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  ‘Kim Kane absolutely nails the treacherous world of junior high school. I love Olive’s thoughts and how she is in the world.’

  Alison Lester

  ‘A gem of a novel! Poignant, funny and blissfully unsentimental, it reminds us that children live with risk and sorrow every day. Kane understands what it’s like to be standing on the outside looking in, and her ruthless depiction of the pecking order in a girls’ school is both hilarious and startling in its honesty. She treads lightly over the jagged rocks of childhood, and writes without patronising or underestimating her readers. Every perfectly chosen word and witty turn of phrase is a compliment to them.’

  Clare Renner, Professional Writing and Editing, RMIT

  First published in 2008

  Copyright © Text, Kimberley Frances Kane 2008

  Copyright © Cover illustration, Elise Hurst 2008

  www.elisehurst.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander St

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Kane, Kim

  Pip : the story of Olive / Kim Kane.

  ISBN 978 1 74175 119 2 (pbk.)

  For primary school age.

  A823.4

  Cover and text design by Georgie Wilson

  Set in 12 pt Cochin by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Map by Bruno Herfst

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For PJS

  One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons;

  A natural perspective, that is, and is not.

  William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (v, 1, 216–17)

  Contents

  1. Chicken Loaf and Chaos

  2. Pleasing Mathilda

  3. Pressed Lips and Proper Mums

  4. Metal-detecting

  5. Ditched

  6. Then Dumped

  7. The Twenty-second Day of the Month

  8. Curiouser and Curiouser

  9. Crime and In-tu-ition

  10. The ‘I’ in We

  11. Plankton or Krill

  12. Origami Massacre

  13. Bury Him

  14. History-shuffle

  15. Yellow Peril

  16. A Cut and a Clue

  17. Square One

  18. Back to Square One

  19. The Port Fairy Find

  20. Changing Places

  21. The Cabana Vegetarian

  22. May Day

  23. A Hobbit, but a Talented Hobbit

  24. Upwardly Mobile

  25. Tripping through the Garden State by Rail and Road

  26. A Map for Living

  27. The Hon. and the SAG

  28. Edges That Would Never Be Straight

  29. Daughters of Mog

  30. Silvery Moon

  31. Lost and Found

  32. The Pip in Olive

  33. Footprints Tall

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  1

  Chicken Loaf and Chaos

  Olive Garnaut looked ever so slightly like an extraterrestrial: a very pale extraterrestrial. She had long thin hair, which hung and swung, and a long thin face to match it. Her eyes were pale green and so widely spaced that if she looked out of the corners of them she could actually see her plaits banging against her bottom.

  Olive’s eyelashes and eyebrows were so very fair that they blended right into her forehead and people could only spot them if the sun caught her at a strange angle. When she stood, her feet turned out at one hundred and sixty degrees (like a ballerina in first position), and her shins were the exact colour of chicken loaf.

  It went without saying that Olive was the most peculiar-looking girl in Year 7. But what happened to Olive Garnaut was not because she looked ever so slightly like an extraterrestrial, even a very pale one.

  ‘Yer mum go and bleach yer, did she?’ said the baker every time Olive went to buy buns. ‘Those arms’d burn in two minutes at the beach.’ The baker always laughed and Olive always flushed puce to her hair roots.

  Olive liked to buy buns six at a time, even though she knew that five would probably be tossed into the compost after they had gone splotchy in the breadbin. Olive liked the baker to think that she might just be collecting buns to take home to a family full of children and noise, a family like Mathilda Graham’s.

  ‘Mrs Graham doesn’t buy her buns, she bakes them, and she certainly doesn’t let them go green in the breadbin,’ Olive would mutter near Mog.

