The Bit In Between

by Claire Varley

  She pulled her mobile from her pocket and dialled his number. When Oliver answered she heard laughter in the background. He was having fun with Rick and this irritated her immensely.

  ‘Where are you?’ she demanded, though she knew.

  ‘I’m at Rick’s,’ Oliver said. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘When are you coming home?’ she barked, ignoring his question.

  ‘Um, soon. Now. Do you want me to come home?’

  ‘Whenever. Whatever. Shouldn’t you be writing? You’re so lazy.’

  Alison hung up and felt instantly ashamed of herself. She was angry about a line in a notebook that her boyfriend thought might have magical powers to change the future. On a list of irrational things to argue about, that was definitely near the top. She shouldn’t have mentioned his writing, shouldn’t have called him lazy. It wasn’t true and she knew exactly how it would make him feel, but it was too late to take it back. A tiny part of her felt good about this. Maybe she should call to apologise.

  Her phone buzzed and she glanced down, wondering what Oliver had to say. But it wasn’t Oliver, it was Ed.

  I’m back. Come see me, Coops.

  She stared at the message. She knew she shouldn’t. She knew she should just delete it and pretend it had never been there. She definitely shouldn’t reply. The phone buzzed again in her hand and she jumped. This time it was Oliver.

  On my way. See you soon.

  Alison watched her phone until she was sure the messages had stopped. She didn’t respond to Ed’s message but she didn’t delete it. And when Oliver returned home, consumed by a guilt she couldn’t identify, Alison didn’t mention anything to him about the message or the notebook. Instead, she lay on her side of the bed, listening to him fumble around the bathroom, pretending to be asleep.

  Alison left the house early the next morning before Oliver awoke, leaving him to spend the day alone with his manuscript. She had an early appointment with Sera and they’d planned to spend the day sourcing secondhand computers. Inside the office, she opened the curtains to let in the light and waited for Sera to arrive. Time passed. Alison checked her phone, stretching out in an office chair and continued to wait. More time passed and she began to worry. Eventually, her mobile rang.

  The sun was sinking low on the horizon when Alison stormed into the little blue house and grabbed Oliver’s laptop from him, holding it threateningly over her head.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he yelped.

  She shook with rage and grief as the afternoon flashed before her eyes. The missed appointment. The dreadful feeling in the pit of her stomach. The frantic unanswered phone calls and the trip to the hospital.

  ‘Did you do it?’ Alison cried.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you do it?’ she yelled.

  ‘Did I do what?’

  ‘Did you take her babies from her? Did you write it?’

  She lowered her arms and started scanning the laptop screen, jabbing at the down arrow again and again. Oliver went pale and carefully took it from her trembling hands.

  ‘Did you write it?’ she demanded, desperately search­ing his face. When he didn’t answer, she staggered off towards the bedroom, clutching at her stomach. She couldn’t even make it to the bed and instead fell to her knees in the doorway. The world felt like it was shaking with a million-point earthquake and she felt the simultaneous urge to scream, throw up, lash out and run. Instead she lay on the dusty floorboards trembling wordlessly. Eventually she realised her hands were clasped around her middle, cradling her abdomen, which felt inexplicably empty. She curled up into a ball and sobbed – big, muted, gasping sobs that made her whole body shudder. Oliver knelt beside her and tried to take her in his arms, but she pushed him away.

  ‘If you did this I will hate you until I am dead in the ground,’ she whispered.

  Oliver’s face collapsed. ‘I didn’t. I swear. But . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I . . . I felt like I should. I didn’t do it, but it felt like what needed to come next. I didn’t write it, but everything in me was telling me that’s how the story needed to go. But I couldn’t.’

  ‘Stop this!’ she said. ‘Stop doing this.’

  ‘I didn’t, Alison. I promise. Do you believe me?’

  She refused to look at him. She refused to look at him for a very long time.

  After Sera’s babies died, Alison spent three days in bed, not crying, not eating, just staring at the blank wall with vacant eyes. She rose only to make her daily trips to the hospital to visit Sera, who had the same vacant eyes. No words passed between them as they sat side by side, Alison stroking her friend’s arm and drying her tears. Sometimes Peter sat on the opposite side, his body slouched defeated in the wooden chair, as he lightly touched his wife’s skin. His life was repeating itself, snatching away his unborn children a second time, and Alison was flooded with a horrid relief that this time at least his wife had been spared. When she was at home, Oliver came and went, bringing her cups of tea and toast with jam, and other things that turned cold waiting unwanted on the floor beside the bed. Sometimes he sat in the room with her and tried to make conversation, and other times he just sat.

  On the third morning, Oliver found Alison standing in the living room. Something small and green dangled from her limp hand.

  ‘What’s the point?’ She looked at the half-finished bonnet in her hand. ‘If we live in a world where babies don’t even get the chance to be born, what’s the point of any of us trying?’

  He stared at the small scrap of wool abandoned mid-stitch.

  ‘I suppose it just wasn’t meant to be . . .’

  She looked at him with a coldness he had never seen before in another human being.

  ‘That is the most unsatisfying fucking answer I have ever heard in my life and I will never forgive you for saying that.’

