by Kim Kane
Olive tucked in her shirt. ‘Pip, we’re going to meet our father. We should look like us. Besides, I thought it might be quite nice if we dressed the same – you know, like proper twins.’
Pip pulled a face and tugged the just like that top down over her shoulder. It dunked so low that Olive could see the skin on her chest, which had marbled in the cold.
‘Okay, I’ll pick something else. I’m too chilly anyway. But I don’t want to wear the same stuff. We do that every day, and it’s geeky. Girls in middle school should not wear matching gear.’ Pip looked at Olive’s skirt. ‘Please don’t tell me you’ve got two of those . . .’
As Pip changed into a denim dress, Olive double-checked the provisions. She added the photo of Mog and the saffron-robed babies, together with a lovely picture of Mog on the front page of a law journal. She was in her wig and gown, shaking the Prime Minister’s hand for being a woman and a successful barrister. In her heels, she had to bend her knees to reach him, but she looked slender and stylish and smiley. She looked a success.
Olive picked up the Brass Eye and tucked it in the front pocket of the backpack.
‘What are you bringing that for?’ Pip did up her dress. ‘You’re not going to give it to him, are you?’ She looked shocked.
‘No. No of course not.’ Olive zipped up the pocket and patted it twice. ‘For joss.’
‘Joss?’
‘Luck.’
The twins walked into the kitchen to make breakfast. Instead of excursion money, Mog had left a note on the table, sticky with drops of butter and jam.
Ahhhhhhh! Tried three ATMs, but all were broken.
What is it with banks? Here’s a cheque. If there’s a problem, tell them to stick it on the account. Isn’t that what they usually do?
Have fun.
x Mog
P.S. Break a leg tonight – can’t wait to hear all about it.
Call me on the mobs when it’s over and you can join us.
Pip read the note and scrunched it up. ‘Bugger. So much for joss.’
‘She’s right. They do always stick it on the account – I forgot. Guess we can’t go.’ Olive put the backpack down.
‘Don’t be dumb, Ol. We have to go. We’re all organised.’
Olive looked at her toes. Pip had managed to ladder her best socks. ‘I don’t know. I feel really uncomfortable about—’
‘Olive Garnaut, you’re a freak. You marched right up to the fake Mustard Seed without thinking, and now there’s a problem?’
‘I did not. I just didn’t have time to think it thr—’
‘For your information, this is not just about you, Olive. This is our father. We have a right to know who he is, and if you don’t want to go, I’ll go by myself.’
Pip stared at Olive with a starched face. Olive looked at the clock. It wasn’t even seven o’clock. They’d run out of time if they didn’t leave soon, though. ‘But what about money?’
‘We’ve got about twenty-two dollars. We’re taking food. If it’s not enough, we can put the tickets on Visa – I don’t think Mog’s going to know. The statement won’t say “two return tickets to Noglarrat”. Look.’ Pip picked up a statement that was on the bench and flapped it at Olive. It only listed the place of purchase and the relevant company. If Mog commented on the train company, they could say they’d bought tickets for school.
‘Okay, okay.’ Olive sighed. In a way, she felt solid with Pip there. Pip was like a brace. No matter how big their father was, he could never consume Pip too. ‘I’ll go, but we’d better be quick. I want to be home before Mog is.’
Pip whooped as Olive collected the backpack. Olive headed out the front door with Pip at her heels.
The morning was wet and cool. The streets were as black and shiny as an oil slick. The twins picked their way between hamburger wrappers and discarded pickles flecked with sauce. They had even beaten the street-cleaners.
The tram they had to catch wasn’t difficult, as Olive had been on it before. It was even easier at this hour, because it was too early for the wise-crack schoolboys with tags scribbled all over their bags.
Olive walked towards the ticket machine. She could tell that Pip didn’t want her to buy a ticket. It was in-tu-ition again, and Olive knew it as surely as she knew that Mog would throttle her if she found out what they were doing. She looked back at her sister and started poking coins in the slot. It wasn’t worth the stress. Olive was stressed about enough things already without being sprung by an inspector in disguise. Besides, they’d got sneaky lately. The girls at school said that they’d even started dressing up as students and knit-one-purl-one grannies. You just never knew where an inspector was going to spring from.
