What Alice Forgot

Someone was screaming.

“Mum! Stop it! Make it stop! Mummy!”

Alice was catapulted up and out of her bed and was walking rapidly, blindly, down the hallway, before she woke up properly, her mouth dry, her head fuzzy with interrupted dreams.

Who was it? Olivia?

The hysterical screams were coming from Madison’s room. Alice pushed open the door. In the dark, she could just make out a figure on the bed thrashing about and screaming, “Get it off! Get it off!”

Alice’s eyes adjusted enough to make out the lamp on the bookshelf next to Madison’s bed. She switched it on.

Madison’s eyes were shut, her face screwed up tight. She was tangled up in her sheets and her pillow was on her chest. She batted it away.

“Get it off!”

Alice took away the pillow and sat down on the bed next to her.

“It’s only a dream, darling,” she said. “It’s only a dream.” She knew from her own nightmares how Madison’s heart would be racing, how the words from the real world would slowly infiltrate the dream world and make it fade away.

Madison’s eyes opened and she threw herself at Alice, pushing her head painfully into Alice’s ribs and clutching her tightly.

“Mummy, get it off Gina! Get it off her!” she sobbed.

“It’s only a dream,” said Alice, stroking back sweaty strands of hair from Madison’s forehead. “I promise you, it’s only a bad dream.”

“But Mummy, you need to get it off her! Get it off Gina.”

“Get what off her?”

Madison didn’t answer. Her hands loosened and her breathing began to slow. She burrowed herself more comfortably into Alice’s lap.

Was she falling back asleep?

“Get what off her?” whispered Alice.

“It’s only a dream,” said Madison sleepily.

Chapter 26

“Auntie Alice! Auntie Alice!”

A boy of about three came running into Alice’s arms.

She automatically lifted his compact body up and whirled him around, while his legs gripped around her hips like a koala. She buried her nose in his dark hair and breathed in the yeasty scent. It was intensely, deliciously familiar. She breathed in again. Was she remembering this little boy? Or some other little boy? Sometimes she thought it might be easier to block her nose to stop these sudden frustrating rushes of memories that evaporated before she could pin down what exactly it was she remembered.

The little boy pressed fat palms on either side of Alice’s face and babbled something incomprehensible, his eyes serious.

“He’s asking if you brought Smarties,” said Olivia. “You always bring him Smarties.”

“Oh, dear,” said Alice.

“You don’t know who he is, do you?” said Madison with happy contempt.

“She does so,” said Olivia.

“It’s our cousin Billy,” said Tom. “Auntie Ella is his mum.”

Nick’s youngest sister had got pregnant! What a scandal! She was fifteen—still at school!

You’re really not the sharpest knife in the drawer, are you, Alice? It’s 2008! She’s twenty-five! She’s probably an entirely different person by now.

Although, actually, not that different, because here she came now, unsmilingly pushing her way past people. Ella still had a gothic look about her. White skin, brooding eyes with a lot of black eyeliner, black hair parted in the middle and cut in a sharp-edged bob. She was dressed in a long black skirt, black tights, black ballet flats, and a turtlenecked black jersey with what looked like four or five strings of pearls of varying lengths around her neck. Only Ella could pull off such a look.

“Billy! Come back here,” she said sharply, trying unsuccessfully to peel her son off Alice.

“Ella,” said Alice, while Billy’s legs gripped harder and he buried his head in her neck. “I didn’t expect to see you here.” If she really had to pick a favorite Flake, it would have been Ella. She had been an intense, teary teenager who could dissolve into hysterical giggles, and she liked talking to Alice about clothes and showing her the vintage dresses she’d bought at secondhand shops that cost more to dry-clean than what she’d paid.

“Have you got a problem with me being here?” said Ella.

“What? No, of course not.”

It was the Family Talent Night at Frannie’s retirement village. They were in a wooden-floored hall with glowing red heaters mounted up high along the sides of the room, radiating an intense heat that was making all the visitors peel off cardigans and coats. There were rows of plastic chairs set up in a semicircle in front of a stage with a single microphone looking somehow pathetic in front of fraying red velvet curtains. Underneath the stage was a neat line of walkers of varying sizes, some with ribbons around them to differentiate them, like luggage at the airport.

Along the side of the hall were long trestle tables with white tablecloths laid with urns, tall stacks of Styrofoam cups, and paper plates of egg sandwiches, lamingtons, and pikelets with jam and blobs of cream melting in the heat.

The front rows of chairs were already occupied by village residents. Tiny wizened old ladies with brooches pinned to their best dresses, bent old men with hair carefully combed across spotted scalps, ties knotted beneath V-necked jumpers. The old people didn’t seem to feel the heat.

Alice could see Frannie sitting right in the center row, engaged in what looked like a rather heated conversation with a grinning white-haired man who stood out because he was wearing a shiny polka-dot vest over a white shirt.

“Actually,” said Ella, finally managing to wrench Billy out of Alice’s arms, “it was your mother who rang and asked us to come. She said Dad had stage fright about this performance, which I find hard to believe, but still. The others all refused to come.”

How strange for Barb to ring up Nick’s sisters and actually ask them to do something, as if they were equals.

Alice caught herself.

Well, of course they were equals. What a strange thing to think.

But then, really, deep down (or maybe not even that deep down) she’d always thought of her own family as inferior to Nick’s.

The Love family was from the eastern suburbs. “I rarely cross the Bridge,” Nick’s mother had once told Alice. She sometimes went to the opera on a Friday night, in the same way that Alice’s mother might pop along to Trivia Night at the church hall on a Friday night (and maybe win a meat tray or a fruit box!). The Love family knew people. Important people, like MPs and actresses, doctors and lawyers, and people with names you felt you should know. They were Anglicans and went to church only at Christmas, languidly, as if it were a rather charming little event. Nick and his sisters went to private schools and Sydney Uni. They knew the best bars and the right restaurants. It was sort of like they owned Sydney.