by Kim Kane
‘Are . . . are you William Peters?’ she asked, although instinctively she knew that he was. Her guts clenched.
The man squinted. ‘Who are you?’
‘Olive,’ said Olive, remembering her name and her manners. She looked down and picked at a fleck of dried seaweed on her cardigan. ‘You are, aren’t you? You’re William Peters.’
‘Bill Peters, mainly.’ There was an M crimped between his eyebrows. He took a step in front of his children, rearranging them behind his sarong. ‘Can I help you?’ His voice was textured, as if he’d just woken.
Olive smiled – not a full-teeth smile, but definitely more of a smile than a nod. She knew that her first proper thoughts should have been my long-lost father sounds like me; my long-lost father looks like me; my long-lost father loves me the best of all these kids, and I love him truly and deeply already.
She found, however, that she thought nothing of the kind. My long-lost father wears a skirt, thought Olive as she stared at the block-print fabric knotted on his hip. My long-lost father has swinging hair and wears a sarong like women in the tropics. She pictured Pip’s face when she heard about this and bit down to plug a laugh.
WilliamPetersMustardSeed’s tan had taken on a rosy sheen. His eyes narrowed when he saw the badge on her lapel. ‘I’m sorry, but who are you?’
‘Olive Garnaut,’ said Olive clearly, hoping to clarify matters. ‘Mog’s daught—’ ‘Emily, Sophie, to your rooms to get changed, please. You know Mum hates wet togs inside – hang them up on their hooks in the laundry. Sam, could you have a look at the muffins? If they’re ready, just one each please – don’t spoil your dinner.’
The children filtered away.
‘Whose daughter?’ Mustard Seed’s voice was tightly sprung.
‘Mog Garnaut’s.’
‘Garo?’ His mouth puckered at the point where the word dug.
‘Garnaut. Gar-no.
’ ‘Yes.’ He turned and straightened the white-slash painting. There was silence – a silence so still that Olive could hear it. She stepped towards him. ‘Don’t you remember Mog?’
‘No.’ Something loosened in his throat. ‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t.’
‘But you must remember her. Mog. Mog and the vegetable patch and the cake-fork van.’
‘It doesn’t ring a bell.’ Mustard Seed had stiffened. Everything he did signalled that he was uncomfortable. Everything he did signalled that he was lying.
‘Look, I’m sorry but I’m actually busy. I have four kids, Christmas is around the corner, and I haven’t wrapped a single present. I’m really sorry, mate, but I have to go.’
The word mate cut through the air like a tomahawk. A blush shot up Olive’s neck. She dug into the backpack, trying to stop her eyes from getting watery. Dads didn’t call their daughters mate. They called them ‘princess’ or ‘angel’ or ‘sweet pea’.
Olive sniffed and pulled out one of the photos. ‘You must recall it. You just must. You washed me in the sea and cuddled me while we swung to drums by the fire; brown as berries and swinging free.’ She held the picture out to him. ‘See, here we are. The lighthouse, me and Mog and . . .’
Olive pointed to it so that William Peters or Mustard Seed or whatever he was called could remember.
There was no drum in the photo, no bathing in the sea, no WilliamPetersMustardSeed. She crunched her toes down hard. Olive hated being tripped up by her own dreamings.
Mustard Seed’s face jumped when he saw the photo, and another silence shuffled about the porch. Olive pushed the photo right up to his head so he couldn’t escape.
‘Do. You. Remember. Mog.’ Olive was firm, each word a separate sentence.
Mustard Seed sagged; his hands slunk to his sides.
‘Of course I do.’
She looked up into the beaten face of her father.
One of the caramel-junket children re-appeared at the door. ‘Dad, who is that kid?’
‘Nobody, sweetheart. Just a girl collecting for charity. Fetch my wallet, will you?’
Mustard Seed’s demeanour had changed upon the arrival of his daughter. His gestures were now extravagant, friendly, high-fiving bold. He looked at Olive: it was a look to mute.
Hurt shot up through Olive, from some cavern deep in her gut. She bit the inside of her mouth to try to anchor it; control it. She couldn’t.
