Pip: The Story of Olive (16 page)
At the end of the lesson, Pip was in such a deep swoon that she barely stirred. It was a bit off, thought Olive, a crush like that. She prodded her sister and looked at her watch. ‘We’ve got Science.’
Pip groaned. ‘I’m not coming.’
Mrs Dixon did not tip her hair and lacked all of Mr Hollywood’s charisma.
‘It’s not that bad,’ said Olive, but her voice was drowned by the screech of chair legs on linoleum. Year 7C was moving to Science, and Pip was already out the door.
Olive zipped her pencil case closed and pulled the loose pages of the clue folder into some sort of order.
‘Olive,’ called Mr Hollywood from the front of the room. ‘You’ve got neat writing. Could you lend Mathilda and Amelia your long-division notes from Friday, please?’
Olive looked up. Amelia was leaning over her desk. Her arms were thin but strong from sun and sport.
‘Yes, Mr Hollywood,’ said Olive.
Why me, Mr Hollywood
, thought Olive.
Amelia loomed right over the open clue folder and tipped her head. ‘What’s that?’ She was smiling sweetly – suspiciously sweetly, as Ms Stable-East always said.
‘Um what?’ Olive placed her pencil case over the folder, but it was too narrow.
‘That.’ Amelia started to read through a coin-slot smile. ‘Clues, WilliamPetersMustardSeed . . . what? Adverse possession, tie-dye, Port Fairy. A map? What’s
that
all about?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Sure.’ Amelia’s dimples shimmered.
Mathilda came up behind Amelia and put her chin on Amelia’s shoulder. ‘Did you get them?’
Mr Hollywood walked over. ‘Not the extension exercises, Olive, just Friday’s notes.’ He turned to Amelia. ‘Next time you’re asked to see Mrs Dalling, Amelia, I suggest you try to do so in your own time.’
‘Here you go.’ Olive handed Amelia her notes.
Amelia managed a half-nod, then she and Mathilda locked arms and laughs and walked out into the afternoon.
Olive looked back down at her clues.
Stirling,
Stirling.
She rolled the word, his word, around her mouth. It was still effervescent. Nothing could collapse it.
Later that afternoon, the kitchen was hazy with smoke. Pip had decided that they should cook, and cartons of milk and split bags of sugar were crammed onto the already crammed bench. Batter dripped onto the kitchen floor, and the marble slab was peppered with black crumbs.
Olive looked around. ‘Mog’s going to kill us.’ She picked a wooden spoon and three eggshells off one of Mog’s binders. ‘I told you she’s fussy about her work.’
‘Whoops,’ said Pip and laughed.
Olive tripped over some stray pots and pans that had tumbled onto the floor with a crash earlier.
‘Hey, I found that in the fridge.’ Pip gestured at one of Mog’s mobiles with her elbow. ‘In the butter compartment.’
Olive picked up the cold phone. There were forty-two missed calls. At least it was still working – Mog had thrown her last mobile in with a white wash.
Pip offered Olive a beater. The best cake-mix streaks had already been licked. ‘Do you think I could have the phone if Mog doesn’t want it?’
‘You can keep it. Mog has a couple of spares. We’ll just need to get a new SIM card.’ Mog had a collection of mobiles like other mothers had collections of luggage sets, charms or French provincial pudding basins. Olive wiped batter from the phone screen and passed it over the bench.
‘Ta da.’ Pip pointed at a tray piled with dark, crooked cakes, speckled with hundreds and thousands. ‘Fairy cakes in honour of the Port Fairy Find.’
Olive rubbed her eyes. Hundreds and thousands were caught in her eyelashes. ‘What are hundreds and thousands?’ She sank her teeth into a cake so tough that burnt bits scratched the roof of her mouth.
‘Smartie poo,’ said Pip. ‘Bad joke. Very J-school.’
Olive picked up a cloth and started to clean. Unfortunately, Pip had left it so dirty that Olive was only rearranging the gunk into ridged smears.
‘Can you pass the map?’ Pip asked. ‘I want to check out Port Stirling again.’
Olive flipped through the clue folder with one hand while she scrubbed at a spot of hardened batter with the other.
‘That’s strange. It’s not here. It must have got mixed up with my stuff in Maths or Science or something. I’ll check my locker tomorrow.’
‘But I want to look at it now, Ol – see how to get there.’
Olive sighed. Pip could be very wearisome. ‘I’ll have a look in the study to see if there’s another map, if you put the rubbish out.’
‘I
hate
garbage,’ said Pip as if she had been asked to deal with nothing else since her arrival, and she pranced out the back door. Olive took the opportunity to dispose of the rest of her cake, which dropped to the bottom of the bin with a most unfairylike thud. She rinsed the cloth and stared at her runny reflection in the corrugated sink.
It was funny. As soon as Pip left, the house was silent, but silence no longer ached or muzzled; it just settled on and around Olive as fine and gentle as pollen.
Mog’s library was stacked with books. Some stood straight and tall on the shelves in two-by-two rows; others had been crammed in above them, so tightly that their covers buckled. Mog said the library was a bit like her life: it had started out neat and ended up all over the place.
Olive read through the books’ leather spines:
Commonwealth
Law Reports, Victorian Law Reports, Australian Criminal
Reports
. Right at the far end of the bottom shelf, near a pile of magazines, was another book with a hard cover:
Victorian Maps: Tripping through the Garden State by Rail
and Road
.
Bingo bango.
The book was split by a thin ribbon. Olive opened it at the marked page. There on the map, circled in biro, was not Port Stirling but Port Wilson Lighthouse. Next to it was also a note in Mog’s scribble:
sandy track, approx.
1
½ hr, take water.
