Before I Go to Sleep

by S. J. Watson

  I feel myself disappear. I want to see Adam. I want to see my husband. But they are not here. No one is here, but me, and this man, this man who has his hands around my throat.

  I am sliding, down, down. Towards blackness. I must not sleep. I must not sleep. I. Must. Not. Sleep.

  The memory ended, suddenly, leaving a terrible, empty void. My eyes flicked open. I was back in my own home, in bed, my husband inside me. ‘Ben!’ I cried out, but it was too late. With tiny, muffled grunts he ejaculated. I clung to him, holding him as tight as I could, and then, after a moment, he kissed my neck and told me again that he loved me, and then said, ‘Chris, you’re crying …’

  The sobs came, uncontrollable. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘Did I hurt you?’

  What could I say to him? I shook as my mind tried to process what it had seen. A hotel room full of flowers. Champagne and candles. A stranger with his hands around my neck.

  What could I say? All I could do was cry harder, and push him away, and then wait. Wait until he slept, and I could creep out of bed and write it all down.

  Saturday, 17 November – 2.07 a.m.

  I cannot sleep. Ben is upstairs, back in bed, and I am writing this in the kitchen. He thinks I am drinking a cup of cocoa that he has just made for me. He thinks I will come back to bed soon.

  I will, but first I must write again.

  The house is quiet and dark now, but earlier everything seemed alive. Amplified. I had hidden my journal in the wardrobe and crept back into bed after writing about what I had seen as we made love, but still felt restless. I could hear the ticking of the clock downstairs, its chimes as it marked the hours, Ben’s gentle snores. I could feel the fabric of the duvet cover on my chest, see nothing but the glow of the alarm clock by my side. I turned on my back and closed my eyes. All I could see was myself, with hands clamped tight around my throat so that I could not breathe. All I could hear was my own voice, echoing. I am going to die.

  I thought of my journal. Would it help to write more? To read it again? Could I really take it from its hiding place without waking Ben?

  He lay, barely visible in the shadows. You are lying to me, I thought. Because he is. Lying about my novel, about Adam. And now I feel certain he is lying about how I came to be here, trapped, like this.

  I wanted to shake him awake. I wanted to scream, Why? Why are you telling me I was knocked over by a car on an icy road? I wonder what he is protecting me from. How bad the truth might be.

  And what else is there, that I do not know?

  My thoughts turned from my journal to the metal box, the one in which Ben keeps the photos of Adam. Maybe there will be more answers in there, I thought. Maybe I will find the truth.

  I decided to get out of bed. I folded the duvet back so that I didn’t wake my husband. I grabbed my journal from its hiding place and crept, barefoot, on to the landing. The house felt different now, sheened in the bluish moonlight. Frozen, and still.

  I pulled the bedroom door closed behind me, a soft scrape of wood on carpet, a subtle click as it shut. There, on the landing, I skimmed through what I had written. I read about Ben telling me I was hit by a car. I read about him denying I had written a novel. I read about our son.

  I had to see a photograph of Adam. But where would I look? ‘I keep these upstairs,’ he had said. ‘For safety.’ I knew that. I had written it down. But where, exactly? The spare bedroom? The office? How would I begin to look for something I could not recall ever seeing before?

  I put the journal back where I had found it and went into the office, closing that door behind me too. Moonlight shone through the window, casting a greyish glow around the room. I didn’t dare to switch on the light, couldn’t risk Ben finding me in there, searching. He would ask me what I was looking for, and I had nothing to tell him, no reason to give for being in there. There would be too many questions to answer.

  The box was metal, I had written, and grey. I looked on the desk first. A tiny computer with an impossibly flat screen, pens and pencils in a mug, papers arranged in tidy piles, a ceramic paperweight in the shape of a seahorse. Above the desk was a wall planner, dotted with coloured stickers, circles and stars. Under the desk was a leather satchel and a wastepaper basket, both empty, and next to it a filing cabinet.

