Before I Go to Sleep

by S. J. Watson

  My reaction was instant. Automatic. ‘No!’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re experiencing memory,’ he said. ‘Think of what happened when we went to visit your old house.’ I nodded. ‘You remembered something then. I think it might happen again. We might trigger more.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You don’t have to. But … look. I’ll be honest. I’ve already made the arrangements with them. They’d be happy to welcome you. Us. Any time. I only have to ring to let them know we’re on our way. I’d come with you. If you felt distressed or uncomfortable we could leave. It’ll be fine. I promise.’

  ‘You think it might help me to get better? Really?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But it might.’

  ‘When? When do you want to go?’

  He stopped walking. I realized the car we were standing next to must be his.

  ‘Today,’ he said. ‘I think we should go today.’ And then he said something odd. ‘We don’t have time to lose.’

  I didn’t have to go. Dr Nash didn’t force me to agree to the trip. But, though I can’t remember doing so – can’t remember much at all, in fact – I must have said yes.

  The journey was not long, and we were silent. I could think of nothing. Nothing to say, nothing to feel. My mind was empty. Scooped out. I took my journal out of my bag – not caring that I had told Dr Nash I didn’t have it with me – and wrote that last entry in it. I wanted to record every detail of our conversation. I did it, silently, almost without thinking, and we didn’t speak as he parked the car, nor as we walked through the antiseptic corridors with their smell of stale coffee and fresh paint. People were wheeled past us on trolleys, attached to drips. Posters peeled off the walls. Overhead lights flickered and buzzed. I could think only of the seven years I had spent there. It felt like a lifetime; one I remembered nothing of.

  We came to a stop outside a double door. Fisher Ward. Dr Nash pressed a button on an intercom mounted on the wall then mumbled something into it. He is wrong, I thought as the door swung open. I did not survive that attack. The Christine Lucas who opened that hotel-room door is dead.

  Another double door. ‘You OK, Christine?’ he said as the first closed behind us, sealing us in. I said nothing. ‘This is a secure unit.’ I was hit with a sudden conviction that the door behind me was closing for ever, that I would not be leaving.

  I swallowed. ‘I see,’ I said. The inner door began to open. I didn’t know what I would see beyond it, couldn’t believe I had ever been here before.

  ‘Ready?’ he said.

  A long corridor. There were doors off each side and as we walked I could see that they opened into glass-windowed rooms. In each was a bed, some made, some unmade, some occupied, most not. ‘The patients here suffer from a variety of problems,’ said Dr Nash. ‘Many show schizoaffective symptoms, but there are those with bipolarity, acute anxiety, depression.’

  I looked in one window. A girl was sitting on the bed, naked, staring at the television. In another a man sat on his haunches, rocking, his arms wrapped around his knees as if to shield himself from the cold.

  ‘Are they locked in?’ I said.

  ‘The patients here have been detained under the Mental Health Act. Also known as sectioning. They’re here for their own good, but against their wishes.’

  ‘“Their own good”?”

  ‘Yes. They’re a danger either to themselves or to others. They need to be kept secure.’

  We carried on walking. A woman looked up as I passed her room, and though our eyes made contact hers betrayed no expression. Instead she slapped herself, still looking at me, and when I winced she did it again. A vision flitted through me – visiting a zoo as a child, watching a tiger pace up and down her cage – but I pushed it away and carried on, resolving to look neither left nor right.

  ‘Why did they bring me here?’ I said.

  ‘Before you were here you were in the general medical ward. In a bed, just like everybody else. You would spend some weekends at home, with Ben. But you became more and more difficult to manage.’

  ‘Difficult?’

  ‘You would wander off. Ben had to start locking the doors to the house. You became hysterical a couple of times, convinced that he had hurt you, that you were being locked in against your will. For a while you were OK when you got back to the ward, but then you started demonstrating similar behaviours there, too.’

