Pip: The Story of Olive (7 page)

If WilliamPetersMustard Seed was here, I’d be normal.
If WilliamPetersMustardSeed was here, my family would
be like the Grahams and I wouldn’t be so strange. If
WilliamPetersMustardSeed was here, I’d wish for things that
would
fi
t on eyelashes, too.
It was so obvious. Olive couldn’t believe it hadn’t occurred to her before. She ran across the road, ashamed and angry.

A new sign had been erected in the beach carpark.

Olive kicked the sign. Now the council had stolen her beach?

Olive wanted to throw her head back and howl. She wanted to wail. Everything was spinning, spiralling out of control. She threw her bag down on the pavement. Something a little longer than a lipstick fell out of the front pocket and rattle-rolled across the concrete. The something stopped at Olive’s shoe.

Olive bent down to pick up the Brass Eye. It must have been in her bag since their last Science project. She looked through it to the beach and then down at the self-portrait which was unfurling in the top of her bag where she had stuffed it. The portrait swooped into view, doubling as it uncurled. Olive shoved the Brass Eye in her pocket. She didn’t have the patience for it right now. She needed to stretch, to move, to feel the sea – even if the council was trying to keep her from it.

It was a grey day, but the beach was busy. Nuggety men in orange pants were unloading crates from trucks onto the sand. There was a lot of shouting, heave ho-ing and whistling through fingers. Olive peeled off her shoes and socks, stuffed them in her schoolbag and jumped down onto the beach. She wove her way between the boxes, feeling the sand break into biscuits under her feet. The Brass Eye bumped against her thigh and the salted air soothed her. Before long, Olive’s breath had steadied.

The tide was low, and the hide of a sandbar lolling just off the beach parted the water. Fishermen in gumboots drew sluggish nets through the shallows. Chipped shells and threads of kelp lay in bands along the shore, mapping the paths of the most curious waves.

Olive walked along the water’s edge, tracing one shell-line all the way to Kelso Pier before it tapered out. That far away, the mob of men and crates had also thinned, and there were only a few coils of rope laying claim to the sand.

Olive looked back at her footprints. She had read that in Antarctica, when it stormed, the wind blew away everything but the compressed snow in people’s footprints. Those inverse footprints then stood high, like footprint-shaped snowmen. Olive thought there was something very majestic about that – something very grand about being the sort of person who didn’t leave a dent, but left a peak instead.

A wave spread over the beach. Olive ran up under the pier to avoid it. Through the slats above her head, she could see shifting clouds. To the right, the beach arched back towards home in a fawn bow, speckled with faraway men. Her view to the left was, however, impeded – blocked by a row of silver-backed boards. It was weird – it looked as if someone had boarded up the pier on one side. Olive ducked back out into the afternoon light to investigate.

They were not, in fact, boards but vast mirrors that had been propped up against the pier. There were three of them all together: three carnival mirrors with luscious gilt frames. The sand on which they were standing was hidden under a braid of torn rugs and twine. Next to the mirrors was an esky with a sticker reading ‘Property of Seaside City Council’.

Olive stepped in front of the first mirror and smiled. She looked like a Coke bottle – long and elongated at the top, swollen and stumpy at the bottom. She jumped across to the second. It was even worse – she was as skinny as a chopstick and as tall as a skyscraper. It was a strange thing seeing herself distorted like that. Olive couldn’t stop looking at her wide eyes. They seemed to be the only parts of her body that were anchored as her flesh contorted about them.

Olive stepped in front of the last mirror and started. Its surface was almost alive; it was like looking up, through goggles, at the silvered underbelly of the sea’s skin. Olive’s reflection rode on crests across the face of the glass, breaking into pieces if she moved even the tiniest inch. She held her breath. The mirror swirled and twirled, flickering with fragments of splintered rainbow and molten silver, pulling and warping her body. Even her irises dissolved into watery spirals. It was as if she had melted, melted into a pool of liquid crystal and molten glass.

Olive rolled the Brass Eye between her fingers. It was still in her pocket; she’d been gripping it without realising and the stem was warm. Looking into the third mirror was not unlike looking through the Brass Eye; it was just as mesmerising, as fluid and alive. Olive was as moved as she had been when she first sank her fingers into Mrs Graham’s wedding dress. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said out loud.