‘Nobody?’ she asked. She could feel her anger pushing out. ‘I’m nobody? Don’t you even want to know what grade I’m in? Who my teacher is? How I’ve been?’ Her shouts were exaggerated by the silence that trailed them.
Mustard Seed tightened the knot in his sarong. His shirt was starting to darken in bands under the arms. ‘Emmie, fetch the wallet for Daddy, please.’
‘But—’
‘Now.’
He watched Emily pad off down the hall and turned. ‘Look, I’ve got the kids to consider, and Pat. She’d kill me – she’s the Mayor, you know.’ He shook his head. ‘It just can’t be.’
But it can be, it can be. Olive wanted to beg. She could fit in there. She could help him with the kids. She was good at muffins. She’d spent years pulling them from the Grahams’ oven. In fact, she’d been in training for this very moment.
Mustard Seed crossed his arms. His voice was quiet but muscular. ‘No. It can’t be. The kids have their needs.’
Olive shrank. She reached for her photo and flattened its bent ends against her top. There was in his words the smugness of a high-fenced family life, with drawings taped on the fridge, and pine-tree shaped air-fresheners, and mountains of macaroni necklaces, and no room, no room for any more. There was a completeness about him, about his family. Everything in Bill Peters’ life already had its spot.
‘Here you go,’ said the little kid called Emily as she skipped back up the hall dragging a bag.
‘Thanks, Emmie. Go and help Sambo keep an eye on the muffins, will you? I’ll just fix up here.’
‘I’ll pay, I’ll pay.’
‘Okay then. You can help.’ He looked at Olive and ladled the child up in his arms. ‘Emily’s our baby girl.’ The child was too big to be a baby, but little enough to be held. She looped her arms around her father’s neck.
Mustard Seed flipped his wallet open with his free hand, took out a twenty-dollar note and passed it to the little girl.
She shook her head. ‘No no no. I’ll do it! Only golden coins.’
‘Okay then.’ Mustard Seed held out his wallet and she took a fistful of coins.
‘One, two . . . three.’ The little girl counted them out for Olive.
Olive took the money, but she couldn’t look at the little girl; she couldn’t look at her shining piggy-tails with their salted tips, couldn’t look at her hand with its smudged star stamp.
‘Oh well, goodbye then,’ Olive mumbled. The words were too clumsy for everything they conveyed. She turned and walked; turned and walked with her head held high, with clipped-step poise: a walk to stop things from spilling. Her future stretched out before her, empty and wild, enormous and unchartered. The kids have their needs. The kids have their needs. The kids have their needs.
But I have them, too.
The door closed. Behind it, Olive could hear the child twittering, her voice amplified by the hardwood floor. ‘She was a bit rude, Dad. She didn’t even say thank you.’
Olive had reached the gate when the security door scraped. Mustard Seed came running behind her. He fished a pile of notes from his wallet. ‘Look, how much do you need? Ten? Twenty? How much is a cab? You’re not living here, are you?’
‘No. Still Melbourne. We live in Melbourne.’
‘Oh. Well . . .’ He waved a clutch of money at her. ‘Well, here you go, Olivia.’
‘It’s—’ Olive’s eyes fogged. ‘It’s—’ She spun away from the notes, pushed the gate, then paused. She turned, lifted her chin and looked straight into Mustard Seed’s black hooded eyes. ‘I’m Olive, just Olive. Olive Garnaut.’
Olive ran down the street, towards Pip.
Mustard Seed stood at the gate and piped words behind her in layers – nothing-words in a broken tone that nipped:
‘Oh, Olive.
‘Of course you’re just Olive.
‘Look, look . . .
‘Um.
‘Oh, I’m . . .
‘Perhaps we could rustle up a fold-up bed . . .’
But the words didn’t stop her.
Only once Olive had reached the end of his street did she pause. She took a deep breath of air and swung, giddy. She could feel Pip at her side.
‘I had twelve years of questions, and I think you just answered each one of them, you Mustard Moron,’ Pip bellowed over the snarl of the traffic.
Olive rested her head against her sister’s shoulder. It smelled safe; it smelled like Olive. She turned and vomited.
