by Kim Kane
‘Okay, keep your head down or the wheel might decapitate you. Let’s start it.’ Pip leant over Olive and wedged the barbeque prong in the ignition. It glided in and when she turned it, the van coughed.
‘Bingo Bango.’
‘Pip, stop.’ Olive jumped back up onto the seat, just as the engine stalled.
Pip released the handbrake. The van rolled forwards.
‘Whoo hoo! We’re outta here. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,’ trilled Pip out the window. She was perched up, on her knees, leaning forwards while she concentrated. Her blonde hair was plastered to her face in stringy bits and her face was flushed. Olive could see the muscles in her sister’s puny arms straining as she tried to harness the half-ton of purple lead and rubber. It was terrifying and exhilarating.
‘Okay, Olive,’ yelled Pip. ‘Let’s get up some pace.’
‘Pip, no.’ Olive pulled the handbrake up as hard as she could. The van crunched.
‘Crap.’
The girls had rolled about four metres and were now pulled up against a strip of salty native grasses and a rubbish bin.
‘Guess we’ll have to go out the window,’ said Pip as she wound it down. Head first, she commando-rolled out. Olive toppled after her.
‘Cow-jumped-over-the-moon-geek-knickers,’ shrieked Pip, spotting Olive’s undies. The problem with not having grown one single centimetre since Grade 4 was that one ended up with a bottom the size of a Grade 4, which could be extremely limiting. Amelia, on the other hand, had a size-eight ladies’ bum and knickers with broderie anglaise trim in ivory.
‘You’re probably wearing them, too,’ retorted Olive indignantly.
Pip checked. ‘Crap.’
Olive couldn’t help noticing that Pip swore like a trooper. Mrs Graham said that people only swore when their vocabularies were inadequate to deal with their emotions. Although Olive didn’t like to think of Pip as inadequate, she did hope that swearing wasn’t contagious.
Before Olive could ponder this too long, Pip whipped her knickers off and threw them into the bin next to the van.
‘Nobody’s catching me in those.’
‘You can’t do that,’ cried Olive, realising that her twin’s behaviour might explain why there were always pairs of soggy knickers at the beach. Olive had never been able to work out how so many people could collectively forget their underwear.
‘I can.’ Pip bounded towards the shop.
‘Pip,’ called Olive, completely scandalised by her sister’s bare bottom under an already transparent uniform. Pip responded to Olive’s prudishness by doing a cartwheel, right there in the middle of the car park. She then spun around and kept running towards Okey Doke’s, drunk on adrenalin.
Olive, abandoning all sense of propriety, followed.
The ice-cream at Okey Doke’s was piled high in folds and teemed with shattered honeycomb, thick chocolate curls, or whole rosy strawberries. The softa the nice-cream the quicka to eat, Okey Doke said when people commented on the texture of his fare.
Pip threaded her arm through Olive’s at the counter. The girls pushed their noses against the glass and watched while Okey Doke’s chubby wrists ladled gelati into lacy cones. Although it was not far off closing time, the crowd was five people deep. Olive caught Pip’s eye and nodded towards the door; Pip slipped outside to wait.
Olive knew Pip would want to check out the bug-catcher at the entrance. She could hear it from inside the shop, electrocuting insects with a crack as they flew into the blue light. Besides, Olive didn’t want to run the risk of old Okey Doke having a heart attack when he realised that he was serving his fine upstanding ice-cream to a schoolgirl with no knickers.
‘One scoop of raspberry and one of passionfruit on a waffle cone, please.’ Olive paused. ‘And I’ll also have a scoop of raspberry and one of honey.’
‘Okey doke, artichoke,’ the man responded on cue. He looked up at Olive. ‘Two at once, bella?’
‘The second’s for my sister,’ said Olive. ‘You haven’t met her yet, but she’s actually my twin sister.’ Okey Doke raised an eyebrow. Olive panicked. For one moment she thought he’d guessed that it was Pip who had started the van with a barbeque prong and was currently cavorting with dead bugs and no underpants. If he did, however, he didn’t comment.
Outside the shop, Olive handed Pip her ice-cream.
‘Wicked. Hey, check this out.’ Pip pitched a stick into the bug-catcher. It exploded in a strip of sparks, then dissolved in a curl of smoke. The ash gathered on the fried insect carcasses in the tray. The bug-catcher was certainly dramatic.
