What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [140]
And I’d probably have sex!
Wasn’t sex nice, Phil?
It was extremely nice.
For some reason I’ve been thinking about it lately, and the nights we spent in your cramped little flat in Neutral Bay with the lights winking on the harbor.
I’d pay two million for just one more night with you in that flat.
Not that I have two million. Or even a million. I’d have to take out a loan.
My apologies, Phil. I’m in a peculiarly flippant mood. Goodness, I’m going to have to make sure I don’t leave this letter lying around for anyone to read. (Actually I might have to destroy it. What if I should drop dead in the middle of the night? What if Barb should find it and show it to the girls. Or far worse, Roger?)
Elisabeth didn’t turn up at the Family Talent Night. I’ve been trying to call her, but without success.
Mr. M. (I can’t seem to call him Xavier) spent a long time talking with Madison. He said, “She’s a very complex, intelligent little girl with a lot on her mind,” and I was filled with affection for him. (I wonder what’s on Madison’s mind?)
I do believe I might have found a new friend, which is a fine and wonderful thing at my age.
He’s asked me out to dinner at the local Chinese restaurant.
I automatically went to decline, and then I thought, For heaven’s sake, Frannie, why not?
“Look, Tom, police car!” cried Alice, as a police car with its siren flashing blue streaked by. “Nee nar, nee nar!”
She turned her head, ready to see an excited little face in the backseat, then realized she was alone in the car, and that Tom was too old to be excited by police cars anyway, and also, she actually didn’t remember him as a baby.
These involuntary flashes of memory, or whatever they were, were happening almost every few minutes now. It was like a weird nervous tic. Just then, at the morning tea break at Elisabeth’s seminar, she’d seen one of the butchers taking two chocolate biscuits at once and she only just managed to stop herself from grabbing his hairy wrist and saying, “One is plenty!”
She constantly found herself heading purposefully somewhere, into the study, the kitchen, or the laundry, and then realizing she didn’t know why she was heading there. Once, she was all the way across the road, walking up the driveway of Gina’s old house, when she stopped and said out loud, “Oh.” She picked up the phone and dialed numbers, before quickly dropping the phone with no idea who she was calling. One time, while waiting outside the school for the children, she caught herself rocking her handbag, patting it, and humming a song she didn’t recognize. “Yummy, yummy, yummy in your tummy, tummy!” she’d said at dinner the other night, zooming a spoonful of food toward Olivia’s mouth. “I think you might be going a bit crazy, darling Mummy,” Oliva had said, with wide eyes.
Her memory was coming back any moment now. She could feel it creeping up on her, like the fuzzy head and ticklish throat that heralded a cold. She just couldn’t decide if she should resist it or encourage it.
Now she was on her way from Elisabeth’s seminar to “help in the library” at the school. This was something she apparently did every third Thursday, which seemed excessively generous of her.
As she drove, she thought about Elisabeth, and how smooth she’d been up onstage, talking to all those butchers, making them laugh, telling them what to do. She’d seemed so natural talking into the microphone. So herself.