by Kim Kane
WilliamPetersMustardSeed did think of her – Pip had to be right. Olive thought of him, and had thought of him for as long as she could remember. Even when she was doing something else, he was always there: a bit of him just sort of hung around, standing stage-left of her thoughts. It made sense that he would also—
Snip.
Olive started when she heard the crisp metallic slice. She felt a breeze on the back of her neck. Before she could register what had happened, one of her fish-spine plaits lay across her lap. Puny and white-blonde, it curled up at the end like baby hair. Her hair. Her hair like Mog’s. Her hair like Pip’s.
The room was silent. The chocolate crackle girls had stopped comparing. They looked at Olive and then at Mathilda, who was brandishing a pair of scissors. Mathilda looked at Amelia, standing beside her.
‘My teeth are not brown,’ said Amelia.
Olive yelped. The chocolate crackle girls yelped. Mrs Kato, who had been packing up her class materials, saw Olive’s lopsided hair and yelped. ‘Mathilda Graham, this is quite intolerable. You will come with me to see Mrs Dalling ima.’
‘Amelia made me—’
‘Ima,’ barked Mrs Kato.
Mathilda was marched out the door by Mrs Kato, in the full knowledge that she would probably be marched out of the Joanne d’Arc School for Girls.
Amelia turned her nose up to the sky, pirouetted, and walked out behind them.
It was a short battle. The stakes were high, but in her own wonky-haired way, Olive had won; well, at least she wasn’t in the headmistress’s office. There was no getting around it, though: her plait was a clear loser.
Pip, returning from the tuckshop, stopped in the doorway. ‘Oh, Ol, what has she done?’ She raced over to her one-plaited sister and stroked the stumpy knob of hair that spiked out from its elastic. ‘That bully.’
‘It was Mathilda,’ said Olive, showing the first signs of recovering from shock. ‘Mathilda did it?’ Olive posed the last statement as a question. She was confused. Big tears streamed down her face, joining tributaries of watery mucus.
‘Mathilda? That pig is so spineless. I have no doubt that Amelia was behind it, though. I hope they’re both throttled for this. In fact, I hope they’re both reincarnated as weevils.’
Olive shook her head and sniffed.
Pip sat back. ‘It’s very modern,’ she said. ‘A bit sort of punk.’ She stroked Olive’s head.
‘I don’t want modern hair.’ Olive started to weep again. ‘I don’t even like uneven hems.’
News about the slaughter had shot outside the classroom and around the school. Year 7s were very efficient conductors of information. Girls stood at the door of the classroom, holding back but peering forward, trying to catch a glimpse of Olive and her plait stump – like pedestrians at a car crash.
‘You could bob it,’ said Lim May Yee, coming over. ‘I think your hair would look great bobbed.’
‘I agree. I think your hair will look much better bobbed. I was thinking of doing it to mine, too.’ Pip handed Olive a piece of origami paper. ‘Here, blow your nose.’
Olive blew her nose all over Pip’s crane.
‘My cousin says that hair carries memories,’ said Lim May Yee.
‘Then I guess that half of mine have just been butchered.’ Olive pulled gently on her blunt plait-tuft.
‘Let’s hope it’s the half with Mathilda and Amelia.’
Olive managed to smile. Lim May Yee handed her a sweet. It was chewy but spicy. ‘Indonesian Ginger. Mum sends them from home.’
‘It’s delicious,’ said Olive. ‘Thanks, Lim May Yee.’
‘My pleasure.’ She paused. ‘You can just call me May, by the way. That’s actually my name. My surname’s Lim, and in my culture, because family is the most important thing, the Lim bit goes first. That’s all.’
‘Oh,’ said Olive, chewing. ‘Were you born in May?’
‘Nope. September. And if you think that’s weird, my sister’s called Sunday and she was born on a Thursday.’
Olive laughed. May smiled and walked back to the boarders.
‘She’s nice,’ said Pip. ‘A bit bow-legged, but funny.’
‘No memories.’ Olive twirled her remaining plait around her finger. ‘It’s probably not a bad time for a fresh start.’
‘There’s no doubt,’ said Pip. ‘Those old memories were starting to wilt like carrots left too long in the crisper.’