  ‘I didn’t write it, I promise,’ he said quietly.

  ‘But you thought it,’ she said. ‘And you’re going to write it, aren’t you? Later. Because you think it’s what the story needs.’

  Alison went back to the bedroom and fell back into the groove in the mattress she had occupied for the last few days. She blinked back tears, surprised that there were any left. She saw their faces, Sera and Peter, exhausted and lost as they sought to comfort one another. She saw this and she saw all the unfairness in the world. It wasn’t fair that babies should die here from things they wouldn’t die from in other countries. It wasn’t fair that bad things should happen to kind people, that these tragedies should be so common and so constant. She wasn’t sure how she could help or if she could help or where she belonged in any of this, so she just kept turning up every day to sit with her friend in grief.

  Time passed. Not a lot of time, but enough time to slowly, slowly start to mend some of the wounds that would never truly heal. Enough time for Sera’s traumatised body to heal and for Alison to answer when Oliver spoke to her.

  One day Alison received a call from Sera asking if she would drive her out past the airport for an appointment. Of course she said yes. Sera sat delicately in the passenger seat of Aunty Patti’s car as Alison negotiated their way out of town and along the road that led beyond the airport. Sera was quieter these days, with a slowness that spoke of the incredible distress she had suffered when she was forced to deliver not one but two dead babies. They had talked about it now, and Alison had wept more tears than Sera, probably because Sera had done so much crying already.

  Sera shifted carefully in the car seat, then reached out and touched Alison’s arm.

  ‘I’m okay. I’ll be okay. He has a reason for everything and one day maybe we might know what this one was.’

  A lifetime of atheism howled inside Alison. ‘Do you believe that?’ she asked quietly.

  Sera didn’t reply.

  ‘You don’t want answers?’
>
  Sera’s eyes remained on the window watching the world pass by.

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘I want to blame everyone. The doctors, this country, myself. But that still doesn’t give me any answers. Maybe God will.’

  ‘Will you try again?’ Alison asked gently, but Sera didn’t answer her.

  After she dropped Sera at her appointment, Alison drove back along the road passing time. She drove without thinking and found herself pulling up at the international terminal of Henderson Airport. As if in a dream, she watched herself stop the car, turn off the ignition and then wander into the terminal. A flight had just arrived and the airport was full of excited, sweaty people embracing each other and commenting on the day’s heat. She pushed past them and sat down on a bench beneath a TV screen that showed a short tourism film on repeat. Alison realised that in recent times she had done an incredible amount of thinking in airports, en route to China, Malaysia, Australia and the Solomon Islands. And now here she was at Henderson Airport, another airport and another chance to escape.

  One day in China, not long before she’d left, she had wandered down to a Nanning park and sat amidst the flowering almond trees. The park was full of young children zipping around on brightly coloured tricycles and old men crowded around Chinese chess boards. Every so often a triumphant cry erupted as a cannon took out an elephant or a general surrendered his kingdom. Alison watched as a hunched old man approached her carrying a tiny bird in a wicker cage. He eased himself down on the bench beside her and gently placed the cage between them. The bird chirped and Alison couldn’t tell if it was singing in sorrow or joy. The old man turned to Alison and gave her a smile that caused the wrinkles of his face to form a complex new pattern.

  ‘Can I practise my English on you?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ she responded.

  They conversed for a while about the usual things – what their names were, where they came from, what they did for a living. Then the little man gazed at her intently.

  ‘Who are you today?’

  Alison grinned. ‘You mean how are you today.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I mean what I say. Who are you today?’

  She had thought about this but didn’t have an answer.

  Now, so many moons later, she still didn’t have an answer. For a moment she was one hundred per cent certain that the very next thing she would do would be to stand up, walk to the ticket counter and buy a seat on the next plane to Australia, which was leaving in an hour or so. There were always spare seats and she had her passport in her bag. She could leave. She could have a fresh start. She could pretend the whole thing – the entire Solomon Islands experience – had never happened. If she tried hard enough she might even be able to convince herself that Oliver had never existed. Or Sera. Or the office.

  She stared across the tarmac and into the hills of Guadalcanal. It was a bright day but the horizon was lined with ominous clouds. Alison was mesmerised. She had always been transfixed by the colours of travel: by green mountains against blue skies speckled with white cloud, the yellow sun shining high above, like a scene from a child’s colouring book; by the thousand shades of grey that storm clouds came in; and by sunsets that never once repeated themselves, with their reds and pinks and crimson and orange and colours she had no names for. She loved the shades people came in, rich and dark and pale and bronzed, all unique and beautiful. She loved the way the sun wore a different outfit, behaved differently, had different mannerisms, breathed differently, in different parts of the world, as if trying to speak the local dialect; and the way night-time stole the colours from the world, cloaking all life in many-hued darkness. But what she loved most was the utter impermanency of colour, its ebb and flow. Each colour was unique to a specific moment, changing with time, temperature and taste, and could never be seen again. Everything was transient. Alison blinked and for the briefest of seconds her tears fractured the world into rainbows and in those rainbows she saw that all her reasons to run were really reasons for staying. Everything was transient but some things were worth staying for. She stood up briskly and dusted herself off. There was Sera to pick up and then Oliver to go home to. This she could manage for now.

