Before I Go to Sleep (6 page)

I look at my watch and note the time. Ben has suggested we go for a walk this afternoon. I have a little over an hour.

This morning I woke not knowing who I am. When my eyes flickered open I expected to see the hard edges of a bedside table, a yellow lamp. A boxy wardrobe in the corner of the room and wallpaper with a muted pattern of ferns. I expected to hear my mother downstairs cooking bacon, or my father in the garden, whistling as he trims the hedge. I expected the bed I was in to be single, to contain nothing except me and a stuffed rabbit with one torn ear.

I was wrong. I am in my parents’ room, I thought first, then realized I recognized nothing. The bedroom was completely foreign. I lay back in bed.
Something is wrong
, I thought. Terribly, terribly wrong.

By the time I went downstairs I had seen the photographs around the mirror, read their labels. I knew I was not a child, not even a teenager, and had worked out that the man I could hear cooking breakfast and whistling along to the radio was not my father or a flatmate or boyfriend, but he was called Ben, and he was my husband.

I hesitated outside the kitchen. I felt scared. I was about to meet him, as if for the first time. What would he be like? Would he look as he did in the pictures? Or were they, too, an inaccurate representation? Would he be older, fatter, balder? How would he sound? How would he move? How well had I married?

A vision came from nowhere. A woman – my mother? – telling me to be careful.
Marry in haste
…

I pushed the door open. Ben had his back to me, nudging bacon with a spatula as it spat and sizzled in the pan. He had not heard me come in.

‘Ben?’ I said. He turned round quickly.

‘Christine? Are you OK?’

I did not know how to answer, and so I said, ‘Yes. I think so.’

He smiled then, a look of relief, and I did the same. He looked older than in the pictures upstairs – his face carried more lines, his hair was beginning to grey and receding slightly at the temples – but this had the effect of making him more, rather than less, attractive. His jaw had a strength that suited an older man, his eyes shone mischief. I realized he resembled a slightly older version of my father. I could have done worse, I thought. Much worse.

‘You’ve seen the pictures?’ he said. I nodded. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything. Why don’t you go through and sit down?’ He gestured back towards the hallway. ‘The dining room’s through there. I won’t be a moment. Here, take this.’

He handed me a pepper mill and I went through to the dining room. A few minutes later he followed me with two plates. A pale sliver of bacon swam in grease, an egg and some bread had been fried and sat on the side. As I ate he explained how I survive my life.

Today is Saturday, he said. He works during the week; he is a teacher. He explained about the phone I have in my bag, the board tacked on the wall in the kitchen. He showed me where we keep our emergency fund – two twenty-pound notes, rolled tightly and tucked behind the clock on the mantelpiece – and the scrapbook in which I can glimpse snatches of my life. He told me that, together, we manage. I was not sure I believed him, yet I must.

We finished eating and I helped him tidy away the breakfast things. ‘We should go for a stroll later,’ he said, ‘if you like?’ I said that I would and he looked pleased. ‘I’m just going to read the paper,’ he said. ‘OK?’

I came upstairs. Once I was alone, my head spun, full and empty at the same time. I felt unable to grasp anything. Nothing seemed real. I looked at the house I was in – the one I now knew was my home – with eyes that had never known it before. For a moment I felt like running. I had to calm myself.

I sat on the edge of the bed in which I had slept. I should make it, I thought. Tidy up. Keep myself busy. I picked up the pillow to plump it and as I did something began to buzz.

I wasn’t sure what it was. It was low, insistent. A tune, thin and quiet. My bag was at my feet and when I picked it up I realized the buzz seemed to come from there. I remembered Ben telling me about the phone I have.

When I found it, the phone was lit up. I stared at it for a long moment. Some part of me, buried deep, or somewhere at the very edge of memory, knew exactly what the call was about. I answered it.

‘Hello?’ A man’s voice. ‘Christine? Christine, are you there?’

I told him I was.

‘It’s your doctor. Are you OK? Is Ben around?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s— What’s this about?’

He told me his name and that we have been working together for a few weeks. ‘On your memory,’ he said, and when I didn’t reply he said, ‘I want you to trust me. I want you to look in the wardrobe in your bedroom.’ Another pause, then, before he went on, ‘There’s a shoebox on the floor in there. Have a look inside that. There should be a notebook.’

I glanced at the wardrobe in the corner of the room.

‘How do you know all this?’

‘You told me,’ he said. ‘I saw you yesterday. We decided you should keep a journal. That’s where you told me you’d hide it.’

I don’t believe you
, I wanted to say, but it seemed impolite and was not entirely true.

‘Will you look?’ he said. I told him I would, then he added, ‘Do it now. Don’t say anything to Ben. Do it now.’

I did not end the call but went over to the wardrobe. He was right. Inside, on the floor, was a shoebox – a blue box with the word
Scholl
on the ill-fitting lid – and inside that a book wrapped in tissue.

‘Do you have it?’ said Dr Nash.

I lifted it out and unwrapped it. It was brown leather and looked expensive.

‘Christine?’

‘Yes. I have it.’

‘Good. Have you written in it?’

I opened it to the first page. I saw that I had.
My name is Christine Lucas
, it began.
I am forty-seven. An amnesiac
. I felt nervous, excited. It felt like snooping, but on myself.

‘I have,’ I said.

