Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel

This morning I asked Ben if he’d ever grown a moustache. I was still feeling confused, unsure of what was true and what not. I had woken early and, unlike previous days, had not thought I was still a child. I had felt adult. Sexual. The question in my mind was not Why am I in bed with a man? but instead, Who is he? and What did we do? In the bathroom I looked at my reflection with horror, but the pictures around it seemed to resonate with truth. I saw the man’s name — Ben — and it was familiar, somehow. My age, my marriage, these facts seemed to be things I was being reminded of, not told about for the first time. Buried, but not deeply.

Dr Nash called me almost as soon as Ben left for work. He reminded me about my journal and then — once he had told me that he would be picking me up later to take me for my scan — I read it. There were a few things in it I could perhaps recall, and maybe whole passages I could remember writing. It was as if some residue of memory had survived the night.

Perhaps that was why I had to be sure the things contained within it were true. I called Ben.

‘Ben,’ I said, once he’d told me he wasn’t busy. ‘Did you ever have a moustache?’

‘That’s an odd question!’ he said. I heard the clink of a spoon against a cup and pictured him spooning sugar into his coffee, a newspaper spread in front of him. I felt awkward. Unsure how much to say.

‘I just—’ I began. ‘I had a memory, I think.’

Silence. ‘A memory?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’ My mind flashed on the things I had written about the other day — his moustache, his naked body, his erection — and those I had remembered yesterday. The two of us in bed. Kissing. Briefly they were illuminated, before sinking back into the depths. Suddenly I felt afraid. ‘I just seem to remember you with a moustache.’

He laughed, and I heard him put down his drink. I felt solid ground begin to slip away. Maybe everything I had written was a lie. I am a novelist, after all, I thought. Or I used to be.

The futility of my logic hit me. I used to write fiction, therefore my assertion that I had been a novelist might be one of those fictions. In which case I had not written fiction. My head spun.

It had felt true, though. I told myself that. Plus I could touch-type. Or I had written that I could …

‘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.’

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.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘Difficult to say. You panicked. It’s not that uncommon. It isn’t comfortable in there, as you said.’

I looked down at my slice of cake. Untouched. Dry. ‘The photographs. Who were they? Where did you get them?’

‘They were a mixture. Some of them I got from your medical files. Ben had donated them, years ago. I asked you to bring a couple from home for the purposes of this exercise — you said they’d been arranged around your mirror. Some I provided — of people you’ve never met. What we call controls. We mixed them all up together. Some of the images were people you knew at a very young age, people you should, or might, remember. Family. Friends from school. The rest were people from the era of your life that you definitely can’t remember. Dr Paxton and I are trying to find out whether there’s a difference in the way you attempt to access memories from these different periods. The strongest reaction was to your husband, of course, but you reacted to others. Even though you don’t remember the people from your past, the patterns of neural excitation are definitely there.’

‘Who was the woman with red hair?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘An old friend, perhaps?’

‘Do you know her name?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t. The photos were in your file. They weren’t labelled.’

I nodded. An old friend. I knew that, of course — it was her name I so wanted.

‘You said that I reacted to the pictures, though?’

‘Some of them, yes.’

‘That’s good?’

‘We’ll need to look at the results in more detail before we really know what conclusions we can draw. This work is very new,’ he said. ‘Experimental.’

‘I see.’ I cut off a corner of the carrot cake. It too was bitter, the icing too sweet. We sat in silence for a while. I offered him my cake and he declined, patting his stomach. ‘Have to watch this!’ he said, even though I could see no reason for him to worry, yet. His stomach was mostly flat, though it looked to be the sort that would develop a paunch. For now, though, he was young, and age had hardly touched him.

I thought of my own body. I am not fat, not even overweight, yet still it surprises me. When I sit it takes a different shape from the one I am expecting. My buttocks sag, my thighs rub as I cross them. I lean forward to reach for my mug and my breasts shift in my bra, as if reminding me that they exist. I shower and feel a slight wobbling of the skin under my arms, barely perceptible. There is more of me than I think, I take up more space than I realize. I am not a little girl, compact, my skin tight on my bones, not even a teenager, my body beginning to layer its fat.

I looked at the uneaten cake and wondered what will happen in the future. Perhaps I will continue to expand. I will grow pudgy and then fat, bloating up and up like a party balloon. Or else I will stay the same size as I am now, never getting used to it, instead watching as the lines on my face deepen and the skin on my hands grows as thin as that of an onion and I turn into an old woman, stage by stage, in the bathroom mirror.

Dr Nash looked down to scratch the top of his head. Through his hair I could see his scalp, more obvious in a circle at the crown. He won’t have noticed that yet, I thought, but one day he will. He will see a photograph of himself taken from behind, or surprise himself in a changing room, or his hairdresser will make a comment, or his girlfriend. Age catches us all out, I thought as he looked up. In differing ways.

