Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel

‘Did you?’ I asked, desperate. ‘It’s just … it’s important.’

‘Let’s think,’ he said. I imagined him closing his eyes, biting his bottom lip in a parody of concentration. ‘I suppose I might have done, once,’ he said. ‘Very briefly. It was years ago. I forget …’ A pause, then, ‘Yes. Actually, yes. I think I probably did. For a week or so. A long time ago.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, relieved. The ground on which I stood felt a little more secure.

‘You OK?’ he asked, and I said that I was.

Dr Nash picked me up at midday. He’d told me to have some lunch first, but I wasn’t hungry. Nervous, I suppose. ‘We’re meeting a colleague of mine,’ he said in the car. ‘Dr Paxton.’ I said nothing. ‘He’s an expert in the field of functional imaging of patients with problems like yours. We’ve been working together.’

‘OK,’ I said, and now we sat in his car, stationary in stuck traffic. ‘Did I call you yesterday?’ I asked. He said that I had.

‘You read your journal?’

‘Most of it. I skipped bits. It’s already quite long.’

He seemed interested. ‘What sections did you skip?’

I thought for a moment. ‘There are parts that seem familiar to me. I suppose they feel as if they’re just reminding me of things I already know. Already remember …’

‘That’s good.’ He glancied at me. ‘Very good.’

I felt a glow of pleasure. ‘So what did I call about? Yesterday?’

‘You wanted to know if you’d really written a novel,’ he said.

‘And had I? Have I?’

He turned back to me. He was smiling. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, you have.’

The traffic moved again and we pulled away. I felt relief. I knew what I had written was true. I relaxed into the journey.

Dr Paxton was older than I expected. He was wearing a tweed jacket, and white hair sprouted unchecked from his ears and nose. He looked as though he ought to have retired.

‘Welcome to the Vincent Hall Imaging Centre,’ he said once Dr Nash had introduced us, and then, without taking his eyes off mine, he winked and shook my hand. ‘Don’t worry,’ he added. ‘It’s not as grand as it sounds. Here, come in. Let me show you round.’

We made our way into the building. ‘We’re attached to the hospital and the university here,’ he said as we went through the main entrance. ‘Which can be both a blessing and a curse.’ I didn’t know what he meant and waited for him to elaborate, but he said nothing. I smiled.

‘Really?’ I said. He was trying to help me. I wanted to be polite.

‘Everyone wants us to do everything.’ He laughed. ‘No one wants to pay us for any of it.’

We walked through into a waiting room. It was dotted with empty chairs, copies of the same magazines Ben has left for me at home — Radio Times, Hello!, now joined by Country Life and Marie Claire — and discarded plastic cups. It looked like there had recently been a party that everyone had left in a hurry. Dr Paxton paused at another door. ‘Would you like to see the control room?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Please.’

‘Functional MRI is a fairly new technique,’ he said, once we’d gone through. ‘Have you heard of MRI? Magnetic Resonance Imaging?’

We were standing in a small room, lit only by the ghostly glow from a bank of computer monitors. One wall was taken up by a window, beyond which was another room, dominated by a large cylindrical machine, a bed protruding from it like a tongue. I began to feel afraid. I knew nothing of this machine. Without memory, how could I?

‘No,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘I’m sorry. MRI is a fairly standard procedure. It’s a little like taking an X-ray through the body. Here we’re using some of the same techniques but actually looking at how the brain works. At function.’

Dr Nash spoke then — the first time in a while he had done so — and his voice sounded small, almost timid. I wondered whether he was in awe of Dr Paxton, or was desperate to impress him.

‘If someone has a brain tumour then we need to scan their head to find out where the tumour is, what part of the brain is affected. That’s looking at structure. What functional MRI allows us to see is which part of the brain you use when you do certain tasks. We want to see how your brain processes memory.’

‘Which parts light up, as it were,’ said Paxton. ‘Where the juices are flowing.’

‘That will help?’ I asked.

‘We hope it will help us to identify where the damage is,’ said Dr Nash. ‘What’s gone wrong. What’s not working properly.’

‘And that will help me to get my memory back?’

He paused, and then said, ‘We hope so.’

I took off my wedding ring and my earrings and put them in a plastic tray. ‘You’ll need to leave your bag in here, too,’ said Dr Paxton, and then he asked me if I had anything else pierced. ‘You’d be surprised, my dear,’ he said when I shook my head. ‘Now, she’s a bit of a noisy old beast. You’ll need these.’ He handed me some yellow earplugs. ‘Ready?’

I hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’ Fear was beginning to creep over me. The room seemed to shrink and darken, and through the glass the scanner itself loomed. I had the sense I had seen it before, or one just like it. ‘I’m not sure about this,’ I said.

Dr Nash came over to me then. He placed his hand on my arm.

‘It’s completely painless,’ he said. ‘Just a little noisy.’

‘It’s safe?’

‘Perfectly. I’ll be here, just on this side of the glass. We’ll be able to see you all the way through.’

I must have still looked unsure, because then Dr Paxton added, ‘Don’t worry. You’re in safe hands, my dear. Nothing will go wrong.’ I looked at him, and he smiled and said, ‘You might want to think of your memories as being lost, somewhere in your mind. All we’re doing with this machine is trying to find out where they are.’

It was cold, despite the blanket they had wrapped around me, and dark, except for a red light blinking in the room and a mirror, hung from a frame a couple of inches above my head, angled to reflect the image of a computer screen that sat somewhere else. As well as the earplugs I was wearing a set of headphones through which they said they would talk to me, but for now they were silent. I could hear nothing but a distant hum, the sound of my breathing, hard and heavy, the dull thud of my heartbeat.

In my right hand I clutched a plastic bulb filled with air. ‘Squeeze it, if you need to tell us anything,’ Dr Paxton had said. ‘We won’t be able to hear you if you speak.’ I caressed its rubbery surface and waited. I wanted to close my eyes, but they had told me to keep them open, to look at the screen. Foam wedges kept my head perfectly still; I could not have moved, even if I’d wanted to. The blanket over me, like a shroud.

A moment of stillness, and then a click. So loud that I started, despite the earplugs, and it was followed by another, and a third. A deep noise, from within the machine or my head. I couldn’t tell. A lumbering beast, waking, the moment of silence before the attack. I clutched the rubber bulb, determined that I would not squeeze it, and then a noise, like an alarm or a drill, over and over again, impossibly loud, so loud that the whole of my body shook with each new shock. I closed my eyes.

A voice in my ear. ‘Christine,’ it said. ‘Can you open your eyes, please?’ They could see me then, somehow. ‘Don’t worry, it’s all fine.’

Fine? I thought. What do they know about fine? What do they know about what it’s like to be me, lying here, in a city I don’t remember, with people I’ve never met? I am floating, I thought, completely without anchor, at the mercy of the wind.

A different voice. Dr Nash’s. ‘Can you look at the pictures? Think what they are, say it, but only to yourself. Don’t say anything out loud.’