Pip: The Story of Olive (2 page)

‘Mog, this chaos is
deesgusting
,’ Olive would say, working her way through the mess; tick-tack-toeing along record covers.

‘Chaos is merely order waiting to be decoded,’ Mog would respond.

‘Mrs Graham says that an untidy house shows an untidy mind,’ Olive would shoot back (but only ever in a whisper). As a consequence of the mess, Olive stuck to her bedroom and the kitchen – which she always kept clutter-free and tidy-minded.

Olive liked her bedroom symmetrical. She liked things in pairs. She had two beds with matching doonas; two lampshades with sage velvet trim; and two bedside tables, each with its own box of tissues and a copy of
Anne of
Green Gables
. Around the walls, Olive had strung chains of paper dolls holding hands. They were meant to look like the French schoolgirls in the ‘Madeline’ books, but Olive didn’t have a navy texta, so their coats were red. To make the dolls, Olive had folded the butcher’s paper carefully down the centre to ensure that their heads and hats were exactly even. Two perfect halves.

Olive believed that everything had two perfect halves – that halves were somehow essential, oats in the porridge of life. In the body, for example, there are two eyes, two ears, two feet, two hands, two kidneys. Even tricky things like the nose and mouth are really comprised of twos (two nostrils, two rows of teeth). It wasn’t something that Olive worried about or even discussed; just something that she had noticed ever since she’d discovered she was born at 2.22 a.m. on the second of February, weighing in at a tiny 2.2 kilograms.

‘Cosmic,’ WilliamPetersMustardSeed had responded (well, so Mog reported after two too many wines one night). ‘We should give her a two-syllable name,’ he had added, before passing out on his second celebratory joint. Mog, awash with hormones, had obligingly called the fledgling ‘O-live’. Unfortunately, Mog had packed her bags a fortnight later when WilliamPetersMustardSeed shacked up with another woman, leaving Olive, Mog and their two-by-one family.

But even with a perfectly symmetrical family, body and bedroom, there was always something absent with Olive – she had only ever felt half. She didn’t feel half from her waist down or from her waist up; it was more abstract than that. ‘Is the glass half-full or half-empty?’ Mog always asked. Half-full half-empty was Mog’s test for whether a person was a pessimist or an optimist. Mog was a half-full, sunny type of woman, even though the house was messy and she’d had to become a barrister because life hadn’t dealt her the hand she’d expected. But to Olive it didn’t really matter: half-full or half-empty, there was still a lot missing.

What happened to Olive, however, wasn’t because she’d only ever felt half. It didn’t even happen because her house was full of crap-knacks and clutter, because she called her mother Mog, or because she knew of a man named WilliamPetersMustardSeed. It wasn’t because she had a peculiar relationship with the number two, or because her skin was the exact colour of chicken loaf. Although there was never any doubt that it was a shake-it-all-about hokey-pokey of all these things, what happened to Olive couldn’t have happened without Mathilda Graham.

2

Pleasing Mathilda

It was Friday afternoon at the Joanne d’Arc School for Girls. Olive stood waiting for Mathilda at the gates as the grounds thinned.

Mathilda finally emerged, a freshly brushed ponytail frizzing behind her. She looked Olive up and then down. Her gaze narrowed at Olive’s feet. ‘Why do you always stand like that? It makes you waddle – like a duck.’ Olive blushed and shuffled her toes back in together. Recently, Mathilda had started walking with a very slight pigeon toe. Olive vowed to affect a pigeon toe herself.

Olive picked up her schoolbag and she and Mathilda set off towards the crossing.

‘Hey – Olive! Mathilda! Stable-West said to give these to you.’

Lim May Yee came puffing up behind the girls, holding out two envelopes.

Olive didn’t know Lim May Yee very well. She was a boarder and tended to stick to her kind. Lim May Yee’s name was a source of great confusion in the school. She insisted on having ‘Lim May Yee’ on the roll but she wrote ‘May Lim’ on her homework. Was she Lim? Was she May? What was with the Yee? The teachers, not knowing what to call her, settled for the whole kit ’n’ caboodle, Lim May Yee, just to be on the safe side. The boarders called her Pud.