13
Bury Him
Olive sat in front of the mirror while Pip attempted to even out her hair. The second plait lay on the kitchen table like a dead animal. Olive watched as her sister waved the scissors around her face. ‘Pip, concentrate! It’s not straight!’
‘First I putta da towel, then I cutta da hair.’ Pip was doing a lousy impersonation of Pirelli from Sweeney Todd and it was making Olive edgy. For a girl who was so condescending about The Little Mermaid, Pip had managed to work an awful lot of musicals into her repertoire.
‘Pip, please! Careful! Here, give me the scissors – I’ll do it.’
‘Olive, you are such a worrywart. It only has to get you through until tomorrow.’
‘Well I don’t want to look like a freak.’
‘You don’t want to look like everybody else, anyway – not with a name like Olive.’
‘Olive’s not that weird.’
‘No, but you’re the only one in the school.’
That was true. ‘Whenever I complain about my name, Mog says that when I was born, there were seven other babies in the house – three called Sunny, three called Rainbow and one boy called Rani. Poor Rani really lucked out. His name means Indian Princess.’
The girls laughed, and the scissors veered north. Pip looked at Olive’s face. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said and scuttled out of the room.
After Pip had left, Olive ran a brush through her hair. It jolted when it came to the ends and she combed the air. Short hair was going to take a bit of getting used to. Olive flattened her bob and examined the cut. It was a teensy bit longer on the left than the right, but it would do until she went to the hairdresser.
Mrs Graham had booked Olive in. She had been so appalled by Mathilda’s behaviour that she had rung Mog at work that afternoon to apologise. Then Amelia’s mother had rung Mog to apologise, too. Well, sort of apologise.
‘We are obviously very upset, but furious that the school has let things disintegrate to this level. This is not the Joanne d’Arc School for Girls that I know. They have suspended Mathilda Graham for one day and given both girls two Saturday detentions. While Mathilda is clearly a very bad influence on Amelia, Luke and I were not certain that Joanne d’Arc was right for our daughter anyway, and we have been investigating other possibilities. It must be said, strictly off the record, that the facilities at Paronton are now infinitely superior.’
‘Strictly off the record,’ Mog had replied, trying to reformat a document.
‘But it is a difficult choice,’ Amelia’s mother had continued, ‘and not one we take lightly. We’ve got three generations of Joanne d’Arc girls in this family. You weren’t at Joanne d’Arc. Where were you? They certainly didn’t have that terrible outdoor programme when I was in Year 9. One semester in the bush – no phones, no electricity. Dreadful. How will Amelia blow-dry her hair?’
‘Three generations! No hairdryers!’ Mog had laughed later on the phone to Olive.
Mog was still laughing when she walked into the kitchen. Olive glanced at Pip, who had been using her bare feet and hands to shimmy up the doorframe for the past hour. Pip started giggling too.
‘So is Amelia leaving school?’ Olive leant forwards to give Mog a kiss hello and Mog sat down next to her.
‘No. Liz Forster went through all of that laborious detail to tell me that “on balance” they’ve “decided against a transfer”. On balance?! I bet she’s the kind of woman who irons tea towels.’
‘She is!’ laughed Olive. ‘She has them ironed. And underpants.’
‘Oh d
ear.’ Mog shook her head and smiled. ‘She really is the pits.’ Mog stroked Olive’s freshly cropped hair.
‘Do I look like a freak?’ Olive nuzzled against Mog’s shoulder like she used to when she was a baby.
‘Olive Garnaut, no! You do not look like a freak!’ Olive could smell smoke and toothpaste on Mog’s breath. ‘But you do look exactly like your mother.’
‘Exactly?’ Olive pushed her head further into Mog’s arm. Mog was trying to flick through the post over Olive’s shoulder.
‘Exactly. I’ll try to dig you up an old school photo of mine.’ Mog looked down at Olive’s face. ‘Is that such a bad thing?’
‘No. But don’t I look even a tiny bit like . . . WilliamPetersMustardSeed?’ Olive mouthed his name with her lips.
‘Like whom?’ Mog peered under the edge of an envelope. Olive took a deep breath.