‘Oh,’ he said, with a cheeriness that sounded forced. ‘I brought you something. A gift. Well, not really a gift, just something you might like to have.’ He reached down and retrieved his briefcase from the floor. ‘You’ve probably already got a copy,’ he said, opening it. He took out a package. ‘Here you go.’

I knew what it was even as I took it. What else could it be? It felt heavy in my hand. He had wrapped it in a padded envelope, sealed it with tape. My name was written in heavy black marker pen. Christine. ‘It’s your novel,’ he said. ‘The one you wrote.’

I didn’t know what to feel. Evidence, I thought. Proof that what I had written was true, should I need it tomorrow.

Inside the envelope was a single copy of a book. I took it out. It was a paperback, not new. There was a coffee ring on the front and the edges of the pages were yellowed with age. I wondered if Dr Nash had given me his own copy, whether it was even still in print. As I held it I saw myself again as I had the other day; younger, much younger, reaching for this novel in an effort to find a way into the next. Somehow I knew it hadn’t worked — the second novel had never been completed.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

He smiled. ‘Don’t mention it.’

I put it underneath my coat, where, all the way home, it beat like a heart.

As soon as I got back to the house I looked at my novel, but only quickly. I wanted to write as much as I could remember in my journal before Ben came home, but once I’d finished and put it away I hurried back downstairs to look properly at what I had been given.

I turned the book over. On the cover was a pastel drawing of a desk, upon which sat a typewriter. A crow was perched on its carriage, its head cocked to one side, almost as if it were reading the paper threaded there. Above the crow was written my name, and above that, the title.

For the Morning Birds, it said. Christine Lucas.

My hands began to shake as I opened the book. Inside was a title page, a dedication, For my father, and then the words I miss you.

I closed my eyes. A fluttering of memory. I saw my father, lying in a bed under bright white lights, his skin translucent, filmed with sweat so that he almost shone. I saw a tube in his arm, a bag of clear liquid hung from an IV stand, a cardboard tray and a tub of pills. A nurse, checking his pulse, his blood pressure, and he not waking up. My mother, sitting on the other side of his bed, trying not to cry while I tried to force the tears to come.

A smell came then. Cut flowers and low, dirty earth. Sweet and sickly. I saw the day we cremated him. Me wearing black — which I somehow know is not unusual — but this time without make-up. My mother, sitting next to my grandmother. The curtains open, the coffin slides away, and I cry, picturing my father turning to dust. My mother squeezing my hand, and then we go home and drink cheap, fizzy wine and eat sandwiches as the sun goes down and she dissolves in the half-light.

I sighed. The image disappeared, and I opened my eyes. My novel, in front of me.

I turned to the title page, the opening line. It was then, I had written, with the engine whining and her right foot pressed hard against the accelerator pedal, that she let go of the wheel and closed her eyes. She knew what would happen. She knew where it would lead. She always had.

I flicked to the middle of the novel. I read a paragraph there, and then one from near the end.

I had written about a woman called Lou, a man — her husband, I guessed — called George, and the novel seemed to be rooted in a war. I felt disappointed. I don’t know what I had been hoping for — autobiography perhaps? — but it seemed any answers this novel could give me would be limited.

Still, I thought as I turned it over to look at the back cover, I had at least written it, got it published.

Where there might have been an author photograph there was none. Instead there was a short biography.

Christine Lucas was born in 1960, in the north of England, it said. She read English at University College London, and has now settled in that city. This is her first novel.

I smiled to myself, feeling a swell of happiness and pride. I did this. I wanted to read it, to unlock its secrets, but at the same time I did not. I was worried the reality might take my happiness away. Either I would like the novel and feel sad that I would never write another, or I would not, and feel frustrated that I never developed my talent. I couldn’t say which was more likely, but I knew that one day, unable to resist the pull of my only achievement, I would find out. I would make that discovery.

But not today. Today I had something else to discover, something far worse than sadness, more damaging than mere frustration. Something that might rip me apart.

I tried to slip the book back in the envelope. There was something else in there. A note, folded into four, the edges crisp. Dr Nash had written on it: I thought this might interest you!

I unfolded the paper. Across the top he’d written Standard, 1986. Beneath it was a copy of a newspaper article, next to a photograph. I looked at the page for a second or two before I realized that the article was a review of my novel and the picture was of me.

I shook as I held the page. I didn’t know why. This was an artefact from years ago; good or bad, whatever its effects had been they were long gone. It was history now, its ripples vanished completely. But it was important to me. How was my work received, all those years ago? Had I been successful?

I scanned the article, hoping to understand its tone before being forced to analyse the specifics. Words jumped out at me. Positive mostly. Studied. Perceptive. Skilled. Humanity. Brutal.

