What Alice Forgot, Page 26

  "Oh, thousands!" said Alice. "Thousands of divinely delicious calories."

  He gave her an odd look, and said, "Well if you've got a head injury, I suppose we shouldn't be training today."

  "No," said Alice. She didn't want to exercise in front of him. The very thought made her feel self-conscious. "I'll still pay, of course."

  "That's okay."

  "No, no, I insist."

  "Well, let's just make it a hundred."

  Geez. What did he normally charge?

  "So, this memory thing is just temporary, I assume?" he said. "What do the doctors say?"

  Alice waved him away irritably. She didn't want to talk to him about that. One hundred dollars! "How long have you been my personal trainer?"

  Luke stretched out his long legs and leaned back on his elbows. "Oh, wow, it must be coming up to three years now. You and Gina were, like, maybe my second-ever clients. Bloody hell, she made me laugh in the beginning. Remember the fuss she made whenever we did the stairs down at the park? Not the stairs, Luke, anything but the stairs. She got pretty good, though. You both got so fit." He stopped talking and Alice realized with a start that he was trying not to cry.

  "Sorry," he said in a muffled voice. "It's just that I never knew anyone who died before. It sort of freaks me out. Every time I come over to train you, I think of her. I mean, obviously you miss her so much more than me. Probably sounds stupid."

  "I don't remember her," said Alice.

  Luke looked at her, shocked. "You don't remember Gina?"

  "No. I mean--I know she used to be my friend. And I know she's dead."

  "Wow." He seemed lost for words. Finally he came up with one. "Freaky."

  Alice stretched her neck from side to side. She felt a strong desire to eat or drink something quite specific, except she couldn't work out what it was. Frankly, it was making her feel quite irritable.

  "Luke," she said snappishly. "Did I ever talk to you about Nick?"

  If she was paying him one hundred dollars for a chat, she might as well gather some useful information.

  He smiled, revealing chunky white teeth. He was a walking multivitamin advertisement. "You and Gina were always trying to get the male perspective from me on your marriage problems. I'd say, 'Hey, girls, I'm outnumbered here!' "

  "Yes," said Alice. She was surprised at just how very, very irritable she was feeling. "It's just that I don't remember why Nick and I are splitting up."

  "Oh," said Luke. He flipped over on his stomach and started doing push-ups on the top veranda step. "I remember once you said that in the end your divorce all came down to one thing. I went home and told my girlfriend that night. I knew she'd be interested."

  He put one arm behind his back and started doing his push-ups on one hand. Was that really necessary?

  "So ..." said Alice, as he switched arms with a grunt. "What was that one thing?"

  "I can't remember." He flipped back over and grinned at the expression on Alice's face. "You want me to call her?"

  "Could you?"

  He pulled out a mobile phone from his pocket and pushed a button.

  "Hey, babe. Yeah, no, nothing's wrong. I'm just with a client. Do you remember I told you that lady said her divorce was caused by one thing? Yeah, no, I just want to know, what was that one thing?"

  He listened.

  "Really? You're sure? Okay. Love ya."

  He hung up and looked at Alice. "Lack of sleep."

  "Lack of sleep," repeated Alice. "That doesn't make much sense."

  "No, that's what my girlfriend said, but I remember Gina seemed to understand."

  Alice sighed and scratched the side of her face. She was sick of hearing about Gina. "I'm feeling really grumpy. I need chocolate or ... something."

  "You probably need to see your dealer," said Luke.

  "My dealer?" What next? Was she a drug addict? Did she drop the kids off at school and then go home and snort a few lines of cocaine? She must be! How else did she know this drug-addict sort of terminology, like "snort a few lines"?

  "The coffee shop. Your body is screaming for a flat white."

  "But I don't drink coffee," said Alice.

  "You're a caffeine junkie," said Luke. "I never see you without a takeaway coffee in your hand."

  "I haven't had a coffee since my accident."

  "Have you had a headache?"

  "Well, yes, but I thought that was the injury."

  "It was probably the caffeine withdrawal as well. This might be a good opportunity to give it up. I've been trying to get you to cut back for ages."

  "No," said Alice, because now the desire she'd been feeling had a label. She could smell coffee beans. She could taste it. She wanted it right now. "Do you know where I get my coffee?"

  "Sure. Dino's. According to you, they do the best coffee in Sydney."

  Alice looked at him blankly.

  "Next to the cinema. On the highway."

  "Right." Alice stood up. "Well, thanks."

