What Alice Forgot (38 page)

When Alice walked into Dino's Coffee Shop her senses were flooded with familiarity. The aroma of coffee and pastries. The rhythmic thud and hiss of the espresso machine.

“Alice, my love!” said a small, dark-haired man behind the counter. He was working the coffee machine with two hands, expertly and elegantly, as if it were a musical instrument. “I heard on the grapevine you had an accident! Lost your memory! But you never forget Dino, do you?”

“Well,” said Alice carefully, “I think I remember your coffee.”

Dino laughed as if she'd made a hilarious joke. “Of course you do, my love! Of course you do! I won't be one moment. I know you're in a hurry. Busy lady. Here you go.”

Without waiting for an order, he handed her a takeaway cup. “How you feeling, anyway? You all better? You remember everything? You ready for the big day on Sunday? Mega Meringue Day at last! My daughter is so excited! All she talks about is ‘
Daddy, Daddy, this pie will be the biggest in the world!
'”

“Mmmm,” said Alice. She was assuming that by Sunday she would have her memory back, because she really had no idea how to bake the world's biggest lemon pie.

She peeled off the lid of the cup and took a sip. Ewww. No sugar, and extremely strong. She took another sip. Actually very good. She didn't need sugar. She took another sip, and another and another. She wanted to tip back her head and pour it straight down her throat. The caffeine was zipping through her veins, clearing her head, making her heart beat faster and her vision sharpen.

“Maybe you need two today?” chortled Dino.

“Maybe I do,” agreed Alice.

“How is your sister, by the way?” said Dino, still chuckling. He appeared to be a jolly fellow. He stopped and clicked his fingers. “Ah, my mind! I keep forgetting, my wife gave me something to give to her.”

“My sister?” Alice ran her finger around the edge of the cup and licked the froth while she wondered how well Dino knew Elisabeth. “She's okay, I guess.” She is an entirely different person. She appears to be desperately unhappy. I'm not sure how I've wronged her.

“I went home and told my wife the whole story, about how this lady walks off with a child, and then when she collapsed like that, crying, and none of us knew what to do! I was making her coffee! That's no help, is it? Even Dino's coffee! Those stupid women wanting to call the police.”

Good Lord. Had Elisabeth tried to kidnap a child? Alice felt pity (Her poor darling Elisabeth, how bad must she be feeling to so publicly break a rule!), a horrified shame (How
embarrassing
! How illegal!) and guilt (How could she be worried about what people thought when her sister was obviously suffering so badly?).

Dino continued, “I said to those women, ‘No harm done!' It was so lucky you showed up and made them see sense, and when you told me her story, so sad! Anyway, my wife gave me this. It's an African fertility figurine. If you have one of these dolls, you give birth to a beautiful baby. That's the legend.”

He handed her a small dark wooden doll with a Post-it note stuck to it saying “Alice.” The doll seemed to be an African woman in tribal dress with an oversized head.

“That's so sweet of your wife.” Alice handled the doll reverently. Was his wife African perhaps and this was some sort of mystical tribal heirloom?

“She bought it off the Internet,” confided Dino. “For her cousin, who couldn't get pregnant. Nine months later—baby! Although to be honest, not such a beautiful baby.” He slapped his knee, his face creased with mirth. “I say to my wife, That's one ugly baby! Got a big head, like the doll!” He could hardly speak, he was laughing so hard now. “Big head, I said. Like the doll!”

Alice smiled. Dino handed her another coffee and he became serious again.

“Nick came in the other day,” he said. “He didn't look too good. I said, You should get back together with your wife. I said, It's not right. I remember when I first opened the shop and you came in every weekend with little Madison. All three of you in overalls. She used to help you with the painting. You two were so proud of her. Never saw prouder parents! Remember?”

“Hmmmm,” said Alice.

“I told Nick that you two should get back together, be a family again,” said Dino. “I said, What went so wrong you can't fix? None of my business, right? My wife says, Dino, it's not your business! I say, I don't care, I say what I think, that's just me.”

“What did Nick say?” asked Alice. She was already halfway through the next cup of coffee.

“He said, ‘I would fix it if I could, mate.' ”

Alice drove home chanting Nick's words in her head. He would if he could, so therefore . . . why not!

She had the takeaway cup of coffee in a handy cup holder close to the steering wheel. She found she could steer this enormous car with one hand and take sips of coffee with the other. So many useful new skills! The caffeine was making her tremble with energy. She felt like her eyes were protruding. When the light changed to green and the car in front didn't move straightaway, she shoved it along with a bossy beep of her horn.

That sharp voice was back in her head, working out everything she had to do before she picked the children up at 3:30 p.m. “You need to be on time, Mum,” Tom had told her. “Monday afternoons are a pretty tight schedule.”

