Free Pip: The Story of Olive by Kim Kane

sniffing it first like Mrs Graham. It smelt a bit off, but milk always smelt a bit off, so Olive poured it into a gravy boat (which was practically a milk jug) and mixed some Quik in. The girls sat down to big bowls of cereal and strawberry milk.
    ‘Gross,’ said Pip. ‘Sultanas. I hate sultanas. Wrinkly rabbit turds.’ Pip began extracting the sultanas from her bowl and putting them on the table, where they joined Olive’s in a wrinkly rabbit-turd mountain.
    ‘Why’s this so scrunched?’ Pip had picked Olive’s self-portrait from the top of her schoolbag and smoothed it out on the table. The face was still too small for the piece of paper on which it floated. Olive grabbed it from her.
    ‘Don’t. It’s dreadful,’ she muttered, crumpling the picture and grinding it into the palm of her hand. She was embarrassed Pip had seen it. It was like somebody seeing something private – knickers with a poo-streak or worm tablets on camp.
    ‘It looked okay to me. Well, obviously until you destroyed it.’
    Olive took a breath and concentrated on pulling together a smile. ‘Would you like a tour?’ she asked in her brightest kitchen-wipe voice.
    The girls pushed through the house. Pip barged in front of her sister, squealing as she bumped into the piles of crap-knacks. Olive ran behind her, trying to steady the towers of junk. Those she couldn’t save toppled with a thud, taking others down in their wake like massive dominos. Dust ballooned up in clouds, glinting in the light.
    ‘Watch it.’ Olive was starting to think about the logistics of having somebody to stay. The house was big, but with all of Mog’s stuff, there wasn’t much room left.
    Pip looked around at the chaos. ‘Why doesn’t Mog have a servant or something? You know, a cleaner or even a nanny?’
    ‘For political reasons. I did actually have a babysitter ages ago, but it didn’t work out.’
    Olive’s babysitter had been called Sarah Afar. Sarah Afar couldn’t drive, and she’d hated Olive almost as much as she’d hated public transport. Sarah was a student and a D-grade actor. The first time she babysat Olive, she had hobbled in the front door scrunched over a walking cane. Olive was appalled.
    Mog had looked at Olive’s stricken face and mouthed the words ‘method actor’ over Sarah’s shoulder. Olive had laughed. She knew all about method actors from Mog. They were actors who got themselves so wrapped up in their roles that they behaved like the person they were playing, twenty-four seven. The end result was that Olive never knew what Sarah Afar would be like – it depended entirely on what play she was in.
    ‘A-choooooooo. Aaaaa-choooooooo,’ sneezed Pip from the billiard room. ‘Check this out.’
    Olive made her way over to Pip, whose face was hidden under the lip of a velvet riding hat.
    ‘That’s Mog.’ Olive pointed to a poster leaning up against a stack of boxes. In it, Mog was dressed in a turban, her skin stained blue like the god Krishna. Her eyes looked big and navy. Olive loved it because Mog looked so flamboyant. She had been an actor in her student days, and posters from the plays in which she had featured – some framed, some unframed, all sticky with dust – lined the hall.
    ‘Wow,’ said Pip. ‘She’s so beautiful.’
    ‘I know. She’s a bit wacko, but she can be fun.’
    Pip took the riding hat off her head and wrapped a gold-threaded sari around her neck. Silk billowed behind her. She flapped a straw around her face and pretended to suck on it like a cigarette in a holder. ‘Ahh darlink.’ Pip sniffed artfully. ‘MMMMmm, place those roses with the others in my changing room. Oh, and fetch me a martini – generous on the gin, light on the olives.’
    Olive smiled.
    In the evening light, Pip looked strange, but it wasn’t only the sari silk. At first they had seemed a perfect double, and Olive had thought Pip could be her doppelgänger – go to school in her place, go to the dentist, go to swimming