‘Get up Ol, quick. We’ve gotta get out of here.’
Olive’s throat burned. Little bits of lettuce stung in her nose and stuck to her shoe. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. ‘You expect the worst. You can’t let yourself think that he might really be good, that he might really care. You think that sort of thing happens to other kids; that you don’t deserve it; that you might jinx it if you think anything else – but somehow you jinx it anyway. And no matter how much you protect yourself, you feel so, well . . .’
‘Try not to . . .’
‘But you play games with yourself, Pip. You say, “If I do all my maths, if I use matching pegs on the line, if I sit at the deep end of the bath, it will work out.” And you do those things, and it still doesn’t.’
‘You could sit in the deep end of the bath from now until you’re a waterlogged granny, and nothing would change.’
Olive sniffed. ‘I know. He’d still be blaming Pat Peters and his kids.’
Pip nodded. ‘Anyway, family is the people you love. Blood counts for nothing.’
They walked back to the train station. Olive sat on the ground of the platform. Tears blistered. She could smell bile on her party skirt, in her fringe. The corner of the handmade frame poked out the top of the backpack.
Olive pushed it back in. ‘The edges aren’t straight. I wanted it perfect.’
Olive leant her head against the wall behind her. The evening shadows that climbed the station were almost as long and thin as the train tracks themselves. Olive was exhausted, but she was also sad; a plain gnawing sadness that was impossible to contemplate. She was sad for so many things – for Pip, for Mog, for herself – but mostly Olive felt sad for edges that would never be straight.
The essence from the tea-trees leached into the air as they excreted the last of the day’s heat. The girls sat in a silence that was as snug and comfortable as Mathilda’s ugh boots.
‘Ministers don’t look like ministers these days, ticket inspectors don’t look like ticket inspectors, hippies don’t look like hippies, and dads don’t look like dads,’ said Olive.
The ground trembled as the 6.42 train to Melbourne approached.
‘Well, ours certainly didn’t act like one.’ Pip stood up and stretched. ‘C’mon Ol, let’s get out of here. Let’s go home.’
29
Daughters of Mog
The trip back from Noglarrat felt quicker than the trip there. There was no sound but the beat of the carriage on the track. There just wasn’t anything left to say. It was as if all of the ideas, chatter and natter had drained away, and the only thing Olive had left was a headache hard in her forehead.
Pip lay on one of the seats and slept, the denim jacket bound around her face. Olive pressed her temples and studied her reflection in the window. She may have looked sepia in the train light, but she was Mog Garnaut’s daughter, all right. She had come to find her father, but she had ended up finding Mog. There was nothing of Bill Peters, not one bit.
It was hard to tell if there was more of Bill Peters in Pip. Not only because she was currently encased in denim, but because her reflection was translucent. In the window, Pip had thinned, and all that was left were the lights from country towns flicking inside her silhouette.
Olive let her face sink into the window. She breathed in the cool from the glass and rocked with the carriage.
30
Silvery Moon
Three hours later, Olive sat in a taxi at the end of her street. The taxi driver punched his meter. ‘Are you sure this is all right? There’s not a lot round here.’
‘Yes, thanks, I just live down there.’ Olive didn’t speak to the man, but to the ID on his dashboard.
‘Well, okay then. Take care.’
The car drove off, leaving the road cold and silent. Olive stood under the dusky orange of a streetlight, looking at the photograph in her hand. In it, Mog squinted out from the vegetable patch with her peeling shoulders and an armful of saffron robes.
She was holding one pale baby.
Pip had vanished.
Olive ran towards the beach, tripping over knobs in the asphalt and cans in the gutter, her shoes thwack thwack on the pavement. Three workmen were digging a hole in the footpath under a spotlight. One whistled as she passed. Olive didn’t care. She dropped down over the bluestone wall onto the beach. Her knee hit her chin as she landed, and her mouth bubbled thick with saliva and salt. Olive spat blood, wiped her mouth on the back of her sleeve, and pressed on, even though the sand grabbed her calves and ankles. She didn’t stop until she got to the pier.
There was nothing left of the carnival but a bleached carton of Double Yoke Eggnog. Olive booted it to the water’s edge, where the sand was sleek. She fumbled in her backpack for the Brass Eye and ran into the sea.
