Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel

I was in the bathroom. I didn’t know how long I’d been standing there. Just looking. All those pictures of me and Ben smiling happily together, when there should have been three of us. I stared at them, unmoving, as if I thought that might make Adam’s image emerge, willed into being. But it did not. He remained invisible.

I had woken with no memory of him. None at all. I still believed motherhood to be something that sat in the future, gleaming and disquieting. Even after I had seen my own middle-aged face, learned that I was a wife, old enough soon to be having grandchildren — even after those facts had sent me reeling — I was unprepared for the journal that Dr Nash told me I kept in the wardrobe when he called. I did not imagine that I would discover that I am a mother, too. That I have had a child.

I held the journal in my hand. As soon as I read it I knew it to be true. I had had a son. I felt it, almost as if he were still with me, inside my pores. I read it over and over again, trying to fix it in my mind.

And then I read on, and discovered that he is dead. It did not seem real. Did not seem possible. My heart resisted the knowledge, tried to reject it even as I knew it was true. Nausea hit me. Bile rose in my throat and as I swallowed it down the room began to swim. For a moment I felt myself begin to fall forward to the floor. The journal slid from my lap and I stifled a scream of pain. I stood up, propelling myself out of the bedroom.

I went into the bathroom, to look again at the pictures in which he ought to be. I felt desperate, did not know what I was going to do when Ben came home. I imagined him coming in, kissing me, making dinner; I thought of us eating it together. And then we would watch television, or whatever it is that we do most evenings, and all the time I would have to pretend that I didn’t know I had lost a son. And then we would go to bed, together, and after that—

It seemed more than I could bear. I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I began to claw at the pictures, ripping, pulling. It seemed to take no time at all, and then they were gone. Scattered on the bathroom floor. Floating in the water in the toilet bowl.

I grabbed this journal and put it in my bag. My purse was empty and so I took one of the two twenty-pound notes that I had read were hidden behind the clock on the mantelpiece, and ran out of the house. I didn’t know where I was going. I wanted to see Dr Nash but had no idea where he was, or how I could get there even if I did. I felt helpless. Alone. And so I ran.

At the street I turned left, towards the park. It was a sunny afternoon. The orange light reflected off the parked cars and the pools of water left by the morning’s storm, but it was cold. My breath misted around me. I pulled my coat tight, my scarf over my ears, and hurried on. Leaves fell from the trees, blew in the wind, piled against the gutter in a brown mush.

I stepped off the kerb. The sound of brakes. A car crunched to a halt. A man’s voice, muffled, from behind glass.

Get out of the way! it said. Stupid fucking bitch!

I looked up. I was in the middle of the road, a stalled car in front of me, its driver screaming with fury. I had a vision: myself, metal on bone, crumpling, buckling, and then sliding, up and over the bonnet of the car, or under it, to lie, a tangled mess, the end of a ruined life.

Could it really be that simple? Would a second collision end what was started by the first, all those years ago? I feel as if I have already been dead for twenty years, but is that where all this has to lead, eventually?

Who would miss me? My husband. A doctor, perhaps, though to him I am only a patient. But there is no one else. Can my circle have drawn so tight? Did my friends abandon me, one by one? How quickly I would be forgotten, were I to die.

I looked at the man in the car. He, or someone like him, did this to me. Robbed me of everything. Robbed me even of myself. Yet there he was, still living.

Not yet, I thought. Not yet. However my life was to end, I didn’t want it to be like this. I thought of the novel I had written, the child I had raised, even the firework party with my best friend all those years ago. I still have memories to unearth. Things to discover. My own truth to find.

I mouthed the word sorry, and ran on, over the road, through a gate and into the park.

There was a hut, in the middle of the grass. A café. I went in and bought myself coffee and then sat on one of the benches, warming my hands on the styrofoam cup. Opposite was a playground. A slide, swings, a roundabout. A small boy sat on a seat shaped like a ladybird that was fixed to the ground by a heavy spring. I watched him rock himself backwards and forwards, an ice cream in one hand despite the cold.

