The Bit In Between (5 page)

She threw pebbles at his window that night, brazen but uncaring. There was a thrilling
silent kiss beneath
the
gibbous moon
, then another, and another.
By the second night Oliver had convinced himself things were turning around for him – 
he
had forgotten his heart was meant to be irreversibly broken – and by the fourth he felt so peaceful he'd mistakenly fallen asleep in her arms by the river and awoke to a village delighted by scandal.

‘She is your cousin,' Costa explained, momentarily enjoying the levity before burdening himself with the task of notifying Oliver's yiayia of her grandson's embarrassment. But while Costa and the rest of the village were laughing, Oliver's yiayia belonged to a Cyprus long gone, and took the anecdote as a chainsaw of shame to the branch of the ancestral tree she now oversaw. And soon enough there was the phone call that would see him on the next available plane to Melbourne to bury his yiayia.

The night before his flight there had been one moment, unexpected and unplanned, when Oliver had awoken at midnight with the dull thud of a headache and rifled through the drawers of his theo's guestroom looking for painkillers. He lifted a bunch of papers that mocked him with letters he couldn't understand, finding beneath them an old tattered photo. Tea-coloured marks stained the edges, creeping determinedly inwards to the centre, where a group of dark-haired people smiled jubilantly at the camera. He turned the photo over. There was a date – 1955.

He flipped the photo over again and looked at the image. In the middle of the group were two young men with familiar eyes staring defiantly back: his papou and Dimitri. The other people, who shared their eyes and strong jawlines, must have been their family. The photo would have been taken not long before his papou had left for Australia. Not long before Dimitri died.

Oliver searched the other faces but recognised none. He knew he was looking at the faces of his ancestors, of those who had come before him, but he did not really know anything about a single person in this photo. He ran his fingers over their faces and realised with a sudden chill that they were all inside him, all a part of him, their histories and genetic peculiarities running through the very structure of his cells. He felt he should cry but found himself smiling instead. He sat there alone in the moonlight in his theo's guestroom, shamed by scandal and mourning the death of his yiayia, beaming to himself like a fool.

The next day the mountains were alive with the vibrant colours of wildflowers, waving goodbye to him as his theo drove him the one-hour trip to Larnaca Airport. The country of his ancestors burst with pinks and yellows and reds and Oliver was in ruins. He had come to Cyprus to discover who he was and where he was going and was leaving more uncertain than ever.

The morning of Oliver's yiayia's funeral was dappled with a Melbourne sun so radiant it seemed unfair considering the circumstances.

Alison was rummaging through her backpack tossing clothes onto the floor. She made a face. ‘I thought I had something appropriate in here, but the only black thing I have is this.'

She held up a strapless sundress that looked like it had spent several weeks damp and balled up in the bottom of her bag.

‘Do you think . . .?'

Oliver shook his head vigorously.

Alison hadn't attended the trisagion at the funeral parlour the night before, which was for immediate family only, but Oliver had described to her later the horrible feeling of hovering over his yiayia's open casket and kissing her forehead as the priest chanted prayers. It had felt like kissing marble, he'd told her, and Alison had wrapped her arms around him.

Now she shimmied into the crumpled dress and frowned at herself in the mirror.

‘OLIVAAAAAA! WE'RE GOING! OMIGAWD!'

They both spun around to see Vicky standing wide-mouthed at the door.

‘She can't wear that!' Vicky looked scandalised. ‘It's the wrong black.'

As if on cue, Christina stuck her head through the door. ‘Oh no, that's the wrong black.' Then she disappeared from sight.

Alison glanced at Oliver and mouthed, ‘The wrong black?'

He shook his head ruefully. For Greeks, the wearing of black was a serious business. Wars had been fought and families split over the wrong hue worn at the wrong occasion.

Eventually the seven of them crammed into Mick and Christina's tired Tarago, Alison swimming in an old maternity dress of Christina's.

‘I only have the one funeral dress,' Christina apologised, motioning to her own outfit, ‘And all the other blacks were wrong.'

Alison clung to Oliver's side as they solemnly filed in through the grand wooden doors of the Greek Orthodox Church. It seemed that half of the elderly Greeks in Melbourne had dusted off their shadowy funeral outfits for the service. The black, Alison noted, was a consistent tone. Oliver led her into the ornate building and she copied him as he lit a candle then leant over a large icon of Mary and Jesus cased beneath plastic.

‘Kiss it,' he whispered.

Alison bent forward. The plastic was smeared with the outline of a hundred previous kisses. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and kissed the plastic. It tasted like lipstick and she gagged slightly.

‘Don't actually kiss it, just kind of hover,' Oliver whispered and Alison cursed his timing.

‘Oliver!'

Alison looked up to see a short, immaculately dressed woman bustling towards them. The woman cast a critical eye over Alison before burying herself in Oliver's arms. Oliver wrapped her in a tight hug.

‘This is my mother, Katerina.'

Alison waited until the woman had uncoiled herself from Oliver and smoothed her dark hair back into the bun it had tried to flee. Alison stuck out her hand.

‘Hello, Katerina. I'm Alison. How are you?'

Oliver's mother gave her a look. ‘We're burying my mother today, dear. It's not a great day for the family.'

Oliver touched her arm lightly, comfortingly.

‘Should we go sit down, Mum?'

Katerina nodded sternly, adjusting a pair of expensive looking glasses. ‘Yes. We're up there with your father.'

Oliver took a step towards the aisle and Alison followed.

‘Not you, dear. Immediate family only. Sorry, but this is our way,' Katerina explained.

Oliver swallowed a frown, surveying the busy church. ‘Who can she sit with?'

Katerina followed his gaze noncommittally. ‘She can go sit with Eleussa.'

