Pip: The Story of Olive (23 page)
Olive took the money, but she couldn’t look at the little girl; she couldn’t look at her shining piggy-tails with their salted tips, couldn’t look at her hand with its smudged star stamp.
‘Oh well, goodbye then,’ Olive mumbled. The words were too clumsy for everything they conveyed. She turned and walked; turned and walked with her head held high, with clipped-step poise: a walk to stop things from spilling. Her future stretched out before her, empty and wild, enormous and unchartered.
The kids have their needs.
The kids have their needs. The kids have their needs.
But I have them, too.
The door closed. Behind it, Olive could hear the child twittering, her voice amplified by the hardwood floor. ‘She was a bit rude, Dad. She didn’t even say thank you.’
Olive had reached the gate when the security door scraped. Mustard Seed came running behind her. He fished a pile of notes from his wallet. ‘Look, how much do you need? Ten? Twenty? How much is a cab? You’re not living here, are you?’
‘No. Still Melbourne. We live in Melbourne.’
‘Oh. Well . . .’ He waved a clutch of money at her. ‘Well, here you go, Olivia.’
‘It’s—’ Olive’s eyes fogged. ‘It’s—’ She spun away from the notes, pushed the gate, then paused. She turned, lifted her chin and looked straight into Mustard Seed’s black hooded eyes. ‘I’m Olive, just Olive. Olive
Garnaut
.’
Olive ran down the street, towards Pip. Mustard Seed stood at the gate and piped words behind her in layers – nothing-words in a broken tone that nipped:
‘Oh, Olive.
‘Of course you’re just Olive.
‘Look, look . . .
‘Um.
‘Oh, I’m . . .
‘Perhaps we could rustle up a fold-up bed . . .’
But the words didn’t stop her.
Only once Olive had reached the end of his street did she pause. She took a deep breath of air and swung, giddy. She could feel Pip at her side.
‘I had twelve years of questions, and I think you just answered each one of them, you Mustard Moron,’ Pip bellowed over the snarl of the traffic.
Olive rested her head against her sister’s shoulder. It smelled safe; it smelled like Olive. She turned and vomited.
‘Get up Ol, quick. We’ve gotta get out of here.’
Olive’s throat burned. Little bits of lettuce stung in her nose and stuck to her shoe. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. ‘You expect the worst. You can’t let yourself think that he might really be good, that he might really care. You think that sort of thing happens to
other
kids; that you don’t deserve it; that you might jinx it if you think anything else – but somehow you jinx it anyway. And no matter how much you protect yourself, you feel so, well . . .’
‘Try not to . . .’
‘But you play games with yourself, Pip. You say, “If I do all my maths, if I use matching pegs on the line, if I sit at the deep end of the bath, it will work out.” And you do those things, and it still doesn’t.’
‘You could sit in the deep end of the bath from now until you’re a waterlogged granny, and nothing would change.’
Olive sniffed. ‘I know. He’d still be blaming Pat Peters and his kids.’
Pip nodded. ‘Anyway, family is the people you love. Blood counts for nothing.’
They walked back to the train station. Olive sat on the ground of the platform. Tears blistered. She could smell bile on her party skirt, in her fringe. The corner of the handmade frame poked out the top of the backpack.
Olive pushed it back in. ‘The edges aren’t straight. I wanted it perfect.’
Olive leant her head against the wall behind her. The evening shadows that climbed the station were almost as long and thin as the train tracks themselves. Olive was exhausted, but she was also sad; a plain gnawing sadness that was impossible to contemplate. She was sad for so many things – for Pip, for Mog, for herself – but mostly Olive felt sad for edges that would never be straight.
The essence from the tea-trees leached into the air as they excreted the last of the day’s heat. The girls sat in a silence that was as snug and comfortable as Mathilda’s ugh boots.
‘Ministers don’t look like ministers these days, ticket inspectors don’t look like ticket inspectors, hippies don’t look like hippies, and dads don’t look like dads,’ said Olive.
The ground trembled as the 6.42 train to Melbourne approached.
‘Well, ours certainly didn’t act like one.’ Pip stood up and stretched. ‘C’mon Ol, let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.’
The trip back from Noglarrat felt quicker than the trip there. There was no sound but the beat of the carriage on the track. There just wasn’t anything left to say. It was as if all of the ideas, chatter and natter had drained away, and the only thing Olive had left was a headache hard in her forehead.
Pip lay on one of the seats and slept, the denim jacket bound around her face. Olive pressed her temples and studied her reflection in the window. She may have looked sepia in the train light, but she was Mog Garnaut’s daughter, all right. She had come to find her father, but she had ended up finding Mog. There was nothing of Bill Peters, not one bit.
It was hard to tell if there was more of Bill Peters in Pip. Not only because she was currently encased in denim, but because her reflection was translucent. In the window, Pip had thinned, and all that was left were the lights from country towns flicking inside her silhouette.
Olive let her face sink into the window. She breathed in the cool from the glass and rocked with the carriage.
Three hours later, Olive sat in a taxi at the end of her street. The taxi driver punched his meter. ‘Are you sure this is all right? There’s not a lot round here.’
‘Yes, thanks, I just live down there.’ Olive didn’t speak to the man, but to the ID on his dashboard.
‘Well, okay then. Take care.’
The car drove off, leaving the road cold and silent. Olive stood under the dusky orange of a streetlight, looking at the photograph in her hand. In it, Mog squinted out from the vegetable patch with her peeling shoulders and an armful of saffron robes.
She was holding one pale baby.
Pip had vanished.
