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

I think of this man discovering my journal, reading it every day. Why didn’t he destroy it?

Because I’d written that I loved him. And because that was what he wanted me to carry on believing.

Or maybe I am being too kind to him. Maybe he just wanted me to see it burn.

‘Claire didn’t call the police?’

‘She did.’ He nodded. ‘But it was a few days before they really took it seriously. In the meantime she’d got hold of Adam and he’d told her that Ben had been abroad for a while and that as far as he knew you were still in Waring House. She contacted them and, though they wouldn’t give her your home address, they eventually relented and gave Adam my number. They must have thought that was a good compromise, as I am a doctor. Claire only got through to me this afternoon.’

‘This afternoon?’

‘Yes. Claire convinced me something was wrong, and of course finding out that Adam was alive confirmed it. We came to see you at home, but by then you’d already left for Brighton.’

‘How did you know to find me there?’

‘You told me this morning that Ben — sorry, Mike — had told you that you were going away for the weekend. You said he’d told you that you were going to the coast. Once Claire told me what was going on I guessed where he was taking you.’

I lay back. I felt tired. Exhausted. I wanted only to sleep, but was frightened to. Frightened of what I might forget.

‘But you told me Adam was dead,’ I said. ‘You said he’d been killed. When we were sitting in the car park. And the fire, too. You told me there’d been a fire.’

He smiled, sadly. ‘Because that’s what you told me.’ I told him I didn’t understand. ‘One day, a couple of weeks after we first met, you told me Adam was dead. Evidently Mike had told you, and you had believed him and told me. When you asked me in the car park I told you the truth as I believed it. It was the same with the fire. I believed there’d been one, because that’s what you told me.’

‘But I remembered Adam’s funeral,’ I said. ‘His coffin …’

Again the sad smile. ‘Your imagination …’

‘But I saw pictures,’ I said. ‘That man’ — I found it impossible to say Mike’s name — ‘he showed me pictures of me and him together, of us getting married. I found a picture of a gravestone. It had Adam’s name—’

‘He must have faked them,’ he said.

‘Faked them?’

‘Yes. On a computer. It’s really quite easy to mock up photos these days. He must have guessed you were suspecting the truth and left them where he knew you’d find them. It’s quite likely that some of the photos you thought were of the two of you were also faked.’

I thought of the times I had written that Mike was in his office. Working. Is that what he’d been doing? How thoroughly he had betrayed me.

‘Are you OK?’ said Dr Nash.

I smiled. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’ I looked at him, and realized I could picture him in a different suit, with his hair cut much shorter.

‘I can remember things,’ I said.

His expression did not change. ‘What things?’ he said.

‘I remember you with a different haircut,’ I said. ‘And I recognized Ben, too. And Adam and Claire, in the ambulance. And I can remember seeing her the other day. We went to the café at Alexandra Palace. We had coffee. She has a son called Toby.’

His eyes were sad.

‘Have you read your journal today?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But don’t you see? I can remember things that I didn’t write down. I can remember the earrings that she was wearing. They’re the same ones she has on now. I asked her. She said I was right. And I can remember that Toby was wearing a blue parka, and he had cartoons on his socks, and I remember he was upset because he wanted apple juice and they only had orange or blackcurrant. Don’t you see? I didn’t write those things down. I can remember them.’

He looked pleased, then, though still cautious.

‘Dr Paxton did say that he could find no obvious organic cause for your amnesia. That it seemed likely that it was at least partly caused by the emotional trauma of what had happened to you, as well as the physical. I suppose it’s possible that another trauma might reverse that, at least to some degree.’

I leapt on what he was suggesting. ‘So I might be cured?’ I said.

He looked at me intently. I had the feeling he was weighing up what to say, how much of the truth I could stand.

‘I have to say it’s unlikely,’ he said. ‘There’s been a degree of improvement over the last few weeks, but nothing like a complete return of memory. But it is possible.’

I felt a rush of joy. ‘Doesn’t the fact that I remember what happened a week ago mean that I can form new memories again? And keep them?’

He spoke hesitantly. ‘It would suggest that, yes. But, Christine, I want you to be prepared for the fact that the effect may well be temporary. We won’t know until tomorrow.’

‘When I wake up?’

‘Yes. It’s entirely possible that after you sleep tonight all the memories you have from today will be gone. All the new ones, and all the old ones.’

‘It might be exactly the same as when I woke up this morning?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It might.’

That I might wake up and have forgotten Adam and Ben seemed too much to contemplate. It felt like it would be a living death.

‘But—’ I began.

‘Keep your journal, Christine,’ he said. ‘You still have it?’

I shook my head. ‘He burned it. That’s what caused the fire.’

Dr Nash looked disappointed. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t really matter. Christine, you’ll be fine. You can begin another. The people who love you have come back to you.’

‘But I want to have come back to them, too,’ I said. ‘I want to have come back to them.’

We talked for a little while longer, but he was keen to leave me with my family. I know he was only trying to prepare me for the worst — for the possibility that I will wake up tomorrow with no idea where I am, or who this man sitting next to me is, or who the person is who is claiming to be my son — but I have to believe that he is wrong. That my memory is back. I have to believe that.

I look at my sleeping husband, silhouetted in the dim room. I remember us meeting, that night of the party, the night I watched the fireworks with Claire on the roof. I remember him asking me to marry him, on holiday in Verona, and the rush of excitement I’d felt as I said yes. And our wedding too, our marriage, our life. I remember it all. I smile.

‘I love you,’ I whisper, and I close my eyes, and I sleep.

This book was inspired in part by the lives of several amnesiac patients, most notably Henry Gustav Molaison and Clive Wearing, whose story has been told by his wife Deborah Wearing in her book Forever Today — A Memoir of Love and Amnesia .

However, events in Before I Go to Sleep are entirely fictitious.