The Bit In Between (8 page)

Rick clearly wanted to keep dancing so Oliver, not wanting to disappoint his new friend, stayed on the dance floor doing a half-hearted shuffle back and forth with one eye on the cooking show. From her table in the corner Alison also gazed at the TV. The cook seemed to be making something with custard. She heard the sound of metal scraping on the floor and then someone sat down heavily on the stool next to her. She looked over expecting to see Oliver, but instead there was a middle-aged white man with short spiky grey hair and a loud floral print shirt. He wiped sweat off his brow with the back of his hand, a harsh smoker's cough accompanying him. Alison offered him a small smile and he leant over.

‘This place is so loud,' he shouted at her.

Alison thought she heard an Australian accent.

The man ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I don't know why I come here.'

She nodded. She didn't know either.

‘It's my wife,' he continued. ‘One of the perks of having a younger wife. You get to do all kinds of things you don't actually want to do.'

The man pointed at a woman on the dance floor who looked to be in her thirties. She was wearing more sequins than Alison had ever seen before in her life.

‘She grew up in Makira province, so she still gets excited about coming here to dance,' he explained. He cleared his throat. ‘So what brings you here?'

Alison gave a small shrug and then pointed at Rick, who was shimmying vigorously to the music. The man gave her a knowing grin. ‘Ah, Rick. Be careful of him, he'll break your heart.'

Alison grinned back at him. ‘It's not my heart I'm worried about.' She glanced over at Oliver, who was trying to shimmy along with Rick but looked more like a malfunctioning robot.

‘Ben.' He stuck out his hand.

‘Alison.' She shook it.

Alison looked over at Ben's wife, who was in the middle of a group of young girls waving their hands in the air excitedly.

‘So have you been in the Solomons for a while now?' she asked.

Ben considered this. ‘Longer than I spent in Oz. I just never seemed to leave, and now with the wife, kids and extended family it looks like I'm here for good.'

He gave her a good-natured smile.

‘So what do you do here, Ben?' Alison asked, digging at the label on her beer bottle with a fingernail.

‘I own a couple of hardware stores, but that's not my real work.'

Alison took the bait. ‘What is?'

Ben leant in closer. ‘Research.'

Alison saw a glint in his eye as the refracted light from a disco ball bounced off it.

‘What kind of research?'

Ben leant closer still. ‘UFOs. The giants of Guadalcanal.'

Alison smiled politely and clutched her bag a little tighter.

‘Giants, you say?'

‘Yep.'

‘In Guadalcanal?'

‘In Guadalcanal.'

She looked over at Oliver, who was now trying to crump along with Rick. ‘Tell me more.'

As a young man, Ben had wanted nothing more than to be a lawyer and change the world. He met a shy girl with big glasses on his first day of law school and they soon decided to change the world together. A couple of weeks before their first year exams, Ben rolled their car on the way home from dinner at his parents' house. He had walked away unscratched while the shy girl with the big glasses received an injury to the brain so severe that she forgot how to walk or talk or use a toilet on her own, and when she looked at Ben she didn't know who he was – certainly not someone she was going to change the world with. Her parents thought it was probably for the best that Ben stop visiting her, and not long after he abandoned law and devoted himself to more arcane studies, in pursuit of other worlds. He travelled to the Solomon Islands looking for giants and stayed because this place had no memories of the shy girl with the big glasses. Years later he had found a nice local girl who didn't look anything like the shy girl with the big glasses and they had married. They raised four children, as well as countless nieces and nephews, who were all devoted to him and whose work in the hardware stores supported his ­continuing quest to find giants. Back home his brothers mocked him, calling him Ben Quixote behind his back, but Ben didn't care. He'd tilt at windmills as long as he needed to.

Ben's wife appeared from out of the crowd and grabbed his arm.

‘Is he talking about giants?' she asked and gave Alison a sympathetic look. Alison smiled and then Ben's wife dragged him off the stool and back onto the dance floor. He turned to Alison and gave her a half-wave before the crowd closed around him and he was gone. Oliver appeared a few minutes later, sweaty and red-cheeked.

