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?’
Alison let out an angry cry and hurled a plate at the floor. ‘Because you didn’t even let me have that. Not for myself. You had to try to make it for me. What does that make me? I’m nothing. I’m not anything. I don’t know what I am.’
His eyes were pleading. ‘You’re something to me. Isn’t that enough?’
And in his heart he knew it wasn’t. Alison stopped throwing things and instead collapsed on the floor, exhausted. Oliver did the same. He felt irreparably broken. After a while she looked over at him, tears running down her cheeks. Her voice was much softer now.
‘We’ve ruined everything, haven’t we?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there any way to make it better?’
He considered this. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Probably not.’
‘Can we try? Should we?’
He didn’t reply. After an excruciating minute he stood up, took his laptop and walked out.
Alison waited a long, long time for Oliver to come back. When he didn’t, she curled up into a ball and cried. Eventually she got up, cleaned up the room, tidied the rest of the house, waited, cried some more and then, unwillingly, fell asleep on the floor between the wall and the bed in the bedroom of their little blue house.
When she woke up the next day the house was still empty. She crawled out into the main room and found that the desk had been cleared of almost all its notes. She pulled herself up and half-ran back into the bedroom. Oliver’s clothes were gone. She ducked into the bathroom. His toothbrush too. Everything that was Oliver was gone. Alison staggered back into the lounge room and over to the desk. His manuscript was still there, but the final pages at the bottom looked new. There was a handwritten note next to it. She stared at Oliver’s messy writer’s scrawl.
This is the book exactly as it should be – no happy ending. This is the book I dreamt I’d write.
She held back a sob and wiped her eyes. And then she read it from the start. She read their lives – his and hers – and she relived it all. Their meeting, the move, the mugging, the babies, the arguments, Ed, everything right up until their fight the night before, all told through the lives of Colonel Drakeford and Geraldine – Oliver and Alison – and it hurt every bit as much as it should have. But when she got to the last chapter she pushed the manuscript away. She wouldn’t read it. She couldn’t. There was another handwritten note underneath the manuscript.
In one year’s time if you want to go to KL International Airport lounge
I might be there. I might not. Go find your happiness. For yourself.
She put the note down and stared at the manuscript on the table. After a few moments she looked around, lost in the wreckage and debris of the previous night/week/month. She stood up, took her backpack down and started packing.
THE BIT AT THE END
ANOTHER WAVE
A young man sits alone in an airport lounge. The seat beside him is empty. It has been a long year. Things have happened. His book was published – good enough sales, but a story he’s proud of. Part of the earnings go – anonymously – to the bank account of a small but burgeoning NGO where a young woman leads a growing number of volunteers to support women in the Pacific to find work and participate in politics. He never contacts her, but sometimes when he makes his donations he sees her in photos published on the NGO’s website. She looks exhausted, but always content.
The seat beside him is still empty. Outside, on the tarmac behind him, a fire engine rushes past, lights flashing, to douse the flames that erupt from the twisted metal wreck of what used to be a plane. Someone sits down next to him . . .
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
By far the greatest thank you is for the exceptional Haylee Nash at Pan Macmillan who fished me out of the slush pile, bought me a fancy lunch and believed in this manuscript more than I could ever have hoped for. To Emma Rafferty, Julia Stiles and Elizabeth Cowell for making the book better and for making me yell at the silent computer screen until I felt I’d made my point. To Debra Billson for the cover I would have designed had I a single ounce of artistry in me. And to my lovely agent, Grace Heifetz at Curtis Brown, for her kindness and her wisdom and all the funnies.
Belief in someone is an exceptional thing, particularly when it far outweighs that which you have in yourself. With love and gratitude: Pip, Nat, Laura, Leah and Renee – the demented stars by which I navigate. Mrs F – my long-term champion. Rhoda, Loretta, Gabriel, Tuksy, Edna, Sizah, Charley, Kanijama, Sarina, Aunty Jan, Uncle Joe and the rest of my Solomon family – you are some of the best people this world will ever know. Bae ufala olowe stap insaed hart blo mi. The owners of all the couches, foldout beds and spare rooms I inhabited across three continents whilst writing this – thank you for your kindnesses: Nat, Daniel, Vassos, Evangelia, Youla and Sophie, Jaine and Antonio, Ana Karenina, Andre Filipi, Filipi, Goleo, Dona Lucia and Mr Macedo, Tereza, Mayanne, Christian, Christianne, Ana, Manuela, Mariana, Gabriella, Giselle and Leo, Cris and Rafael, Ann, Peter, Tom dog, Cas, Bruce, Sid and Magee, and Ben and Dani. Doaky – early draft reader/top-shelf friend. Rani and Rani’s dad – for polar/stellar legal advice. Jemal – because he asked and because I’d
like extra TIL. Aunty Rene and Aunty Jo – for helping with the Greek. Brian and Lauren – for accepting my ratbaggery and returning it with love. Matt and Max – I didn’t get to choose you but I wouldn’t choose anyone else. John – my person and my world, who holds me together when I’d otherwise crumple and reminds me mid-histrionics that the sky will never actually fall. And Ma, always.
To EC for being there with me on the jetty by the lagoon when this all started. And a too-late thank you to Terry Pratchett for first making me adore stories and then making me want to write them. Your books are my oldest friends.
The Pacific is an incredible place and as Australians we should know more about our closest neighbours. The Solomon Islands, like many other Pacific nations, faces many challenges in their efforts to improve the opportunities of their people, particularly women and girls. I lived and worked in Solomon Islands for nearly two years and I know that when people are supported to design and implement their own development projects, real sustainable change can happen. To find out more about some of the inspiring change happening, visit www.pacificwomen.org or www.iwda.org.au
About Claire Varley
Claire Varley grew up on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria. She has sold blueberries, worked in a haunted cinema, won an encouragement award for being terrible at telemarketing, taught English in rural China, and coordinated community development projects in remote Solomon Islands.
The Bit In Between is her first novel.
First published 2015 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000
Copyright © Claire Varley 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
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