Pip: The Story of Olive (18 page)

Olive’s pine and nutmeg dream crumbled. ‘But that’s Thursday. What about the concert?’ While shopping for provisions for their trip and making the frame had been fun, somehow the whole expedition had felt like a far-flung whim. In naming a day, Pip had made it solid.

‘Mog’s not going to the concert, remember. We can turn up late to dinner and blame it on the show.’

Olive pressed the remote control to turn down the volume. ‘What about school? We’ve got rehearsals. They’ll notice if we’re not there.’

Pip’s eyes didn’t move from the television. ‘We’ll ring the school in the morning and tell them we caught a bug, so Ms Stable-East doesn’t call Mog. We can figure the note bit out later. If you tell Mog that night that we needed a doona day, she’ll probably feel so guilty she wasn’t around, she’ll write one.’

‘Pip, you’re terrible,’ said Olive, but she knew Pip was also right. Once Olive had felt sick and had come home from school in a taxi at lunchtime. That night, Mog had blushed, kissed her and brought her a thick, fizzy vitamin drink in bed. She’d said that if Olive ever felt sick again, she could come into Chambers and lie on the couch with a hottie, regardless of what Mog had on.

‘Besides, if we ring Mog
before
she heads off to the Attorney-General dinner, we won’t have to go to that at all,’ said Pip.

‘Good-o,’ said Olive. ‘We’ll try for Thursday. As soon as Mog goes to work, we’ll catch the tram into the city and take it from there. I guess.’

Olive tried to make her voice sound as tough as the hot-chip boys who sat on Mrs Stewart’s fence. She wanted her sister to think that she was cool with it – that she was cool with a three-hour train trip to the country when they should be at school – but her voice wavered.

‘We can call school from the city,’ said Pip. ‘It will still be so early, we can just leave a message.’

Olive noticed that Pip’s voice didn’t waver at all.

22

May Day

The next day, Olive and Pip were late to school. Again.

‘Why are you so slow in the mornings?’ Olive asked. ‘You know I hate being late. It’s selfish.’

‘You should just go without me,’ Pip struck back. ‘Besides, you’re just cranky because it’s Wednesday.’

Mog called Wednesday the mid-week hump.
People are
ratty until they get over the mid-week hump
, she always said.

The school grounds were empty but for a chip packet and a forgotten shin pad. Olive felt panicky. She breathed in little puffs.

Year 7C was in the gym, practising for the Christmas concert. Olive dropped her bag and blazer discreetly at the entrance. She needn’t have bothered; the hall was in pandemonium. The microphone was howling, as were a bunch of Grade 3 choir shepherds who had lost their sheep. Ms Stable-East was sitting uncomfortably on the stage with her varicose-veined ankles dangling all bumpy over the edge. She was talking too close to the microphone, trying to appear both relaxed
and
in control for the benefit of Mrs Dalling, the headmistress (who did not look convinced).

‘Why have they got them here?’ Pip pointed to the J-school kids.

‘Remember it’s the
Centennial
Christmas Concert, so they want everyone involved. And they can reach the high notes.’

Ms Stable-East bellowed at the Grade 3 choir shepherds, somewhat unhelpfully, to ‘ship up or shape out’, and the microphone screeched again. Pip stuck her fingers in her ears. ‘I can’t stand the reverb,’ she yelled, twice as loudly as the microphone.

Just near Pip and Olive stood Mrs Steif. She was earbashing Mr Hollywood about the strengths of the Dewey Decimal System. Mr Hollywood looked riveted.

‘Are they flirting?’

Olive shrugged.

‘I’ll wait outside.’ Pip slung her bag over her shoulder and turned away, looking disgusted.

‘Don’t leave me.’ Olive grabbed at the back of Pip’s jumper. ‘Please.’

Pip shook her head. ‘I don’t want to watch. Not
that
.’ She motioned to Mr Hollywood and Mrs Steif. ‘You’ll be fine, Ol.’

‘Good-o.’ Olive let out a shaky sigh.

Pip raised one eyebrow. ‘I’ll rephrase that. You’ll be fine as long as you drop the “Good-o”. It’s really mumsy.’

‘Oh.’

‘Seriously, Ol, just come and get me if you need to.’

Olive watched Pip leave. The door swung behind her. She wondered if, hoped that, Pip had forgotten something, that she would return. She hadn’t, didn’t.

Olive stood by herself, waiting for instructions. Around her, girls huddled in bunches of threes and fours, their year groups all mixed up, tossed like salad.