‘Excellent!’ Then he said he would phone me tomorrow and we ended the call.

I didn’t move. There, crouching on the floor by the open wardrobe, the bed still unmade, I began to read.

At first, I felt disappointed. I remembered nothing of what I had written. Not Dr Nash, nor the offices I claim that he took me to, the puzzles I say that we did. Despite having just heard his voice I couldn’t picture him, or myself with him. The book read like fiction. But then, tucked between two pages near the back of the book, I found a photograph. The house in which I had grown up, the one in which I expected to find myself when I woke this morning. It was real, this was my evidence. I had seen Dr Nash and he had given me this picture, this fragment of my past.

I closed my eyes. Yesterday I had described my old home, the sugar jar in the pantry, picking berries in the woods. Were those memories still there? Could I conjure more? I thought of my mother, my father, willing something else to come. Images formed, silently. A dull orange carpet, an olive-green vase. A yellow romper suit with a pink duck sewn on to the breast and press-studs up the middle. A plastic car seat in navy blue and a faded pink potty.

Colours and shapes, but nothing that described a life. Nothing. I want to see my parents, I thought, and it was then, for the first time, I realized that somehow I knew that they are dead.

I sighed and sat on the edge of the unmade bed. A pen was tucked between the pages of the journal and almost without thinking I took it out, intending to write more. I held it, poised over the page, and closed my eyes to concentrate.

It was then that it happened. Whether that realization – that my parents are gone – triggered others, I don’t know, but it felt as if my mind woke up from a long, deep sleep. It came alive. But not gradually; this was a jolt. A spark of electricity. Suddenly I was not sitting in a bedroom with a blank page in front of me but somewhere else. Back in the past – a past I thought I had lost – and I could touch and feel and taste everything. I realized I was remembering.

I saw myself coming home, to the house I grew up in. I am thirteen or fourteen, eager to get on with a story I am writing, but I find a note on the kitchen table.
We’ve had to go out
, it says.
Uncle Ted will pick you up at six
. I get a drink and a sandwich and sit down with my notebook. Mrs Royce has said that my stories are
strong
and
moving
; she thinks I could turn them into a career. But I can’t think what to write, can’t concentrate. I seethe in silent fury. It is their fault. Where are they? What are they doing? Why aren’t I invited? I screw up the paper and throw it away.

The image vanished, but straight away there was another. Stronger. More real. My father is driving us home. I am sitting in the back of the car, staring at a fixed spot on the windscreen. A dead fly. A piece of grit. I can’t tell. I speak, not sure what I am going to say.

‘When were you going to tell me?’

Nobody answers.

‘Mum?’

‘Christine,’ says my mother. ‘Don’t.’

‘Dad? When were you going to tell me?’ Silence. ‘Will you die?’ I ask, my eyes still focused on the spot on the window. ‘Daddy? Will you die?’

He glances over his shoulder and smiles at me. ‘Of course not, angel. Of course not. Not until I’m an old, old man. With lots and lots of grandchildren!’

I know he’s lying.

‘We’re going to fight this,’ he says. ‘I promise.’

A gasp. I opened my eyes. The vision had ended, was gone. I sat in a bedroom, the bedroom I had woken up in this morning, yet for a moment it looked different. Completely flat. Colourless. Devoid of energy, as if I was looking at a photograph that had faded in the sun. It was as if the vibrancy of the past had leached all the life from the present.

I looked down at the book in my hand. The pen had slipped from my fingers, marking the page with a thin blue line as it slid to the floor. My heart raced in my chest. I had remembered something. Something huge, important. It was not lost. I picked the pen off the floor and started writing this.

I will finish there. When I close my eyes and try to will the image back, I can. Myself. My parents. Driving home. It is still there. Less vivid, as if it has faded with time, but still there. Even so, I am glad I have written it down. I know that eventually it will disappear. At least now it is not completely lost.

Ben must have finished his paper. He has called upstairs, asked if I am ready to go out. I told him I was. I will hide this book in the wardrobe, find a jacket and some boots. I will write more later. If I remember.

That was written hours ago. We have been out all afternoon but are back at home now. Ben is in the kitchen, cooking fish for our dinner. He has the radio on and the sound of jazz drifts up to the bedroom where I sit, writing this. I didn’t offer to make our meal – I was too eager to come upstairs and record what I saw this afternoon – but he didn’t seem to mind.

‘You have a nap,’ he said. ‘It’ll be about forty-five minutes before we eat.’ I nodded. ‘I’ll call you when it’s ready.’

I look at my watch. If I write quickly I should have time.

*

We left the house just before one o’clock. We did not go far, and parked the car by a low, squat building. It looked abandoned; a single grey pigeon sat in each of the boarded windows and the door was hidden with corrugated iron. ‘That’s the lido,’ said Ben as he got out of the car. ‘It’s open in summer, I think. Shall we walk?’

A concrete path curved towards the brow of the hill. We walked in silence, hearing only the occasional shriek of one of the crows that sat on the empty football pitch or a distant dog’s plaintive bark, children’s voices, the hum of the city. I thought of my father, of his death and the fact that I had remembered a little of it at least. A lone jogger padded around a running track and I watched her for a while before the path took us beyond a tall hedge and up towards the top of the hill. There I could see life; a little boy flew a kite while his father stood behind him, a girl walked a small dog on a long lead.