Olive trained the Brass Eye tentatively on the mirror. She expected the mirror to boil. She expected a spectacular display – to be dazzled with sparks, if not live flames. The light, however, refracted, and Olive’s reflection congealed. Her silhouette hovered in the circle of the Brass Eye, forming and then fading, forming and then fading, evoking things in Olive that she couldn’t describe but somehow knew.

Olive felt giddy, weightless. She lowered the Brass Eye and put it back in her pocket. The mirror changed again. While it still shimmered, the swaying had steadied, and she appeared not once, but twice. One of the reflected heads in the mirror turned. Behind her, something stirred.

Olive spun. A kid stood right next to her, shaking water from its arms. They were pale, skinny arms – arms that would burn in two minutes at the beach. The arms were attached to a girl with long blonde hair that hung and swung; a peculiar girl who looked ever so slightly like an extraterrestrial: a very pale extraterrestrial. A girl with shins the exact colour of chicken loaf.

Olive tried to breathe in, but she couldn’t. She dropped into a crouch on the sand – just shrivelled up and retracted like the sea anemones that she and Mog found (and poked their fingers into) in rock pools down the coast. Olive shivered and looked up again. The girl’s mouth wound into a smile.

‘What are you doing?’ The girl jiggled her arms and legs. ‘Man, I’m so wet, I could get part-time work as a water feature.’

Olive didn’t answer. Her underarms were damp. She could smell the stress in her sweat; it clung to the air like Mog’s sweat clung to her shirts in court. The girl cocked her head and peered at Olive. She tapped Olive’s forehead with her fist. ‘Hello in there? Anyone home?’

Olive looked around for help, or at the very least an explanation. None was forthcoming. She peeped up at the girl, who had one hand on her hip.

‘And you are?’ The girl’s voice was as high as Olive’s.

Olive stood, clutching the Brass Eye in one hand and a tuft of her uniform in the other. ‘Confused,’ she said. ‘Actually, very confused.’

The girl reached out her hand. ‘Hello, Very Confused, I’m Pip. Pip Garnaut.’

Olive couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’m a Garnaut too, but Olive.’ As Olive reached out her own hand, the girls’ finely veined wrists bumped together. They both snatched them back. Pip laughed.

If she had let herself think it (which was a big
if
for a glass-half-empty type of person), Olive Garnaut might have realised, as early as that moment, that she was no longer an only child.

8

Curiouser and Curiouser

Pip and Olive sat on the sand in front of the row of mirrors. Olive snuck peeks at Pip. Pip stared straight at Olive. They were so extraordinarily identical that Olive couldn’t tell Arthur from Martha, as Mog would say. She scanned Pip’s face for differentiations – odd spots, dimples, cowlicks – but there was nothing. Things on Pip weren’t even back-to-front like in a normal reflection. The two girls were peas in a pod – they even distorted in the mirrors in exactly the same manner.

‘We’re pretty similar,’ said Olive after a while.

‘Yes,’ said Pip, ‘I expect we’re twins.’

‘Twins? But—’ Olive quivered.

‘What?’

‘But I don’t have any siblings.’

‘Look at us. We must be.’ Pip rolled her eyes. ‘We even have the same surname.’

This extreme change of circumstance was difficult to digest. Although Olive wanted to refute it, the evidence was right there in front of her nose; the very same nose as Pip’s.

Before them, the third mirror glimmered. ‘It’s like a pool of sparkles,’ said Olive, attempting to get back onto more certain terrain. As soon as she’d spoken, she felt like an idiot.

If she looked like one, Pip didn’t notice. ‘It is pretty beautiful.’

Olive panned for more things to say, but it was awkward. There were no rules. Mrs Graham said that etiquette was always there to guide you; to make people feel comfortable in every situation. She even had a book on it, on the top shelf in her kitchen. Although the book instructed
one
how to use a fish knife, and which way to pass somebody at the theatre, Olive couldn’t imagine that it covered situations like this; situations like
Suggested
Introductory Conversation Topics for One and One’s Newly
Discovered Twin
.

While Olive struggled, however, Pip didn’t seem to need a book. She seemed perfectly comfortable.

‘I’m thirsty.’ Pip stood up and walked over to the esky. The pillar it sat next to stood out because it was bent. ‘Crooked as an old man’s elbow,’ said Pip. She lifted the esky lid and rifled through the ice. ‘Beer, beer, beer, gross, gross, gross, Red Bull, Red Bull, Double Yoke Eggnog. That will do.’