  "Oh. We're done? Okay." Luke stood up, towering over her. He seemed to be waiting for something.

  Alice realized with a start that he wanted his money. She went inside and found her purse. It was physically painful to hand over two fifty-dollar notes. He actually wasn't that good-looking at all.

  Luke's huge hand closed cheerfully around the cash. "Well, I hope you're back to yourself next week, eh? We'll do a killer session to make up!"

  "Great!" beamed Alice. She paid this man over a hundred dollars to tell her how to exercise each week?

  She watched him roar out of the driveway and shook her head. Right. Coffee. She looked at the step where Luke had done his push-ups and suddenly she was down on her hands and knees, palms flat, body horizontal, stomach muscles pulled in hard, and she was bending her elbows and bringing her chest smoothly down toward the step.

  One, two, three, four ...

  Good Lord, she was doing push-ups.

  She counted to thirty before she collapsed, her chest burning, arms aching, and yelled, "Beat that!" as she looked around triumphantly for someone who wasn't there.

  There was silence.

  Alice hugged her knees to her chest and looked at the For Sale sign across the road.

  She had a feeling the person she'd been looking for was Gina.

  Gina.

  It was very strange to miss a person she didn't even know.

  Chapter 24

  Elisabeth's Homework for Jeremy Well, I don't know, you seemed a bit grumpy this morning. Is that allowed? Are therapists allowed to have feelings? I don't think so, J. Save them for your own therapy sessions. Not on my time, buddy.

  I really wanted a bit more praise when I showed you how many pages I'd written for my homework. Couldn't you tell that, as a therapist? I mean, I know you're not meant to read it, but the reason I brought along my notebook was so you could say something like "Wow! I wish all my clients were as committed to this process as you!" Or you could have said what nice handwriting I had. Just a suggestion. You're the one who is meant to be good with people. Instead you just looked a bit taken aback, as if you didn't even remember asking me to do the homework. It always bugged me when teachers forgot to ask for the homework they'd set. It made the world seem undependable.

  Anyway, today, you wanted to talk about the coffee shop incident.

  Personally, I think you were just curious about it. You were feeling a bit bored for a Monday morning and thought it might spice things up.

  You seemed quite testy when I said I preferred to talk about Ben and the adoption issue. The customer is always right, Jeremy.

  This is what happened in the coffee shop, if you must know.

  It was a Friday morning and I'd stopped in at Dino's on the way to work. I was having a large skim cappuccino because I wasn't pregnant or in the middle of the cycle. There was a woman at the table next to me with a baby and a toddler about two years old.

  A little girl. With brown curly hair. Ben has brown curly hair. Well, actually, he d
oesn't because he gets it cut really close to his head like a car thief but I've seen photos from before we met. When I used to imagine our children I always gave them brown curly hair like Ben's.

  So, there was that, but she wasn't particularly cute or anything. She had a dirty face and she was being sort of whiny.

  The mother was talking on her mobile phone and smoking a cigarette.

  Well, she wasn't smoking a cigarette at all.

  But she looked like a smoker. That sort of thin, edgy face. She was telling someone a story on the mobile phone that was all about how she put someone in their place and she kept saying, "It was just too funny." How can something be too funny, Jeremy?

  Anyway, she wasn't watching the little girl. It's like she forgot the child even existed.

  Dino's is on the Pacific Highway. The door is always being opened and closed as people come in and out.

  So I was watching the little girl. Not in a weird, obsessive infertile way. Just watching her, idly.

  The door opened to let in a Mothers' Group. Prams. And mothers.

  I thought, Time to go.

  I stood up and the mothers came crashing through with their giant prams, sending chairs and tables skidding, and I watched the little girl slip out the door and onto the street.

  The woman on the phone kept talking. I said, "Excuse me!" and nobody heard me. Two mothers had already sat down and were busy unbuttoning shirts and pulling out breasts to feed babies (this relaxed attitude to breast-feeding has got a bit too relaxed if you ask me) while they shrieked coffee orders across the room.

  As I walked out of the coffee shop, the little girl was toddling straight toward the curb. Semi-trailers and four-wheel-drives were thundering down the highway. I had to run to get to her. I scooped her into the air just as she was about to step down into the gutter.

  I saved the kid's life.

  And I looked back to the coffee shop and the thin-faced mother was still on her mobile phone and the Mothers' Group was deep in conversation and the little girl was in my arms, smelling of sugar and maybe a touch of cigarette smoke. One fat little hand resting so trustingly on my shoulder.

  And I kept walking. I just walked off with her.

