The Bit In Between (11 page)

‘What happened?'

‘I'm out. I was barely in, but now I'm definitely out.'

He patted her on the head. ‘There, there.'

Alison squirmed. ‘I mean, I know I'm not everyone's cup of tea. I'm more like . . . what's that one that smells like smoked bacon?'

Oliver had no idea what she was talking about. He told her so.

‘Well, I'm more like that. I'm the tea that smells like smoked bacon and no one wants it.'

She gnawed on the spoon. ‘But, I mean, someone must want it or else why would they keep selling it? I just need to find my customers.'

Oliver glanced at his computer, all the while nodding sympathetically.

‘What about Sera? Isn't she your friend?'

And Alison realised that maybe, just maybe, she had already found the person who wants the tea that smells like smoked bacon.

As the second month rolled into the third, Oliver's days were becoming a blur, each the same as the next. Wake, eat, write, maybe leave the house to go buy fruit from the market, or pick up a copy of the
Solomon Star
from outside the bank, or a coffee from Lime Lounge, where he sometimes saw Alison deep in conversation with Sera, or Rick, who seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time having meetings over coffee with tired-looking men and women in suits. The book was slowly, word by word, taking shape, but his world had lost all sense of time. Apart from the occasional email from his publisher, enquiring in an increasingly anxious tone when she would be sent something, there was nothing to help him keep track of the days and weeks.

Alison came home every day after her English lessons with Sera full of stories and snippets of gossip for him. Sera had recently asked Alison for help updating her résumé as she was thinking about looking for part-time work. Alison had spent an afternoon adjusting and editing and making Sera sound too good to turn down, then came home and told Oliver all about it. The following week Sera brought along a cousin who had recently graduated from university and needed help with applications for accounting jobs. The next time they met it was another cousin, who wanted to apply for a scholarship to a university in Australia, and Alison helped her decipher the complicated forms. Back at the little blue house, Oliver listened with interest, and suddenly Geraldine became the go-to-person for helping Mary and her friends fill in forms.

‘The cabinet aren't happy with the prime minister,' Alison informed him one day. ‘Sera's husband is going to switch to the opposition and demand a vote of no confidence.' Two days later she returned home with the news that Sera's husband had been offered the forestry portfolio in exchange for his continued allegiance to the current government. This too had gone into the book, and Mary's husband, a minister in the newly formed inaugural government of the independent Solomon Islands, was offered a better ministry in order to remain on side with the government. As Oliver's story unfolded, the lives of Alison, Sera, Mary and Geraldine became so thoroughly intertwined that he often forgot which parts he had made up and which he had lifted from the real world.

One morning Alison set off to meet Sera in a café in White River, at the western end of Honiara. Another cousin was about to attend a job interview with one of the NGOs and wanted Alison to run a mock interview. Geraldine did the same, though Oliver had to invent a new location for the scene, as the café certainly didn't date back to Independence. He was happily banging away at the keyboard when Alison walked in a few hours later looking flustered.

‘You'll never guess what happened to me in White River.'

Oliver looked up from his laptop. ‘Something happened?'

‘Yeah, I was mugged. Some guy came out of nowhere, shoved me, then pulled my bag off my shoulder. I lost everything – my money, my phone, my keys.'

Alison sat down heavily on the couch and rested her head on the coffee table.

‘You got mugged?'

‘Yes.'

‘In White River?'

‘Yeah.'

‘You sure?'

Alison raised her head and gave him a look. ‘Of course I'm sure. I'm okay, too, by the way.'

‘No, yeah, sorry, I'm glad you're okay. It's just . . .'

‘Just what?'

‘Just' – Oliver looked at his laptop screen – ‘just that I wrote that.'

Alison glared at him. ‘What are you talking about?'

‘I wrote that.' He pointed at his laptop. ‘Today. That's what I wrote. Geraldine went to White River and her bag was stolen. Was Sera with you?'

‘No, it was before we met.'

‘It was before Geraldine met up with Mary.'

Alison stared at him for a moment. ‘Seriously? Well, that's a bit freaky. But I mean, White River is a pretty dodgy place, so it's not completely unprecedented that this would happen'

Oliver nodded, but he still looked concerned.

‘What? You think you made it happen? Some kind of voodoo black magic?' Alison laughed.

Oliver's brow furrowed for a moment but then he smiled. ‘No. It's just a bit of a crazy coincidence.'

‘Yeah.' Alison nodded. She stared into space for a moment and then smiled. ‘Hey, Oliver.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Next time make me win the lottery.'

He smiled and turned back to his work. He looked relaxed on the outside but inside his heart was still fluttering around. He felt guilty, which was completely ridiculous. Muggings were common in White River, and yet the coincidence still unnerved him. It was definitely a story to tell people once the book was published, a book tour type yarn . . .

Alison lay down on the couch and sighed.

‘He was young, the guy who mugged me. Really young and he looked absolutely terrified,' she said. ‘I think he was more frightened than I was. He looked so scared and unhappy about what he was doing that I almost felt sorry for him.'

Phillip had planned to get a scholarship to Australia or New Zealand in order to make something of himself. He was a good student, one of the ones who actually enjoyed learning. At night after studying he would lie in bed and map out his future in his head: university, return to the Solomons and get a good job, work hard, move up the ladder and one day be in the position to make a real difference in his country. Then, one night not long after his form six exams, Phillip and some of the other kids had gotten drunk celebrating, and a couple of months later Judy's brothers had turned up at his house and told him that Judy was pregnant and he had to marry her. And because Phillip was a quiet, obedient boy who never questioned anything, he did as he was told, and several months later he was a father. Phillip moved to Honiara to find work, but work refused to be found, so Phillip, like so many other young men, was forced to make his own work. And instead of studying alongside expatriates, he now found himself stealing their bags.

