What Alice Forgot

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 br**sts 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.