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

I shook my head. ‘We’re not in touch.’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘What a pity. But never mind. I can tell you a little bit of what life was like here back then.’ She glanced at her notes, then clasped her hands together. ‘Your treatment was mostly handled by a consultant psychiatrist. You underwent sessions of hypnosis, but I’m afraid any success was limited and unsustained.’ She read further. ‘You didn’t receive a great deal of medication. A sedative, occasionally, though that was more to help you sleep — it can get quite noisy in here, as I’m sure you can understand,’ she said.

I recalled the howling I’d imagined earlier, wondering if that might have once been me. ‘What was I like?’ I said. ‘Was I happy?’

She smiled. ‘Generally, yes. You were well liked. You seemed to make friends with one of the nurses in particular.’

‘What was her name?’

She scanned her notes. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t say. You played a lot of solitaire.’

‘Solitaire?’

‘A card game. Perhaps Dr Nash can explain later?’ She looked up. ‘According to the notes you were occasionally violent,’ she said. ‘Don’t be alarmed. It’s not unusual in cases like this. People who have suffered severe head trauma will often exhibit violent tendencies, particularly when there has been damage to the part of the brain that allows self-restraint. Plus patients with amnesia such as yours often have a tendency to do something we call confabulation. Things around them don’t seem to make sense, and so they feel compelled to invent details. About themselves and other people around them, or about their history, what has happened to them. It’s thought to be due to the desire to fill gaps in the memory. Understandable in a way. But it can often lead to violent behaviour when the amnesiac’s fantasy is contradicted. Life must have been very disorientating for you. Particularly when you had visitors.’

Visitors. Suddenly I was afraid I might have hit my son.

‘What did I do?’

‘You occasionally lashed out at some of the staff,’ she said.

‘But not at Adam? My son?’

‘Not according to these notes, no.’ I sighed, not entirely relieved. ‘We have some pages from a sort of diary that you were keeping,’ she said. ‘Might it be helpful for you to take a look at them? You might find it easier to understand your confusion.’

This felt dangerous. I glanced at Dr Nash, and he nodded. She pushed a sheet of blue paper over to me and I took it, at first frightened even to look at it.

When I did I saw that it was covered in an unruly scrawl. At the top the letters were well formed, and kept neatly within the printed lines that ran across the page, but towards the bottom they were large and messy, inches tall, just a few words across. Though dreading what I might see I began to read.

8.15 a.m ., read the first entry. I have woken up. Ben is here . Directly underneath I had written, 8.17 a.m. Ignore that last entry. It was written by someone else , and underneath that, 8.20 I am awake NOW. Before I was not. Ben is here .

My eyes flicked further down the page. 9.45 I have just woken up, FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME , and then, a few lines later, 10.07 NOW I am definitely awake. All these entries are a lie. I am awake NOW .

I looked up. ‘This was really me?’ I said.

‘Yes. For a long time it seemed that you were in a perpetual state of feeling that you had just woken up from a very long, very deep sleep. Look here.’ Dr Wilson pointed at the page in front of me, and began quoting entries from it. ‘I have been asleep for ever. It was like being DEAD. I have only just woken up. I can see again, for the first time . They apparently encouraged you to write down what you were feeling, in an effort to get you to remember what had happened before, but I’m afraid you just became convinced that all the preceding entries had been written by someone else. You began to think people here were conducting experiments on you, keeping you against your will.’

I looked at the page again. The whole sheet was filled with almost identical entries, each just a few minutes apart. I felt myself go cold.

‘Was I really this bad?’ I said. My words seemed to echo in my head.

‘For a while, yes,’ said Dr Nash. ‘Your notes indicate that you retained memory for only a few seconds. Sometimes a minute or two. That time has gradually lengthened over the years.’

I could not believe I had written this. It seemed to be the work of someone whose mind was completely fractured. Exploded. I saw the words again. It was like being DEAD .

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t—’

Dr Wilson took the sheet from me. ‘I understand, Christine. It’s upsetting. I—’

Panic hit me then. I stood up, but the room began to spin. ‘I want to leave,’ I said. ‘This isn’t me. It can’t have been me, I–I would never hit people. I would never. I just—’

Dr Nash stood, too, and then Dr Wilson. She stepped forward, colliding with her desk, sending papers flying. A photograph spilled to the floor.

‘Dear God—’ I said, and she looked down, then crouched to cover it with another sheet. But I had seen enough. ‘Was that me?’ I said, my voice rising to a scream. ‘Was that me?’

The photograph was of the head of a young woman. Her hair had been pulled back from her face. At first it looked as though she was wearing a Halloween mask. One eye was open and looked at the camera, the other was closed by a huge, purple bruise, and both lips were swollen, pink, lacerated with cuts. Her cheeks were distended, giving her whole face a grotesque appearance. I thought of pulped fruit. Of plums, rotten and bursting.

‘Was that me?’ I screamed, even though, despite the swollen, distorted face, I could see that it was.

My memory splits there, fractured in two. Part of me was calm, quiet. Serene. It watched as the other part of me thrashed and screamed and had to be restrained by Dr Nash and Dr Wilson. You really ought to behave, it seemed to be saying. This is embarrassing.

But the other part was stronger. It had taken over, become the real me. I shouted out, again and again, and turned and ran for the door. Dr Nash came after me. I tore it open and ran, though where could I go? An image of bolted doors. Alarms. A man, chasing me. My son, crying. I have done this before, I thought. I have done all this before.

My memory blanks.

They must have calmed me down, somehow, persuaded me to go with Dr Nash; the next thing I can remember is being in his car, sitting next to him as he drove. The sky was beginning to cloud over, the streets grey, somehow flattened out. He was talking, but I couldn’t concentrate. It was as if my mind had tripped, fallen back into something else, and now couldn’t catch up. I looked out of the windows, at the shoppers and the dog-walkers, at the people with their prams and their push-bikes, and I wondered whether this — this search for truth — was really what I wanted. Yes, it might help me to improve, but how much can I hope to gain? I don’t expect that I will ever wake up knowing everything, as normal people do, knowing what I did the day before, what plans I have for the day that follows, what circuitous route has led me to here and now, to the person I am. The best I can hope for is that one day looking in the mirror will not be a total shock, that I will remember I married a man called Ben and lost a son called Adam, that I will not have to see a copy of my novel to know that I had written one.

But even that much seems unattainable. I thought of what I had seen in Fisher Ward. Madness, and pain. Minds that had been shattered. I am closer to that, I thought, than I am to recovery. Perhaps it would be best if I learned to live with my condition, after all. I could tell Dr Nash I don’t want to see him again and I could burn my journal, burying the truths I have already learned, hiding them as thoroughly as those I don’t yet know. I would be running away from my past, but I would have no regrets — in just a few hours I wouldn’t even know that either my journal or my doctor had ever existed — and then I could live simply. One day would follow another, unconnected. Yes, occasionally the memory of Adam would surface. I would have a day of grief and pain, would remember what I miss, but it would not last. Before long I would sleep and, quietly, forget. How easy that would be, I thought. So much easier than this.