I looked at the photograph. Black and white, it showed me sitting at a desk, my body angled towards the camera. I am holding myself awkwardly. Something is making me uncomfortable, and I wondered if it was the person behind the camera or the position I am sitting in. Despite this I am smiling. My hair is long and loose, and although the photograph is black and white it seems darker than it is now, as if I have dyed it black, or it is damp. Behind me there are patio doors, and through them, just visible in the corner of the frame, is a leafless tree. There is a caption beneath the photograph. Christine Lucas, at her north London home.

I realized it must be the house I had visited with Dr Nash. For a second I had an almost overwhelming desire to go back there, to take this photograph with me and convince myself that yes, it was true; I had existed, then. It had been me.

But I knew that already, of course. Though I couldn’t remember it any more, I knew that there, standing in the kitchen, I had remembered Ben. Ben, and his bobbing erection.

I smiled and touched the photograph, running my fingertips over it, looking for hidden clues as a blind man might. I traced the edge of my hair, ran my fingers over my face. In the photograph I look uncomfortable, but also radiant in some way. It is as if I am keeping a secret, holding it like a charm. My novel has been published, yes, but there is something else, something more than that.

I looked closely. I could see the swell of my breasts in the loose dress I am wearing, the way I am holding one arm across my stomach. A memory bubbles up from nowhere — me, sitting for the picture, the photographer in front of me behind his tripod, the journalist with whom I have just discussed my work hovering in the kitchen. She calls through, asking how it’s going, and both of us reply with a cheery ‘Fine!’ and laugh. ‘Not long now,’ he says, changing his film. The journalist has lit a cigarette and calls to ask, not if I mind but whether we have an ashtray. I feel annoyed, but only slightly. The truth is I am yearning for a cigarette myself, but I have given up, ever since I found out that—

I looked at the picture again, and I knew. In it, I am pregnant.

My mind stopped for a moment, and then began to race. It tripped over itself, caught on the sharp edges of the realization, the fact that, not only had I been carrying a baby as I sat in the dining room and had my picture taken, but I had known it, was happy about it.

It did not make sense. What had happened? The child ought to be — how old now? Eighteen? Nineteen? Twenty?

But there is no child, I thought. Where is my son?

I felt my world tip again. That word: son. I had thought it, said it to myself with certainty. Somehow, from somewhere deep within me, I knew that the child I had been carrying was a boy.

I gripped the edge of the chair to try to steady myself, and as I did so another word bubbled to the surface and exploded. Adam. I felt my world slip out of one groove and into another.

I had had the child. We called him Adam.

I stood up and the package containing the novel skidded to the floor. My mind raced like a whirring engine that has at last caught, energy ricocheted within me as if desperate for release. He was absent from the scrapbook in the living room. I knew that. I would have remembered seeing a picture of my own child as I leafed through it this morning. I would have asked Ben who he was. I would have written about it in my journal. I crammed the cutting back into the envelope along with the book and ran upstairs. In the bathroom I stood in front of the mirror. I didn’t even glance at my face but looked around it, at the pictures of the past, the photographs that I must use to construct myself when I don’t have memory.

Me and Ben. Me, alone, and Ben, alone. The two of us with another couple, older, who I take to be his parents. Me, much younger, wearing a scarf, petting a dog, smiling happily. But there is no Adam. No baby, no toddler. No photos taken on his first day of school, or at sports day, or on holiday. No pictures of him building castles in the sand. Nothing.

It didn’t make sense. Surely these are pictures that every parent takes and none discards?

They must be here, I thought. I lifted pictures up to see if there were others taped beneath them, layers of history overlain like strata. There was nothing. Nothing but the pale blue tiles on the wall, the smooth glass of the mirror. A blank.

Adam. The name spun in my head. My eyes closed and more memories hit, each one striking violently, shimmering for a moment before disappearing, triggering the next. I saw Adam, his blond hair that I knew would one day turn brown, the Spiderman T-shirt that he insisted on wearing until it was far too small for him and had to be thrown out. I saw him in a pram, sleeping, and remember thinking that he was the most perfect baby, the most perfect thing I had ever seen. I saw him riding a blue bike — a plastic tricycle — and somehow knew that we had bought it for him on his birthday, and that he would ride it everywhere. I saw him in a park, his head hunched over handlebars, grinning as he flew down an incline towards me and, a second later, tipping forward and slamming to the ground as the bike hit something on the path and twisted beneath him. I saw myself holding him as he cried, mopping blood from his face, finding one of his teeth on the ground next to a still-spinning wheel. I saw him showing me a picture he’d painted — a blue strip for the sky, green for the ground and between them three blobby figures and a tiny house — and I saw the toy rabbit that he carried everywhere.

I snapped back to the present, to the bathroom in which I stood, but closed my eyes again. I wanted to remember him at school, or as a teenager, or to picture him with me or his father. But I could not. When I tried to organize my memories they fluttered and vanished, like a feather caught on the wind that changes direction whenever a hand snatches at it. Instead I saw him holding a dripping ice cream, then with liquorice over his face, then sleeping in the back seat of a car. All I could do was watch as these memories came, and then went, just as quickly.

