‘Hello, Alice, it’s me again, Sister Fitzgerald. I’m just going to give you a quick wash, and change your dressings for when your visitors come, and I need to change your feeding tube too. It doesn’t look too appetizing, this soupy, liquid stuff they’re giving you. You should give the hospital food a whirl; it’s not bad! Y’know what, Alice? When you wake up I’ll make sure you get a feast. You can order anything you like. What would you pick? Roast turkey, or nachos with cheese and sour cream and jalapenos, or a big pizza with every kind of topping? Apple pie and ice cream or red velvet chocolate cake? Just tell me. And I’ll toast you, Alice, with a glass of champagne – or maybe lemonade, because this is the NHS we’re talking about, after all. Wake up soon, Alice. There are a lot of people missing you.’
I’m not sure how I got here. It’s dark, a kind of hallway with doors all around it, and there’s a funny little three-legged table with a bottle on it. The bottle has a label with ‘drink me’ printed on it in large letters.
It would be silly to drink it just because of the label, of course. It could be poison, or some nasty, foul-tasting medicine, left here as a joke. I pick it up and look at it carefully, then uncork the top and breathe in the aroma. I don’t think it’s poison. I’m pretty sure it’s not.
I take a sip, and it tastes like cherry tart, custard, pineapple, roast turkey, toffee and hot buttered toast. And just as I am thinking that it’s the best thing I have ever tasted, I feel myself shrinking, getting smaller and smaller, until there’s barely anything left of me at all.
Savvy picked up the teapot and poured fizzy pink liquid into a vintage teacup.
‘Wonderland starts here,’ she told me. ‘We made some fruit punch earlier. Try it, Alice! It’s gorgeous! I put a whole handful of mushed-up strawberries in there!’
I took the teacup and saucer, obedient; a handwritten label saying ‘drink me’ was tied to the bone china handle. I lifted the cup and drank, sipping cold, fizzy liquid that tasted of fruit and sugar with something bitter and burny hidden beneath it.
‘What is that?’ I spluttered. ‘Alcohol?’
‘No, no, nothing like that,’ Savvy laughed. ‘It’s just lemonade, really, but we were experimenting a bit. There might be some bitter lemon in it. And possibly a dash of chilli sauce …’
I wasn’t stupid – I knew that bitter lemon, strawberries and chilli sauce were not supposed to smell this way; like a brewery, like the whiff of Dad’s hot, sour breath the morning after Uncle Jim’s stag party. I was sure Savvy was lying, but I pretended not to care. She poured out more of the punch and handed teacups to Erin, Yaz and Lainey. All four of them knocked back their drinks eagerly, pulling faces at the nasty taste, giggling like it was no big deal.
‘Oof; pretty strong,’ Erin said with a smirk. ‘Tastes rank …’
‘It’ll do the job,’ Savvy said. ‘Drink up, Alice! Don’t be a wuss!’
I didn’t want to be a wuss, but I didn’t want to drink the fruit punch either. I was certain it contained a generous slug of something stolen from Savvy’s parents’ drinks cabinet, diluted with lemonade and strawberries and half a ton of sugar.
I took another sip and my throat burned; my whole body felt warm and glowy. What happened in Alice in Wonderland when she drank the magic potion? She shrank right down to a few inches tall and stepped through a tiny doorway into a different world. In the book, the potion tastes of cherry tart and custard and hot buttered toast and a bunch of other things all mixed up; I was worried this drink was a bit more like the one the White Queen makes in the film – from worm fat, the urine of a horsefly, three coins from a dead man’s pocket and two teaspoons of wishful thinking.
Well, more than two teaspoons of wishful thinking, really. There was a whole bucketful of that swishing around inside me already. Wishful thinking was why I was there, wanting to fit in, to be a part of Savvy’s world, to have my old friends back. I just wasn’t sure that Savvy’s weird cocktail was the answer. A part of me thought that if I drank it, I might be transformed somehow, accepted. Another part knew that this was not a ticket to Wonderland, but to some other place; somewhere nightmarish, surreal, where I might shrink away, becoming smaller and smaller until there was nothing left of me at all.
‘Like it?’ Savvy enquired, watching me carefully. ‘There might be just the tiniest shot of rum in there; just enough to loosen us up, chill us out!’
‘It’s great,’ I said, trying not to cough. ‘Well, not exactly great, but … interesting.’
‘You’re interesting, Alice,’ she declared. ‘I had you down as an uptight goody-two-shoes, but I think there’s much more to you than meets the eye …’
I smiled, pathetically pleased to be described as interesting, but not pleased enough to finish the punch. I spotted a potted plant on a tall stand by the door and wondered if I could get near enough to pour my drink into that, but Savvy was at my side, an arm snaked around my waist.
‘Just drink it,’ she said, sweetly. ‘Knock it back; it’s the easiest way. It tastes disgusting, I know, but it will make you feel lovely, I promise! Just all relaxed and happy!’
‘I don’t really drink,’ I confessed as carelessly as I could. ‘It’s not my thing.’
Was it anybody’s thing? We were thirteen years old. Surely that was way too young to drink cocktails of rum and lemonade and strawberries with chilli sauce mixed in? I couldn’t imagine wanting to drink something like that at any age. It reminded me of the games I played with Lainey when we were really little, mixing up garden soups and stews for our teddy bears and dolls from mud and grass clippings and flower petals and rainwater.
Lainey was watching me, waiting to see what I’d do. Did she remember those garden brews too?
‘None of us really drink,’ Savvy said, laughing. ‘It’s just for fun; part of the Alice theme. Don’t wimp out on us.’
It was a tipping point, I knew. I could stay a victim, a loner; or I could take a risk and change everything.
I was still trying to decide whether I had the guts to drink it when the doorbell rang three times.
It was like an alarm bell going off: the girls went all wide-eyed and giggly, smoothing their hair and checking their cute little painted-on noses in the mirror above the sideboard. The doorbell rang again, but nobody seemed to want to actually answer it.
‘Who is that?’ I asked.
‘Our special guests, of course,’ Savvy said, laughing. ‘You didn’t think I’d gone to all this trouble just for us, did you?’
I had thought exactly that, of course, but now that I looked properly I could see that the dining table was set for a crowd, and that the plates heaped high with cupcakes, sandwiches, crisps and pizza held way too much food for just the five of us. I was invisible briefly in the sudden chaos of giggles and mirror-checking, and I drifted over to the big bay window, hiding the punch-filled teacup out of sight behind the heavy brocade curtain. Peeking out of the window from behind the curtain, I glimpsed a bunch of huddled figures clowning around on the path by the door and heard loud chat and whoops of boyish laughter. A pale face flashed out of the darkness briefly, grinning and pushing back an overgrown tawny fringe.
The face was familiar. I knew it well from primary school, from rehearsals for the school play, from that lost summer between primary and secondary school when I went to drama summer school. He was younger then, of course, his face chubbier, cheekier, but even so, I’d have known Luke Miller anywhere.