Lucy and Linh by Alice Pung

Author:Alice Pung
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

A few days later, after school, I took the Lamb to the Sunray Shopping Center. We stayed away from the basement level, which was where all the people my age hung out, because I didn’t want to run into you. I fed the Lamb a small tub of potatoes and gravy from KFC; a quarter of it spilled down the front of his overalls and got caught in the buttons. He chuckled with glee, the little snot, and stuck a finger in his buttonhole.

Then I took him to the Postman Pat carousel, which had three seats—one shaped like Pat’s mailbag, one like his mail van and one like his black-and-white cat. You had to put a coin in a slot to make the seats move up and down for two minutes, but Mum would never let us operate it—she said you might as well throw away money. Luckily, the Lamb thought that sitting on one of the special seats was the ride.

I placed him on the black-and-white cat, even though he wanted to sit on the mailbag, because there was already another kid there, a little girl with a tutu and fairy wings over her pink tracksuit.

“Git lost—we was here first.”

I looked up and saw a dinner-plate-sized version of the little girl’s face, massive and scowling. Her mother.

“Have you got a dollar?” Before I had a chance to reply, she said, “Coz I’m not putting in a dollar for you too.”

To her, people like us existed to supply people like her with the cheap and lurid-colored Chinese takeout food they loved so much, or the two-dollar T-shirts they bought from Kmart every few months. In fact, the Postman Pat carousel had probably been made by people who looked like me. Maybe that’s why the seats were so small—to hold pert little bums like the Lamb’s, not the wide load of her poor junk-food-fed pup.

And it was then that I understood my attachment to Laurinda. I was wearing my uniform, and this woman—who lived on welfare and fast food—would never be part of that world. She thought that people like us were going to steal her kid’s job in the future, just as she thought we were trying to steal a free ride now.

It was cowardice that made me leave the carousel, not contempt—the contempt came later. In that moment there was only a flash of anger. I knew what you would have done, Linh, what you would have said. But you weren’t there. So I could only do what I could do. I took the Lamb off the carousel, and he started to grizzle, and then cry.

In the past, stuff like this would have got me all wounded and teary, but now it didn’t matter. Now I felt better than them, the whole lot of them in Stanley. You may not have minded being stuck there, but I was different. Now I could see a future where I didn’t have to fight such petty battles all the time.

As I felt

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