It took all my strength not to tear at the photos in front of me. I wanted to rip them from the wall, looking for evidence of my son. Instead, as if fearing that any movement at all might result in my limbs betraying me, I stood perfectly still in front of the mirror, every muscle in my body tensed.

No photographs on the mantelpiece. No teenage bedroom with posters of pop stars on the wall. No T-shirts in the laundry or amongst the piles of ironing. No tattered training shoes in the cupboard under the stairs. Even if he had left home there would still be some evidence of his existence, surely? Some trace?

But no, he isn’t in this house. With a chill I realized it was as if he didn’t exist, and never had.

I don’t know how long I stood there in the bathroom, looking at his absence. Ten minutes? Twenty? An hour? At some point I heard a key in the front door, the swoosh as Ben wiped his feet on the mat. I didn’t move. He went into the kitchen, then the dining room, and then called upstairs, asking if everything was all right. He sounded anxious, his voice had a nervous fluting to it that I had not heard this morning, but I only mumbled that, yes, yes I was OK. I heard him go into the living room, the television flick on.

Time stopped. My mind emptied of everything. Everything except the need to know what had happened to my son balanced perfectly with a dread of what I might find out.

I hid my novel in the wardrobe and went downstairs.

I stood outside the living-room door. I tried to slow down my breathing but could not; it came in hot gasps. I didn’t know what to say to Ben: how I could tell him that I knew about Adam. He would ask me how, and what would I say then?

It didn’t matter, though. Nothing did. Nothing other than knowing about my son. I closed my eyes and, when I felt as calm as I thought I would ever feel, gently pushed the door open. I felt it slide against the rough carpet.

Ben didn’t hear me. He was sitting on the sofa, watching television, a plate balanced on his lap, half a biscuit on it. I felt a wave of anger. He looked so relaxed and happy, a smile played across his mouth. He began to laugh. I wanted to rush over, to grab him and shout until he told me everything, told me why he had kept my novel from me, why he had hidden evidence of my son. I wanted to demand he give back to me everything that I had lost.

But I knew that would do no good. Instead, I coughed. A tiny, delicate cough. A cough that said I don’t want to disturb you, but …

He saw me and smiled. ‘Darling!’ he said. ‘There you are!’

I stepped into the room. ‘Ben?’ I said. My voice was strained. It sounded alien to me. ‘Ben, I need to talk to you.’

His face melted to anxiety. He stood up and came towards me, the plate sliding to the floor. ‘What is it, love? Are you all right?’

‘No,’ I said. He stopped a metre or so from where I stood. He held out his arms for me to fall into, but I did not.

‘Whatever’s wrong?’

I looked at my husband, at his face. He appeared to be in control, as if he had been here before, was used to these moments of hysteria.

I could go no longer without saying the name of my son. ‘Where’s Adam?’ I said. The words came out in a gasp. ‘Where is he?’

Ben’s expression changed. Surprise? Or shock? He swallowed.

‘Tell me!’ I said.

He took me in his arms. I wanted to push him away, but did not. ‘Christine,’ he said. ‘Please. Calm down. I can explain everything. OK?’

I wanted to tell him that, no, things weren’t OK at all, but I said nothing. I hid my face from him, burying it in the folds of his shirt.

I began to shake. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Please, tell me now.’

We sat on the sofa. Me at one end. Him at the other. It was as close as I wanted us to be.

We’d been talking. For minutes. Hours. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t want him to speak, to say it again, but he did.

‘Adam is dead.’

I felt myself clench. Tight as a mollusc. His words, sharp as razor wire.

I thought of the fly on the windscreen on the way home from my grandmother’s house.

He spoke again. ‘Christine, love. I’m so sorry.’

I felt angry. Angry with him. Bastard, I thought, even though I knew it wasn’t his fault.

I forced myself to speak. ‘How?’

He sighed. ‘Adam was in the army.’

I went numb. Everything receded, until I was left with pain and nothing else. Pain. Reduced to a single point.

A son I did not even know that I had, and he had become a soldier. A thought ran through me. Absurd. What will my mother think?

Ben spoke again, in staccato bursts. ‘He was a Royal Marine. He was stationed in Afghanistan. He was killed. Last year.’

I swallowed, my throat dry.

‘Why?’ I said, and then, ‘How?’

‘Christine—’

‘I want to know,’ I said. ‘I need to know.’

He reached across to take my hand, and I let him, though I was relieved when he moved no closer on the sofa.

‘You don’t want to know everything, surely?’

My anger surged. I couldn’t help it. Anger, and panic. ‘He was my son!’

He looked away, towards the window.

‘He was travelling in an armoured vehicle,’ he said. He spoke slowly, almost whispering. ‘They were escorting troops. There was a bomb, on the roadside. One soldier survived. Adam and one other didn’t.’