‘Like WilliamPetersMustardSeed.’
Olive held her breath. Pip had said it, really said it. His name stained the air.
Mog’s lipstick-smile dropped. She stopped flicking. Pip was still. Mog exhaled, and her shoulders dropped down after her smile. She held Olive out from her chest. ‘You know I don’t like that name in this house, Olive. We have no secrets here, but trust me, this is important.’
‘But why don’t I see him? Ingrid, Louisa and Lisa all have divorced parents and they see their dads every second weekend and go to the football and the zoo and get show bags. And Melody Moore lives with her dad.’
Mog raised her eyebrow in the manner she usually reserved for ladies at David Jones and barristers on the Other Side. ‘Don’t whinge, Olive.’
Olive’s top lip quivered.
Mog softened and pulled her daughter back towards her. ‘He’s not a father, Ol. He hasn’t acted like a father, now or ever. We lived a very different type of life down the coast to the one that we live now.’
Pip’s eyebrow’s shot up.
‘Which coast?’
‘You are trying! The Victorian coast. I don’t expect you to understand, but things were different. We squatted. That means we didn’t pay rent. It was illegal, but we didn’t care. But now I’m an officer of the law – I enforce the law. Those days were okay, in part, but they could work against me, especially for my chances of getting on the Bench, and we don’t want anything to jeopardise that. I’ve worked too hard, and I have enough against me already.’
Olive nodded. The Bench and sitting on it was all Mog wanted. Olive knew that ‘certain people’ were conservative, and that ‘certain people’ looked down on single mothers, even if those single mothers were like Mog and darn good at their jobs.
‘Although, if William’s still there, he’s probably got a good case for adverse possession.’ Mog laughed.
‘What’s adverse possession?’ Olive was relieved that Mog’s mood had passed.
‘It means that you inhabit a property for such a long period of time that it becomes yours. Like those people in the Clare Renner library. They squatted in the basement with padlocks for so many years that the Council had to pass them the title papers. They stayed put. But really, Ol, forget it all. It’s easier to sit on these things, bury them.’
‘Bury what? I don’t even know what he does.’ Olive picked at a piece of fluff through a cigarette burn in the sofa arm.
‘Olive, please don’t pick. I left William and went back to law because I realised that I deserved better; that we deserved much better. Our life is good. You have an excellent role model and everything you possibly need. Now please, can we forget him? He wasn’t worth the angst then and he certainly isn’t worth it now. The only decent thing he did in his entire life was produce – no, rather, contribute to the production of – you.’ Mog kissed Olive’s soft blonde down. ‘And that is priceless.’
Mog went back to the post. Olive slipped out of her chair and went to join Pip. They headed to Olive’s room and closed the door.
‘Man, I see what you mean. She may have been trying to look calm, but she was so worked up, her neck was stringy.’ Pip’s face was flushed and her eyes shone.
‘She’s okay,’ said Olive. ‘She does a good job. We get by.’
‘But we didn’t get many clues.’
‘I think we should forget it, Pip. It’s not worth making Mog angry.’
‘Forget it? Are you mad? We know this much.’ Pip took out a notebook and started to write.
Clues
WilliamPetersMustardSeed
• Coast – Victoria
• Adverse possession
• Possibly likes mustard
• Not worth it
‘There must be something else,’ said Pip. ‘Clothing? Letters?’
‘I swear, there’s nothing. It’s like he never existed. She’s deleted him, and I want to, too.’
Pip stared at her.
‘Can you just leave it? It doesn’t seem right.’ Olive ripped the clue list out of the notebook.
‘Sure.’ Pip glared at Olive and left the room.
14
History-shuffle
Olive stalked to the kitchen and pulled out her paints. She liked to paint whenever she felt tight, and she felt tight now. Even the smell of the watercolour, the thickness of the paper, was enough to calm her. Olive ran the bristles of a brush along her fingers. It may have been bad for the fibres, but Olive loved the way the tips felt like cats’ tails (without the fleas).
Mog was in her study working. Every so often, Olive could hear her turn the page of a document. Pip’s whereabouts was anyone’s guess. Olive sat at the kitchen table and painted until the hard wood of the chair made her legs prickle.
