by Kim Kane
‘Why have they got them here?’ Pip pointed to the J-school kids.
‘Remember it’s the Centennial Christmas Concert, so they want everyone involved. And they can reach the high notes.’
Ms Stable-East bellowed at the Grade 3 choir shepherds, somewhat unhelpfully, to ‘ship up or shape out’, and the microphone screeched again. Pip stuck her fingers in her ears. ‘I can’t stand the reverb,’ she yelled, twice as loudly as the microphone.
Just near Pip and Olive stood Mrs Steif. She was earbashing Mr Hollywood about the strengths of the Dewey Decimal System. Mr Hollywood looked riveted.
‘Are they flirting?’
Olive shrugged.
‘I’ll wait outside.’ Pip slung her bag over her shoulder and turned away, looking disgusted.
‘Don’t leave me.’ Olive grabbed at the back of Pip’s jumper. ‘Please.’
Pip shook her head. ‘I don’t want to watch. Not that.’ She motioned to Mr Hollywood and Mrs Steif. ‘You’ll be fine, Ol.’
‘Good-o.’ Olive let out a shaky sigh.
Pip raised one eyebrow. ‘I’ll rephrase that. You’ll be fine as long as you drop the “Good-o”. It’s really mumsy.’
‘Oh.’
‘Seriously, Ol, just come and get me if you need to.’
Olive watched Pip leave. The door swung behind her. She wondered if, hoped that, Pip had forgotten something, that she would return. She hadn’t, didn’t.
Olive stood by herself, waiting for instructions. Around her, girls huddled in bunches of threes and fours, their year groups all mixed up, tossed like salad.
‘Olive. Hey Olive, come over here,’ someone shouted. Olive looked up and squinted. It was Mathilda. She and Amelia were surveying the room, perched up on the uneven bars at the back of the hall like queens on a throne.
‘Me?’ asked Olive, as if she were surrounded by a great horde of other Olives. Mathilda nodded and waved her over.
Olive walked towards them. Perhaps Mathilda had decided to let her back in, because Olive might have wagged; perhaps Mathilda had found out how great Pip was, Olive’s very own flesh and blood; perhaps Mathilda also thought that their lives were like parallel lines that would – should – cross.
Mathilda pushed up her jumper sleeves. ‘We just have to ask you something. Unless you’re too busy planning that camping trip with your father.’
Mathilda laughed. Amelia laughed, too. Their laughs were as empty as the smiles of the rotating clown heads at the school fair. Olive wished she had balls to stuff down the Till–Mill throats and cursed herself for falling for them again. She stared at the corner of a leaf that was stuck to the underbelly of Mathilda’s shoe and hoped that the leaf was stuck on with chewy, or the guts of some dead marsupial.
Amelia crossed her arms. ‘What’s a ho?’ she asked.
Olive looked up from Mathilda’s shoe and turned red.
‘I told you she didn’t know.’ Mathilda looked at Amelia.
‘I do too,’ said Olive, more haughtily than she’d intended.
They both glared at her. Man, thought Olive, where’s Pip when you need her?
Olive had no idea what to say. Ho was one of those words she definitely knew; she just didn’t know what it actually meant – and she knew that she should. It was like not knowing what group sang what song on the radio (which Olive never did).
‘So what is it?’ Mathilda kicked Amelia.
‘It’s like . . .’
The two girls stared down at Olive. Their faces were black against the windows behind them. The gym was suddenly still.
‘It’s like, you know,’ said Olive, looking to the stuck leaf for answers (which were not forthcoming). ‘It’s hard to explain. It’s like, you know. Like . . . a skanky ho.’ Olive held her breath until she thought she might just float up and away like an air balloon.
The talking around her started up again. The answer, although patently unsatisfactory, seemed to have satisfied Mathilda and Amelia, and laughing (definitely at, not with, Olive), they started a conversation about something else. Olive had been dismissed. She shuffled to the other side of the gym.
Olive leant against the rockclimbing wall and blurred her eyes. She breathed in and tried to act like she didn’t care. She took out her phone and scrolled through the numbers, hoping the other girls would think that she had heaps of friends, all of whom knew about hos and pop songs.
She got to the end of the list of names (Mog (w), Mog (m), Taxi) and then scrolled through them from the top again. She hooked her thumbs into the cuffs of her jumper and stared out the window.
