What Alice Forgot

  "Why are you talking to me like that?" said Alice. Her heart raced. This was more terrifying than anything that had happened to her today. "What did I do?"

  "Oh, for God's sake, I don't have time for fucking games at the moment!"

  He was shouting. He was actually shouting at her, and she was in hospital.

  "Paprika," whispered Alice. "You have to wash your mouth out with paprika, Nick."

  Elisabeth stood up. "Give it here," she ordered.

  She removed the phone from Alice's trembling fingers, put the phone to her ear, and pressed a finger to her other ear. She turned her face away from Alice and dropped her chin. "Nick, it's Elisabeth. This is actually quite serious. She's had a bad head injury and she's lost her memory. She's forgotten everything since 1998. Do you understand what I'm saying? Everything."

  Alice let her head fall back against the pillow and breathed shallow gasps of air. What did it mean?

  Elisabeth paused, listening, her forehead furrowed. "Yes, yes, I understand, but she doesn't actually remember any of that."

  Another pause.

  "They're with Ben. He's taken them to their swimming lesson, and I guess we'll stay over with them tonight, and then--"

  Pause. "Yes, okay, and then your mum can pick them up exactly as per the arrangements, and I'm sure by Sunday night Alice should be back on her feet and everything will be back to normal." Pause. "No, I haven't talked to a doctor yet, but I will soon." Pause. "Right. Okay, well do you want me to put Alice back on?"

  Alice held out her hand for the phone--surely Nick would be himself again now--but Elisabeth said, "Oh. Okay. Well, bye, Nick."

  She hung up.

  Alice said, "He didn't want to talk to me? He actually didn't want to talk to me?" She could feel stabbing pains all over her body, a long witchy finger poking her cruelly.

  Elisabeth clicked the phone shut and put her hand on Alice's arm. She said gently, "You'll remember soon. It's okay. It's just that you and Nick aren't together anymore."

  Alice felt a sensation of everything around her plummeting toward the central point of Elisabeth's moving lips. She focused on those lips. Raspberry lipstick with a darker line around the edge. Elisabeth must use lip liner. Fancy that. She must line her lips.

  What was she saying? She could not be saying--

  "What?" said Alice.

  Elisabeth said again, "You're getting divorced."

  Well, fancy that.

  Chapter 8

  Alice had one glass of champagne with her bridesmaids while they were getting their makeup done, another half a glass in the limo, three and a quarter glasses at the wedding reception (including strawberries), and another glass sitting up with Nick on the king-size bed in their hotel room that night.

  So she was somewhat sozzled, but that was no problem because she was the bride and it was her wedding day, and everyone had said she looked beautiful, and so this was a beautiful, romantic drunkenness that would probably not result in a hangover.

  "Do you love and adore my wedding dress?" she asked Nick for what could have been the third time, as she ran her hand across its rich, lustrous fabric. It was called Ivory Silk Duchess Satin, and touching it gave her the same sensuously satisfied feeling as when she was a little girl and she used to run her finger over the plush pink lining of her music box, except this was even better because back then she really wanted to be in the music box, rolling around on pink satin. "I love my wedding dress. It sort of looks like golden, magical ice cream, doesn't it? Couldn't you just eat it?"

  "Normally I'd tuck in," said Nick. "But I'm full of cake. I had three pieces. That was outstanding cake. Everybody will be talking about the cake at our wedding for years to come. Most wedding cake is boring, but our cake! I'm so proud of our cake. I didn't make the cake, but I'm proud of it."

  It seemed Nick had drunk quite a bit of champagne, too.

  Alice set her glass on the bedside table and lay down on her back with a rich rustle of fabric. Nick slid down beside her. He'd taken off his tie and undone the buttons of his white dinner shirt. He had the beginnings of a five-o'clock shadow and slightly bloodshot eyes, but his hair was still perfect with a ridgelike wave at the part. Alice touched it and pulled her hand back. "It feels like straw!"

  "The sisters," explained Nick. "Armed with gel."

  He stroked her hair and said, "That's a nice synthetic feel you've got going there, wife."

  "Hairspray. A lot of hairspray, husband."

  "Is that right, wife?"

  "Yes it is, husband."

