What Alice Forgot (12 page)

“Alice, you've been separated for six months, but you know, once you get your memory back, you'll realize it's okay, because you're fine with this. This is what you want. I asked you just last week. I said, ‘Are you sure this is what you want?' and you said, ‘Absolutely sure. This marriage was dead and buried a long time ago.'”

Liar, liar, pants on fire. That could not be true. That had to be a fabrication. Alice tried to keep the rage out of her voice. “You're just making that up to make me feel better, aren't you? I would never say that. ‘Dead and buried!' That doesn't even sound like me! I don't talk like that. Please don't make stuff up. This is hard enough.”

“Oh,
Alice
,” said Elisabeth sadly. “I promise you, it's just your head injury, it's just . . . oh, hi there, hi!”

A nurse Alice hadn't seen before pulled back the curtain briskly on their cubicle and Elisabeth greeted her with obvious relief.

“How are you feeling?” The nurse pumped up the blood-pressure strap around Alice's arm once again.

“I'm fine,” said Alice resignedly. She knew the drill now. Blood pressure. Pupils. Questions.

“Your blood pressure has soared from the last time I checked,” commented the nurse, making a note on her chart.

My husband just yelled at me like I was his worst enemy. My lovely Nick. My Nick. I want to tell him about it, because he'd be so angry if he ever heard somebody speak to me like that. He's the first person I want to tell when somebody upsets me; my foot pressing on the accelerator, desperate to get home from work just to tell him, the moment I tell him, the moment his face lights up with fury on my behalf, it's better, it's fixed.

“She's had a few shocks,” said Elisabeth.

“We really need you to try and stay relaxed.” The nurse leaned close and did something feathery-quick with her fingers to pull back Alice's eyelids while she shone her miniature torch into each pupil. The nurse's perfume reminded Alice of something—someone?—but of course the feeling vanished as soon as the nurse moved. Was this going to be her from now on—a permanent, irritating case of déjà vu like an itchy rash?

“Now I'm just going to ask you a few boring questions again. What's your name?”

“Alice Mary Love.”

“And where are you and what are you doing here?”

“I'm at Royal North Shore Hospital because I hit my head at the gym.”

“And what day is it?”

“It's Friday, 2 May . . . 2008.”

“Good, excellent!” The nurse turned to Elisabeth, as if expecting her to be impressed. “We're just checking that her cognitive reasoning isn't affected by her injury.”

Elisabeth blinked irritably. “Yes, okay, great, but she still thinks it's 1998.”

Tattletale, thought Alice.

“I do not,” she said. “I know it's 2008. I just said that.”

“But she still doesn't remember anything
since
1998. Or hardly anything. She doesn't remember her children. She doesn't remember her marriage breakup.”

Her marriage breakup. Her marriage was something that could be sliced up like a pizza.

Alice closed her eyes and thought of Nick's face, creased from sleep, lying on the pillow next to hers on a Sunday morning. Sometimes in the morning his hair would be all spiked up in the middle of his head. “You've got a Mohawk,” said Alice the first time she observed this phenomenon. “Of course,” he said. “It's Sunday. Mohawk day.” Even with his eyes closed, he knew when she was awake, lying there, looking at him, thinking hopefully that he might bring her a cup of tea in bed. “No,” he would say, before she'd even asked. “Don't even think about it, woman.” But he always got it for her.

Alice would give anything, anything at all, to be lying in bed right now with Nick, waiting for a cup of tea. Maybe he got sick of making her cups of tea? Was that it? Had she taken him for granted? Who did she think she was, some sort of princess, lying in bed waiting for cups of tea to be delivered, without even brushing her teeth? She wasn't pretty enough to get away with that sort of behavior. She should have jumped up before he woke, done her hair and makeup and made him pancakes and strawberries, wearing a long lacy nightgown. That was how you kept a marriage alive, for God's sake, it wasn't as if there wasn't enough advice around in every women's magazine she'd ever read. It was basic knowledge! She felt as though she'd been unforgivably negligent—careless! sloppy!—with the most precious, wonderful gift she'd ever received.

