The Bit In Between (6 page)

They all nodded in agreement and Yianni gestured to the food. ‘Eat something. Mum would have wanted you to.'

As they stood eating their spanakopita a projector lit up the far wall. Traditional Greek music erupted from a speaker, startling the whole room, and someone scurried to turn down the volume. Elaborate cursive writing appeared against a background of roses.
Yiayia: Gone but not forgotten.
Alison's eyes met Oliver's.

‘My cousin Eleussa made a video,' he sighed.

‘She's doing multimedia at TAFE,' Yianni added.

Alison watched a procession of photos parade across the screen.

‘Eleussa's your cousin from the church, right?'

‘No, a different Eleussa. We have a lot of Eleussas.'

‘And Yiannis,' Yianni added, shovelling another prawn into his mouth.

‘How did you end up being Oliver?' she asked, grabbing at a plate of olives.

‘Dad's best friend. He named me after him. It really annoyed Yiayia. And then Dad and Oliver had this falling-out when I was nine and Dad's never spoken to him since. For a while he tried to rename me.'

A photo of him sitting on his yiayia's lap crawled across the screen and he paused, his eyes softening.

‘So what did your dad call you instead?' Alison asked.

Oliver and his uncle exchanged a look.

‘Yianni.'

Alison laughed, and Yianni laughed, and finally Oliver laughed too. Watching him laugh with a lightness she'd not before seen, Alison knew she was making the right decision. And as their eyes met, Alison felt certain Oliver was thinking the same thing too.

CHAPTER TWO

BEGINNING AGAIN

‘H
ello, Missus! Hey, Missus!'

Alison looked around the busy Honiara street trying to see who was calling to her. She swapped the heavy bag of fruit and vegies to her other hand, waved away a fly and then found him. A boy of about fifteen was loitering in front of a shop window. His hair was shaved into an extravagant mohawk with a row of little dreadlocks running along the base of his hairline. When he saw he had her attention, the boy burst into an excited grin. He straightened up and shot a look to his friends, who were standing in a circle of baggy jeans and dazzling bling.

‘Hey, Missus,' he repeated, making sure he had his friends' attention. ‘Mi laek fukem iu.'

His friends exploded into laughter and everyone high-fived everyone else while Alison stood on the side of the road red with embarrassment and sunburn. Eventually the traffic eased and she could step out cautiously, dodging cars as she made her way to the other side of the street.

They had been in the Solomon Islands for almost three weeks now. The little they knew of the country had been garnered from their guidebook on the three-hour flight from Brisbane to Honiara, the small nation's capital in the north of Guadalcanal Island. The Melanesian archipelago consisted of more than 900 islands, two-thirds of them uninhabited, scattered like dropped stones between Papua New Guinea's eastern tip and the top of Vanuatu. They had been relieved to discover that the money pooled from Alison's savings and Oliver's royalties, though small, would have them living like kings in a country where a majority of the population depended on subsistence farming.

Since they'd arrived, Alison had made the journey from their rented house in Mbokonavera Heights to Central Market a handful of times now and every time she was caught off guard when catcalled by one of Honiara's many unemployed young men. At first she had tried to engage with them, calling hello back and offering a smile, but no matter how she replied the response was always the same, so she'd stopped.

It was shadier on this side of the street and Alison ambled along, stepping over cracks in the pavement and dodging splotches of bright red betel nut that speckled the ground. She had tried betel nut when they first arrived, chewing first the soft nut, then the fruit dipped in lime powder. Oliver had declined, citing a Wikipedia article he had found that explained how the lime – calcium carbonate made from crushed coral – had a carcinogenic effect, resulting in high rates of mouth and throat cancer. At the time Alison had rolled her eyes and told him to live a little, but the betel nut had numbed her lower lip and she'd dribbled bright red spit all over her chin. Oliver had given her a smug look.

‘Well, you certainly make a strong point,' he'd said.

Skipping over another betel nut stain, Alison ducked into one of the many identical stores on the main street. Loud island music was pumping through a ridiculously big set of speakers. A small child wearing only shorts was sitting astride one of the speakers, busy with the intricacies of opening a roll of mints. The whole place smelt of dust and heat.

