in this room with closed shutters. The broad lines of the furniture again must express absolute rest
.

As I gazed at the picture, I felt peace, peace I hadn’t felt in a long time. “A waste of a mind,” Chelsea had once scoffed when we saw a well-heeled woman wheeling her pram across the road. But this work brought me some peace, a peace that had been hard to come by since I’d been at Laurinda. Now I understood my mother’s desire that every day would unfurl like the last, with no major dramas.

After my breakdown, and the Lamb’s hospital visit, I did not yearn for excitement. I liked the quiet company of the Lamb and Professor Gombrich. I liked spending time with Mum at home, and doing things that made an immediate difference to our lives: cleaning dishes and doing laundry and cooking a huge pot of stock. There was nothing wrong with this, I thought.

*

“Vince said that his wife told him there was a job as a trimmer at the Stanley seafood plant,” Dad told Mum one evening after we had put the Lamb to bed.

“But are you qualified to do that?” asked my mother.

“You don’t need any qualifications to cut up seafood,” my father said. “And it’s not a job for me. It’s for you. They’re only hiring women. They want to pay the lowest wage.”

“Me?” exclaimed my mother. “But I can’t even speak English!”

“You don’t need to. Anyhow, you’ll learn on the job. It pays pretty well, especially the overtime and late shift.”

“But what about the Lamb? He’s just recovered—”

“He’s the reason I think you should work in a factory,” my father said. “No more dust mites and dirty chemicals to make him sick. We could clear up the garage. We could rid the house of all these boxes. And we’ll never see that Sokkha again.”

“Yes, but who will look after the Lamb, huh?”

“I have been thinking about this,” said my father. “And—”