Olive poked another coin into the slot and thought of Macca, with her blue streaks and Birkenstocks. Ministers didn’t look like ministers these days, and ticket inspectors didn’t look like ticket inspectors. Life was all very tricky.
They arrived at the station to discover that the train had been delayed. By almost two hours. The girls camped in what was once the Ladies Only waiting room. Olive looked out the window. The station was striped with grey-faced businesspeople walking in lines.
Olive’s phone buzzed to signal a text.
‘Is that Mog already? It’s only 9.30 a.m. – I thought she only called at night.’ The wait was making Pip jittery.
‘She does, usually.’ Olive trawled through the backpack.
Pip paced the room. ‘I hadn’t thought about the phone. If Mog calls and it’s on, she’ll know where we are. She’ll only know later, when the bill comes in, but still . . .’
Olive clicked into the message. ‘It’s not Mog.’
Harriet the Spy. Ur not the only who’s gr8 with clues. We bet we no where uve gone & we’re cumin .
‘Who’s it from?’
Olive shook her head. ‘Who do you think? Why are they so awful?’ She passed the phone to Pip, who dropped it. The mobile smacked the floor and noise exploded, bouncing around the metal Ladies Only roof. Neither of the girls moved.
‘Do you think they’re for real?’ asked Olive.
‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should just forget it. Wait until the holidays or something.’
Olive walked to the window and watched the platforms haemorrhage people. She couldn’t see one single Joanne d’Arc blazer among them. She blew on the window and the suits dissolved in a mist.
‘They won’t come.’ Olive shook her head.
‘How do you know?’
‘They won’t. It’s puff.’
‘Look Ol, they do have a track record of following through. Maybe we should leave it? They could really muck things up.’
‘Pip, this is crazy! Three hours ago you were trying to convince me! They’re just trying to intimidate us. They won’t show.’
Pip clicked her tongue.
‘They won’t, Pip. They don’t even know where we’re going. How could they?’
‘We know they definitely saw the map – in Maths that time – and we now know they probably nicked it.’ Pip looked quite small sitting by herself on the long cream bench.
‘We don’t know that, Pip.’
‘Did you ever find the copy?’
Olive stood up. ‘No, I didn’t find it, but I don’t think we’d marked it. Anyway, if they were going to come, they’d be here already. I’m sure of it.’
Pip cocked her head to the side, then smiled. ‘Well, I do know Mathilda won’t come by herself. She can’t do anything without asking Amelia.’ She jumped up and held out her fist in a fake microphone. ‘Now tell me, Mathilda, have you ever wiped your bottom without Amelia’s permission?’ Pip flicked a pretend noodle ponytail. ‘Hmmm . . . sometimes.’
The girls were interrupted by the mobile, which broke into song on the floor, sucking the laughter out of the room.
‘I’ll get it.’ Pip reached out for the phone.
‘Leave it,’ said Olive, picking up the mobile with two fingers as if it were radioactive
. She held the ‘off’ button down until the screen turned blue and then blank. ‘That should stop it.’ The room was quiet.
‘I can’t believe you just did that.’
Olive tossed the phone into the top of her bag and grinned. ‘I’m over them.’
25
Tripping through the Garden
State by Rail and Road
Thirty minutes later, the train to Noglarrat pulled away from the station. Olive watched as city buildings and cranes whipped past the window. ‘We’re off,’ she said. ‘We’re actually off!’
The morning sun warmed her skin. Olive felt a surge of happiness and freedom that made her giddy.
Pip stuck her head out the open window: ‘Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.’
Olive didn’t quite feel that free. ‘Don’t do that – your head might get lopped off.’
‘C’mon, try it.’ It feels like flying. It feels lov’leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.’ Pip’s voice was picked up by the wind and blown along the tracks.
Olive stuck her head gingerly outside. The wind pulled her hair back and massaged her scalp. It did feel wonderful, even just a moment of it. Olive imagined that it felt exactly the same as driving in Amelia’s father’s GST convertible.
