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

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. I just had a bad dream.’

I got up, ate dinner, then went to bed. I wanted to write, to get down all I had learned before it disappeared. I wasn’t sure I would have time to do so before Ben came to bed.

But what could I do? I have spent so long today writing, I thought. Surely he will be suspicious, will wonder what I have been doing, upstairs, alone. I have been telling him I am tired, that I need to rest, and he has believed me.

I can’t say I don’t feel guilty. I have heard him creeping around the house, opening and closing doors softly so as not to wake me, while I have been hunched over my journal, writing furiously. But I have no choice. I have to record these things. To do so seems almost more important than anything, because otherwise I will lose them for ever. I must make my excuses and return to my book.

‘I think I’ll sleep in the spare room tonight,’ I’d said. ‘I’m upset. You understand?’

He’d said yes, told me that he will check on me in the morning, to make sure that I am all right before he goes to work, then kissed me goodnight. I hear him now, switching off the television, turning the key in the front door. Locking us in. It would do no good for me to wander, I suppose. Not in my condition.

I cannot believe that in a few moments, when I fall asleep, I will forget about my son all over again. The memories of him had seemed — still seem — so real, so vivid. And I had remembered him even after dozing in the bath. It does not seem possible that a longer sleep will erase everything, yet Ben, and Dr Nash, tell me that this is exactly what will happen.

Do I dare hope that they are wrong? I am remembering more each day, waking knowing more of who I am. Perhaps things are going well, writing in this journal is bringing my memories to the surface.

Perhaps today is the day I will one day look back on and recognize as a breakthrough. It is possible.

I am tired now. I will stop writing soon, and then hide my journal, turn off the light. Sleep. Pray that tomorrow I may wake and remember my son.

I was in the bathroom. I didn’t know how long I’d been standing there. Just looking. All those pictures of me and Ben smiling happily together, when there should have been three of us. I stared at them, unmoving, as if I thought that might make Adam’s image emerge, willed into being. But it did not. He remained invisible.

I had woken with no memory of him. None at all. I still believed motherhood to be something that sat in the future, gleaming and disquieting. Even after I had seen my own middle-aged face, learned that I was a wife, old enough soon to be having grandchildren — even after those facts had sent me reeling — I was unprepared for the journal that Dr Nash told me I kept in the wardrobe when he called. I did not imagine that I would discover that I am a mother, too. That I have had a child.

I held the journal in my hand. As soon as I read it I knew it to be true. I had had a son. I felt it, almost as if he were still with me, inside my pores. I read it over and over again, trying to fix it in my mind.

And then I read on, and discovered that he is dead. It did not seem real. Did not seem possible. My heart resisted the knowledge, tried to reject it even as I knew it was true. Nausea hit me. Bile rose in my throat and as I swallowed it down the room began to swim. For a moment I felt myself begin to fall forward to the floor. The journal slid from my lap and I stifled a scream of pain. I stood up, propelling myself out of the bedroom.

I went into the bathroom, to look again at the pictures in which he ought to be. I felt desperate, did not know what I was going to do when Ben came home. I imagined him coming in, kissing me, making dinner; I thought of us eating it together. And then we would watch television, or whatever it is that we do most evenings, and all the time I would have to pretend that I didn’t know I had lost a son. And then we would go to bed, together, and after that—

It seemed more than I could bear. I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I began to claw at the pictures, ripping, pulling. It seemed to take no time at all, and then they were gone. Scattered on the bathroom floor. Floating in the water in the toilet bowl.

I grabbed this journal and put it in my bag. My purse was empty and so I took one of the two twenty-pound notes that I had read were hidden behind the clock on the mantelpiece, and ran out of the house. I didn’t know where I was going. I wanted to see Dr Nash but had no idea where he was, or how I could get there even if I did. I felt helpless. Alone. And so I ran.

At the street I turned left, towards the park. It was a sunny afternoon. The orange light reflected off the parked cars and the pools of water left by the morning’s storm, but it was cold. My breath misted around me. I pulled my coat tight, my scarf over my ears, and hurried on. Leaves fell from the trees, blew in the wind, piled against the gutter in a brown mush.

I stepped off the kerb. The sound of brakes. A car crunched to a halt. A man’s voice, muffled, from behind glass.

Get out of the way! it said. Stupid fucking bitch!

I looked up. I was in the middle of the road, a stalled car in front of me, its driver screaming with fury. I had a vision: myself, metal on bone, crumpling, buckling, and then sliding, up and over the bonnet of the car, or under it, to lie, a tangled mess, the end of a ruined life.

Could it really be that simple? Would a second collision end what was started by the first, all those years ago? I feel as if I have already been dead for twenty years, but is that where all this has to lead, eventually?

Who would miss me? My husband. A doctor, perhaps, though to him I am only a patient. But there is no one else. Can my circle have drawn so tight? Did my friends abandon me, one by one? How quickly I would be forgotten, were I to die.

I looked at the man in the car. He, or someone like him, did this to me. Robbed me of everything. Robbed me even of myself. Yet there he was, still living.

Not yet, I thought. Not yet. However my life was to end, I didn’t want it to be like this. I thought of the novel I had written, the child I had raised, even the firework party with my best friend all those years ago. I still have memories to unearth. Things to discover. My own truth to find.

I mouthed the word sorry , and ran on, over the road, through a gate and into the park.

There was a hut, in the middle of the grass. A café. I went in and bought myself coffee and then sat on one of the benches, warming my hands on the styrofoam cup. Opposite was a playground. A slide, swings, a roundabout. A small boy sat on a seat shaped like a ladybird that was fixed to the ground by a heavy spring. I watched him rock himself backwards and forwards, an ice cream in one hand despite the cold.

My mind flashed on a vision of myself and another young girl in the park. I saw the two of us, climbing stairs to a wooden cage from where we would glide to the ground on a metal slide. How high it had felt, all those years ago, yet looking at the playground now I saw that it must have been only a little higher than I am tall. We would muddy our dresses and be told off by our mothers, and skip home, clutching bags of penny chews or bright orange crisps.

Was this memory? Or invention?

I watched the boy. He was alone. The park seemed empty. Just the two of us, in the cold, under a sky roofed with dark cloud. I took a mouthful of my coffee.

‘Hey!’ said the boy. ‘Hey! Lady!’

I looked up, then down at my hands.

‘Hey!’ he shouted more loudly. ‘Lady! You help! You spin me!’