What Alice Forgot (3 page)

“She fell off her bike during the spin class.” Jane adjusted her bra strap beneath her top. “I saw it happen. I’m pretty sure she fainted. Her head smashed against the handlebars of the bike next to her. She’s been unconscious for about ten minutes.”

Spin Crazy Girl reappeared, ponytail swinging, and Alice stared up at her smooth long legs and hard flat stomach. It looked like a pretend stomach. “She can’t have had her feet strapped to the pedals properly. I
do
make a point of reminding everyone about that at the beginning of the class. It’s a safety issue,” said Spin Crazy Girl to George Clooney in the confidential tone of one professional talking to another. “Also, I really don’t recommend spin classes to pregnant women. I
did
ask if anyone was pregnant.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll sue if necessary,” said Jane quietly to Alice.

“How many weeks are you, Alice?” asked George.

Alice went to answer and to her surprise found a blank space in her head.

“Thirteen,” she said, after a second. “I mean, fourteen. Fourteen weeks.” They’d had the twelve-week ultrasound at least two weeks ago. The Sultana had done a peculiar little jump, like a disco dance move, as if someone had poked it in the back, and afterward Nick and Alice had kept trying to replicate the movement for people. Everyone had been polite and said it was remarkable.

She put a hand to her stomach again and for the first time she noticed what she was wearing. Sneakers and white socks. Black shorts and a yellow sleeveless top with a shiny gold-foil sticker stuck to her top. It seemed to be a picture of a dinosaur with a balloon coming out of its mouth saying, “ROCK ON.” Rock on?

“Where did these clothes come from?” she asked Jane accusingly. “These aren’t my clothes.”

Jane raised a meaningful eyebrow at George.

“There’s a dinosaur stuck to my shirt,” said Alice, awestruck.

“What day of the week is it today, Alice?” asked George.

“Friday,” answered Alice. She was cheating, because Jane had told her they were doing a “Friday spin class.” Whatever that was.

“Remember what you had for breakfast?” George gently examined the side of her head while he talked. The other paramedic strapped a blood-pressure monitor to her upper arm and pumped it up.

“Peanut butter on toast?”

That was what she generally had for breakfast. It seemed a safe bet.

“He doesn’t actually
know
what you had for breakfast,” said Jane. “He’s trying to see if you
remember
what you had for breakfast.”

The blood-pressure monitor squeezed hard around Alice’s arm.

George sat back on his haunches and said, “Humor me, Alice, and tell me the name of our illustrious prime minister.”

“John Howard,” answered Alice obediently. She hoped there wouldn’t be any more questions about politics. It wasn’t her forte. She could never get appalled enough.

Jane made a strange explosive sound of derision and mirth.

“Oh. Ah. But he’s still the prime minister, isn’t he?” Alice was mortified. People were going to tease her about this for years to come. Oh,
Alice
, you don’t know the prime minister! Had she missed an election? “But I’m sure he’s the prime minister.”

“And what year is it?” George didn’t seem too concerned.

“It’s 1998,” Alice answered promptly. She felt confident about that one. The baby would be born next year, in 1999.

Jane pressed her hand over her mouth. George went to speak, but Jane interrupted him. She put her hand on Alice’s shoulder and stared at her intently. Her eyes were wide with excitement. Tiny balls of mascara hovered on the ends of her eyelashes. The combination of her lavender deodorant and garlic breath was quite overpowering.

“How old are you, Alice?”

“I’m twenty-nine,
Jane
.” Alice was irritated by Jane’s dramatic tone. What was she getting at? “Same age as you.”

Jane sat back up and looked at George Clooney triumphantly.

She said, “I just got an invitation to her fortieth birthday.”

That was the day Alice Mary Love went to the gym and carelessly misplaced a decade of her life.

Chapter 2

J
ane said of course she would have come to the hospital with her but she had to be in court at two o’clock.

“What are you going to court for?” asked Alice, who was perfectly happy not to have Jane come to the hospital. That was quite enough of Jane for one day.
“An invitation to her fortieth birthday.”
What exactly did she mean by that?

