by S. J. Watson
‘Mike—’ I gasp. I cannot breathe. His hands are around my throat and I cannot breathe. Memory floods back. I can remember him holding my head under water. I remember waking up, in a white bed, wearing a hospital gown, and Ben sitting next to me, the real Ben, the one I married. I remember a policewoman asking me questions I cannot answer. A man in pale-blue pyjamas sitting on the edge of my hospital bed, laughing with me even as he tells me that I greet him every day as if I have never seen him before. A little boy with blond hair and a tooth missing, calling me Mummy. One after another the images come. They flood through me. The effect is violent. I shake my head, trying to clear it, but Mike grips me tighter. His head is above mine, his eyes wild and unblinking as he squeezes my throat, and I can remember it being so once before, in this room. I close my eyes. ‘How dare you!’ he is saying, and I cannot work out which Mike it is who’s speaking: the one here, now, or the one who exists only in my memory. ‘How dare you!’ he says again. ‘How dare you take my child!’
It is then that I remember. When he had attacked me all those years ago, I had been carrying a baby. Not Mike’s but Ben’s. The child that was going to be our new start together.
Neither of us had survived.
I must have blacked out. When I regain consciousness I am sitting in a chair. I cannot move my hands, the inside of my mouth tastes furry. I open my eyes. The room is dim, lit only by the moonlight streaming in through the open curtains and the reflected yellow streetlights. Mike is sitting opposite me, on the edge of the bed. He is holding something in his hand.
I try to speak, but cannot. I realize something is in my mouth. A sock, perhaps. It has been secured somehow, tied in place, and my wrists are tied together, and also my ankles.
This is what he wanted all along, I think. Me, silent and unmoving. I struggle, and he notices that I have woken up. He looks up, his face a mask of pain and sadness, and stares at me, right into my eyes. I feel nothing but hate.
‘You’re awake.’ I wonder if he intends to say anything else, whether he is capable of saying anything else. ‘This isn’t what I wanted. I thought we would come here and it might help you to remember. Remember how things used to be between us. And then we could talk, and I could explain what happened here, all those years ago. I never meant for it to happen, Chris. I just get so mad, sometimes. I can’t help it. I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you, ever. I ruined everything.’
He looks down, into his lap. There is so much more I used to want to know, yet I am exhausted, and it is too late. I feel as though I could close my eyes and will myself into oblivion, erasing everything.
Yet I do not want to sleep tonight. And if I must sleep, then I do not want to wake up tomorrow.
‘It was when you told me you were having a baby.’ He doesn’t lift his head. Instead he speaks softly into the folds of his clothes and I have to strain to hear what he is saying. ‘I never thought I’d have a child. Never. They all said—’ He hesitates, as if changing his mind, deciding that some things are better not shared. ‘You said it wasn’t mine. But I knew it was. And I couldn’t cope with the thought that you were still going to leave me, going to take my baby away from me, that I might never see him. I couldn’t cope, Chris.’
I still don’t know what he wants from me.
‘You think I’m not sorry? For what I did? Every day. I see you so bewildered and lost and unhappy. Sometimes I lie there, in bed. I hear you wake up. And you look at me, and I know you don’t know who I am, and I can feel the disappointment and shame. It comes off you in waves. That hurts. Knowing that you’d never sleep with me, now, if you had the choice. And then you get out of bed and go to the bathroom, and I know that in a few minutes you will come back and you’ll be so confused and so unhappy and in so much pain.’
He pauses. ‘And now I know even that will be over soon. I’ve read your journal. I know your doctor will have worked it out by now. Or he will do soon. Claire, too. I know they’ll come for me.’ He looks up. ‘And they’ll try to take you away from me. But Ben doesn’t want you. I do. I want to look after you. Please, Chris. Please remember how much you loved me. Then you can tell them that you want to be with me.’ He points to the last few pages of my journal, scattered on the floor. ‘You can tell them that you forgive me. For this. And then we can be together.’
