They sat down opposite each other at the square formica table, each in their usual positions, Jo facing the back door and Mandy the hallway. Flicking through that morning’s newspaper, Mandy took bites of her toast while Jo poured milk into a bowl of no-name breakfast cereal. They both drank their instant coffee the same way, with milk and no sugar, out of identical heavy Bulldogs mugs. ‘Anyone can tell you’re mother and daughter,’ people had told Jo numerous times. Of course, there were the obvious things: light brown hair that hung straight and flat, and that you could do nothing with, the sort of hair that hairdressers wanted to highlight, and the identical scattering of freckles over the bridges of both their small noses. But Mandy had hazel eyes, more brown than green, while Jo had her father’s smoky-blue eyes, underscored by dark shadows, which intensified after a late night or not enough sleep. She had his olive skin too — it went dark brown at the slightest hint of summer sun — and because her mother and Ash, who were both susceptible to sunburn, were envious, she thought of it as her best feature.
Jo wore two earrings in each ear — an elongated silver loop and a stud in the shape of a tree. On her left shoulder, a tattoo of a flock of black birds. Mandy was one of a handful of women of her generation who hadn’t pierced her ears. Mandy said Jo did these things to annoy her, and to be different, and to fit in. ‘Give me a break. Which is it?’ Jo retorted whenever the topic came up.
Jo pierced her ears the first time when she was eleven; the earrings and the cost of the piercing were a birthday present from her paternal grandmother, Mary. She’d worn earrings ever since. The second piercings were a whim. She was thirteen, and the process involved a sewing needle, boiling water, and a great deal of blood and pain. When Ash turned eighteen and they were both legal, they had gone to get tattoos together; Ash’s was an eagle feather, on her thigh. Ash’s mother listed infections and diseases. Mandy talked about rebellion and regret. Together Jo and Ash were impervious. But it was the last time they had conspired. That was almost six months ago now.
‘How did your meeting with the careers teacher go?’ Mandy asked.
‘Fine.’
‘What does that mean?’
Jo shrugged her shoulders in a dismissive gesture she hoped would shut her mother up. The meeting with Mrs Chang hadn’t gone anywhere. In her list of preferences for courses she might want to do at university, she had listed Architecture and Urban Design and Planning at the University of Melbourne and RMIT, but Mrs Chang, whose cluttered office was surrounded by brochures on every career imaginable, said, ‘Great to aim high. But you need to be practical too. What are you going to do if you don’t get in?’ She went on to tell Jo that her teachers predicted she would get a ‘respectable’ VCE score if she ‘put her mind to it’, probably something in the high 60s, but it was unlikely to get her into any of the courses she’d listed, all requiring scores of 75 or above.
‘You could apply for Architecture at Deakin in Geelong, you might get in there.’
‘I want to stay in the city,’ Jo said.
‘What about other careers, teaching? You could teach History or Geography. They seem to be your best subjects,’ Mrs Chang suggested.
Jo shook her head. ‘I don’t want to be a teacher.’
‘You’re a sensible girl with a level head. You’d make a good paramedic or nurse, or one of the other health professions would suit you. Nutrition. Not physiotherapy, though — everyone wants to be a physio, it’s hard to get in.’ Mrs Chang was squinting at a list on the computer monitor.
‘No, I don’t want to look after sick people.’
Mrs Chang showed no sign of disapproval or frustration. ‘There are so many jobs to choose from that it can be confusing,’ she said. ‘Problem is, everyone thinks you have to find the one thing you love — that’s a lot of pressure. Most people work to make a living. You just have to find something that you don’t mind doing.’
Jo didn’t mind waitressing, but could she spend the rest of her life as a waitress? Follow your passions, teachers in earlier years advised, but maybe that advice was for the clever people. Like Ash. Ash and Jo read the same books, discussed their essays, and came up with a shared set of ideas, but in the process of writing and handing them in, Ash’s essay evolved into an A+ and Jo’s dwindled into C–.
Ash was going to be a lawyer. No one suggested a fallback position to her. Their friend Mani planned to study music. She might scrape through VCE if she were lucky, but she didn’t care. She had a long list of fallback positions: music teaching or music production or sound technology… Not that she needed them — her band was going to get millions of hits on YouTube and record companies would be killing one another to sign them up, and if that didn’t happen they’d go on Australia’s Got Talent. Laura was doing VCE to placate her parents, but she wanted to be a beautician. She brokered (her father was in finance) a deal with her parents that if she passed VCE, they would pay for a beauty therapy course. Laura’s mother was determined to get Laura to university, to make sure she had a degree and a profession. Laura said her mother lit candles at the local church once a week and prayed to St Joseph to change her daughter’s mind. But Laura wasn’t worried; her parents were sticklers for keeping promises.
Jo sat on the other side of Mrs Chang’s desk and stared at the large photograph of Halong Bay, the limestone rocks rising out of the green water and disappearing into the mist. ‘Is that where you grew up?’
‘My mother came from one of the floating villages in the bay.’ Mrs Chang paused and turned around to look at the photograph. ‘I went last year for a holiday. So many punts and tourists.’
‘It’s a great photo. Looks peaceful.’
‘I took it for my mother. I had it blown up and framed, but she gave it back to me.’ Mrs Chang let out a long sigh. She was a tall, slender woman in her late fifties. She wore two- and three-piece suits in pastel colours — baby blue, salmon pink, lavender — with silk blouses and high heels. Her manicured nails were painted in hues that matched her outfits. She was out of place at the school, where most of the teachers dressed in various shades of denim. Jo had trouble imagining her on a boat in Halong Bay.
‘Why?’
‘She says it is hard enough to forget. Vietnam has a sad history. Sometimes things happen to people that they want to forget.’ She glanced at her watch and frowned. ‘So, enough chat, Jo. Were you listening to my suggestions? Or is your heart set on studying urban design?’
Mr Williams, Jo’s Year 10 Geography teacher, had introduced her to urban design. His passion was ‘environmental justice’, making industrial areas safer, more liveable. He had a long list of activist ‘wins’ that included saving forests, saving rivers, and helping secure the vote for Indigenous Australians. Ian, the students called him — at least when the principal wasn’t in earshot — and rolled their eyes when he became overly zealous, picking on their plastic drink bottles, on paper wastage, on the clothes they wore, going on about where they were made and how much the manufacturers paid poor workers in Asia. He spent several classes trying to get them to stop eating meat by showing them gruesome videos of abattoirs and chickens in battery farms.
Jo volunteered for one of his ‘urban regeneration’ projects and helped plant three hundred trees along Stony Creek, the polluted waterway that snaked its way through several industrial suburbs from St Albans to Yarraville. It was hard work. They cleared weeds, broke up the hard topsoil to reach the rich brown loam underneath, and planted drooping sheoak, river red gums, and various acacias — just saplings, most less than 10 centimetres high. For weeks after, Jo researched local trees. She discovered the western suburbs had fewer trees, and certainly fewer mature trees, than other areas of the city. She discovered the council’s list of significant trees and went exploring along the Maribyrnong River, where there were the native kurrajongs and sugar gums, as well as date palms and pepper trees. The majestic old elms, in Stephen Street, in Fairlie Street, and at Footscray Primary School, were her favourites: from their sturdy grey trunks they rose 20 metres, but while their canopies were wide and dense, their roots were shallow and visible, like the veins of her grandmother’s hands.