Pip: The Story of Olive (9 page)
Pip stared directly at the tangle of school shoes and caps. ‘What a bunch of off-chops.’
‘Shush,’ said Olive, looking over her shoulder to make sure the hot-chip boys hadn’t heard; and if they had heard, that they didn’t care; and if they had heard and did care, that they weren’t going to clobber them. But the boys were talking and smoking and laughing and couldn’t have looked less interested in the twins.
A square of footpath in front of Olive’s house had been roped off.
‘Hey, concrete! Let’s check if it’s still wet.’ Pip crouched down and stuck her finger in. It was.
‘Do you think you should?’ Olive asked dubiously. She was learning swiftly that she was not as inclined to crime as her sister.
‘What? You’d pass up a patch as fresh as this? Are you kidding?’ Pip ran her finger through the cement. It looked as thick and grainy as biscuit dough. ‘Perfect consistency.’
O L I V E
, wrote Pip.
‘You
can’t
do that. That’s outrageous,’ said Olive. ‘Mog will see it and freak. And she’ll think it was me.’
Olive looked back at the hot-chip boys. They were flicking stones at a lamppost. Apart from that, the street was empty.
Olive added:
‘Or she’ll think it was you,’ Olive giggled. ‘Look. It joins with the “i” in me.’
‘The “i” in we, you mean.’ Pip stood up. The twins walked through Olive’s front gate and down the side path to the back door. For the first time ever, Olive didn’t notice the branches and their long twiggy fingers.
‘You got anything to eat? I’m starving.’ Pip headed straight to the fridge and opened the door. Although it was the first time she’d done this, there was already a sense of habit about her action.
Olive pulled the Sultana Bran down from the cupboard, together with two bowls and a can of strawberry Quik. She nudged Pip out of the way and fetched the milk from the fridge, sniffing it first like Mrs Graham. It smelt a bit off, but milk always smelt a bit off, so Olive poured it into a gravy boat (which was practically a milk jug) and mixed some Quik in. The girls sat down to big bowls of cereal and strawberry milk.
‘Gross,’ said Pip. ‘Sultanas. I hate sultanas. Wrinkly rabbit turds.’ Pip began extracting the sultanas from her bowl and putting them on the table, where they joined Olive’s in a wrinkly rabbit-turd mountain.
‘Why’s this so scrunched?’ Pip had picked Olive’s self-portrait from the top of her schoolbag and smoothed it out on the table. The face was still too small for the piece of paper on which it floated. Olive grabbed it from her.
‘Don’t. It’s dreadful,’ she muttered, crumpling the picture and grinding it into the palm of her hand. She was embarrassed Pip had seen it. It was like somebody seeing something private – knickers with a poo-streak or worm tablets on camp.
‘It looked okay to me. Well, obviously until you destroyed it.’
Olive took a breath and concentrated on pulling together a smile. ‘Would you like a tour?’ she asked in her brightest kitchen-wipe voice.
The girls pushed through the house. Pip barged in front of her sister, squealing as she bumped into the piles of crap-knacks. Olive ran behind her, trying to steady the towers of junk. Those she couldn’t save toppled with a thud, taking others down in their wake like massive dominos. Dust ballooned up in clouds, glinting in the light.
‘Watch it.’ Olive was starting to think about the logistics of having somebody to stay. The house was big, but with all of Mog’s stuff, there wasn’t much room left.
Pip looked around at the chaos. ‘Why doesn’t Mog have a servant or something? You know, a cleaner or even a nanny?’
‘For political reasons. I did actually have a babysitter ages ago, but it didn’t work out.’
Olive’s babysitter had been called Sarah Afar. Sarah Afar couldn’t drive, and she’d hated Olive almost as much as she’d hated public transport. Sarah was a student and a D-grade actor. The first time she babysat Olive, she had hobbled in the front door scrunched over a walking cane. Olive was appalled.
