Pip: The Story of Olive (3 page)
‘I guess so,’ said Olive even though she knew that was absolutely not the case.
‘That’s dumb. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to lock them in.’ Mathilda shook her ponytail and poked her head inside. Olive cringed; she’d assumed the shelter would be locked.
‘Um, maybe it was to lock us in,’ said Olive tentatively, picking over her words, hoping to distract Mathilda from the mess. ‘To protect us from them?’
Mathilda turned pink and slammed the door. ‘Gross. It’s so full of crap they’d never fit anyway.’
Olive turned her back to Mathilda, hand trembling with the key. She knew Mathilda was right, and she felt deeply ashamed. Behind her, the red bricks of the bomb shelter blushed in sympathy.
Once Olive finally managed to open the back door, Mathilda walked in and headed straight to the pantry.
‘Sorry, but there’s nothing,’ said Olive, following. ‘I haven’t shopped.’
Mathilda opened the pantry door, sweeping Olive out of the way. Mathilda loved processed food and often snuck money from her mum’s handbag to buy lollies. Unfortunately, however, Olive was right: apart from pasta shells, soy sauce and capers, the cupboard was empty. Mathilda looked every bit as put out as she obviously felt.
‘Let’s go to Babette’s Feast,’ suggested Olive. ‘We can take Mog’s Visa card.’
Mog always left a Visa debit card tucked in an envelope on the fridge for emergencies (fire/flood/famine). This, Olive felt, qualified as famine.
‘Cool.’ Mathilda looked perkier. ‘Can we dress up?’
Olive shrugged. ‘If you want.’ Mog was very relaxed about things like that. Mrs Graham didn’t let the girls into her wardrobe, although she had once shown them her wedding gown and Olive had never forgotten. It was a dress made from thick ivory velvet, which was soft and heartbreakingly beautiful. It had tiny antique buttons that shimmered in a line, all the way from the nape of the neck to the floor. Olive had sunk her fingers into the creamy fabric and shivered as she swept them along it. It was the first time she had really wished that Mog had married too.
Mathilda rummaged through the drawers in Mog’s dressing room, fingering silky stockings and lacy petticoats, which smelt like lily-o’-the-valley. ‘Mog really does have the best clothes. If I lived here, I’d never be out of them.’ She pulled on a skirt and a pair of high-heeled shoes with diamanté clasps at the ankle; she wound chiffon and silk scarves around her neck, and a thick belt around her hips. Mathilda wanted to be a fashion designer when she grew up, with shops in Paddington and Paris and a range of scented candles to earn proper money.
Olive flicked through the racks. ‘Mog’s always on the hunt for “jaw-dropping” frocks. She likes beautiful things.’
And not so beautiful things
, she thought, tucking a bracelet made from a knitting needle into the top drawer.
Mathilda shuffled off to study the photos on Mog’s mantelpiece. ‘Is this your dad?’
Olive didn’t discuss her father with anyone, not even Mathilda, although she did often think about him. All Olive knew was that he and Mog had split when she was born, and that Mog had had ‘zip’ to do with him since. Olive’s father was christened William Peters but he’d changed his name by deed poll to Mustard Seed, because he liked mustard and because he was what Mog called a ‘flaky hippy’. WilliamPetersMustardSeed was too free with his love for Mog.
Mathilda was examining a new photo Olive’s Uncle John had sent. ‘Nope. That’s my uncle,’ said Olive.
The kids at school sometimes teased Olive and said that Mog was a lesbian because she hadn’t found a man since WilliamPetersMustardSeed. But if Mog was a lesbian, she wasn’t a very good one. She never brought anybody home.
‘Uncle John’s a doctor. He works with kids in Nigeria.’
‘Oh,’ said Mathilda, in a voice that meant she didn’t care about Uncle John, and that Mog must be a lesbian after all.
Unlike Mog, Mathilda’s mum was a proper mum. She was brusque and organised and ran the Graham family like the army.
‘Come on, troops!’ she’d cry. ‘
En avant
. Let’s keep the chaos to a minimum.’
She baked her own cakes and stewed her own marmalade and she ran the school fete and ferried all of the Graham children between soccer trials and choir practice and gymnastics and Chinese lessons and decoupage and flute. She sewed sparkles onto sneakers and wind-cheaters that she sold from the back of her people mover to raise money for the school’s new sport centre. She wrote hundreds of lists with tick-boxes, which she left for her ‘brood’ (Mrs Graham called her kids her ‘brood’) in helpful places.
Olive thought she was wonderful. Mathilda, however, would have traded any amount of homemade cake and marmalade for a Visa card and freedom.
Mathilda had started reading Mog’s Christmas cards. Olive straightened them and put the one Mathilda was holding back on the shelf. ‘I’m starving. Let’s get something to eat.’
‘Great,’ said Mathilda, whose thirst for gossip was trumped only by her thirst for junk food. She tugged at her top, which had ridden up over the doughnut of flesh around her middle, wiped away a smear of eyeliner, and thrust out her bosoms. ‘You got the plastic?’
Olive held up her wallet.
Mathilda puffed her curls and spun away from the mirror. Her grin cut from one ear to the other. ‘C’mon, Olive Garnaut, let’s blow this joint.’
