What Alice Forgot

  Of course, I didn't tell him about you.

  Mr. Mustache listened (I'll give him that. He really did listen.) and then he said, "I think you can drop the 'honorary.' Sounds like they really are your family."

  Phil, I'm not sure why this bothered me so much. It was something about his tone. So definite. So presumptuous. I've only known the man five minutes and he's making remarks about my life. And he seemed to be implying that I was being overly pedantic.

  Am I making too much of this? Am I pedantic?

  I guess I've always taken secret pride in my pedantry.

  Oh I can just imagine you snorting!

  Must rush. I'm catching the minibus into the shops to buy a gift for Alice. I'll never get this letter finished at this rate!

  Right! Time to get moving. A nice hot shower. Clothes. Hair. Makeup.

  The last nurse had left and now a brisk, bossy voice in Alice's head was telling her what to do.

  Too tired, replied Alice truculently. Her eyes were dry and stinging. I've just had the worst night of my life. Also I should probably wait and ask a nurse.

  Rubbish! You'll feel more awake after your shower. You always do!

  Do I?

  Yes! And it's time to look in the mirror, for heaven's sake. You're only thirty-nine, not eighty-nine. How bad can it be?

  What about a towel? I don't know which towel to use. There might be procedures.

  You smell of sweat, Alice. From that gym class. You need a shower.

  Alice sat up. She couldn't stand the thought of having any sort of body odor. It was the ultimate humiliation. She was horrified even when Nick casually mentioned she had garlicky breath the day after they'd eaten an especially garlicky dinner. She would clap a hand to her mouth and run to clean her teeth and spend the whole day chewing gum. Nick was bemused by the fuss. He couldn't care less if he smelled. After working all day on the house, he'd sniff cheerfully at his armpits like an ape and announce, "I stink!" as if it were a fine achievement.

  Maybe Nick was divorcing her because she'd developed extremely bad breath.

  She put a tentative hand to the tender lump on her head. The pain was still there, but it was definitely better, more like a memory of yesterday's pain.

  But she didn't remember those children, and she didn't remember Nick moving out.

  She slid her bare feet onto the cool floor and looked around her. The tulips her mother had given her were fat, gold bulbs against the white of the hospital room wall. She tried to imagine her mother dancing the salsa with Roger, their hips swiveling in unison. She could imagine Roger's hips swiveling all right, but Mum's? She was fascinated and repelled by the thought. She couldn't wait to talk to Nick about it.

  Well.

  She remembered his voice on the phone yesterday, thick with hatred. It had to be over something more than bad breath. If that had been the reason, he would have sounded compassionate and embarrassed.

  Even with the memory of that phone call (the way he swore at her!), it still seemed impossible that Nick wasn't about to turn up any minute, breathless and rumpled, apologizing for the misunderstanding, hugging her to his chest. She couldn't feel properly upset about this talk of divorce because it was too stupid. This was Nick! Her Nick. As soon as she saw him again it would all be okay.

  The rucksack with the dinosaur stickers was sitting in the cupboard next to her bed. She thought about that beautiful red dress; maybe she could squeeze into it.

  She held the rucksack under one arm and prudishly clutched the hospital robe together behind her in one hand so as not to reveal her underpants, but there was no need. The curtains around the other girl's bed were pulled and she was still snoring her mosquito-whine snore.

  Maybe as Alice had got older her snoring had got even worse and that's why Nick had left. She could get one of those horrible mouthguard things. That was easy to solve. Come on home, Nick.

  She was so tired it felt like she was walking through wet concrete.

  I think I should get back into bed.

  Don't you dare get back into bed. You'll make them late for school again and you'll never hear the end of it.

  Alice's chin jerked up with surprise. Where did that come from? She thought of the photo of the three children in their school uniforms. It must be Alice's responsibility to get them to school on time each day.

  Maybe, just maybe, there was the tiniest, fleeting, corner-of-the-eye memory of pounding footsteps down a hallway, doors slamming, a horn tooting, a child wailing, a drilling feeling right in the center of her forehead. But as soon as she tried to grab hold of it, it vanished, as if she'd made it up.

