Pip: The Story of Olive (5 page)

By the time Olive got home, the moon sat low and lumpy in the sky. Olive held her key out in front of her as she made her way to the back door. She tried not to look at the tree shadows that plucked worms from the garden and moths from the sky with their long twiggy fingers. She plunged towards the lock and stumbled, then scuttled inside and bolted the door.

Even indoors, however, Olive couldn’t relax. She stomped into each room, turning on lights; colonising the unknown with each flick of the switch. Only after this was done could Olive breathe.

When the house was blazing and her heart had steadied, Olive checked the answering machine. The light was flashing. Olive loved the old answering machine; she particularly loved it when it flashed.
Hello
, it seemed to say.
Thinking of you. Remember that you are somebody.

There was only one message and it was from Mog.

‘Hi, Ol. Hope you had a lovely day. Bad news. Just realised that I’ve gone and accepted dinner with the Attorney-General on the night of your concert. It is a slippery year – Christmas already. I hope you don’t mind, darling. I know it’s not ideal, but it’s the only day he’s in town before he heads off for his summer break. I thought you could come along after the concert. We can ask Mathilda, too. I’ll call later to discuss. Love Mog.’

Mog always signed off her answering-machine messages like they were emails or letters she was dictating. Olive hated it. She kicked at a pile of papers. How could Mog go and do that?
Slippery year my foot
. The Christmas concert was sacred. It was the one evening when Mog was there with the other girls’ parents,
guaranteed.
Afterwards they’d have burnt urn coffee in the foyer with the teachers, and Olive would lean against Mog and feel like
them
. This year was even more important, because Olive’s art might be chosen for display. Olive kicked out at the papers again.

It actually wasn’t unusual for Mog and Olive to dine with politicians like the Attorney-General. In fact, they often had dinner with politicians and their families on Sunday nights, for what Mog called ‘relaxed quality family time’ – but they never ate in. Instead, they went to suitably casual-for-the-kids bistros, where Olive could order spaghetti with meat sauce and lick the bolognaise off each strand.

Sometimes Olive fell asleep at the table, and when she woke she’d have bits of meat sauce in her hair. ‘I’d better be getting this one to bed,’ Mog would say. But she would always have another glass of red wine – ‘for the road’ – and Olive rarely remembered the taxi ride home.

And that was to be Olive’s first senior-school concert? Her art – maybe the only Year 7 art – could be on display, and while all of the other parents studied it, her mother would be studying a politician who blow-dried his hair?

Olive picked up the phone. Mathilda would understand. Even though Mrs Graham had never missed a single concert, and in fact served the biscuits, Mathilda would get it.

It took some time for Mathilda to answer. ‘Hi Ol, I’ve got to be quick. The boys have their school Christmas barbeque picnic tonight and Mum’s making us all go.’

Olive had heard other girls talking about the Christmas barbeque picnic earlier in the day. As much as Mathilda moaned, it sounded quite fun. Apparently everyone sat on blankets and held candles, in cups to stop the drips running down their hands, while they ate crackers and cold chicken.

‘That’s okay,’ said Olive, wishing she had a brother, too. Olive paused, hoping Mathilda might include her.

Mathilda didn’t. ‘Guess what? I’m getting a lift with Amelia – in her dad’s convertible!’

Amelia Forster’s father wore cufflinks and drove a car with the numberplate ‘GST’ (no numbers). He had made his fortune in tax. ‘Crass,’ both Mog and Mrs Graham had agreed in a rare moment, although the girls had thought that it would be rather delicious to drive with windy hair.

‘Oh,’ said Olive. ‘Say hi to Amelia.’ She said goodbye and hung up.

Olive walked to the bathroom, mouth and limbs saggy. Shadows skulked behind the boxes in the hall. Baths were a good cure-all, Mog said – baths and hot-water bottles. And they both were.

Olive waited until the tub had filled before she undressed, breathing in the steam. As she climbed in, the water rose reassuringly up the bath’s sides. Olive had matter. She did matter. The water folded around her limbs and held her.

Once Olive was warm in her pyjamas, she made some Vegemite toast. She buttered it quickly and evenly so that the butter and the Vegemite would melt in together before the toast got cold. Olive took the plate and a glass of water and fell back into the couch with Mog’s old photo album.

