Chapter 2
Jane said of course she would have come to the hospital with her but she had to be in court at two o’clock.
“What are you going to court for?” asked Alice, who was perfectly happy not to have Jane come to the hospital. That was quite enough of Jane for one day. “An invitation to her fortieth birthday.” What exactly did she mean by that?
Jane smiled oddly and didn’t answer Alice’s question about court. “I’ll call someone to be there at the hospital waiting for you.”
“Not someone.” Alice watched the paramedics set up a stretcher for her. It looked a bit flimsy. “Nick.”
“Yes, of course, I’ll call Nick.” Jane enunciated her words carefully, as if she were acting in a children’s pantomime.
“Actually, I’m sure I can walk,” Alice said to George Clooney. She never liked the idea of being lifted by people, even Nick, who was pretty strong. She worried about her weight. What if the paramedics grunted and grimaced like furniture removalists when they lifted the stretcher? “I feel fine. Just my head.”
“You’re suffering from a pretty serious concussion there,” said George. “We can’t muck around with head injuries.”
“Come on now, our favorite part of the job is carrying attractive women around on stretchers,” said the other paramedic. “Don’t deprive us.”
“Yes, don’t deprive them, Alice,” said Jane. “Your brain is damaged. You think you’re twenty-nine.”
What did that mean, exactly?
Alice lay back and allowed the two men to efficiently lift her onto the stretcher. As her head rolled to one side, the pain made her dizzy.
“Oh, here’s her bag.” Jane picked up a rucksack from the side of the room and squashed it next to Alice.
“That’s not mine,” said Alice.
“Yes it is.”
Alice stared at the red canvas bag. There was a row of three shiny dinosaur stickers like the one on her shirt stuck across the top flap. She wondered if she was about to be sick.
The two paramedics lifted up the stretcher. They didn’t seem to have a problem carrying it. She guessed it was their job to lift all-sized people.
“Work!” said Alice in a sudden panic. “You’d better call work for me. Why aren’t we at work if it’s a Friday?”
“Well, I really don’t know! Why aren’t we at work?” repeated Jane in that pantomime voice again. “But don’t you worry a thing about it, I’ll call ‘Nick,’ and then I’ll call ‘work.’ So by work I assume you mean, ah, ABR Bricks?”
“Yes, Jane, I do,” said Alice carefully. They’d been working at ABR for three years now. Could the poor girl have some sort of mental illness?
Alice said, “You’d better let Sue know I won’t be in today.”
“Sue,” repeated Jane slowly. “And by Sue, I take it you mean Sue Mason.”
“Yes, Jane. Sue Mason.” (Definitely loopy.)
Sue Mason was their boss. She was a stickler for punctuality and medical certificates and appropriate work attire. Alice couldn’t wait for her maternity leave to start so she could get out of the place.
“Get better soon, Alice!” Spin Crazy Girl called out from the front of the room, her voice amplified by a microphone strapped to her head. She was sitting astride a bike up on a small raised platform, facing the class. There was a television screen flickering above her head and a huge rotating fan next to her. All of the women except for Jane had climbed back onto their bikes and were pedaling slowly, their eyes fixed on some invisible horizon. As Alice’s stretcher reached the door, there was a burst of loud throbbing music and the lights in the room suddenly went out, plunging them into darkness. “Let’s go, team!” shouted Spin Crazy Girl. “We’ve got to make up for lost time! Where were we?”
“Stuck behind a semi-trailer halfway up the mountain!” shouted one of the women.
“That’s right! Let’s push it up a notch! Push it, push it, push it . . . and out of the saddle!”
The women’s bottoms lifted simultaneously in the air as they stood up on their pedals, their strong legs pumping like pistons.
Goodness, thought Alice.
Jane propped a heavy glass door open with her foot, and Alice clutched the sides of the stretcher, worried that they’d have to turn her on an angle, like a sofa, but the paramedics carried her smoothly through.
“You’ll be fine,” said Jane, giving one of Alice’s sneakers a jaunty pat.
The glass door closed, and the music’s volume was suddenly reduced to the sound of a distant party. Alice could see Jane’s face through the glass, watching them go. She was pinching her lower lip together with her finger and thumb, so she looked like a fish.
She must remember every moment of this freaky day to tell Nick. He’d think it was hilarious. Yes, this whole day was quite a hoot.
Now she was being carried through another, much larger, blue-carpeted room, with rows of complicated-looking machinery being operated by men and women who all seemed to be straining to lift, pull, or push things that were far too heavy for them. The place had the studious, muted feel of a library. Nobody stopped what they were doing as the stretcher went by. Only their eyes followed with blank, impersonal interest, as if she were a news event on TV.
“Alice!”
A man stepped off a treadmill, pushing his headphones down from his ears and onto his shoulders. “What happened to you?”
His face—bright red and beaded with sweat—meant nothing to her. Alice stared up at him, groping for something polite to say. It was surreal, making conversation with a stranger while lying flat on her back on a stretcher. She was in one of those dreams where she turned up at a cocktail party in her pajamas.
“Fell off her bike and got a bit of a bump on the noggin,” George Clooney answered for her, sounding not at all medical.
“Oh no!” The man smeared a towel across his forehead. “Just what you need, with the big day coming up!”
Alice attempted to pull a rueful face about the big day coming up. Perhaps he was one of Nick’s colleagues and it was some work function she was meant to know about?
“Well, that’ll teach you to be such a gym addict, eh, Alice?”
“Ho,” said Alice. She wasn’t sure what she’d been trying to say, but that’s what it came out as: “Ho.”
As the paramedics kept walking, the man climbed back onto his treadmill and started running, calling out after her, “Take care, Alice! I’ll get Maggie to call!” He held up his thumb and little finger to his ear.
Alice closed her eyes. Her stomach churned.
“You doing okay there, Alice?” asked George Clooney.
Alice opened her eyes. “I feel a bit sick,” she said.
“That’s to be expected.”
They stopped in front of a lift.
“I really don’t know where I am,” she reminded George. She felt like it was worth mentioning again.
“Don’t worry about it for now,” said George.
The lift doors hissed open and a woman with sleek bobbed hair stepped out. “Alice! Are you okay? What happened?” She had one of those “How now, brown cow” accents. “What a coincidence! I was just thinking about you! I was going to call you about the—ahh, the little incident—at school, Chloe told me about it, you poor thing! Oh dear, this is all you need! What with tomorrow night, and the big day coming up!”