The girls started on their cones, both eating the ice-cream in small bites. Pip eyed Olive’s cone. ‘I hate passionfruit pips – they get stuck in my teeth.’
‘That’s weird,’ said Olive. ‘I didn’t ask you what flavours you wanted, because I knew. I knew you’d want honey and raspberry, just like I knew why you’d want to wait outside. It’s like I’ve known all the way along.’
Pip shrugged. ‘You didn’t know I’d cartwheel without knickers.’
‘No,’ admitted Olive.
Pip took another bite of her ice-cream. ‘You should have seen your face. Classic. Besides,’ she continued, ‘it’s not the same as knowing I’m about to be brutalised by a fifty-foot fanged turtle and risking all to come to my rescue.’
‘I guess not,’ said Olive, who didn’t actually know what ‘brutalised’ meant, but thought it sounded horrible. ‘But fifty-foot fanged turtle or not, it’s in-tu-ition, Pip. It’s just the same as the circus horses the morning before the dust storm.’
Pip traced a line in the pile of ash under the bug-catcher with a stick and looked bored. Olive persevered. ‘Ms Stable-East told us about this dust storm that rolled in years ago and dumped a thick blanket of red dirt all over the city. She thought it was the end of the world, but the thing that’s stuck in her mind is the circus horses she saw on the telly.’
‘What was with them?’ Pip appeared to have no interest in teachers or in-tu-ition but a little more interest in circus horses.
‘Well, the entire morning before the storm, the horses were upset. They had dry noses, and they tugged at their harnesses, kicking at the ground until their hooves bled. It’s like they knew it was coming. Ms Stable-East says that sometimes animals just know things – know things that we don’t.’
‘So, I don’t get it.’
‘She says we should never forget that we’re mammals too.’ Olive laughed. ‘Mathilda reckons Ms Stable-East says that to justify her hairy legs and moustache. She’s a beast.’ Olive gnawed her bottom lip. ‘But what if she’s actually a bit right? Perhaps I knew what flavour you wanted because I’m a mammal.’
‘Could be.’ Pip lobbed her cone into the bug-catcher, ‘But she should wax. Whales are mammals, and they don’t get around with hairy lips.’ The cone exploded into sparks. ‘Who’s this Mathilda, anyway?’
‘My best friend,’ said Olive. ‘She and Amelia Forster and me are a threesome.’ The lie tugged.
Pip poked some ash on the ground. Her feet were turned out like a piano’s.
‘Don’t worry. I’m sure you can join in.’
‘Whatever.’ Pip blew the end of the stick. Olive wondered how she could not care.
The fluorescent light above their heads spluttered again. Olive stood up. ‘Good-o. I hadn’t realised it was so late. We should get going.’
Olive loved the phrase ‘Good-o’. It sounded very efficient and very mature. Mrs Graham pronounced it so that the ‘o’ was about twice as long as the ‘good’. Olive did too. Pip didn’t move.
‘We should probably go pr-pr-pronto.’ Olive wasn’t very good at rolled r’s. Pip stared but didn’t move.
‘C’mon, Pip. Mog might get home soon, and we’ve got heaps to organise before tomorrow.’ Pip stretched slowly and rolled her eyes.
Olive rolled her eyes back. If one thing was certain, eyes were easier to roll than r’s.
10
The ‘I’ in We
&nb
sp; Pip and Olive walked home. A group of boys with dusty school shoes and hot chips were sprawled over Mrs Stewart’s fence on the corner of Olive’s street. As the girls walked past the hot-chip boys, Olive put her head down. Her hand shot up to her forehead and she pretended to scratch a mozzie bite. It was a habit she’d assumed ever since one of the boys had commented on the size of her forehead a couple of weeks ago. ‘Egghead’, he’d called her.
Pip stared directly at the tangle of school shoes and caps. ‘What a bunch of off-chops.’
‘Shush,’ said Olive, looking over her shoulder to make sure the hot-chip boys hadn’t heard; and if they had heard, that they didn’t care; and if they had heard and did care, that they weren’t going to clobber them. But the boys were talking and smoking and laughing and couldn’t have looked less interested in the twins.
A square of footpath in front of Olive’s house had been roped off.