Mog had been a hippy when she was a student. Now having a hippy past just meant that Mog felt guilty when she accepted plastic bags, and that they’d get takeaway Thai rather than McDonald’s. But the album featured shots of Mog when she was young – all hairy armpitted and nut brown. Looking at the photos, Olive could imagine WilliamPetersMustardSeed holding Olive while bongo drums beat; both brown as berries and swinging free.

Olive liked to examine the photos for signs of Him.
I
bet he wouldn’t miss a Centennial Christmas Concert with an art
show for the Attorney-General.
She studied the photos. Did the thigh towering behind her mother (in the yoga lotus pose) belong to him? Were they his dark glasses on the coffee table? Was that his Joni Mitchell T-shirt, taut over Mog’s swollen tummy? Olive shook her toast over the page. If WilliamPetersMustardSeed was there, a crumb would land on him to prove it.

The toast crumbs were picked up in a draught that shot through the house. Olive sighed. The answer was blowing in the wind.

Olive’s dreamings were interrupted by the phone. It was Mog’s new secretary, Trudy, who spoke in squawks like a cockatoo. ‘Hi, Olive. Your mum’s been trying to get through to you. I’ll pop her on.’

Mog gushed onto the phone. ‘Hi darling! How are you? How was your day? How’s Mathilda? Did you hand in your Ming dynasty assignment?’

Mog always did this. She shot off a series of questions, leaving no room for the answers. But Mog always remembered one thing that Olive had on each day, and she always asked about it. Although Olive was cross, she liked the fact Mog tried.

‘Fine thanks,’ said Olive neatly. ‘I didn’t get much down at the beach with the metal detector, but I’m going to try again tomorrow. When will you be home?’

Olive tried to hide the whinge in her voice. Mog hated whingers, but Olive could feel it creeping up her throat. She took a big gulp of water to push the whinge back down.

‘I’m sorry, Ol. You know I’m stuck on a Big Case.’

‘But it’s been two years.’

There was a silence. ‘Ol, it hasn’t been quite that long. Anyway, I should be home shortly. Tuck yourself into bed with a hottie and I’ll turn out the lights when I get in.’

‘Okay.’

‘And about the concert, darling. I’m sorry about it –
really
sorry about it. I owe you one. Big time. Oh, and stick to the back of the beach. I always lose stuff in the soft sand at the back. We’ll have a shot on the weekend if you like. Client’s waiting. Better go. Love you!’

The line clicked and went blank. The thing was, thought Olive, Mog really would feel sorry about it, desperately sorry. She always did. But Mog was frightfully ambitious. ‘She nurtures that media profile more than her daughter,’ Olive had overheard a tennis-and-tuckshop mum whisper once. The other mums had all murmured their agreement. Most of the time, Olive didn’t care what they thought. In fact, most of the time she was actually proud.

Mog, like Olive, was very skinny, with the same hair, only Mog’s was cut in a professional bob and had darkened to honey with age. Mog wore lipstick and high-heeled shoes and the press always mentioned her lovely long pins. Mog said that this was ‘ridiculous’ and ‘offensive’, and that it had absolutely nothing to do with her performance on behalf of her clients – which was, she noted, always ‘sterling’. Olive noticed, however, that Mog continued to wear sliced skirts (which did show off her rather nice legs).

Olive often wondered if the tennis-and-tuckshop mums and WilliamPetersMustardSeed watched Mog on the evening news when she did.

Mog was ambitious because she wanted to be a judge. At the moment she was a QC, or Queen’s Counsel, which Mog said just meant she was darn good at her job and a super role model for young women. It was weird though, thought Olive, because Australia didn’t have a queen, only Crown Princess Mary, who would be the Queen of Denmark, not Australia.

When Mog wasn’t working she spent the evenings hobnobbing with politicians – like the Attorney-General – because politicians appointed Queen’s Counsel as judges. As far as Olive knew, Crown Princess Mary didn’t appoint judges. Which might explain why Mog had never invited Mary to dinner.

Olive closed the album. Even with all that royal waving to do, Olive was sure Crown Princess Mary would be in the front row at her kids’ concerts. As Olive headed for bed, she kicked out at a random tower of Mog’s trinkets in the hall. They scattered and shattered. Olive left them where they fell.

6

Then Dumped

The next morning at school, conversation was dominated by tales of the Christmas barbeque picnic. Mathilda told everyone how her family and Amelia Forster’s family had sat on rugs next to each other. The girls had snuggled in under a blanket while Mr Graham pointed out crosses and saucepans and pink planets in the sky.