  I looked there first. I pulled out the top drawer slowly, quietly. It was full of papers, in files labelled Home, Work, Finance. I flicked past the binders. Behind them was a plastic bottle of pills, though I couldn’t make out the name in the semi-dark. The second drawer was full of stationery – boxes, pads of paper, pens, Tipp-Ex – and I closed it gently before crouching down to open the bottom drawer.

  A blanket, or a towel; it was difficult to tell in the dim light. I raised one corner, felt beneath, touched cold metal. I pulled it out. Underneath was the metal box, larger than I had imagined it, so big it almost filled the drawer. I manoeuvred my hands around it and realized it was heavier than I expected, too, and I almost dropped it as I lifted it out and set it on the floor.

  The box sat in front of me. For a moment I didn’t know what I wanted to do, whether I even wanted to open it. What new shocks might it contain? Like memory itself, it might hold truths that I couldn’t even begin to conceive of. Unimagined dreams and unexpected horrors. I was afraid. But, I realized, these truths are all I have. They are my past. They are what makes me human. Without them I am nothing. Nothing but an animal.

  I breathed deeply, closing my eyes as I did so, and began to lift the lid.

  It moved a little way but no further. I tried it again, thinking it was jammed, and then once more, before I realized. It was locked. Ben had locked it.

  I tried to remain calm, but an anger came then, unbidden. Who was he to have locked this box of memories? To keep me from what was mine?

  The key would be near, I was sure of it. I looked in the drawer. I opened out the towel and shook it loose. I stood up, tipped the pens and pencils out of the mug on the desk, and looked in there. Nothing.

  Desperate, I searched the other drawers as well as I could in the half-light. I could find no key, and realized it might be anywhere. Anywhere at all. I sank to my knees.

  A sound, then. A creak, so quiet I thought it might be my own body. But then another noise. Breathing. Or a sigh.

  A voice. Ben’s. ‘Christine?’ it said, and then, louder, ‘Christine!’

  What to do? I was sitting there, in his office, with the metal box that Ben thinks I have no memory of on the floor in front of me. I began to panic. A door opened, the landing light flicked on, illuminating the crack around the door. He was coming.

  I moved quickly. I put the box back and, sacrificing silence for speed, slammed the drawer closed.

  ‘Christine?’ he said again. Footsteps on the landing. ‘Christine, love? It’s me. Ben.’ I shoved the pens and pencils back in the mug on the desk and then sank to the floor. The door began to open.

  I didn’t know what I was about to do until I did it. I reacted instinctively, from a level lower than gut.

  ‘Help me!’ I said as he appeared at the open door. He was silhouetted against the light on the landing and for a moment I really did feel the terror that I was affecting. ‘Please! Help me!’

  He switched on the light and came towards me. ‘Christine! What’s wrong?’ he said. He began to crouch down.

  I skirted back, away from him, until I was pressed against the wall under the window. ‘Who are you?’ I said. I found I had begun to cry, to shake hysterically. I clawed at the wall behind me, clutched at the curtain that hung above me as if trying to pull myself upright. Ben stayed where he was, on the other side of the room. He held out his hand to me, as if I was dangerous, a wild animal.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Your husband.’

  ‘My what?’ I said, and then, ‘What’s happening to me?’

  ‘You have amnesia,’ he said. ‘We’ve been married for years.’ And then, as he made me the cup of cocoa that still sits in front of me, I let him tell
me, from scratch, what I already knew.

  Sunday, 18 November

  That happened in the early hours of Saturday morning. Today is Sunday. Midday, or thereabouts. A whole day has gone, unrecorded. Twenty-four hours, lost. Twenty-four hours spent believing everything Ben told me. Believing that I have never written a novel, never had a son. Believing it was an accident that robbed me of my past.

  Maybe, unlike today, Dr Nash didn’t call, and I didn’t find this journal. Or perhaps he did but I chose not to read it. I feel a chill. What would happen if one day he decides never to call again? I would never find it, never read it, never even know it existed. I would not know my past.