I shake my head. I cannot believe he wants me to remember. He wants me to know what he has done.
He smiles. ‘You know, sometimes I think it might have been kinder if you’d died that night. Kinder for both of us.’ He looks out of the window. ‘I would join you, Chris. If that’s what you wanted.’ He looks down again. ‘It would be easy enough. You could go first. And I promise you I would follow. You do trust me, don’t you?’
He looks at me, expectantly. ‘Would you like that?’ he says. ‘It would be painless.’
I shake my head, try to speak, fail. My eyes are burning, and I can hardly breathe.
‘No?’ He looks disappointed. ‘No. I suppose any life is better than none. Very well. You’re probably right.’ I begin to cry. He shakes his head. ‘Chris. This will all be fine. You see? This book is the problem.’ He holds up my journal. ‘We were happy, before you started writing this. Or as happy as we could be, anyway. And that was happy enough, wasn’t it? We should just get rid of this, and then maybe you could tell them you were confused, and we could go back to how it was before. For a little while at least.’
He stands up and slides the metal bin from beneath the dresser, takes out the empty liner and discards it. ‘It’ll be easy, then,’ he says. He puts the bin on the floor between his legs. ‘Easy.’ He drops my journal into the bin, and gathers the last few pages that are still littering the floor and adds those. ‘We have to get rid of it,’ he says. ‘All of it. Once and for all.’
He takes a box of matches out of his pocket, strikes one, and retrieves a single page from the bin.
I look at him in horror. ‘No!’ I try to say; nothing comes but a muffled grunt. He doesn’t look at me as he sets fire to the single page and then drops it into the bin.
‘No!’ I say again, but this time it is a silent scream in my head. I watch my history begin to burn to ash, my memories reduced to carbon. My journal, the letter from Ben, everything. I am nothing without that journal, I think. Nothing. And he has won.
I do not plan to do what I do next. It is instinctive. I launch my body at the bin. With my hands tied I cannot break my fall and I hit it awkwardly, hearing something snap as I twist. Pain shoots from my arm and I think I will faint, but I don’t. The bin falls over, scattering burning paper across the floor.
Mike cries out – a shriek – and falls to his knees, slapping the ground, trying to put out the flames. I see that a burning shred has come to rest under the bed, unnoticed by Mike. Flames are beginning to lick at the edge of the bedspread but I can neither reach it nor cry out, and so I simply lie there, watching the bedspread catch fire. It begins to smoke, and I close my eyes. The room will burn, I think, and Mike will burn, and I will burn, and no one will ever really know what happened here, in this room, just like no one will ever really know what happened here all those years ago, and history will turn to ash and be replaced by conjecture.
I cough, a dry, heaving retch, swallowed by the sock balled in my throat. I am beginning to choke. I think of my son. I will never see him now, though at least I’ll die knowing I had one, and that he is alive, and happy. For that I am glad. I think of Ben. The man I married and then forgot. I want to see him. I want to tell him that now, at the end, I can remember him. I can remember meeting him at the rooftop party, and him proposing to me on a hill looking out over a city, and I can remember marrying him in the church in Manchester, having our photographs taken in the rain.
And, yes, I can remember loving him. I know that I do love him, and I always have.
Things go dark. I can’t breathe. I can hear the lap of flames, and feel their heat on my lips and eyes.
There were never going to be
any happy endings for me. I know that now. But that is all right.
That is all right.
I am lying down. I have been asleep, but not for long. I can remember who I am, where I have been. I can hear noise, the roar of traffic, a siren that is neither rising nor falling in pitch but remaining constant. Something is over my mouth – I think of a balled sock – yet I find I can breathe. I am too frightened to open my eyes. I do not know what I will see.
But I must. I have no choice but to face whatever my reality has become.
The light is bright. I can see a fluorescent tube on the low ceiling, and two metal bars running parallel to it. The walls are close by on each side, and they are hard, shiny with metal and perspex. I can make out drawers and shelves stocked with bottles and packets, and there are machines, blinking. Everything is moving slightly, vibrating, including, I realize, the bed in which I am lying.
