Pip: The Story of Olive by Kim Kane Page A

coloured in by reference to Mog. But it was unclear if Mog and Mustard Seed were like skinny Jack Sprat who ate no fat and his wife who ate no lean, or if they were both, in fact, Jack Sprats.
    From the pieces she had, Olive couldn’t picture whether he was a noisy honker of a man who would have been banned from attending netball matches for overzealous parental support, or whether he was a barrel-chested partygoer in an open shirt, telling stories with a glass of red wine. Maybe he was the sort of person to talk loudly about shares on his mobile phone in public places. ‘Sell, sell, sell.’
    It was always possible that he wore a navy fisherman’s cap, walked a Westie and smelt of rum and tuna, with scars on his hands from oyster shells – or perhaps he was more like the personal trainers who urged panting women around the park: ‘I’ve got clients twice your age who could run rings around you.’ He could have resembled the school gardener, a man with dirt that would never wash out of the lines in his palms and manure scraped up the back of his King Gees. Or perhaps he was like Hugh Jackman (the only actor Mog had ever declared very handsome ), or a crier like Prince Frederick at the Danish Royal Wedding.
    Whenever Olive noticed a man on the street or in the newspaper, she added him to her mental catalogue of possible Mustard Seeds, until he managed to be a jumble of everything: a netball-supporting gardener who drank wine, traded stocks over his mobile, danced, and cried in Danish.
    A while later – when her glass of painting water had turned the colour of a grape milkshake – Olive’s quiet was interrupted.
    ‘Olive, c’mon, where are the photos? There must be some and I can’t find them anywhere.’
    Olive moaned. Pip was as persistent as a terrier. ‘There’s only a very old album with photos of me and Mog. He’s not there, Pip. I know because I’ve checked a trillion times.’
    Pip, however, promised that she would leave Olive to paint in peace if Olive indulged her this one time.
    Olive snuck past the study. The door was open and it was chaotic. Mog’s desk featured an in-tray for documents she had yet to get to, and an out-tray for documents that she had completed. The trays were piled with cigarette lighters, wads of unpaid bills and orphaned high heels, but Mog said they gave her the impression that she had a system; that she could be organised if she wanted to be. And that, Mog said, was important.
    Mog was stooped over a document with her chin tucked into her neck. Just seeing Mog hunched like that made Olive stand tall. She dragged the album up from under the coffee table in the lounge room and headed towards her room.
    ‘Ol?’ There was a thud as a pile of Mog’s books rolled backwards off her desk. ‘Bugger! Olive?’
    Olive froze. She could see Mog through the open door. The album was too big to hide behind her back, so she dropped it and stood on it. Her heart thrashed against her ribs. Mog stopped reading and looked up, an unlit cigarette poised between her first two fingers, which were held in an elegant V for victory (appropriate as she always won her cases). ‘Ol, can you grab me a lighter?’ Mog took off her glasses and rubbed the crease between her eyebrows. ‘I’d also kill for a coffee.’ Olive watched as Mog’s fingernail tapped the desk. It was long and nicotine-yellow.
    ‘Sure,’ said Olive, so relieved that she forgot to reprimand Mog for the minutes of her life that she was puffing away.
    Olive left the the album on the floor and headed to the kitchen. When she returned, Mog was unloading bundles of briefs tied with hot-pink ribbon. ‘I almost forgot to tell you. I met a parent of a friend of yours yesterday.’
    ‘You did?’ Olive was confused. So far as she knew, she didn’t have any friends except Pip, who was family and didn’t count.
    ‘He’s the instructing solicitor on this case. Smith, Jason Smith. Nice man. Earnest but smart – his two girls are at