What Alice Forgot

  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.

  You told me the other week that this doesn't define me, but it does, Dr. Hodges, it just does.

  As I walked along the echoey corridors (clop, clop, clop, went my heels, and the smell, well, you probably know that horrible boiled-potato smell, Dr. Hodges, the way it floods your sinuses with memories of every other hospital visit), I ignored the badly dressed ghosts of hospital visits past and concentrated on Alice and wondered if she was still thinking it was 1998, and if so, what that would be like. The only thing I could compare it to was the one time when I was a teenager and got horribly drunk at a twenty-first party and stood up and gave a long, loving toast to the birthday boy, whom I had never met before that night. The next day, I didn't remember a thing about it, nothing, not even shadowy snippets. Apparently I used the word "paucity" in my speech, and that disturbed me, because I didn't think my sober self had ever said that word out loud before and I wasn't even entirely sure what it meant. I never got drunk like that again. I'm too much of a control freak to have other people falling about laughing while they describe my own actions to me.

  If I couldn't stand losing two hours of my memory, what would it be like to lose ten years?

  As I looked for Alice's ward number, I had a sudden memory of Mum and Frannie and me, giddy with excitement, just like that family in the lift, practically running through the corridors of another hospital looking for Alice's room when Madison was born. We happened to see Nick in the distance, walking along ahead of us, and we all shrieked, "Nick!" and he turned around and while he waited for us to catch up, he ran around in circles on the spot, and did a two-fisted punch in the air like Rocky, and Frannie said fondly, "He's such a card!" and I was dating that patronizing town planner at the time and I decided right then and there to break up
with him, because Frannie would never call him a card.

  If Alice had really lost every memory of the last ten years, I thought, then she would have no memory of that day, or of Madison as a baby. She wouldn't remember how we all shared a tin of Quality Street chocolates while the pediatrician came in to check Madison. He flipped her this way and that, and held her in one palm with casual expertise, like a basketballer spinning a ball, and Alice and Nick blurted out in unison, "Careful!" and we all laughed and the pediatrician smiled and said, "Your daughter gets ten out of ten, an A-plus." We all applauded and "whoo-hoo'd" Madison for her first-ever good mark, while he wrapped her back up in her white blanket, a neat packet of fish-and-chips, and ceremonially presented her to Alice.

  I was just starting to consider the enormity of all the things that had happened to Alice over the last ten years when I found her ward number, and as I glanced through the door, I saw her in the first curtained-off cubicle, propped up against pillows, her hands resting on her lap and her eyes staring straight ahead. There was no color to her. She was wearing a white hospital gown, lying against a white pillow with a white gauze bandage wrapped around her head, and even her face was dead white. It was strange to see her so still; Alice is all about sharp, quick movement. She's texting on her mobile, jangling her car keys, grabbing one of the kids by the elbow and saying something stern in their ear. She's fingernail-tapping busy, busy, busy.

  (Ten years ago she was nothing like that. She and Nick slept till noon every Sunday morning. "How will they ever find time to renovate that enormous house!" clucked Mum and Frannie and me, like elderly aunts.)

  She didn't see me at first and as I walked up to her, her eyes flickered, and they looked so big and blue in her pale face, but more importantly, she was looking at me in a different, but familiar, way. I don't know how to describe it, except that the strange thought came into my head, "You're back."

  You want to know the first thing she said to me, Dr. Hodges?

  She said, "Oh Libby, what happened to you?"

  I told you, it defines me.

  Alice had finally been moved up to a ward and given a hospital gown and a remote for the television and a white chest of drawers. A lady wheeling a trolley brought her a cup of weak tea and four tiny triangular curried-egg sandwiches. The nurse was right; the tea and sandwiches had made her feel better, except they hadn't done anything about the huge gaping crevasse in her memory.

  When she'd heard Elisabeth's voice on the mobile phone, it was just like each time she'd called home on that disastrous trip around Europe when she was nineteen and trying to pretend she had a different personality--an adventurous, extroverted sort of personality; the sort of person who loves exploring cathedrals and ruins all day on her own and talking to drunk boys from Brisbane in youth hostels at night--when really she was homesick and lonely and often bored, and couldn't make head or tail of the train timetables. The sound of Elisabeth's voice, loud and clear in a strange phone box on the other side of the world, always made Alice's knees buckle with relief, and she'd press her forehead against the glass and think, That's right; I am a real person.

  "My sister is coming right now," she told the nurse when she hung up, as if giving her credentials as a proper person with a family; a family she recognized.

  Although, when Elisabeth first walked toward her bed, she actually didn't recognize her. She vaguely assumed that this woman in the cream suit with the glasses and the swinging shoulder-length hair must be a hospital administrator coming to do something administrative, but then something about the woman's straight-backed "I'll take you on" posture, something essentially Elisabeth, gave her away.

  It was a shock, because it seemed that overnight Elisabeth had put on a lot of weight. She'd always had a strong, lithe, athletic-looking body, because of her rowing and her jogging and whatever else it was she was always so busy doing. Now she wasn't fat but definitely larger, softer, and bustier; a puffed-out version of herself, as if someone had blown her up like a plastic pool toy. She won't like that, thought Alice. Elisabeth had always been so amusingly moralistic about fattening food, refusing an offer of pavlova as if it were crack cocaine. Once, when Nick, Alice, and Elisabeth went away for a weekend together, Elisabeth spent ages at the breakfast table studying the "nutritional information" panel on the side of a container of yogurt, warning them darkly, "You have to be really careful with yogurt." Whenever Nick and Alice ate yogurt after that, one of them would always shout, "Careful!"