  ‘So they had to find a way of locking me in,’ I said. We had reached a nursing station. A man in uniform sat behind a desk, entering something on a computer. He looked up as we approached and said the doctor would be with us soon. He invited us to take a seat. I scanned his face – the crooked nose, the gold-studded earring – hoping something would ignite a glimmer of familiarity. Nothing. The ward seemed utterly foreign.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dr Nash. ‘You’d gone missing. For something like four and a half hours. You were picked up by the police, down by the canal. Dressed only in pyjamas and a gown. Ben had to collect you from the station. You wouldn’t go with any of the nurses. They had no choice.’

  He told me that right away Ben began to campaign to have me moved. ‘He felt that a psychiatric ward was not the best place for you. He was right, really. You weren’t dangerous, either to yourself or to others. It’s even possible that being surrounded by those who were more ill than you was making you worse. He wrote to the doctors, the head of the hospital, your MP. But nothing was available.

  ‘And then,’ he said, ‘a residential centre for people with chronic brain injuries opened. He lobbied hard, and you were assessed and thought to be suitable, though funding was an issue. Ben had had to take a break from work to look after you and couldn’t afford to fund it himself, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Apparently he threatened to go to the press with your story. There were meetings and appeals and so on, but eventually he was successful and you were accepted as a patient, with the state agreeing to pay for your stay for as long as you were ill. You were moved there about ten years ago.’

  I thought of my husband, tried to imagine him writing letters, campaigning, threatening. It didn’t seem possible. The man I had met that morning seemed humble, deferential. Not weak, exactly, but accepting. He didn’t seem like the kind of person to make waves.

  I am not the only one, I thought, whose personality has changed because of my injury.

  ‘The home was fairly small,’ said Dr Nash. ‘A few rooms in a rehab centre. There weren’t many other residents. Lots of people to help look after you. You had a little more independence there. You were safe. You made improvements.’

  ‘But I wasn’t with Ben?’

  ‘No. He lived at home. He needed to carry on working, and he couldn’t do that and look after you. He decided—’

  A memory flashed through me, tearing me suddenly back into the past. Everything was slightly out of focus and had a haze around it, and the images were so bright I almost wanted to look away. I saw myself, walking through these same corridors, being led back towards a room that I dimly understood as mine. I am wearing carpet slippers, a blue gown with ties up the back. The woman with me is black, wearing a uniform. ‘Here you go, hon,’ she says to me. ‘Look who’s here to see you!’ She lets go of my hand and guides me towards the bed.

  A group of strangers are sitting around it, watching me. I see a man with dark hair and a woman wearing a beret, but I can’t make out their faces. I am in the wrong room, I want to say. There’s been a mistake. But I say nothing.

  A child – four or five years old – stands up. He had been sitting on the edge of the bed. He comes towards me, running, and he says Mummy and I see that he is talking to me, and only then do I realize who he is. Adam. I crouch down and he runs into my arms, and I hold him and kiss the top of his head, and then I stand. ‘Who are you?’ I say to the group around the bed. ‘What are you doing here?’

  The man looks suddenly sad, the woman with the beret stands and says, ‘Chris. Chrissy. It’s me. You know w
ho I am, don’t you?’ and then comes towards me and I see that she is crying.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No! Get out! Get out!’ and I turn to leave the room and there is another woman there – standing behind me – and I don’t know who she is, or how she got there, and I start to cry. I begin to sink to the floor, but the child is there, holding on to my knees, and I don’t know who he is, but he keeps calling me Mummy, saying it over and over again, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, and I don’t know why, or who he is, or why he is holding me …

  A hand touched my arm. I flinched as if stung. A voice.

  ‘Christine? Are you OK? Dr Wilson is here.’

  I opened my eyes, looked around. A woman wearing a white coat stood in front of us. ‘Dr Nash,’ she said. She shook his hand, and then turned to me. ‘Christine?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said. ‘I’m Hilary Wilson.’ I took her hand. She was a little older than me; her hair was beginning to turn grey, and a pair of half-moon glasses dangled on a gold chain round her neck. ‘How d’you do?’ she said, and from nowhere I felt certain I had met her before. She nodded down the corridor. ‘Shall we?’

