Laurinda Read Free

some reason, the picture in the exam paper had reminded me of my mother, so I’d written about her. If the other girls had asked, I would have told them. But somehow I did not want to share this with Tully.

“W hat took you so long?”
    My mother was in the kitchen, putting some water on the stove to boil and opening up a packet of Indomie Goreng, when I arrived home. She lived off these dehydrated noodles, a pack every afternoon.
    “I had to wait for the bus and then catch a train.”
    She wanted to know if the $60 we’d paid for me to take the scholarship exam would be refunded if I didn’t get in.
    “No, Mum. Where’s the Lamb?” I asked.
    “Lamb’s in his box. Eat first.”
    I watched her open the sachet of desiccated onions and MSG and pour it into the noodles, then plonk a fried egg on top. My Chinese mother had a profile that I imagined photographers in National Geographic would consider noble: born in Hanoi, she had somehow ended up with darker skin and the bone structure of a Montagnard woman, those highland-dwellers with strong jaws and long eyes.
    We always called my baby brother the Lamb because of our surname, Lam. His real name is Aidan, because Mum wanted a word that our grandmother in Hanoi could pronounce, even though he had never met her. Mum kept saying she wanted to go back, but in thirteen years she had been there only once, and that was to bury Grandpa. “Life gets in the way,” she sighed whenever I asked, and then she would stare into the distance like a blind person remembering sight. Because I was so young when we left, I don’t remember much about my grandmother except that she smelled like aniseed rings and incense.
    The Lamb slept in my parents’ bedroom, but during the day spent most of his time in the garage with Mum. There were babies with faces like apples and bodies like small blimps, and then there was the Lamb, who looked more like a dried tamarind. Brown and skinny, he even sat in an enormous fruit box waiting to be picked up. The Lamb was never the sort of baby who’d make it into a Target catalogue – he’d more likely be the poster child for Compassion Australia – but he was a healthy and cheerful little pup. His box had cushions and toys, and it was very cosy. We didn’t have air conditioning in our house, but we had a unit in the garage because that was where Mum spent most of the day, and sometimes a big part of the evening too. Sometimes my father helped out, because along with a sewing machine, there was a second-hand overlocker for denim and polar fleece.
    “Hello there, Lamby.”
    Looking at the piles of orange tracksuit pants, I wondered who would ever buy such ugly attire. Then I looked down at the Lamb: with the leftover fabric remnants, Mum had sewn him an orange polar-fleece tracksuit, complete with hood. He looked like a miniature pimp in the making.
    “Lamby, we’re going to have some noodles now.”
    The Lamb looked up with his round, unblinking eyes. He bunched his hand into a small fist with one finger sticking out, and as I leaned down to pick him up, he stuck that finger in my eye.
    “Owww!”
    The Lamb was beginning to explore the world through his hands. For months it had been his mouth. He put everything he found in it to test it out, including the plastic backs of Roll-Up fruit sheets and a powdery dead moth, whose re-emergence caused my mother grave alarm.
    As I washed my eye out at the sink, the Lamb crawled into the kitchen and rubbed his own eye. Lately he had learned to stand. He was standing now, with one hand splayed on the wall for balance, the index finger of his left hand pointing straight up towards the ceiling and the other fingers balled into a little fist, as if having a eureka moment.
    “Come here, Lambface.” I hoisted him onto my lap.
    “He’s been in the garage all day,” Mum told me. “After you finish your noodles, take him outside for a walk. But don’t be too long, because I need you to help me iron a box of