I’m sorry, but there is no heartbeat.

It was such a clear memory. It felt like it really happened.

Alice said, “Dr. Sam Chapple. He’s at Chatswood.”

“Okay, good. Don’t worry. It’s perfectly normal to feel confused after a serious head injury.”

The doctor smiled sympathetically and left the room. Alice watched her go and then lifted up her shirt again to look at her stomach. In addition to being flatter, her stomach had feathery silver lines up and down the sides. Stretch marks. Awestruck, she ran her fingertips over them. Was this really her stomach?

A cesarean scar, the doctor had said (unless she’d got it wrong, of course. Maybe it wasn’t a cesarean scar at all, just a perfectly normal . . . scar. Of some sort).

But if she was right, that would mean some doctor (her own Dr. Chapple?) had sliced through her skin with a scalpel and lifted a bloody squawling baby straight out of her stomach and she didn’t remember any of it.

Could a bump on the head really knock out such a significant event from her memory? Wasn’t that a bit excessive?

She thought of times when she’d been watching a movie with Nick and had fallen asleep halfway through with her head on his lap. She hated it because she would wake up sticky-mouthed to see the lives of the movie characters had moved on and the couple who hated each other were now sharing an umbrella under the Eiffel Tower.

“You had your baby,” she said tentatively to herself. “Remember?”

This was absurd. Surely she wasn’t about to slap herself on the side of the head and say, “Oh, the baby, of course I had the baby! Fancy that slipping my mind.”

How could she have forgotten her baby growing and kicking and rolling inside her? If she’d already had the baby, that meant she’d already been to the prenatal classes with Nick. It meant she’d bought her first maternity clothes. It meant they’d painted the nursery. It meant they’d been shopping for a crib and a pram and nappies and a stroller and a changing table.

It meant there was a baby.

She sat up, her hands pressed to her stomach.

So where was it? Who was looking after it? Who was feeding it?

This was far bigger than a normal “Oh, Alice” mix-up. This was huge. This was terrifying.

For God’s sake, where was Nick? Actually, she was going to be just a bit snappy with him when he finally turned up, even if he did have a good excuse.

The nurse with the green eyes came back into the room and said, “How are you feeling?”

“Fine, thank you,” said Alice automatically.

“Do you remember why you’re here and what happened to you?”

This constant re-asking of questions was presumably to check her mental state. Alice thought about yelling, ACTUALLY, I’M GOING OUT OF MY MIND! but she didn’t want to make the nurse feel uncomfortable. Crazy behavior made people feel awkward.

Instead, she said to the nurse, “Can you tell me what year it is?” She spoke quickly in case the doctor with the glasses came back in and caught her checking up on her facts behind her back.

“It’s 2008.”

“It’s definitely 2008?”

“It’s definitely second of May, 2008. Mother’s Day next weekend!”

Mother’s Day! It would be Alice’s first-ever Mother’s Day.

Except, if it was 2008, it wasn’t her first Mother’s Day at all.

If it was 2008, the Sultana was ten years old. He wasn’t a sultana at all. He would have progressed from sultana to raisin to peach to tennis ball to basketball to . . . baby.

Alice felt an inappropriate gale of laughter catch in her throat.

Her baby was ten years old.

Elisabeth’s Homework for Dr. Hodges Much to Layla’s horror, I stopped halfway through “Visualizing the Prospect” and switched over to the “Idea Olympics.” I’m sure you’ll be fascinated to hear, Dr. Hodges, that this is the part where I get them to look under their tables and find their “Mystery Product.” Everybody gets pretty excited about this and they dive under the tables. It’s amazing how so many different people can come out with EXACTLY the same jokes. It reinforces this feeling I have that the years are rolling by but nothing is changing. I am the perfect example of the phrase: Going nowhere fast.

While all my students were writing down ideas on butcher paper for how to market their Mystery Products, I tried to call Jane back. Only of course now Jane had switched her phone off, so I loudly said “Fuck it” and saw Layla give a tiny, tight smile. I had offended her by changing the agenda, as if the agenda didn’t matter, when the agenda is her life.

I explained to her that my sister had been in an accident and I didn’t know what hospital she was at and I needed somebody to pick up her kids from school. Layla said, “Okay, but when are you going to finish the rest of the ‘Visualizing the Prospect’ segment?” (I guess that sort of dedication is good in an employee, but isn’t it a bit pathological, Dr. Hodges? What’s your expert opinion?)

I called Mum next and got her voice mail, too. Oh for the days before Mum got a life. It seems only a short time ago that I would have called Frannie first. She was always so calm in a crisis. But Frannie decided to stop driving when she moved into the retirement village. (I still find that weirdly upsetting. She was such a good driver.)

I called the school and got put on hold listening to a recorded message about family values. I called Alice’s gym to find out if they knew which hospital she’d been taken to and got put on hold listening to a message about sensible nutrition.