Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel

I am shaking, can barely breathe. I feel that I have not only lived an entire life in the last few hours, but I have changed. I am not the same person who met Dr Nash this morning, who sat down to read the journal. I have a past now. A sense of myself. I know what I have, and what I have lost. I realize I am crying.

I close the journal. I force myself to calm down, and the present begins to reassert itself. The darkening room in which I sit. The drilling I can still hear in the street outside. The empty coffee cup at my feet.

I look at the clock next to me and there is a jolt of shock. Only now do I realize that it is the same clock as the one in the journal that I have been reading, that I am in the same living room, am the same person. Only now do I fully understand that the story I have been reading is mine.

I take my journal and mug into the kitchen. There, on the wall, is the same wipe-clean board I had seen this morning, the same list of suggestions in neat capitals, the same note that I had added myself: Pack bag for tonight?

I look at it. Something about it troubles me, but I can’t work out why.

I think of Ben. How difficult life must have been for him. Never knowing with whom he would wake. Never being certain how much I would remember, how much love I would be able to give him.

But now? Now I understand. Now I know enough for us to both live again. I wonder if I ever had the conversation with him that I had been planning. I must have, so certain was I that it was the right thing to do, but I have not written about it. I have written nothing for a week, in fact. Perhaps I gave my journal to Dr Nash before I had the opportunity. Perhaps I felt there was no need to write in my book, now that I had shared it with Ben.

I turn back to the front of the journal. There it is, in the same blue ink. Those three words, scratched on to the page beneath my name. Don’t trust Ben.

I take a pen and cross them out. Back in the living room I see the scrapbook on the table. Still there are no photographs of Adam. Still he didn’t mention him to me this morning. Still he hasn’t shown me what is in the metal box.

I think of my novel — For the Morning Birds — and then look at the journal I am holding. A thought comes, unbidden. What if I made it all up?

I stand up. I need evidence. I need a link between what I have read and what I am living, a sign that the past I have been reading about is not one I have invented.

I put the journal in my bag and go out of the living room. The coat stand is there, at the bottom of the stairs, next to a pair of slippers. If I go upstairs will I find the office, the filing cabinet? Will I find the grey metal box in the bottom drawer, hidden underneath the towel? Will the key be in the bottom drawer by the bed?

And, if it is, will I find my son?

I have to know. I take the stairs two at a time.

*

The office is smaller than I imagined and even tidier than I expected, but the cabinet is there, gun-metal grey.

In the bottom drawer is a towel, and beneath it a box. I grip it, preparing to lift it out. I feel stupid, convinced it will be either locked or empty.

It is neither. In it I find my novel. Not the copy Dr Nash had given to me — there was no coffee ring on the front and the pages of this look new. It must be one Ben has been keeping all along. Waiting for the day when I know enough to own it again. I wonder where my copy is, the one that Dr Nash gave to me.

I take the novel out and underneath it is a single photograph. Me and Ben, smiling at the camera, though we both look sad. It looks recent, my face is the one I recognize from the mirror and Ben looks as he did when he left this morning. There is a house in the background, a gravel driveway, pots of bright-red geraniums. On the back someone has written Waring House. It must have been taken on the day he collected me, to bring me back here.

That’s it, though. There are no other photographs. None of Adam. Not even the ones I have found here before and described in my journal.

There is an explanation, I tell myself. There has to be. I look through the papers that are piled on the desk: magazines, catalogues advertising computer software, a school timetable with some sessions highlighted in yellow. There is a sealed envelope — which, on an impulse, I take — but there are no photographs of Adam.

I go downstairs and make myself a drink. Boiling water, a teabag. Don’t let it stew too long, and don’t compress the bag with the back of the spoon or you’ll squeeze out too much tannic acid and the tea will be bitter. Why do I remember this yet I don’t remember giving birth? A phone rings, somewhere in the living room. I retrieve it — not the one that flips open, but the one that my husband gave to me — from my bag and answer it. Ben.

‘Christine? Are you OK? Are you at home?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes. Thank you.’

‘Have you been out today?’ he says. His voice sounds familiar, yet somehow cold. I think back to the last time we spoke. I don’t remember him mentioning that I had an appointment with Dr Nash. Perhaps he really doesn’t know, I think. Or perhaps he is testing me, wondering whether I will tell him. I think of the note written next to the appointment. Don’t tell Ben. I must have written that before I knew I could trust him.

I want to trust him now. No more lies.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’ve been to see a doctor.’ He doesn’t speak. ‘Ben?’ I say.

‘Sorry, yes,’ he says. ‘I heard.’ I register his lack of surprise. So he had known then, known that I was seeing Dr Nash. ‘I’m in traffic,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit tricky. Listen, I just wanted to make sure you’ve remembered to pack? We’re going away …’

‘Of course,’ I say, and then I add, ‘I’m looking forward to it!’ and I realize I am. It will do us good, I think, to get away. It can be another beginning for us.

‘I’ll be home soon,’ he says. ‘Can you try to have our bags packed? I’ll help when I get in, but it’d be better if we can set off early.’

‘I’ll try,’ I say.

‘There’re two bags in the spare bedroom. In the wardrobe. Use those.’

‘OK.’

‘I love you,’ he says, and then, after a moment too long, a moment in which he has already ended the call, I tell him that I love him too.

I go to the bathroom. I am a woman, I tell myself. An adult. I have a husband. One I love. I think back to what I have read. Of the sex. Of him fucking me. I had not written that I enjoyed it.

Can I enjoy sex? I realize I don’t even know that. I flush the toilet and step out of my trousers, my tights, my knickers. I sit on the edge of the bath. How alien my body is. How unknown to me. How can I be happy giving it to someone else, when I don’t recognize it myself?

I lock the bathroom door, then part my legs. Slightly at first, then more. I lift my blouse and look down. I see the stretch marks I saw the day I remembered Adam, the wiry shock of my pubic hair. I wonder if I ever shave it, whether I choose not to based on my preference or my husband’s. Perhaps those things don’t matter any more. Not now.

I cup my hand and place it over my pubic mound. My fingers rest on my labia, parting them slightly. I brush the tip of what must be my clitoris and press, moving my fingers gently as I do, already feeling a faint tingle. The promise of sensation, rather than sensation itself.

I wonder what will happen, later.

The bags are in the spare room, where he said they would be. Both are compact, sturdy, one a little larger than the other. I take them through, into the bedroom in which I woke this morning, and put them on the bed. I open the top drawer and see my underwear, next to his.

I select clothes for us both, socks for him, tights for me. I remember reading of the night we had sex and