What Alice Forgot (8 page)

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.