by S. J. Watson
I go to the bathroom. I am a woman, I tell myself. An adult. I have a husband. One I love. I think back to what I have read. Of the sex. Of him fucking me. I had not written that I enjoyed it.
Can I enjoy sex? I realize I don’t even know that. I flush the toilet and step out of my trousers, my tights, my knickers. I sit on the edge of the bath. How alien my body is. How unknown to me. How can I be happy giving it to someone else, when I don’t recognize it myself?
I lock the bathroom door, then part my legs. Slightly at first, then more. I lift my blouse and look down. I see the stretch marks I saw the day I remembered Adam, the wiry shock of my pubic hair. I wonder if I ever shave it, whether I choose not to based on my preference or my husband’s. Perhaps those things don’t matter any more. Not now.
I cup my hand and place it over my pubic mound. My fingers rest on my labia, parting them slightly. I brush the tip of what must be my clitoris and press, moving my fingers gently as I do, already feeling a faint tingle. The promise of sensation, rather than sensation itself.
I wonder what will happen, later.
The bags are in the spare room, where he said they would be. Both are compact, sturdy, one a little larger than the other. I take them through, into the bedroom in which I woke this morning, and put them on the bed. I open the top drawer and see my underwear, next to his.
I select clothes for us both, socks for him, tights for me. I remember reading of the night we had sex and realize I must have stockings and suspenders somewhere. I decide it would be nice to find them now, to take them with me. It might be good for both of us.
I move to the wardrobe. I choose a dress, a skirt. Some trousers, a pair of jeans. I notice the shoebox on the floor – the one that must have hidden my journal – now empty. I wonder what kind of couple we are, when we go on holiday. Whether we spend our evenings in restaurants, or sitting in cosy pubs, relaxing in the rosy heat of a real fire. I wonder whether we walk, exploring the town and its surroundings, or drive to carefully selected venues. These are the things I don’t know, yet. These are the things I have the rest of my life to find out. To enjoy.
I select some clothes for both of us, almost randomly, and fold them, placing them in the cases. As I do I feel a jolt, a surge of energy, and I close my eyes. I see a vision, bright, but shimmering. It is unclear at first, as if hovering, out of both reach and focus, and I try to open my mind, to let it come.
I see myself standing in front of a bag; a soft suitcase in worn leather. I am excited. I feel young again, like a child about to go on holiday, or a teenager preparing for a date, wondering how it will go, whether he’ll ask me back to his house, whether we’ll fuck. I feel that newness, that anticipation, can taste it. I roll it on my tongue, savouring it, because I know it will not last. I open my drawers in turn, selecting blouses, stockings, underwear. Thrilling. Sexy. Underwear that is worn only with the anticipation of its removal. I put in a pair of heels in addition to the flat shoes I am wearing, take them out, put them in again. I don’t like them, but this night is about fantasy, about dressing up, about being other than what we are. Only then do I move on to the functional things. I take a quilted wash-bag in bright red leather and add perfume, shower gel, toothpaste. I want to look beautiful tonight, for the man I love, for the man I have been so close to losing. I add bath salts. Orange blossom. I realize I am remembering the night I packed to go to Brighton.
The memory evaporates. My eyes open. I could not have known, back then, that I was packing for the man who would take everything from me.
I carry on packing for the man I still have.
I hear a car pull up outside. The engine dies. A door opens, and then shuts. A key in the lock. Ben. He is here.
I feel nervous. Scared. I am not the same person he left this morning; I have learned my own story. I have discovered myself. What will he think, when he sees me? What will he say?
I must ask him if he knows about my journal. If he has read it. What he thinks.
He calls out as he closes the door behind him. ‘Christine? Chris? I’m home.’ His voice doesn’t sing, though; he sounds exhausted. I call back, and tell him I am in the bedroom.