As much as Olive wanted to delete WilliamPeters MustardSeed, she couldn’t. It was a funny thing, to imagine a father. Her missing father wasn’t like a missing person, because there was no photograph. He was more like the chalk outline of a body on the pavement in a New York murder; a gap Olive needed to fill, but whose insides were still unknown. A gap that could perhaps only be coloured in by reference to Mog. But it was unclear if Mog and Mustard Seed were like skinny Jack Sprat who ate no fat and his wife who ate no lean, or if they were both, in fact, Jack Sprats.
From the pieces she had, Olive couldn’t picture whether he was a noisy honker of a man who would have been banned from attending netball matches for overzealous parental support, or whether he was a barrel-chested partygoer in an open shirt, telling stories with a glass of red wine. Maybe he was the sort of person to talk loudly about shares on his mobile phone in public places. ‘Sell, sell, sell.’
It was always possible that he wore a navy fisherman’s cap, walked a Westie and smelt of rum and tuna, with scars on his hands from oyster shells – or perhaps he was more like the personal trainers who urged panting women around the park: ‘I’ve got clients twice your age who could run rings around you.’ He could have resembled the school gardener, a man with dirt that would never wash out of the lines in his palms and manure scraped up the back of his King Gees. Or perhaps he was like Hugh Jackman (the only actor Mog had ever declared very handsome), or a crier like Prince Frederick at the Danish Royal Wedding.
Whenever Olive noticed a man on the street or in the newspaper, she added him to her mental catalogue of possible Mustard Seeds, until he managed to be a jumble of everything: a netball-supporting gardener who drank wine, traded stocks over his mobile, danced, and cried in Danish.
A while later – when her glass of painting water had turned the colour of a grape milkshake – Olive’s quiet was interrupted.
‘Olive, c’mon, where are the photos? There must be some and I can’t find them anywhere.’
Olive moaned. Pip was as persistent as a terrier. ‘There’s only a very old album with photos of me and Mog. He’s not there, Pip. I know because I’ve checked a trillion times.’
Pip, however, promised that she would leave Olive to paint in peace if Olive indulged her this one time.
Olive snuck past the study. The door was open and it was chaotic. Mog’s desk featured
an in-tray for documents she had yet to get to, and an out-tray for documents that she had completed. The trays were piled with cigarette lighters, wads of unpaid bills and orphaned high heels, but Mog said they gave her the impression that she had a system; that she could be organised if she wanted to be. And that, Mog said, was important.
Mog was stooped over a document with her chin tucked into her neck. Just seeing Mog hunched like that made Olive stand tall. She dragged the album up from under the coffee table in the lounge room and headed towards her room.
‘Ol?’ There was a thud as a pile of Mog’s books rolled backwards off her desk. ‘Bugger! Olive?’
Olive froze. She could see Mog through the open door. The album was too big to hide behind her back, so she dropped it and stood on it. Her heart thrashed against her ribs. Mog stopped reading and looked up, an unlit cigarette poised between her first two fingers, which were held in an elegant V for victory (appropriate as she always won her cases). ‘Ol, can you grab me a lighter?’ Mog took off her glasses and rubbed the crease between her eyebrows. ‘I’d also kill for a coffee.’ Olive watched as Mog’s fingernail tapped the desk. It was long and nicotine-yellow.
‘Sure,’ said Olive, so relieved that she forgot to reprimand Mog for the minutes of her life that she was puffing away.
Olive left the the album on the floor and headed to the kitchen. When she returned, Mog was unloading bundles of briefs tied with hot-pink ribbon. ‘I almost forgot to tell you. I met a parent of a friend of yours yesterday.’
‘You did?’ Olive was confused. So far as she knew, she didn’t have any friends except Pip, who was family and didn’t count.
‘He’s the instructing solicitor on this case. Smith, Jason Smith. Nice man. Earnest but smart – his two girls are at Joanne d’Arc. Kate’s in your year and Melanie’s a few years behind. He said that you and Kate sometimes have lunch together.’
‘We do? Kate who?’ asked Olive, making a mental note to hunt the mysterious Kate down should Pip ever take ill or end up on school camp at a different time.