Pip: The Story of Olive (17 page)
‘And that’s all she said?’
Olive had convened a crisis meeting at lunch to discuss the exchange with her sister, who had failed to show up for Pastoral Care.
‘Yep. She said “Oh”, “Are you wagging”, and then “Oh” (again), but it was fine. There were lots of meaningful gaps in between.’
‘Meaningful gaps? Olive, are you mad? She was monosyllabic – rude to you,’ Pip spluttered. ‘Did she at least say whether
she
was wagging?’
‘Nope.’
‘Did you ask?’
‘Nope. There wasn’t time. It was over so quickly.’
‘Olive, you’re useless sometimes. We could have got her in trouble, got her back.’
Olive swallowed and tried not to look shocked. ‘Pip. That’s not in the spirit of things. She’s my best friend.’
Pip rolled her eyes and moved away from Olive. ‘Charming.’
‘Oh, come off it, Pip. Not like that. She
was
my best friend, I mean.’ Olive reached out for her sister’s arm. Pip pulled away.
‘Remember your plait?’
Olive rolled the greaseproof paper down her sausage roll. ‘It’s just that I don’t want more trouble. Besides, maybe Mathilda’s changed? Maybe she was just there enjoying the peace of the empty locker room, too? Maybe she’d also lost something? I didn’t ask.’
Olive liked the thought that both she and Mathilda, despite the dumping, might be leading lives in parallel lines; lines that could perhaps move together one day. True parallel lines never met – like tram tracks. But Olive knew that sets of parallel lines could cross – sometimes even over and over, like the paths of slalom skiers – and maybe Olive and Pip, as a pair, would one day cross Mathilda and Amelia’s tracks again.
Pip shook her head. ‘Like you as I do, sometimes I worry whether all your oars are in the water.’
Olive sniffed and looked away.
‘Look at that.’ Pip pointed at two girls sitting on a bench to their left. Nut Allergy and her sister, the Nut Allergy Facsimile, were eating cheese-slice sandwiches. Nut Allergy’s sister was in junior school. She had exactly the same matted hair and orthotic lace-up shoes, just in a smaller size. Unlike Nut Allergy, she was meant to be smart. Her real name was Melanie, but she was called the Nut Allergy Facsimile or Smelly Melly.
Nut Allergy and Smelly Melly weren’t speaking, but they didn’t look unhappy.
‘Isn’t that social death, to sit with your sister at lunchtime?’ asked Pip through a mouthful of pastry. Neither Pip nor Olive commented on the inescapable fact that there was nobody without the surname Garnaut in their own elite circle
à deux.
‘I guess if you’re Nut Allergy, it’s a question of where else there is to go.’ Olive took another bite of her sausage roll. Sauce shot out the bottom of the soggy bag and onto the bricks, where it lay like evidence in a crime scene.
‘I wonder if they play
Dungeons and Dragons
?’ asked Pip.
Suddenly, something in Olive twitched. It was an epiphany – a series of little facts and conversations which converged in her mind to form something solid. ‘Pip, I’ve just remembered something.’
‘What?’ Pip was trying to rub tomato sauce off the T of Olive’s T-bar, but had only succeeded in transferring it onto Olive’s socks through the petal-shaped cut-outs.
‘Nut Allergy. Her name is Kate.’
Olive knew that she should feel outraged, incensed, even violated: Nut Allergy was a social climber of the most grotesque and conniving kind. Fancy telling her father that she, lowly Nut Allergy, ate lunch with her, Olive Garnaut, formerly of the greater Year 7 middle class.
Instead, however, Olive just felt sad.
That afternoon, the twins dumped their schoolbags at home and headed straight to Woolworths to shop for provisions for their trip. This was the only domestic task Olive had seen Pip apply herself to with any sort of dedication. Although they still hadn’t agreed on a date, Pip was adamant that they be prepared. It was funny: the longer they had to think about it, the more they needed to organise – when they’d taken nothing at all to see the fake Mustard Seed.
At the supermarket, the girls bought bottled water, a torch, batteries and chocolate for energy. Olive remembered something called scroggin she’d read about in a camping book. It was a mix of chocolate, dried fruit, nuts and seeds, but as neither of them particularly liked dried fruit, nuts or seeds, they ditched those bits.
