Pip: The Story of Olive (4 page)
‘Internet?’ Mathilda loved chat rooms. She wasn’t allowed into them at home, but Mog didn’t have any issues with them.
‘Chat rooms? What a lovely invention,’ Mog had once said. She thought that crime stayed in her chambers. ‘In my day, we had penfriends.’
Olive took the damp towel and changed as quickly and discreetly as possible. When she emerged from the bathroom, Mathilda was back reading Mog’s Christmas cards, draining the last of Olive’s Coke straight from the bottle.
‘I’ll meet you in the study.’ Olive passed the light switch and thought, just for one moment, about switching it off.
‘Move over.’ Mathilda took up the driving seat behind the keyboard. ‘You’re such a hog. You always take the best seat.’
‘Sorry,’ said Olive. ‘I was just turning the monitor on.’
Mathilda crossed one leg. She was wearing Mog’s bathrobe and had knotted her hair on top of her head. She typed in an address. ‘This one’s great,’ she said as the web page flashed onto the screen. ‘Real desperados.’
A bloke called Sinus was online.
Even though the room was empty, Olive looked over her shoulder. ‘Do you think we should do this?’
‘You’re such a worrywart, Olive. It’s cheeky. I happen to be very good at sexual innuendo because of my three brothers. Dad says they speak nothing but sexual innuendo.’
Olive laughed, but only a bit. She didn’t exactly know what sexual innuendo was. ‘But what if Sinus can track us?’
‘Just don’t wor—’ Mathilda was interrupted by the doorbell.
Olive walked down the hall to find Mrs Graham red-faced and blustery on the verandah. A few black noodle curls had escaped from her combs and stuck to her doughy face.
‘Hello Olive. Is Mathilda here?’ Mrs Graham looked Olive up and down. Olive smelt like grape bubble bath, and she was scratching a rash that had sprung up behind her knee. Olive stopped scratching as Mrs Graham’s lips tightened.
Mathilda moseyed down to see who was at the door. Despite the bath, her face was streaked with ruined makeup. Her tongue was cola-brown.
‘I have been trying to get through on the phone for hours, Mathilda.’ Mrs Graham’s voice was as tight as her pink-frosted lips.
‘Oh, sorry, Mrs Graham,’ said Olive. ‘We’ve been on the internet and we don’t have broadband yet.’
Mathilda didn’t say anything. She just rubbed her mouth along Mog’s bathrobe sleeve.
Olive invited Mrs Graham inside. Mrs Graham gave her a clipped nod and strode straight down the hall. ‘Collect your belongings, Mathilda
. Pronto
.’
Olive knew Mrs Graham always used the word pronto when she was cross. Because it was Spanish, she rolled the ‘r’: p
rrrrrrr
onto. Olive watched as Mrs Graham walked into Mog’s study, ahead of the girls. She looked up at the walls, which had yellowed with smoke and age, and pushed her tight lips tighter.
You could press
fl
owers between
those lips
, thought Olive.
They’d be as effective as phone books.
Before either Olive or Mathilda could protest, Mrs Graham walked over to the computer and read the exchange between Salami and Sinus. Later, according to Mathilda, Mrs Graham would tell Mr Graham that the girls had been engaging perverts who could have lured them with promises of meetings with That Paris Hilton. For the time being, however, she asked one question: ‘Where is your mother, Olive?’ And when Olive couldn’t deliver the right response, Mrs Graham and her pressed lips drove Mathilda home. Without another word.
Ten days later, the sky sagged and the rain set in. Olive was stuck watching water trickle down the windows and the insides of the walls. Mog had forgotten to call the man to fix the roof tiles
again
.
Olive was in a mood, and she was bored – bored in the sort of way a kid can only be if she’s made to sit through four hours of Wagnerian opera or to hang about watching the rain after school without her best friend. Mathilda wasn’t at Olive’s because she wasn’t allowed to come over any more. While Olive was
more than welcome
to stay at Mathilda’s, where the Grahams could
keep an eye
on them
, Olive didn’t want to.
Olive had gone to Mathilda’s once or twice since The Incident, but she’d felt the Grahams’ simultaneous sympathy and disapproval with each visit. As Olive had sat in their kitchen tearing date scones from buttery trays and watching Mathilda swat her brothers with a tea towel, she had felt like a traitor; a traitor deserting Mog, their weekends in junk stores, her jaw-dropping frocks and every single one of their dust-covered crap-knacks.
While Olive waited for Mog to get home, she tried to find things to do. She waded through junk to the computer in Mog’s study, where she logged on to the chatroom she and Mathilda had mucked about on. Olive read all the entries, but Sinus wasn’t there – there were just two kids called Spanakopita and Ironic talking about character development in
Harry Potter and the Goblet of
Fire.
Olive abandoned them and found a search engine instead.
Olive loved search engines and often ran Google searches, spelling ‘Mustard Seed and William Peters’ carefully, although she never found anything. Tonight was no different. Olive did a search for ‘Mog Garnaut’ and scrolled through the files. She studied the photos of her mother, who looked sterner and older under her grey Bo Peep work wig. Olive noted which web pages were new and printed them out for her diary. She liked to keep track of Mog like that; it made Mog feel closer.
When Olive had finished, she switched off the computer. The house fell poison-still.
Maybe I should just catch a taxi to Mathilda’s after all,
she thought. Maybe the Grahams didn’t
really
disapprove of her. It could be lovely. She could watch Mr Graham while he did suitable dad-like things, such as putting up picture hooks, carving the roast lamb and helping himself to chutney. Then she and Mathilda could sit in the drawing room while Mr Graham read to them from ‘His Dark Materials’. The curtains in the drawing room had aqua checks
in chintz
to match the aqua-checked poof and the shiny aqua door on the cover of the book on the coffee table.
