18

Saturday morning started with a long riverside run.

A shower, hair wash.

Fifty minutes of oboe practice. Gah! A couple of annoying duck squawks. Round the sound. Round the sound. Her new reed was still too tangy—it needed some more breaking in. She knuckle-jiggled her face muscles against her teeth.

An attempt at an art journal entry. What does it mean? What does it mean to me? She wrote a response to the sequence in the film American Beauty where the boy next door has filmed the plastic bag blowing around in the wind. A mundane object imbued with a balletic beauty. Fragility. Vulnerability. Hmmm. It felt a bit bullshitty, but that was probably okay, given Ms. Halabi’s playground/laboratory instruction. The journal was a place to explore. It was a relief to have a place like that, away from the land of rights and wrongs. What does it mean to me?

She created a new page border by repeatedly writing out a quote from Picasso—Art is a lie that tells the truth—and filled the page by writing a response to it as it pertained to her work. Little things combining to show us something new, something larger.

She did an image search of footpath and street surveyor marks from around the world, and bookmarked a few images to print at school.

She image-searched some photography of metal surfaces and old glass.

Good to get so much ticked off the list before 11 a.m.

Because the early bird catches the worm.

Those old wacko English proverbs and idiomatic sayings were great. It was one of the things she and Debi did when Vân Ước was in year five, in their first year together at homework club. They weren’t forms of English she ever heard at home. It takes one to know one. A tempest in a teacup. A stitch in time saves nine.

Her mother used occasional mystifying Vietnamese equivalents, like, If you put in the work to sharpen the steel, it will one day turn into needles. Laugh at others today and tomorrow others will laugh at you. And others that were simply a variation on study hard: The hand works, the mouth is allowed to chew. A good beginning is half the battle.

After a couple more hours of homework, it was time to collect Jess and go to work. Five hours of making rice paper rolls at Henry Ha Minh Rolls on Chapel Street. Seating for twelve only, and the rest was takeaway, the long queue a permanent fixture. The kitchen was as big as the seating area. Six people covered Saturday’s prep and rolling. You had to work fast. Fast and Fresh: that was the simple sell.

Henry had two other small but equally popular places: Henry Ha Minh Dumplings and Henry Ha Minh Barbecue. He was a hard-line minimalist. One perfect, tiny range at each outlet. His signage was all typeset in lowercase Courier. And each cafe was painted in blackboard paint so walls became a changing artwork/message board for the day. Today, he’d written: The object of art is to give life a shape… Jean Anouilh. His girlfriend, Tiên, was an interior designer and as much of a perfectionist and control freak as Henry. When he did the occasional pop-up stall with rolls, buns, and barbecue—Henry Ha Minh Pops Up—social media wet itself with excitement.

She and Jess were a fabulously efficient production line. Vermicelli noodles, finely shredded lettuce, then either chicken, two strands of chives, and two Vietnamese mint leaves, perfectly positioned on a just-overlapping diagonal, or roast duck with hoisin sauce and spring onion, or tiger prawn with julienned green pawpaw and coriander leaves. Roll, roll, roll. Working so hard, with such concentration, even on a menial task, the time went pretty quickly. Vân Ước was surprised when Gary came over and told them to take their break. Vân Ước and Jess had decided long ago that Gary’s wardrobe contained nothing but black T-shirts, black jeans, and his signature red bandannas. They could never decide how many he had of each. Cam and Bec, who had been prepping, took over the rolling.

If the weather was fine, she and Jess always went outside for their break. Eyes needed the relaxation of a more distant horizon after looking closely at rice paper rolls, twelve up, for two hours. They were in the alleyway beside the cafe, sitting on the milk crate and cushion seats that were dragged out on the first break of the day and stacked and packed up at closing time. Gary’s preferred music of the moment filtered out: Dionne Warwick singing Burt Bacharach songs.

“I love this one,” said Jess. It was “Trains and Boats and Planes.”

“Me too.”

“I think of this album as basically an instruction manual for life.”

“Really?” asked Vân Ước, in a vagued-out trance.

“Unless you think that the moment I wake up I say a little prayer for an unspecified other, before I put on my makeup, when you know I don’t even wear makeup, no, not really. I was being stupid. For humor.”

“I haven’t studied the lyrics, okay?”

“Yeah, well, they don’t really bear examining.” Jess opened a bag of Cheezels, her current break snack favorite. “Does it ever occur to you that we should look for other work?”

“How come?”

“We are Vietnamese Australian girls making rice paper rolls.”

“So?”

“Well, we haven’t exactly spread our cultural wings.”

“What do you want to do, flip burgers?”

“Yuck, no, because, smell.”

“Work in a shop?”

“Yuck, no, subservience. Have you found everything you need today? Can I help you with that? It really looks great on you.”

“Then what?”

“No, I’m happy—I’m just saying, just noting, that we’re living quite the cliché.”

“Suits me. Work’s work. Henry’s great. And we get food.” Vân Ước bit into a prawn roll.

Jess had put a Cheezel on each fingertip and was nibbling them off, one at a time. They were still wearing their paper hygiene hats, so should probably at least have put their backs to the alleyway in case anyone they knew walked by, but Vân Ước felt too work-zonked to care.

“Why do you think it is that I don’t like actual cheese, but I love Cheezels?” asked Jess.

“Because there’s no actual cheese in Cheezels?”

“Though there is the thing called cheese powder,” said Jess, looking at the ingredients list on the pack on her knee, nibbling the Cheezel from her left-hand little finger.

A group of girls tumbled across the alleyway, laughing, carrying Henry Ha Minh takeaway bags. One of them was Holly. She spotted Vân Ước and Jess, and pointed. Laughter spurted from the group. Vân Ước froze. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of looking embarrassed or apologetic.

“Who or what are they?” asked Jess.

“Just girls from school,” said Vân Ước.

Another gale of laughter issued from them as they walked off.

“Are they friends of his?”

“Yes.”

“The case against him just got stronger.”