‘Rick's gone home with a blond from the World Bank,' he explained and the two of them caught a taxi back to their little blue house, where they ate cold leftover pasta and slept a couple of hours before the sun awoke. That night Alison dreamt of elderly gentlemen dressed in armour fighting giants.

The next morning Alison left a sleeping Oliver and took herself to swim in the pool at the Honiara Hotel. She tried to do laps but was interrupted by a family of loud, sunburnt Australians who were unhappy about everything in general, including but not limited to the weather, the menu and the lack of pool toys. She left when she noticed the youngest one squatting in the shallow end, its face screwed up in concentration as fine bubbles danced in the water around it. When she got home, Oliver was sprawled out in the hammock asleep. A notepad was wedged between his hip and the netting. Alison glanced at it. All it said was: ‘Narrator is a cat?!' A little further down the word ‘­allegory' was crossed out several times.

When she emerged from the shower, Oliver was back at his laptop. She kissed his cheek. ‘How's it going?'

Oliver stared at the screen. ‘This is all I've got for three hours work.'

She looked over his shoulder. There were a couple of random lines, a few individual words, and then a longer passage that was preceded by a note reading: ‘Col. Drakeford talks to assistant over tea and scones.'

‘You know, Johnson, independence is like these scones here.'

‘How do you mean, sir?'

‘Well, everyone thinks they have the perfect recipe but rarely does one come across a truly decent version.'

‘Quite right, sir. Quite right.'

‘The secret,' Colonel Drakeford said conspiratorially, ‘is the jam. You can have any type of scone you want, but the jam's the thing that brings it all together.'

Johnson peered at his scone. ‘We're the jam, aren't we, sir?'

‘Right you are, old boy. Right you are.'

Alison was quiet for a moment.

‘It's a metaphor,' Oliver prompted. ‘For empire.'

There was a prolonged hesitation, during which Oliver deleted everything he had written that morning.

They had lunch together, but then Oliver started looking morose, so Alison grabbed her bag and headed back out the door. She was enjoying this new adventure with Oliver and hanging out with him was fun most of the time – he made her feel special and important, and he laughed at all her jokes. There was something incredible, too, about being beside him as he conjured a whole new work from nothing, but she knew by now when he was about to enter what she called ‘moody bastard writer mode', and preferred to leave him alone at those times. If she didn't, he would spend hours complaining that he was a hack and a fluke and should just give up on life altogether because he was terrible at everything. Alison didn't mind listening to him moan for a while, but the unspoken rules of relationships dictated a level to which one should not see one's partner descend, and Oliver curled up under the table biting his knuckles was a fairly solid benchmark for this.

The Honiara air was thick and muggy, desperate to release the rain from its clouds. As she strolled towards town Alison felt sweat patches forming across her lower back and stomach and beneath her armpits. She couldn't bear another afternoon drenched in her own sweat, so she waved down a taxi and got into the passenger seat. The taxidriver was a worried-looking young man with thin dreadlocks pulled back into a thick bundle at the back of his head.

Alison smiled at him. ‘Mi laek go lo post offis,' she said and he nodded, pulling into the traffic. Alison sat beside him, still smiling, trying to look open to conversation. The young man didn't take his eyes off the road but cleared his throat.

‘You are from where? America?'

‘Australia,' Alison replied.

‘You are with RAMSI?'

‘Nope. Just . . . volunteering.' While currently she had no work, she was looking into volunteering options, so it wasn't really a lie, and it was much easier than trying to explain that she had come here with her boyfriend, who was writing a novel. That explanation always prompted more questions, such as were they married, why not, would they get married and what did their parents think about all this?

Her answer seemed to satisfy the young man.

‘Mi friend with wanfala Australian girl before,' he said.

Alison knew he meant friend in the same way that Oliver's mother had introduced her to everyone at his ­yiayia's funeral as Oliver's ‘friend'.

‘Hem work with an NGO. Mi work with same NGO before mi drivem taxi.'

