Pip: The Story of Olive (20 page)
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
de
fi
nitely
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.’
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.
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
Victorian 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.