Olive and Mathilda hobbled down to Babette’s Feast with pigeon toes and too-big lipsticked mouths. Olive ordered blueberry smoothies and slabs of caramel slice.
‘Don’t you want a main meal?’ asked the waiter. ‘I can recommend the pesto linguini.’
Olive looked at Mathilda.
‘Perhaps some garlic bread,’ said Mathilda. ‘Two serves.’
The waiter sniffed and his nostrils pinched together. Mathilda and Olive laughed bubbles into their blueberry smoothies.
‘Let’s hop on the swings,’ yelled Mathilda after the café. She ran off towards the kids’ playground on the foreshore, scarves trailing.
Mathilda and Olive swung high, trying to lance the sun with their heels before it sank into the horizon. Olive watched as the sky turned pink and then inky.
‘Do you want to get an ice-cream? From Okey Doke’s?’ Summer or winter, Olive ate ice-cream until her head ached and her lips turned purple. Okey Doke’s stall stood in the beach car park, battered by the wind and a strong current of loyal patrons. The shop was actually called Tackle Togs ’n’ Takeaway
,
but Olive called the owner Okey Doke because whenever she ordered ice-cream he responded, ‘Okey doke, artichoke,’ every time. Olive would then monitor him carefully while he smeared the confectionery onto the cone, in case he slipped in a suspect flavour – a flavour just like artichoke. He never did.
Mathilda shook her head. ‘Nah.’ She had wandered over to some women who were twirling flaming batons. The women were dancing and spinning, their full stomachs greased and yellow in the light.
Olive sat on a bluestone wall watching the dancers until she was distracted by a family with a gaggle of kids playing together. They were just like the Grahams, that family, she thought. As she stared, Olive tried to work out which kid looked like which parent. The kids were bickering.
‘Give it here, yer loser. Muuuuarrm, Braedon’s got my frisbee and ’e won’t giveitback.’
Olive wondered how they could fight when they were so lucky to have that many kids living out in the sticks with them. The father of the kid called Braedon ran into the middle of the mob and held the frisbee above his head, hopping from one foot to the other to keep it from the kids while they pawed at his shirt. Olive looked away.
Olive always told herself she didn’t need a father, but when she saw one her yearning came barrelling back and the ache was real.
This yearning was private, anonymous; it had no name. Girls at school yearned for music and new skirts and tarts they could cook in the toaster. There wasn’t anything bad about these desires, but Olive thought them rice-cracker wishes, insubstantial.
Sometimes Olive tugged out her eyelashes. She pulled them out in little clumps, and the sting distracted her from her wanting for a moment. Olive collected the eyelashes, as fine and pale as they were, and wished on them, but she couldn’t wish for a father on an eyelash: a father wouldn’t fit. A father wouldn’t fit on a birthday candle, or on the surface of coins thrown into the park fountain, either. A wish like a father was too cumbersome, too heavy.
Mog had once taken Olive to see Father Christmas on a forty-degree day. ‘Now, what would you like this year?’ he had asked with brandied cheer as Olive sat on his knee. Olive had let her sandal-heavy feet dangle. Cupped in Father Christmas’s thick lap, she felt she’d finally found a place big enough for her wish.
That Christmas, Olive had woken to a bicycle.
The kids’ father put the frisbee in his bag. ‘We’d better head off,’ he said. ‘It’s getting dark.’
Olive looked around for Mathilda. The father was right. Mog wouldn’t like them hanging around in the park after dark, either. Olive stood and walked back towards her friend. Mathilda wasn’t watching the dancers any more. She was sitting on the bluestone fence that divided the park from the beach, curling a ringlet around her finger. She was staring at two baggy boys gnawing hamburgers on the sand. They were staring back.
‘Hey,’ said Olive. ‘What are you up to?’
The baggy boys turned with their burgers to the sea.
Mathilda glanced from Olive to the boys and back again. Then she leant down and undid a diamanté clasp. ‘My feet are killing,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’
When they got home, Olive ran a huge bubble bath. Mog had a bath with feet, which stood with splayed toes in the middle of her bathroom. The tips of its claws had chipped polish where Olive had once varnished them in Ruby Woo.
Olive always sat at the deep end of the bath. She had convinced herself years ago that if she didn’t sit in the deep end, she’d contract some horrible disease and would have to spend the rest of her life in pain and dire poverty. Once a girl had made a rule like that, it was hard to fly in the face of it. Although Mathilda didn’t actually know this, she always let Olive sit in the deep end because that was the end with the plug (which she said hurt her bottom).
While they were in the bath, the telephone rang. ‘Bags not getting it,’ said Mathilda and Olive at exactly the same time. The water had cooled to the point where it was too cold to stay in and too cold to get out. As the phone rang on, the girls huddled under the greasy water and bickered happily over who would (not) tend to the call until it stopped. Then started again.
‘Oh, I will.’ Olive clutched the enamel sides of the bath.
‘Don’t worry about it. It’ll just be my mum. I forgot to tell her I was coming – I’ll ring when we get out.’ Mathilda turned on the hot-water tap, which spat hot drips.
‘Whoops,’ screeched Olive, ‘we’ve drained the tank. Again!’
‘I’m freezing.’ Mathilda stood up and grabbed Mog’s towel.
‘What do you want to do next?’ asked Olive, shivering in the tepid water.