Alison squeezed down the narrow aisle and stood at the counter. A young woman was leaning against the stock shelves on the other side, thumbing a message into her mobile. The young woman had sharp, angular cheeks with a delicate pattern scarred across them like a radiant sun. Someone had told Alison that it was customary in another province to etch these patterns into women's skin when they were very young, a sort of flesh tattoo. Alison wished she could reach out and stroke its fine raised lines. The young woman looked up disinterestedly.

Leesa had worked in the store for two years. Each day she enjoyed it less and less. Time seemed to stand still there and she felt her life was racing by while she did nothing with it. The job didn't pay very well and most of the money went back to her family in Malaita anyway. She worked six days a week and spent her evenings lying on her woven mat in her uncle's house dreaming about all the things she would rather be doing. Sometimes young people darted into the store to buy cigarettes on their way to classes at the College of Higher Education and she would glare at them, jealous of their laughter and the freedom with which they spent their days flitting between home, class and dates with friends. Leesa's uncle dropped her off in the mornings and picked her up every evening when the store closed. Sometimes Leesa would text her cousin, complaining of her boredom and hoping to hear some gossip. The news that some poor girl had fallen pregnant by accident always made her feel marginally less despondent about her life. There was no way Leesa would be falling pregnant. The closest she'd come was a brief encounter with a friend of her cousin that had turned into a month's worth of text messages that filled her days with excitement and frustration and anticipation. Then one day the text messages had stopped and life became boring again.

The young woman raised her eyebrows at Alison, who pointed to the tins of chilli tuna on the back shelf.

‘Tufala chilli taiyo,' she said.

The young woman sighed and reached behind her before handing Alison two tins.

‘Tagio,' Alison said, handing over some notes.

The woman gave her a half-nod and Alison tried not to look disappointed.

Oliver had pointed out that most people, in Honiara at least, spoke not only English and Pijin but also their own provincial dialect, so it wasn't particularly impressive that Alison had picked up a few everyday phrases. Alison, whose only other language skills were a minuscule amount of French she had learnt from the lyrics of Beatles songs, secretly disagreed and lived in hope that someone would eventually comment on how polyglotomous she was. It wasn't a word but it was how she felt speaking Pijin.

Alison left the store and turned towards home. It was almost midday and the heat was stifling. Her T-shirt was stained with sweat and she winced when a small bead of perspiration rolled down her temple and into her eye. There was a loud rumble as a military truck rattled past. Australian soldiers sat in the back, sweltering in their uniforms. Oliver had told her they were part of RAMSI, the regional peace-keeping mission sent to restore order after civil conflict broke out at the turn of the millennium. With little soldiering left to do now, their continued presence was largely decorative, a deterrent to further violence as the country worked to rebuild its justice system.

‘Where are their necks?' Alison had whispered the first time she saw them grabbing coffee and muffins at the Lime Lounge, a local expat café.

Oliver had burst out laughing.

‘You don't need a neck for war,' he'd whispered back and made a small note in his notebook.

As the army truck passed, Alison turned up the winding road that led away from the main street and into the residential jungle of Honiara. The road was speckled with small betel nut markets – tiny stalls piled with betel nuts, fruit and soft drink bottles filled with crushed lime. Their owners' faces, teeth and gums were stained with telltale red marks, and they offered familiar smiles as she passed.

She rounded the corner of the last hill, her calf muscles complaining loudly, and saw the little house she shared with Oliver. It was a spectacular sky blue colour and Alison loved it. There was a small kitchen that looked out onto the living area, a bedroom and a mouldy-smelling bathroom. The house had three fans, only one of which worked. The water, when it ran, was alternately crystal clear and murky brown, and the electricity was intermittent at the best of times. It was everything Alison wanted it to be. Oliver had been less impressed until he found a solar panel that would charge his laptop and then he too fell in love with their grimy little house. The neighbourhood kids would wander in to watch them and allow Alison to practise her Pijin, and one of the less feral street dogs had started visiting at dinnertime to eat their leftovers. Alison had named it Roger. Oliver called it Nightstalker. It responded to neither.

She pushed open the front door and found Oliver slouched over his laptop tapping away. On closer inspection she noticed that the only key he was tapping was ‘delete'. She eyed him cautiously. ‘Any magic happen today?'

