What Alice Forgot (8 page)

Even some of the women were laughing. Rita was laughing like a loon. She has dementia, so I guess I can excuse her—but still, you’d think she’d retain a modicum of decency!

It was the strangest thing. I felt the most absurdly embarrassing desire to burst into tears. All at once, I was straight back in my very first classroom out of teacher’s college. There was a very handsome boy in my class (I can still see where he sat—second row from the back) who was always cracking jokes and making everyone laugh. Did I ever tell you about him? He made me feel so humorless and stodgy. Like an old maid. (And I was twenty years old, for heaven’s sake!)

You never made me feel—

Barb just phoned.

Alice has had a nasty fall during her gym class (she seems to spend half her life at that gym) and she’s in hospital.

I’m in a fluster.

I’ll finish this later.

“Mum?” the child spoke again, impatiently. Alice couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. It was just an average kid’s voice. Breathy, rushed, a touch snuffly. Kind of adorable. She hardly ever spoke to children on the phone, except for an occasional stilted birthday chat with one of Nick’s nephews or nieces, and she was always struck by the sweetness of their kidlike voices. They seemed so much bigger and scarier and dirtier in the flesh.

Her hand was sweaty. She took a firm grip of the phone, licked her lips, and said hoarsely, “Hello?”

“Mum! It’s
me
!” The kid’s voice bubbled up and out of the phone, as if he or she were yelling straight in her ear. “Why did you think it would be Dad? Is he calling you from Portugal? Oh! If you speak to him, can you please tell him that the name of the Xbox game I want is Lost Planet, Extreme Condition, okay? Got it? ’Cause I think I told him the wrong name. Okay, Mum, this is pretty important, so you might need to write this down. Do you want me to talk slowly?
Lost. Planet. Extreme. Condition.
Anyway, where are you? We’ve got swimming and you
know
I hate being late because then I get stuck with the stupid paddleboard. Oh, there’s Uncle Ben! Is he taking us swimming today? Okay! Cool! Why didn’t you tell us? HI, UNCLE BEN! Okay, gotta go, see you, Mum.”

There was a scraping sound, a thud, and the sounds of children shouting in the distance. A man’s voice said, “Gidday, champ,” and then the line was cut off.

Alice dropped the phone in her lap and stared straight ahead at the open doorway. Had she just had a
conversation
with the Sultana?

She didn’t even know the baby’s name. They were still arguing over the names. Nick wanted “Tom”—a “good honest name for a man”—and Alice wanted “Ethan”—a sexy, successful name. Or if the Sultana surprised them by being a girl, Alice wanted “Madeline” and Nick wanted “Addison”—because apparently girls didn’t need “good honest names.”

Alice thought, I could not be mother to a child and not know his name. This is simply not possible. It is beyond the realms of possibility.

Maybe it was a wrong number! The child had mentioned an “Uncle Ben.” There was no “Ben” in Alice’s family. She didn’t know a single Ben. She wasn’t sure she’d ever even met a Ben. She searched her mind and all she could dredge up was a huge bearded neon-sign designer she’d once met while helping Nick’s older sister, Dora (possibly the flakiest of the Flakes), at her “Psychic Arts” shop, and in fact his name could just as easily have been Bill or Brad.

The problem was that the kid had asked, “Why did you think it would be Dad?” when she’d said “Nick.” Also, he knew Nick was in Portugal.

It was beyond the realms of possibility, yet, on the other hand, it seemed sort of conclusive. She closed her eyes briefly and opened them again, trying to visualize a ten-year-old son. How tall would he be? What color eyes? What color hair?

Part of her wanted to scream with the sheer terror of this situation, and part of her wanted to roar with laughter because it was so ridiculous. An impossible joke. A hilarious story she would be telling for years—“And
then
, I ring Nick and this woman tells me he’s in Portugal! And I’m thinking,
Portugal
!?”

She picked up the phone gingerly, as if it were an explosive device, and considered calling somebody else: Elisabeth? Mum? Frannie?

No. She didn’t want any more strange voices telling her things she didn’t know about the people she loved.

Her body felt weak and heavy. She would do nothing. Nothing at all. Eventually something would happen; somebody would come. The doctors would fix her head and everything would be okay. She began shoving things back into the rucksack. As she picked up the leather-bound diary, a photo fell out.

It was a photo of three children in school uniforms. It was obviously a posed shot because they were sitting in a row on a step with their elbows on their knees and their chins in their hands. There were two girls and a boy.

The boy was in the middle. He had messy white-blond hair, ears that stuck out, and a turned-up nose. He had tipped his head to one side and clenched his teeth together in a grotesque grimace that Alice knew was meant to be a smile. She knew this because she must have seen at least a hundred photos of her sister pulling an identical face. “Why do I do that?” Elisabeth would say sadly when she saw the photo.

On the boy’s left side was a girl who looked older. She was a chunky, stolid-looking girl with a long face and straight brown hair in a ponytail that had fallen over one shoulder. She was slumped forward in a way that clearly said, “I do not want to sit in this ridiculous position.” Her mouth was compressed in a straight line and she was looking grimly off to the right of the camera. She had a nasty graze on one chunky knee, and both her shoelaces were undone. There was nothing remotely familiar about her.

To the boy’s right was a little girl with blond curls bunched together in fat pigtails on either side of her head. She was smiling ecstatically with a dimple denting her cherubic cheeks. There was something stuck to both the shirt collars of her uniform; Alice held the photo up closer. They were shiny dinosaur stickers just like the one on Alice’s own shirt.