Alison's eyes bulged and she stared at the coffin at the front of the room.

‘She means my cousin Eleussa, not Yiayia,' Oliver said quietly and pointed to a young woman sitting by herself towards the back of the church. Oliver's mother arched an immaculate brow and nodded.

As she set off towards Eleussa, Alison heard Katerina admonish her son. ‘She's wearing the wrong black.'

Alison didn't end up seated beside Eleussa, though. En route she found herself seized by a tiny ancient woman, her face a sea of wrinkles, and guided towards a pew. The old woman didn't seem to be with anyone in particular, and no one acknowledged her. For a moment Alison wondered if she had perhaps been wandering down the street and decided to duck in for the service. The old woman sat Alison down beside her and held her arm, softly stroking the back of her hand. It was almost inaudible, at the very edge of hearing, but Alison could have sworn the old woman was singing.

When Ourania was seventeen, her new husband told her they were crossing the world to make a new life in a new young country. A country that could fit fifty-eight Greeces within its borders but had a population barely big enough to fill its cities. ‘We'll have a whole city to ourselves,' he told her as they waved her family goodbye. Instead it was a room in the back of his uncle's café and then a flat and finally a house in the suburbs where their family grew and grew. Money was always tight, so Ourania could never return home, but she called her family every week so that she never forgot their voices. Then life seemed to speed up, and one by one the faces that were still so young in her memory began to shrivel and fade in the photographs that arrived by post every Christmas. And at each death – separated by a life of living and half the world's oceans – Ourania took herself to church and in place of her loved ones mourned the passing of strangers. Rituals were rituals, she told herself, and goodbyes goodbyes.

Two priests appeared from the back of the church and started singing in strong, proud voices as they entered the nave. Alison tried to pick out words that sounded similar to English. She became lost in the harmonies, following the priests' voices as they rose and fell with powerful purpose. Suddenly there was a commotion beside her as her mobile exploded with movement. She had remembered to silence it but the vibrations against the wooden pew sent tremors through the church and echoed into the dome above. Alison fumbled with the zip of her bag and jammed the ‘end call' button. Almost as soon as she'd replaced it, it sprang to life again. Mortified, Alison glanced at the screen. Her father. She looked up to a sea of curious disapproving faces and scrunched her nose in embarrassment as she rose and slid awkwardly along the aisle.

‘I'm so sorry,' she whispered. ‘I'm so, so sorry.'

Red-cheeked, she hurried out the church door, which groaned shut behind her. Out in the sunshine she jammed the phone to her ear.

‘What?' she hissed.

‘Alison?' Her father sounded hurt and confused. ‘Where are you? We waited for the train three days in a row but you weren't on any of them, and you haven't been answering your phone.'

Alison immediately felt terrible. ‘I'm so sorry, Dad. I keep forgetting to call you back. I'm in Melbourne. I'm not coming home. I'm at a funeral and then I'm going back overseas, to the Solomon Islands.'

There was a pause as her father processed this new information.

‘Whose funeral?'

‘Oliver's yiayia.'

There was another pause.

‘Who's Oliver?'

‘A boy I met.'

‘What's a yiayia?'

‘His grandmother.'

‘Ah. I see. Pass on my condolences then.'

She could hear her father ruminating on the other end of the phone.

‘Samoa, you say? Some of the young men who pick fruit at Gav's farm are from Samoa.'

Alison made a face. ‘No, they're from Tonga. And I'm going to the Solomon Islands.'

Her father paused again. ‘Well. It's a big world, isn't it?'

Alison acceded it was.

‘So you're not coming home yet?'

Alison confirmed that she wasn't.

‘I'll tell your mother then.'

‘Thank you.'

‘If you're in Melbourne for a bit you could pop in on Uncle Max.'

‘I don't know who that is.'

‘From when you were little. Son of the neighbours on the other side. A bit funny in the head. Had the tractor that got stuck in the old dam and –'

‘I have to go, Dad – I'm at a funeral.'

‘Love you.'

‘Love you too.'

Alison hung up the phone. From inside the church a wail erupted and thundered around the cavernous dome as if trying to find a way out to heaven.

After the burial the crowd trudged across the grass towards the reception room where a short memorial was to take place. Oliver seized Alison's arm and pulled her back.

‘I don't think I can go in there.'

His beautiful brown eyes were filled with fear.

‘They know. Everyone knows. They think I killed her.'

Alison took his face in her hands, an instinctive gesture that filled them both with awkward intimacy.

‘Of course you can go in there. No one thinks that. This is your chance to say goodbye.'

Oliver gripped her hand tightly as they entered the reception room, pausing at the entry to throw back the small glasses of brandy offered to them. The woman holding the tray observed Oliver.

‘You're the grandson, aren't you?'

Alison squeezed his hand and shepherded him inside.
They made their way to a long table at the side of the room
where food was laid out. A short round man with a comb-over was piling his plate with prawns. He placed a final handful on top and steadied the plate as the ­crustacean tower threatened to topple. His eyes lit up when he saw Oliver.

‘Oliver! Who's this? Another cousin? Haven't you had enough?' The man chuckled to himself and a prawn fell to the ground. ‘Nah, I'm kidding, Ollie. No one thinks it's your fault. I'm just playing.'

Oliver sighed. ‘Alison, this is my uncle Yianni. Theo, this is Alison.'

‘It's a pleasure, Alison,' Yianni said, beaming. ‘You watch this one, eh?' He took a prawn and raised it to his lips, still chuckling to himself. ‘But seriously, this is a horrible day for everyone. Poor mum. What a way to go. What a horrible thing.' A solemn look swept across his face and he crossed himself with the prawn. ‘But what can we do. Life, eh? It is what it is.'