Lim May Yee smiled. ‘They’re just tickets for the Christmas concert – for your parents.’ She gave a short wave and ran off ahead to catch up with a group of boarders who were already across the crossing and halfway down the hill to the milk bar.

Mathilda’s envelope bulged. She opened it – despite the fact it was addressed to her mother – and sighed. ‘I had to get six tickets even though the maximum was actually four.’

‘Oh,’ said Olive. She clutched her envelope with its single ticket inside. Tickets and notices were always for paren
ts
and never for paren
t
. People assumed. Even if a girl’s parents were divorced, they assumed she had two – maybe even three or four – stuffed in different homes. Asking after a paren
t
was as abnormal as asking somebody whether they wore bed soc
k
or ate pe
a
.

Mathilda zipped her fat wad of tickets into her schoolbag and the girls stepped onto the crossing. ‘Do you mind if I stay?’

‘Of course not.’ Olive grinned and her tummy soared.

Mathilda liked aspects of Olive’s house. Mog had arranged accounts at the newsagency and the chemist and Olive was allowed to put whatever she wanted on them. Mathilda thought that was marvellous. Mathilda also thought Mog’s nail polish collection was marvellous, and the girls had spent most of Grade 6 painting each nail on their hands and toes a different shade of red. For French cosmetics and air-freighted magazines, Mathilda was willing to put up with any amount of chaos and clutter.

‘Can we catch a taxi home?’

‘Sure,’ said Olive, who usually did.

‘Here,’ said Mathilda. ‘Pass me your phone. I’ll call.’

Olive had her own mobile with her own plan. Mathilda wasn’t even allowed pre-paid, but Olive always let her text, whenever she wanted.

Olive excavated the phone from her bag. Mathilda punched a few buttons and it burst into song. ‘What’s that ringtone?’ Mathilda scrunched her nose and stuffed the phone up her sleeve to dull the metallic chirping. She looked over both shoulders.

‘It’s a virus and I don’t know how to get rid of it.’ Olive blushed again. This was not actually true. Olive knew exactly how to get rid of it, because she’d put it on; it was Johanna’s bird song from the musical
Sweeney Todd
.

Olive loved musicals. Sometimes, when Mog had the night off, they would sit through double features at an old cinema with cracked leather seats, watching
Singin’ in
the Rain
,
Funny Girl
and
Cabaret
. On the way home, Mog and Olive would swing their arms, click their heels, and bellow out all the words. Those movies made Olive tinkle; they made her feel like she could fly.

‘Hmm, I just love Fridays,’ said Mathilda once the chirping had stopped and she’d called a taxi. She popped Olive’s phone in her bag.

‘Why?’ asked Olive, deeply relieved that the subject of the ringtone had been abandoned (even if her phone had been appropriated in the process).

‘Olive. Der! Because there’s such a stretch until school again.’ Mathilda studied her shoes while they walked, obviously irritated that her mother had once again polished over the carefully cultivated scuff marks.

‘Oh, me too. Love Fridays,’ said Olive, but she didn’t sound very convincing. Olive studied her own T-bars, which shone in the afternoon light. As she walked, she tried to keep her feet at least parallel to the curb.

It was strange, but Olive had never actually thought about enjoying weekends. Unless she was hanging out with Mathilda, she usually just sat around waiting for class again, waiting to chat. Sometimes Olive was so bored that she became completely inert: arms leaden and lips thick. On those days (usually Sundays), Olive felt too heavy to move from the couch; she couldn’t even pick up her paints. She’d just sit there, listening to the hum of the beach market down the street, as blank as the pages of the watercolour pad on her lap.

Mathilda’s house, on the other hand, was always teeming with kids, and bathers hung out to dry on the line in rows, and bundled sneakers that smelt of salt water and rubber. The cupboards were filled with scratched hand-me-down hockey sticks, and violins, and bent white mouthguards with bits of somebody else’s Wheaties in them, which Olive did find a bit disgusting. But there was always somebody to play Monopoly with; Scrabble with; to hit (or miss) a ball with. Even though Mathilda whinged about not having any sisters, Olive thought her incredibly lucky.