Pip spotted some freeze-dried beef stroganoffs. They opened one of the boxes to have a peek. It really was amazing to think that an entire beef stroganoff could be squeezed into such a small bag. The beef stroganoff was brown with orange bits in it – like vomit.
‘It’s sucking in its cheeks in disgust.’ Olive poked the plastic. The stroganoff was as rigid as a ski boot.
‘We’d have to be in a real emergency to eat that.’ Pip nudged the bag. ‘Especially since I’m vegetarian.’
Olive turned to her sister. ‘You are not vegetarian.’ Olive knew about vegetarians. Mog was vegetarian and before that she had been vegan, which was a stricter kind of vegetarian who didn’t eat honey or wear leather shoes. Not that it had mattered to Mog though, as in those days she hadn’t worn shoes anyway. Pip, on the other hand, did wear shoes, and for a pretty skinny kid she was a complete guts who devoured everything she was served (and half of Olive’s) – including the meaty parts.
‘I am, too,’ protested Pip.
‘Since when?’
‘Since always.’
‘But you eat cabana.’ Olive recalled the hoses of cabana that hung on hooks in the local deli. On the weekend, Pip had chowed through the better half of a metre of sausage before they’d even made it home.
‘Cabana doesn’t count. I am vegetarian for everything other than tasty smallgoods.’
‘And chicken.’
‘Oh. Some chicken,’ said Pip thoughtfully.
‘And fish,’ Olive pushed.
‘Okay. And fish, but only with batter.’
‘I think you just don’t eat steak.’
‘Or freeze-dried beef that looks like vomit.’
Olive took the frozen stroganoff back from her sister. ‘Even if we were facing death by starvation?’
Pip looked Olive up and then down. She grabbed three beef stroganoffs (one for Mustard Seed) and tossed them back in the trolley. ‘Good point. I reckon I’d eat them over you, anyway. More meat.’
The girls walked along the aisles, heads tilted to the side, browsing for anything they may have forgotten. All the products looked crisp and shiny under the white, white supermarket light.
‘The problem with planning,’ said Pip, ‘is that you only ever plan to do what you feel like doing at the time you actually make the plan. At the moment I feel like chocolate, but how do I know what I’ll want to eat when we’re on the road? I might want chips. It’s so much easier to play things by ear. You mind the trolley. I’m just going to check out the lolly aisle again.’ Pip headed off towards aisle three.
‘Hello there.’
Olive looked straight up and into the pink-frosted lips of Mrs Graham. She sidled around to the front of the trolley so that Mrs Graham wouldn’t see the freeze-dried beef stroganoffs and get suspicious or, even worse, think that they were the type of girls to eat freeze-dried beef stroganoffs when there wasn’t an emergency. ‘Hello, Mrs Graham.’
Mrs Graham had a bulk packet of toilet paper sticking out of the top of her trolley. It made Olive feel embarrassed. Knowing that her friend’s mother bought toilet paper twenty-four rolls at a time seemed indecently intimate.
Mrs Graham leant over Olive and peered into their trolley. ‘Are you going camping?’
Olive nodded and smiled.
‘With Mog?’ The pink-frosted lips dropped open. ‘I thought Mog hated camping.’
‘No, no. With my father, actually.’
‘Oh.’ Mrs Graham looked rattled, as if there were a number of things she expected of the Garnauts on the weekend, and none of them involved anything as functional as a family camping trip with a father who was supposed to be unknown and/or absent.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Graham. ‘Won’t that be fun.’ She tipped her head to the side and blinked.
Olive blinked back.
‘Well, I hope we’ll see you soon then,’ said Mrs Graham and steered her cart down
Pasta / Spreads / Kitchen Utensils.
Olive watched her floppy navy bottom lumber, then pause. Mrs Graham reached for a family pack of shell pasta and turned. ‘Olive, what was the name of your father again?’
‘William,’ said Olive. ‘William Peters.’
‘William,’ said Mrs Graham, chewing on the name, looking as if she’d expected something a little more unusual, a little more flamboyant, a little more like
Mustard Seed.
‘Well, have fun, dear,’ she said and wheeled out of sight.
Pip jogged back towards Olive. ‘Who was that?’
‘Mrs Graham.’
