Before I Go to Sleep (12 page)

I spoke as casually as I could. ‘Ben?’ I said. ‘What did I do for a living?’ He looked up from the newspaper. ‘Did I have a job?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You worked as a secretary for a while. Just after we were married.’

I tried to keep my voice even. ‘Really? I have the feeling I used to want to write.’

He folded his pages together, giving me his full attention.

‘A feeling?’

‘Yes. I definitely remember loving books as a child. And I seem to have a vague memory of wanting to be a writer.’ He held out his hand across the dinner table and took mine. His eyes seemed sad. Disappointed.
What a shame
, they seemed to say.
Bad luck. I don’t suppose you ever will now
. ‘Are you sure?’ I began. ‘I seem to remember—’

He interrupted me. ‘Christine,’ he said, ‘please. You’re imagining things …’

For the rest of the evening I was silent, hearing only the thoughts that echoed in my head. Why would he do that? Why would he pretend I had never written a word? Why? I watched him, asleep on the sofa, snoring softly. Why had I not told him that I knew I had written a novel? Did I really trust him so little? I had remembered us lying in each other’s arms, murmuring our love for each other as the sky grew darker. How had we gone from that to this?

But then I began to imagine what would happen if I did stumble upon a copy of my novel in a cupboard or at the back of a high shelf. What would it say to me, other than,
Look how far you have fallen. Look what you could do, before a car on an icy road took it all from you, leaving you worse than useless
.

It would not be a happy moment. I saw myself becoming hysterical – much more so than this afternoon when at least the realization was gradual, triggered by a longed-for memory – screaming, crying. The effect might be devastating.

No wonder Ben might want to hide it from me. I picture him now, removing all the copies, burning them in the metal barbecue on the back porch, before deciding what to tell me. How best to reinvent my past to make it tolerable. What I needed to believe for the remainder of my years.

But that is over now. I know the truth. My own truth, one I have not been told but have remembered. And it is written now, etched in this journal rather than my memory, but permanent nevertheless.

I know that the book I am writing – my second, I realize with pride – may be dangerous, as well as necessary. It is not fiction. It may reveal things best left undiscovered. Secrets that ought not to see the light of day.

But still my pen moves across the page.

Wednesday, 14 November

This morning I asked Ben if he’d ever grown a moustache. I was still feeling confused, unsure of what was true and what not. I had woken early and, unlike previous days, had not thought I was still a child. I had felt adult. Sexual. The question in my mind was not
Why am I in bed with a man?
but instead,
Who is he?
and
What did we do?
In the bathroom I looked at my reflection with horror, but the pictures around it seemed to resonate with truth. I saw the man’s name – Ben – and it was familiar, somehow. My age, my marriage, these facts seemed to be things I was being reminded of, not told about for the first time. Buried, but not deeply.

Dr Nash called me almost as soon as Ben left for work. He reminded me about my journal and then – once he had told me that he would be picking me up later to take me for my scan – I read it. There were a few things in it I could perhaps recall, and maybe whole passages I could remember writing. It was as if some residue of memory had survived the night.

Perhaps that was why I had to be sure the things contained within it were true. I called Ben.

‘Ben,’ I said, once he’d told me he wasn’t busy. ‘Did you ever have a moustache?’

‘That’s an odd question!’ he said. I heard the clink of a spoon against a cup and pictured him spooning sugar into his coffee, a newspaper spread in front of him. I felt awkward. Unsure how much to say.

‘I just—’ I began. ‘I had a memory, I think.’

Silence. ‘A memory?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’ My mind flashed on the things I had written about the other day – his moustache, his naked body, his erection – and those I had remembered yesterday. The two of us in bed. Kissing. Briefly they were illuminated, before sinking back into the depths. Suddenly I felt afraid. ‘I just seem to remember you with a moustache.’

He laughed, and I heard him put down his drink. I felt solid ground begin to slip away. Maybe everything I had written was a lie. I am a novelist, after all, I thought. Or I used to be.

The futility of my logic hit me. I used to write fiction, therefore my assertion that I had been a novelist might be one of those fictions. In which case I had not written fiction. My head spun.

It had felt true, though. I told myself that. Plus I could touch-type. Or I had written that I could …

‘Did you?’ I asked, desperate. ‘It’s just … it’s important.’

‘Let’s think,’ he said. I imagined him closing his eyes, biting his bottom lip in a parody of concentration. ‘I suppose I might have done, once,’ he said. ‘Very briefly. It was years ago. I forget …’ A pause, then, ‘Yes. Actually, yes. I think I probably did. For a week or so. A long time ago.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, relieved. The ground on which I stood felt a little more secure.

‘You OK?’ he asked, and I said that I was.

Dr Nash picked me up at midday. He’d told me to have some lunch first, but I wasn’t hungry. Nervous, I suppose. ‘We’re meeting a colleague of mine,’ he said in the car. ‘Dr Paxton.’ I said nothing. ‘He’s an expert in the field of functional imaging of patients with problems like yours. We’ve been working together.’

‘OK,’ I said, and now we sat in his car, stationary in stuck traffic. ‘Did I call you yesterday?’ I asked. He said that I had.

‘You read your journal?’

‘Most of it. I skipped bits. It’s already quite long.’

He seemed interested. ‘What sections did you skip?’

I thought for a moment. ‘There are parts that seem familiar to me. I suppose they feel as if they’re just reminding me of things I already know. Already remember …’

‘That’s good.’ He glancied at me. ‘Very good.’

I felt a glow of pleasure. ‘So what did I call about? Yesterday?’

‘You wanted to know if you’d really written a novel,’ he said.

‘And had I? Have I?’

He turned back to me. He was smiling. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, you have.’