‘Tickets!’ The girls heard a thud as the door to the next compartment was opened.
‘Crap, the inspector,’ said Pip. The girls pulled their heads in. ‘I’ll disappear. Don’t want to go drawing attention to ourselves. They’ll be looking for two girls, not one.’ She climbed up onto the luggage rack and crouched down behind the backpack.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Pip’s head poked up over the top of the backpack. Olive tried to pull her sister back down. ‘We’ve got a ticket for you, and I swear if anything’s going to draw attention to us, this will.’ Pip could be so ridiculous.
‘Tickets!’ The door slid open. People in uniforms always made Olive feel nervous. She’d caught that anxiety from Mog. Mog wasn’t scared of police, because she saw them in court and she said that they were usually trigger-happy young blokes who were as thick as planks. But Mog was very edgy around customs inspectors and sniffer dogs when they went on holiday. They always make me feel like I might have a bag full of pastrami or some other forbidden product, Mog would say (even though she was a committed vegetarian).
Olive worried, too, but not about pastrami. She’d seen Bangkok Hilton. She’d followed the Schapelle Corby case. Olive was terrified that somebody would plant drugs on her person.
‘Ticket?’
‘Oh, sorry.’ Olive pulled the tickets they’d bought earlier that morning out of her wallet. This inspector wasn’t interested in pastrami or discovering drugs on her person.
‘Where are you off to?’ he asked, clipping holes in her card. He had a pit in his chin that sank as he spoke. It made his face twinkle.
‘To see my father.’ Olive’s hands were sticky. The inspector nodded and dipped into his leather pouch. ‘Want a balloon?’
‘Um, thank you,’ said Olive, too polite to mention that she was actually twelve.
‘You can have one of these, too.’ The inspector dipped deeper into his pouch and produced a chocolate Swiss roll.
‘Yum, thanks,’ said Olive, a little more genuinely. Swiss rolls were deliciously processed, soft and feather-light.
‘Grab me one and ask if he’s single,’ hissed Pip from the luggage rack. The inspector, however, had already left, shutting the door behind him.
Olive pulled the sponge in two and handed half to Pip. The girls uncurled the Swiss roll. They dug the fake cream out with their fingers, saving the middle kernel until last. As they licked their hands they bickered and bantered, watching while never-ending cows in never-ending paddocks streamed by their window.
‘This service will be pulling into Noglarrat in ten minutes. Please prepare to disembark,’ boomed a tinny voice almost three hours later.
Olive stood up and stretched, then went to shut the window.
‘Leave it open a smidge, can you? I’m a bit sick and the air’s good for me.’ Pip did look a bit green.
‘That will teach you to eat so quickly. Want a peppermint? Mog says they help digestion.’
Pip shook her head. ‘We ate hours ago. Besides, it isn’t that kind of sick.’
‘It’s not your period, is it?’ Olive lived in fear of getting her period, and in mortal fear of getting her period on public transport.
‘No.’
The girls were quiet as the train click-clack-clacked over the tracks. Olive poked her sister’s knee. ‘You’re not still worried about Amelia and Mathilda, are you? Because they won’t—’
‘No. It’s more than them.’ Pip chewed on her cuticle. ‘What if he’s awful, Ol? What if he’s a Stranger-Danger stranger? These things don’t always end happily.’
Olive sat back. Pip was scaring her.
Ever since Pip had first suggested finding Mustard Seed, Olive had lain awake in bed at night writing the story of the hunt for their father in her head. When she was positive – and she tried to be – the story ended with greasy chicken-fingers and a bucket of KFC; but mostly it started with ‘Once upon a time’. On these nights, the story had a musty spine and yellow pages that crackled, and it was filled with black woods and wolves and hunters and witches and lurking shadows and the smell of gunpowder and all of the unaccountable creaks and thumps that old houses make only at night.
These stories had a distinctly Germanic feel, which meant that they would never, could never turn out well. Mog had told Olive that. At the end of the Second World War, when the Allies marched into Germany, the first thing they did, even before planting their victory flags, was pull the Grimms’ Fairy Tales off the shelves, because they were too, well, grim.