  It would be unthinkable. I know that now. My husband is telling me one version of how I came to have no memory, my feelings another. I wonder if I have ever asked Dr Nash what happened. Even if I have, can I believe what he says? The only truth I have is what is written in this journal.

  Written by me. I must remember that. Written by me.

  I think back to this morning. I remember the sun slammed through the curtains, waking me suddenly. My eyes flicked open on an unfamiliar scene and I was confused. Yet, though particular events didn’t come to me, I had the sense of looking back on a wealth of history, not just a few short years. And I knew, however dimly, that that history contained a child of my own. In that fraction of a second before I was fully conscious, I knew that I was a mother. That I had borne a child, that mine was no longer the only body that I had a duty to nurture and protect.

  I turned over, aware of another body in the bed, an arm draped over my waist. I didn’t feel alarmed, but secure. Happy. I woke more fully and the images and feelings began to coalesce into truth and memory. First I saw my little boy, heard myself calling his name – Adam – and saw him running towards me. And then I remembered my husband. His name. I felt deeply in love. I smiled.

  The feeling of peace didn’t last. I looked over at the man next to me and his face was not the one I expected to see. A moment later I realized that I didn’t recognize the room in which I had slept, couldn’t remember getting there. And then, finally, I understood that I could remember nothing clearly. Those brief, disconnected snatches had not been representative of my memories, but their sum total.

  Ben explained it to me, of course. Or parts of it at least. And this journal explained the rest, once Dr Nash phoned me and I found it. I didn’t have time to read it all – I had called down, feigning a headache, and then listened for the slightest movement downstairs, worried that Ben might come up at any moment with an aspirin and a glass of water. But I read enough. The journal told me who I am, how I came to be here, what I have, and what I have lost. It told me that all is not lost. That my memories are coming back, however slowly. Dr Nash told me so, on the day that I watched him read my journal. You’re remembering lots of things, Christine, he’d said. There’s no reason that won’t continue. And the journal told me that the hit-and-run was a lie, that somewhere, hidden deep, I can remember what happened to me on the night I lost my memory. That it doesn’t involve a car and icy roads, but champagne and flowers and a knock on the door of a hotel room.

  And now I have a name. The name of the person I had expected to see when I opened my eyes this morning was not Ben.

  Ed. I woke expecting to be lying next to someone called Ed.

  At the time I didn’t know who he was, this Ed. I thought perhaps he was nobody, it was a name I invented, plucked from nowhere. Or perhaps he was an old lover, a one-night stand that I have not quite forgotten. But now I have read this journal. I have learned that I was assaulted in a hotel room. And so I know who this Ed is.

  He is the man who was waiting on the other side of the door that night. The man who attacked me. The man who stole my life.

  This evening I tested my husband. I didn’t want to, didn’t even plan to, but I had spent the whole day worrying. Why had he lied to me? Why? And does he lie to me every day? Is there only one version of the past that he tells me, or several? I need to trust him, I thought. I have no one else.

  We were eating lamb; a cheap joint, fatty and overcooked. I was pushing the same forkful around my plate, dipping it in gravy, bringing it to my mouth, putting it down again.

  ‘How did I get to be like this?’ I asked. I had tried to summon up the vision of the hotel room, but it had remained elusive, just out of reach. In a way I was glad.

  Ben looked up from his own plate, his eyes wide with surprise. ‘Christine,’ he said. ‘Darling. I don’t—’

  ‘Please,’ I interrupted him. ‘I need to know.’

  He put his knife and fork down. ‘Very well,’ he said.

  ‘I need you to tell me everything,’ I said. ‘Everything.’

  He looked at me, his eyes narrow. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I hesitated, but then I decided to say it. ‘Some people might think it would be better not to tell me all the details. Especially if they were upsetting. But I don’t think that. I think you should tell me everything, so that I can decide for myself what to feel. Do you understand?’