While Mog often commented on how fast time went when she was having fun, she had never commented on how devastatingly slow it could be when she was sad. Olive stretched her eyes open wide to stop the tears from slipping out. There was nothing left of her, nothing but tears and an emptiness like a hollow.
‘Hey.’
Olive looked up.
‘Want to come up here?’ May was waving down at Olive from a tower of crash mats. She patted her hand on the blue plastic beside her. The gesture was so kind that Olive wanted to throw her arms around May. It felt like the single kindest thing that anyone had ever done for Olive: kinder than when Okey Doke threw in an extra flavour for nothing; kinder than when Mrs Graham added Olive’s name to the Graham family height chart on their laundry wall.
Olive sniffed. ‘Hi May, thanks so much, that’s really nice of you,’ she said and then felt silly. Olive hoped she hadn’t looked like a desperado. Mog always said that nothing stinks like desperation.
May gave Olive a hand and hauled her up onto the mat. ‘Don’t be dumb.’ From the pile of crash mats, they were higher than everybody.
May nodded in the direction of Amelia. ‘Have you heard who’s going to be Mary?’
‘Oh, was Amelia replaced?’ Olive inexplicably felt a bit bad. When she was first chosen, Amelia had made it pretty clear that she saw Mary as a springboard to a part on Neighbours. ‘What part’s Amelia playing now?’
May giggled. ‘She’s one of the four Doric columns holding up the stable roof.’
The columns were a bit pagan for a Christmas pageant, but they were left over from the school’s Olympic opening ceremony. Year 7 had studied Greek columns in History, and even Nut Allergy could identify Dorics as the plainest of the columns.
‘Apparently Amelia told Mrs Dalling that if she had to be a post, she wasn’t settling for anything less than Corinthian,’ said May. ‘But it fell on deaf ears.’
Olive smiled. ‘Who’s the new Mary, then? They don’t have much time to learn the role.’
‘Maybe Skyep,’ called a boarder with a face like a Knitting Nancy from the other side of May. Skyep’s name wasn’t really Skyep, it was Skye Parsons, but as there were four Skyes, each added the first letter of their surname to the end of the ‘Skye’ bit: Skyep, Skyeg, Skyet and Skyez.
Skyep was the newest girl inYear 7; she’d arrived mid-term from a state school. She was tall with a heart-shaped face, curvy breasts and a French manicure. She’d distinguished herself on the first day by wearing blue eyeliner.
‘Common,’ Mathilda had said at the time.
‘Very sixties, actually,’ Amelia had retorted. And from then on, to the extent that she had wanted to embrace it, Skyep was in.
‘Skyep? Mary’s going to another Year 7?’ May twirled an earring. ‘Isn’t she a bit new?’
The boarder with the face like a Knitting Nancy shrugged. Mary usually went to Year 9 establishment. Amelia had been an anomaly. And the part never went to a new girl, not even a popular one.
‘It’s going to be some Year 9,’ called another boarder. ‘Stable-East said it can’t go to anyone who wears makeup, even if the costume is a perfect fit.’
‘Why do they always give Mary to the prettiest girls?’ Olive piped up, then wished she hadn’t. May and the Knitting Nancy looked at her, waiting for her to continue. Olive concentrated, forming her words cautiously. ‘Well, nobody looks great in la
bour, and Mary’s meant to be on the verge of giving birth. I doubt that she’d have had time to do her nails.’
This was something Mog had said about a television show last year, but Olive was happy to pass it off as her own. The other girls laughed. As she smiled with them, Olive felt herself growing taller and wider. The laughter sprung around the insides of the bigger Olive. She felt like a queen.
‘What part are you playing?’ May twirled one of the little gold baubles in her ears again.
Olive shrugged. ‘Townsperson forty-two or something.’
‘Me too,’ said May. ‘Still, better a townsperson than a column.’ Olive and May beat their legs against the mat. This time of year was nice; it was more relaxed, because most things had started to wind down for the long summer break.
‘You might only be townsperson forty-two, but at least your folio has been hung.’ May moved onto her other earring. ‘It’s the first thing people will see when they walk into the foyer.’
