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

My head jerks back. Panic. I am on my knees. I see water, bubbles, already thinning. I try to speak but cannot. His hand is round my throat, and I cannot breathe. I am pitched forward, down, down, so quickly that I think I will never stop, and then my head is in the water. Orange blossom in my throat .

I heard a voice. ‘Christine!’ it said. ‘Christine! Stop!’ I opened my eyes. Somehow, I was out of the car. I was running. Across the park, as fast as I could, and running after me was Dr Nash.

We sat on a bench. It was concrete, crossed with wooden slats. One was missing, and the remainder sagged beneath us. I felt the sun against the back of my neck, saw its long shadows on the ground. The boys were still playing football, though the game must be finishing now; some were drifting off, others talked, one of the piles of jackets had been removed, leaving the goal unmarked. Dr Nash had asked me what had happened.

‘I remembered something,’ I said.

‘About the night you were attacked?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘How did you know?’

‘You were screaming,’ he said. ‘You kept saying, “Get off me,” over and over.’

‘It was like I was there,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Please, don’t apologize. Do you want to tell me what you saw?’

The truth was I did not. I felt as if some ancient instinct was telling me that this was a memory best kept to myself. But I needed his help, knew I could trust him. I told him everything.

When I had finished he was silent for a moment, then said, ‘Anything else?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t remember what he looked like? The man who attacked you?’

‘No. I can’t see that at all.’

‘Or his name?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’ I hesitated. ‘Do you think it might help to know who did this to me? To see him? Remember him?’

‘Christine, there’s no real evidence to suggest that remembering the attack would help.’

‘But it might?’

‘It seems to be one of your most deeply repressed memories—’

‘So it might?’

He was silent, then said, ‘I’ve suggested it before, but it might help to go back there …’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No. Don’t even say it.’

‘We can go together. You’d be fine, I promise. If you were there again … Back in Brighton—’

‘No.’

‘You might remember then—’

‘No! Please!’

‘It might help?’

I looked down at my hands, folded in my lap.

‘I can’t go back there,’ I said. ‘I just can’t.’

He sighed. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Maybe we’ll talk about it again?’

‘No,’ I whispered. ‘I can’t.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK.’

He smiled, but seemed disappointed. I felt eager to give him something, to have him not give up on me. ‘Dr Nash?’ I said.

‘Yes?’

‘The other day I wrote that something had come to me. Perhaps it’s relevant. I don’t know.’

He turned to face me.

‘Go on.’ Our knees touched. Neither of us drew away.

‘When I woke,’ I said, ‘I kind of knew that I was in bed with a man. I remembered a name. But it wasn’t Ben’s name. I wondered if it was the name of the person I’d been having the affair with. The one who attacked me.’

‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘It might have been the beginning of the repressed memory emerging. What was the name?’

Suddenly I didn’t want to tell him, to say it out loud. I felt that by doing so I would be making it real, conjuring my attacker back into existence. I closed my eyes.

‘Ed,’ I whispered. ‘I imagined waking up with someone called Ed.’

Silence. A heartbeat that seemed to last for ever.

‘Christine,’ he said. ‘That’s my name. I’m Ed. Ed Nash.’

My mind raced for a moment. My first thought was that he had attacked me. ‘What?’ I said, panicking.

‘That’s my name. I’ve told you that before. Maybe you’ve never written it down. My name is Edmund. Ed.’

I realized it could not have been him. He would barely have been born.

‘But—’

‘You may be confabulating,’ he said. ‘Like Dr Wilson explained?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I—’

‘Or maybe you were attacked by someone with the same name?’

He smiled awkwardly as he said it, making light of the situation, but in doing so revealed he had already worked out what only later — after he had driven me home, in fact — occurred to me. I had woken that morning happy. Happy to be in bed with someone called Ed. But it was not a memory. It was a fantasy. Waking with this man called Ed was not something I had done in the past but — even though my conscious, waking mind didn’t know who he was — something I wanted to do in the future. I want to sleep with Dr Nash.

And now, accidentally, inadvertently, I have told him. I have revealed the way I must feel about him. He was professional, of course. We both pretended to attach no significance to what had happened, and in doing so revealed just how much significance there was. We walked back to the car and he drove me home. We chatted about trivialities. The weather. Ben. There are few things we can talk about; there are whole arenas of experience from which I am utterly excluded. At one point he said, ‘We’re going to the theatre tonight,’ and I noted his careful use of the plural. Don’t worry, I wanted to say. I know my place. But I said nothing. I didn’t want him to think of me as bitter.

He told me he would call me tomorrow. ‘If you’re sure you want to continue?’

I know that I cannot stop now. Not until I have learned the truth. I owe myself that, otherwise I am living only half a life. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do.’ In any case, I need him to remind me to write in my journal.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Good. Next time I think we should visit somewhere else from your past.’ He looked to where I sat. ‘Don’t worry. Not there. I think we should go to the care home you were moved to when you left Fisher Ward. It’s called Waring House.’ I said nothing. ‘It’s not too far from where you live. Shall I ring them?’

I thought for a moment, wondering what good it might do, but then realized there were no other options, and anything is better than nothing.

I said, ‘Yes. Yes. Ring them.’

It is morning. Ben has suggested that I clean the windows. ‘I’ve written it on the board,’ he said, as he got into his car. ‘In the kitchen.’

I looked. Wash windows he had written, adding a tentative question mark. I wondered if he thought I might not have time, wondered what he thought I did all day. He doesn’t know I now spend hours reading my journal, and sometimes hours more writing in it. He does not know there are days when I see Dr Nash.

I wonder what I did before my days were taken up like this. Did I really spend all my time watching television, or going for walks, or doing chores? Did I spend hour after hour sitting in an armchair, listening to the ticking of the clock, wondering how to live?

Wash windows . Possibly some days I read things like that and feel resentful, seeing it as an effort to control my life, but today I viewed it with affection, as nothing more sinister than the desire to keep me occupied. I smiled to myself but, even as I did so, I thought how difficult it must be to live with me. He must go to extraordinary lengths to make sure I am safe, and even so must worry constantly that I will get confused, will wander off, or worse. I remembered reading about the fire that had destroyed most of our past, the one Ben has never told me that I started, even though I must have done so. I saw an image — a burning door, almost invisible in the thick smoke, a sofa, melting, turning to wax — that hovered, just out of reach, but refused to resolve itself into a memory, and remained a half-imagined dream. But Ben has forgiven me for that, I thought, just as he must have forgiven me for so much more. I looked out of the kitchen window, and through the reflection of my own face I saw the mowed lawn, the tidy borders, the shed, the fences. I realized that Ben must have known that I was having an affair — certainly once I’d been discovered in Brighton, even if not before. How much strength it must have taken to look after me — once I had lost my memory — even with the knowledge that I had been away from home, intending to fuck someone else, when it had happened. I thought of what I had seen, of the diary I had written. My mind had been fractured. Destroyed. Yet still he had stood by me, where another man might have told me that I deserved everything, left me to rot.