The Bit In Between (27 page)

‘Ah, the young man who stopped the show!'

‘Sorry about that,' Oliver mumbled. ‘I had a good cry. I'm okay now.'

‘Yes, I find most things tend to be solved with a good cry.' The high commissioner gave him an understanding smile.

‘I also threw up.'

The high commissioner shrugged. ‘That too. Any bodily evacuation, really, tends to improve the mood immensely.'

‘It was in your pool. I'm sorry.'

The high commissioner's face broke momentarily before he resumed his diplomat's smile. ‘Not to worry.'

‘I'm going to go now,' Oliver said sheepishly.

At Rick's urging, Alison agreed to go home with Oliver. She refused to speak to him that night, but she let him sleep in the bed. It could have been better but it could have been worse.

The next morning Oliver woke early with a throbbing headache. Alison was still asleep, curled up in a tight ball. He crept out of bed in search of water. After downing several glasses, he decided against going back to bed and instead opened up his laptop to check his email.

Dear Oliver,

I can only write a little because Michelle is teaching us how to attach photos to emails. Michelle has replaced Claudia, who has a new work roster and can't take classes anymore. I don't know where Michelle is from but it seems she doesn't shave her armpit hair.

Your father's mole is fine, though the doctor suggested he get his cholesterol checked as he is in the high risk age bracket. He eats too much fat but what can I do? I told him he's making an early widow of me but he won't listen.

I'm worried about you, Ollie. A mother can sense these things, and Yianni dropped by the other day. Remember, you are my baby boy and there is nothing you can do that will ever make me stop loving you. You are going to make mistakes and hurt people and hurt yourself. Remember, we Greeks invented both comedy and tragedy.

I have an over-fifties zumba class this afternoon. I've stopped pilates because that nice doctor from Oprah said zumba is a better overall body work out.

Mrs Foster from down the road died the other week and there are new tenants so we're going to take them a casserole tonight. I hope they maintain the garden better than she did.

From your mother.

He stared at the screen. There, amidst the trivia and the gossip, the worries and complaints, was the most profound and freeing thing his mother had ever said to him. He noticed there was an attachment. He clicked on it, revealing a picture of his mother sitting primly at a computer desk. She'd removed her glasses, something she did for every photo, as if trying to create an altered historical record of herself in which she had twenty-twenty vision. Her hands were folded neatly in front of her and she wore her best Vaseline-on-teeth-juvenile-beauty-queen smile. Oliver felt his heart collapse in his chest and he wanted in that moment more than anything to be sitting beside her on the couch while his father snored in the nearby recliner and she spoilt the endings of movies he'd yet to finish watching. He didn't want to be an adult anymore and for the first time in a long time all he wanted was his mum. So he pressed ‘reply' and wrote an email in which he told his mum how much he loved her and how he wouldn't want anyone else in her place, and he pressed ‘send' knowing that when she read it she would sit quietly, her mouth forming a tight, straight line, then briskly print and fold it, putting it in her purse. Once home she would sit down at the dining room table to read it again, and this time it would make her cry and she would then go clean something, because this is what she did when she was overcome with emotion. And she wouldn't show his father, or anyone else for that matter. No one would know but the two of them.

There was the sound of movement in the bedroom and Alison shuffled out wearily, wiping sleep from her eyes. She drew a big glass of water from the kitchen tap, drank it, filled it again and then came and sat on the couch. She stared at him wordlessly. Oliver took a deep breath.

‘Do you love me?' he asked softly.

‘Of course I do,' she replied hoarsely.

‘Wait. That's the wrong question. Do you like me?'

Alison paused. She couldn't answer that. Oliver stared at his hands.

‘Why do you love me?' he asked.

Alison took a slow, purposeful sip of water and then rested the glass on the coffee table. ‘Why is a terrible question. It's unanswerable for the most part.'

Oliver looked at her earnestly. ‘I've given you everything. What's left to give?'

Alison's eyes filled with tears. She could do nothing but shrug pathetically.

‘What can I do? For you. Or Sera, or Rick. I could write things. Good things for everyone. For all of us.'

‘You don't get it. That's not the point.'

Oliver's eyes were wide. ‘The grant. You could get the grant.'

Alison looked at him gently. ‘We got the grant.'

‘What?'

‘I didn't tell you. We got it. Sera, Janet and I. We got it.'

Oliver sunk into the couch, his shoulders slumped.

‘Some things need to be mine,' Alison said softly.

She moved along the couch so that they were shoulder to shoulder, barely touching. Oliver nodded. Fear was rising up inside him, things twisting out of his control. He had no idea what this meant, for him or for her. He turned to Alison.

‘I love you and I trust you and I only want you.'

Her mouth trembled and she nodded. ‘Me too.'

Then they hugged and everything felt a little better. Not perfect, but not terrible.

That afternoon Alison went into town to pick up ingredients for dinner while Oliver stayed home and wrote. He had reached the final chapter of his manuscript. Words were pouring out of him now, and in the elation that he felt at having finally resolved the troubles in their relationship, he found the sentences and phrases he needed to resolve the fate of his characters.