Olive ran towards the beach, tripping over knobs in the asphalt and cans in the gutter, her shoes
thwack
thwack
on the pavement. Three workmen were digging a hole in the footpath under a spotlight. One whistled as she passed. Olive didn’t care. She dropped down over the bluestone wall onto the beach. Her knee hit her chin as she landed, and her mouth bubbled thick with saliva and salt. Olive spat blood, wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve, and pressed on, even though the sand grabbed her calves and ankles. She didn’t stop until she got to the pier.
There was nothing left of the carnival but a bleached carton of Double Yoke Eggnog. Olive booted it to the water’s edge, where the sand was sleek. She fumbled in her backpack for the Brass Eye and ran into the sea.
Olive kicked at the waves, dragging her feet through the shallows, feeling her socks expand, heavy with brine. She pushed against the current, pushing and calling Pip’s name, pushing even though her
in-tu-ition
told her it was useless.
When the tide tugged at Olive’s hem, she knelt. Her lungs ached. The waves wove around her, washing cool across her lap; her skirt ballooned like leavened dough. Olive raised the Brass Eye to her face, shaking. But it was too dark; the Brass Eye was filled with shadows.
Olive lowered the cylinder to her cheek and listened to boats bump about their moorings. Behind her, the beach smouldered in the nightlights; before her, the sea sloshed metallic under the moon. She breathed in the fishy damp and, for just a few seconds, in the slip of silence between the knocking hulls, the water looked like a mirror – a flickering mirror of molten silver, liquid crystal, and glass.
Olive walked home with squelchy shoes and puckered fingers. Wet sand chafed her legs like facial scrub. She stepped over Pip’s name imprinted in the concrete; before her, the house blazed.
As Olive let herself in the front door, Mog clacked across the hall in high heels. When she saw Olive, her face went sloppy. ‘I thought I heard you.’ She threw her arms around Olive and gripped her. ‘Where on earth have you been?’
‘Sorry.’
Mog ran her hands up and down Olive’s arms, clutching at them as if she were rockclimbing. ‘Everything intact? You’re wet.’
‘Careful Mog, that hurts.’
The grip slackened, but only faintly. ‘
Gott sei Dank.’
While Mrs Graham spoke Spanish when she was cross, Mog spoke German when she was relieved.
‘Where did you go, Ol? With whom? I’ve got a massive search party combing every inch of Port Fairy. I’ve called all the hospitals. We’ve been looking for hours.’
Olive snatched her arms back. ‘Why Port Fairy?’
‘Mathilda rang me at work. She was worried because you weren’t at school, and she was sure you’d gone there.’
‘Mathilda?’ Olive scrunched her face. ‘That girl needs a hobby.’
Mog’s laugh was gluey with tears.
‘I wasn’t at Port Fairy.’
Mog sucked deeply on her cigarette. ‘Where – Jesus, Ol, I thought I’d lost you.’ She squeezed her daughter and tapped her bottom. ‘I’m tempted to have one of those council chips injected into your rump – then at least I’d be able to scan and locate you.’
Olive smiled. ‘I thought you said those pet things were barbaric carcinogens.’
‘
Effective
barbaric carcinogens.’ Mog exhaled and smoke spread out in a fan over Olive’s shoulder.
‘You’re the one who hasn’t been around, Mog. Maybe I’ll have one injected in you.’
Mog took Olive’s arm and drew her into the morning room, where she stubbed out her cigarette on the rim of an empty vase. Then she pulled Olive to her chest again and stroked her hair. ‘Where did you go?’ Mog repeated. She rested her chin on her daughter’s head.
‘Away.’
Mog looked at Olive, head on a tilt. Her face was tired without lipstick. ‘Away where? It’s after eleven. No Year 7 has the Freedom of the City, Olive, even one with a mother on a Big Case. It was just awful to discover news of my only child through her friends.’
Olive studied a leaf-shaped stain on the ceiling and shook her head. ‘It’s awful to discover news of your father through his children.’
‘Father?’ A crack slid about Mog’s face. She ran her finger over the
Hawke Cried Because He Lied
pin on Olive’s cardigan and stiffened. ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’
Olive nodded and whimpered. She had only a vague memory of black hooded eyes, a painting of slashes and a thatch of caramel-junket limbs; these details felt so remote, they were no longer real.
‘Why did you lie?’ Mog’s voice was taut.
Olive didn’t answer. She really didn’t know.
‘How?’ Mog took a breath. ‘How did you find him?’ She grated her chin along her daughter’s part and held her. ‘Oh Ol, why didn’t you trust me? He’s hopeless. Just hopeless.’
Olive looked up at her mother. ‘I don’t think he is.’
Mog flinched.
‘Not hopeless.’
There was a silence long enough to count twelve of Mog’s breaths.
‘I just don’t think there’s room for me. He lives in the town now, with a wife and the . . . the children.’
‘Oh,’ said Mog, with an ‘Oh’ that could never be light. She breathed in Olive like she breathed in smoke. Then she whispered into Olive’s scalp, so quietly that later Olive would wonder whether she had heard it at all, ‘Nothing can ever replace a child, Ol. What great bloody fool would miss out on you . . .’
Olive didn’t respond, couldn’t. It was too early for the right words.
‘Ah-hem.’
A police officer was standing in the bay window, his hat hooked under his arm. He looked awkward and fiddled with a loose strip of braid on the rim. ‘Your mother has been very worried about you, young lady,’ he said in a voice that was higher than Olive had expected for a man so tall. ‘She’s a good woman. You shouldn’t have put her through this.’