S. Watson: Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel

‘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.

‘This is Parliament Hill,’ said Ben. ‘We come here often.’

I said nothing. The city sprawled before us under the low cloud. It seemed peaceful. And smaller than I imagined; I could see all the way across it to low hills in the distance. I could see the thrust of the Telecom tower, St Paul’s dome, the power station at Battersea, shapes I recognized, though dimly and without knowing why. There were other, less familiar, landmarks, too: a glass building shaped like a fat cigar, a giant wheel, way in the distance. Like my own face the view seemed both alien and somehow familiar.

‘I feel I recognize this place,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘Yes. We’ve been coming here for a while, though the view changes all the time.’

We continued walking. Most of the benches were occupied, by people alone or in couples. We headed for one just past the top of the hill and sat down. I smelt ketchup; a half-eaten burger lay under the bench in a cardboard box.

Ben picked it up carefully and put it in one of the litter bins, then returned to sit next to me. He pointed out some of the landmarks. ‘That’s Canary Wharf,’ he said, gesturing towards a building that, even at this distance, looked immeasurably tall. ‘It was built in the early nineties, I think. They’re all offices, things like that.’

The nineties. It was odd to hear a decade that I could not remember living through summed up in two words. I must have missed so much. So much music, so many films and books, so much news. Disasters, tragedies, wars. Whole countries might have fallen to pieces as I wandered, oblivious, from one day to the next.

So much of my own life, too. So many views I don’t recognize, despite seeing them every day.

‘Ben?’ I said. ‘Tell me about us.’

‘Us?’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

I turned to face him. The wind gusted up the hill, cold against my face. A dog barked somewhere. I wasn’t sure how much to say; he knows I remember nothing of him at all.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about me and you. I don’t even know how we met, or when we got married, or anything.’

He smiled, and shuffled along the bench so that we were touching. He put his arm around my shoulder. I began to recoil, then remembered he is not a stranger but the man I married. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How did we meet?’

‘Well, we were both at university,’ he said. ‘You had just started your Ph.D. Do you remember that?’

I shook my head. ‘Not really. What did I study?’

‘You’d graduated in English,’ he said, and an image flashed in front of me, quick and sharp. I saw myself in a library and recalled vague ideas of writing a thesis concerning feminist theory and early twentieth-century literature, though really it was just something I could be doing while I worked on novels, something my mother might not understand but would at least see as legitimate. The scene hung for a moment, shimmering, so real I could almost touch it, but then Ben spoke and it vanished.

‘I was doing my degree,’ he said, ‘in chemistry. I would see you all the time. At the library, in the bar, whatever. I would always be amazed at how beautiful you looked, but I could never bring myself to speak to you.’

I laughed. ‘Really?’ I couldn’t imagine myself as intimidating.

‘You always seemed so confident. And intense. You would sit for hours, surrounded by books, just reading and taking notes, sipping from cups of coffee or whatever. You looked so beautiful. I never dreamed you would ever be interested in me. But then one day I happened to be sitting next to you in the library, and you accidentally knocked your cup over and your coffee went all over my books. You were so apologetic, even though it hardly mattered anyway, and we mopped up the coffee and then I insisted on buying you another. You said it ought to be you buying me one, to say sorry, and I said OK then, and we went for a coffee. And that was that.’

I tried to picture the scene, to remember the two of us, young, in a library, surrounded by soggy papers, laughing. I could not, and felt the hot stab of sadness. I imagined how every couple must love the story of how they met — who first spoke to who, what was said — yet I have no recollection of ours. The wind whipped the tail of the little boy’s kite; a sound like a death rattle.

‘What happened then?’ I said.

‘Well, we dated. The usual, you know? I finished my degree, and you finished your Ph.D., and then we got married.’