  Her office was large, lined with books, piled with boxes of spilling papers. She sat behind a desk and indicated two chairs opposite it, into which Dr Nash and I sank. I watched her take a file from the pile on her desk and open it. ‘Now, my dear,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Her image froze. I knew her. I had seen her picture as I lay in the scanner, and, though I hadn’t recognized it at the time, I did now. I had been here before. Many times. Sitting where I am now, in this chair or one like it, watching her making notes in a file as she peered through the glasses held delicately to her eyes.

  ‘I’ve met you before …’ I said. ‘I remember.’ Dr Nash looked over at me, then back to Dr Wilson.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, you have. Though not that often.’ She explained that she’d only just started working here when I moved out and that at first I wasn’t even on her caseload. ‘It’s certainly most encouraging that you remember me, though,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time since you were resident here.’ Dr Nash leaned forward and said it might help me to see the room in which I’d lived. She nodded and squinted in the file, then after a minute said she didn’t know which it was. ‘It’s possible that you moved around a fair old bit, in any case,’ she said. ‘Many of the patients do. Could we ask your husband? According to the file he and your son, Adam, visited you almost every day.’

  I had read about Adam this morning and felt a flash of happiness at the mention of his name, and relief that I’d seen a little of him growing up, but shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’d rather not ring Ben.’

  Dr Wilson didn’t argue. ‘A friend of yours called Claire seemed to be something of a regular too. How about her?’

  I shook my head. ‘We’re not in touch.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘What a pity. But never mind. I can tell you a little bit of what life was like here back then.’ She glanced at her notes, then clasped her hands together. ‘Your treatment was mostly handled by a consultant psychiatrist. You underwent sessions of hypnosis, but I’m afraid any success was limited and unsustained.’ She read further. ‘You didn’t receive a great deal of medication. A sedative, occasionally, though that was more to help you sleep – it can get quite noisy in here, as I’m sure you can understand,’ she said.

  I recalled the howling I’d imagined earlier, wondering if that might have once been me. ‘What was I like?’ I said. ‘Was I happy?’

  She smiled. ‘Generally, yes. You were well liked. You seemed to make friends with one of the nurses in particular.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  She scanned her notes. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t say. You played a lot of solitaire.’

  ‘Solitaire?’

  ‘A card game. Perhaps Dr Nash can explain later?’ She looked up. ‘According to the notes you were occasionally violent,’ she said. ‘Don’t be alarmed. It’s not unusual in cases like this. People who have suffered severe head trauma will often exhibit violent tendencies, particularly when there has been damage to the part of the brain that allows self-restraint. Plus patients with amnesia such as yours often have a tendency to do something we call confabulation. Things around them don’t seem to make sense, and so they feel compelled to invent details. About themselves and other people around them, or about their history, what has happened to them. It’s thought to be due to the desire to fill gaps in the memory. Understandable in a way. But it can often lead to violent behaviour when the amnesiac’s fantasy is contradicted. Life must have been very disorientating for you. Particularly when you had visitors.’

  Visitors. Suddenly I was afraid I might have hit my son.

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘You occasionally lashed out at some of the staff,’ she said.

  ‘But not at Adam? My son?’

  ‘Not according to these notes, no.’ I sighed, not entirely relieved. ‘We have some pages from a sort of diary that you were keeping,’ she said. ‘Might it be helpful for you to take a look at them? You might find it easier to understand your confusion.’

  This felt dangerous. I glanced at Dr Nash, and he nodded. She pushed a sheet of blue paper over to me and I took it, at first frightened even to look at it.

  When I did I saw that it was covered in an unruly scrawl. At the top the letters were well formed, and kept neatly within the printed lines that ran across the page, but towards the bottom they were large and messy, inches tall, just a few words across. Though dreading what I might see I began to read.