  ‘How else would penicillin have been invented?’ Mog would respond (nursing a gin-and-tonic headache and willing to embrace mould). Mog was Olive’s mum, and Olive called her Mog because that’s the sort of family they were. But Olive called her ‘Mum’ at school – the same way she sometimes made her own sandwiches, rather than buying them from the tuckshop, and then pretended that Mog had prepared them instead. Olive would say, rather too loudly, ‘Gross, Mum’s given me cheese ’n’ gherkin spread again.’ Nobody took much notice – except Mathilda, who knew but didn’t say anything. Mathilda Graham was Olive’s best friend. Olive liked Mathilda; Mathilda liked tuck lunches.

  Mathilda was one of the only friends Olive had ever brought home. Olive lived ‘out in the sticks’ (or so Mathilda’s mum grumbled when she dropped Olive off). While Mathilda could walk to school, Olive faced a three-tram ride or a taxi. But it wasn’t just distance that made Olive reluctant to bring anybody home.

  Olive and Mog rattled around in a ramshackle house with five bedrooms, a drawing room, a sitting room, a morning room, two studies, a billiard room, a cellar, a scullery, and a room with no name that had bars on the windows because the family before them had collected stamps. The house was right near the sea and was Federation in style, which meant that it was built when Australia became a nation of states and women wore whalebone in their singlets to make them look thin. Mog always complained that it hadn’t been touched since.

  Mog liked the idea of living in a magazine house, but she didn’t have the time to be neat or the patience for interior decorators. ‘This home may look as weary as I feel, but it’s got good bones,’ she’d say. ‘Besides, I have better things to do with my time than discuss whether the kitchen would look more “of the minute” painted in butter-yellow or clotted milk.’

  Olive rather fancied the idea of their house with butter-yellow or clotted-milk walls. It would be like living in a cream tea, she thought. It could only be better than cobwebs and stains.

  While Mog did not have time for interior decorators, she did have time to look in junk shops. On special weekends, when Mog wasn’t working, Olive and Mog travelled through the country in a hire car with a driver, trawling through second-hand shops, eating tarts and searching for gems with jammy fingers. Mog swore that she would strip the gems and turn them into something new and stylish, but they both knew, somewhere not too deep down, that she never would. Consequently, Mog and Olive had a real Coolgardie safe with torn flywire; a �
�Leading Lady’ hairdryer; seventies dolls with nipped waists; and champagne saucers with bubbled glass, which they always meant to stack into a pyramid just like in an old Grace Kelly movie.

  Perhaps their most beautiful find was the Brass Eye – an antique marble, about the size of a bubblegum ball, tucked into the tip of a hollow metal stem. It was slightly longer than a lipstick and looked like a tiny squat telescope. Mog and Olive had bought it in a shop on the goldfields from a man with a tic that made him wink.

  Olive kept all of the golden bits on the Brass Eye polished with Brasso and an old tennis sock. It rattled as she rubbed it. When Olive looked through the stem of the Brass Eye, the light refracted and everything appeared in triangles and circles. If she moved towards an object, Olive could see it spliced into hundreds of pieces; if she moved away, the object shot outwards, exploding from pinpoints like choreographed fireworks or synchronised swimmers. Olive liked to point the Brass Eye at her shoes and watch as her T-bars doubled, quadrupled and then octupled while she pulled back slowly, until they finally ignited in a dazzling jumble of school socks and silver buckles.

  ‘But how does it work?’ Olive asked Mog again and again.

  ‘It’s all smoke and mirrors, Ol,’ Mog said. And, as a child, Olive had imagined that the stem of the Brass Eye rattled because it was filled with tiny mirrors and little Indians who burnt wet matchsticks and wafted smoke along the brass tube; brassy smoke to multiply Olive’s school socks and T-bar shoes.

  Unfortunately not everything was as beautiful as the Brass Eye. When Mog and Olive returned home from their junk-hunts, Mog would put the stuff down wherever there was space – and there it would usually stay. Much to Olive’s shame, the house was crowded with mountains of crap-knacks and clutter that lined the hall and cast shadows in dank piles. The piles were so high in places that she couldn’t see over them, and the dust made her wheeze. Nobody at school had to live in bedlam like that.

