Pip: The Story of Olive (12 page)

Mog raised her eyebrow in the manner she usually reserved for ladies at David Jones and barristers on the Other Side. ‘Don’t whinge, Olive.’

Olive’s top lip quivered.

Mog softened and pulled her daughter back towards her. ‘He’s not a father, Ol. He hasn’t acted like a father, now or ever. We lived a very different type of life down the coast to the one that we live now.’

Pip’s eyebrow’s shot up.

‘Which coast?’

‘You are trying! The Victorian coast. I don’t expect you to understand, but things were different. We squatted. That means we didn’t pay rent. It was illegal, but we didn’t care. But now I’m an officer of the law – I enforce the law. Those days were okay, in part, but they could work against me, especially for my chances of getting on the Bench, and we don’t want anything to jeopardise that. I’ve worked too hard, and I have enough against me already.’

Olive nodded. The Bench and sitting on it was all Mog wanted. Olive knew that ‘certain people’ were conservative, and that ‘certain people’ looked down on single mothers, even if those single mothers were like Mog and darn good at their jobs.

‘Although, if William’s still there, he’s probably got a good case for adverse possession.’ Mog laughed.

‘What’s adverse possession?’ Olive was relieved that Mog’s mood had passed.

‘It means that you inhabit a property for such a long period of time that it becomes yours. Like those people in the Clare Renner library. They squatted in the basement with padlocks for so many years that the Council had to pass them the title papers. They stayed put. But really, Ol, forget it all. It’s easier to sit on these things, bury them.’

‘Bury what? I don’t even know what he does.’ Olive picked at a piece of fluff through a cigarette burn in the sofa arm.

‘Olive, please don’t pick. I left William and went back to law because I realised that I deserved better; that
we
deserved much better. Our life is good. You have an excellent role model and everything you possibly need. Now please, can we forget him? He wasn’t worth the angst then and he certainly isn’t worth it now. The only decent thing he did in his entire life was produce – no, rather, contribute to the production of – you.’ Mog kissed Olive’s soft blonde down. ‘And that is priceless.’

Mog went back to the post. Olive slipped out of her chair and went to join Pip. They headed to Olive’s room and closed the door.

‘Man, I see what you mean. She may have been trying to
look
calm, but she was so worked up, her neck was stringy.’ Pip’s face was flushed and her eyes shone.

‘She’s okay,’ said Olive. ‘She does a good job. We get by.’

‘But we didn’t get many clues.’

‘I think we should forget it, Pip. It’s not worth making Mog angry.’

‘Forget it? Are you mad? We know this much.’ Pip took out a notebook and started to write.

‘There must be something else,’ said Pip. ‘Clothing? Letters?’

‘I swear, there’s nothing. It’s like he never existed. She’s deleted him, and I want to, too.’

Pip stared at her.

‘Can you just leave it? It doesn’t seem right.’ Olive ripped the clue list out of the notebook.

‘Sure.’ Pip glared at Olive and left the room.

14

History-shuffle

Olive stalked to the kitchen and pulled out her paints. She liked to paint whenever she felt tight, and she felt tight now. Even the smell of the watercolour, the thickness of the paper, was enough to calm her. Olive ran the bristles of a brush along her fingers. It may have been bad for the fibres, but Olive loved the way the tips felt like cats’ tails (without the fleas).

Mog was in her study working. Every so often, Olive could hear her turn the page of a document. Pip’s whereabouts was anyone’s guess. Olive sat at the kitchen table and painted until the hard wood of the chair made her legs prickle.

As much as Olive wanted to delete WilliamPeters MustardSeed, she couldn’t. It was a funny thing, to imagine a father. Her missing father wasn’t like a missing person, because there was no photograph. He was more like the chalk outline of a body on the pavement in a New York murder; a gap Olive needed to fill, but whose insides were still unknown. A gap that could perhaps only be coloured in by reference to Mog. But it was unclear if Mog and Mustard Seed were like skinny Jack Sprat who ate no fat and his wife who ate no lean, or if they were both, in fact, Jack Sprats.

From the pieces she had, Olive couldn’t picture whether he was a noisy honker of a man who would have been banned from attending netball matches for overzealous parental support, or whether he was a barrel-chested partygoer in an open shirt, telling stories with a glass of red wine. Maybe he was the sort of person to talk loudly about shares on his mobile phone in public places. ‘Sell, sell, sell.’