  8.15 a.m., read the first entry. I have woken up. Ben is here. Directly underneath I had written, 8.17 a.m. Ignore that last entry. It was written by someone else, and underneath that, 8.20 I am awake NOW. Before I was not. Ben is here.

  My eyes flicked further down the page. 9.45 I have just woken up, FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME, and then, a few lines later, 10.07 NOW I am definitely awake. All these entries are a lie. I am awake NOW.

  I looked up. ‘This was really me?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. For a long time it seemed that you were in a perpetual state of feeling that you had just woken up from a very long, very deep sleep. Look here.’ Dr Wilson pointed at the page in front of me, and began quoting entries from it. ‘I have been asleep for ever. It was like being DEAD. I have only just woken up. I can see again, for the first time. They apparently encouraged you to write down what you were feeling, in an effort to get you to remember what had happened before, but I’m afraid you just became convinced that all the preceding entries had been written by someone else. You began to think people here were conducting experiments on you, keeping you against your will.’

  I looked at the page again. The whole sheet was filled with almost identical entries, each just a few minutes apart. I felt myself go cold.

  ‘Was I really this bad?’ I said. My words seemed to echo in my head.

  ‘For a while, yes,’ said Dr Nash. ‘Your notes indicate that you retained memory for only a few seconds. Sometimes a minute or two. That time has gradually lengthened over the years.’

  I could not believe I had written this. It seemed to be the work of someone whose mind was completely fractured. Exploded. I saw the words again. It was like being DEAD.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t—’

  Dr Wilson took the sheet from me. ‘I understand, Christine. It’s upsetting. I—’

  Panic hit me then. I stood up, but the room began to spin. ‘I want to leave,’ I said. ‘This isn’t me. It can’t have been me, I – I would never hit people. I would never. I just—’

  Dr Nash stood, too, and then Dr Wilson. She stepped forward, colliding with her desk, sending papers flying. A photograph spilled to the floor.

  ‘Dear God—’ I said, and she looked down, then crouched to cover it with another sheet. But I had seen enough. ‘Was that me?’ I said, my voice rising to a scream. ‘Was that me?’<
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  The photograph was of the head of a young woman. Her hair had been pulled back from her face. At first it looked as though she was wearing a Halloween mask. One eye was open and looked at the camera, the other was closed by a huge, purple bruise, and both lips were swollen, pink, lacerated with cuts. Her cheeks were distended, giving her whole face a grotesque appearance. I thought of pulped fruit. Of plums, rotten and bursting.

  ‘Was that me?’ I screamed, even though, despite the swollen, distorted face, I could see that it was.

  My memory splits there, fractured in two. Part of me was calm, quiet. Serene. It watched as the other part of me thrashed and screamed and had to be restrained by Dr Nash and Dr Wilson. You really ought to behave, it seemed to be saying. This is embarrassing.

  But the other part was stronger. It had taken over, become the real me. I shouted out, again and again, and turned and ran for the door. Dr Nash came after me. I tore it open and ran, though where could I go? An image of bolted doors. Alarms. A man, chasing me. My son, crying. I have done this before, I thought. I have done all this before.

  My memory blanks.

  They must have calmed me down, somehow, persuaded me to go with Dr Nash; the next thing I can remember is being in his car, sitting next to him as he drove. The sky was beginning to cloud over, the streets grey, somehow flattened out. He was talking, but I couldn’t concentrate. It was as if my mind had tripped, fallen back into something else, and now couldn’t catch up. I looked out of the windows, at the shoppers and the dog-walkers, at the people with their prams and their push-bikes, and I wondered whether this – this search for truth – was really what I wanted. Yes, it might help me to improve, but how much can I hope to gain? I don’t expect that I will ever wake up knowing everything, as normal people do, knowing what I did the day before, what plans I have for the day that follows, what circuitous route has led me to here and now, to the person I am. The best I can hope for is that one day looking in the mirror will not be a total shock, that I will remember I married a man called Ben and lost a son called Adam, that I will not have to see a copy of my novel to know that I had written one.