My mind flashed on a vision of myself and another young girl in the park. I saw the two of us, climbing stairs to a wooden cage from where we would glide to the ground on a metal slide. How high it had felt, all those years ago, yet looking at the playground now I saw that it must have been only a little higher than I am tall. We would muddy our dresses and be told off by our mothers, and skip home, clutching bags of penny chews or bright orange crisps.

Was this memory? Or invention?

I watched the boy. He was alone. The park seemed empty. Just the two of us, in the cold, under a sky roofed with dark cloud. I took a mouthful of my coffee.

‘Hey!’ said the boy. ‘Hey! Lady!’

I looked up, then down at my hands.

‘Hey!’ he shouted more loudly. ‘Lady! You help! You spin me!’

He got up and went over to the roundabout. ‘You spin me!’ he said. He tried to push the metal contraption but despite the effort evident in his face it barely moved. He gave up, looking disappointed. ‘Please?’ he said.

‘You’ll be OK,’ I called. I took a sip of my coffee. I would wait here, I decided, until his mother came back from wherever she was. I will keep an eye on him.

He climbed on to the roundabout, shifting himself until he stood right in its centre. ‘You spin me!’ he said again. His voice was lower. Pleading. I wished I had not come here, could make him go away. I felt removed from the world. Unnatural. Dangerous. I thought of the photos I had ripped off the wall and left scattered in the bathroom. I had come here for peace. Not this.

I looked at the boy. He had moved, was trying once again to push himself round, his legs barely reaching the ground from where he stood on the roundabout’s platform. He looked so fragile. Helpless. I went over to him.

‘You push me!’ he said. I put my coffee on the ground and grinned.

‘Hold tight!’ I said. I heaved my weight against the bar. It was surprisingly heavy, but I felt it begin to give, and walked round with it so that it gained speed. ‘Here we go!’ I said. I sat on the edge of the platform.

He grinned excitedly, clutching the metal bar with his hands as though we were spinning far more quickly than we were. His hands looked cold, almost blue. He was wearing a green coat that looked far too thin, a pair of jeans turned up at the ankle. I wondered who had sent him out without gloves, or a scarf or hat.

‘Where’s your mummy?’ I said. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Your daddy?’

‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘Mummy says Daddy’s gone. She says he doesn’t love us no more.’

I looked at him. He had said it with no sense of pain, or disappointment. For him it was a simple statement of fact. For a moment the roundabout felt perfectly still, the world spinning around the two of us rather than us within it.

‘I bet your mummy loves you, though?’ I said.

He was silent for a few seconds. ‘Sometimes,’ he said.

‘But sometimes she doesn’t?’

He paused. ‘I don’t think so.’ I felt a thudding in my chest, as if something was turning over. Or waking. ‘She says not. Sometimes.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said. I watched the bench I had been sitting on come towards us, then recede. We spun again, and again.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Alfie,’ he said. We were slowing down, the world coming to a halt behind his head. My feet connected with the ground and I kicked off, spinning us again. I said his name, as if to myself. Alfie.

‘Mummy says sometimes she’d be better off if I lived somewhere else,’ he said.

I tried to keep smiling, my voice cheery. ‘I bet she’s joking, though.’

He shrugged his shoulders.

My whole body tensed. I saw myself asking him if he would like to come with me. Home. To live. I imagined how his face would brighten, even as he said he wasn’t supposed to go anywhere with strangers. But I’m not a stranger, I would say. I would lift him up — he would be heavy and smell sweet, like chocolate — and together we would go into the café. What juice do you want? I would say, and he would ask for apple. I would buy him a drink, and some sweets too, and we would leave the park. He would be holding my hand as we walked back home, back to the house I shared with my husband, and that night I would cut his meat for him and mash his potatoes, and then, once he was in his pyjamas, I would read him a story before tucking the covers under his sleeping body and kissing him softly on the top of his head. And tomorrow—

Tomorrow? I have no tomorrow, I thought. Just as I had no yesterday.

‘Mummy!’ he called out. For a moment I thought he was talking to me, but he leapt off the roundabout and ran towards the café.

‘Alfie!’ I called out, but then I saw a woman walking towards us, clutching a plastic cup in each hand.

