Read Online The Bit In Between by Claire Varley - Free Book Online

screen. This was all he had after two weeks of lying around thinking and a full week of actual work.
    â€˜Don’t worry.’ She reached for his hand. ‘If all else fails you can just make Colonel Drakeford a vampire.’
    He grinned, but then his gaze drifted away, his brow furrowing slightly. She could practically hear his brain ticking.
    â€˜No, Oliver. Come back. Don’t make Colonel Drakeford a vampire.’
    Oliver blinked and shook his head. ‘No. Yes. You’re right. Because then he couldn’t drink gin and tonic on a balcony and muse about the pompous cad of a sun.’
    â€˜You’re going to keep that part?’
    â€˜It might be my only option for getting out of this book deal because it’s patently clear I cannot write.’
    Alison made the appropriate soothing noises and he conceded a break was in order, and together they drank warmish local SolBrew beers on the little stoop outside their house.

    Though it had only been a few weeks, Oliver was surprised by how easily he had adjusted to life in the Solomon Islands, despite his literary frustrations. To the heat and the slow pace and the beers in bars where you made lifelong friends you would probably never see again. This was what he had expected when he travelled to Cyprus, but it hadn’t been like that. It had been strange and foreign, and he had felt like his family had expectations of him he didn’t quite understand and that overall they were largely unimpressed with him. This had been a blow to Oliver. Growing up in Australia, he’d felt he never quite fit in and had blamed his Cypriot heritage, yet in his fabled homeland he still felt like an outsider. Perhaps one day he’d feel at home in the Solomon Islands, but deep down he was starting to suspect that some people didn’t fit in anywhere. Or maybe everyone felt like this but most were better at hiding it than he was. Oliver often thought things like this. Sometimes he felt very old and wise when he thought such thoughts, particularly when he was wearing his reading glasses and nursing a glass of something.
    He hadn’t noticed he was different as a child until one day a particularly unpleasant classmate named Smith had pointed out that Oliver’s surname was difficult to pronounce. Nine-year-old Oliver had neither the confi dence nor the vocabulary to point out that no one in his family had difficulty pronouncing it so therefore the defici­ency must lie with the unpleasant Smith child and not with him, and he had instead gone and cried behind the school gym. His teacher found him there and soon after gave the class an impromptu lesson on how everyone should love Oliver because he was different, which made him special and important. Then Miss Brown had made Oliver, Yusuf and Jenny Woo stand up the front and talk about ‘where they came from’ even though they had all been born in Australia. When Oliver told the class he came from Northcote, Miss Brown had asked again, ‘But where do you come from? Originally?’ Oliver had been confused. Thinking it was a trick question, he replied, ‘From my mother’s vagina?’ and everyone laughed, and Miss Brown blushed and told him that wasn’t what she meant, but she didn’t get angry, because this was what the kids of migrants were like, and then Yusuf told the class he was born in fucking Footscray, so could they please get back to normal school stuff, and Miss Brown sent them all to the principal’s office, even Jenny Woo. The principal, Mr Panopoulos, whose parents had come to Australia years before his birth, had patiently listened to their story and then let them go to lunch early. Oliver had loitered and then asked Mr Panopoulos something that had been bothering him.
    â€˜Am I different?’
    Mr Panopoulos’s eyes had flickered with an unidentifiable emotion for a second and then he gave Oliver a warm smile. ‘Only to white people, Oliver.