  ‘Chris,’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

  I looked away. My eyes rested on the photograph of the two of us that sat on the sideboard. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I know I wasn’t always like this. And now I am. So something must have happened. Something bad. I’m just saying that I know that. I know it must have been something awful. But even so, I want to know what. I have to know what it was. What happened to me. Don’t lie to me, Ben,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  He reached across the table and took my hand. ‘Darling, I would never do that.’

  And then he began. ‘It was December,’ he said. ‘Icy roads …’ and I listened, with a mounting sense of dread, as he told me about the car accident. When he had finished he picked up his knife and fork and carried on eating.

  ‘You’re sure?’ I said. ‘You’re sure it was an accident?’

  He sighed. ‘Why?’

  I tried to calculate how much to say. I didn’t want to reveal that I was writing again, keeping a journal, but wanted to be as honest as I could.

  ‘Earlier today I got an odd feeling,’ I said. ‘Almost like a memory. Somehow it felt like it had something to do with why I’m like this.’

  ‘What sort of feeling?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘A memory?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Well, did you remember specific things about what happened?’

  I thought of the hotel room, the candles, the flowers. The feeling that they had not been from Ben, that it was not him I had opened the door to in that room. I thought, too, of the feeling that I could not breathe. ‘What sort of thing?’ I said.

  ‘Any details, really. The type of car that hit you? Even just the colour? Whether you saw who was driving it?’

  I wanted to scream at him, Why are you asking me to believe I was hit by a car? Can it really be that it is an easier story to believe than whatever did happen?

  An easier story to hear, I thought, or an easier one to tell?

  I wondered what he would do if I was to say, Actually, no. I don’t even remember being hit by a car. I remember being in a hotel room, waiting for someone who wasn’t you.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not really. It was more just a general impression.’

  ‘A general impression?’ he said. ‘What do you mean, “a general impression”?’

  He had raised his voice, sounded almost angry. I was no longer sure I wanted to continue the discussion.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It was nothing. Just an odd feeling, as if something really bad were happening, and a feeling of pain. But I don’t remember any details.’

  He seemed to relax. ‘It’s probably nothing,’ he said. ‘Just the mind playing tricks on you. Try to just ignore it.’

  Ignore it? I thought. How could he ask me to do that? Was he frightened of me remembering the truth?

  It is possible, I suppose. He has already told me t
oday that I was hit by a car. He cannot enjoy the thought of being exposed as a liar, even for the rest of the one day that I could hold on to the memory. Particularly if he is lying for my benefit. I can see how believing I was hit by a car would be easier for both of us. But how will I ever find out what really happened?

  And who I had been waiting for, in that room?

  ‘OK,’ I said, because what else could I say? ‘You’re probably right.’ We went back to our lamb, now cold. Another thought came then. Terrible, brutal. What if he is right? If it was a hit-and-run? What if my mind had invented the hotel room, the attack? It might all be invention. Imagination, not memory. Was it possible that, unable to comprehend the simple fact of an accident on an icy road, I had made it all up?

  If so, then my memory is not working. Things are not coming back to me. I am not getting better at all, but going mad.

  I found my bag and upended it over the bed. Things tumbled out. My purse, my floral diary, a lipstick, a powder contact, some tissues. A mobile phone, and then another. A packet of mints. Some loose coins. A yellow square of paper.

  I sat on the bed, searching through the detritus. I fished out the tiny diary first, and thought I was in luck when I saw Dr Nash’s name scrawled in black ink at the back, but then I saw that the number beneath it had the word Office next to it in brackets. It was Sunday. He wouldn’t be there.

  The yellow paper was gummed along one edge, with dust and hair sticking to it, but otherwise blank. I was beginning to wonder what on earth had made me think, even for a moment, that Dr Nash would have given me his personal number, when I remembered reading that he had written his number in the front of my journal. Ring me if you get confused, he’d said.