‘Hey, concrete! Let’s check if it’s still wet.’ Pip crouched down and stuck her finger in. It was.
‘Do you think you should?’ Olive asked dubiously. She was learning swiftly that she was not as inclined to crime as her sister.
‘What? You’d pass up a patch as fresh as this? Are you kidding?’ Pip ran her finger through the cement. It looked as thick and grainy as biscuit dough. ‘Perfect consistency.’
O L I V E, wrote Pip.
‘You can’t do that. That’s outrageous,’ said Olive. ‘Mog will see it and freak. And she’ll think it was me.’
Olive looked back at the hot-chip boys. They were flicking stones at a lamppost. Apart from that, the street was empty.
Olive added:
‘Or she’ll think it was you,’ Olive giggled. ‘Look. It joins with the “i” in me.’
‘The “i” in we, you mean.’ Pip stood up. The twins walked through Olive’s front gate and down the side path to the back door. For the first time ever, Olive didn’t notice the branches and their long twiggy fingers.
‘You got anything to eat? I’m starving.’ Pip headed straight to the fridge and opened the door. Although it was the first time she’d done this, there was already a sense of habit about her action.
Olive pulled the Sultana Bran down from the cupboard, together with two bowls and a can of strawberry Quik. She nudged Pip out of the way and fetched the milk from the fridge, sniffing it first like Mrs Graham. It smelt a bit off, but milk always smelt a bit off, so Olive poured it into a gravy boat (which was practically a milk jug) and mixed some Quik in. The girls sat down to big bowls of cereal and strawberry milk.
‘Gross,’ said Pip. ‘Sultanas. I hate sultanas. Wrinkly rabbit turds.’ Pip began extracting the sultanas from her bowl and putting them on the table, where they joined Olive’s in a wrinkly rabbit-turd mountain.
‘Why’s this so scrunched?’ Pip had picked Olive’s self-portrait from the top of her schoolbag and smoothed it out on the table. The face was still too small for the piece of paper on which it floated. Olive grabbed it from her.
‘Don’t. It’s dreadful,’ she muttered, crumpling the picture and grinding it into the palm of her hand. She was embarrassed Pip had seen it. It was like somebody seeing something private – knickers with a poo-streak or worm tablets on camp.
‘It looked okay to me. Well, obviously until you destroyed it.’
Olive took a breath and concentrated on pulling together a smile. ‘Would you like a tour?’ she asked in her brightest kitchen-wipe voice.
The girls pushed through the house. Pip barged in front of her sister, squealing as she bumped into the piles of crap-knacks. Olive ran behind her, trying to steady the towers of junk. Those she couldn’t save toppled with a thud, taking others down in their wake like massive dominos. Dust ballooned up in clouds, glinting in the light.
‘Watch it.’ Olive was starting to think about the logistics of having somebody to stay. The house was big, but with all of Mog’s stuff, there wasn’t much room left.
Pip looked around at the chaos. ‘Why doesn’t Mog have a servant or something? You know, a cleaner or even a nanny?’
‘For political reasons. I did actually have a babysitter ages ago, but it didn’t work out.’
Olive’s babysitter had been called Sarah Afar. Sarah Afar couldn’t drive, and she’d hated Olive almost as much as she’d hated public transport. Sarah was a student and a D-grade actor. The first time she babysat Olive, she had hobbled in the front door scrunched over a walking cane. Olive was appalled.
Mog had looked at Olive’s stricken face and mouthed the words ‘method actor’ over Sarah’s shoulder. Olive had laughed. She knew all about method actors from Mog. They were actors who got themselves so wrapped up in their roles that they behaved like the person they were playing, twenty-four seven. The end result was that Olive never knew what Sarah Afar would be like – it depended entirely on what play she was in.
‘A-choooooooo. Aaaaa-choooooooo,’ sneezed Pip from the billiard room. ‘Check this out.’
Olive made her way over to Pip, whose face was hidden under the lip of a velvet riding hat.
‘That’s Mog.’ Olive pointed to a poster leaning up against a stack of boxes. In it, Mog was dressed in a turban, her skin stained blue like the god Krishna. Her eyes looked big and navy. Olive loved it because Mog looked so flamboyant. She had been an actor in her student days, and posters from the plays in which she had featured – some framed, some unframed, all sticky with dust – lined the hall.