Olive looked up. Amelia Forster was sitting on the fence of a nearby house, waiting for her mum with a tennis racquet and a tan. Amelia looked like a piece of sun-kissed caramel – sun-kissed caramel with a ski-jump nose and sparkling smile.

Amelia Forster was the most desired girl in Year 7: class captain in first term every year since Prep; netball captain; Mary in the upcoming Christmas concert – the
Centennial
Christmas Concert. She had effortless style, pretty pretty eyes, pierced ears and a holiday house with a tennis court. She also stood and walked with a very slight pigeon toe, which had gained a cult following in Year 7 as a result.

‘That is so true.’

‘What is?’ Olive looked at Mathilda, who was back on the mobile. Olive didn’t recall it ringing. ‘Who are you . . .’

Mathilda threw Olive a
not-now
look. She shook her noodle curls (brushing them out never lasted long) and laughed. ‘Hmmm,’ she said coyly. Then, after a quick pause, ‘hmmm’ again. The girls were now level with Amelia Forster’s sneakers.

Mathilda flicked Amelia a smile and gestured at the phone in a
you understand this is a crucial social moment
sort of way.

Olive went to smile at Amelia too, but Amelia had dipped into her schoolbag; Olive just smiled at the space where Amelia’s pout had hung.

The girls turned down a side street to meet their taxi.

‘See ya,’ said Mathilda and put the phone back in her bag.

‘Who was that?’ asked Olive, wondering who was so wise and how they knew her number.

‘Just a friend.
Ouch!
’ Mathilda gave her shoulder an exaggerated rub and stepped away from Olive.

‘Sorry,’ said Olive, whose arms swung a bit too irreverently when she walked. It was hard to concentrate on holding a heavy bag, walking with a pigeon toe and avoiding the cracks.

‘Well, you should watch where you’re going, Ol. You always bump into me and it kills.’

Olive stared out the window as the taxi driver drove the girls home. While Mrs Graham said that Olive lived out in the sticks, the description wasn’t strictly accurate. For Mrs Graham, any trip that involved longer than seven minutes in the car may as well have been to the country, and in fact, the suburb in which the Grahams lived (and the girls went to school) was a lot stickier – well, greener anyway. It had nature strips of emerald grass thick enough to roll in – although nobody ever did – and roundabouts that toasted spring with flowers (English, colour-themed) and winter with herbs (French). The roads wrapped around parks where well-pressed children played cricket and collected their dogs’ poo in monogrammed bags. The homes, tucked behind heritage hedges, were all different, unique, yet they fitted together like a string of freshwater pearls.

Down where Olive and Mog lived, the streets were looser – as bleached and broad as airport runways. They were lined up next to each other in rows and led to the beach, which lay like a discarded towel, bumpy and bitten, at their feet. The buildings were thrown together, mismatched and chipped, like shelves of op-shop crockery. Some houses had turrets, others balconies with pillars as curly as candy canes. A couple were stumpy and thickset. Olive’s house stood tall and red – the only red-brick home in a suburb of peeling paint.

‘She sticks out like a true redhead,’ Mog said. Olive didn’t see how that was a good thing: most red-nuts at school had no friends.

The neighbours didn’t water their gardens. They didn’t say hi. The whole suburb was bathed in sweat and salt and lit with the neon-blue of laundromats. While it was sometimes cooler than the collared suburbs, the evening breeze was rank with seaweed.

When they got home, Mathilda poked around the garden while Olive fumbled about in her schoolbag for the key. It was a rule: the quicker Olive tried to find anything, the slower she was.

‘What is that anyway?’ Mathilda called. She was looking at a tiny shed dug deep into the corner of the backyard and covered with ivy.

‘The bomb shelter,’ said Olive, joining her. The bomb shelter was a squat damp room with no windows.

Mathilda rattled the doorknob. ‘What’s it for?’

‘Mog said it was built in case the Japanese came to Australia during World War Two.’

‘To lock them in?’ Mathilda assumed the look she used for maths – a calculated blend of irritation, confusion and disinterest.