Before I Go to Sleep (9 page)

‘I’m very tired, Ben,’ I said.

He lowered his voice, and began to murmur. ‘I know, my darling,’ he said. He kissed me, softly on the cheek, my lips, my eyes. ‘I know.’ His hand moved lower, beneath the covers, and I felt a wave of anxiety begin to build within me, almost panic.

‘Ben,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I grabbed his hand and stopped its descent. I resisted the urge to fling it away as if it were revolting and stroked it instead. ‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘Not tonight. OK?’

He said nothing, but withdrew his hand and lay on his back. Disappointment came off him in waves. I didn’t know what to say. Some part of me thought I should apologize, but some larger part told me I had done nothing wrong. And so we lay in silence, in bed but not touching, and I wondered how often this happens. How often he comes to bed and craves sex, whether I ever want it myself, or even feel able to give it to him, and if this is always what happens, this awkward silence, if I do not.

‘Goodnight, darling,’ he said, after a few more minutes, and the tension lifted. I waited until he was snoring softly and slipped out of bed and here, in the spare room, sat down to write this.

I would like so much to remember him. Just once.

Monday, 12 November

The clock has just chimed four; it is beginning to get dark. Ben will not be home just yet but, as I sit and write, I listen for his car. The shoebox sits on the floor next to my feet, the tissue paper in which this journal was wrapped spilling out of it. If he comes in I will put my book in the wardrobe and tell him I have been resting. It is dishonest, but not terribly so, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to keep the contents of my journal a secret. I must write down what I have seen. What I have learned. But that doesn’t mean I want someone – anyone – to read it.

I saw Dr Nash today. We were sitting opposite each other, on either side of his desk. Behind him was a filing cabinet, on top of which sat a plastic model of the brain, sliced down the middle, parted like an orange. He asked me how I’d been getting on.

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I suppose.’ It was a difficult question to answer – the few hours since I had woken that morning were the only ones I could clearly remember. I met my husband, as if for the first time though I knew it was not, was called by my doctor who told me about my journal. Then, after lunch, he picked me up and drove me here to his office.

‘I wrote in my journal,’ I said, ‘after you called. On Saturday.’

He seemed pleased. ‘Do you think it helped at all?’

‘I think so,’ I said. I told him about the memories I’d had. The vision of the woman at the party, of learning of my father’s illness. He made notes as I spoke.

‘Do you still remember those things now?’ he said. ‘Or did you when you woke up this morning?’

I hesitated. The truth was I did not. Or only some of it at least. This morning I had read my entry for Saturday – of the breakfast I shared with my husband, of the trip to Parliament Hill. It had felt as unreal as fiction, nothing to do with me, and I found myself reading and rereading the same section, over and over, trying to cement it in my mind, to fix it. It took me more than an hour.

I read of the things Ben had told me, of how we met and married, of how we lived, and I felt nothing. Yet other things stayed with me. The woman, for example. My friend. I could not recall specifics – the fireworks party, being on the roof with her, meeting a man called Keith – but her memory still existed within me and this morning, as I read and reread my entry for Saturday, more details had come. The vibrant red of her hair, the black clothes that she preferred, the studded belt, the scarlet lipstick, the way that she used to make smoking look as though it was the coolest thing in the world. I could not remember her name, but now recalled the night we met, in a room that was shrouded in a thick fug of cigarette smoke and alive with the whistles and bangs of pinball machines and a tinny jukebox. She had given me a light when I asked her for one, then introduced herself and suggested I join her and her friends. We drank vodka and lager and, later, she held my hair out of the toilet bowl as I vomited most of it back up. ‘I guess we’re definitely friends now!’ she said, laughing, as I pulled myself back to my feet. ‘I wouldn’t do that for just anyone, you know.’

I thanked her and, for no reason I knew, and as if it explained what I had just done, told her my father was dead. ‘Fuck …’ she said, and, in what must have been the first of her many switches from drunken stupidity to compassionate efficiency, she took me back to her room and we ate toast and drank black coffee, all the time listening to records and talking about our lives, until it began to get light.

She had paintings propped up against the wall and at the end of the bed, and sketch books littered the room. ‘You’re an artist?’ I said, and she nodded. ‘It’s why I’m here at university,’ she said. I remembered her telling me she was studying fine art. ‘I’ll end up a teacher, of course, but in the meantime one has to dream. Yes?’ I laughed. ‘What about you? What are you studying?’ I told her. English. ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘So do you want to write novels or teach, then?’ She laughed, not unkindly, but I didn’t mention the story I had worked on in my room before coming down. ‘Dunno,’ I replied instead. ‘I guess I’m the same as you.’ She laughed again. ‘Well, here’s to us!’ she said, and as we toasted each other with coffee I felt, for the first time in months, that things might finally be all right.

I remembered all this. It exhausted me, this effort of will to search the void of my memory, trying to find any tiny detail that might trigger a recollection. But my memories of my life with my husband? They had gone. Reading those words had not stirred even the smallest residue of memory. It was as if not only had the trip to Parliament Hill not happened, but neither had the things he told me there.

‘I remember some things,’ I said to Dr Nash. ‘Things from when I was younger, things that I remembered yesterday. They’re still there. And I can remember more details, too. But I can’t remember what we did yesterday at all. Or on Saturday. I can try to construct a picture of the scene I described in my journal, but I know it isn’t a memory. I know I’m just imagining it.’

He nodded. ‘Is there anything you remember from Saturday? Any small detail that you wrote down that you can still recall? The evening, for example?’

I thought of what I had written about going to bed. I realized I felt guilty. Guilty that, despite his kindness, I had not been able to give myself to my husband. ‘No,’ I lied. ‘Nothing.’