  It felt like she was facing straight ahead but just to the left and right of her were ten years' worth of memories, if only she could find a way to just turn her head to face them.

  She went into the small bathroom that she and the snoring girl shared, switched on the fluorescent light, and locked the door behind her. She blinked in the all-enveloping brightness. Last night she'd managed to use the toilet and wash her hands without looking at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. There would be no more of that. Today was the day for clean, crisp action.

  She undid the ties around her neck and back, let the robe fall to the floor, and stepped in front of the mirror.

  She could see herself from the waist up.

  Skinny, she thought, pressing her fingertips to the curve of her waist and then running them up and down her ribs. She could actually see her ribs. You're a skinny girl. Her stomach was hard and flat like that girl's at the gym. How did that happen?

  Of course she'd always said that she should get fit and lose weight, without ever actually doing anything about it. It was something you were meant to say to your girlfriends at regular intervals to show you were a proper woman: "Oh God, I'm so fat!" When she was going out with Richard, the boyfriend before Nick, who would say "Heave 'em up!" when he watched her pull up her jeans over her thighs, that slight dissatisfaction with her body occasionally turned to self-hatred and she'd starve herself for a day before eating a packet of chocolate biscuits for dinner. But then she met Nick, who told her she was beautiful, and whenever he touched her, it was as if his touch were actually making her as beautiful as he seemed to believe she was. So why would she deny herself a second piece of mud cake or glass of champagne if Nick was there with the knife or the bottle poised, grinning evilly and saying "You only live once," as if every day were a celebration. Nick had a little boy's sweet tooth, and an appreciation of good food, fine wine, and beautiful weather; eating and drinking with Nick in hot sunshine was like sex. He made her feel like a well-fed, happy cat: plump, sleek, purring with sensual satisfaction.

  Alice couldn't decide if she liked her flat new stomach or not. On the one hand, there was a distinct feeling of pride, like discovering a new skill. Look what I did! I've got a stomach like a supermodel! On the other hand, the feeling of hard bone under her skin gave her a slight feeling of revulsion, as if her flesh had been shaved away.

  What did Nick think of this new skinny body? Perhaps he didn't care. "So why the fuck did you ring me?"

  Her breasts were a lot smaller, she noted, and not quite as perky. Actually, they were awful, elongated and sagging like socks down toward her stomach. She held them up in her hands and let them drop again. Oh, yuck. She didn't like that at all. She missed her nice, round, cheerful, bobbing-about breasts.

  Was it breast-feeding three children that had done this? And that would be perfectly fine if she had nostalgic memories of late nights sitting in a rocking chair with a downy-headed baby in her arms, except she didn't. She was looking forward to breast-feeding. It was meant to happen in her future, not in her past.

  Okay, forget the breasts. The face. It was time for the face.

  She took a step closer to the mirror and held her breath.

  At first it was a relief, because it was still her own Alice face looking dopily back at her. She wasn't hideously deformed. She hadn't grown horns. In fact, she quite
liked her thinner face. It seemed to have more definition and made her eyes look bigger. Her eyebrows were perfectly shaped and her eyelashes were dark. She didn't seem to have as many freckles. Her skin looked smooth and clear, although actually, there were quite a few funny, faint scratches on her face around her mouth and eyes. Maybe from when she fell over? She leaned in closer to examine them.

  Oh.

  They weren't scratches. They were wrinkles, just like Elisabeth's, maybe worse than Elisabeth's. There were two deep grooves in between her eyes. When she stopped frowning they didn't go away. There were little pouches of pink skin under her eyes, and Alice remembered how when she'd seen Jane yesterday she thought at first there was something wrong with her eyes. There had been nothing wrong with Jane; she was just ten years older.

  She rubbed her fingertip over the fine scratchlike lines around her mouth and eyes as if she could just smear them away. They seemed wrong, as if they shouldn't be there; thank you anyway, but I don't think so, not for me, these don't belong on my face.

  She gave up and stood back from the mirror so she couldn't see the wrinkles.