It was always possible that he wore a navy fisherman’s cap, walked a Westie and smelt of rum and tuna, with scars on his hands from oyster shells – or perhaps he was more like the personal trainers who urged panting women around the park: ‘I’ve got clients twice your age who could run rings around you.’ He could have resembled the school gardener, a man with dirt that would never wash out of the lines in his palms and manure scraped up the back of his King Gees. Or perhaps he was like Hugh Jackman (the only actor Mog had ever declared
very
handsome
), or a crier like Prince Frederick at the Danish Royal Wedding.

Whenever Olive noticed a man on the street or in the newspaper, she added him to her mental catalogue of possible Mustard Seeds, until he managed to be a jumble of everything: a netball-supporting gardener who drank wine, traded stocks over his mobile, danced, and cried in Danish.

A while later – when her glass of painting water had turned the colour of a grape milkshake – Olive’s quiet was interrupted.

‘Olive, c’mon, where are the photos? There must be some and I can’t find them anywhere.’

Olive moaned. Pip was as persistent as a terrier. ‘There’s only a very old album with photos of me and Mog. He’s not there, Pip. I know because I’ve checked a trillion times.’

Pip, however, promised that she would leave Olive to paint in peace if Olive indulged her this one time.

Olive snuck past the study. The door was open and it was chaotic. Mog’s desk featured an in-tray for documents she had yet to get to, and an out-tray for documents that she had completed. The trays were piled with cigarette lighters, wads of unpaid bills and orphaned high heels, but Mog said they gave her the impression that she had a system; that she could be organised if she wanted to be. And that, Mog said, was important.

Mog was stooped over a document with her chin tucked into her neck. Just seeing Mog hunched like that made Olive stand tall. She dragged the album up from under the coffee table in the lounge room and headed towards her room.

‘Ol?’ There was a thud as a pile of Mog’s books rolled backwards off her desk. ‘Bugger! Olive?’

Olive froze. She could see Mog through the open door. The album was too big to hide behind her back, so she dropped it and stood on it. Her heart thrashed against her ribs. Mog stopped reading and looked up, an unlit cigarette poised between her first two fingers, which were held in an elegant V for victory (appropriate as she always won her cases). ‘Ol, can you grab me a lighter?’ Mog took off her glasses and rubbed the crease between her eyebrows. ‘I’d also kill for a coffee.’ Olive watched as Mog’s fingernail tapped the desk. It was long and nicotine-yellow.

‘Sure,’ said Olive, so relieved that she forgot to reprimand Mog for the minutes of her life that she was puffing away.

Olive left the the album on the floor and headed to the kitchen. When she returned, Mog was unloading bundles of briefs tied with hot-pink ribbon. ‘I almost forgot to tell you. I met a parent of a friend of yours yesterday.’

‘You did?’ Olive was confused. So far as she knew, she didn’t have any friends except Pip, who was family and didn’t count.

‘He’s the instructing solicitor on this case. Smith, Jason Smith. Nice man. Earnest but smart – his two girls are at Joanne d’Arc. Kate’s in your year and Melanie’s a few years behind. He said that you and Kate sometimes have lunch together.’

‘We do? Kate who?’ asked Olive, making a mental note to hunt the mysterious Kate down should Pip ever take ill or end up on school camp at a different time.

‘Kate Smith, I assume. Unless the girls are under their mum’s name. She’s a solicitor as well.’

‘Oh, must be.’ Olive had no idea who Mog was talking about.

Olive picked the album off the ground and headed back to her bedroom. Pip grabbed it from her and pored over the photos. ‘I know there’ll be more clues in here. Hey, check this one out. Mog’s a classic.’ Mog was lying back in a beanbag, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt that said ‘I kissed a fairy at Port Fairy Folk Festival’
.
‘Fairy festival? What’s that?’ Pip laughed. ‘You think she wore fairy wings?’

