The Bit In Between (20 page)

‘He has malaria but he's okay. Nothing to worry about. He's sleeping.'

The haus mere motioned with her head towards Rick's
room. Oliver nodded. She stretched out her arms in
pantomime, pretending to cry like a baby. Oliver realised
she was mimicking Rick. He grinned and nodded again.

The haus mere sighed deeply, then leant her broom against the wall and bustled out and down the hall towards the bedroom. Oliver heard the creak of a door and then Rick's sad, weak voice cry out, ‘Shirley! I'm dying . . .'

Oliver grinned and turned to leave, then changed his mind and instead went and got one of the expensive imported beers from Rick's beer fridge. He twisted the top off it and then sprawled out on the bright red sofa, resting his feet on Rick's ornate Balinese coffee table. Rick had a TV, something Oliver hadn't watched since he left Melbourne, so he flicked it on and sat absorbed in the Australian chat show that was on. On screen a group of women were sitting around on a couch discussing the best type of bra for various breast shapes. Oliver found himself strangely transfixed. There was a sigh from behind him and Rick's haus mere plonked down on the couch. Oliver looked away from the screen guiltily. He felt awkward, like he was invading her territory, messing up everything she had just cleaned. He glanced at his beer sitting on the coffee table. No coaster . . .

‘How's Rick?' he asked.

The haus mere laughed. ‘He says he is dying but he is okay. He's sleeping now.'

Oliver grinned. ‘I'm Oliver. Rick's friend.'

He held out his hand. The haus mere shook it.

‘Shirley.'

‘How long have you worked for Rick?'

Shirley thought. ‘Since he got here. I worked for the man who lived here before him too.'

Mr Carlson had been a good employer. He had even allowed Shirley to bring her youngest child to work when she couldn't find someone to watch him. He himself had small children and understood how difficult it could be to raise them. His wife, a lithe, smiling woman, would sometimes take Shirley's son with her when she took her own little boy out to play with the other expat children. Shirley had liked the Carlsons. Shirley had been cleaning houses for almost twenty years and this was the first time she had found employers who were good to her, who talked to her like she was a person and who seemed to take a genuine interest in her. She had enjoyed the time she spent working for the Carlsons. It had been three years of steady work and this had meant a steady income, so she could budget and save and put away a little to cover her children's school fees. It had meant they could plan their future with a small amount of certainty for the first time in their lives. But like all good things, this period of stability and certainty did not last, and eventually Mr Carlson's contract ended and the family moved away. Rick moved in, and while Shirley liked him, he did not require the same amount of housework as a family, and her workdays were dramatically reduced. She would sometimes joke with her eldest son that the only certainty in life is uncertainty, and it was uncertainty that seemed to be the constant in their lives.

Oliver took a sip of his warming beer and paused. He felt like an irresponsible schoolboy drinking beer in front of Shirley. He wondered if he should offer her one. He decided against it and then thought that he should probably just follow the standard Solomon line of questioning.

‘Are you married, Shirley? Children?'

Shirley made a face. ‘We left my husband. He was no good. He drank too much and killim me and my pikinini.'

Oliver knew enough Pijin to know that ‘kill' meant to physically hurt someone, and not to actually kill someone.

‘So now there is me and my four pikinini. All boys. The firstborn is in his last year of high school. The small one is six. We live with my mother, but she is old now and can't do much.'

Oliver nodded. ‘How many days do you work here?'

‘Just two. Before, when a family lived here, I work five days cleaning and helping with the children, but now it's just Rick, so not enough mess for five days.'

‘That must be hard,' Oliver said.

‘Yes,' she agreed. ‘Before we had money from five days of working and now just two. But we're okay. My firstborn wants to go study computers but maybe first he will work to help out with the other children's school fees.'

Oliver listened. He knew Shirley's story was common for many women in the Solomons. He felt a sudden compulsion to do something to help her. ‘You can come work for us. We don't have a haus mere,' he said.

Shirley's eyes widened. ‘You sure?'

Oliver found himself nodding emphatically. ‘Of course. Our house is super dirty. We could use someone once or twice a week. Do you do laundry too?'

Shirley nodded yes.

‘Good, because we don't. Not well. Neither of us are any good at hand washing. All our clothes smell like mildew all the time.' He offered her the sleeve of his T-shirt to confirm this.

Shirley gave a vague sniff and pretended she had smelt something terrible. ‘Yes. Very bad. I can fix this.'

‘Excellent! It's settled. Give me your mobile number and I'll give you a call to work out the details.'

Shirley gave him a grateful look and then took his mobile and entered her number into it.

As he was leaving he stuck his head into Rick's bedroom. Rick was propped up in a large chair by the window, a blanket tucked around him like a consumptive invalid writer. A coil of smoke spiralled from a half-spent joint in his hand and his eyes stared vacantly into the distance. The door creaked and Rick spun around in a panic.

‘Shit, Ollie, I thought you were Shirley. She always throws out my weed when she finds it. Come in, man. Sit down.'

Oliver slipped in and sat on the edge of the bed. Rick proffered the joint. ‘It's medicinal, man.'

They sat for a while, sharing the last of the joint. Eventually Rick gave a soft sigh.

‘I wanna fly but I got nowhere to go. You know who said that?'

Oliver had no idea.

‘Pink Floyd, man. You know what else they said?'

‘What?' Oliver waited.

‘The wall's too high and we're stuck here. Man.'

Oliver laughed. He suspected Rick was paraphrasing. Suddenly Rick's face went serious.

