The Bit In Between (23 page)

There was a power failure that evening and Oliver sat at his laptop in the living area checking emails as the last of the sun and his battery ebbed away.

To Oliver Constantinos.

HoniarA, the Solomon ISlands.

Hello Oliver, its your mother here.

CLaudia says I dont need to tell you that because you can see MY signature but I think its courtesy dont you?

Claudia took over the classes from Valerie because Valerie has gone backpacking in Europe with a friend. Claudia is half-Brazilian half-Irish. She works part time at that restaurant on HIgh street where you got food poisoning after eating fish at Yianni's birthday dinner last year. I told her this and she thinks she remembers you. She said you seemed nice.

I WAS talking to theo vassili yesterday and he said Lydia told him that YIANNI told her that you told him that you and your friend had been fighting. If you need me to send you money for a plane ticket home tell me. Your father agrees. His prostate is fine. Did you get yours checked? Next week he is booked for a mole scan because he may have a melanoma near his nose.

This afternoon I have over-fifties pilates. I stopped going to aqua aerobics because the chlorine does not agree with my hair colour and they let small children urinate in the shallow end without punishment

Claudia says to send the email because we should be practising google. I tried to google you but nothing came up. Perhaps it is broken.

From your mother Katerina Constantinos.

Oliver frowned at the screen and made a mental note not to Skype Yianni again. He closed the email and then, after a moment's consideration, deleted it just in case.

The low battery light was flashing, but he had just one more email, from Luke, a friend from his university days. It was titled ‘Sit down before you read this'. Luke was an engineer, so he didn't mess around with small talk or unnecessary details. There were only two sentences.

Jasmine had a baby. Sorry, dude.

Oliver stared at the screen. It flickered for a moment and then went black.

He thought they'd broken up, Jasmine and Marcel. Hadn't he made them break up? But now Jasmine had a baby. He wanted to be happy, because that's what you were meant to do when people had babies. Babies were sweet and innocent and had tiny little feet they kicked about in helpless cuteness. You were supposed to be happy like Alison was about Sera's babies. You weren't supposed to imagine the baby as a tiny little thing with the fully grown face of Marcel, a red, wrinkled newborn with a mocking, leering smile. He wanted to be happy for Jasmine but he couldn't, because she was Jasmine, and Jasmine had been his first love. She had a baby now. With Marcel. And there was nothing he could do about it.

Who knows, he thought, maybe Alison would end up having a baby with Ed. She was meeting with Ed and not telling him, which meant Alison might go away, just like Jasmine had gone away, and there was nothing Oliver could do about it. There would be nothing in his future but embarrassing chance encounters with blood relatives. And he couldn't fix it, because his stupid battery was flat, and how could he possibly fix it all anyway? There was so much to fix . . .

Alison found him drinking alone under the mango tree, raindrops trickling down the branches and onto his face, illuminated by a near full moon. He was trying not to cry and failing.

‘You okay?'

‘Jasmine had a baby. She was the first person I loved and now she has a baby.'

‘Oh . . . Are you all right?'

‘I love you. I wouldn't change anything.'

‘I know.'

‘Then why am I feeling like this?'

Alison shrugged and sat down next to him. She suspected the answer was ‘because human beings are stupid and complicated', but she didn't feel this would help. She took a swig of his beer. It was warm and three-quarters of the way to flat.

‘I want to be happy but my heart won't let me. I feel like the rest of me is a grown-up but my heart refuses to be.'

Alison nodded.

‘And really, I'm just so happy,' he whispered, then burst into tears.

‘There, there,' Alison soothed. ‘There, there.'

Later, after they'd both slept and Oliver had cried some more, he had looked into her eyes.

‘I need a break from being me,' Oliver said, and Alison agreed.

The next day they got up early, packed a few items of clothing in a backpack, switched off their phones and caught a taxi to the airport, where they purchased two tickets for the next plane.

For two days they sat on a beach in Western Province letting the sun soak into their bones, doing nothing. They stayed in a small rickety guest house by the water. There was no electricity and no tourists. It was perfect.

Alison read her way through a couple of novels that had been sitting ignored beside their bed in the little blue house. Each time she finished the final pages of a book, she would lie on her back, close her eyes and think about the ending. Oliver had once told her that the end of a book was the author's way of offering their advice to the world. As she lay on the hot sand she tried to work out what each author was trying to tell her.

For someone who rarely followed advice, she had received an inordinate amount in her twenty-five years. Much of it had been from Granny Smithford, her mother's mother, including ‘Nobody marries clever', ‘Jeans are for factory workers, prostitutes and the ethnic' and ‘Girls who put their elbows on the table end up alone and unloved and throw themselves in front of trains.' Granny Smithford had been a stern, imposing woman who had strategically married up and then disdainfully watched her daughter marry down. She had for many years, often when they were within earshot, referred to Alison and Rosie as ‘the farmer's daughters'. She died, understandably, alone, and left her considerable fortune to a nervous Pomeranian called Prince Harold, who struggled with his relocation to Alison's family's farm and had died by throwing himself into the dam and declining to swim. After his elaborate funeral, a condition of Granny Smithford's will, the family had used the remainder of Prince Harold's fortune to put Alison through university and build a pool that Alison's father jokingly referred to as the ‘Prince Harold Memorial Water Feature'.