He paused and thought of Alison and the small smile she had given him when she'd left that day. The smile that belonged to him alone. Then he found Ludwig, the Ed character, and wrote him onto the first plane out of the Solomon Islands. That took care of Ludwig, he thought triumphantly, that took care of Ed.

And then, in the space of an hour, typing with the speed of demon, Oliver spun together the strands of his story and brought it to a close. It might not have been the ending he'd thought it would have, and it certainly wasn't the ending he felt it should have, but it was the ending he wanted it to have, and he was the author, after all.

Oliver saved the final document and then pressed print. When it was ready, he laid the printed manuscript down on the table and looked at it proudly. His baby. The first look at his baby. It had taken him nine long months, but finally it was here.

To celebrate, Oliver headed into town to pick up a bottle of outrageously expensive sparkling to surprise Alison with that night. He walked along the road smiling to himself and broke out in a spontaneous whistled tune.

As she left the supermarket, Alison hefted the recycled grocery bag over her shoulder. She took the shortcut through the shops, past the place that sold barbecue chicken and rice, beyond the place that did passport photos. She turned up the next street and headed in the direction of the little blue house.

‘Coops!'

She whirled around. Ed was coming out of Bulk Store with a packet of red lentils in his hand.

‘Coops!' He jogged over to her. ‘Hi!'

‘Hi,' she said and shifted the bag of groceries protectively in front of her.

‘I'm glad I saw you,' Ed said, panting slightly. ‘I wanted to say something.'

‘It's not another poem?' Alison replied.

‘Ha, no,' Ed chuckled. ‘What I wanted to say is this: I'm sorry. For everything. For how I treated you. For China. For getting so caught up in me. Seeing you here made me think about things, about us. I mean, what are the chances of us turning up on the same Pacific island?'

Alison thought about Geraldine and Ludwig, of Oliver's self-conviction. Ed pushed on.

‘I've missed you.' He leant forward and took her hand. ‘Meet me tonight?'

She shook her hand free. ‘No.'

‘Why?'

She didn't respond.

‘Meet me tonight.'

He gave her a small smile – the one he did when he forgot to act like Ed – and then walked off.

Alison took a deep breath, tried to calm her heart, and continued on her way home. She didn't know what to do. She wanted Oliver. She wanted to hug him and smell his familiar scent and hide in his arms where everything would be all right. But when she got home Oliver wasn't there. Instead, she found a printed version of his manuscript. Alison stared at it. There it was. Everything he had been working so hard for. Just sitting there.

She had read very little of Oliver's work so far, just the occasional scene here or there. He wanted it to be well polished before she saw it, before he let her judge the stuff that came out of his soul. Against her better judgement, Alison sat down at the desk and picked up the manuscript. She looked over her shoulder, then turned the cover page and started reading.

As she leafed through the early chapters, Alison soon realised that what she was reading was her life – their story – twisting and turning in the exact same pattern, as if Oliver had glued her history onto the page for everyone to see, a thinly veiled, shadowy version of reality. She started skimming ahead, and it was all there. Her. Oliver. Rick. Sera. Even Ed, or Ludwig, who Oliver had sent packing back to Australia. And then she got to the end and she discovered that Oliver's plane crash was gone. In its place was Colonel Drakeford and Geraldine's happily ever after. They got married. They had babies. He had given their story a fairytale ending.

Alison sat, her body numb, forgetting to breathe. When she remembered, she calmly stood up, grabbed her bag, keys and phone, and walked out the front door.

When Oliver returned he called out a happy hello to what he soon found was an empty house. He glanced around the rooms and then realised that his manuscript had been touched. It sat messy and open in two piles on the desk. His heart sank. So Oliver waited. He sat at his desk and waited. Her mobile was off, so he waited. Night came and darkness fell and he waited. He eventually nodded off, still waiting, his head resting on his arms on the desk.

He woke up to the sound of things crashing. He glanced at his watch in confusion – just after midnight. Alison was in the kitchen hurling utensils across the room and up-ending drawers.

‘What are you doing?' he cried out. ‘Where have you been?'

Alison stared at him with angry eyes.

‘Where do you think I've been?' she said darkly.

Oliver's whole body sagged. ‘But I put him on a plane . . .'

‘It's my life. How dare you!' she hissed. She threw the saucepan she was holding at the wall. It made a loud crash and then thudded to the floor.

Oliver looked at her with desperate eyes. ‘Why? I thought you were happy . . .'

She stopped, frying pan held aloft, trembling furiously.

‘Because I feel like I don't have any control over anything anymore. Because you took that from me – my choice – and you made it yours. Everything that was mine was actually yours. And it was probably the wrong fucking thing to do, but at least I made that decision. You didn't write it or predict it or whatever the hell is going on here. I made the decision. Because other than this, I have nothing.' She screamed the last part.

He looked at her with pained eyes. ‘I was going to ask you to marry me.'

‘I know. I read the ending. Your new happily-ever-after, no-plane-crash ending.' Alison scowled at him. ‘What happened to reality? What happened to telling the true story? You're cheating yourself. Lying to yourself. You think you can just shape and manipulate things as you like.'

‘But I love you. And I just want your happiness. Why is that wrong?'