Pip frowned. ‘What did she want?’
‘Nothing, I just bumped into her. It was completely uncomfy – like talking to somebody with poppy seeds in their teeth. I wasn’t quite sure where to look.’
‘She buys gherkins,’ said Pip. ‘That fact alone has confirmed all of my prejudices about that family.’
‘Do you think we should take Mustard Seed a present?’ Olive was keen to stay clear of the subject of Mrs Graham. She couldn’t believe she’d gone and blabbed about Mustard Seed, but she’d wanted Mrs Graham to admire
them
for once. She could only hope that Mrs Graham would never tell Mathilda and never ever tell Mog.
‘A present? Are you kidding? By my calculations, he owes us each twelve birthdays and eleven Christmases.’
‘I just don’t think we should turn up empty-handed.’ Olive lunged at the trolley to stop it from ploughing through a pyramid of lime marmalade.
Pip batted Olive’s hands off the red handles. ‘Well, I guess. If you want.’
‘Mog doesn’t like it when I buy her presents. She thinks it’s much more thoughtful to make them.’
‘I saw all those pinch pots in the kitchen,’ said Pip. ‘I figured no shop would sell those.’ Mog had kept every clay pot Olive had ever made. Most sat coiled on the mantelpiece in the kitchen like brown snakes (according to Mog) or dog poo (according to Olive).
‘What about an ashtray? We could make him one. If he’s anything like Mog, he’ll use it,’ said Pip.
‘Nah,’ said Olive. ‘It’s an okay idea, but it’s not brilliant. This has to be really special. It has to have something of us in it.’ Olive scanned the supermarket shelves – brown rice, arborio rice, polenta, couscous. It wasn’t much to go on. ‘What about job coupons? Our class made them for Father’s Day, and apparently they were a real hit. Each coupon had a promise on it: to make breakfast in bed, clean the car or polish shoes.’ Olive paused. ‘I gave mine to Mog.’
Pip bit her thumbnail. ‘I hate Father’s Day, too.’
They pushed the trolley together in silence. Girls with fathers could never understand how bare Father’s Day could be. Olive imagined it was like being Jewish or Muslim on Christmas Day, when Santa Claus only brought presents for the Christian kids – even the kids who had never set foot in a church.
Olive pulled up her socks. ‘Not for long. If we can make it to Port Wilson, next year will be different. Next year we’ll both be able to make presents in Art that say “I ♥ Dad”.’
That night at home, the twins sat around the kitchen table making a cardboard frame. They had decided to give WilliamPetersMustardSeed photographs they’d taken in an automatic photo booth in the shopping centre. They’d stuck out their tongues and pushed their cheeks together and the booth had spat out a strip of sticky photos. Then they had both stuck a fingerprint on the bottom of the strip before it dried.
‘For authenticity,’ Olive had said. ‘Sort of an autograph – like real artists.’
Olive had started the cardboard frame four times, but she was using a pair of kitchen scissors with a slight lean, and no matter how hard she tried, the edges curved.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Pip. ‘Nobody but you can notice. Think of it as an arc rather than a lean.’
But it did matter,
because
Olive noticed. The tilted edges gave the frame a homemade feel, and Olive wanted it to look professional. She picked the best of the four and drew olive trees and olives with pips and hearts around the outside.
‘That was a brilliant idea, the pip and olive bit,’ said Pip as Olive wrapped the framed photos in tissue paper. ‘Really clever. He’s going to love it.’
While Olive tidied up the craft box, Pip sat watching television. Coloured light jumped about the wall as it did when they had a Christmas tree. Mog didn’t like fake Christmas trees, because they didn’t smell, and she didn’t like cut ones, because it was cruel to butcher a tree for a few days’ use. Instead, they had a tree in a pot in the garden.
‘Want to help me move the Christmas tree inside tomorrow?’ Olive asked Pip. ‘It’s a bit of a monster, but the two of us might be able to manage.’ In the quick dark before a flare of advertisements, Olive saw them all collected around the base of a perfectly straight tree, hanging baked biscuits and candles on the branches like the Grahams did. The image was so clear, Olive could smell pine and nutmeg.
‘Nah, I thought we should go to the lighthouse the day after tomorrow, so we’ll need tomorrow night to get organised.’