Alice could hear Elisabeth murmuring urgently to the nurse, asking if she could see the doctor, wanting to know what tests had been done. “How do you know she hasn't got some sort of
clot
in her brain?” Elisabeth's voice rose a bit hysterically, and Alice smiled to herself. Drama queen.

(Although, could there be a clot? A dark, ominous thing swooping about in her head like an evil bat? Yes, they really should look into that.)

Maybe Nick had got bored with her. Was that it? Once, when she was in high school, she overheard a girl saying, “Oh, Alice, she's okay, but she's a
nothing
sort of person.”

A nothing sort of person. The girl had said it so casually, without malice, as if it were a fact, and at fourteen Alice had felt cold with the official confirmation of what she'd always believed. Yes, of course she was boring, she bored herself silly! Other people's personalities were so much more substantial. That same year, a boy at the bowling alley leaned in close with the sweet smell of Coke on his breath and said, “You've got a face like a pig.” And that just confirmed something else she'd always suspected; her mother was wrong when she said her nose was as cute as a button; it wasn't a nose, it was a
snout
.

(The boy had a skinny, tiny-eyed face like a rat. She was twenty-five before it occurred to her that she could have insulted him back, but the rule of life was that the boys got to decide which girls were pretty; it didn't really matter how ugly they were themselves.)

Maybe Nick had been bringing her a cup of tea one morning and all of a sudden a veil lifted from his eyes and he thought, Hey, wait a second, how did I end up married to this lazy girl with her boring nothing personality and piglike face?

Oh Lord, were all those terrible insecurities really so fresh and close to the surface? She was grown up; she was twenty-nine! It was only recently that she'd been walking home from the hairdresser's, feeling gorgeous, and a gaggle of teenage girls walked by, and the sound of their strident giggles made her send a message back through time to her fourteen-year-old self: “Don't worry, it all works out. You get a personality, you get a job, you work out what to do with your hair,
and
you get a boy who thinks you're beautiful.” She'd felt so
together
, as if all the teenage angst and the failed relationships before Nick had all been part of a perfectly acceptable plan that was leading to this moment, when she would be twenty-nine years old and everything would finally be just as it should be.

Thirty-nine. Not twenty-nine. She was thirty-nine. And that day with the teenagers must have been ten years ago.

Elisabeth came back in and sat back down next to Alice. “She's going to try and get the doctor to come around again. Apparently that's a very big deal, because you're just under observation now and the doctor is ‘extremely busy,' but she's going to ‘see what she can do.' So I think our chances are probably zero.”

Alice said, “Please tell me it's not true. About Nick.”

“Oh, Alice.”

“Because I love him. I properly love him. I love him so much.”

“You did love him.”

“No, I
do
. Right now. I know I still do.”

Elisabeth made a “tsk” sound that was full of sympathy, and lifted her hands in a hopeless sort of gesture. “When you get your memory back—”

“But we're so happy!” interrupted Alice frantically, trying to make Elisabeth see. “It's not even possible to be happier.” Tears slid helplessly down the sides of her face and trickled ticklishly into her ears. “What happened? Did he fall in love with someone else? Is that it?”

Surely not. It was impossible. Nick's love for Alice was a fact.
A fact.
You were allowed to take facts for granted. Once, a friend was teasing Nick for agreeing to go with Alice to a musical (although he actually quite liked musicals). “I can see the thumbprint in between your eyes,” the friend said, and Nick shrugged. “Mate, what can I do? I love her more than oxygen.”

Sure, he'd been drinking a lot of beer, but he said that in a
pub
, when he was trying to be blokey. He loved her more than oxygen.

So, what—the boy didn't need oxygen anymore?