‘Has it?’ Olive smiled. She tried to look friendly but disinterested. On the inside, however, Olive was bubbling. She bit her lip to contain herself. ‘Did yours get in, too?’ Olive was a good drawer, but nobody could do cartoons like May.
‘Nah. Your folio was the only one for Year 7. Stable-East said mine will probably get up next year.’ May smiled and began chatting to the boarder with the face like a Knitting Nancy about last night’s lasagne. ‘Broccoli? Broccoli? Who ever made lasagne with overcooked broccoli?’ asked May. ‘At home they say even mince is for peasants.’
Olive excused herself and snuck out to the foyer.
23
A Hobbit, but a Talented Hobbit
The parquetry floor of the foyer was plaited; in the morning sun, it gleamed like school-fete toffee. Olive had long figured that the architect of the hall had taken a leaf out of ‘Hansel and Gretel’ when she’d designed the building, because she’d filled it with lolly-like features to lure kids in.
Olive looked up. There on a board in the middle of the foyer was her painting, centre-front. It was a picture of a globe that was being whipped around by a gossip of girls. Their dresses blurred as the globe spun, but the countries had been painted precisely, and if you looked carefully (and in the right spot) you could even see snow on the peaks of the spinning Himalayas.
Olive was incredibly proud of it. It really did look like it was moving. She’d called it ‘Confidence Makes the World Spin Round’ while she’d painted it, but she hadn’t had the confidence to call it anything out loud. Instead there was a tag that said, very grandly, ‘Olive Garnaut, 7C, Untitled’.
The second piece was a linocut of Olive’s home. Mog was gardening in the front yard. ‘That is imaginative!’ Mog had said when Olive told her about the picture.
The third was a sketch of Pip in pencil. Her shoulders were feathery, but her face was shaded and very detailed. Ms Stable-East had called it ‘Olive Garnaut, 7C, Self-portrait’.
‘Can you believe they called that one “Olive”? It looks nothing like you,’ said Pip. ‘I was just trying to find a pen to change it. I mean, look at the hair. It’s long! Even when yours was long, you didn’t wear it in a loose ponytail. And you never look straight at anyone like that. You talk to people’s knees.’
‘Thanks,’ said Olive, but nothing could ruin this moment. She wanted to savour it. Mog may never see her work, but Olive wanted to keep living the time when her paintings were up there, centre-front.
‘Well, you do talk to people’s knees,’ said Pip. ‘Still, well done. It’s just like in a proper gallery. Can I get your autograph?’ Pip thumped her sister on the arm.
The bell rang and a bunch of Year 9s, as tall as Mog, burst in from the gym.
‘Take them down, take them down! I don’t want them to see.’ Olive grated her nail along her bottom teeth.
‘Olive, you’re nuts. You were gloating twenty seconds ago.’
‘That was with family, and I was not gloating.’ At that moment, Olive would rather have been back in front of Mathilda and Amelia than waiting for the approaching big girls. ‘I love my pictures being here, but I don’t want anyone to see them. I can’t explain it.’ Olive ducked behind the display board.
Pip followed. ‘Don’t worry about it. They’re great, I promise.’
Olive put her index finger to her mouth in a desperate shush. The big girls were now directly in front of the display. Olive could see their racehorse calves under the board.
‘Hey, check this out,’ said one of the Year 9 girls. ‘Can you believe that was done by a Year 7?’
‘Not bad,’ said another.
‘Olive Garnaut,’ said a third, pronouncing it ‘Gar-nort’ instead of ‘Gar-no’. ‘Who’s that?’
Olive froze. She felt sick. She waited for them to say, Oh, that’s the skinny runt with bee-sting boobs and no friends. A real Nut Allergy.
‘No idea.’
Olive bit down on her finger. One of the big girls shifted her weight from one foot to the other. There was silence for a second; the sort of silence that suggested the others probably shrugged.
‘Cute blonde girl. Tiny. Sort of albino,’ said one. ‘In Burnett.’
‘She looks like her self-portrait!’ shrieked another, shrill with her own cleverness.
‘A hobbit, but a talented hobbit.’
They all laughed.
‘Hey, check out Tamsin’s stuff,’ called a girl further along the board, and the row of shaved legs and scuffed T-bars inched up to join her.