In Germany, things didn’t always work out with Bambi and a bluebird. That only happened in America. In the real world, Hansel and Gretel got eaten by the witch in a crunch of bones; eaten without so much as a thread of apron or a Hansel-burp to let their father know what had happened to his knock-kneed children. The real world was tough.
Olive didn’t live in Germany, but she did live in the real world. She lived in a world where the lighthouse could be an oven, Mustard Seed a witch. He might have craggy nails and a starvation cage. He might be Stranger Danger – fathers weren’t all good.
Sometimes, Mog came home distressed because she saw things in court. She saw fathers who had lost their children in divorces, and then committed unmentionable crimes. The worst thing was that these fathers looked normal. They had photos taken with white-zinced noses, doing whizzies with their kids in the surf.
Fathers weren’t always like Mr Graham or Mr Forster, and there could be just no saying what Mustard Seed would be like. All Olive knew was that at night, Mustard Seed got bigger and stronger and hairier and craggier, until he was part-witch, part-maniac, and only the teensy-weensy, inciest bit flaky hippy.
‘We are now approaching Noglarrat Station, where this service will be terminating. Thank you for travelling with Victorian Trains today.’
Olive looked at her sister and then at her watch – it was only just lunchtime at the Joanne d’Arc School for Girls. She put her face to the window. Everything was yellow and dusty and seemed not only a million miles from school, but a million miles from a limestone lighthouse by the sea.
26
A Map for Living
Noglarrat station didn’t have much to recommend it. It was an old station and its ironwork had been left to corrode in the weather like moth-gnawed lace. Everything looked tired except the vending machine, which blinked in the sun.
A boy in a fleece top, stooped in the corner, was the only person on the platform. He had a homemade cigarette, which flared as he drew back on it. ‘Mornin’,’ he mumbled as the girls walked by. Olive walked faster.
‘Spacey . . . two fancy girls,’ he muttered, then collapsed to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Pip stared. ‘Where the bezoozus have you brought me?’
Olive pulled Victor
ian Maps: Tripping through the Garden State by Rail and Road out of the backpack and took a very deep breath. ‘We’ve got a fair way to walk. We should probably get going.’
They found the mouth of the track without too much fuss.
‘Just down there, past the dogleg,’ said a woman at the milk bar, looking at the map. Her skin was as lumpy as barley soup. A short eyelash lay thick across the lens of her glasses, like a crack. She handed Olive a photocopied map. ‘This is probably a better one. Now, where are we?’ She rubbed her glasses on her T-shirt. When she put them back on, the eyelash hadn’t moved.
‘Okay, you’re here.’ She drew a slack star. ‘Watch the track; only the first part is sealed.’
‘Thanks.’ Olive handed over coins for a bottle of water and tried not to touch the woman’s skin.
The path was even longer than Olive had predicted. The first part was easy, but once the tarmac ended, the sand fell away under their feet.
‘This feels like army training.’ Pip’s face was red.
‘When have you ever trained for the army?’ Olive was holding her arms up to shade her face and they were getting tired. The sun was stingy. They walked along the edge of the track, trying to catch the tea-tree shadows.
‘Stick to the grass bits,’ said Olive. ‘It sort of anchors the sand.’
‘Shouldn’t we be dropping bread, like Hansel and Gretel? Or pebbles?’ Pip shucked leaves from an overhanging branch.
‘Look at that,’ said Olive. They were passing a rock. Somebody had sprayed a slogan across its mossy front.
‘Sounds like Mog’s “chaos is order waiting to be decoded” crap,’ said Pip.
Olive laughed. ‘It’s funny, chaos. When I was little, I caught a taxi into the city every Friday afternoon with Sarah Afar.’
‘The babysitter you hated? The role-player?’
Olive rolled her eyes. ‘Yep. That’s the one. Anyway, Sarah Afar was practising for some obsessive-compulsive role. Every Friday we’d leave school to see Mog at 3.17 p.m. – just after the bell. Sarah Afar would have the taxi waiting. She’d direct the driver along the same route, and we’d get every single green light.’