The lowest step creaks as it accepts his weight, and I hear an exhalation as first one shoe is removed, and then the other. He will be putting his slippers on now, and then he will come to find me. I feel a surge of pleasure at knowing his rituals – my journal has keyed me into them, even though my memory cannot – but, as he ascends the stairs, another emotion takes over. Fear. I think of what I wrote in the front of my journal. Don’t trust Ben.
He opens the bedroom door. ‘Darling!’ he says. I have not moved. I still sit on the edge of the bed, the bags open behind me. He stands by the door until I stand and open my arms, then he comes over and kisses me.
‘How was your day?’ I say.
He takes off his tie. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘let’s not talk about that. We’re on holiday!’
He begins to unbutton his shirt. I fight the instinct to look away, remind myself that he is my husband, that I love him.
‘I packed the bags,’ I say. ‘I hope yours is OK. I didn’t know what you’d want to take.’
He steps out of his trousers and folds them before hanging them in the wardrobe. ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’
‘Only I wasn’t exactly sure where we were going. So I didn’t know what to pack.’
He turns, and I wonder whether I catch a flash of annoyance in his eyes. ‘I’ll check, before we put the bags in the car. It’s fine. Thanks for making a start.’ He sits on the chair at the dressing table and pulls on a pair of faded blue jeans. I notice a perfect crease ironed down their front, and the twenty-something me has to resist the urge to find him ridiculous.
‘Ben?’ I say. ‘You know where I’ve been today?’
He looks at me. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know.’
‘You know about Dr Nash?’
He turns away from me. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You told me.’ I can see him, reflected in the mirrors arranged around the dresser. Three versions of the man I married. The man I love. ‘Everything,’ he says. ‘You told me about it all. I know everything.’
‘You don’t mind? About me seeing him?’
He doesn’t look round. ‘I wish you’d told me. But no. No, I don’t mind.’
‘And my journal? You know about my journal?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You told me. You said it helped.’
A thought comes. ‘Have you read it?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘You said it was private. I would never look through your private things.’
‘But you know about Adam? You know that I know about Adam?’
I see him flinch, as if my words have been hurled at him with violence. I am surprised. I was expecting him to be happy. Happy that he would no longer have to tell me about his death, over and over again.
He looks at me.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘There aren’t any pictures,’ I say. He asks what I mean. ‘There are photos of me and you but still none of him.’
He stands and comes over to where I am sitting, then sits on the bed beside me. He takes my hand. I wish he would stop treating me as if I am fragile, brittle. As if the truth would break me.
‘I wanted to surprise you,’ he says. He reaches under the bed and retrieves a photo album. ‘I’ve put them in here.’
He hands me the album. It is heavy, dark, bound in something meant to resemble black leather but it doesn’t. I open the cover, and inside it is a pile of photographs.
‘I wanted to put them in properly,’ he says. ‘To give to you as a present tonight, but I didn’t have time. I’m sorry.’
I look through the photographs. They are not in any order. There are photographs of Adam as a baby, a young boy. They must be the ones from the metal box. One stands out. In it he is a young man, sitting next to a woman. ‘His girlfriend?’ I say.
‘One of them,’ says Ben. ‘The one he was with the longest.’
She is pretty, blonde, her hair cut short. She reminds me of Claire. In the photograph Adam is looking directly at the camera, laughing, and she is looking half at him, her face a mixture of joy and disapproval. They have a conspiratorial air, as though they have shared a joke with whoever is behind the lens. They are happy. The thought pleases me. ‘What was her name?’
‘Helen. She’s called Helen.’
I wince as I realize I had thought of her in the past tense, imagined that she had died too. A thought stirs; what if she had died instead, but I force it down before it forms and finds a shape.
‘Were they still together when he died?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘They were thinking of getting engaged.’
She looks so young, so hungry, her eyes full of possibility, of what is in store for her. She doesn’t yet know the impossible amount of pain she still has to face.
‘I’d like to meet her,’ I say.
Ben takes the picture from me. He sighs. ‘We’re not in touch,’ he says.
