Anyway, Mr. Mustache was full of suggestions.

We’re serving tea, coffee, sandwiches, pikelets, and scones on the family Talent Night. Standard fare for a function at a retirement village. Mr. Mustache piped up and suggested we set up a cocktail bar. Said he once spent a year bartending on some Caribbean island and that he could make a cocktail “guaranteed to blow my socks off.” I’m not joking, Phil. This is the way he talks.

I tried to explain about liquor licenses, but he was already on to a new topic. He said he knew a young girl who wasn’t exactly a family member, but would she still be allowed to perform? Of course, I said. He said that was wonderful because she did a very entertaining “pole dancing” act. All the men slapped their knees, roaring with laughter. (You wouldn’t have laughed, would you?)

Even some of the women were laughing. Rita was laughing like a loon. She has dementia, so I guess I can excuse her—but still, you’d think she’d retain a modicum of decency!

It was the strangest thing. I felt the most absurdly embarrassing desire to burst into tears. All at once, I was straight back in my very first classroom out of teacher’s college. There was a very handsome boy in my class (I can still see where he sat—second row from the back) who was always cracking jokes and making everyone laugh. Did I ever tell you about him? He made me feel so humorless and stodgy. Like an old maid. (And I was twenty years old, for heaven’s sake!)

You never made me feel—

Barb just phoned.

Alice has had a nasty fall during her gym class (she seems to spend half her life at that gym) and she’s in hospital.

I’m in a fluster.

I’ll finish this later.

“Mum?” the child spoke again, impatiently. Alice couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl. It was just an average kid’s voice. Breathy, rushed, a touch snuffly. Kind of adorable. She hardly ever spoke to children on the phone, except for an occasional stilted birthday chat with one of Nick’s nephews or nieces, and she was always struck by the sweetness of their kidlike voices. They seemed so much bigger and scarier and dirtier in the flesh.

Her hand was sweaty. She took a firm grip of the phone, licked her lips, and said hoarsely, “Hello?”

“Mum! It’s me!” The kid’s voice bubbled up and out of the phone, as if he or she were yelling straight in her ear. “Why did you think it would be Dad? Is he calling you from Portugal? Oh! If you speak to him, can you please tell him that the name of the Xbox game I want is Lost Planet, Extreme Condition, okay? Got it? ’Cause I think I told him the wrong name. Okay, Mum, this is pretty important, so you might need to write this down. Do you want me to talk slowly? Lost. Planet. Extreme. Condition. Anyway, where are you? We’ve got swimming and you know I hate being late because then I get stuck with the stupid paddleboard. Oh, there’s Uncle Ben! Is he taking us swimming today? Okay! Cool! Why didn’t you tell us? HI, UNCLE BEN! Okay, gotta go, see you, Mum.”

There was a scraping sound, a thud, and the sounds of children shouting in the distance. A man’s voice said, “Gidday, champ,” and then the line was cut off.

Alice dropped the phone in her lap and stared straight ahead at the open doorway. Had she just had a conversation with the Sultana?

She didn’t even know the baby’s name. They were still arguing over the names. Nick wanted “Tom”—a “good honest name for a man”—and Alice wanted “Ethan”—a sexy, successful name. Or if the Sultana surprised them by being a girl, Alice wanted “Madeline” and Nick wanted “Addison”—because apparently girls didn’t need “good honest names.”

Alice thought, I could not be mother to a child and not know his name. This is simply not possible. It is beyond the realms of possibility.

Maybe it was a wrong number! The child had mentioned an “Uncle Ben.” There was no “Ben” in Alice’s family. She didn’t know a single Ben. She wasn’t sure she’d ever even met a Ben. She searched her mind and all she could dredge up was a huge bearded neon-sign designer she’d once met while helping Nick’s older sister, Dora (possibly the flakiest of the Flakes), at her “Psychic Arts” shop, and in fact his name could just as easily have been Bill or Brad.

The problem was that the kid had asked, “Why did you think it would be Dad?” when she’d said “Nick.” Also, he knew Nick was in Portugal.

It was beyond the realms of possibility, yet, on the other hand, it seemed sort of conclusive. She closed her eyes briefly and opened them again, trying to visualize a ten-year-old son. How tall would he be? What color eyes? What color hair?

Part of her wanted to scream with the sheer terror of this situation, and part of her wanted to roar with laughter because it was so ridiculous. An impossible joke. A hilarious story she would be telling for years—“And then, I ring Nick and this woman tells me he’s in Portugal! And I’m thinking, Portugal!?”

She picked up the phone gingerly, as if it were an explosive device, and considered calling somebody else: Elisabeth? Mum? Frannie?

No. She didn’t want any more strange voices telling her things she didn’t know about the people she loved.

Her body felt weak and heavy. She would do nothing. Nothing at all. Eventually something would happen; somebody would come. The doctors would fix her head and everything would be okay. She began shoving things back into the rucksack. As she picked up the leather-bound diary, a photo fell out.