Mog had looked at Olive’s stricken face and mouthed the words ‘method actor’ over Sarah’s shoulder. Olive had laughed. She knew all about method actors from Mog. They were actors who got themselves so wrapped up in their roles that they behaved like the person they were playing, twenty-four seven. The end result was that Olive never knew what Sarah Afar would be like – it depended entirely on what play she was in.
‘A-choooooooo. Aaaaa-choooooooo,’ sneezed Pip from the billiard room. ‘Check this out.’
Olive made her way over to Pip, whose face was hidden under the lip of a velvet riding hat.
‘That’s Mog.’ Olive pointed to a poster leaning up against a stack of boxes. In it, Mog was dressed in a turban, her skin stained blue like the god Krishna. Her eyes looked big and navy. Olive loved it because Mog looked so flamboyant. She had been an actor in her student days, and posters from the plays in which she had featured – some framed, some unframed, all sticky with dust – lined the hall.
‘Wow,’ said Pip. ‘She’s so beautiful.’
‘I know. She’s a bit wacko, but she can be fun.’
Pip took the riding hat off her head and wrapped a gold-threaded sari around her neck. Silk billowed behind her. She flapped a straw around her face and pretended to suck on it like a cigarette in a holder. ‘Ahh darlink.’ Pip sniffed artfully. ‘MMMMmm, place those roses with the others in my changing room. Oh, and fetch me a martini – generous on the gin, light on the olives.’
Olive smiled.
In the evening light, Pip looked strange, but it wasn’t only the sari silk. At first they had seemed a perfect double, and Olive had thought Pip could be her doppelgänger – go to school in her place, go to the dentist, go to swimming lessons – but now Olive suspected that people might actually guess.
The harder you looked, the more different they were. Put simply, Pip was the same but better: her eyes looked bigger and somehow less weirdly spaced; her skin was not as blotchy; she seemed taller, stronger and, well, plain prettier.
It was like when Olive bought two Caramello Koalas – one was always superior, even if they came out of the same mould in the same factory. If Olive and Pip were Caramello Koalas, thought Olive, then there was no doubt that Olive had less caramel.
Olive looked from Pip back to the poster of Mog. Mog! Olive had completely forgotten to call her.
Trudy answered the phone. ‘I’ll put you through, Olive,’ she squawked, ‘but I should warn you, things are feverish in here.’
‘Hi Ol, how was your day?’ spurted Mog onto the line.
‘Fine, thanks. Crazy. You’ll never guess what happened. I went to the beach and they were putting up some sculpture carnival thing, but I saw this set of mirrors against Kelso Pier, a—’
‘Yes, I understand the importance of this mediation, James, but I
am
on the phone to my daughter. I shall be in again shortly. Sorry, Ol. That man. Where were you?’
‘I took the Brass Eye, and . . . to trim a long story, I was doubled – well, twinned – and now Pip is—’
‘Yes, James, as I
just
explained not less than twenty-three seconds ago, I’m coming. Sorry, Ol. Things are frantic here. There’s enormous pressure to find a solution tonight, and everyone’s as tense as ticks. All right if I see you later at home? Tuck yourself up with a hottie. Love you.’ The phone clicked.
‘And I can’t wait for you to meet her,’ said Olive into the dead line.
Olive ploughed through the debris created by her sister and went to find some linen.
‘Mog will be home later.’
‘Wicked,’ yelled Pip from Olive’s room and sneezed again.
‘Much later,’ said Olive into the hall cupboard.
When she returned, Pip had picked up Olive’s watch and was buckling it around her wrist using the last, homemade hole. It was the special watch Mog had bought Olive for her first double-digit birthday, and Olive was careful not to wear it in the shower. Pip held up her hand. ‘That’s nice.’
Olive’s eyes moved between her sister’s wrist and the watch-shaped gap in her jewellery box.
Pip scanned Olive’s CDs and DVDs. ‘
The Little
Mermaid
? Isn’t that for kids?’
