What Alice Forgot

Divorce was like a phobia for Nick, his only phobia! If this were true, then he would be devastated, crushed. The thing he feared most had happened. Her heart broke for him.

“Did we have a really bad argument about something?” Alice asked Elisabeth. She would get to the bottom of it, she would put a stop to it.

“I don’t think it’s just one argument. I guess it’s probably a whole lot of little issues, but to be honest, you haven’t really told me that much about it. You just rang me the day after Nick moved out and said—”

“He moved out? He actually moved out of the house?”

It was mind-boggling; she tried to visualize how it could actually happen, Nick throwing stuff into a suitcase, slamming the door behind him, a yellow taxicab waiting outside—it would have to be yellow, like an American cab, because this could not be real, this was a scene from a movie with a heart-wrenching soundtrack. This was not her life.

“Alice, you’ve been separated for six months, but you know, once you get your memory back, you’ll realize it’s okay, because you’re fine with this. This is what you want. I asked you just last week. I said, ‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ and you said, ‘Absolutely sure. This marriage was dead and buried a long time ago.’”

Liar, liar, pants on fire. That could not be true. That had to be a fabrication. Alice tried to keep the rage out of her voice. “You’re just making that up to make me feel better, aren’t you? I would never say that. ‘Dead and buried!’ That doesn’t even sound like me! I don’t talk like that. Please don’t make stuff up. This is hard enough.”

“Oh, Alice,” said Elisabeth sadly. “I promise you, it’s just your head injury, it’s just . . . oh, hi there, hi!”

A nurse Alice hadn’t seen before pulled back the curtain briskly on their cubicle and Elisabeth greeted her with obvious relief.

“How are you feeling?” The nurse pumped up the blood-pressure strap around Alice’s arm once again.

“I’m fine,” said Alice resignedly. She knew the drill now. Blood pressure. Pupils. Questions.

“Your blood pressure has soared from the last time I checked,” commented the nurse, making a note on her chart.

My husband just yelled at me like I was his worst enemy. My lovely Nick. My Nick. I want to tell him about it, because he’d be so angry if he ever heard somebody speak to me like that. He’s the first person I want to tell when somebody upsets me; my foot pressing on the accelerator, desperate to get home from work just to tell him, the moment I tell him, the moment his face lights up with fury on my behalf, it’s better, it’s fixed.

Nick, you will never believe how this man spoke to me. You will want to punch him in the nose when you hear. Except it’s so strange, because it was you, Nick, you were the man.

“She’s had a few shocks,” said Elisabeth.

“We really need you to try and stay relaxed.” The nurse leaned close and did something feathery-quick with her fingers to pull back Alice’s eyelids while she shone her miniature torch into each pupil. The nurse’s perfume reminded Alice of something—someone?—but of course the feeling vanished as soon as the nurse moved. Was this going to be her from now on—a permanent, irritating case of déjà vu like an itchy rash?

“Now I’m just going to ask you a few boring questions again. What’s your name?”

“Alice Mary Love.”

“And where are you and what are you doing here?”

“I’m at Royal North Shore Hospital because I hit my head at the gym.”

“And what day is it?”

“It’s Friday, 2 May . . . 2008.”

“Good, excellent!” The nurse turned to Elisabeth, as if expecting her to be impressed. “We’re just checking that her cognitive reasoning isn’t affected by her injury.”

Elisabeth blinked irritably. “Yes, okay, great, but she still thinks it’s 1998.”

Tattletale, thought Alice.

“I do not,” she said. “I know it’s 2008. I just said that.”

“But she still doesn’t remember anything since 1998. Or hardly anything. She doesn’t remember her children. She doesn’t remember her marriage breakup.”

Her marriage breakup. Her marriage was something that could be sliced up like a pizza.

Alice closed her eyes and thought of Nick’s face, creased from sleep, lying on the pillow next to hers on a Sunday morning. Sometimes in the morning his hair would be all spiked up in the middle of his head. “You’ve got a Mohawk,” said Alice the first time she observed this phenomenon. “Of course,” he said. “It’s Sunday. Mohawk day.” Even with his eyes closed, he knew when she was awake, lying there, looking at him, thinking hopefully that he might bring her a cup of tea in bed. “No,” he would say, before she’d even asked. “Don’t even think about it, woman.” But he always got it for her.

Alice would give anything, anything at all, to be lying in bed right now with Nick, waiting for a cup of tea. Maybe he got sick of making her cups of tea? Was that it? Had she taken him for granted? Who did she think she was, some sort of princess, lying in bed waiting for cups of tea to be delivered, without even brushing her teeth? She wasn’t pretty enough to get away with that sort of behavior. She should have jumped up before he woke, done her hair and makeup and made him pancakes and strawberries, wearing a long lacy nightgown. That was how you kept a marriage alive, for God’s sake, it wasn’t as if there wasn’t enough advice around in every women’s magazine she’d ever read. It was basic knowledge! She felt as though she’d been unforgivably negligent—careless! sloppy!—with the most precious, wonderful gift she’d ever received.

Alice could hear Elisabeth murmuring urgently to the nurse, asking if she could see the doctor, wanting to know what tests had been done. “How do you know she hasn’t got some sort of clot in her brain?” Elisabeth’s voice rose a bit hysterically, and Alice smiled to herself. Drama queen.

(Although, could there be a clot? A dark, ominous thing swooping about in her head like an evil bat? Yes, they really should look into that.)

Maybe Nick had got bored with her. Was that it? Once, when she was in high school, she overheard a girl saying, “Oh, Alice, she’s okay, but she’s a nothing sort of person.”