The Bit In Between (4 page)

Alison didn't say much during the tram trip, but Christina's pleading look burned in her mind.

They brunched in Northcote until the caffeine and oil soaked up enough alcohol to make life slightly more ­bearable. Oliver told stories that made Alison laugh. Alison did impressions that made Oliver chuckle, mostly because he couldn't tell who they were supposed to be, and they gave each other the kind of shy, sideways smiles that are reserved for only a few living mortals. Then they took the long tram ride into Southern Cross Station. Alison leant against Oliver's shoulder and he laced his fingers through hers. A man sat opposite talking animatedly into a bluetooth earpiece as if negotiating energetically with himself. Alison giggled, her body pressing into Oliver's, and she felt him tense beside her. With a sudden rush of urgency he turned to her. ‘I think I'm falling in love with you.'

Alison glanced at him, startled. She took in his serious gaze and offered a helpless shake of her head. ‘But I'm not your cousin . . .'

And Oliver smiled and she smiled and time stopped forever and for only a second.

Soon the tram reached Southern Cross Station, slowing to a halt. Alison turned to Oliver. Oliver looked at Alison. She didn't stand up. He didn't either. They rode the tram to the end of the line and then rode it back again. They would both go to the Solomon Islands.

But first there was Oliver's yiayia. Waiting, embalmed and lonely, for her oldest grandson to return so that she could be laid to rest beside her long-dead husband in a patient patch of earth in Fawkner Memorial Park.

Yianni, Oliver's papou, had died long before Oliver was born. His remaining grandparents, being typical Greeks,
had refused to die, so his Yiayia Eleussa was the first grandparent
he was conscious of losing. He'd dreaded this moment since he was fourteen, when he'd realised he was the only person in his class yet to bury a grandparent, but still he wasn't prepared for it. He lay awake in his aunt's spare room that night staring into darkness as Alison snored loudly beside him, running through all the little moments that were his yiayia. Tomorrow he would bury her, the woman who had fed him homemade galaktompoureko and told the younger cousins that she loved Oliver most because God gave him to her first. Who had told him with resolute certainty when he was six that he was the most beautiful boy in Australia because he had the singing voice of an angel and the eyelashes of Jesus himself, and then lovingly spat on his head three times to drive off the mati. Who had cried joyful tears and swept her hand in grateful full-bodied crosses when he'd told her he was going to Cyprus, to the ancestral mountains of her childhood. Who had – he'd been told – died from the shame he'd sent rippling across two continents. Oliver's mind raced between sleep and memory and he was suddenly back in Cyprus, back before his yiayia left this world, standing in the village at the foot of the mountains where his grand­parents had grown up almost a century before.

Arriving in Cyprus, Oliver had deliberately avoided the tourist circuit and had instead gone straight to the house of his theo Costa – who was actually his papou Yianni's cousin – in the Troodos mountains. He hoped, he was embarrassed to admit, to ‘reconnect with his roots'. Also, he doubted anyone here would have heard of his book, so no one would tell him how relieved they had been ‘when everything turned out for the best in the end', which was all he ever heard back home. The village was nestled amidst the hard stones of the mountains. Years before, the area had been a prime site for asbestos and chrome mining, but the mines had closed down when people realised why so many of their young men kept coughing themselves to death. The young men of the village were good at dying. They died doing many things: making a living, fighting wars. Statues and monuments from the various wars filled the village, which sat quaint and perfect beneath towering conifers and squat fruit trees. There were monuments from World War II, from the war against the British, the conflict with Turkey and a handful of other disputes to which Cyprus had committed the blood of its youth. Near his theo's house was a statue to his papou's twin, Dimitri, who had died fighting the British for independence in the 1950s. Shortly after, because everything reminded them of Dimitri, his grandparents had left for Australia with his infant mother. Many years later when Oliver was born, he would be given the middle name Dimitri in honour of his dead uncle.

His theo Costa's house was built on a ledge between two clear running streams, which – Oliver was delighted to discover – actually babbled. Pine trees swayed in the wind, scattering their needles across the paths, and on a quiet evening nightingales could be heard above the sound of the water. Each morning someone would offer to take him for a drive to show him the sights, hoping to receive an impromptu English lesson. Oliver would spend his afternoons ‘working', which most days meant sitting in the little kafenio drinking strong Cypriot coffee and writing either ‘one hit wonder' or ‘
βλακα
' – the Greek word for moron – over and over again in his notebook. His sense of failure was compounded by the fact that this was one of the only words he knew in Greek. It made him feel like a stranger in this place that should feel like home, and this in turn made him feel like a failure in life. He kept these thoughts to himself, though, partly because he realised how absurd it had been to expect to find himself in a tiny village in the mountains halfway around the world, but mostly because he couldn't speak Greek.

One day he had been sitting in the kafenio with his theo Costa when a very old woman walked up to him, her eyes wide as full moons. She grasped his cheeks with her hands and said something wild and rambling. The only part he understood was the name Dimitri repeated over and over again. His theo had gently removed the woman's bony hands and spoken to her quietly. She looked at Oliver with disbelief and backed away.

‘She is not right in her memory. She thinks you are Dimitri,' his theo said. He cocked his head. ‘You do look like Dimitri.'

Oliver was going to say that he had always been told he looked like his papou Yianni but then realised how stupid this sounded, so he just nodded and thought about the man who had shared his papou's DNA and been erased from this world decades before Oliver was born.