‘Why?’ I say. I had it planned in my head; we would be a support to each other. We would share something, an understanding, a love that pierced all others, if not for each other then at least for the thing we had lost.
‘There were arguments,’ he says. ‘Difficulties.’
I look at him. I can see that he doesn’t want to tell me. The man who wrote the letter, the man who believed in me and cared for me, and who, in the end, loved me enough both to leave me and then to come back for me, seems to have vanished.
‘Ben?’
‘There were arguments,’ he says.
‘Before Adam died, or after?’
‘Both.’
The illusion of support vanishes, replaced by a sick feeling. What if Adam and I had fought too? Surely he would have sided with his girlfriend, over his mother?
‘Were Adam and I close?’ I say.
‘Oh yes,’ says Ben. ‘Until you had to go to the hospital. Until you lost your memory. Even then you were close, of course. As close as you could be.’
His words hit me like a punch. I realize that Adam was a toddler when he lost his mother to amnesia. Of course I had never known my son’s fiancée; every day I saw him would have been like the first.
I close the book.
‘Can we bring it with us?’ I say. ‘I’d like to look at it some more later.’
We have a drink, cups of tea that Ben made in the kitchen as I finished packing for the journey, and then we get into the car. I check I have my handbag, my journal still within it. Ben has added a few things to the bag I packed for him, and he has brought another bag, too – the leather satchel that he left with this morning – as well as two pairs of walking boots from the back of the wardrobe. I had stood by the door as he loaded these things into the boot and then waited while he checked the doors were closed, the windows locked. Now, I ask him how long the journey may take.
He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Depends on the traffic,’ he says. ‘Not too long, once we’re out of London.’
A refusal to provide an answer, disguised as an answer itself. I wonder if this is what he is always like. I wonder if years of telling me the same thing have worn him down, bored him to the point where he can no longer bring himself to tell me anything.
He is a careful driver, that much I can see. He proceeds slowly, checking his mirror frequently, slowing down at the merest hint of an approaching hazard.
I wonder if Adam drove. I suppose he must have done so to be in the army, but did he ever drive when he was on leave? Did he pick me up, his invalid mother, and take me on trips, to places he thought I might like? Or did he decide there was no point, that whatever enjoyment I might have had at the time would disappear overnight like snow melting on a warm roof?
We are on the motorway, heading out of the city. It has begun to rain; huge droplets smack into the windscreen, hold their shape for a moment before beginning the swift slide down the glass. In the distance the lights of the city bathe the concrete and glass in a soft orange glow. It is beautiful and terrible, but I am struggling inside. I want so much to think of my son as something other than abstract, but without a concrete memory of him I cannot. I keep coming back to the single truth: I cannot remember him, and so he might as well never have existed.
I close my eyes. I think back to what I read about our son this afternoon and an image explodes in front of me – Adam as a toddler pushing the blue tricycle along a path. But even as I marvel at it I know it is not real. I know I am not remembering the thing that happened, I am remembering the image I formed in my mind this afternoon as I read about the thing, and even that was a recollection of an earlier memory. Memories of memories, most people’s going back through years, through decades, but, for me, just a few hours.
Failing to remember my son I do the next best thing, the only thing to quieten my sparking mind. I think of nothing. Nothing at all.
The smell of petrol, thick and sweet. There is a pain in my neck. I open my eyes. Up close I see the wet windscreen, misted with my breath, and beyond it there are distant lights, blurred, out of focus. I realize that I have been dozing. I am leaning against the glass, my head twisted awkwardly. The car is silent, the engine off. I look over my shoulder.
Ben is there, sitting next to me. He is awake, looking ahead, out of the window. He doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to have noticed that I have woken up, but instead continues to stare, his expression blank, unreadable in the dark. I turn to see what he is looking at.