Olive kicked at the waves, dragging her feet through the shallows, feeling her socks expand, heavy with brine. She pushed against the current, pushing and calling Pip’s name, pushing even though her in-tu-ition told her it was useless.
When the tide tugged at Olive’s hem, she knelt. Her lungs ached. The waves wove around her, washing cool across her lap; her skirt ballooned like leavened dough. Olive raised the Brass Eye to her face, shaking. But it was too dark; the Brass Eye was filled with shadows.
Olive lowered the cylinder to her cheek and listened to boats bump about their moorings. Behind her, the beach smouldered in the nightlights; before her, the sea sloshed metallic under the moon. She breathed in the fishy damp and, for just a few seconds, in the slip of silence between the knocking hulls, the water looked like a mirror – a flickering mirror of molten silver, liquid crystal, and glass.
31
Lost and Found
Olive walked home with squelchy shoes and puckered fingers. Wet sand chafed her legs like facial scrub. She stepped over Pip’s name imprinted in the concrete; before her, the house blazed.
As Olive let herself in the front door, Mog clacked across the hall in high heels. When she saw Olive, her face went sloppy. ‘I thought I heard you.’ She threw her arms around Olive and gripped her. ‘Where on earth have you been?’
‘Sorry.’
Mog ran her hands up and down Olive’s arms, clutching at them as if she were rockclimbing. ‘Everything intact? You’re wet.’
‘Careful Mog, that hurts.’
The grip slackened, but only faintly. ‘Gott sei Dank.’ While Mrs Graham spoke Spanish when she was cross, Mog spoke German when she was relieved.
‘Where did you go, Ol? With whom? I’ve got a massive search party combing every inch of Port Fairy. I’ve called all the hospitals. We’ve been looking for hours.’
Olive snatched her arms back. ‘Why Port Fairy?’
‘Mathilda rang me at work. She was worried because you weren’t at school, and she was sure you’d gone there.’
‘Mathilda?’ Olive scrunched her face. ‘That girl needs a hobby.’
Mog’s laugh was gluey with tears.
‘I wasn’t at Port Fairy.’
Mog sucked deeply on her cigarette. ‘Where – Jesus, Ol, I thought I’d lost you.’ She squeezed her daughter and tapped her bottom. ‘I’m tempted to hav
e one of those council chips injected into your rump – then at least I’d be able to scan and locate you.’
Olive smiled. ‘I thought you said those pet things were barbaric carcinogens.’
‘Effective barbaric carcinogens.’ Mog exhaled and smoke spread out in a fan over Olive’s shoulder.
‘You’re the one who hasn’t been around, Mog. Maybe I’ll have one injected in you.’
Mog took Olive’s arm and drew her into the morning room, where she stubbed out her cigarette on the rim of an empty vase. Then she pulled Olive to her chest again and stroked her hair. ‘Where did you go?’ Mog repeated. She rested her chin on her daughter’s head.
‘Away.’
Mog looked at Olive, head on a tilt. Her face was tired without lipstick. ‘Away where? It’s after eleven. No Year 7 has the Freedom of the City, Olive, even one with a mother on a Big Case. It was just awful to discover news of my only child through her friends.’
Olive studied a leaf-shaped stain on the ceiling and shook her head. ‘It’s awful to discover news of your father through his children.’
‘Father?’ A crack slid about Mog’s face. She ran her finger over the Hawke Cried Because He Lied pin on Olive’s cardigan and stiffened. ‘You’ve seen him, haven’t you?’
Olive nodded and whimpered. She had only a vague memory of black hooded eyes, a painting of slashes and a thatch of caramel-junket limbs; these details felt so remote, they were no longer real.
‘Why did you lie?’ Mog’s voice was taut.
Olive didn’t answer. She really didn’t know.
‘How?’ Mog took a breath. ‘How did you find him?’ She grated her chin along her daughter’s part and held her. ‘Oh Ol, why didn’t you trust me? He’s hopeless. Just hopeless.’
Olive looked up at her mother. ‘I don’t think he is.’