Elisabeth put the back of her hand to Alice's forehead and stroked her hair. “He didn't meet anyone else as far as I know, and you're right, you were happy together and you did have a wonderful, special relationship. I remember it. But things change. People change. It just happens. It's just life. The fact that you're getting a divorce doesn't change the fact that you had all those wonderful times. And I swear to you that once you get your memory back, you'll be fine with this.”

“No.” Alice shut her eyes. “No, I won't. I don't want to be fine with it.”

As Elisabeth continued to stroke her forehead, Alice remembered the day from her childhood when she'd been dropped home after a birthday party still fizzing from winning the Simon Says competition. She was carrying a balloon and a basket made of shiny cardboard and filled with lollies. Elisabeth had met her at the front door and ordered, “Come with me.”

Alice trotted along behind her, ready for whatever new game Elisabeth must have organized, and ready to share the lollies, but not the Freddo Frogs—she loved Freddo Frogs—and as they walked past the living room, her balloon bobbing along behind her, she noticed that it seemed to be full of strange grown-ups surrounding her mum, who was sitting on the couch with her head resting back on the couch at a strange angle (odd, but maybe she had a headache). Alice didn't call out to her because she didn't want to have to talk to all the strange grown-ups, and she followed Elisabeth down the hallway to her bedroom, where Elisabeth said, “I have to tell you something that is going to make you feel very bad, so I think you should get in your pajamas and get into bed and be ready for it so it won't hurt so much.”

Alice didn't say, “What? What is it? Tell me now!” because she was six and nothing bad had ever happened to her, and besides which she always did what Elisabeth said. So she was perfectly happy to put on her pajamas while Elisabeth went to fill up a hot water bottle and put it in a pillowslip so it wouldn't burn. She also brought along a spoonful of honey, the Vicks VapoRub, and half an aspirin and a glass of water. These were all things their mother did when they were sick, and Alice loved being sick. Once Elisabeth had her tucked in bed and had rubbed the Vicks on her chest, she started stroking back the hair off Alice's forehead, just like their mum did when either of them had an especially bad stomachache, and Alice had closed her eyes and enjoyed all the good parts of being sick, without the actual sick feeling. Then Elisabeth said, “Now I have to tell you the bad thing. It's going to give you a bad, surprised feeling, so be ready for it, okay? You can suck your thumb if you want.” Alice had opened her eyes and frowned, because she did not suck her thumb anymore, except for when she'd had an extremely bad day, and even then it was just the very tip, hardly the whole thumb. Then Elisabeth said, “Daddy has died.”

Alice could never remember what happened next, or even how she felt on hearing the words. All she remembered was how Elisabeth had tried so hard to protect her from the “bad, surprised feeling.” She was twenty-four before it occurred to her with a jolt of surprise that Elisabeth had been only a little girl herself that day. She'd phoned her to talk about it, to thank her, and the funny thing was that Elisabeth had an entirely different set of memories about when their dad died and didn't even remember putting Alice to bed.

Of course, there was also the time Elisabeth had thrown a pair of nail scissors at her, which got impaled in the back of her neck. But still . . .

Now Alice opened her eyes and said to Elisabeth, “You're such a good big sister.”

Elisabeth took her hand away and said flatly, “No I'm not.”

Neither of them said anything for a few seconds, and then Alice said, “Are
you
happy, Libby? Because you seem . . .” Desperately unhappy, she wanted to say.

“I'm fine.”

Elisabeth seemed to be thinking of things to say and then discarding them. “Just be your proper self!” Alice wanted to scream.

Finally Elisabeth said, “I guess maybe our lives haven't turned out quite the way we envisaged they would when we were thirty.”

A voice interrupted them. “At last! I found you! I thought I'd never find you!”

There was a woman standing at the end of the bed, her face hidden for a moment as she ceremoniously held up a large bunch of yellow tulips.

She lowered the tulips and revealed her face. Alice blinked and blinked again in disbelief.