‘I got an email from my old man yesterday. He says he doesn't think I'm living up to my potential. He thinks I'm living too hedonistically. That I'm selfish.' Rick glared out at the clouds. ‘Selfish. That's what he said. Fucking selfish. Fuck him. I voted Obama. Plus, I have malaria. Fuck that. Am I right, Ol? Fuck that.'

They sat in silence for a while, then Oliver squeezed Rick's shoulder and rose from the bed. He offered a small wave which Rick returned with a slight tilt of his head.

As he made his way home, Oliver tried to work out how he would broach the subject of Shirley with Alison.

Alison had spent the day helping Sera set up their new office. Peter had dropped by with some old furniture, and with the help of a young woman named Janet, they hauled it into the building. Janet had wandered into the empty office the week before, her small child bound to her back in a sling, in search of assistance compiling her résumé. She had since been by the empty office every day, helping them prepare the space for use, her young son toddling about after her, scattering piles of dust in his wake.

Before leaving, Peter went back to his Hilux and returned with a computer and printer.

‘A gift,' he beamed as the three women clapped in delight.

Janet's son soon grew tired, and after successfully setting up the computer station to a backing track of his wails, she lifted him from the ground and prepared to head home.

‘Bae mi kam bak tumoro,' she told them, hoisting him onto her hip.

Alison and Sera followed her to the door as she pulled the little boy onto her back, securing him with the fabric sling. She tightened the sling across her body and waved a final time.

Janet had been a year away from finishing high school when her father called her to his side as he sat in front of their leaf house. The foreigners from the nearby logging camp were back and had offered the villagers boats and motors in exchange for permission to log their land. As village chairman, her father was responsible for bringing together all the chiefs and securing a consensus. He was worried – this kind of thing was tearing apart villages all around them, turning brother against brother as responsibility for ancestral lands clashed with the responsibility to support their families in an increasingly cash-dependent world. Before, subsistence farming had been enough, he'd explained to her, but now the villagers required money for fuel and kerosene and school fees. Janet listened and copied all this down. Her father was illiterate and it was Janet's role to fill this gap. When the loggers finally came, they brought with them the trappings of a better life. Janet listened to their whispers and their promises and truly believed that one day she would leave this country the wife of a logger, but when the first rotation of loggers left they not only took with them barges full of the village's natural resources but all their hollow promises too, leaving Janet with a child whose pale skin and foreign features advertised to the world his shameful paternity. She had not yet completed high school, and now she could not, but Janet would do anything to secure a job and give her son the life she herself had forfeited.

Alison turned to go back to their small office but Sera held out her arm.

‘I thought this afternoon we will go on an adventure to reward ourselves for our hard work.' She pointed at a waiting taxi. ‘Don't worry,' she added. ‘I brought takeaway cake.'

The taxi took them out of town and down to Turtle Beach. Sera paid the entry fee to the old man dozing in the small leaf hut by the entrance and they drove in, parking by the edge of the bright white sand. The sky was cloudless and the azure sea crashed in gentle waves on the pebbled sand. The beach was quiet except for a couple of tourists trying out snorkelling gear in the shallows. It was perfect. Sera instructed the taxi to come back in an hour and they settled themselves on the sand in the shade of a palm tree. Sera brought the cake out of her bag.

‘Four pieces. One for each of us,' she said, indicating her large belly. She took a bite of cake and leant back happily. Alison watched her watching her belly, the two little life forms encased in a cocoon of maternal love.

‘How are they?' Alison asked, inspecting her own slice of cake. Double chocolate. She nodded approvingly and took a bite.

Sera shrugged. ‘Okay, but at night they don't like to let me sleep. They make me sick when I lie down. My husband says they are going to be like bats – sleeping during the day and awake at night.'

She took a big bite of cake and brushed the crumbs off her swollen stomach.

‘Have you been to the doctor?' Alison asked, concerned.

‘Don't worry, it's normal.' Sera smiled and patted Alison's hand.

Alison grinned. ‘I don't know much about babies.'

‘No,' Sera agreed. ‘But I have been around pregnant women since I was a girl. It's normal.'

Alison stretched her legs out. The sun was hot and scalded her skin like a freshly drawn bath, making her instantly drowsy. She was starting to doze off when the sky above her abruptly fell into shadow. Alison opened one eye and started as she saw an angry face looking down on her. The man took a quick swig from the old soft drink bottle he was holding, pushed his messy curls from his face and held his hand out to her.

‘Hem san bis blo mi!'

Alison sat up and looked at Sera in confusion. Sera said something to the man in Pijin. She turned to Alison.

‘He says this is his beach, but I told him we already paid the entry fee to his wantok at the gate.'

The man was shaking his head, irate. He swept his hand through the air before him, as if showcasing the beach.

‘Hem san bis blo mi! Mi nao ownem beauty!'

Sera sighed and fished around in her bag.

‘He says it is his beach. He owns the beauty.'

She thrust some money at him. The man inspected it then shoved it in his pocket. He gave them both a short nod before staggering off down the beach. Sera watched him go.

‘Lots of people, they decide some land is theirs and then demand compensation for using it. Solomon, ai!' she exclaimed, shaking her head.

‘
Is
this his land?' Alison asked, watching as the man tottered up to the snorkelers who were sitting in the shallows, hand thrust before him.

Sera shook her head. ‘I don't know. Nothing is really written down, so it's hard to know whose tribe owns what land and whose great-grand-daddy just found a patch of land and built a house. Lots of conflict about this. Land is our biggest source of wealth and our biggest source of trouble.'

They settled back in the sand and Alison felt herself drifting off again. She watched Sera's belly rise and fall.