‘Olive. Hey Olive, come over here,’ someone shouted. Olive looked up and squinted. It was Mathilda. She and Amelia were surveying the room, perched up on the uneven bars at the back of the hall like queens on a throne.

‘Me?’ asked Olive, as if she were surrounded by a great horde of other Olives. Mathilda nodded and waved her over.

Olive walked towards them. Perhaps Mathilda had decided to let her back in, because Olive
might
have wagged; perhaps Mathilda had found out how great Pip was, Olive’s very own flesh and blood; perhaps Mathilda also thought that their lives were like parallel lines that would – should – cross.

Mathilda pushed up her jumper sleeves. ‘We just have to ask you something. Unless you’re too busy planning that camping trip
with your father
.’

Mathilda laughed. Amelia laughed, too. Their laughs were as empty as the smiles of the rotating clown heads at the school fair. Olive wished she had balls to stuff down the Till–Mill throats and cursed herself for falling for them again. She stared at the corner of a leaf that was stuck to the underbelly of Mathilda’s shoe and hoped that the leaf was stuck on with chewy, or the guts of some dead marsupial.

Amelia crossed her arms. ‘What’s a ho?’ she asked.

Olive looked up from Mathilda’s shoe and turned red.

‘I told you she didn’t know.’ Mathilda looked at Amelia.

‘I do too,’ said Olive, more haughtily than she’d intended.

They both glared at her.
Man
, thought Olive,
where’s
Pip when you need her
?

Olive had no idea what to say. Ho was one of those words she definitely knew; she just didn’t know what it actually meant – and she knew that she should. It was like not knowing what group sang what song on the radio (which Olive never did).

‘So what is it?’ Mathilda kicked Amelia.

‘It’s like . . .’

The two girls stared down at Olive. Their faces were black against the windows behind them. The gym was suddenly still.

‘It’s like, you know,’ said Olive, looking to the stuck leaf for answers (which were not forthcoming). ‘It’s hard to explain. It’s like, you know. Like . . . a skanky ho.’ Olive held her breath until she thought she might just float up and away like an air balloon.

The talking around her started up again. The answer, although patently unsatisfactory, seemed to have satisfied Mathilda and Amelia, and laughing (definitely
at
, not
with
, Olive), they started a conversation about something else. Olive had been dismissed. She shuffled to the other side of the gym.

Olive leant against the rockclimbing wall and blurred her eyes. She breathed in and tried to act like she didn’t care. She took out her phone and scrolled through the numbers, hoping the other girls would think that she had heaps of friends, all of whom knew about hos and pop songs.

She got to the end of the list of names (
Mog (w), Mog (m),
Taxi
) and then scrolled through them from the top again. She hooked her thumbs into the cuffs of her jumper and stared out the window.

While Mog often commented on how fast time went when she was having fun, she had never commented on how devastatingly slow it could be when she was sad. Olive stretched her eyes open wide to stop the tears from slipping out. There was nothing left of her, nothing but tears and an emptiness like a hollow.

‘Hey.’

Olive looked up.

‘Want to come up here?’ May was waving down at Olive from a tower of crash mats. She patted her hand on the blue plastic beside her. The gesture was so kind that Olive wanted to throw her arms around May. It felt like the single kindest thing that anyone had ever done for Olive: kinder than when Okey Doke threw in an extra flavour for nothing; kinder than when Mrs Graham added Olive’s name to the Graham family height chart on their laundry wall.

Olive sniffed. ‘Hi May, thanks so much, that’s really nice of you,’ she said and then felt silly. Olive hoped she hadn’t looked like a desperado. Mog always said that nothing stinks like desperation.

May gave Olive a hand and hauled her up onto the mat. ‘Don’t be dumb.’ From the pile of crash mats, they were higher than everybody.

May nodded in the direction of Amelia. ‘Have you heard who’s going to be Mary?’

‘Oh, was Amelia replaced?’ Olive inexplicably felt a bit bad. When she was first chosen, Amelia had made it pretty clear that she saw Mary as a springboard to a part on
Neighbours
. ‘What part’s Amelia playing now?’

May giggled. ‘She’s one of the four Doric columns holding up the stable roof.’

The columns were a bit pagan for a Christmas pageant, but they were left over from the school’s Olympic opening ceremony. Year 7 had studied Greek columns in History, and even Nut Allergy could identify Dorics as the plainest of the columns.

‘Apparently Amelia told Mrs Dalling that if she had to be a post, she wasn’t settling for anything less than Corinthian,’ said May. ‘But it fell on deaf ears.’