  Her hair was still pulled back in the elastic band from the night before. She pulled it out and looked at it in the palm of her hand, amazed afresh that she didn't even recognize the black hair band and had no memory of putting it in her hair.

  Her hair fell just above her shoulders. She must have had it cut, as she suspected. What brought on that decision, she wondered. The color was different, too. It was bordering on blond rather than brown; a dark ashy sort of blond. It was messy from her night of tossing and turning, but then she ran her fingers through it and saw that it was cut in an elegant shape that curved around the neck, making it seem longer. It wasn't her taste, but she had to admit it did suit her face better than any other haircut she'd had.

  She'd grown up. That was it. A grown-up looked back at her. She just didn't feel that way.

  Okay, then. This is you, Alice. This is who you are. A grown-up skinny mother of three in the middle of a nasty custard-throwing divorce.

  She squinted her eyes and imagined her old self, her real self, staring back at her from the mirror. Long brown hair in no particular style, a rounder, softer face, perkier, bigger breasts, fatter (pretty fat) stomach, more freckles, no wrinkles to speak of--in love with Nick and pregnant with her first baby.

  But that girl was gone. There was no point thinking about her.

  Alice turned away from the mirror and, looking around the unfamiliar bathroom, she was overwhelmed with loneliness. She thought again of that silly solitary trip through Europe, brushing her teeth in strange bathrooms, staring at herself in speckled mirrors with a dizzy feeling of dissociation as she tried to work out who she really was without people who loved her to reflect back her personality. Now she wasn't in a strange country where people spoke a different language, but she was in a strange new world where everybody knew what was going on except for her. She was the foolish one making a goose of herself, saying the wrong thing, not knowing the rules.

  She took a shaky breath.

  This was only temporary. Soon she would have her memory back and life would go on as normal.

  But did she want her memory back? Did she want to remember? What she really wanted was to hop in her time machine and go directly back to 1998.

  Well. Bad luck. Deal with it, honey. Have a shower. Time for coffee and an egg-white omelette before the kids wake up.

  "Before the kids wake up." The way this rather bossy, acerbic voice kept popping into her head was really freaking her out. And an "egg-white omelette"? What was that all about? Wouldn't it be entirely without flavor? She didn't fancy that at all for breakfast.

  Or did she? She licked her lips experimentally. Egg-white omelette or peanut butter on toast? Both choices seemed simultaneously delicious and disgusting.

  Well, it's hardly a matter of life and death, is it, Alice?

  Oh shut up. No offense, but you sound like a bit of a bitch, Alice.

  She went to the rucksack and pulled out the swish toiletries bag. Presumably she could rely on new Alice to have packed shampoo and conditioner. She rifled through chunky, expensive-looking jars and bottles (good Lord, wasn't this just a trip to the gym?) and found two slim, tall, dark bottles. They were brands she didn't recognize promising "salon-quality results."

  As she stood under the shower and massaged the shampoo into her hair, the fragrant smell of peach filled her nostrils and it was so entirely familiar her knees buckled. Of course, of course. She made a sound like a strangled sob and remembered herself standing under a pounding shower, steam billowing, resting her forehead against a wall of blue tiles and howling silently while the bubbly lather from the peach-smelling shampoo slipped into her eyes. I can't bear it. I can't ... I can't ...

  For a moment the memory was so real, it could have been happening right then, and then the next second it slithered away like the froth from her shampoo.

  The smell of the shampoo remained intensely, ridiculously familiar, but she couldn't grab hold of another memory.

  Oh, that feeling of hopeless grief and just wanting the pain to stop.

  Am I remembering crying over Nick?

  If these were the memories that were locked away in her head--memories of a perfectly wonderful marriage disintegrating, memories of clinging to a shower wall while she cried--did she really want them back?

  She turned off the shower and dried herself with the towel from the rucksack. With the towel wrapped around her, she pulled the bottles and jars out of the toiletries bag and lined them up in front of her. What did she actually do with all that stuff?

  Move it, move it.