  ‘Mog, this chaos is deesgusting,’ Olive would say, working her way through the mess; tick-tack-toeing along record covers.

  ‘Chaos is merely order waiting to be decoded,’ Mog would respond.

  ‘Mrs Graham says that an untidy house shows an untidy mind,’ Olive would shoot back (but only ever in a whisper). As a consequence of the mess, Olive stuck to her bedroom and the kitchen – which she always kept clutter-free and tidy-minded.

  Olive liked her bedroom symmetrical. She liked things in pairs. She had two beds with matching doonas; two lampshades with sage velvet trim; and two bedside tables, each with its own box of tissues and a copy of Anne of Green Gables. Around the walls, Olive had strung chains of paper dolls holding hands. They were meant to look like the French schoolgirls in the ‘Madeline’ books, but Olive didn’t have a navy texta, so their coats were red. To make the dolls, Olive had folded the butcher’s paper carefully down the centre to ensure that their heads and hats were exactly even. Two perfect halves.

  Olive believed that everything had two perfect halves – that halves were somehow essential, oats in the porridge of life. In the body, for example, there are two eyes, two ears, two feet, two hands, two kidneys. Even tricky things like the nose and mouth are really comprised of twos (two nostrils, two rows of teeth). It wasn’t something that Olive worried about or even discussed; just something that she had noticed ever since she’d discovered she was born at 2.22 a.m. on the second of February, weighing in at a tiny 2.2 kilograms.

  ‘Cosmic,’ WilliamPetersMustardSeed had responded (well, so Mog reported after two too many wines one night). ‘We should give her a two-syllable name,’ he had added, before passing out on his second celebratory joint. Mog, awash with hormones, had obligingly called the fledgling ‘O-live’. Unfortunately, Mog had packed her bags a fortnight later when WilliamPetersMustardSeed shacked up with another woman, leaving Olive, Mog and their two-by-one family.

  But even with a perfectly symmetrical family, body and bedroom, there was always something absent with Olive – she had only ever felt half. She didn’t feel half from her waist down or from her waist up; it was more abstract than that. ‘Is the glass half-full or half-empty?’ Mog always asked. Half-full half-empty was Mog’s test for whether a person was a pessimist or an optimist. Mog was a half-full, sunny type of woman, even though the house was messy and she’d had to become a barrister because life hadn’t dealt her the hand she’d expected. But to Olive it didn’t really matter: half-full or half-empty, there was still a lot missing.

  What happened to Olive, however, wasn’t because she’d only ever felt half. It didn’t even happen because her house was full of crap-knacks and clutter, because she called her mother Mog, or because she knew of a man named WilliamPetersMustardSeed. It wasn’t because she had a peculiar relationship with the number two, or because her skin was the exact colour of chicken loaf. Although there was never any doubt that it was a shake-it-all-about hokey-pokey of all these things, what happened to Olive couldn’t have happened without Mathilda Graham.

  2

  Pleasing Mathilda

  It was Friday afternoon at the Joanne d’Arc School for Girls. Olive stood waiting for Mathilda at the gates as the grounds thinned.

  Mathilda finally emerged, a freshly brushed ponytail frizzing behind her. She looked Olive up and then down. Her gaze narrowed at Olive’s feet. ‘Why do you always stand like that? It makes you waddle – like a duck.’ Olive blushed and shuffled her toes back in together. Recently, Mathilda had started walking with a very slight pigeon toe. Olive vowed to affect a pigeon toe herself.

  Olive picked up her schoolbag and she and Mathilda set off towards the crossing.

  ‘Hey – Olive! Mathilda! Stable-West said to give these to you.’

  Lim May Yee came puffing up behind the girls, holding out two envelopes.