Jane smiled oddly and didn’t answer Alice’s question about court. “I’ll call someone to be there at the hospital waiting for you.”

“Not someone.” Alice watched the paramedics set up a stretcher for her. It looked a bit flimsy. “Nick.”

“Yes, of
course
, I’ll call
Nick
.” Jane enunciated her words carefully, as if she were acting in a children’s pantomime.

“Actually, I’m sure I can walk,” Alice said to George Clooney. She never liked the idea of being lifted by people, even Nick, who was pretty strong. She worried about her weight. What if the paramedics grunted and grimaced like furniture removalists when they lifted the stretcher? “I feel fine. Just my head.”

“You’re suffering from a pretty serious concussion there,” said George. “We can’t muck around with head injuries.”

“Come on now, our favorite part of the job is carrying attractive women around on stretchers,” said the other paramedic. “Don’t deprive us.”

“Yes, don’t deprive them, Alice,” said Jane. “Your brain is damaged. You think you’re twenty-nine.”

What did that mean, exactly?

Alice lay back and allowed the two men to efficiently lift her onto the stretcher. As her head rolled to one side, the pain made her dizzy.

“Oh, here’s her bag.” Jane picked up a rucksack from the side of the room and squashed it next to Alice.

“That’s not mine,” said Alice.

“Yes it is.”

Alice stared at the red canvas bag. There was a row of three shiny dinosaur stickers like the one on her shirt stuck across the top flap. She wondered if she was about to be sick.

The two paramedics lifted up the stretcher. They didn’t seem to have a problem carrying it. She guessed it was their job to lift all-sized people.

“Work!” said Alice in a sudden panic. “You’d better call work for me. Why aren’t we at work if it’s a Friday?”

“Well, I really don’t know! Why aren’t
we
at work?” repeated Jane in that pantomime voice again. “But don’t you worry a thing about it, I’ll call ‘Nick,’ and then I’ll call ‘work.’ So by work I assume you mean, ah, ABR Bricks?”

“Yes, Jane, I do,” said Alice carefully. They’d been working at ABR for three years now. Could the poor girl have some sort of mental illness?

Alice said, “You’d better let Sue know I won’t be in today.”

“Sue,” repeated Jane slowly. “And by Sue, I take it you mean Sue Mason.”

“Yes, Jane. Sue Mason.” (Definitely loopy.)

Sue Mason was their boss. She was a stickler for punctuality and medical certificates and appropriate work attire. Alice couldn’t wait for her maternity leave to start so she could get out of the place.

“Get better soon, Alice!” Spin Crazy Girl called out from the front of the room, her voice amplified by a microphone strapped to her head. She was sitting astride a bike up on a small raised platform, facing the class. There was a television screen flickering above her head and a huge rotating fan next to her. All of the women except for Jane had climbed back onto their bikes and were pedaling slowly, their eyes fixed on some invisible horizon. As Alice’s stretcher reached the door, there was a burst of loud throbbing music and the lights in the room suddenly went out, plunging them into darkness. “Let’s go, team!” shouted Spin Crazy Girl. “We’ve got to make up for lost time! Where were we?”

“Stuck behind a semi-trailer halfway up the mountain!” shouted one of the women.

“That’s right! Let’s push it up a notch! Push it, push it, push it . . . and
out of the saddle
!”

The women’s bottoms lifted simultaneously in the air as they stood up on their pedals, their strong legs pumping like pistons.

Goodness,
thought Alice.

Jane propped a heavy glass door open with her foot, and Alice clutched the sides of the stretcher, worried that they’d have to turn her on an angle, like a sofa, but the paramedics carried her smoothly through.

“You’ll be fine,” said Jane, giving one of Alice’s sneakers a jaunty pat.

The glass door closed, and the music’s volume was suddenly reduced to the sound of a distant party. Alice could see Jane’s face through the glass, watching them go. She was pinching her lower lip together with her finger and thumb, so she looked like a fish.

