could hear the ticking of the clock downstairs, its chimes as it marked the hours, Ben’s gentle snores. I could feel the fabric of the duvet cover on my chest, see nothing but the glow of the alarm clock by my side. I turned on my back and closed my eyes. All I could see was myself, with hands clamped tight around my throat so that I could not breathe. All I could hear was my own voice, echoing. I am going to die.
I thought of my journal. Would it help to write more? To read it again? Could I really take it from its hiding place without waking Ben?
He lay, barely visible in the shadows. You are lying to me, I thought. Because he is. Lying about my novel, about Adam. And now I feel certain he is lying about how I came to be here, trapped, like this.
I wanted to shake him awake. I wanted to scream,
And what else is there, that I do not know?
My thoughts turned from my journal to the metal box, the one in which Ben keeps the photos of Adam. Maybe there will be more answers in there, I thought. Maybe I will find the truth.
I decided to get out of bed. I folded the duvet back so that I didn’t wake my husband. I grabbed my journal from its hiding place and crept, barefoot, on to the landing. The house felt different now, sheened in the bluish moonlight. Frozen, and still.
I pulled the bedroom door closed behind me, a soft scrape of wood on carpet, a subtle click as it shut. There, on the landing, I skimmed through what I had written. I read about Ben telling me I was hit by a car. I read about him denying I had written a novel. I read about our son.
I had to see a photograph of Adam. But where would I look? ‘I keep these upstairs,’ he had said. ‘For safety.’ I knew that. I had written it down. But where, exactly? The spare bedroom? The office? How would I begin to look for something I could not recall ever seeing before?
I put the journal back where I had found it and went into the office, closing that door behind me too. Moonlight shone through the window, casting a greyish glow around the room. I didn’t dare to switch on the light, couldn’t risk Ben finding me in there, searching. He would ask me what I was looking for, and I had nothing to tell him, no reason to give for being in there. There would be too many questions to answer.
The box was metal, I had written, and grey. I looked on the desk first. A tiny computer with an impossibly flat screen, pens and pencils in a mug, papers arranged in tidy piles, a ceramic paperweight in the shape of a seahorse. Above the desk was a wall planner, dotted with coloured stickers, circles and stars. Under the desk was a leather satchel and a wastepaper basket, both empty, and next to it a filing cabinet.
I looked there first. I pulled out the top drawer slowly, quietly. It was full of papers, in files labelled
A blanket, or a towel; it was difficult to tell in the dim light. I raised one corner, felt beneath, touched cold metal. I pulled it out. Underneath was the metal box, larger than I had imagined it, so big it almost filled the drawer. I manoeuvred my hands around it and realized it was heavier than I expected, too, and I almost dropped it as I lifted it out and set it on the floor.
The box sat in front of me. For a moment I didn’t know what I wanted to do, whether I even wanted to open it. What new shocks might it contain? Like memory itself, it might hold truths that I couldn’t even begin to conceive of. Unimagined dreams and unexpected horrors. I was afraid. But, I realized, these truths are all I have. They are my past. They are what makes me human. Without them I am nothing. Nothing but an animal.
I breathed deeply, closing my eyes as I did so, and began to lift the lid.
It moved a little way but no further. I tried it again, thinking it was jammed, and then once more, before I realized. It was locked. Ben had locked it.
I tried to remain calm, but an anger came then, unbidden. Who was he to have locked this box of memories? To keep me from what was mine?
The key would be near, I was sure of it. I looked in the drawer. I opened out the towel and shook it loose. I stood up, tipped the pens and pencils out of the mug on the desk, and looked in there. Nothing.
Desperate, I searched the other drawers as well as I could in the half-light. I could find no key, and realized it might be anywhere. Anywhere at all. I sank to my knees.
A sound, then. A creak, so quiet I thought it might be my own body. But then another noise. Breathing. Or a sigh.
A voice. Ben’s. ‘Christine?’ it said, and then, louder, ‘Christine!’
What to do? I was sitting there, in his office, with the metal box that Ben thinks I have no memory of on the floor in front of me. I began to panic. A door opened, the landing light flicked on, illuminating the crack around the door. He was coming.
I moved quickly. I put the box back and, sacrificing silence for speed, slammed the drawer closed.
‘Christine?’ he said again. Footsteps on the landing. ‘Christine, love? It’s me. Ben.’ I shoved the pens and pencils back in the mug on the desk and then sank to the floor. The door began to open.
I didn’t know what I was about to do until I did it. I reacted instinctively, from a level lower than gut.
‘Help me!’ I said as he appeared at the open door. He was silhouetted against the light on the landing and for a moment I really did feel the terror that I was affecting. ‘Please! Help me!’
He switched on the light and came towards me. ‘Christine! What’s wrong?’ he said. He began to crouch down.
I skirted back, away from him, until I was pressed against the wall under the window. ‘Who are you?’ I said. I found I had begun to cry, to shake hysterically. I clawed at the wall behind me, clutched at the curtain that hung above me as if trying to pull myself upright. Ben stayed where he was, on the other side of the room. He held out his hand to me, as if I was dangerous, a wild animal.
‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Your husband.’
‘My what?’ I said, and then, ‘What’s happening to me?’
‘You have amnesia,’ he said. ‘We’ve been married for years.’ And then, as he made me the cup of cocoa that still sits in front of me, I let him tell me, from scratch, what I already knew.
That happened in the early hours of Saturday morning. Today is Sunday. Midday, or thereabouts. A whole day has gone, unrecorded. Twenty-four hours, lost. Twenty-four hours spent believing everything Ben told me. Believing that I have never written a novel, never had a son. Believing it was an accident that robbed me of my past.
Maybe, unlike today, Dr Nash didn’t call, and I didn’t find this journal. Or perhaps he did but I chose not to read it. I feel a chill. What would happen if one day he decides never to call again? I would never find it, never read it, never even know it existed. I would not know my past.
It would be unthinkable. I know that now. My husband is telling me one version of how I came to have no memory, my feelings another. I wonder if I have ever asked Dr Nash what happened. Even if I have, can I believe what he says? The only truth I have is what is written in this journal.
Written by me. I must remember that. Written by me.
I think back to this morning. I remember the sun slammed through the curtains, waking me suddenly. My eyes flicked open on an unfamiliar scene and I was confused. Yet, though particular events didn’t come to me, I had the sense of looking back on a wealth of history, not just a few short years. And I knew, however dimly, that that history contained a child of my own. In that fraction of a second before I was fully conscious, I knew that I was a mother. That I had borne a child, that mine was no longer the only body that I had a duty to nurture and protect.
I turned over, aware of another body in the bed, an arm draped over my waist. I didn’t feel alarmed, but secure. Happy. I woke more fully and the images and feelings began to coalesce into truth and memory. First I saw my little boy, heard myself calling his name — Adam — and saw him running towards me. And then I remembered