  Olive didn’t know Lim May Yee very well. She was a boarder and tended to stick to her kind. Lim May Yee’s name was a source of great confusion in the school. She insisted on having ‘Lim May Yee’ on the roll but she wrote ‘May Lim’ on her homework. Was she Lim? Was she May? What was with the Yee? The teachers, not knowing what to call her, settled for the whole kit ’n’ caboodle, Lim May Yee, just to be on the safe side. The boarders called her Pud.

  Lim May Yee smiled. ‘They’re just tickets for the Christmas concert – for your parents.’ She gave a short wave and ran off ahead to catch up with a group of boarders who were already across the crossing and halfway down the hill to the milk bar.

  Mathilda’s envelope bulged. She opened it – despite the fact it was addressed to her mother – and sighed. ‘I had to get six tickets even though the maximum was actually four.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Olive. She clutched her envelope with its single ticket inside. Tickets and notices were always for parents and never for parent. People assumed. Even if a girl’s parents were divorced, they assumed she had two – maybe even three or four – stuffed in different homes. Asking after a parent was as abnormal as asking somebody whether they wore bed sock or ate pea.

  Mathilda zipped her fat wad of tickets into her schoolbag and the girls stepped onto the crossing. ‘Do you mind if I stay?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Olive grinned and her tummy soared.

  Mathilda liked aspects of Olive’s house. Mog had arranged accounts at the newsagency and the chemist and Olive was allowed to put whatever she wanted on them. Mathilda thought that was marvellous. Mathilda also thought Mog’s nail polish collection was marvellous, and the girls had spent most of Grade 6 painting each nail on their hands and toes a different shade of red. For French cosmetics and air-freighted magazines, Mathilda was willing to put up with any amount of chaos and clutter.

  ‘Can we catch a taxi home?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Olive, who usually did.

  ‘Here,’ said Mathilda. ‘Pass me your phone. I’ll call.’

  Olive had her own mobile with her own plan. Mathilda wasn’t even allowed pre-paid, but Olive always let her text, whenever she wanted.

  Olive exca
vated the phone from her bag. Mathilda punched a few buttons and it burst into song. ‘What’s that ringtone?’ Mathilda scrunched her nose and stuffed the phone up her sleeve to dull the metallic chirping. She looked over both shoulders.

  ‘It’s a virus and I don’t know how to get rid of it.’ Olive blushed again. This was not actually true. Olive knew exactly how to get rid of it, because she’d put it on; it was Johanna’s bird song from the musical Sweeney Todd.

  Olive loved musicals. Sometimes, when Mog had the night off, they would sit through double features at an old cinema with cracked leather seats, watching Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Girl and Cabaret. On the way home, Mog and Olive would swing their arms, click their heels, and bellow out all the words. Those movies made Olive tinkle; they made her feel like she could fly.

  ‘Hmm, I just love Fridays,’ said Mathilda once the chirping had stopped and she’d called a taxi. She popped Olive’s phone in her bag.

  ‘Why?’ asked Olive, deeply relieved that the subject of the ringtone had been abandoned (even if her phone had been appropriated in the process).

  ‘Olive. Der! Because there’s such a stretch until school again.’ Mathilda studied her shoes while they walked, obviously irritated that her mother had once again polished over the carefully cultivated scuff marks.

  ‘Oh, me too. Love Fridays,’ said Olive, but she didn’t sound very convincing. Olive studied her own T-bars, which shone in the afternoon light. As she walked, she tried to keep her feet at least parallel to the curb.

  It was strange, but Olive had never actually thought about enjoying weekends. Unless she was hanging out with Mathilda, she usually just sat around waiting for class again, waiting to chat. Sometimes Olive was so bored that she became completely inert: arms leaden and lips thick. On those days (usually Sundays), Olive felt too heavy to move from the couch; she couldn’t even pick up her paints. She’d just sit there, listening to the hum of the beach market down the street, as blank as the pages of the watercolour pad on her lap.