  More time passed. It would have been, for the record, the last month of Sera’s pregnancy. It was Saturday afternoon and the boys were at a bar, as had become their habit. Oliver was perched on a stool fiddling with the label on his SolBrew waiting for Rick to finish in the men’s room. He was beginning to suspect that Rick was a high-functioning alcoholic.

  ‘What up!’

  Rick burst out through the men’s room door with his Hawaiian shirt on back to front. He grinned at Oliver, spun around, overbalanced, tripped over an empty beer crate and then steadied himself on the bar. His eyes bulged for a moment, he gulped, then grinned.

  ‘Man, I totally just re-swallowed some vomit.’

  A functioning alcoholic . . .

  Rick leant over the bar and held up three fingers. ‘Threefala brewskis.’

  Oliver frowned. ‘Three?’

  ‘Three,’ Rick nodded. ‘Look who I met when I accidentally wandered into the girls’ toilets.’

  He indicated an expressionless young blond who Oliver hadn’t noticed hovering in the background. She had striking blue eyes and was wearing the worn T-shirt and board shorts of a long-time traveller.

  ‘This is Ingrid. From Sweden. Show Oliver your tattoo.’

  Ingrid shot Oliver a look, then sighed and pulled down the neck of her scooped T-shirt. There was a sprawling geometric shape reaching across her collarbone and down her shoulder. It looked like a dolphin.

  ‘It’s Polynesian. From Tahiti,’ Rick beamed.

  Oliver looked up at Ingrid. ‘Are you Polynesian?’

  ‘I feel I am.’

  The look on her face dared Oliver to challenge her, so he just took another sip of beer and looked away. Her face softened and she crossed the room towards the exit.

  ‘Are you okay on your own?’ Rick prodded Oliver. ‘I’m going to take Ingrid back to her hostel.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Oliver replied.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ Rick agreed and turned to leave.

  ‘You’re going to leave me here at the bar by myself?’

  ‘Solidarity, brother,’ Rick replied and offered a fist bump.

  He grabbed two of the beers from the bar, saluted Oliver and then marched towards the door where Ingrid was waiting for him. Oliver stared at the fresh beer in front of him. The one in his hand was practically full. He sat for a moment trying to work out if he should give up on the warmer one and start on the cool one. This problem was solved when a short, sunburnt man swung onto the stool next to him and grabbed the new beer.

  ‘I’ll get the next one.’ He nodded to Oliver and took a huge gulp.

  Oliver stared at him. He had seen this man playing darts with some of the other regulars earlier and he had looked drunk then. Now he looked positively effervescent.

  The man extracted himself from his bottle and turned to Oliver. ‘Gotta love it,’ he smiled joyfully. ‘Drinking, I mean. Almost as good as flying. That’s what I do. I’m a pilot.’

  He stuck out his hand and Oliver shook it.

  ‘What’s it like?’ Oliver asked, impressed despite himself.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Flying?’

  The man thought for a moment, sucking back his beer.

  ‘It’s the most magical feeling in the world. Knowing you’re doing something we’re not born to do. That you’re up in the realm of birds and angels.’

  He paused for another sip and then carefully placed the bottle back on the bar as if it were made from expensive crystal.

  ‘Bloody scary, though. Knowing you’re responsible for all those people’s lives. That if you make a mistake – and they’re easy to make – all those people are going to die a horrible
painful death. I tell ya, now I know how planes work I’m way more terrified than before.’

  Oliver stared at him with wide eyes. ‘But that rarely happens, right? You guys have autopilot and fancy remote equipment now, don’t you?’

  The pilot let out a low whistle. ‘Yeah, but . . . some of the clowns flying these days. Taxidrivers with wings. And the number of near misses . . .’ He shook his head and took another big sip. ‘Unless I’m the one doing the flying, I’m never one hundred per cent comfortable. And even then . . .’ He gave a small shake of his head and then drained the bottle.

  ‘Anyway, I better get back to my hotel room and sober up. Early flight tomorrow.’

  He eased himself off the stool and staggered unsteadily towards the door. Oliver sat picking at the label on his beer bottle, watching him go. He struggled with the door, pushing instead of pulling, muttering curses to himself. As the pilot finally managed to make his way out of the bar, Oliver blinked then took a giant swig from his beer. In his mind, planes dropped from the sky, exploding in searing thousand-degree fireballs, ripping apart lives and shattering families. He thought of his manuscript and the plane crash he’d promised at the end. The one he was so insistent on. The one that would tear apart Colonel Drakeford and Geraldine, destroying the life they’d planned together. He felt sick. He knew this was how the book should end, but the thought of what this would do to his characters unsettled him – firstly because he had grown to love them, but also because their lives had become so entwined with his own. It seemed like they were going to be okay, Colonel Drakeford and Geraldine, that they’d actually get their happily ever after. That he and Alison would have theirs. Didn’t they deserve a chance – all of them?