Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel

have used the bar, or found the ring, for weeks. But still, it was not an unromantic story.

‘Who did I share a house with?’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t really remember. A friend. Anyway, we got married the following year. In a church in Manchester, near where your mother lived. It was a lovely day. I was training to be a teacher by then, so we didn’t have much money, but it was still lovely. The sun shone, everyone was happy. And then we went for our honeymoon. To Italy. The lakes. It was wonderful.’

I tried to picture the church, my dress, the view from a hotel room. Nothing would come.

‘I don’t remember any of it,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He looked away, turning his head so that I couldn’t see his face. ‘It doesn’t matter. I understand.’

‘There aren’t many photographs,’ I said. ‘In the scrapbook, I mean. There aren’t any photos of us from our wedding.’

‘We had a fire,’ he said. ‘In the last place we were living.’

‘A fire?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Our house pretty much burned down. We lost a lot of things.’

I sighed. It didn’t seem fair, to have lost both my memories and my souvenirs of the past.

‘What happened then?’

‘Then?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What happened? After the marriage, the honeymoon?’

‘We moved in together. We were very happy.’

‘And then?’

He sighed, and said nothing. That can’t be it, I thought. That can’t describe my whole life. That can’t be all I amounted to. A wedding, a honeymoon, a marriage. But what else was I expecting? What else could there have been?

The answer came suddenly. Children. Babies. I realized with a shudder that that was what seemed to be missing from my life, from our home. There were no pictures on the mantelpiece of a son or daughter — clutching a degree certificate, white-water rafting, even just posing, bored, for the camera — and none of grandchildren either. I had not had a baby.

I felt the slap of disappointment. The unsatisfied desire was burned into my subconscious. Even though I had woken up not even knowing how old I was, some part of me must have known I had wanted to have a child.

Suddenly I heard my own mother, describing the biological clock as if it were a bomb. ‘Get busy achieving all the things in life you want to achieve,’ she said, ‘because one day you’ll be fine and the next …’

I knew what she meant: boom! My ambitions would disappear and all I would want to do was have children. ‘It’s what happened to me,’ she said. ‘It’ll happen to you. It happens to everyone.’

But it hadn’t, I suppose. Or something else had happened instead. I looked at my husband.

‘Ben?’ I said. ‘What then?’

He looked at me and squeezed my hand.

‘Then you lost your memory,’ he said.

My memory. It all came back to that, in the end. Always.

I looked out across the city. The sun hung low in the sky, shining weakly through the clouds, casting long shadows on the grass. I realized that it would be dark soon. The sun would set, finally, the moon rise in the sky. Another day would end. Another lost day.

‘We never had children,’ I said. It was not a question.

He didn’t answer, but turned to look at me. He held my hands in his, rubbing them, as if against the cold.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No. We didn’t.’

Sadness etched his face. For himself, or me? I could not tell. I let him rub my hands, hold my fingers between his. I realized that, despite the confusion, I felt safe there, with this man. I could see that he was kind, and thoughtful, and patient. No matter how awful my situation, it could be so much worse.

‘Why?’ I said.

He said nothing. He looked at me, the expression on his face one of pain. Pain, and disappointment.

‘How did it happen, Ben?’ I said. ‘How did I get to be like this?’

I felt him tense. ‘You’re sure you want to know?’ he said.

I fixed my eyes on a little girl riding a tricycle in the distance. I knew this couldn’t be the first time I have asked him this question, the first time he has had to explain these things to me. Possibly I ask him every day.

‘Yes,’ I said. I realized this time is different. This time I will write down what he tells me.

He took a deep breath. ‘It was December. Icy. You’d been out for the day, at work. You were on your way home, a short walk. There were no witnesses. We don’t know if you were crossing the road at the time or if the car that hit you mounted the pavement, but either way you must have gone over the bonnet. You were very badly injured. Both legs were broken. An arm and your collarbone.’

He stopped talking. I could hear the low beat of the city. Traffic, a plane overhead, the murmur of the wind in the trees. Ben squeezed my hand.

‘They said your head must have hit the ground first, which is why you lost your memory.’

I closed my eyes. I could remember nothing of the accident, and so did not feel angry, or even upset. I was filled instead with a kind of quiet regret. An emptiness. A ripple across the surface of the lake of memory.

He squeezed my hand, and I put mine over his, feeling the cold, hard band of his wedding ring. ‘You were lucky to survive,’ he said.

I felt myself go cold. ‘What happened to the driver?’

‘He didn’t stop. It was a hit-and-run. We don’t know who hit you.’

‘But who would do that?’ I said. ‘Who would run someone over and then just drive away?’

He said nothing. I didn’t know what I had expected. I thought of what I had read of my meeting with Dr Nash. A neurological problem, he had told me. Structural or chemical. A hormonal imbalance. I assumed he had meant an illness. Something that had just happened, had come out of nowhere. One of those things.

But this seemed worse; it was done to me by someone else, it had been avoidable. If I had taken a different route home that evening — or if the driver of the car that hit me had done so — I would have still been normal. I might even have been a grandmother by now, just.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why?’

It was not a question he could answer, and so Ben said nothing. We sat in silence for a while, our hands locked together. It grew dark. The city was bright, the buildings lit. It will be winter soon, I thought. We will soon be halfway through November. December will follow, and then Christmas. I couldn’t imagine how I would get from here to there. I couldn’t imagine living through a whole string of identical days.

‘Shall we go?’ said Ben. ‘Back home?’

I didn’t answer him. ‘Where was I?’ I said. ‘The day that I was hit by the car. What had I been doing?’

‘You were on your way home from work,’ he said.

‘What job, though? What was I doing?’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You had a temporary job as a secretary — well, personal assistant really — at some lawyers, I think it was.’

‘But why—’ I began.

‘You needed to work so that we could pay the mortgage,’ he said. ‘It was tough, for a while.’

That wasn’t what I meant, though. What I wanted to say was, You told me I had a Ph.D. Why had I settled for that?

‘But why was I working as a secretary?’ I said.

‘It was the only job you could get. Times were hard.’

I remembered the feeling I had earlier. ‘Was I writing?’ I said. ‘Books?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

So it was a transitory ambition, then. Or maybe I had tried, and failed. As I turned to ask him the clouds lit up and, a moment later, there was a loud bang. Startled, I looked out; sparks in the distant sky, raining down on the city below.

‘What was that?’ I said.