Pip

by Kim Kane

  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 boo
k 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.

  Pip giggled. ‘Crap,’ she said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ She sprinted up the beach towards the footpath. Olive grabbed her schoolbag, then began collecting the empty cartons Pip had tossed.

  ‘Olive, are you nuts? This is no time for tidy town. He said he’d tan us,’ Pip called back.

  Olive looked around. The furry man and his heeler had launched into a jog. They lumbered towards her, sand churning beneath their feet. Up closer, the dog looked more dingo than heeler.

  ‘Olive, quick.’

  ‘Blow this,’ said Olive and, dumping the rubbish, she sprinted after Pip.

  9

  Crime and In-tu-ition

  It took Olive a while to catch Pip. She’d taken off along the beach path that headed back towards home, apparently unhampered by the Double Yoke Eggnog, which was sloshing about Olive’s own tummy and giving her a stitch.

  ‘Did you lose him?’ Pip panted, slowing to a walk.

  ‘Yep.’ Olive shuddered at the thought of the slack-gummed dingo.

  ‘So, what took you so long?’ Pip looked down at Olive’s pigeon toe. ‘Man, if you’d just walk normally, you’d go faster. What’s with the bird feet?’ She started to run again.

  Olive sniffed, re-aligned her toes (somewhere closer to first position) and followed.

  At the end of the path, the beach car park basked in the evening sun. A flag advertising drinks cracked in the breeze.

  ‘Do you like ice-cream?’ asked Olive.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll show you Okey Doke’s, then. He’s just across there.’

  Parked in front of them was an old purple van with sloppy flowers and the words ‘addiction to drugs shows commitment’ painted on the side.

  ‘Mog, our mum, used to have one of those vans, with a bed inside and wind chimes hanging from the rearview mirror,’ said Olive. ‘I’ve seen the pictures. Mog said she could start it with a spoon in the ignition. Whenever WilliamPetersMustardSeed – that’s our dad – lost the keys, it didn’t matter. They just worked their way through the cutlery drawer using everything but the Good Silver.’

  Olive looked around. Behind them, two girls in Joanne d’Arc uniforms were walking towards the car park: one had a long blonde ponytail; the other a surge of dark curls. Their heads were bowed in an arc of confidentiality.

  Olive felt sick. What were they doing here? Okey Doke was hers. She’d introduced Mathilda to him. Olive watched the girls grow as they drew closer. Pip jiggled the handle of the van. ‘It’s open.’

  ‘Let’s see if this one’s the same as Mog’s,’ Olive said quickly.

  ‘Are you serious? You didn’t strike me as the type.’

  ‘Just hurry.’ Olive opened the front door and jumped up inside.

  The van seats were sun-warm and the ashtray was crammed with cigarette butts that smelt sweet, like allspice. Pip rifled through old bottles of sunscreen, broken mozzie coils and half-tubes of Life Savers that she found on the shelf under the dashboard. Olive angled the rear-vision mirror so that she could see Till–
Mill through the back window.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Pip asked.

  ‘Nothing.’ Olive watched the reflected girls as they approached, talking and laughing, without hats or blazers.

  Pip offered Olive a Life Saver. ‘They’re not too stale.’

  ‘No.’ Olive shook her head. ‘No thanks.’ She laced her fingers.

  Pip squinted and clambered over the seat into the back. Olive kept her eye on the mirror. When the Joanne d’Arc girls were almost at the van, their faces fell into focus.

  ‘Thankyouthankyouthankyou.’ Olive sank against the seat as two Year 9 girls headed towards the beach. It was not Till–Mill at all.

  Pip crawled back into the front. ‘You look pretty comfort able for a person who was so anxious thirty seconds ago.’

  Olive smiled. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  ‘All right. There’s not so much as a chopstick back here anyway. Hang on.’ Pip had spotted something down the side of the front seat. ‘What about that!’

  ‘This?’ Olive held up a barbeque prong.

  ‘Brilliant, let’s try it. You hop down and do the pedals. I’ll do the wheel.’

  Although Pip was arguably Olive’s twin, she was already displaying the bossy older-sister tendencies Mathilda showed with her younger brothers.

  ‘No way, Pip. It’s totally illegal.’ Bossiness didn’t really bother Olive, but criminality did, and while Olive may have survived drinking a Brand She Had Never Heard Of, and escaped a furry workman, not to mention his dingo, driving someone else’s van was surely inviting arrest.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Pip. ‘We won’t go far. Anyway, it might not even start.’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Olive knelt on the floor. She pushed an old thong under the seat with her fingertip and wrinkled her nose. She could see the imprint of somebody’s sweaty foot on it, including a knobbly bunion on the side. It was disgusting. Olive looked at the pedals; there were three. All three were dirty. She tried not to think of the knobbly bunion on them.