  "How interesting, wife."

  "Are we going to talk like this forever, husband?"

  "No way, wife."

  They looked up at the ceiling and said nothing.

  "What about Ella's speech!" said Alice.

  "I think it was meant to be touching."

  "Ah."

  "What about your Aunt Whatsie's dress!"

  "I think it was meant to be, um ... stylish."

  "Ah."

  They snickered quietly.

  Alice rolled onto her side and said, "Imagine," and her eyes filled with tears. She always got emotional when she drank too much champagne. "Imagine if we never met."

  "It was fated," said Nick. "So we would have met the next day."

  "But I don't believe in fate!" whimpered Alice, reveling in the luxurious feeling of hot, wet tears rolling down her cheeks; those triple coats of mascara would be streaked all over her face. It seemed truly frightening that it was only by sheer chance that she had met Nick. It could so easily not have happened, and then she would have had a shadowy, half-alive existence, like some sort of woodland creature who never sees sunlight, never even knowing how much she could love and how much she could be loved. Elisabeth once said--very definitely and severely--that the right man didn't complete you, you have to find happiness yourself, and Alice nodded agreeably, while thinking to herself, "Oh, but yes he does."

  "If we'd never met," continued Alice, "then today would just be like any other day and right now we'd be watching television in separate homes, and I'd be wearing tracksuit pants and, and ... we wouldn't be going on honeymoon tomorrow." The full horror of what could have been struck her. "We'd be going to work! Work!"

  "Come here, my darling inebriated bride." Nick pulled Alice to him, so that her head was resting beneath his shoulder and she breathed in the scent of his aftershave. It was much stronger than usual; he must have slapped on extra that morning, and the thought of him doing that was so unbearably sweet, it made her cry even harder. He said, "The important point here is this--wait for it, it's a very important and intelligent point--you ready?"

  "Yes."

  "We did meet."

  "Yes," conceded Alice. "We did meet."

  "So it all turned out okay."

  "That's true," sniffed Alice. "It all turned out okay."

  "It all turned out okay."

  And then they had both fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep, with Alice's Ivory Silk Duchess Satin wedding dress swirled all over them, and a single red dot of confetti stuck to the side of Nick's face, which would leave a red circle that would stay there for the first three days of their honeymoon.

  "We must have just had a bad argument," said Alice to Elisabeth. "We're not actually divorcing. We would never divorce."

  That word--"divorce"--was so ugly; her lips pursed together like a fish on the second syllable. Dee-vorce. No. Not them. Never, ever them.

  Nick's parents divorced when he was a child. He remembered everything about it. Whenever they heard about a couple divorcing--even a trashy, laughable celebrity couple--Nick always said, sadly, like an Irish grandma, "Ah, that's a shame." He believed in marriage. He felt that people gave up on their relationships too easily. He once said to Alice that if they were ever having troubles in their marriage, he would move heaven and earth to fix things. Alice couldn't take it seriously because heaven and earth wouldn't need to be moved; any troubles in their relationship could always be fixed with a few hour
s in separate rooms, a hug in the hallway, the quiet sliding of a chocolate bar under an elbow, or even just a gentle, meaningful poke in the ribs that meant "Let's stop fighting now."

  Divorce was like a phobia for Nick, his only phobia! If this were true, then he would be devastated, crushed. The thing he feared most had happened. Her heart broke for him.

  "Did we have a really bad argument about something?" Alice asked Elisabeth. She would get to the bottom of it, she would put a stop to it.

  "I don't think it's just one argument. I guess it's probably a whole lot of little issues, but to be honest, you haven't really told me that much about it. You just rang me the day after Nick moved out and said--"

  "He moved out? He actually moved out of the house?"

  It was mind-boggling; she tried to visualize how it could actually happen, Nick throwing stuff into a suitcase, slamming the door behind him, a yellow taxicab waiting outside--it would have to be yellow, like an American cab, because this could not be real, this was a scene from a movie with a heart-wrenching soundtrack. This was not her life.

  "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.

  Nick, you will never believe how this man spoke to me. You will want to punch him in the nose when you hear. Except it's so strange, because it was you, Nick, you were the man.

  "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 deja 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."