Oliver straightened in his chair and stretched his head from side to side, cracking his neck. His face was slick with sweat.

Alison gave him a quick kiss. ‘You're boiling.'

‘Fan stopped working. My brain stopped working. I'm a terrible writer. I hope I melt so no one has to see this appalling mess.'

‘That productive, eh?'

‘I can't start it . . . I just keep . . . See for yourself.'

Oliver let out a frustrated sigh and pushed the laptop towards Alison. She knelt by the desk and read.

The sun, begrudgingly, like the pompous cad that it was, conspicuously refused to set, which rendered these midsummer days bewitchingly luminous in a magnanimous fashion. Col. Drakeford would be dining on spam that night.

Then, a little further down:

Honiara, 1978. Hot. Dusty. A town more than a city, with dark secrets lying poised to leap from every corner.

Alison's eyes remained on the screen. This was all he had after two weeks of lying around thinking and a full week of actual work.

‘Don't worry.' She reached for his hand. ‘If all else fails you can just make Colonel Drakeford a vampire.'

He grinned, but then his gaze drifted away, his brow furrowing slightly. She could practically hear his brain ticking.

‘No, Oliver. Come back. Don't make Colonel Drakeford a vampire.'

Oliver blinked and shook his head. ‘No. Yes. You're right. Because then he couldn't drink gin and tonic on a balcony and muse about the pompous cad of a sun.'

‘You're going to keep that part?'

‘It might be my only option for getting out of this book deal because it's patently clear I cannot write.'

Alison made the appropriate soothing noises and he conceded a break was in order, and together they drank warmish local SolBrew beers on the little stoop outside their house.

Though it had only been a few weeks, Oliver was surprised by how easily he had adjusted to life in the Solomon Islands, despite his literary frustrations. To the heat and the slow pace and the beers in bars where you made lifelong friends you would probably never see again. This was what he had expected when he travelled to Cyprus, but it hadn't been like that. It had been strange and foreign, and he had felt like his family had expectations of him he didn't quite understand and that overall they were largely unimpressed with him. This had been a blow to Oliver. Growing up in Australia, he'd felt he never quite fit in and had blamed his Cypriot heritage, yet in his fabled homeland he still felt like an outsider. Perhaps one day he'd feel at home in the Solomon Islands, but deep down he was starting to suspect that some people didn't fit in anywhere. Or maybe everyone felt like this but most were better at hiding it than he was. Oliver often thought things like this. Sometimes he felt very old and wise when he thought such thoughts, particularly when he was wearing his reading glasses and nursing a glass of something.

He hadn't noticed he was different as a child until one day a particularly unpleasant classmate named Smith had pointed out that Oliver's surname was difficult to pronounce. Nine-year-old Oliver had neither the confi
dence nor the vocabulary to point out that no one in
his family had difficulty pronouncing it so therefore the defici­ency must lie with the unpleasant Smith child and not with him, and he had instead gone and cried behind the school gym. His teacher found him there and soon after gave the class an impromptu lesson on how everyone should love Oliver because he was different, which made him special and important. Then Miss Brown had made Oliver, Yusuf and Jenny Woo stand up the front and talk about ‘where they came from' even though they had all been born in Australia. When Oliver told the class he came from Northcote, Miss Brown had asked again, ‘But where do you come from? Originally?' Oliver had been confused. Thinking it was a trick question, he replied, ‘From my mother's vagina?' and everyone laughed, and Miss Brown blushed and told him that wasn't what she meant, but she didn't get angry, because this was what the kids of migrants were like, and then Yusuf told the class he was born in fucking Footscray, so could they please get back to normal school stuff, and Miss Brown sent them all to the principal's office, even Jenny Woo. The principal, Mr Panopoulos, whose parents had come to Australia years before his birth,
had patiently listened to their story and then let them go to lunch early. Oliver had loitered and then asked
Mr Panopoulos something that had been bothering him.

‘Am I different?'

Mr Panopoulos's eyes had flickered with an unidentifiable emotion for a second and then he gave Oliver a warm smile. ‘Only to white people, Oliver. Only to white people.'