I wondered what he might have done differently for me to want to take him in my arms, to let him love me. Flowers? Chocolates? Does he need to make romantic overtures every time he’d like to have sex, as if it were the first time? I realized how closed the avenues of seduction are to him. He can’t even play the first song we danced to at our wedding, or recreate the meal we enjoyed the first time we ate out together, because I don’t remember what they are. And in any case, I am his wife; he should not have to seduce me as if we have only just met every time he wants us to have sex.

But is there ever a time when I let him make love to me, or perhaps, even, want to make love to him? Do I ever wake and know enough for desire to exist, unforced?

‘I don’t even remember Ben,’ I said. ‘I had no idea who he was this morning.’

He nodded. ‘You’d like to?’

I almost laughed. ‘Of course!’ I said. ‘I want to remember my past. I want to know who I am. Who I married. It’s all part of the same thing.’

‘Of course,’ he said. He paused, then leaned his elbows on the desk and clasped his hands in front of his face, as if thinking carefully about what to say, or how to say it. ‘What you’ve told me is encouraging. It suggests that the memories aren’t lost completely. The problem is not one of storage, but of access.’

I thought for a moment, then said, ‘You mean my memories are there, I just can’t get to them?’

He smiled. ‘If you like,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

I felt frustrated. Eager. ‘So how do I remember more?’

He leaned back and looked in the file in front of him. ‘Last week,’ he said, ‘on the day I gave you your journal, did you write that I showed you a picture of your childhood home? I gave it to you, I think.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I did.’

‘You seemed to remember much more, having seen that photo, than when I asked you about the place where you used to live without showing you a picture of it first.’ He paused. ‘Which, again, isn’t surprising. But I’d like to see what happens if I show you pictures from the period you definitely don’t remember. I want to see if anything comes back to you then.’

I was hesitant, unsure of where this avenue might lead, but certain it was a road I had no choice but to take.

‘OK,’ I said.

‘Good! We’ll look at just one picture today.’ He took a photograph from the back of the file and then walked round the desk to sit next to me. ‘Before we look, do you remember anything of your wedding?’

I already knew there was nothing there; as far as I was concerned, my marriage to the man I had woken up with this morning had simply not happened.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

‘You’re sure?’

I nodded. ‘Yes.’

He put the photograph on the desk in front of me. ‘You got married here,’ he said, tapping it. It was of a church. Small, with a low roof and a tiny spire. Totally unfamiliar.

‘Anything?’

I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind. A vision of water. My friend. A tiled floor, black and white. Nothing else.

‘No. I don’t remember ever having seen it before.’

He looked disappointed. ‘You’re sure?’

I closed my eyes again. Blackness. I tried to think of my wedding day, tried to imagine Ben, me, in a suit and a wedding dress, standing on the grass in front of the church, but nothing came. No memory. Sadness rose in me. Like any bride I must have spent weeks planning my wedding, choosing my dress and waiting anxiously for the alterations, booking a hairdresser, thinking about my make-up. I imagined myself agonizing over the menu, choosing the hymns, selecting the flowers, all the time hoping that the day would live up to my impossible expectations. And now I have no way of knowing whether it did. It has all been taken from me, every trace erased. Everything apart from the man I married.

‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing.’

He put the photograph away. ‘According to the notes taken during your initial treatment, you were married in Manchester,’ he said. ‘The church is called St Mark’s. That was a recent photograph – it’s the only one I could get – but I imagine it looks pretty much the same now as it did then.’

‘There are no photographs of our wedding,’ I said. It was both a question and a statement.

‘No. They were lost. In a fire at your home apparently.’

I nodded. Hearing him say it cemented it somehow, made it seem more real. It was almost as if the fact he was a doctor gave his words an authority that Ben’s didn’t have.

‘When did I get married?’ I said.

‘It would have been in the mid-eighties.’

‘Before my accident.’

Dr Nash looked uncomfortable. I wondered if I had ever spoken to him about the accident that left me with no memory.

‘You know about what caused your amnesia?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I spoke to Ben. The other day. He told me everything. I wrote it in my journal.’

He nodded. ‘How do you feel about it?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. The truth was that I had no memory of the accident, and so it didn’t seem real. All I had were its effects. The way it had left me. ‘I feel like I ought to hate the person who did this to me,’ I said. ‘Especially as they’ve never been caught, never been punished for leaving me like this. For ruining my life. But the odd thing is I don’t, really. I can’t. I can’t imagine them, or picture what they look like. It’s like they don’t even exist.’

He looked disappointed. ‘Is that what you think?’ he said. ‘That your life is ruined?’

‘Yes,’ I said after a few moments. ‘Yes. That’s what I think.’ He was silent. ‘Isn’t it?’

I don’t know what I expected him to do, or say. I suppose part of me wanted him to tell me how wrong I am, to try and convince me that my life is worth living. But he didn’t. He just looked straight at me. I noticed how striking his eyes are. Blue, flecked with grey.

‘I’m sorry, Christine,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. But I’m doing everything I can, and I think I can help you. I really do. You have to believe that.’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘I do.’

He put his hand on top of mine, where it lay on the desk between us. It felt heavy. Warm. He squeezed my fingers, and for a second I felt embarrassed, for him, and also for me, but then I looked into his face, at the expression of sadness I saw there, and realized that his action was that of a young man comforting an older woman. Nothing more.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I need to use the bathroom.’

When I returned he had poured coffee and we sat on opposite sides of the desk, sipping at our drinks. He seemed reluctant to make eye contact, instead leafing through the papers on his desk, shuffling awkwardly. At first I thought he was embarrassed about squeezing my hand, but then he looked up and said, ‘Christine. I wanted to ask you something. Two things, really.’ I nodded. ‘First, I’ve decided to write up your case. It’s pretty unusual in the field, and I think it would be really beneficial to get the details out there in the wider scientific community. Do you mind?’