Alison sighed again, more dramatically this time. ‘I'll have to spend the next week and half trying to replace everything that was stolen.' She rubbed her temples, anticipating the work ahead. Oliver started tap-tap-tapping at his laptop again, imagining the terrified eyes of the young man.

Alison's eyes flicked open and she rolled over. ‘Ollie, I know you're working but can I put some music on? I'd like my brain to shut up for a little bit.'

Oliver looked at her tired face. He still felt strangely guilty about the mugging. ‘Yeah, of course. I'm probably due for a break anyway.'

He saved his work then opened iTunes and set it to shuffle. He crossed the room and Alison made space for him on the couch. The two of them lay there, legs jumbled together, listening to the music. After a couple of minutes the track changed and a new song started. Alison felt Oliver's body stiffen.

‘What?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Nothing nothing.'

But Oliver didn't reply. He wasn't sure how this song was still on his computer. He thought he had deleted it. It was Jasmine's song. Fucking Jasmine's song.

They had been best friends throughout university, and then one day in their final year Oliver had finally told her he loved her and they had dated for several months before she ended it unexpectedly, saying she didn't want a relationship, not with him, not now. The next week she had met the man of her dreams. And because they had promised to still be friends, Oliver had gone to her wedding, made a speech because she had asked him to, and lied and said he was happy for them both, for Jasmine and Marcel. Then Marcel's band performed a song Marcel had written especially for his new bride. Oliver had watched as the two of them locked eyes and were transported to a place where no one – not any of the wedding guests or the band or the wait staff – existed, and Oliver felt like the biggest voyeuristic third wheel in history. And suddenly Oliver had felt intensely angry as his heart demanded to know why she hadn't been able to look at him like that when this was how he'd seen her for years. His brain was flooded with the image of her the morning after he had declared his love, lying naked, half-awake in her single college residence bed, her eyes searching space as they processed the events of the previous evening before a soft smile spread across her face and she rolled over to greet him. And Oliver had returned her smile, his heart soaring with the release of three years of love secreted away. Then the song had ended and Oliver had pushed through the wedding crowd to the bar and drunk a fair amount of the house red, and then woken up under a park bench in the Fitzroy Gardens. The wedding had been in St Kilda, which left five suburbs and the entire CBD unaccounted for and didn't explain why Oliver had later found a half-smeared lipstick drawing of a dragon on his back.

Not long after this, the song had come onto the radio one day while Oliver was driving and he'd had to pull the car over into the emergency lane on the Eastern Freeway to sob uncontrollably until a police car pulled up behind him and an anxious young officer strode self-consciously up to his car. Oliver had wound down the window, taken a shuddering sniff and pointed to the radio. ‘My ex-girlfriend.' The young officer had listened for a moment and then his eyes welled up before he rammed his sunglasses on. He'd turned around swiftly and without saying a single word had gone back to his patrol car and driven away.

Later Oliver had downloaded the song (illegally, which gave him a minor sense of satisfaction) and listened to it on repeat for two sullen hours. Each rotation reminded him of how certain he'd been that he and Jasmine would end up together and that she'd never stop wanting him.

He thought he'd deleted it, but clearly he hadn't.

Beside him on the couch Alison looked over with concern. ‘Ollie, are you ok?'

He didn't say anything but sat up and walked back to his laptop. He sat down and started typing.

‘I loved her, dammit,' Colonel Drakeford cried, his fist striking the table between them. ‘But she could never love a man such as me.'

Geraldine's brow was knitted with concern. ‘What happened to her?'

‘She met another man,' Drakeford said, eyes dark with remembering.

‘Dreadful,' Geraldine consoled him. ‘I'll fetch us gins, shall I?'

She did, and Drakeford drank at his like a man dying of thirst.

‘She came back,' he said, his voice now hard. ‘Spurned and remorseful, pleading for me to take her back.'

‘And then what?' Geraldine's voice was barely a whisper.

‘I refused her,' Drakeford replied simply, and in his mind he relived the vision of that broken woman wretchedly walking away from his life forever.

As the words left his fingers Oliver felt instantly better. At least he could use the pain to write something useful.

That night he went to sleep content and the next day continued working until Alison returned home from her weekly excursion to the post office. There was another letter from his mother, whose capacity for correspondence was prodigious.

Oliver tossed aside the photo of yet another cheerful-looking young lady posing in a garden and unfolded the letter. The first thing his mother mentioned was that she had seen Jasmine's mother in the supermarket and that Jasmine and Marcel were living opposite lives in opposite parts of Melbourne and would he, Oliver, like her phone number? The letter made Oliver's spine do shivery things. First the mugging and now this. His brain started screaming, trying to blurt out fantastical reasons why these things were happening. Perhaps he'd overheard some snatch of conversation whilst back in Melbourne and forgotten it until now. Or maybe it was just the reality that so many marriages ended in divorce so it wasn't that bizarre that Jasmine's might too. For one brief moment his brain departed the rational and he stared at his fingers in wonder, as if they wielded some great unexplained magic, but he swiftly chased this thought away. And then it all became too much to think about, because it was Jasmine – JASMINE – and he couldn't deal with the what-ifs and maybes when Alison was right there in front of him.