Pip: The Story of Olive (8 page)
Pip giggled. ‘Crap,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ She sprinted up the beach towards the footpath. Olive grabbed her schoolbag, then began collecting the empty cartons Pip had tossed.
‘Olive, are you nuts? This is no time for tidy town. He said he’d
tan
us,’ Pip called back.
Olive looked around. The furry man and his heeler had launched into a jog. They lumbered towards her, sand churning beneath their feet. Up closer, the dog looked more dingo than heeler.
‘Olive,
quick
.’
‘Blow this,’ said Olive and, dumping the rubbish, she sprinted after Pip.
It took Olive a while to catch Pip. She’d taken off along the beach path that headed back towards home, apparently unhampered by the Double Yoke Eggnog, which was sloshing about Olive’s own tummy and giving her a stitch.
‘Did you lose him?’ Pip panted, slowing to a walk.
‘Yep.’ Olive shuddered at the thought of the slack-gummed dingo.
‘So, what took you so long?’ Pip looked down at Olive’s pigeon toe. ‘Man, if you’d just walk normally, you’d go faster. What’s with the bird feet?’ She started to run again.
Olive sniffed, re-aligned her toes (somewhere closer to first position) and followed.
At the end of the path, the beach car park basked in the evening sun. A flag advertising drinks cracked in the breeze.
‘Do you like ice-cream?’ asked Olive.
‘Of course.’
‘I’ll show you Okey Doke’s, then. He’s just across there.’
Parked in front of them was an old purple van with sloppy flowers and the words ‘addiction to drugs shows commitment’ painted on the side.
‘Mog, our mum, used to have one of those vans, with a bed inside and wind chimes hanging from the rearview mirror,’ said Olive. ‘I’ve seen the pictures. Mog said she could start it with a spoon in the ignition. Whenever WilliamPetersMustardSeed – that’s our dad – lost the keys, it didn’t matter. They just worked their way through the cutlery drawer using everything but the Good Silver.’
Olive looked around. Behind them, two girls in Joanne d’Arc uniforms were walking towards the car park: one had a long blonde ponytail; the other a surge of dark curls. Their heads were bowed in an arc of confidentiality.
Olive felt sick. What were they doing here? Okey Doke was hers. She’d introduced Mathilda to him. Olive watched the girls grow as they drew closer. Pip jiggled the handle of the van. ‘It’s open.’
‘Let’s see if this one’s the same as Mog’s,’ Olive said quickly.
‘Are you serious? You didn’t strike me as the type.’
‘Just hurry.’ Olive opened the front door and jumped up inside.
The van seats were sun-warm and the ashtray was crammed with cigarette butts that smelt sweet, like allspice. Pip rifled through old bottles of sunscreen, broken mozzie coils and half-tubes of Life Savers that she found on the shelf under the dashboard. Olive angled the rear-vision mirror so that she could see Till–Mill through the back window.
‘What are you doing?’ Pip asked.
‘Nothing.’ Olive watched the reflected girls as they approached, talking and laughing, without hats or blazers.
Pip offered Olive a Life Saver. ‘They’re not too stale.’
‘No.’ Olive shook her head. ‘No thanks.’ She laced her fingers.
Pip squinted and clambered over the seat into the back. Olive kept her eye on the mirror. When the Joanne d’Arc girls were almost at the van, their faces fell into focus.
‘Thankyouthankyouthankyou.’ Olive sank against the seat as two Year 9 girls headed towards the beach. It was not Till–Mill at all.
Pip crawled back into the front. ‘You look pretty comfort able for a person who was so anxious thirty seconds ago.’
Olive smiled. ‘Okay, let’s go.’
‘All right. There’s not so much as a chopstick back here anyway. Hang on.’ Pip had spotted something down the side of the front seat. ‘What about that!’
‘This?’ Olive held up a barbeque prong.
‘Brilliant, let’s try it. You hop down and do the pedals. I’ll do the wheel.’
Although Pip was arguably Olive’s twin, she was already displaying the bossy older-sister tendencies Mathilda showed with her younger brothers.
‘No way, Pip. It’s totally illegal.’ Bossiness didn’t really bother Olive, but criminality did, and while Olive may have survived drinking a Brand She Had Never Heard Of, and escaped a furry workman, not to mention his dingo, driving someone else’s van was surely inviting arrest.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Pip. ‘We won’t go far. Anyway, it might not even start.’