A man’s face appears from somewhere behind me, over my head. He is wearing a green shirt. I don’t recognize him.
‘She’s awake, everybody,’ he says, and then more faces appear. I scan them quickly. Mike is not among them, and I relax a little.
‘Christine,’ comes a voice. ‘Chrissy. It’s me.’ It’s a woman’s voice, one I recognize. ‘We’re on our way to the hospital. You’ve broken your collarbone, but you’re going to be all right. Everything’s going to be fine. He’s dead. That man is dead. He can’t hurt you any more.’
I see the person speaking, then. She is smiling and holding my hand. It’s Claire. The same Claire I saw just the other day, not the young Claire I might expect to see after just waking up, and I notice her earrings are the same pair that she had on the last time I saw her.
‘Claire—’ I say, but she interrupts.
‘Don’t speak,’ she says. ‘Just try to relax.’ She leans forward and strokes my hair, and whispers something in my ear, but I don’t hear what. It sounds like I’m sorry.
‘I remember,’ I say. ‘I remember.’
She smiles, and then she steps back and a young man takes her place. He has a narrow face and is wearing thick-rimmed glasses. For a moment I think it is Ben, until I realize that Ben would be my age now.
‘Mum?’ he says. ‘Mum?’
He looks the same as he did in the picture of him and Helen, and I realize I remember him, too.
‘Adam?’ I say. Words choke in my throat as he hugs me.
‘Mum,’ he says. ‘Dad’s coming. He’ll be here soon.’
I pull him to me, and breathe in the smell of my boy, and I am happy.
I can wait no longer. It is time. I must sleep. I have a private room and so there is no need for me to observe the strict routines of the hospital, but I am exhausted, my eyes already beginning to close. It is time.
I have spoken to Ben. To the man I really married. We talked for hours, it seems, though it may only have been a few minutes. He told me that he flew in as soon as the police contacted him.
‘The police?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When they realized you weren’t living with the person Waring House thought you were they traced me. I’m not sure how. I suppose they had my old address and went from there.’
‘So where were you?’
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘I’ve been in Italy for a few months,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working out there.’ He paused. ‘I thought you were OK.’ He took my hand. ‘I’m sorry …’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ I said.
He looked away. ‘I left you, Chrissy.’
‘I know. I know everything. Claire told me. I read your letter.’
‘I thought it was for the best,’ he said. ‘I really did. I thought it would help. Help you. Help Adam. I tried to get on with my life. I really did.’ He hesitated. ‘I thought I could only do that if I divorced you. I thought it would free me. Adam didn’t understand, even when I explained to him that you wouldn’t even know, wouldn’t even remember being married to me.’
‘Did it?’ I said. ‘Did it help you to move on?’
He turned to me. ‘I won’t lie to you, Chrissy. There have been other women. Not many, but some. It’s been a long time, years and years. At first nothing serious, but then I met someone a couple of years ago. I moved in with her. But—’
‘But?’
‘Well, that ended. She said I didn’t love her. That I’d never stopped loving you …’
‘And was she right?’
He did not reply, and so, fearing his answer, I said, ‘So what happens now? Tomorrow? Will you take me back to Waring House?’
He looked up at me.
‘No,’ he said. ‘She was right. I never stopped loving you. And I won’t take you there again. Tomorrow, I want you to come home.’
Now I look at him. He sits in a chair next to me, and although he is already snoring, his head tipped forward at an awkward angle, he still holds my hand. I can just make out his glasses, the scar running down the side of his face. My son has left the room to phone his girlfriend and whisper a goodnight to his unborn daughter, and my best friend is outside in the car park, smoking a cigarette. No matter what, I am surrounded by the people I love.
Earlier, I spoke to Dr Nash. He told me I had left the care home almost four months ago, a little while after Mike had started visiting, claiming to be Ben. I had discharged myself, signed all the paperwork. I had left voluntarily. They couldn’t have stopped me, even if they’d believed there was a reason for them to try. When I left I took with me the few photographs and personal possessions that I still had.