‘It’s Disney’s best,’ said Olive and stopped. She loved Disney’s animations. She’d watched
The Little Mermaid
DVD until it got lines in it.
Pip went back to the CDs and DVDs. ‘Nothing I like.’ She switched on the radio and turned the volume up.
‘Lucky Mog’s not home with a gin-and-tonic hangover,’ Olive said pointedly.
‘What’s the fish’s name?’ A fish the colour of canned tomato soup spiralled up and down a bowl.
‘Ariel,’ said Olive, hoping Pip would fail to recognise the obvious Disney reference.
‘I’d have called him Killer.’ Pip chasséd over to Olive’s cupboard, bobbing her hips and circling her arms above her head. She pored over the racks and held clothes up in front of the mirror, sucking in her cheeks. When she had finished with the garments, she let them fall to the floor like she was in a bric-a-brac market rather than Olive’s room.
Olive made the spare bed. She then folded a towel, all fancy like a napkin, placed a bar of soap on top, and put it on Pip’s bed. She’d seen this done at hotels with Mog and it looked very sophisticated and very welcoming. If Pip noticed, she didn’t care, though, because she plonked herself down on top of it. ‘So, you talk about Mog but what about What’shisnameseed?’
Olive picked up a leftover sheet and let the hem drop to the carpet.
‘Where is he?’
Olive held the sheet out from her body and gathered the ends together, neatly drawing edge to edge. ‘I don’t know. Mog never mentions him. It’s sort of a no-go area. Every time I try she just freezes up, so I don’t. It’s easier.’
Olive folded the sheet again and again until it was so thick it wouldn’t bend. She held it to her nose, breathing in the clean smells of cotton and washing powder. It was hard to explain to people that she wouldn’t even recognise her own father if he turned up to collect her from school.
‘What does he do?’ pressed Pip. She was leaning forwards on the spare bed, trying to catch Olive’s eye.
‘I don’t know what he does, where he lives or whether he’s even alive.’ Olive stared at the faded flyspot pattern on the sheet. ‘All I know is that he was a flaky hippy who was too liberal with his love.’ She picked at a cotton thread trailing from the sheet’s corner.
‘That’s not much to go on. There must be clues. Haven’t you checked the mail? Maybe he sends cheques or Christmas cards or something?’
Olive shrugged. ‘I don’t think so. Mog wouldn’t like that. I don’t think he cares.’
‘You’re nuts. I bet he’s gazing out at the night sky as we speak, wondering where his baby is, feeling happy that no matter what, he’s under the same moon.’
‘Babies.’ Olive shook her head. ‘That might freak him.’
Pip flipped her plaits over her shoulders and started swaying about the room. She threw her arms about theatrically, trying to reflect the gravitas of the situation (although she looked like Nut Allergy doing an impression of an elephant in Drama Dance). ‘I bet he studies every girl and tries to work out how old she is and whether she could be his daughter. Maybe he has an entire room filled to the ceiling with letters addressed to you and stamped ‘Return to Sender’ – and maybe he goes into his room every night and cries, wishing that he’d never been such a flaky hippy who was too liberal with his love.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Olive gripped the cotton thread and tugged until it snapped. ‘I’m twelve and he’s never tried to contact me. Not once.’
Pip shrugged. The air in the room had somehow flattened, lost its zest. It had become solemn and grown-up. Not grown-up in an exuberant Mog way, but grown-up in a severe discussion-about-bills, children-go-to-the-next-room, Grahams sort of way.
Olive took out a pair of pyjamas and handed them to Pip. Her mood had congealed. ‘Come on,’ she said, more primly than she’d intended. ‘It’s a school night. Let’s get ready for bed.’
Olive sounded just like Mrs Graham.
When the girls woke the next morning, Mog had already come and gone. In her wake was a trail of burnt toast crusts, laddered tights and documents. Pip picked up a folder tied in pink ribbon.