Beyond the rain-spattered windscreen is the bonnet of the car, and beyond that a low wooden fence, dimly illuminated in the glow from the street-lamps behind us. Beyond the fence I see nothing, a blackness, huge and mysterious, in the middle of which hangs the moon, full and low.
‘I love the sea,’ he says, without looking at me, and I realize we are parked on a cliff top, have made it as far as the coast.
‘Don’t you?’ He turns to me. His eyes seem impossibly sad. ‘You do love the sea, don’t you, Chris?’ he says.
‘I do,’ I say. ‘Yes.’ He is speaking as if he doesn’t know, as if we have never been to the coast before, as if we have never been on holiday together. Fear begins to burn within me, but I resist it. I try to stay here, in the present, with my husband. I try to remember all that I learned from my journal this afternoon. ‘You know that, darling.’
He sighs. ‘I know. You always used to, but I just don’t know any more. You change. You’ve changed, over the years. Ever since what happened. Sometimes I don’t know who you are. I wake up each day and I don’t know how you’re going to be.’
I am silent. I can think of nothing to say. We both know how senseless it would be for me to try to defend myself, to tell him that he is wrong. We both know that I am the last person who knows how much I change from day to day.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say at last.
He looks at me. ‘Oh, it’s all right. You don’t need to apologize. I know it’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. I’m being unfair, I suppose. Thinking of myself.’
He looks back out to sea. There is a single light in the distance. A boat, on the waves. Light in a sea of treacly blackness. Ben speaks. ‘We’ll be all right, won’t we, Chris?’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Of course we will. This is a new beginning for us. I have my journal now, and Dr Nash will help me. I’m getting better, Ben. I know I am. I think I’m going to start writing again. There’s no reason not to. I should be fine. And anyway, I’m in touch with Claire now, and she can help me.’ An idea comes to me. ‘We can all get together, don’t you think? Just like old times? Just like at university? The three of us. And her husband, I suppose – I think she said she had a husband. We can all meet up and spend time together. It’ll be fine.’ My mind fixes on the lies I have read, on all the ways I have not been able to trust him, but I force it away. I remind myself that all that has been resolved. It is my turn to be strong now. To be positive. ‘As long as we promise to always be hon
est with each other,’ I say, ‘then everything is going to be OK.’
He turns back to face me. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’
‘Of course. Of course I do.’
‘And you forgive me? For leaving you? I didn’t want to. I had no choice. I’m sorry.’
I take his hand. It feels both warm and cold at the same time, slightly damp. I try to hold it between my hands, but he neither assists nor resists my action. Instead his hand rests, lifeless, on his knee. I squeeze it, and only then does he seem to notice that I am holding it.
‘Ben. I understand. I forgive you.’ I look into his eyes. They too seem dull and lifeless, as if they have seen so much horror already that they cannot cope with any more.
‘I love you, Ben,’ I say.
His voice drops to a whisper. ‘Kiss me.’
I do as he asks, and then, when I have drawn back, he whispers, ‘Again. Kiss me again.’
I kiss him a second time. But, even though he asks me to, I cannot kiss him a third. Instead we gaze out over the sea, at the moonlight on the water, at the drops of rain on the windscreen reflecting back the yellow glow from the headlights of passing cars. Just the two of us, holding hands. Together.
We sit there for what feels like hours. Ben is beside me, staring out to sea. He scans the water, as if looking for something, some answer in the dark, and he doesn’t speak. I wonder why he has brought us here, what he is hoping to find.
‘Is it really our anniversary?’ I say. There is no answer. He doesn’t appear to have heard me, and so I say it again.
‘Yes,’ he replies softly.
‘Our wedding anniversary?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s the anniversary of the night we met.’
I want to ask him whether we are supposed to be celebrating, and to tell him that it doesn’t feel like a celebration, but it seems cruel.
The busy road behind us has quietened, the moon is rising high in the sky. I begin to worry that we will stay out all night, looking at the sea while the rain falls around us. I affect a yawn.