She must remember every moment of this freaky day to tell Nick. He’d think it was hilarious. Yes, this whole day was quite a hoot.

Now she was being carried through another, much larger, blue-carpeted room, with rows of complicated-looking machinery being operated by men and women who all seemed to be straining to lift, pull, or push things that were far too heavy for them. The place had the studious, muted feel of a library. Nobody stopped what they were doing as the stretcher went by. Only their eyes followed with blank, impersonal interest, as if she were a news event on TV.

“Alice!”

A man stepped off a treadmill, pushing his headphones down from his ears and onto his shoulders. “What happened to you?”

His face—bright red and beaded with sweat—meant nothing to her. Alice stared up at him, groping for something polite to say. It was surreal, making conversation with a stranger while lying flat on her back on a stretcher. She was in one of those dreams where she turned up at a cocktail party in her pajamas.

“Fell off her bike and got a bit of a bump on the noggin,” George Clooney answered for her, sounding not at all medical.

“Oh no!” The man smeared a towel across his forehead. “Just what you need, with the big day coming up!”

Alice attempted to pull a rueful face about the big day coming up. Perhaps he was one of Nick’s colleagues and it was some work function she was meant to know about?

“Well, that’ll teach you to be such a gym addict, eh, Alice?”

“Ho,” said Alice. She wasn’t sure what she’d been trying to say, but that’s what it came out as: “Ho.”

As the paramedics kept walking, the man climbed back onto his treadmill and started running, calling out after her, “Take care, Alice! I’ll get Maggie to call!” He held up his thumb and little finger to his ear.

Alice closed her eyes. Her stomach churned.

“You doing okay there, Alice?” asked George Clooney.

Alice opened her eyes. “I feel a bit sick,” she said.

“That’s to be expected.”

They stopped in front of a lift.

“I really don’t know where I am,” she reminded George. She felt like it was worth mentioning again.

“Don’t worry about it for now,” said George.

The lift doors hissed open and a woman with sleek bobbed hair stepped out. “Alice! Are you okay? What happened?” She had one of those “How now, brown cow” accents. “What a coincidence! I was just
thinking
about you! I was going to call you about the—ahh, the little incident—at school, Chloe told me about it, you poor thing! Oh dear, this is all you need! What with tomorrow night, and the big day coming up!”

As she kept talking, the paramedics maneuvered the stretcher into the lift and pressed the “G” button. The doors slid shut on the woman lifting a pretend phone to her ear just like the treadmill guy, while at the same time a voice cried out, “Is that
Alice Love
I just saw on that stretcher?”

George said, “You know a lot of people.”

“No,” said Alice. “No, I really don’t.”

She thought about Jane saying,
“I just got an invitation to her fortieth birthday.”

She turned her head and was sick all over George Clooney’s nice, shiny black shoes.

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges

It was just toward the end of the lunch break when I got the call. I only had five minutes before I was back on and I should have been in the bathroom checking I didn’t have food between my teeth. She said, “Elisabeth, oh, hi, it’s Jane, I’ve got a problem here,” as if there was only one Jane in the whole world (you would think somebody named Jane would be in the habit of giving their last name) and I was thinking Jane, Jane, a Jane with a problem, and then I realized it was Jane Turner. Alice’s Jane.

She said that Alice had fallen over at the gym during her spin class.

So there I was with 143 people all sitting back behind their tables, pouring their ice water, eating their mints, looking expectantly at the podium with pens poised, who had each paid $2,950 to see me speak, or $2,500 if they took advantage of the Early Bird discount.

That’s how much people pay me to teach them how to write a successful direct-mail campaign. I know! That nasty commercial world out there is entirely foreign to you, isn’t it, Dr. Hodges? I could tell you were just politely nodding your head when I tried to explain my job. I’m sure it has never occurred to you that those letters and brochures you receive in the mail are actually written by real people. Real people like me. I bet you have a “NO JUNK MAIL” sticker on your letterbox. Don’t worry. I won’t hold it against you.