She crouched down as he reached her. ‘Y’all right, Tiger?’ she said as he ran into her arms, and she looked up, past him, at me. Her eyes were narrowed, her face set hard. I’ve done nothing wrong! I wanted to shout. Leave me alone!

But I didn’t. Instead I looked the other way and then, once she had led Alfie away, I got off the roundabout. The sky was darkening now, turning to an inky blue. I sat on a bench. I didn’t know what time it was, or how long I’d been out. I knew only that I couldn’t go home, not yet. I couldn’t face Ben. I couldn’t face having to pretend I knew nothing about Adam, that I had no idea I’d had a child. For a moment I wanted to tell him everything. About my journal, Dr Nash. Everything. But I pushed the thought from my mind. I did not want to go home, but had nowhere else to go.

I stood and began to walk as the sky turned black.

The house was in darkness. I didn’t know what to expect when I pushed open the front door. Ben would be missing me; he had said he would be home by five. I pictured him pacing up and down the living room — for some reason, even though I had not seen him smoke this morning, my imagination added a lit cigarette to this scene — or maybe he was out, driving the streets, looking for me. I imagined teams of police and volunteers out there, going from door to door with a photocopied picture of me, and felt guilty. I tried to tell myself that, even though I had no memory, I was not a child, I was not a missing person, not yet, but still I went into the house ready to make an apology.

I called out. ‘Ben?’ There was no answer, but I felt, rather than heard, movement. A creak of a floorboard somewhere above me, an almost imperceptible shift in the equilibrium of the house. I called out again, louder this time. ‘Ben?’

‘Christine?’ came a voice. It sounded weak, cracked open.

‘Ben,’ I said. ‘Ben, it’s me. I’m here.’

He appeared above me, standing at the top of the stairs. He looked as though he’d been sleeping. He was still wearing the clothes he’d put on that morning to go to work, but now his shirt was creased and hung loose from his trousers, and his hair stood out in all directions, emphasizing his look of shock with an almost comical hint of electricity. A memory floated through me — science lessons and Van de Graaff generators — but did not emerge.

He started to come down the stairs. ‘Chris, you’re home!’

‘I … I had to get some air,’ I said.

‘Thank God,’ he said. He came over to where I stood and took my hand. He gripped it, as if to shake it or to make sure it was real, but did not move it. ‘Thank God!’

He looked at me, his eyes wide, glowing. They glistened in the dim light as though he’d been crying. How much he loves me, I thought. My feeling of guilt intensified.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

He interrupted me. ‘Oh, let’s not worry about that, shall we?’

He brought my hand to his lips. His expression changed, became one of pleasure, of happiness. All traces of anxiety disappeared. He kissed me.

‘But—’

‘You’re back now. That’s the main thing.’ He flicked on the light and then smoothed his hair into a semblance of order. ‘Right!’ he said, tucking in his shirt. ‘What say you go and freshen up? And then I thought we could go out? What do you think?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I—’

‘Oh, Christine. We should! You look like you need cheering up!’

‘But, Ben, I don’t feel like it.’

‘Please?’ he said. He took my hand again, squeezing it gently. ‘It would mean a lot to me.’ He took my other hand and brought them both together, between his. ‘I don’t know if I told you this morning. It’s my birthday today.’

*

What could I do? I didn’t want to go out. But then, I didn’t want to do anything. I told him I would do as he asked, would freshen up, and then see how I felt. I went upstairs. His mood had disturbed me. He had seemed so concerned, but, as soon as I appeared safe and well, that concern evaporated. Did he really love me so much? Trust me so much that all he cared about was that I was safe, not where I had been?

I went into the bathroom. Perhaps he hadn’t seen the photos scattered all over the floor, genuinely believed I had been out for a walk. There was still time for me to cover my tracks. To hide my anger, and my grief.

I locked the door behind me. I pulled the cord and turned on the light. The floor had been swept clean. There, arranged around the mirror as if they had never been moved, were the photographs, every one perfectly restored.

I told Ben I would be ready in half an hour. I sat in the bedroom and, as quickly as I could, wrote this.