‘Pip. Hey Piiip, check this out!’ Olive bellowed. Pip bounded into the study. She looked at Mog’s scribble, then flicked to Port Stirling in the index. The brittle pages of Map 47 creaked, and the smell of ink welled. It had never been opened.
‘What do you think?’ asked Olive. ‘Wilson or Stirling?’
‘I think we were wrong,’ said Pip. I think it’s Wilson – which means she must have travelled mighty far to kiss that fairy at Port Fairy.’
‘Or she borrowed the T-shirt.’ Olive was surprised it hadn’t occurred to her before. Mog said all her clothes were second-hand in those days, which was why, despite all their crap-knacks, Mog was keen on new clothing now.
‘I’m just glad we didn’t hitch all the way over there.’
Olive nodded, although she had never had any intention of hitchhiking. She ran her finger along the road to Port Wilson Lighthouse. In her dreamings, the lighthouse was whitewashed and airy. She’d imagined a soaring roof with wooden beams, like the inside of a cathedral; a galley kitchen with bags of spices pegged shut and bulk tubs of margarine, like the kitchen at school camp. She’d imagined chairs with seats smooth from wear, and hammocks to rock in. She hadn’t imagined it would be so far away. ‘It’s still a long way.’
Pip looked as depressed as one of the cupcakes. ‘I think Noglarrat’s the nearest big town.’ She pointed to a spot where the roads converged into an artery.
‘Well, I guess we’ve got to get to Noglarrat,’ said Olive as if there could be nothing simpler for two girls not that far into their double digits.
Pip brightened immediately. ‘Without Mog noticing,’ she said, just as confidently.
‘Or Ms Stable-East.’
‘We could collect that van from the car park – I’d get better at it if we practised.’
Olive remembered the dirty bunion-thong under the pedals. ‘It’s not ours, Pip. Anyway, I might die down there, or catch tinea or some other disgusting fungal disease.’
Pip’s nostrils flared. ‘You have to get over these hygiene issues.’
‘Over? You don’t get
over
hygiene issues. You might get over a cold, but hygiene is important.’ Olive could feel the vein in her forehead throb.
‘You’ll never be able to have a boyfriend, Olive. You simply can’t have your hygiene standards and any sort of interest in boys – they stink like salami sandwiches left in a schoolbag for six weeks. With any luck, you’ll be a lesbian.’
The study was quiet. Pip tapped the map with a finger as fine and pale as one of Mog’s cigarettes. ‘Should we hitch?’
Olive shook her head. Hopping into a car with people they didn’t know spelled Stranger Danger. Olive wasn’t that dumb.
A black line much like a stitched scar cut across the page.
‘That must be a train track,’ said Pip. ‘We could catch a train to Noglarrat and then figure it out.’
‘Okay.’ Olive was not convinced, although arguably they
could
run away from Stranger Danger in a train – or at least leap onto the roof or fly out the window into a butter-yellow paddock. ‘But we’ll have to find some money. I don’t want Mog to read it on her statement. She’d freak.’
‘Mog reads bank statements?’
Olive shrugged. It was true that it was difficult to imagine. Mog did not seem, and was in fact not, the finicky bank-statement-double-checking type. She took more of an it-will-all-come-out-in-the-wash approach to finance, unlike Mrs Graham, who checked off every item on her receipts with a tick and went back to the supermarket when she was short-corn-canned.
‘She reads them sometimes, but not as often as she says she should. She thinks banks are shifty. She’s worked against a couple of them.’ Olive picked up the map book and headed for the kitchen. ‘She doesn’t trust banks, weathermen, or anybody who works in real estate and calls themself a professional.’
Pip nodded. Even she had nothing to add.
The next day at school, Olive ducked out of Pastoral Care to find her diary. Pastoral Care was taught by Macca, who looked more like a teenage babysitter than a minister, which she in fact was. Macca was an anomaly at the Joanne d’Arc School for Girls, and from the first lesson, Olive had been transfixed. She had expected a minister to speak of nothing but God and wear a white-collared robe and probably even metal underpants. Macca, however, had blue hair extensions, played the banjo, and talked about social justice. While Olive had learnt little about Buddhism or the meaning of cows to Hindus (Macca preferred songs to the syllabus), she had learnt that ministers didn’t always look like ministers.
Olive wandered through the cloakroom, humming ‘Kumbaya’. The lockers were in two rows: top and bottom. Top lockers were prized, because the girls didn’t have to stoop to open them, but Olive’s was on the bottom. It didn’t really bother her. Top or bottom, they still had the distinctive middle school smell of rust, soiled gym gear and decaying assignments.
Olive rifled through the shelves of her locker, looking for her diary. It had a hard dark green cover with the school’s emblem monogrammed in gold across the front and a special sticker for body spray that Mathilda had found in some magazine. It also contained her homework for Pastoral Care.
Olive was searching slowly. There was something very peaceful about school grounds with no students – something peaceful and not at all lonely. Somehow the knowledge that other girls were nearby made it a genuine place of rest.
Just as Olive was pondering this, Mathilda walked past. She looked at Olive. Her eyes ducked to the side and then to the floor. ‘Oh. Hi,’ she mumbled.
Olive peered around; Amelia was nowhere in sight.
‘Are you wagging?’ Mathilda looked incredulous.
‘No,’ said Olive. ‘No, I’m not. I’m . . . I’m just trying to find something.’
‘Oh.’
‘My diary. You know, the one with that scratch-and-sniff sticker you stuck on it. The body-spray one that smells like pudding.’
Mathilda shrugged and looked awkward and then irritated, in a way that made it clear it was far too early to be discussing shared pasts, especially in public. She then walked off towards the classrooms with her pigeon-toed walk.
‘Oh well. Great to speak to you.’ Olive stared at Mathilda’s back until it disappeared around the corner.