Vespoula had been meant to marry Dimitri since they were both children. They were neighbours and best friends, and both were secretly excited when as teenagers they found out about the childhood matchmaking undertaken by their parents. But before they could marry Dimitri needed a job. They waited but work couldn't be found. The war with the British was coming closer and closer to their village and Dimitri knew he would have to go join his cousins in the fight for independence. They found a sympathetic priest who married them in secret, and the next morning Dimitri kissed her goodbye and joined the rest of the young men. Not long after he was shot through the neck and died not far from the house that would have been theirs once the fighting stopped. When the fighting did eventually end, Vespoula moved into the house anyway. Refusing to consider other men, she wore her widow's black every day for the rest of her life. One day they erected a statue of Dimitri in the village square and she visited it in the middle of the night. Kissing it and holding it, she promised that she would wait until the end of her mortal life so that they could be together in the endless time that began at the final human breath. And wait she did, as age and time ravaged her body and mind, and she awoke each morning cursing the sun that she was still alive. Every so often she thought she saw him, Dimitri, from the corner of her eye, at the edge of a field, in the shadows outside her window at night. But he never came to find her.

Not long into Oliver's stay a group of old men in the kafenio had taken pity on this strange quiet young man who sat scribbling morosely into his notebook and looking like his dead uncle. They invited him to join them for cards and he had, hoping to stop his growing anxiety. Perhaps in their banter lay answers, or, at the very least, a story. One of them spoke a little English and introduced himself as Stavros.

‘When your papou was alive we are enemies, but now he is dead we are okay,' Stavros said by way of introduction and smoothed his thick grey moustache happily.

Oliver soon learnt that when Stavros smoothed his moustache he was bluffing. The big overconfident smile was an unconscious giveaway that he was holding a handful of threes or fours. Stavros had hitched up his pants and pointed to the other three men at the table.

‘Spiro – he is a teacher. Panayiotis – he is the café owner. And Mikelis – he is a drunk. You will learn cards from him.'

Mikelis squinted at Oliver before patting the seat beside him unenthusiastically. Oliver sat down. He glanced at Mikelis, who smelt like he'd fallen into a barrel of beer. Mikelis gave him a fuzzy nod.

Mikelis's dream had been to get an education and leave the village. He wanted to be a writer like the greats; to write a new Odyssey, like Homer, who his father had read to him as a boy. But Mikelis was an only son and tied to this land. Over the years as he worked the fields, he wrote in private great volumes of work – musings on the state of the world, tales of adventures, retellings of classics with his favourite TV characters in the main roles, and reams of Virgilian poetry, full of babbling brooks like the ones that ran through the village and grass that seemed alive as it danced in the breeze. To allow himself time to write, he pretended to exist in a perpetual drunken state, washing his shirts in beer so everyone would assume he spent his after-work hours passed out somewhere. When he was an old man he planned to put down his pen for the last time and hide his life's work in a crate so that one day after his death it would be discovered and at last the world would revel in the glory of his words.

They played on in an amiable wordlessness punctuated only by the victorious cry of whoever took out each game. Panayiotis won most, then Stavros, then Oliver. Mikelis had won just once, after he fumbled his cards and the others saw he had a moderately good hand. They paused play while Panayiotis jumped up to serve a couple of lost British tourists who had stopped for directions and a bite to eat. Stavros shuffled the cards and cracked his knuckles as he looked Oliver up and down.

‘You not married, Oliver?' he enquired, though it was more of a statement than a question.

‘No.' Oliver shook his head.

Stavros made a conciliatory face and gave a shrug.

‘It's too bad.'

Oliver nodded. ‘Yes.'

‘What you do?' Stavros asked. ‘For work, I mean.'

Oliver considered the question. Maybe he should tell them he was a mechanic. That would save him an explanation. But then they might ask him to fix something, and he'd be in trouble.

‘I'm a writer,' he said quietly.

Stavros set down his cards, impressed. ‘A writer!' he said aloud, smoothing his moustache. He repeated the word in Greek. ‘Syngraféas?'

Mikelis's eyes flashed for a moment. He glanced over at the strange young man who looked so much like the twins he had played with as a child, fishing and hunting and roaming the forest looking for adventure. A writer. Mikelis wanted to say something, to commend this young man for doing what he himself had always dreamt of. For a moment he considered his work – his life's work – and the possibility of bequeathing it to the young writer, who could perhaps make something of it, but language and pride and almost seventy years of secrecy stopped him. Instead he gave Oliver a thunderous slap on the back followed by a pantomimic drunkard's hug.

Panayiotis returned, but as play resumed a stunning young woman walked through the door. She had clear olive skin, thick black hair and enormous brown eyes that took up a great deal of her face. She looked like she'd stepped straight out of an ancient painting. Out of a stone carving. Out of history. Oliver's heart lurched in his chest. She walked over to the refrigerator and took a bottle of soft drink, left some coins on the counter and walked back outside, where she sat at one of the plastic tables that lined the street. She looked back over her shoulder, caught Oliver's eye for the briefest of moments and offered him the tiniest fraction of a smile.

Illeana had been born around the same time the village mines closed and the family lost their sole source of income. Her father struggled to find new work, eventually managing to make ends meet by travelling the lengths of the Troodos Mountains offering his services as a handyman. She watched her older brothers grow up and leave school only to find that there was no work here in the village and that opportunity lay only in the port cities of Lemesos or Pafos, or the capital Nicosia. So, like the rest of the village's young men, they moved away, chasing opportunity. When the young people left, the village became a museum, preserved in time and declining in numbers with every death. Illeana was clever and breezed through school, all the while planning her big escape. She would win a scholarship to university. She would get a job on one of the big cruise ships. Anything to get out of the village. But she didn't get a scholarship and her parents wouldn't hear of their only daughter moving away to the city, so she waited and watched for her chance. When the strange young man arrived, she saw an opportunity. It didn't matter to her if they were cousins or that she didn't speak much English. She wanted out. Right out. Australia would do.