Before Olive could indulge in too many more Graham-family domestic fantasies, a fat drop of water hit her on the nose. ‘No!’ she cried. Water had migrated from the walls to the middle of the ceiling. Leaks had also spouted in the hall, and everything was getting wet.
Olive spent the next hour darting through towers of junk, strategically placing pots, pans and towels on the carpet. While she was plonking a particularly large saucepan under a particularly virile leak in the billiard room, a big brown box tumbled down from a stack of junk. She ducked. A blue-green metallic contraption rolled out onto the floorboards, where it lay gleaming like a new bike. It had a long handle and a flat disc at the base that was connected to a number of levers and wires. Olive was still trying to work out what it was when Mog walked in.
‘What a day, what a day.’ Mog kissed Olive on her forehead just where it met the tip of her part. It was 9.45 p.m. and neither of them had eaten. ‘I thought you said Mathilda was coming over?’
‘She just left,’ Olive lied. Mog hated it when Olive was alone. She always seemed much happier knowing that Olive was hanging out with other girls – as if it was a way to gauge if Olive was normal or something. Besides, Mog would be furious if she knew the real reason Mathilda hadn’t been there. Olive fetched two bowls and the muesli.
‘Oh dear,’ said Mog. ‘It’s hardly meat and three veg. Try not to pick out the raisins.’
Olive sat with a placemat at the table, methodically picking out the raisins. Mog ate standing at the fridge, whizzing through the post and listening to phone messages.
‘That council,’ said Mog. ‘Now they’re putting electronic chips in dogs to track them – injecting them square into their rumps. Barbaric carcinogens. What’s this country coming to?’ She sighed in a
hmph
through her nose and went back to the post.
‘And that school of yours,’ she continued, shredding a glossy update. ‘I’d just like to know when students became “clients” and parents “stakeholders”? If I’d wanted to have you schooled in a corporation, I’d at least have picked a listed company.’ As Mog spoke, she threw up her hands to
Prove! The! Point!
like an exclamation mark of elbows and wrists before dumping the post in the recycling pile. If she noticed the saucepans filling with water, the soggy towels or the leaky roof, she didn’t say anything, and Olive didn’t draw her attention to them.
After dinner, Olive put the muesli bowls in the dishwasher and continued to fiddle with the contraption.
‘What have you got that old thing for?’ Mog was standing over Olive with the home phone clutched to her ear. Olive shrugged.
‘It’s an old metal detector I picked up somewhere yonks ago,’ said Mog. ‘Oh, I think we might have needed it for a play. But you know what they say: something lost is something found.’ She laughed. ‘That saying certainly made me feel better whenever I lost things – my bag, my mascara, you at the drycleaner . . . bugger.’ Mog’s mobile was ringing. With the home phone clamped between her head and a shoulder, she picked up her mobile and went to fend off another crisis.
Olive found the owner’s manual for the metal detector in the bottom of the box. It showed a man in a soft hat drawing a grid on the sand. His face had a studied, inquisitive look that made him look like George Bush or the village idiot, but Olive would draw a grid too. It was good to be thorough. With a grid, she would be sure to avoid covering the same patch of beach twice.
In her mind, Olive could see herself walking patiently backwards and forwards. She could hear the bleep of the metal detector as it thrust its nose into the sand, and she could see the headlines plastered across every newsstand already:
Twelve-year-old Girl Unearths Long-lost
Titanic
Bullion on Local Beach
Bullion was a fancy word for treasure. This metal detector was going to be the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Olive Garnaut.
She just knew it.
The next afternoon, Olive walked home with lucky-coin ice-cream on her breath and the metal detector in her hand. She hadn’t found lost
Titanic
bullion, or even Roman coins, but she had found two dollars, which she’d put straight towards an ice-cream. She’d watched the coin as it dropped into Okey Doke’s tubby hand. It was lovely to think that a lucky coin like that would now be in circulation.
Man, wait until Mathilda hears about this
, thought Olive. The potential was endless.
‘Watch it!’
‘Whoops, sorry.’ Olive was so distracted, she’d walked into a man with a fisherman’s cap. The metal detector had hit him square in the stomach. The man with the fisherman’s cap looked at the contraption and his face softened. ‘A metal detector. Golly, I haven’t seen one of those for a while. You find anything?’
‘A tin of boot polish, some rusty fishhooks and two dollars.’
‘Not bad. Stick at it – you could find more.’
‘Like what?’
‘Oh, keys to a mansion, pirate treasure, the Honourable Harold Holt. That sort of thing.’
Olive looked blank.
‘The former Prime Minister who disappeared in Mysterious Circumstances further along the coast.’ The man smiled, and the white stubble on his chin rippled.
‘Do you really think so?’ Olive looked down at the man’s dog. Mog said she didn’t trust men with small dogs, but this one was a little West Highland terrier. ‘A Westie!’ she said. ‘My best friend, Mathilda, has one of those. Mathilda Graham – she’s my best friend. What’s your dog’s name?’
‘Jones,’ said the man in the fisherman’s cap.
‘Mathilda’s is called Cassie. I actually can’t wait to tell Mathilda about this metal detector, even if I haven’t got much yet. I kept it a secret today, because I wanted to see whether it actually works. Now I know it does, we’ll have a go together after school tomorrow. If she’s allowed. Mathilda might have a bit more luck than me – she tends to.’ The words tumbled out before Olive could catch them.
‘You always such a chatterbox?’ The man in the fisherman’s cap laughed.
‘No,’ said Olive, and the truth was that she wasn’t. Olive Garnaut was quiet, really; she always had been.