Olive flushed. Her blood soared. They liked her pictures. They liked them. The big girls thought she was talented. Olive Garnaut: talented and cute.
‘Let’s go to the tuckshop.’ Pip took Olive’s hand.
‘No thanks, I’m going back to the gym.’
‘Oh. Do you want anything? Cheesy roll?’
Olive shook her head.
‘Okay,’ said Pip. ‘It is a weird colour, anyway, that cheese.’
Olive smiled and, squeezing her art victory hard to her chest, she drifted back to find May and the boarder who looked just like a Knitting Nancy.
When the girls got home from school that afternoon, the electricity was still buzzing in Olive’s bones. She lay in the bath and relaxed as her hips bobbed on the surface. Her hair floated out around her face like a lion’s mane. Olive felt wonderful; she had an almost new friend and she was talented.
‘Hey.’ Pip strolled into the bathroom. Olive snapped up and hung her chin on the edge of the bath. She angled her body towards the wall. ‘Pip, it’s polite to knock.’
‘Sorry, but we forgot something.’
‘What?’ asked Olive, convinced that nothing could destroy this day.
‘Money,’ said Pip, destroying it in one word.
Olive sighed. In all of her euphoria, she had forgotten that tomorrow was Thursday. D-Day. Well, W-Day – WilliamPetersMustardSeed-Day.
Pip sat on the edge of the bath. Olive groped for a flannel.
‘Do we have to go tomorrow?’ Olive drew the flannel over her face, breathing its distinctive soggy smell.
‘Yes, we do. You promised.’
Olive frowned and twisted the flannel. She couldn’t articulate her anxiety to Pip. She couldn’t express that she was worried about seeing her father because she was scared that she’d evaporate; that to see him could mean being consumed by him. That he – that it all – felt too big. She was Olive Garnaut, daughter of Mog, sister of Pip, a hobbit but good at art. Despite all her imaginings, Mustard Seed was an unknown ingredient. He could rupture that.
‘Maybe we can ask Mog for some money for a school excursion – say we’re going to the zoo for Science or something.’ Pip plucked the flannel from Olive’s face, put it on the soap dish, and passed Olive the phone. ‘Go on, Ol. You can tell her about the exhibition, too.’
‘Are you sure we can’t do it in the holidays?’ The discussion had bleached Olive’s art display excitement.
‘I’m sure. Mog might miss us then. We planned for
tomorrow, so we should stick to it,’ Pip said firmly. She pressed the talk button and Olive could hear the dial tone hammer. ‘Besides, it’s a good time because Mog will be out.’
Olive closed her eyes and saw Mog bubbling over a glass of wine and pesto with the Attorney-General while all the other parents bubbled over Olive’s pictures at school. ‘Pass me a hand-towel.’
Pip smiled. ‘So we’re back on?’
Olive dialled Mog’s number. Mog agreed to leave some money out on the bench later that night. ‘Oooh, how fun. Make sure you get a photo of the white tiger for me. One of my clients was saying that the new enclosure is fantastic. Really realistic.’
Olive felt dreadful again. She wanted to tell Mog that the money wasn’t for the zoo, but for WilliamPetersMustardSeed, whom she was travelling to see with just Pip on a school day, even though she knew Mog would be worried and livid and hurt, and that there was a real risk of Stranger Danger, even on a train; in fact rural Stranger Danger, which might just be worse.
But Olive caught Pip’s eye and didn’t say a word.
24
Upwardly Mobile
Early the next morning, Olive and Pip lay awake in bed waiting for Mog to leave. Olive breathed into the sheets and snuggled in the reflected warmth of her breath. The clock clicked forwards and Mog scrambled out the door. As soon as they heard it snip shut, Pip jumped up. ‘Come on. Get dressed.’
‘How is it that I have to drag you out of bed every morning for school, and you make me late anyway, but now, on a not-school day, you’re up before the possums have gone to bed?’
Pip ignored Olive and bounced around the bedroom filling a backpack with their supplies.
Olive buttoned her skirt. It was her favourite – navy with cream velvet trim. She looked up at Pip, who was strutting about the bedroom. ‘You can’t wear that!’
Pip had on a very short skirt, which she had teamed with the just like that top and a pair of Mog’s high heels. There was an inch of gap at the back of the shoes because her feet were too short and had slipped forwards.