  I wasn't thinking. It wasn't like I was planning to dye her hair blond and drive off to the Northern Territory to live with her in a caravan by the sea, where we would both become nut brown in the sun and live on seafood and fresh fruit and I could homeschool her and ... Kidding! I wasn't thinking any of that.

  I was just walking.

  The little girl was giggling as if it was a game. If she'd cried, I would have taken her straight back, but she was giggling. She liked me. Maybe she was grateful that I saved her life.

  And then, pounding feet behind me, and the thin-faced woman grabbing at my shoulder, screaming, "Hey!" Her face filled with terror, her nails scratching my skin as she dragged the little girl out of my arms, and then the little girl did cry because she got a fright, and the mother was saying, "It's okay, sweetie, it's okay," and looking at me with such revulsion.

  Oh God, the shame and the horror.

  Some of the mothers had come out of the coffee shop and were standing silently, cupping their babies' heads and staring, as if I was a traffic accident. The owner of the coffee shop, Dino himself, I guess, had come out, too. I'd only ever seen the top half of him over the counter. He was shorter than I expected. It was a surprise: like seeing a newsreader in full length. It's the only time I've seen him serious. He's normally one of those permanent chucklers.

  All those people watching me and judging. It was like I was bleeding in public. I felt something come loose in my mind. I really did. It was an actual physical sensation of going crazy. Maybe there is a word for it, Jeremy?

  I collapsed to my knees on the footpath, which was so unnecessary, and also excruciatingly painful. The grazes took weeks to heal.

  That's when Alice turned up. She was wearing a new jacket I'd never seen before, hurrying into Dino's, handbag swinging, frowning. I saw the expression on her face when she recognized me. She actually recoiled, as if she'd seen a rat. She must have been mortified. I had to pick her local coffee shop for my public meltdown.

  She was nice, though. I have to admit she was nice. She came and knelt down beside me and when our eyes met, it reminded me of when we were children and we'd run into each other in the school playground and I would suddenly feel as if I'd been performing on a stage all day, because only Alice knew my real self.

  "What happened?" she whispered.

  I was crying too hard to talk.

  She fixed everything. It turned out she knew the mother of the child, as well as some of the Mothers' Group women. There was a lot of intense mother-to-mother talk while I stayed kneeling on the footpath. She made their faces soften. The crowd melted away.

  She helped me up off the footpath and took me to her car and strapped me into the passenger seat.

  "Do you want to talk about it?" she said.

  I said I didn't.

  "Where do you want to go?" she said.

  I said I didn't know.

  Then she did exactly the right thing and drove me to Frannie. We sat on Frannie's tiny balcony, drinking tea and eating buttered arrowroot biscuits, and we didn't talk about what had happened.

  In fact, we talked about something quite interesting. I could see some new stationery on Frannie's desk, and it prompted me to ask her about the time I found her writing a mysterious letter when I was a teenager. I told her that Alice and I had been convinced that she had a secret lover.

  Frannie didn't look embarrassed, just dismissive. She waved her hand impatiently as if it wasn't an important subject. She said she had once been briefly engaged when she was in her late thirties, and she still wrote occasionally to her ex-fiance, and she probably just hadn't wanted to talk about it at the time.

  "So you're still friends?" said Alice, all agog.

  "I guess you could say that," Frannie had said. There was a peculiar quizzical expression on her face.

  "And he writes back?" I asked.

  And she said, "Well, no."

  So that was odd. And it seemed like she was about to say more but then we had to rush off because Alice had to pick up the children from school, so I never got to hear more about this man, this "Phil" who never answers her letters. Did she leave him at the altar all those years ago? Why has she never mentioned him before?

  I've been meaning to call Frannie to ask her about it, but I haven't even got the energy to be nosy these days. Also I've been avoiding her because I know she thinks I should stop trying to have a baby. She said it at least two years ago. She said that sometimes you had to be brave enough to "point your life in a new direction." I was a bit snappy at the time. I said a baby wasn't a "direction." Besides which, as far as I can see, she never pointed her life in a new direction. We just fell into her life after Dad died.

  Thank goodness we did, of course. And who knows, maybe there will be a convenient death in our local area! Think positive! That father two doors down always looks like he's about to drop dead when he mows the lawn.

  Anyway, the day after my psychotic episode I went to my GP and asked for a referral to see a good psychiatrist. I wonder if you pay her a spotter's fee.

  So that's how I came into your life, Jeremy.

  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."

  W
ithout 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.