The traffic moved again and we pulled away. I felt relief. I knew what I had written was true. I relaxed into the journey.

Dr Paxton was older than I expected. He was wearing a tweed jacket, and white hair sprouted unchecked from his ears and nose. He looked as though he ought to have retired.

‘Welcome to the Vincent Hall Imaging Centre,’ he said once Dr Nash had introduced us, and then, without taking his eyes off mine, he winked and shook my hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added. ‘It’s not as grand as it sounds. Here, come in. Let me show you round.’

We made our way into the building. ‘We’re attached to the hospital and the university here,’ he said as we went through the main entrance. ‘Which can be both a blessing and a curse.’ I didn’t know what he meant and waited for him to elaborate, but he said nothing. I smiled.

‘Really?’ I said. He was trying to help me. I wanted to be polite.

‘Everyone wants us to do everything.’ He laughed. ‘No one wants to pay us for any of it.’

We walked through into a waiting room. It was dotted with empty chairs, copies of the same magazines Ben has left for me at home –
Radio Times, Hello!
, now joined by
Country Life
and
Marie Claire
– and discarded plastic cups. It looked like there had recently been a party that everyone had left in a hurry. Dr Paxton paused at another door. ‘Would you like to see the control room?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Please.’

‘Functional MRI is a fairly new technique,’ he said, once we’d gone through. ‘Have you heard of MRI? Magnetic Resonance Imaging?’

We were standing in a small room, lit only by the ghostly glow from a bank of computer monitors. One wall was taken up by a window, beyond which was another room, dominated by a large cylindrical machine, a bed protruding from it like a tongue. I began to feel afraid. I knew nothing of this machine. Without memory, how could I?

‘No,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘I’m sorry. MRI is a fairly standard procedure. It’s a little like taking an X-ray through the body. Here we’re using some of the same techniques but actually looking at how the brain works. At function.’

Dr Nash spoke then – the first time in a while he had done so – and his voice sounded small, almost timid. I wondered whether he was in awe of Dr Paxton, or was desperate to impress him.

‘If someone has a brain tumour then we need to scan their head to find out where the tumour is, what part of the brain is affected. That’s looking at structure. What functional MRI allows us to see is which part of the brain you use when you do certain tasks. We want to see how your brain processes memory.’

‘Which parts light up, as it were,’ said Paxton. ‘Where the juices are flowing.’

‘That will help?’ I asked.

‘We hope it will help us to identify where the damage is,’ said Dr Nash. ‘What’s gone wrong. What’s not working properly.’

‘And that will help me to get my memory back?’

He paused, and then said, ‘We hope so.’

I took off my wedding ring and my earrings and put them in a plastic tray. ‘You’ll need to leave your bag in here, too,’ said Dr Paxton, and then he asked me if I had anything else pierced. ‘You’d be surprised, my dear,’ he said when I shook my head. ‘Now, she’s a bit of a noisy old beast. You’ll need these.’ He handed me some yellow earplugs. ‘Ready?’

I hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’ Fear was beginning to creep over me. The room seemed to shrink and darken, and through the glass the scanner itself loomed. I had the sense I had seen it before, or one just like it. ‘I’m not sure about this,’ I said.

Dr Nash came over to me then. He placed his hand on my arm.

‘It’s completely painless,’ he said. ‘Just a little noisy.’

‘It’s safe?’

‘Perfectly. I’ll be here, just on this side of the glass. We’ll be able to see you all the way through.’

I must have still looked unsure, because then Dr Paxton added, ‘Don’t worry. You’re in safe hands, my dear. Nothing will go wrong.’ I looked at him, and he smiled and said, ‘You might want to think of your memories as being lost, somewhere in your mind. All we’re doing with this machine is trying to find out where they are.’

It was cold, despite the blanket they had wrapped around me, and dark, except for a red light blinking in the room and a mirror, hung from a frame a couple of inches above my head, angled to reflect the image of a computer screen that sat somewhere else. As well as the earplugs I was wearing a set of headphones through which they said they would talk to me, but for now they were silent. I could hear nothing but a distant hum, the sound of my breathing, hard and heavy, the dull thud of my heartbeat.

In my right hand I clutched a plastic bulb filled with air. ‘Squeeze it, if you need to tell us anything,’ Dr Paxton had said. ‘We won’t be able to hear you if you speak.’ I caressed its rubbery surface and waited. I wanted to close my eyes, but they had told me to keep them open, to look at the screen. Foam wedges kept my head perfectly still; I could not have moved, even if I’d wanted to. The blanket over me, like a shroud.

A moment of stillness, and then a click. So loud that I started, despite the earplugs, and it was followed by another, and a third. A deep noise, from within the machine or my head. I couldn’t tell. A lumbering beast, waking, the moment of silence before the attack. I clutched the rubber bulb, determined that I would not squeeze it, and then a noise, like an alarm or a drill, over and over again, impossibly loud, so loud that the whole of my body shook with each new shock. I closed my eyes.

A voice in my ear. ‘Christine,’ it said. ‘Can you open your eyes, please?’ They could see me then, somehow. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all fine.’

Fine? I thought. What do they know about fine? What do they know about what it’s like to be me, lying here, in a city I don’t remember, with people I’ve never met? I am floating, I thought, completely without anchor, at the mercy of the wind.

A different voice. Dr Nash’s. ‘Can you look at the pictures? Think what they are, say it, but only to yourself. Don’t say anything out loud.’

I opened my eyes. Above me, in the little mirror, were drawings, one after the other, white on black. A man. A ladder. A chair. A hammer. I named each one as it came, and then the screen flashed the words
Thank you! Now relax!
and I said that to myself, too, to keep myself busy, wondering at the same time how anyone could relax in the belly of a machine like this.