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

‘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.

More instructions flashed on the screen. Recall a past event , it said, and then beneath it flashed the words, A party .

I closed my eyes.

I tried to think of the party I had remembered as Ben and I watched the fireworks. I tried to picture myself on the roof next to my friend, to hear the noise of the party beneath us, to taste the fireworks on the air.

Images came, but they did not seem real. I could tell I was not remembering but inventing them.

I tried to see Keith, to remember him ignoring me, but nothing would come. Those memories were lost again to me. Buried, as if for ever, though now at least I know that they exist, that they are in there somewhere, locked away.

My mind turned to childhood parties. Birthdays, with my mother and aunt and my cousin Lucy. Twister. Pass-the-parcel. Musical chairs. Musical statues. My mother with bags of sweets to wrap up as prizes. Sandwiches of potted meat and fish paste with the crusts removed. Trifle and jelly.

I remembered a white dress with frills at the sleeves, frilled socks, black shoes. My hair is still blonde, and I am sitting at a table in front of a cake, with candles. I take a deep breath, lean forward, blow. Smoke rises in the air.

Memories of another party crowded in then. I saw myself at home, looking out of my bedroom window. I am naked, about seventeen. There are trestle tables out in the street, arranged in long rows, loaded with trays of sausage rolls and sandwiches, jugs of orange squash. Union Jacks are everywhere, bunting hangs from every window. Blue. Red. White.

There are children in fancy dress — pirates, wizards, Vikings — and the adults are trying to organize them into teams for an egg-and-spoon race. I can see my mother on the other side of the street fastening a cape around Matthew Soper’s neck and, just below my window, my father sits in a deckchair with a glass of juice.

‘Come back to bed,’ says a voice. I turn round. Dave Soper sits in my single bed, underneath my poster of The Slits. The white sheet is twisted around him, spattered with blood. I had not told him it was my first time.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Get up! You have to get dressed before my parents come back!’

He laughs, though not unkindly. ‘Come on!’

I pull on my jeans. ‘No,’ I say, reaching for a T-shirt. ‘Get up. Please?’

He looks disappointed. I didn’t think this would happen — which doesn’t mean I didn’t want it to — and now I would like to be alone. It is not about him at all.

‘OK,’ he says, standing up. His body looks pale and skinny, his penis almost absurd. I look away as he dresses, out of the window. My world has changed, I think. I have crossed a line, and I cannot go back. ‘Bye, then,’ he says, but I don’t speak. I don’t look back until he has left.

A voice in my ear brought me back to the present. ‘Good. More pictures now, Christine,’ said Dr Paxton. ‘Just look at each one and tell yourself what, or who, it is. OK? Ready?’

I swallowed hard. What would they show me? Who? How bad could it be?