‘All right, all right.’ Olive knelt on the floor. She pushed an old thong under the seat with her fingertip and wrinkled her nose. She could see the imprint of somebody’s sweaty foot on it, including a knobbly bunion on the side. It was disgusting. Olive looked at the pedals; there were three. All three were dirty. She tried not to think of the knobbly bunion on them.
‘Okay, keep your head down or the wheel might decapitate you. Let’s start it.’ Pip leant over Olive and wedged the barbeque prong in the ignition. It glided in and when she turned it, the van coughed.
‘Bingo Bango.’
‘Pip, stop.’ Olive jumped back up onto the seat, just as the engine stalled.
Pip released the handbrake. The van rolled forwards.
‘Whoo hoo! We’re outta here. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,’ trilled Pip out the window. She was perched up, on her knees, leaning forwards while she concentrated. Her blonde hair was plastered to her face in stringy bits and her face was flushed. Olive could see the muscles in her sister’s puny arms straining as she tried to harness the half-ton of purple lead and rubber. It was terrifying and exhilarating.
‘Okay, Olive,’ yelled Pip. ‘Let’s get up some pace.’
‘Pip, no.’ Olive pulled the handbrake up as hard as she could. The van crunched.
‘Crap.’
The girls had rolled about four metres and were now pulled up against a strip of salty native grasses and a rubbish bin.
‘Guess we’ll have to go out the window,’ said Pip as she wound it down. Head first, she commando-rolled out. Olive toppled after her.
‘Cow-jumped-over-the-moon-geek-knickers,’ shrieked Pip, spotting Olive’s undies. The problem with not having grown one single centimetre since Grade 4 was that one ended up with a bottom the size of a Grade 4, which could be extremely limiting. Amelia, on the other hand, had a size-eight ladies’ bum and knickers with broderie anglaise trim in ivory.
‘You’re probably wearing them, too,’ retorted Olive indignantly.
Pip checked. ‘Crap.’
Olive couldn’t help noticing that Pip swore like a trooper. Mrs Graham said that people only swore when their vocabularies were inadequate to deal with their emotions. Although Olive didn’t like to think of Pip as inadequate, she did hope that swearing wasn’t contagious.
Before Olive could ponder this too long, Pip whipped her knickers off and threw them into the bin next to the van.
‘Nobody’s catching me in those.’
‘You can’t do that,’ cried Olive, realising that her twin’s behaviour might explain why there were always pairs of soggy knickers at the beach. Olive had never been able to work out how so many people could collectively forget their underwear.
‘I can.’ Pip bounded towards the shop.
‘Pip,’ called Olive, completely scandalised by her sister’s bare bottom under an already transparent uniform. Pip responded to Olive’s prudishness by doing a cartwheel, right there in the middle of the car park. She then spun around and kept running towards Okey Doke’s, drunk on adrenalin.
Olive, abandoning all sense of propriety, followed.
The ice-cream at Okey Doke’s was piled high in folds and teemed with shattered honeycomb, thick chocolate curls, or whole rosy strawberries.
The softa the nice-cream
the quicka to eat,
Okey Doke said when people commented on the texture of his fare.
Pip threaded her arm through Olive’s at the counter. The girls pushed their noses against the glass and watched while Okey Doke’s chubby wrists ladled gelati into lacy cones. Although it was not far off closing time, the crowd was five people deep. Olive caught Pip’s eye and nodded towards the door; Pip slipped outside to wait.
Olive knew Pip would want to check out the bug-catcher at the entrance. She could hear it from inside the shop, electrocuting insects with a crack as they flew into the blue light. Besides, Olive didn’t want to run the risk of old Okey Doke having a heart attack when he realised that he was serving his fine upstanding ice-cream to a schoolgirl with no knickers.
‘One scoop of raspberry and one of passionfruit on a waffle cone, please.’ Olive paused. ‘And I’ll also have a scoop of raspberry and one of honey.’
‘Okey doke, artichoke,’ the man responded on cue. He looked up at Olive. ‘Two at once, bella?’