‘Shush, Mog’ll kill us if she finds us,’ Olive whispered. There really were two types of people, she thought. Olive was quiet. She liked to make herself thin; to creep through life. Pip, however, was loud. Everything she did was noisy, even the way she chewed apples (like a horse) and walked (slapping her feet like a seal). Mog was a combo. She was noisy but she hated talk at certain times, like when she had a hangover. She always said that the worst things in the morning were eggs and noise. After 10 a.m., however, Mog was a foghorn.

Once Pip had gone through all the photos, they added the following to the list:

‘Study the backgrounds. There must be something else.’ Pip bent back down over the album.

Olive, who had now well and truly abandoned any idea of painting, turned the page to a photo of Mog and a baby in a vegetable patch. There were a number of photos of Mog in shorts and a bikini top pulling weeds in this vegetable patch, her face and back speckled by the sun. ‘Hey, check this out!’ said Olive, her voice high. ‘You’re there, too.’

‘What?’ Pip looked up from her list. ‘No way, shut up, get out of here.’ But Olive was right. There was Mog in the vegetable patch holding not one but two pale babies wrapped in saffron robes.

‘How did
that
happen?’ Olive’s voice was not only high, it was also squeaky. ‘I’ve seen that photo a thousand times before.’

‘I don’t know, but we’ve got our clue.’

‘How can you think of clues at a time like this?’ Olive looked down at the photo again.

‘Look!’

Suddenly, Olive knew exactly what Pip was talking about and wondered how she had ever missed it. The lighthouse, the lighthouse. Mog was standing in a long vegetable patch. Just behind the garden was a lighthouse. It was not a tall lighthouse, as far as Olive could see, but it was a pretty one. It was quite squat, with a thick base of limestone that resembled lumps of sugar. The top was off-white and peeling. Both the garden and lighthouse were encircled by a picket fence with missing posts, like forgotten items on a shopping list.

‘What’s that thing?’ Pip pointed at a dot where the lighthouse’s peak met the sky. Olive grabbed the magnifying glass she had used to burn ants in J-school. Under the magnifying glass, Olive could see that at the top of the lighthouse was a tiny window, like an eye – only the glass was broken. A purple sheath of fabric – cloth or a towel, perhaps – flapped from it.

‘I don’t know,’ said Olive. ‘But if this lighthouse is flying flags and the window is broken, I don’t think it works.’

‘You’re a genius, Holmes.’ Pip added the final and best clue to the list.

‘I’m still freaked out about you being in that photo.’ Olive pushed her finger down on the two babies in their saffron robes. The cellophane crackled.

Pip shrugged. ‘Forget the photo. It makes sense that history shuffled a bit to make room for me. It would be kind of hurtful if it didn’t.’

Olive rolled her eyes.

‘The important thing is that WilliamPetersMustardSeed is one step closer.’ Pip beat the biro down on the page. ‘Now, we just need to do some careful research.’

Mog coughed in the next room. Her cough was deep and rattly.

‘We can’t use the computer tonight.’ Olive gestured towards Mog’s study. ‘Anyway, I hope you’re better at research than you are at origami, or we won’t find him until we’re grown-up with our own kids.’

Pip snapped the album shut. ‘Plenty of world leaders were hopeless at cranes, Olive. Do you think Margaret Thatcher knew how to fold a crane?’

Olive tried to remember who Margaret Thatcher was exactly.

‘Well I doubt it, Olive Garnaut. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of England, and she was much too busy learning important stuff like law and politics, and how to sip tea without getting lipstick on the cup.’ And with that, Pip stood and marched out of the room.

15

Yellow Peril

The following morning, Pip was grumpy. As expected, Mog had hogged the internet the night before, and Olive did not need
in-tu-ition
to tell that the wait to begin research was killing her sister. Pip had done every celebrity crossword in Mog’s magazines and repeatedly checked whether the study light was still on, but Mog was on an all-nighter for the Big Case and couldn’t be stopped.

‘Doesn’t she ever sleep?’

‘She’ll do three or four nights straight and then crash for twenty hours at the end,’ said Olive.

‘Well, I’m not waiting for the weekend before I start.’

‘Pip, don’t worry about it. Mog might be at it again tonight, but the computer should be free sometime over the weekend. And we can always try the library.’

Pip’s mood deteriorated further at school, as the library server had crashed. Luckily house meetings had been convened to replace the daily hymn-singing, prayer-spouting assembly.