  Her hand moved instinctively toward a jar with a gold lid. She opened it to reveal a thick, creamy moisturizer. With rapid, efficient movements she briskly rubbed the moisturizer all over her face. Dab, dab, dab. Without stopping to think, she picked up a glass bottle of foundation, poured some onto a sponge, and began rubbing it all over her face. A part of her mind registered all this with astonishment. Foundation? She never wore foundation. She hardly ever bothered with makeup. But her hands were moving so fast, her head tilting this way and that as if she'd done this a million times before. Next came a shiny gold-colored stick that she rubbed into her cheeks. She snapped open jars, bottles, and containers. Mascara. Eyeliner. Lipstick.

  Suddenly--it must have taken less than five minutes--she was finished and stowing all the bottles away in the toiletries bag. Without stopping, she unzipped a pocket on the side of the bag and wondered what she was looking for until she pulled out a portable hair dryer and a round brush. Oh, right, fair enough. Time to blow-dry your hair. She plugged it in and once again her hands moved without waiting for her to tell them what to do. The brush moved back and forth. The hair dryer roared hot air.

  Okay, so once you leave here, you've got to--

  Her mind went blank.

  ... you've got to ...

  Her hair was done.

  She snapped off the hair dryer, pulled the plug out of the socket, twirled the cord round and round, and shoved it back into the bag and began to rustle again for something else. Good Lord. Why was she moving so fast? Where was the fire?

  She pulled out the flat plastic bag with the clothes, shook it open, and pulled out the matching cream underwear and dress. The underwear felt smooth and luxurious against her skin and the bra lifted her breasts back to their former perky position. Surely this beautiful dress would not fit, but she was sliding it over her head, doing up the zipper at the side without having to look for it, and there were no bulges of unsightly fat because she didn't have them anymore.

  Jewelry. She found the topaz necklace and Nick's bracelet and put them on. Shoes. She slid her feet into them.

  She stopped and looked at the woman in the mirror and watched her bottom lip drop in awe.

  She looked, well, she had to say that she looked pretty good. She turned side to side and observed herself over one shoulder.

&
nbsp; An attractive, elegant, slim woman. The sort of woman she never thought it was possible for her to be. She had become one of those women, those other women, who had seemed too perfectly put together to be real.

  Why did Nick want to leave her if she looked this damned good?

  There was still something missing.

  Perfume.

  She found it in the zippered section at the front of the toiletries bag. She sprayed it on both wrists and suddenly she was leaning forward, grasping both sides of the basin to stop herself from falling. The scent was vanilla, mandarin, and roses. Her whole life was right there in that scent. She was being sucked into a massive swirling vortex of grief and fury and the ring, ring, ring of the phone and the rising whiny shriek of a child and the babble of the television and Nick sitting on the end of the bed, bent right over with his hands laced tightly around the back of his head.

  "Excuse me?"

  There was a knock on the bathroom door.

  "Excuse me? Will you be much longer? It's just that I'm dying to go!" Alice stood slowly back up. The color had drained from her face. Was she going to be sick again, like yesterday? No.

  "Sorry!" she called out. "Won't be a second."

  She put her hands in the sink and used the pink soap from the soap dispenser to scrub away hard at the perfume. As the straightforward, bracing smell of strawberry bubble gum mixed with disinfectant filled her nostrils, the vortex receded.

  I don't remember.

  I don't remember.

  I won't remember.

  Elisabeth's Homework for Dr. Hodges She was dressed and waiting for me when I went to pick her up from the hospital. She had dark circles under very red eyes, but her hair was done and her makeup perfect as always.

  She looked so much like her normal self that I was sure she must have her memory back and this strange interlude in our lives was all over.

  I said, "Has it all come back to you now?" and she said, "Just about," and avoided my eyes and I thought she must have felt embarrassed about what she'd said about Nick. She said she'd been checked over by the doctor, and signed all the forms, and couldn't wait to get home to her own bed.

  She didn't say much as we were leaving the hospital, and I didn't either. When she finally went to speak, I thought for sure she would be talking about all the million things she had to do that weekend and the precious time she'd lost being in hospital. Instead she said, "How many children do you have?"