What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [82]
Mr. Mustache was uncharacteristically quiet. Then he said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Frannie,” and touched my hand, and for a moment I couldn’t speak.
He had an unexpectedly gentle touch.
Of course, only a few minutes after that, he was regaling the whole table with the most tasteless “dirty joke” you have ever heard.
“Nick!”
Alice sat bolt upright, her heart racing, her breath shallow. She felt about the bed with her hand for Nick, to wake him up and tell him about the nightmare, although the details were already slipping away and starting to seem silly. Something to do with a . . . tree?
A huge tree. Branches black against a stormy sky.
“Nick?”
Normally he woke up immediately when she had a nightmare, his voice gruff with sleep, automatically soothing her, “It’s okay, it’s just a dream, just a bad dream.” Part of her mind would always think, He’s going to make such a great dad.
She patted at the sheets. He must have gone to get a glass of water. Or had he not come to bed yet?
Nick is not here, Alice. He lives somewhere else. He flew back from Portugal this morning and you weren’t there to meet him. Maybe “Gina” picked him up at the airport. Oh, and you kissed that school principal today. Remember? Remember? Can you just please REMEMBER your life, you fool!
She snapped on the bedside lamp, threw back the sheets, and got out of bed. There was no way she was going back to sleep now.
Right.
She ran her palms down her nightie. It was a sleeveless, shimmery oyster-colored silk. It must have cost a fortune. It was just so stupid that she didn’t remember buying it. She’d had enough. She wanted to remember everything, right now.
She went into the bathroom and found the bottle of perfume she’d used at the hospital. She sprayed it in big lavish swoops and sniffed deeply. She was going to run and jump straight into that vortex of memory.
The perfume assaulted her nostrils, making her feel a bit sick. She waited for the images of the last ten years to fill her mind, but all she could see were the smiling strange faces from tonight’s party, and Dominick’s liquid brown eyes, and her mother smiling coyly at Roger, and the disappointed lines around Elisabeth’s mouth.
All these recent memories were too fresh and confusing. That was the problem. There was no space for all the old memories.
She sat down on the cold bathroom tiles and hugged her knees in close. All those people tonight, trooping happily into her house, helping themselves to glasses of champagne and tiny canapés from white-aproned caterers (who had turned up at five p.m., taking over the kitchen, blandly efficient), standing around her backyard in little groups, high heels sinking into the grass. “Alice!” they said so familiarly, kissing her on both cheeks. (There was a lot of kissing of both cheeks in 2008.) “How are you?” Hairstyles were smoother and flatter than in 1998. It made everyone’s heads seem comically smaller.
People talked about petrol prices (how could there be anything to say on such a boring topic?), property prices, development applications, and some political scandal. They talked about their children—“Emily,” “Harry,” “Isabel”—as if Alice knew them intimately. There were hilarious jokes about some school excursion she’d apparently attended where things had gone hilariously wrong. There were serious, lowered voices about some teacher everybody hated. They talked to her about jazz ballet lessons, saxophone lessons, swimming lessons, the school band, the school fête, the tuckshop, the extension class for “gifted and talented” kids. None of it made any sense. The conversations were so detailed—so many names and dates and times and acronyms—the PE-something class, the WE-something teacher. On two occasions different women hissed the unfamiliar word “Botox” in Alice’s ear as another woman walked by. Alice couldn’t be sure if it was a contemptuous insult or an envious compliment.
Dominick hovered unobtrusively close by, explaining to