She shouldn't have had the two cups of coffee. Her heart was beating much too fast. She took a few deep, shaky breaths to steady herself. She couldn't keep up with her own body. She felt as if she needed to run crazily across a huge expanse of grass, flinging her body about like a puppy let off its leash.

When she got home she ran through the house as if she were in some sort of weird competition, gathering piles of clothes from laundry hampers and the floors of the children's bedrooms and bathrooms. There was a lot. She pounded down the stairs to the laundry. No surprise to see a huge, shiny-white washing machine taking up half the room. She lifted the lid ready to toss in the clothes when she felt a rush of feelings. Embarrassed. Betrayed. Shocked.

What did it mean? The memory flipped to the front of her brain like a neat index card. Of course. Something had happened right here. Right here in this extraordinarily clean laundry. Something horrible.

That's right. It was a party.

Alice stared down at the pile of clothes in the machine. She could see the woman's face so clearly. The delicate bones of her face. She could even hear her voice. Sugar-sweet and childlike to match her tiny body. It made her teeth ache.

She poured in a scoop of washing powder and slammed down the machine lid. How dare Nick guffaw when she asked if he'd had an affair? That kiss was worse than catching them in bed together. It was worse because it was so obviously a kiss at the beginning. Early kisses were so much more erotic than early sex. Sex at the beginning of a relationship was fumbly and silly and vaguely gynecological, like a doctor's appointment. But fully clothed kisses, before you'd slept together, were delicious and mysterious.

Nick had kissed her for the first time up against the car after they'd just seen
Lethal Weapon 3
at the movies. He tasted of popcorn, with a hint of chocolate. He was wearing a black jumper over a white T-shirt and jeans, and he was a bit stubbly under his lower lip and even as he was kissing her, she was already carefully saving it up as a memory, knowing that she'd be sitting at her computer screen the next day, reliving it. She'd pulled it out and replayed it like an old movie so many times. She had described it in minute detail to her friend Sophie, who had been in a relationship for five years and had therefore moaned with jealousy, even though Jack was the love of her life.

Sophie. Her oldest friend. Bridesmaid at her wedding.

She would ring Sophie right now. There was no way she hadn't called Sophie and told her about the horror of that kiss in the laundry. First she would have called Elisabeth. Then Sophie. She would have skewed the story for each of them. For Elisabeth she would have concentrated on her own feelings. “How could he do that to me?” she would have asked and her voice would have quivered. For Sophie she would have spun out the story for maximum shock: “So I walked into the laundry to get some champagne and you will never in a million years guess what I saw. Go on, guess.” From Elisabeth she would have got sympathy and very clear instructions on what to do next. From Sophie she would have got shock and fury and an invitation to go out right now and get very drunk.

She found her address book and Sophie's mobile number. It seemed that Sophie was living in Dee Why. The northern beaches. Good for her. She'd always wanted to live by the beach, but Jack preferred to live close to the city. She must have won out in the end. They must be married with children by now, although of course Alice had to remember not to take that for granted. She hoped Sophie hadn't had fertility problems like Elisabeth. Or she and Jack could have broken up? No. Not possible.

“Sophie Drew.”

Goodness. Everyone had become so professional and grown-up.

“Sophie, hi, it's me, Alice.”

There was a slight pause. “Oh, hi, Alice. How are you?”

“Well, you're not going to
believe
what happened to me,” said Alice, and she realized she was feeling strangely silly. Almost nervous. Why? It was only Sophie.

There was another pause. “What happened to you?”

There was something not quite right. Sophie's voice was too polite. Alice wanted to cry. Oh, for heaven's sake, I can't have lost you as well, can I? Who do I
talk
to?

She didn't bother spinning out the story. She said, “I had an accident. Hit my head. I've lost my memory.”

This time there was an even longer pause. Then she heard Sophie say to someone in the background, “I won't be long. Just tell them to hold on.”

Her voice came back. Louder. Maybe a touch impatient. “Sorry, Alice. So, umm, you had an accident?”

“Are we still friends?” said Alice desperately. “We are still friends, aren't we, Soph?”

“Of course we are,” said Sophie immediately, warmly, except now her voice had an undercurrent of “
Something weird is going on here. Must tread carefully
!”

“It's just that my last proper memory is of being pregnant with Madison. And now I find I've got three children, and Nick and I aren't together anymore, and I can't work out why, and Elisabeth—”

“No, no, not that one! The green one!” Sophie spoke sharply. “Sorry. I'm in the middle of a shoot for the new line. It's a madhouse around here.”

“Oh. What do you do?”

Another pause. “Does that look green to you? Because it sure doesn't look green to me. Alice, I'm sorry, but can I call you back?”

“Oh. Sure.”

“Look. I know we keep saying it but we must catch up!”

“Okay.” So they weren't friends anymore. Not proper friends. They were “must catch up” friends.