Olive had stared at the stars one night herself with Mr Graham, trying to find those exact constellations. Olive had pretended as best she could, but she’d had no idea what Mr Graham was talking about. They’d just looked like stars.

This was not, however, Amelia Forster’s experience. ‘It was brilliant,’ she boasted. ‘We also saw Jupiter, and we’re going to use it to tell our own horoscopes.’

That would be right
, thought Olive. Amelia was so talented she could probably even see the African animals in those fuzzy drawings that merged if you looked at them in the right way.

Amelia and Mathilda talked about the picnic all the way through English and into Art. Olive tried to change the topic. She wanted to discuss her metal detector and the endless possibilities of unearthing pirate treasure, but Mathilda was distracted.

‘You should see it, Mathilda,’ said Olive. ‘The whole machine shudders, and it can pick things up miles under the sand.’

‘Oh,’ said Mathilda and smiled loosely, vaguely, somehow absent.

‘And I wanted to ask you about the Christmas concert,’ said Olive. ‘Mog’s organised a dumb dinner with a politician that night, and I was wondering if you’d like to come afterwards. It will be in a restaurant.’

Mathilda liked restaurants. She pronounced it ‘
restaurong
’, like the French and her mum. Dinner in a
restaurong
would be a drawcard for Mathilda.

Mathilda looked at Amelia. Olive looked at Amelia, too. She didn’t want to leave anyone out. ‘I’m sure Amelia can come along.’ Amelia gulped a big nasty laugh and Mathilda went pink.

‘Girls, quiet over there,’ said Ms Stable-East. ‘We require calm to draw.’ She tapped a paintbrush against the bobbly sleeve of her hand-knitted jumper for some quiet. It was a shrill-coloured knit, which showed that although Ms Stable-East was the homeroom teacher for Year 7C, she was, first and foremost, a teacher of art.

Olive concentrated on her self-portrait. The face was too small for the piece of paper on which it floated. Out of the corner of her wide eye, she could see Mathilda and Amelia passing notes backwards and forward, forwards and back.

When the bell rang for recess, the girls filed out of the Art Cottage. Amelia linked her arm through Mathilda’s. ‘I’m dying for a chocolate Paddle Pop. Got any money?’ Amelia ate a Paddle Pop almost every day, but she didn’t nibble them like most girls – she ran her finger up along the sides, carving out the ice-cream, using her finger like a scoop. Only Amelia Forster could manage to do this elegantly.

‘I’ll get them. Mog gave me pocket money this morning.’ Olive doubted the girls recognised this for the sacrifice it was: as soon as the bell rang for recess or lunch, the tuckshop boiled. The counter was buried under a swarm of grey-and-green jumpers – big girls lounging over it, little kids stuffed under it at awkward angles, the whole woollen mass pushing forwards. Olive would try to punch her way through the crowd, holding her breath. The tuckshop smelled like an old-people’s home: like canned soup and faded vegetables. Although the snacks were good (especially the cheesy rolls), facing the rabble was never worth it.

Olive faced it anyway, and returned victorious, holding the chocolate Paddle Pops above her head like an Olympic baton. She dropped onto the grass, panting, and smiled. For that plump, perfect second, the three of them were a team.

Amelia peeled off her wrapper and flipped it onto the ground. The wind blew the paper and it cartwheeled over Olive’s shoe. Olive grabbed it.

‘Eww,
grow-oss
. Don’t pick things off the ground, Olive.’ Mathilda and Amelia rolled their eyes and looked at once smug and stern. Olive blushed and dropped the wrapper.

‘Olive. Don’t litter or we’ll all lose house points.’ Amelia said this very loudly, in her primmest class-captain voice. She said it so loudly that Ms Stable-East, who was on duty, looked over and frowned.

‘Sorry, Ms Stable-East. I’ll pick it up,’ called Olive.

‘Sorry, Ms Stable-East. I’ll pick it up,’ mimicked Amelia and Mathilda in high-pitched, goody-two-shoes voices, and then laughed.

Olive looked at them and squinted, confused. She laughed along with them, but it was clear that she had done something wrong. She was just not entirely sure what.

When the first bell rang, Amelia jumped up and tucked her gummy stick down the back of Olive’s collar. Mathilda did too.

‘Thanks for the Paddle Pop,’ said Amelia. ‘C’mon, Till. Let’s go to the bubbler before class. Water’s good for our pores.’

Till!
Olive blinked and waited for Mathilda to say something. Mathilda even made her family call her ‘Mathilda’ because she thought it sounded more sophisticated.