Olive smiled. ‘Who’s the new Mary, then? They don’t have much time to learn the role.’

‘Maybe Skyep,’ called a boarder with a face like a Knitting Nancy from the other side of May. Skyep’s name wasn’t really Skyep, it was Skye Parsons, but as there were four Skyes, each added the first letter of their surname to the end of the ‘Skye’ bit: Skyep, Skyeg, Skyet and Skyez.

Skyep was the newest girl inYear 7; she’d arrived mid-term from a state school. She was tall with a heart-shaped face, curvy breasts and a French manicure. She’d distinguished herself on the first day by wearing blue eyeliner.

‘Common,’ Mathilda had said at the time.

‘Very sixties, actually,’ Amelia had retorted. And from then on, to the extent that she had wanted to embrace it, Skyep was in.

‘Skyep? Mary’s going to another Year 7?’ May twirled an earring. ‘Isn’t she a bit new?’

The boarder with the face like a Knitting Nancy shrugged. Mary usually went to Year 9 establishment. Amelia had been an anomaly. And the part never went to a new girl, not even a popular one.

‘It’s going to be some Year 9,’ called another boarder. ‘Stable-East said it can’t go to anyone who wears makeup, even if the costume is a perfect fit.’

‘Why do they always give Mary to the prettiest girls?’ Olive piped up, then wished she hadn’t. May and the Knitting Nancy looked at her, waiting for her to continue. Olive concentrated, forming her words cautiously. ‘Well, nobody looks great in labour, and Mary’s meant to be on the verge of giving birth. I doubt that she’d have had time to do her nails.’

This was something Mog had said about a television show last year, but Olive was happy to pass it off as her own. The other girls laughed. As she smiled with them, Olive felt herself growing taller and wider. The laughter sprung around the insides of the bigger Olive. She felt like a queen.

‘What part are you playing?’ May twirled one of the little gold baubles in her ears again.

Olive shrugged. ‘Townsperson forty-two or something.’

‘Me too,’ said May. ‘Still, better a townsperson than a column.’ Olive and May beat their legs against the mat. This time of year was nice; it was more relaxed, because most things had started to wind down for the long summer break.

‘You might only be townsperson forty-two, but at least your folio has been hung.’ May moved onto her other earring. ‘It’s the first thing people will see when they walk into the foyer.’

‘Has it?’ Olive smiled. She tried to look friendly but disinterested. On the inside, however, Olive was bubbling. She bit her lip to contain herself. ‘Did yours get in, too?’ Olive was a good drawer, but nobody could do cartoons like May.

‘Nah. Your folio was the only one for Year 7. Stable-East said mine will probably get up next year.’ May smiled and began chatting to the boarder with the face like a Knitting Nancy about last night’s lasagne. ‘Broccoli? Broccoli? Who ever made lasagne with overcooked broccoli?’ asked May. ‘At home they say even mince is for peasants.’

Olive excused herself and snuck out to the foyer.

23

A Hobbit, but a Talented Hobbit

The parquetry floor of the foyer was plaited; in the morning sun, it gleamed like school-fete toffee. Olive had long figured that the architect of the hall had taken a leaf out of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ when she’d designed the building, because she’d filled it with lolly-like features to lure kids in.

Olive looked up. There on a board in the middle of the foyer was her painting, centre-front. It was a picture of a globe that was being whipped around by a gossip of girls. Their dresses blurred as the globe spun, but the countries had been painted precisely, and if you looked carefully (and in the right spot) you could even see snow on the peaks of the spinning Himalayas.

Olive was incredibly proud of it. It really did look like it was moving. She’d called it ‘Confidence Makes the World Spin Round’ while she’d painted it, but she hadn’t had the confidence to call it anything out loud. Instead there was a tag that said, very grandly, ‘Olive Garnaut, 7C, Untitled’.

The second piece was a linocut of Olive’s home. Mog was gardening in the front yard. ‘That is imaginative!’ Mog had said when Olive told her about the picture.

The third was a sketch of Pip in pencil. Her shoulders were feathery, but her face was shaded and very detailed. Ms Stable-East had called it ‘Olive Garnaut, 7C, Self-portrait’.

‘Can you believe they called that one “Olive”? It looks nothing like you,’ said Pip. ‘I was just trying to find a pen to change it. I mean, look at the hair. It’s long! Even when yours was long, you didn’t wear it in a loose ponytail. And you never look straight at anyone like that. You talk to people’s knees.’