‘I’m not sure we should touch that. It’s not ours.’

‘I’m parched. Open this, can you?’

Olive opened a carton and Pip glugged the milkshake down. ‘Try it,’ she gargled, pearls of milk spotting in the corners of her mouth.

Olive was a picky eater who stuck to Brands She Knew. Double Yoke Eggnog was not a Brand She Knew, or even a Brand She’d Heard Of, but stress had left Olive dying of thirst, and people dying of thirst were not in any position to be picky. Besides, she didn’t want Pip to think she was a chicken, not on their first day.

Olive looked around to make sure there were no workmen in sight and opened the top of the carton. She was a bit worried that Double Yoke Eggnog might be exactly the sort of thing she’d suspected Okey Doke would serve (when in actual fact he always stuck to passionfruit and raspberry). But the drink smelt all right – well, it didn’t smell of anything obviously disgusting, like blood ’n’ bone or alfalfa. Olive crinkled her face and took a tiny sip. Despite her anxiety, Double Yoke Eggnog was delicious.

Pip started on a second carton and burped without apologising. Her burp smelt. ‘This is
eggsellent
,’ she said.

‘That’s a terrible pun.’ It was as lousy as any of Mr Graham’s. It was the sort of bad pun that would have made Mathilda roll her eyes and squawk ‘Da-aaad’ like a banshee (or so Mr Graham said) before she clubbed him over the shoulder. Olive liked bad puns – they were about as dad as chuckles, shaving cream and polo shirts. Olive would never have expected a twin to pun.

‘So, what are these mirrors for?’ Pip tossed the Double Yoke Eggnog carton and it spun away in a plume of milk.

Olive watched the carton nosedive into the sand. ‘I’m not sure. I was going to ask you the same thing – you’re the one who emerged through them. I’d assumed they were for the festival.’

‘I did not emerge through them.’ Pip chewed the words, exaggerating Olive’s prim schoolgirl vowels. Olive winced. Pip wiped the back of her hand along her mouth, smearing rather than cleaning her face. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, dropping back to her normal voice. ‘I’m starving and I want to get out of here before my stomach corrodes. Woman can only live on Double Yoke Eggnog for so long.’ Pip stood up. She held out two hands. ‘Well, come on. Are you both coming?’

‘Both?’ Olive turned around. Surely one double was enough for the afternoon. That was going to take enough explaining as it was. Thankfully, though, there were no more chicken-loaf shins in sight. ‘Who else are you inviting?!’

Pip looked straight at Olive with her pale eyes. ‘You you both both.’

Oh man
, thought Olive. Maybe Pip was seeing double. Maybe that was some weird spin-off of this cloning process, or whatever on earth it was.

Olive held up three fingers. ‘How many?’

‘Six six.’

Olive’s stomach clenched. She hadn’t asked for this whole thing, and what if now she was stuck with a freak for a twin? What if that wasn’t the only thing wrong with Pip? What if things were wrong with her on the inside, too? What if, say, she had two pancreases? What if she didn’t have two lungs but four? Would that make her more likely to die of a fatal asthma attack, or half as likely? Would she start fitting in the classroom?

Olive’s mind whirled through a list of possible but dire outcomes. Pip winked. ‘Tricked you,’ she said and laughed like a hyena. She bent over, cackling so hard that she had to hold her stomach.

Olive stood slowly, a bit peeved. It wasn’t
that
funny. Pip spied Olive’s pout from the side. ‘If you’re not careful, a bird will come and perch on that lip.’ Pip laughed more.

That was exactly the sort of thing Olive’s gran used to say to tease her, and it had always made her blood boil. Olive was tempted to walk right off and leave Pip stranded on the beach, four-lunged and starving or not, but Pip smiled her big wobbly smile.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

Olive forgave her instantly.

Suddenly, there was a shout from somewhere down near the shore. A workman with furry shoulders gestured at the girls. ‘Oi,’ he called. ‘You there. Beach is strictly outta-bounds – and if you’ve gone anywhere near that esky, I’ll tan ya.’ He started walking towards them on legs so chunky they joined all the way down to the knee. A heeler with slack blue gums trotted beside him. Olive froze.