Alice turned the photo over and saw there was a typewritten label stuck to the back. It said:

Children (left to right): Olivia Love (Kindergarten), Tom Love (Yr4B), Madison Love (Yr5M)

Parent: Alice Love

Number of copies ordered: 4

Alice turned the photo back over and looked again at the three children.

I have never seen you before in my life.

There was a distant buzzing sound in her ears; she could feel herself breathing short, shallow breaths, her chest rising and falling quickly as if she were at high altitude. (Oh, it was so
funny
! So, I’m looking at this photo, right, of three kids? And it’s my own children! And
I don’t even recognize them
! Hilarious!)

Another nurse Alice hadn’t seen before came into the room, glanced briefly at Alice, and picked up the clipboard at the end of her stretcher. “I’m so sorry we’re still keeping you waiting. The powers that be assure me it should only be a few more minutes and we’ll have a bed free for you. How are you feeling?”

Alice put crazily trembling fingertips to her head. “The thing is, I don’t actually remember the last ten years of my life.” There was a quiver of hysteria in her voice.

“I think we might try and organize a nice cup of tea and sandwiches for you.” The nurse looked at the photo lying in Alice’s lap and said, “Your kids?”

“Apparently,” said Alice, and gave a little laugh that turned into a sob, and the taste of tears in her mouth felt so familiar, and the thought came into her head,
Stop it! I’m so sick, sick, sick of crying,
but what did that mean, because she hadn’t cried like this since she was little, and anyway she couldn’t stop even if she wanted.

Chapter 6

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges

In the afternoon tea break I called Ben on his mobile and he said, over a babble of noise that sounded like twenty kids, not three, that he’d picked up the children from school and he was driving them to their swimming lessons now. He said he’d been informed it was impossible to miss even one swimming lesson because Olivia had just become a crocodile or a platypus or something and I heard Olivia’s gurgling laugh as she shouted, “A DOLPHIN, silly billy!” I could also hear Tom, who must have been in the front next to Ben, saying monotonously, “You are now five kilometers OVER the speed limit, you are now four kilometers OVER the speed limit, you are now two kilometers UNDER the speed limit.”

Ben sounded stressed, but happy. Happier than I’ve heard him in weeks. Picking up the children and driving them to swimming is not something Alice would normally ask (trust) us to do and I knew that Ben was probably exhilarated by the responsibility. I imagined how people glancing over at traffic lights would see a standard dad (maybe a bit bigger and bushier than average) with his three kids.

If I think too much about this, it will hurt a great deal, so I won’t.

Ben told me that Tom had just spoken on the mobile to Alice and according to Tom she didn’t say anything about falling over at the gym and she sounded “just like Mum except maybe ten to fifteen percent grumpier than usual.” I think he’s learning percentages at school right now.

Weirdly, I’d never even thought of just ringing Alice’s mobile myself. So I immediately dialed her number.

When she answered, she sounded so strange that I didn’t recognize her voice and thought that a nurse must have picked up the phone. I said, “Oh, sorry, I was just trying to reach Alice Love,” and then I realized it was Alice and she was sobbing, “Oh, Libby, thank God it’s you!” She sounded terrible, hysterical really, babbling about a photo and dinosaur stickers and a red dress that couldn’t possibly fit her but was really beautiful and being deliriously drunk in a gym and why was Nick in Portugal and she didn’t know if she was pregnant or not and she thought it was 1998 but everybody else said it was 2008. It gave me a fright. I can’t remember when I last saw or heard Alice cry (or call me Libby). Even though she has had so much to cry about over the past year, she doesn’t cry in front of me, and there is such a horrible polite restraint in all our conversations recently, with both of us putting on these oh-so-reasonable voices.

It actually felt sort of good to hear Alice cry. It felt real. It’s been such a long time since she needed me, and that used to be such an important part of my identity, being the big sister who shielded Alice from the world. (I should save my money and analyze myself, Dr. Hodges.)

So I told her not to worry, that I was coming straight there and we would sort everything out and I went straight back onstage and said that there had been a family emergency and that I had to leave but that my very capable assistant Layla would be taking over and when I looked at Layla to see her reaction, she was pink and radiant, as if she’d just got religion. So that was OK.

Of course the hospital would have to be Royal North Shore.

I always feel as though I have swallowed something huge when I drive into that car park. It’s shaped like an anchor, this thing I’ve swallowed, and it goes straight down my throat and stretches out on either side of my belly.

Another thing: the sky always seems so huge, like a big empty shell. Why is that? I must always look up as I’m driving in, or maybe it’s something to do with me feeling tiny and useless, or maybe it’s just simple geography for heaven’s sake, and the road goes up before it dips down into the car park.

I’m here for Alice, I reminded myself when I got out of the car.

But everywhere I looked I could see old versions of Ben and me. We haunt the place. If you ever go there, Dr. Hodges, keep an eye out for us. There we’ll be, shuffling down the pathway along the side of the hospital back toward the car park on a sunny ice-cold day, me in that unflattering hippie skirt that I keep wearing because it doesn’t need ironing, and I’m holding Ben’s hand, letting him lead me, looking at the ground and chanting my mantra, “Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.” You’ll see us standing at the reception desk filling in forms and Ben is close behind me, rubbing my lower back in tiny circles and I feel like the circles are somehow keeping me breathing, in, out, in, out, like a ventilator. There we are, squashed into the back of the lift with an excited family, their arms overflowing with flowers and “It’s a girl!” balloons. We both have our arms wrapped protectively around our stomachs in exactly the same way, as if we’re hugging ourselves close, so all that joy can’t hurt us.