What Alice Forgot (38 page)

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-fiancé, 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.”

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.”

Well, you can’t spend your day lounging around eating custard tart. You won’t fit into those beautiful clothes for long, will you? Speaking of which, what about laundry? You probably should do laundry when you get home. Mothers are always complaining about washing.