‘The second’s for my sister,’ said Olive. ‘You haven’t met her yet, but she’s actually my twin sister.’ Okey Doke raised an eyebrow. Olive panicked. For one moment she thought he’d guessed that it was Pip who had started the van with a barbeque prong and was currently cavorting with dead bugs and no underpants. If he did, however, he didn’t comment.
Outside the shop, Olive handed Pip her ice-cream.
‘Wicked. Hey, check this out.’ Pip pitched a stick into the bug-catcher. It exploded in a strip of sparks, then dissolved in a curl of smoke. The ash gathered on the fried insect carcasses in the tray. The bug-catcher was certainly dramatic.
The girls started on their cones, both eating the ice-cream in small bites. Pip eyed Olive’s cone. ‘I hate passionfruit pips – they get stuck in my teeth.’
‘That’s weird,’ said Olive. ‘I didn’t ask you what flavours you wanted, because I knew. I knew you’d want honey and raspberry, just like I knew why you’d want to wait outside. It’s like I’ve known all the way along.’
Pip shrugged. ‘You didn’t
know
I’d cartwheel without knickers.’
‘No,’ admitted Olive.
Pip took another bite of her ice-cream. ‘You should have seen your face. Classic. Besides,’ she continued, ‘it’s not the same as
knowing
I’m about to be brutalised by a fifty-foot fanged turtle and risking all to come to my rescue.’
‘I guess not,’ said Olive, who didn’t actually know what ‘brutalised’ meant, but thought it sounded horrible. ‘But fifty-foot fanged turtle or not, it’s
in-tu-ition
, Pip. It’s just the same as the circus horses the morning before the dust storm.’
Pip traced a line in the pile of ash under the bug-catcher with a stick and looked bored. Olive persevered. ‘Ms Stable-East told us about this dust storm that rolled in years ago and dumped a thick blanket of red dirt all over the city. She thought it was the end of the world, but the thing that’s stuck in her mind is the circus horses she saw on the telly.’
‘What was with them?’ Pip appeared to have no interest in teachers or
in-tu-ition
but a little more interest in circus horses.
‘Well, the entire morning before the storm, the horses were upset. They had dry noses, and they tugged at their harnesses, kicking at the ground until their hooves bled. It’s like they knew it was coming. Ms Stable-East says that sometimes animals just know things – know things that we don’t.’
‘So, I don’t get it.’
‘She says we should never forget that we’re mammals too.’ Olive laughed. ‘Mathilda reckons Ms Stable-East says that to justify her hairy legs and moustache. She’s a beast.’ Olive gnawed her bottom lip. ‘But what if she’s actually a bit right? Perhaps I
knew
what flavour you wanted because I’m a mammal.’
‘Could be.’ Pip lobbed her cone into the bug-catcher, ‘But she should wax. Whales are mammals, and they don’t get around with hairy lips.’ The cone exploded into sparks. ‘Who’s this Mathilda, anyway?’
‘My best friend,’ said Olive. ‘She and Amelia Forster and me are a threesome.’ The lie tugged.
Pip poked some ash on the ground. Her feet were turned out like a piano’s.
‘Don’t worry. I’m sure you can join in.’
‘Whatever.’ Pip blew the end of the stick. Olive wondered how she could not care.
The fluorescent light above their heads spluttered again. Olive stood up. ‘Good-o. I hadn’t realised it was so late. We should get going.’
Olive loved the phrase ‘Good-o’. It sounded very efficient and very mature. Mrs Graham pronounced it so that the ‘o’ was about twice as long as the ‘good’. Olive did too. Pip didn’t move.
‘We should probably go pr-pr-pronto.’ Olive wasn’t very good at rolled r’s. Pip stared but didn’t move.
‘C’mon, Pip. Mog might get home soon, and we’ve got heaps to organise before tomorrow.’ Pip stretched slowly and rolled her eyes.
Olive rolled her eyes back. If one thing was certain, eyes were easier to roll than r’s.
Pip and Olive walked home. A group of boys with dusty school shoes and hot chips were sprawled over Mrs Stewart’s fence on the corner of Olive’s street. As the girls walked past the hot-chip boys, Olive put her head down. Her hand shot up to her forehead and she pretended to scratch a mozzie bite. It was a habit she’d assumed ever since one of the boys had commented on the size of her forehead a couple of weeks ago. ‘Egghead’, he’d called her.