‘What happened?' Alison asked.

The young man blinked. ‘She had to go home. She said she'd come back one day.'

They both let this last part hang in the air, untouched and unbelieved, until it faded away out of existence.

In the post office car park Alison paid the young man and paused. She wanted to say something, but there wasn't really anything she could say, so she offered an awkward ‘tagio' and left the cab. She watched him drive away.

Moses had worked for one of the biggest NGOs in the Solomon Islands as a driver and mechanic. The work was relatively easy, the pay was all right and he got to spend a lot of time staring at Jessica, the Australian volunteer who smiled at everyone and sometimes baked cakes for the entire office. One day when he was filling in his fuel log, Moses noticed that Jessica was staring at him, and later that day the piece of cake she saved for him was by far the biggest of all the slices. Moses and Jessica started what was at first an awkward but then wonderful friendship and made plans for a future full of adventure. Then Jessica's contract had ended and she couldn't get it extended. So she and Moses cried together and promised each other things that they both knew would never happen and then Jessica flew back to her homeland. The other expats working at the NGO felt sorry for Moses and told him that Jessica had used him, but Moses didn't say anything because it wasn't their business and they didn't know anything. Not long after, Moses quit his NGO job and started driving his own taxi, which gave him more freedom because he could choose his own hours and have lunch whenever he wanted. And every time a missus flagged him down, a small, ­unrealistic part of him hoped it would be the one person he knew it never would be.

When Alison returned home Oliver looked considerably more cheerful.

‘How many pages?' she asked.

‘Two.' He gave her a smug look then glanced at the parcel under her arm.

‘From your mother,' Alison said, and Oliver's face contorted in a look of suspicion.

‘What impractical thing has she sent this time?'

Last week Oliver's mother had sent them three packs of scented baby wipes. Alison tore open the box and grinned, then held up a tea towel, two rolls of toilet paper and something that claimed to be an ‘egg peeler'. Oliver stared at the toilet paper. ‘What does she think we've been using for the past couple of weeks?'

Alison glanced in the box. ‘There's a letter too.'

She extracted the folded letter and a photo fell out. Oliver picked it up. It was a profile shot of a beautiful young woman hugging a fluffy dog. Oliver turned it over.

‘Lexi's boyfriend left her to study bees in the Amazon, and her mother says she's single now.'

Written on the back in pen was a phone number and an email address accompanied by a playful love heart.

Alison's mouth dropped open. ‘Wow.'

Oliver looked at the letter. ‘It's addressed to both of us,' he said.

‘Wow.'

‘I know.'

‘Wow.' Alison grinned. ‘I wonder when your mum will stop hating me?'

Oliver didn't say anything.

‘Maybe at our wedding?' Alison joked. ‘Or my funeral?'

Oliver didn't respond.

‘What's wrong?'

‘Nothing.'

‘What's wrong?'

Oliver looked at his hands. ‘I've been thinking about something Rick said last night.'

Alison's eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, yes. What did Rick have to say?'

‘He said something about how it was nice that we're still in the honeymoon phase where everything I do is cute to you and you haven't started hating me yet.'

Alison scowled. ‘What? What does Rick know? I'm not going to start hating you. I can't believe you're listening to Rick. You barely even know him.'

Oliver gave her a measured look. ‘I barely know you, really.'

Alison shrugged. ‘Don't worry about it. Should we try to peel some eggs?' She held up the device and waggled it in the air.

‘What happens when it ends?'

‘When what ends?'

‘The honeymoon phase. What happens when you wake up and realise that this is reality? When I fart in bed or I get really sick and you have to put up with my sniffing and hacking up phlegm? When you look at me and see a Picasso?'

Alison shrugged again. ‘That won't happen.'

‘Yes, it will. Because that's life. That's reality. Some days I'll do things that annoy you. In fact, I reckon I'll do something vaguely annoying pretty much every day, because that's the type of person I am. But you don't know that, because you don't know me yet. You still think I'm perfect.'