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

A shadow fell across my face and I opened my eyes. A woman stood over me. Tall, with a shock of ginger hair, she was wearing trousers and a sheepskin jacket. A little boy held her hand, a plastic football in the crook of his other arm. ‘Sorry,’ I said, and shuffled along the bench to allow room for them both to sit beside me, but as I did so the woman smiled.

‘Chrissy!’ she said. The voice was Claire’s. Unmistakably so. ‘Chrissy darling! It’s me.’ I looked from the child to her face. It was furrowed where once it must have been smooth, her eyes had a downturn to them that was absent from my mental image, but it was her . There was no doubt. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so worried about you.’ She pushed the child towards me. ‘This is Toby.’

The boy looked at me. ‘Go on,’ said Claire. ‘Say hello.’ For a moment I thought she was talking to me, but then he took a step forward. I smiled. My only thought was, is this Adam? even though I knew it couldn’t be.

‘Hello,’ I said.

Toby shuffled his feet and murmured something I didn’t catch, then turned to Claire and said, ‘Can I go and play now?’

‘Don’t go out of sight, though. Yes?’ She stroked his hair and he ran over to the park.

I stood up and turned to face her. I didn’t know if I would have preferred to turn and run myself, so vast was the chasm between us, but then she held out her arms. ‘Chrissy darling,’ she said, the plastic bracelets that hung from her wrists clattering into each other. ‘I’ve missed you. I’ve missed you so fucking much.’ The weight that had been pressing down on me somersaulted, lifted and vanished, and I fell sobbing into her arms.

For the briefest of moments I felt as if I knew everything about her, and everything about myself, too. It was as if the emptiness, the void that sat at the centre of my soul, had been lit with light brighter than the sun. A history — my history — flashed in front of me, but too quickly for me to do anything but snatch at it. ‘I remember you,’ I said. ‘I remember you,’ and then it was gone and the darkness swept in once more.

We sat on the bench and, for a long time, silently watched Toby playing football with a group of boys. I felt happy to be connected with my unknown past, yet there was an awkwardness between us that I could not shake. A phrase kept repeating in my head. Something to do with Claire .

‘How are you?’ I said in the end, and she laughed.

‘I feel like hell,’ she said. She opened her bag and took out a packet of tobacco. ‘You haven’t started again, have you?’ she said, offering it to me, and I shook my head, aware again of how she was someone else who knew so much more about me than I did myself.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

She began to roll her cigarette, nodding towards her son. ‘Oh, you know. Tobes has ADHD. He was up all night, and hence so was I.’

‘ADHD?’ I said.

She smiled. ‘Sorry. It’s a fairly new phrase, I suppose. Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. We have to give him Ritalin, though I fucking hate it. It’s the only way. We’ve tried just about everything else, and he’s an absolute beast without it. A horror.’

I looked over at him, running in the distance. Another faulty, fucked-up brain in a healthy body.

‘He’s OK, though?’

‘Yes,’ she said, sighing. She balanced her cigarette paper on her knee and began sprinkling tobacco along its fold. ‘He’s just exhausting sometimes. It’s like the terrible twos never ended.’

I smiled. I knew what she meant, but only theoretically. I had no point of reference, no recollection of what Adam might have been like, either at Toby’s age or younger.

‘Toby seems quite young?’ I said.

She laughed. ‘You mean I’m quite old!’ She licked the gum of her paper. ‘Yes. I had him late. Pretty sure it wasn’t going to happen, so we were being careless …’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You mean …?’

She laughed again. ‘I wouldn’t say he was an accident, but let’s just say he was something of a shock.’ She put the cigarette in her mouth. ‘Do you remember Adam?’

I looked at her. She had her head turned away from me, shielding her lighter from the wind, and I couldn’t see her expression, or tell whether the move was deliberately evasive.

‘No,’ I said. ‘A few weeks ago I remembered that I had a son, and ever since I wrote about it I feel like I’ve been carrying the knowledge around, like a heavy rock in my chest. But no. I don’t remember anything about him.’

She sent a cloud of blue-tinged smoke skyward. ‘That’s a shame,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. Ben shows you pictures, though? Doesn’t that help?’

I weighed up how much I should tell her. They seemed to have been in touch, to have been friends, once. I had to be careful, but still I felt an increasing need to speak, as well as hear, the truth.

‘He does show me pictures, yes. Though he doesn’t have any up around the house. He says I find them too upsetting. He keeps them hidden.’ I nearly said locked away .

She seemed surprised. ‘Hidden? Really?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He thinks I would find it too disturbing if I were to stumble across a picture of him.’

Claire nodded. ‘You might not recognize him? Know who he is?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I imagine that might be true,’ she said. She hesitated. ‘Now that he’s gone.’

Gone , I thought. She said it as though he had just popped out for a few hours, had taken his girlfriend to the cinema, or to shop for a pair of shoes. I understood it, though. Understood the tacit agreement that we would not talk about Adam’s death. Not yet. Understood that Claire is trying to protect me, too.

I said nothing. Instead I tried to imagine what it must have been like, to have seen my child every day, back when the phrase every day had some meaning, before every day became severed from the one before it. I tried to imagine waking every morning knowing who he was, being able to plan, to look forward to Christmas, to his birthday.

How ridiculous, I thought. I don’t even know when his birthday is.

‘Wouldn’t you like to see him?’

My heart leapt. ‘You have photographs?’ I said. ‘Could I—’

She looked surprised. ‘Of course! Loads! At home.’

‘I’d like one,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But—’

‘Please. It’d mean so much to me.’

She put her hand on mine. ‘Of course. I’ll bring one next time, but—’

She was interrupted by a cry in the distance. I looked across the park. Toby was running towards us, crying, as, behind him, the game of football continued.

‘Fuck,’ said Claire under her breath. She stood up and called out. ‘Tobes! Toby! What happened?’ He kept running. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘I’ll just go and sort him out.’

She went to her son and crouched down to ask what was wrong. I looked at the ground. The path was carpeted with moss, and the odd blade of grass had poked through the tarmac, fighting towards the light. I felt pleased. Not only that Claire would give me a photograph of Adam, but that she had said she would do so next time we met. We were going to be seeing more of each other. I realized that every time would once again seem like the first. The irony: that I am prone to forgetting that I have no memory.

I realized, too, that something about the way she had spoken of Ben — some wistfulness — made me think that the idea of them having an affair was ridiculous.

She came back.

‘Everything’s fine,’ she said. She flicked her cigarette away and ground it out with her heel. ‘Slight misunderstanding over ownership of the ball. Shall we walk?’ I nodded, and she turned to Toby. ‘Darling! Ice cream?’