I closed my eyes, and my voice dropped to a whisper too. ‘Did he die straight away? Did he suffer?’

Ben sighed. ‘No,’ he said, after a moment. ‘He didn’t suffer. They think it would have been very quick.’

I looked across to where he sat. He didn’t look at me.

You’re lying, I thought.

I saw Adam bleeding to death by a roadside, and pushed the thought out, focusing instead on nothing, on blankness.

My mind began to spin. Questions. Questions that I dared not ask in case the answers killed me. What was he like as a boy, a teenager, a man? Were we close? Did we argue? Was he happy? Was I a good mother?

And, how did the little boy who had ridden a plastic tricycle end up being killed on the other side of the world?

‘What was he doing in Afghanistan?’ I said. ‘Why there?’

Ben told me we were at war. A war against terror, he said, though I don’t know what that means. He said there was an attack, an awful attack, in America. Thousands were killed.

‘And now my boy ends up dead in Afghanistan?’ I said. ‘I don’t understand …’

‘It’s complicated,’ he said. ‘He always wanted to join the army. He thought he was doing his duty.’

‘His duty? Did you think that was what he was doing? His duty? Did I? Why didn’t you persuade him to do something else? Anything?’

‘Christine, it was what he wanted.’

For an awful moment I almost laughed. ‘To get himself killed? Is that what he wanted? Why? I never even knew him.’

Ben was silent. He squeezed my hand, and a single tear rolled down my face, hot as acid, and then another, and then more. I wiped them away, frightened that to start to cry would be never to stop.

I felt my mind begin to close down, to empty itself, to retreat into nothingness. ‘I never even knew him,’ I said.

Later, Ben brought down a box and put it on the coffee table in front of us.

‘I keep these upstairs,’ he said. ‘For safety.’

From what? I thought. The box was grey, made of metal. The kind of box in which one might keep money, or important documents.

Whatever it contains must be dangerous. I imagined wild animals, scorpions and snakes, hungry rats, venomous toads. Or an invisible virus, something radioactive.

‘For safety?’ I said.

He sighed. ‘There are some things it wouldn’t be good for you to stumble on when you’re by yourself, some things that it’s better if I explain to you.’

He sat next to me and opened the box. I could see nothing inside but paper.

‘This is Adam as a baby,’ he said, taking out a handful of photographs and handing one to me.

It was a picture of me, on a street. I am walking towards the camera, with a baby — Adam — strapped to my chest in a pouch. His body is facing mine, but he is looking over his shoulder at whoever is taking the picture, the smile on his face a toothless approximation of my own.

‘You took this?’

Ben nodded. I looked at it again. It was torn, its edges stained, the colours fading as if it were slowly bleaching to white.

Me. A baby. It did not seem real. I tried to tell myself I was a mother.

‘When?’ I said.

Ben looked over my shoulder. ‘He would have been about six months old then,’ he said. ‘So, let’s see. That must be about nineteen eighty-seven.’

I would have been twenty-seven. A lifetime ago.

My son’s lifetime.

‘When was he born?’

He dug his hand into the box again, passed me a slip of paper. ‘January,’ he said. It was yellow, brittle. A birth certificate. I read it in silence. His name was there. Adam.

‘Adam Wheeler,’ I said, out loud. To myself as much as to Ben.

‘Wheeler is my last name,’ he said. ‘We decided he should have my name.’

‘Of course,’ I said. I brought the paper up to my face. It felt too light to be a vessel for so much meaning. I wanted to breathe it in, for it to become part of me.

‘Here,’ said Ben. He took the paper from me and folded it. ‘There are more pictures,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see them?’

He handed me a few more photographs.

‘We don’t have that many,’ he said as I looked at them. ‘A lot were lost.’

He made it sound as if they had been left on trains or given to strangers for safekeeping.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I remember. We had a fire.’ I said it without thinking.

He looked at me oddly, his eyes narrowed, pinched tight.

‘You remember?’ he said.

Suddenly I wasn’t sure. Had he told me about the fire this morning or was I remembering him telling me the other day? Or was it just that I had read it in my journal after breakfast?

‘Well, you told me about it.’

‘I did?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

When was it? Had it been that morning, or days ago? I thought of my journal, remembered reading it after he’d gone to work. He’d told me about the fire as we sat on Parliament Hill.

I could have told him about my journal then, but something held me back. He seemed less than happy that I had remembered something. ‘Before you left for work,’ I said. ‘When we looked through the scrapbook. You must have, I suppose.’

He frowned. It felt terrible to be lying to him, but I didn’t feel able to cope with more revelations. ‘How would I know otherwise?’

He looked directly at me. ‘I suppose so.’

I paused for a moment, looking at the handful of photographs in my hand. They were pitifully few, and I could see that the box didn’t contain many more. Were they really all I would ever have to describe my son’s life?

‘How did the fire start?’ I said.