‘That was why Mike had those pictures?’ I said. ‘The ones of me, and Adam. That’s why he had the letter that Adam had written to Santa Claus? His birth certificate?’
‘Yes,’ said Dr Nash. ‘They were with you at Waring House, and they went with you when you left. At some point Mike must have destroyed all the pictures that showed you with Ben. Possibly even before you were discharged from Waring House – the staff turnover is fairly high and they had no idea what your husband really looked like.’
‘But how would he have got access to the photographs?’
‘They were in an album in a drawer in your room. It would have been easy enough for him to get to them once he started visiting you. He might even have slipped in a few photographs of himself. He must have had some of the two of you taken during … well, when you were seeing each other, years ago. The staff at Waring House were convinced that the man who had been visiting you was the same one as in the photo album.’
‘So I brought my photos back to Mike’s house and he hid them in a metal box? Then he invented a fire, to explain why there were so few?’
‘Yes,’ he said. He looked tired, and guilty. I wondered whether he blamed himself for any of what had happened, and hoped he didn’t. He had helped me, after all. He had rescued me. I hoped he would still be able to write his paper and present my case. I hoped he would be recognized for what he had done for me. After all, without him I’d—
I don’t want to think about where I’d be.
‘How did you find me?’ I said. He explained that Claire had been frantic with worry after we’d spoken, but she had waited for me to call the next day. ‘Mike must have removed the pages from your journal that night. That was why you didn’t think anything was wrong when you gave me the journal on Tuesday, and neither did I. When you didn’t call her Claire tried to phone you, but she only had the number for the mobile phone I had given you and Mike had taken that, too. I should have known something was wrong when I called you on that number this morning and you didn’t answer. But I didn’t think. I just called you on your other phone …’ He shook his head.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s fair to assume he’d been reading your journal for at least the last week or so, probably longer. At first Claire couldn’t get hold of Adam and didn’t have Ben’s number, so she called Waring House. They only had one number that they thought was for Ben but in fact it was Mike’
s. Claire didn’t have my number. She called the school he worked at and persuaded them to give her Mike’s address and phone number, but both were false. She was at a dead end.’
I think of this man discovering my journal, reading it every day. Why didn’t he destroy it?
Because I’d written that I loved him. And because that was what he wanted me to carry on believing.
Or maybe I am being too kind to him. Maybe he just wanted me to see it burn.
‘Claire didn’t call the police?’
‘She did.’ He nodded. ‘But it was a few days before they really took it seriously. In the meantime she’d got hold of Adam and he’d told her that Ben had been abroad for a while and that as far as he knew you were still in Waring House. She contacted them and, though they wouldn’t give her your home address, they eventually relented and gave Adam my number. They must have thought that was a good compromise, as I am a doctor. Claire only got through to me this afternoon.’
‘This afternoon?’
‘Yes. Claire convinced me something was wrong, and of course finding out that Adam was alive confirmed it. We came to see you at home, but by then you’d already left for Brighton.’
‘How did you know to find me there?’
‘You told me this morning that Ben – sorry, Mike – had told you that you were going away for the weekend. You said he’d told you that you were going to the coast. Once Claire told me what was going on I guessed where he was taking you.’
I lay back. I felt tired. Exhausted. I wanted only to sleep, but was frightened to. Frightened of what I might forget.
‘But you told me Adam was dead,’ I said. ‘You said he’d been killed. When we were sitting in the car park. And the fire, too. You told me there’d been a fire.’
He smiled, sadly. ‘Because that’s what you told me.’ I told him I didn’t understand. ‘One day, a couple of weeks after we first met, you told me Adam was dead. Evidently Mike had told you, and you had believed him and told me. When you asked me in the car park I told you the truth as I believed it. It was the same with the fire. I believed there’d been one, because that’s what you told me.’