‘Wow,’ said Pip. ‘She’s so beautiful.’
‘I know. She’s a bit wacko, but she can be fun.’
Pip took the riding hat off her head and wrapped a gold-threaded sari around her neck. Silk billowed behind her. She flapped a straw around her face and pretended to suck on it like a cigarette in a holder. ‘Ahh darlink.’ Pip sniffed artfully. ‘MMMMmm, place those roses with the others in my changing room. Oh, and fetch me a martini – generous on the gin, light on the olives.’
Olive smiled.
In the evening light, Pip looked strange, but it wasn’t only the sari silk. At first they had seemed a perfect double, and Olive had thought Pip could be her doppelgänger – go to school in her place, go to the dentist, go to swimming lessons – but now Olive suspected that people might actually guess.
The harder you looked, the more different they were. Put simply, Pip was the same but better: her eyes looked bigger and somehow less weirdly spaced; her skin was not as blotchy; she seemed taller, stronger and, well, plain prettier.
It was like when Olive bought two Caramello Koalas – one was always superior, even if they came out of the same mould in the same factory. If Olive and Pip were Caramello Koalas, thought Olive, then there was no doubt that Olive had less caramel.
Olive looked from Pip back to the poster of Mog. Mog! Olive had completely forgotten to call her.
Trudy answered the phone. ‘I’ll put you through, Olive,’ she squawked, ‘but I should warn you, things are feverish in here.’
‘Hi Ol, how was your day?’ spurted Mog onto the line.
‘Fine, thanks. Crazy. You’ll never guess what happened. I went to the beach and they were putting up some sculpture carnival thing, but I saw this set of mirrors against Kelso Pier, a—’
‘Yes, I understand the importance of this mediation, James, but I am on the phone to my daughter. I shall be in again shortly. Sorry, Ol. That man. Where were you?’
‘I took the Brass Eye, and . . . to trim a long story, I was doubled – well, twinned – and now Pip is—’
‘Yes, James, as I just explained not less than twenty-three seconds ago, I’m coming. Sorry, Ol. Things are frantic here. There’s enormous pressure to find a solution tonight, and everyone’s as tense as ticks. All right if I see you later at home? Tuck yourself up with a hottie. Love you.’ The phone clicked.
‘And I can’t wait for you to meet her,’ said Olive into the dead line.
Olive ploughed through the debris created by her sister and went to find some linen.
&nbs
p; ‘Mog will be home later.’
‘Wicked,’ yelled Pip from Olive’s room and sneezed again.
‘Much later,’ said Olive into the hall cupboard.
When she returned, Pip had picked up Olive’s watch and was buckling it around her wrist using the last, homemade hole. It was the special watch Mog had bought Olive for her first double-digit birthday, and Olive was careful not to wear it in the shower. Pip held up her hand. ‘That’s nice.’
Olive’s eyes moved between her sister’s wrist and the watch-shaped gap in her jewellery box.
Pip scanned Olive’s CDs and DVDs. ‘The Little Mermaid? Isn’t that for kids?’
‘It’s Disney’s best,’ said Olive and stopped. She loved Disney’s animations. She’d watched The Little Mermaid DVD until it got lines in it.
Pip went back to the CDs and DVDs. ‘Nothing I like.’ She switched on the radio and turned the volume up.
‘Lucky Mog’s not home with a gin-and-tonic hangover,’ Olive said pointedly.
‘What’s the fish’s name?’ A fish the colour of canned tomato soup spiralled up and down a bowl.
‘Ariel,’ said Olive, hoping Pip would fail to recognise the obvious Disney reference.
‘I’d have called him Killer.’ Pip chasséd over to Olive’s cupboard, bobbing her hips and circling her arms above her head. She pored over the racks and held clothes up in front of the mirror, sucking in her cheeks. When she had finished with the garments, she let them fall to the floor like she was in a bric-a-brac market rather than Olive’s room.
Olive made the spare bed. She then folded a towel, all fancy like a napkin, placed a bar of soap on top, and put it on Pip’s bed. She’d seen this done at hotels with Mog and it looked very sophisticated and very welcoming. If Pip noticed, she didn’t care, though, because she plonked herself down on top of it. ‘So, you talk about Mog but what about What’shisnameseed?’