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed. ‘It was years ago. In our old house. The one we lived in before we came here.’ I wondered if he meant the one I’d been to. ‘We lost a lot of things. Books, papers. That kind of stuff.’

‘But how did it start?’ I said.

For a moment he said nothing. His mouth began to open and close, and then he said, ‘It was an accident. Just an accident.’

I wondered what he was not telling me. Had I left a cigarette burning, or the iron plugged in, or a pot to boil dry? I imagined myself in the kitchen I had stood in the day before yesterday, with its concrete worktop and white units, but years ago. I saw myself standing over a sizzling fryer, shaking the wire basket that contained the sliced potatoes that I was cooking, watching as they floated to the surface before rolling and sinking back under the oil. I saw myself hear the phone ring, wipe my hands on the apron I had tied around my waist, go into the hall.

What then? Had the oil burst into flames as I took the call, or had I wandered back into the living room, or up to the bathroom, with no recollection of ever having begun to cook dinner?

I don’t know, can never know. But it was kind of Ben to tell me that it had been an accident. Domesticity has so many dangers for someone without a memory, and another husband might have pointed out my mistakes and deficits, might have been unable to resist taking the moral high ground. I touched his arm, and he smiled.

I thumbed through the handful of photographs. There was one of Adam wearing a plastic cowboy hat and a yellow neckerchief aiming a plastic rifle at the person with the camera, and in another he was a few years older; his face thinner, his hair beginning to darken. He was wearing a shirt buttoned to the neck, and a child’s tie.

‘That was taken at school,’ said Ben. ‘An official portrait.’ He pointed to the photograph and laughed. ‘Look. It’s such a shame. The picture’s ruined!’

The elastic of the tie was visible, not tucked under the collar. I ran my hands over the picture. It wasn’t ruined, I thought. It was perfect.

I tried to remember my son, tried to see myself kneeling in front of him with an elasticated tie, or combing his hair, or wiping dried blood from a grazed knee.

Nothing came. The boy in the photograph shared a fullness of mouth with me, and had eyes that resembled, vaguely, my mother’s, but otherwise he could have been a stranger.

Ben took out another picture and gave it to me. In it Adam was a little older — maybe seven. ‘Do you think he looks like me?’ he said.

He was holding a football, dressed in shorts and a white T-shirt. His hair was short, spiked with sweat. ‘A little,’ I said. ‘Perhaps.’

Ben smiled, and together we carried on looking at the photographs. They were mostly of me and Adam, the occasional one of him alone; Ben must have taken the majority. In a few he was with friends; a couple showed him at a party, wearing a pirate costume, carrying a cardboard sword. In one he held a small black dog.

There was a letter tucked amongst the pictures. It was addressed to Santa Claus and written in blue crayon. The jerky letters danced across the page. He wants a bike, he says, or a puppy, and promises to be good. It is signed, and he has added his age. Four.

I don’t know why, but as I read it my world seemed to collapse. Grief exploded in my chest like a grenade. I had been feeling calm — not happy, not even resigned, but calm — and that serenity vanished, as if vaporized. Beneath it I was raw.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, handing the bundle back to Ben. ‘I can’t. Not now.’

He hugged me. I felt nausea rise in my throat, but swallowed it down. He told me not to worry, told me I would be fine, reminded me that he was here for me, that he always would be. I clung to him, and we sat there, rocking together. I felt numb, totally removed from the room in which we sat. I watched him get me a glass of water, watched as he closed the box of photographs. I was sobbing. I could see that he was upset too, yet already his expression seemed tinged with something else. Resignation, it could have been, or acceptance, but not shock.

With a shudder I realized that he has done all this before. His grief is not new. It has had the time to bed down within him, to become part of his foundations, rather than something that rocks them.

It is only my grief that is fresh, every day.

I made an excuse. I came upstairs, to the bedroom. Back to the wardrobe. I wrote on.

These snatched moments. Kneeling in front of the wardrobe or leaning on the bed. Writing. I am feverish. It floods out of me, almost without thought. Pages and pages. I am here again now, while Ben thinks I am resting. I cannot stop. I want to write down everything.

I wonder if this is what it was like when I wrote my novel, this pouring on to the page. Or had that been slower, more considered? I wish I could remember.

After I went downstairs I made us both a cup of tea. As I stirred in the milk I thought of how many times I must have made meals for Adam, puréeing vegetables, mixing juice. I took the tea back through to Ben. ‘Was I a good mother?’ I said, handing it to him.

‘Christine—’

‘I have to know,’ I said. ‘I mean, how did I cope? With a child? He must have been very little when I—’

‘—had your accident?’ he interrupted. ‘He was two. You were a wonderful mother, though. Until then. Afterwards, well—’

He stopped talking, letting the rest of the sentence disappear, and turned away. I wondered what it was he was leaving unsaid, what he’d thought better of telling me.