Conversely, the best advice Alison had ever received had come from a homeless woman outside Flinders Street station in Melbourne. When Alison bent down to give her some change, the woman had grabbed her arm, dark green eyes darting back and forth, then reached out with her free hand and offered Alison a scrunched-up ball of paper. Alison hesitated and the woman gave her a short nod. Thinking it was rubbish, Alison had shoved it in her pocket and only remembered it later on the train home. She withdrew it from her pocket and smoothed it out. It was an incredible drawing with intricate lines and swirls forming a complicated circular labyrinth. Little designs were etched into it, like shells, circles, stars and pyramids. She followed the pattern and realised there were words spiralling round like a snail shell. She turned the page anti-clockwise as she read:

The things you hope to see when you're looking at yourself, you won't find them in me or in anybody else.

The words had instantly moved Alison and she had stuck it above the bathroom mirror of her share house, so she would see it every morning and every night when she brushed her teeth. It had travelled with her to China and it was here in the Solomon Islands, wedged into the front of the diary she sporadically remembered to write in.

Sitting on the beach in Western province, Alison thought about the homeless woman's advice. What did she hope to see when she looked at herself? She glanced at Oliver, immersed in his writing on the Solomon Islands beach, then thought of Ed hunched over his notebook in a dirty Nanning rest house. She thought of Sera, of the office, of Rita, and then Alison realised she hadn't looked at herself in a long, long time.

Further along the beach Oliver was scribbling away in his notebook, his hand aching from the effort. It had been so long since he'd written with paper and pen that he barely remembered how. He wrote a lot of words that he hated but also some that he liked. His favourite lines had come to him as he lay on a secluded part of the beach crying pathetically into his fists:

I managed to be born and I'm pretty confident about dying. It's the bit in between I'm struggling with.

He didn't know which of his characters would say this or where it would go, but he knew it needed to be in his book.

Colonel Drakeford and Geraldine were enjoying a weekend away, lying peacefully in each other's arms on a faraway beach while the warm Pacific lapped at the dazzling white sand. They were happy. More than happy. Content.

Oliver sat back and read through what he had just written. Of course they were happy. This was the calm before the storm. He wondered if he should write a literal storm or not. That was how it always went in books. It was quiet, peaceful, people were happy, people were in love, and then BAM, something terrible had to happen, because that's how it worked. No happy endings. He lay back in the soft sand and felt it warm against his bare skin. There didn't need to be a storm, did there?

The two days passed and Oliver and Alison could no longer pretend the rest of the world didn't exist, so they boarded the small Twin Otter that would take them back to Honiara. The flight was full and they had to sit separately, Alison squeezing in beside a stout silver-haired man and Oliver in the single seat in front of her. The silver-haired man promptly fell asleep after take-off. His head lolled to one side, coming to rest on Alison's shoulder. His snores made his whole body shudder and she watched helplessly as a pool of saliva spread onto her T-shirt, like blood seeping from a gunshot wound in a movie. She gagged, praying it wouldn't make contact with her skin, then felt the soft, cool sensation on her collarbone as it did. She squeezed her eyes shut and bit down hard on her tongue. In front of her, Oliver turned to say something, noticed what was happening, and burst into noiseless laughter. Alison looked at him despairingly.

‘Help,' she mouthed.

Oliver grinned then coughed loudly. The silver-haired man jerked in his sleep and turned to the other side. Alison gave him a gentle nudge with her shoulder to help him along. She glanced down at her T-shirt. The spittle was drying in a faint round tie-dye pattern. Alison made a face. Perhaps she would burn this T-shirt when they landed. Then she realised which T-shirt it was. The I HEART MALAYSIA motif had started to fade and it was a softer shade of yellow now, after all the hand washing. She remembered the day she had bought this T-shirt, and the next few days after that and what they had meant. She remembered the coffee and kisses and the thrilling, terrifying uncertainty that accompanied them. She smiled thinking that Oliver had an identical T-shirt stuffed away in the wardrobe of the little blue house. Or maybe this was Oliver's. The two shirts had become indistinguishable and interchangeable, floating between them depending on what was clean and who had a hankering for neon yellow. She forgot about the saliva drying on her shoulder and imagined herself being buried in this T-shirt, an old woman content and fulfilled by the life she had lived. She looked at the back of Oliver's head and suddenly felt an incredible tightness in her chest as her heart filled with more love than she had ever felt before. She reached out and brushed the nape of his neck lightly with her fingers. Oliver reached up absent-mindedly and adjusted his T-shirt, not realising what had happened, and turned back to his book. Alison gazed out the window at the patchy clouds and furrowed her brow. That was Oliver, and she was Alison. They were together, but they could be separate. And Oliver had his book and she had . . . She had a lot more than she'd thought she had.