  As she got closer and the bright light over Alice's bed lit up her face, Alice saw fine spidery lines etched around Elisabeth's mouth and on either side of her eyes behind the elegant spectacles. Elisabeth had large, pale blue eyes with dark lashes, like Alice, inherited from their father; eyes that attracted compliments, but now they seemed smaller and paler, as if the color had begun to wash out.

  There was something bruised and wary and worn out about those washed-out eyes, as if she'd just been badly defeated in a fight she'd expected to win.

  Alice felt a surge of worry; something terrible must have happened.

  But when she asked, Elisabeth said, "What do you mean what happened to me?" so briskly and spiritedly that Alice doubted herself.

  Elisabeth pulled over a plastic chair and sat down. Alice caught a glimpse of her skirt pulling unflatteringly across her stomach and quickly looked away; it made her want to cry.

  Elisabeth said, "You're the one in hospital. The question is what happened to you?"

  Alice felt herself slip into the role of irrepressible, hopeless Alice. "It's completely bizarre. It's like a dream. Apparently, I fell over at the gym. Me, at the gym! I know! According to Jane Turner I was doing something called my 'Friday spin class.' " She could be silly now, because Elisabeth was here to be sensible.

  Elisabeth stared at her with such grim, frightened concentration that Alice felt her silly grin drift away.

  She reached out for the photo she'd left sitting on the chest of drawers next to her bed and handed it to Elisabeth, saying in a small, polite voice, "Are these my ..." She felt more foolish than she'd ever felt in her life. "Are these my children?"

  Elisabeth took the photo, glanced at it, and something complicated crossed her face, a barely perceptible tremor, and vanished. She smiled carefully and said, "Yes, Alice."

  Alice took a deep, shaky breath and closed her eyes. "I've never seen them before."

  She heard Elisabeth take a deep breath herself. "It's just temporary, I'm sure. You probably just need to rest, to relax and--"

  "What are they like?" Alice opened her eyes. "Those children. Are they ... nice?"

  Elisabeth said in a stronger voice, "They're wonderful, Alice."

  Alice said, "Am I a good mother? Do I look after them all right? What do I feed them? They're so big!"

  "Your children are your life, Alice," said Elisabeth. "You'll remember for yourself soon. It will all come back. Just--"

  "I could cook them sausages, I guess," said Alice, cheering up at the thought. "Kids love sausages."

  Elisabeth stared. "You would never feed them sausages."

  "I thought I was pregnant," said Alice. "But they did a blood test and told me I'm definitely not. I don't feel like I am, but I can't believe I'm not. I can't believe it."

  "No. Well, I don't think you would be pregnant--"

  "Three kids!" said Alice. "We're only going to have two."

  "Olivia was an accident," said Elisabeth stiffly, as if she disapproved.

  "None of this seems real," said Alice. "I'm like Alice in Wonderland. Remember how much I hated that book? Because nothing made sense. You didn't like it either. We liked things to make sense."

  "I can imagine it must feel really strange, but it's not going to last, it's all going to come back to you any minute. You must have hit your head quite ... severely."

  "Yes. Very severely." Alice picked up the photo again. "So this little girl. This little girl is the oldest, so she must be my first baby, right? So we had a girl?"
/>
  "Yes, you did."

  "We thought it was a boy."

  "I remember that."

  "And labor! I went through labor three times? What was my labor like? I'm so nervous about it. I mean, I was ..."

  "I think you had a pretty easy time with Madison, but there were complications with Olivia--" Elisabeth fidgeted in her plastic seat. "Look, Alice, I think I should go and try to talk to one of your doctors. I'm finding this really hard. It's weird. It's really ... scary."

  Alice reached out for Elisabeth's arm in a panic. She couldn't stand to be alone again. "No, no, don't go. Someone will be around soon. They keep coming and checking on me. Hey, Libby, I called Nick at work and they told me he was in Portugal! Portugal! What's he doing there? I left a message with some horrible secretary. I stood up to her. You'd be proud of me! I showed backbone. My backbone was like steel."

  "Good for you," said Elisabeth. She looked as if she'd just eaten something that disagreed with her.

  "But he still hasn't called me back," sighed Alice.

  Elisabeth's Homework for Dr. Hodges It was only when she started talking about Nick being in Portugal that the obvious hit me, and it seemed even more shocking than when she asked me whether her children were "nice."

  She really has forgotten everything.

  Even Gina.

  Chapter 7

  "So, you seriously don't remember anything, not a single thing, since 1998?" Elisabeth shifted the plastic chair in closer toward Alice's bed and leaned toward her, as if it was time to get to the bottom of this. "Nothing at all?"

  "Well, I've been having some funny snippets of things come into my mind," said Alice. "But none of them make sense."

  "Okay, so tell me about them," urged Elisabeth. Her face was closer now to Alice and the lines on either side of her mouth were even deeper than Alice had first thought. Goodness. Involuntarily, Alice pressed her fingertips to her own skin; she still hadn't looked at herself in a mirror.