I knew enough to fill in some of the blanks. I might not be able to remember that time, but I can imagine it. I can see myself being reminded every day that I was married and a mother, being told that my husband and son were coming to visit me. I can imagine myself greeting them both every day as if I had never seen them before, slightly frostily, perhaps, or simply bewildered. I can see the pain we must have been in. All of us.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

‘You couldn’t look after yourself. You were too ill for me to look after you at home. You couldn’t be left alone, even for a few minutes. You would forget what you were doing. You used to wander off. I was worried you might run yourself a bath and leave the water running, or try and cook yourself some food and forget you’d started it. It was too much for me. So I stayed at home and looked after Adam. My mother helped. But every evening we would come and see you, and—’

I took his hand.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just find it hard, thinking of that time.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. How about my mother, though? Did she help? Did she enjoy being a grandmother?’ He nodded, and looked about to speak. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ I said.

He squeezed my hand. ‘She died a few years ago. I’m sorry.’

I had been right. I felt my mind begin to close down, as if it couldn’t process any more grief, any more of this scrambled past, but I knew I would wake up tomorrow and remember none of this.

What could I write in my journal that would get me through tomorrow, the next day, the one after that?

An image floated in front of me. A woman, with red hair. Adam in the army. A name came, unbidden. What will Claire think?

And there it was. The name of my friend. Claire.

‘And Claire?’ I said. ‘My friend Claire. Is she still alive?’

‘Claire?’ said Ben. He looked puzzled for a long moment, and then his face changed. ‘You remember Claire?’

He seemed surprised. I reminded myself that — according to my journal at least — it had been a few days since I had told him I had remembered her at the party on the roof.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We were friends. What happened to her?’

Ben looked at me, sadly, and for a moment I froze. He spoke slowly, but his news was not as bad as I feared. ‘She moved away,’ he said. ‘Years ago. Must be nearly twenty years, I think. Just a few years after we got married, in fact.’

‘Where to?’

‘New Zealand.’

‘Are we in touch?’

‘You were for a while, but no. Not any more.’

It doesn’t seem possible. My best friend, I had written, after remembering her on Parliament Hill, and I had felt the same sensation of closeness when I had thought of her today. Otherwise, why would I care what she thought?

‘We argued?’

He hesitated, and again I sensed a calculation, an adjustment. I realized that of course Ben knows what will upset me. He has had years to learn what I will find acceptable and what is dangerous ground for us to tread. After all, this is not the first time he has had this conversation. He has had the opportunity to practise, to learn how to navigate routes that will not rip through the landscape of my life and send me tumbling somewhere else.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. You didn’t argue. Or not that you ever told me anyway. I think you just drifted apart, and then Claire met someone, and she married him and they moved away.’

An image came then. Claire and I joking that we would never marry. ‘Marriage is for losers!’ she was saying as she raised a bottle of red wine to her lips, and I was agreeing, though at the same time I knew that one day I would be her bridesmaid, and she mine, and we would sit in hotel rooms, dressed in organza, sipping champagne from a flute while someone did our hair.

I felt a sudden flush of love. Though I have barely remembered any of our time, our life, together — and tomorrow even that will have gone — I sensed somehow that we are still connected, that for a while she had meant everything to me.

‘Did we go to the wedding?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he nodded, opening the box on his lap and digging through it. ‘There are a couple of photos here.’

They were wedding pictures, though not formal shots; these were blurred and dark, taken by an amateur. By Ben, I guessed. I approached the first one cautiously.

She was as I had imagined her. Tall, thin. More beautiful, if anything. She was standing on a clifftop, her dress diaphanous, blowing in the breeze, the sun setting over the sea behind her. I put the picture down and looked through the rest. In some she was with her husband — a man I didn’t recognize — and in others I had joined them, dressed in pale-blue silk, looking only slightly less beautiful. It was true; I had been a bridesmaid.

‘Are there any of our wedding?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘They were in a separate album,’ he said. ‘It was lost.’

Of course. The fire.

I handed the photos back to him. I felt like I was looking at another life, not my own. I desperately wanted to get upstairs, to write about what I had discovered.

‘I’m tired,’ I said. ‘I need to rest.’

‘Of course,’ he said. He held out his hand. ‘Here.’ He took the bundle of photographs from me and put them back in the box.

‘I’ll keep these safe,’ he said, closing the lid, and I came up here to my journal, and wrote this.

Midnight. I am in bed. Alone. Trying to make sense of all that has happened today. All that I have learned. I don’t know whether I can.

I decided to take a bath before dinner. I locked the bathroom door behind me and looked quickly at the pictures arranged around the mirror, now seeing only what was missing. I turned on the hot tap.

Most days I realize I don’t remember Adam at all, yet today he had come to me after I saw just one picture. Are these photographs selected so they will anchor me in myself without reminding me of what I have lost?

