Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel

I opened my eyes. Above me, in the little mirror, were drawings, one after the other, white on black. A man. A ladder. A chair. A hammer. I named each one as it came, and then the screen flashed the words Thank you! Now relax! and I said that to myself, too, to keep myself busy, wondering at the same time how anyone could relax in the belly of a machine like this.

More instructions flashed on the screen. Recall a past event, it said, and then beneath it flashed the words, A party.

I closed my eyes.

I tried to think of the party I had remembered as Ben and I watched the fireworks. I tried to picture myself on the roof next to my friend, to hear the noise of the party beneath us, to taste the fireworks on the air.

Images came, but they did not seem real. I could tell I was not remembering but inventing them.

I tried to see Keith, to remember him ignoring me, but nothing would come. Those memories were lost again to me. Buried, as if for ever, though now at least I know that they exist, that they are in there somewhere, locked away.

My mind turned to childhood parties. Birthdays, with my mother and aunt and my cousin Lucy. Twister. Pass- the-parcel. Musical chairs. Musical statues. My mother with bags of sweets to wrap up as prizes. Sandwiches of potted meat and fish paste with the crusts removed. Trifle and jelly.

I remembered a white dress with frills at the sleeves, frilled socks, black shoes. My hair is still blonde, and I am sitting at a table in front of a cake, with candles. I take a deep breath, lean forward, blow. Smoke rises in the air.

Memories of another party crowded in then. I saw myself at home, looking out of my bedroom window. I am naked, about seventeen. There are trestle tables out in the street, arranged in long rows, loaded with trays of sausage rolls and sandwiches, jugs of orange squash. Union Jacks are everywhere, bunting hangs from every window. Blue. Red. White.

There are children in fancy dress — pirates, wizards, Vikings — and the adults are trying to organize them into teams for an egg-and-spoon race. I can see my mother on the other side of the street fastening a cape around Matthew Soper’s neck and, just below my window, my father sits in a deckchair with a glass of juice.

‘Come back to bed,’ says a voice. I turn round. Dave Soper sits in my single bed, underneath my poster of The Slits. The white sheet is twisted around him, spattered with blood. I had not told him it was my first time.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Get up! You have to get dressed before my parents come back!’

He laughs, though not unkindly. ‘Come on!’

I pull on my jeans. ‘No,’ I say, reaching for a T-shirt. ‘Get up. Please?’

He looks disappointed. I didn’t think this would happen — which doesn’t mean I didn’t want it to — and now I would like to be alone. It is not about him at all.

‘OK,’ he says, standing up. His body looks pale and skinny, his penis almost absurd. I look away as he dresses, out of the window. My world has changed, I think. I have crossed a line, and I cannot go back. ‘Bye, then,’ he says, but I don’t speak. I don’t look back until he has left.

A voice in my ear brought me back to the present. ‘Good. More pictures now, Christine,’ said Dr Paxton. ‘Just look at each one and tell yourself what, or who, it is. OK? Ready?’

I swallowed hard. What would they show me? Who? How bad could it be?

Yes, I thought to myself, and we began.

The first photograph was black and white. A child — a girl, four, five years old — in the arms of a woman. The girl was pointing to something, and they were both laughing, and in the background, slightly out of focus, was a fence with a tiger resting on the other side of it. A mother, I thought to myself. A daughter. At a zoo. And then with a shock of recognition I looked at the child’s face and realized that the little girl was me, the mother my own. Breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t remember ever going to a zoo, yet here we were, here was evidence that we had. Me, I said silently, remembering what I had been told. Mother. I stared at the screen, trying to burn her image into my memory, but the picture faded and was replaced by another, also of my mother, now older, yet not seeming old enough to need the walking stick on which she is leaning. She was smiling but looked exhausted, her eyes sunk deep in her thin face. My mother, I thought again, and other words came, unbidden: in pain. I closed my eyes involuntarily, had to force them open again. I began to grip the bulb in my hand.

The images came quickly then, and I recognized only a few. One was of the friend I had seen in my memory, and with a thrill I recognized her almost straight away. She looked as I had imagined her, dressed in old blue jeans and a T-shirt, smoking, her red hair loose and untidy. Another picture showed her with her hair cut short and dyed black, and a pair of sunglasses pushed high on her head. It was followed by a photograph of my father — the way he looked when I was a little girl, smiling, happy, reading a newspaper in our front room — and then one of me and Ben, standing with another couple I didn’t recognize.

Other photos were of strangers. A black woman in a nurse’s uniform, another woman dressed in a suit, sitting in front of a bookcase, peering over the top of her half-moon glasses with a grave expression. A man with ginger hair and a round face, another with a beard. A child, six or seven, a boy eating an ice cream and then, later, the same boy, sitting at a desk, drawing. A group of people, arranged loosely, looking at the camera. A man, attractive, his hair black and slightly longish, with a pair of dark-rimmed glasses framing narrowed eyes and a scar running down the side of his face. They went on and on, these photographs, and as they did so I looked at them all, and tried to place them, to remember how — or even whether — they were woven into the tapestry of my life. I did as I had been asked. I was good, and yet I felt myself begin to panic. The whirr of the machine seemed to rise in pitch and volume until it became an alarm, a warning, and my stomach clenched. I could not breathe, and I closed my eyes, and the weight of the blanket began to press down on me, heavy as a marble slab, so that it felt like I was drowning.

I squeezed my right hand, but it balled itself into a fist, closing on nothing. Nails bit into flesh; I had dropped the bulb. I called out, a wordless cry.

‘Christine,’ came a voice in my ear. ‘Christine.’

I couldn’t tell who it was, or what they wanted me to do, and I cried out again, and began kicking the blanket off my body.

‘Christine!’

Louder now, and then the siren noise whirred to a halt, a door crashed open, and there were voices in the room, and hands on me, on my arms and legs, and across my chest, and I opened my eyes.

‘It’s OK,’ said Dr Nash in my ear. ‘You’re OK. I’m here.’

Once they’d calmed me down with reassurances that everything was fine — and given me back my handbag, my earrings and my wedding ring — Dr Nash and I went to a coffee bar. It was along the corridor, small, with orange plastic chairs and yellowing Formica-topped tables. Trays of tired pastries and sandwiches sat wilting in the harsh light. I had no money in my purse, but I let Dr Nash buy me a cup of coffee and a piece of carrot cake and then selected a seat by the window while he paid. Outside was sunny, the shadows long in the courtyard of grass. Purple flowers dotted the lawn.

Dr Nash scraped his chair under the table. He seemed much more relaxed, now that the two of us were alone together. ‘There you go,’ he said, setting the tray in front of me. ‘Hope that’s OK.’

I saw that he had selected tea for himself; the bag still floated in the syrupy liquid as he added sugar from the bowl in the centre of the table. I took a sip of my drink, and grimaced. It was bitter, and too hot.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, after a moment. At first I thought he was talking about the coffee. ‘I had no idea that you would find it so distressing in there.’

‘It’s claustrophobic,’ I said. ‘And noisy.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘I dropped the emergency button.’

He said nothing, but instead stirred his drink. He fished the teabag out and deposited it on the tray. He took a sip.