The room began to fill with hot steam. I could hear my husband downstairs. He had turned on the radio and the sound of jazz floated up to me, hazy and indistinct. Beneath it I could hear the rhythmic slice of a knife on a board; he would be chopping carrots, onions, peppers. Making dinner, as if this were a normal day.

For him it is a normal day, I realized. I am filled with grief, but not Ben.

I don’t blame him for not telling me, every day, about Adam, my mother, Claire. In his position I would do the same. These things are painful, and if I can go a whole day without remembering them then I am spared the sorrow and he the pain of causing it. How tempting it must be for him to keep quiet, and how difficult life must be for him, knowing that I carry these jagged shards of memory with me always, everywhere, like tiny bombs, and at any moment one might pierce the surface and force me to go through the pain as if for the first time, taking him with me.

I undressed slowly, folded my clothes, placed them on the chair by the side of the bath. Naked, I stood in front of the mirror and stared at my alien body. I forced myself to look at the wrinkles in my skin, at my sagging breasts. I do not know myself, I thought. I recognize neither my body nor my past.

I stepped closer to the mirror. They were there, across my stomach, on my buttocks and breasts. Thin, silvery streaks, the jagged scars of history. I had not seen them before, because I hadn’t looked for them. I pictured myself charting their growth, willing them to disappear as my body expanded. Now I am glad they are there; a reminder.

My reflection began to disappear in the mist. I am lucky, I thought. Lucky to have Ben, to have someone to look after me, here, in what is my home, even if I don’t remember it as such. I am not the only one suffering. He has been through what I have, today, but will go to bed knowing that tomorrow he might have to do it all again. Another husband might have felt unable to cope, or unwilling. Another husband might have left me. I stared into my own face, as if I was trying to burn the image into my brain, to leave it near the surface so that when I wake up tomorrow it will not be so alien to me, so shocking. When it had completely vanished I turned away from myself, and stepped into the water. I fell asleep.

I did not dream — or didn’t think I had — but when I woke I was confused. I was in a different bathroom, the water still warm, a tapping on the door. I opened my eyes and recognized nothing. The mirror was plain and unadorned, bolted to white tiles rather than blue. A shower curtain hung from a rail above me, two glasses were face down on a shelf above the sink and a bidet sat next to the toilet bowl.

I heard a voice. ‘I’m coming,’ it said, and I realized it was mine. I sat up in the bath and looked over to the bolted door. Two dressing gowns hung off hooks on the opposite wall, both white, matching, monogrammed with the letters R.G.H. I stood up.

‘Come on!’ came a voice from outside the door. It sounded like Ben, but at the same time not Ben. It became sing-song. ‘Come on! Come on, come on, come on!’

‘Who is it?’ I said, but it did not stop. I stepped out of the bath. The floor was tiled, black and white, diagonals. It was wet, I felt myself slip, my feet, my legs giving way. I crashed to the floor, pulling the shower curtain down on top of me. My head hit the sink as I fell. I cried out. ‘Help me!’

I woke for real then, with another, different voice calling me. ‘Christine! Chris! Are you OK?’ it said, and with relief I realized it was Ben and I had been dreaming. I opened my eyes. I was lying in a bath, my clothes folded on a chair beside me, pictures of my life taped to the pale-blue tiles above the sink.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. I just had a bad dream.’

I got up, ate dinner, then went to bed. I wanted to write, to get down all I had learned before it disappeared. I wasn’t sure I would have time to do so before Ben came to bed.

But what could I do? I have spent so long today writing, I thought. Surely he will be suspicious, will wonder what I have been doing, upstairs, alone. I have been telling him I am tired, that I need to rest, and he has believed me.

I can’t say I don’t feel guilty. I have heard him creeping around the house, opening and closing doors softly so as not to wake me, while I have been hunched over my journal, writing furiously. But I have no choice. I have to record these things. To do so seems almost more important than anything, because otherwise I will lose them for ever. I must make my excuses and return to my book.

‘I think I’ll sleep in the spare room tonight,’ I’d said. ‘I’m upset. You understand?’

He’d said yes, told me that he will check on me in the morning, to make sure that I am all right before he goes to work, then kissed me goodnight. I hear him now, switching off the television, turning the key in the front door. Locking us in. It would do no good for me to wander, I suppose. Not in my condition.

I cannot believe that in a few moments, when I fall asleep, I will forget about my son all over again. The memories of him had seemed — still seem — so real, so vivid. And I had remembered him even after dozing in the bath. It does not seem possible that a longer sleep will erase everything, yet Ben, and Dr Nash, tell me that this is exactly what will happen.

Do I dare hope that they are wrong? I am remembering more each day, waking knowing more of who I am. Perhaps things are going well, writing in this journal is bringing my memories to the surface.

Perhaps today is the day I will one day look back on and recognize as a breakthrough. It is possible.

I am tired now. I will stop writing soon, and then hide my journal, turn off the light. Sleep. Pray that tomorrow I may wake and remember my son.