Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel

Part Three

I turn the page, but there is no more. The story ends there. I have been reading for hours.

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 realize I must have stockings and suspenders somewhere. I decide it would be nice to find them now, to take them with me. It might be good for both of us.

I move to the wardrobe. I choose a dress, a skirt. Some trousers, a pair of jeans. I notice the shoebox on the floor — the one that must have hidden my journal — now empty. I wonder what kind of couple we are, when we go on holiday. Whether we spend our evenings in restaurants, or sitting in cosy pubs, relaxing in the rosy heat of a real fire. I wonder whether we walk, exploring the town and its surroundings, or drive to carefully selected venues. These are the things I don’t know, yet. These are the things I have the rest of my life to find out. To enjoy.

I select some clothes for both of us, almost randomly, and fold them, placing them in the cases. As I do I feel a jolt, a surge of energy, and I close my eyes. I see a vision, bright, but shimmering. It is unclear at first, as if hovering, out of both reach and focus, and I try to open my mind, to let it come.

I see myself standing in front of a bag; a soft suitcase in worn leather. I am excited. I feel young again, like a child about to go on holiday, or a teenager preparing for a date, wondering how it will go, whether he’ll ask me back to his house, whether we’ll fuck. I feel that newness, that anticipation, can taste it. I roll it on my tongue, savouring it, because I know it will not last. I open my drawers in turn, selecting blouses, stockings, underwear. Thrilling. Sexy. Underwear that is worn only with the anticipation of its removal. I put in a pair of heels in addition to the flat shoes I am wearing, take them out, put them in again. I don’t like them, but this night is about fantasy, about dressing up, about being other than what we are. Only then do I move on to the functional things. I take a quilted wash-bag in bright red leather and add perfume, shower gel, toothpaste. I want to look beautiful tonight, for the man I love, for the man I have been so close to losing. I add bath salts. Orange blossom. I realize I am remembering the night I packed to go to Brighton.

The memory evaporates. My eyes open. I could not have known, back then, that I was packing for the man who would take everything from me.

I carry on packing for the man I still have.

I hear a car pull up outside. The engine dies. A door opens, and then shuts. A key in the lock. Ben. He is here.

I feel nervous. Scared. I am not the same person he left this morning; I have learned my own story. I have discovered myself. What will he think, when he sees me? What will he say?

I must ask him if he knows about my journal. If he has read it. What he thinks.

He calls out as he closes the door behind him. ‘Christine? Chris? I’m home.’ His voice doesn’t sing, though; he sounds exhausted. I call back, and tell him I am in the bedroom.

The lowest step creaks as it accepts his weight, and I hear an exhalation as first one shoe is removed, and then the other. He will be putting his slippers on now, and then he will come to find me. I feel a surge of pleasure at knowing his rituals — my journal has keyed me into them, even though my memory cannot — but, as he ascends the stairs, another emotion takes over. Fear. I think of what I wrote in the front of my journal. Don’t trust Ben.

He opens the bedroom door. ‘Darling!’ he says. I have not moved. I still sit on the edge of the bed, the bags open behind me. He stands by the door until I stand and open my arms, then he comes over and kisses me.

‘How was your day?’ I say.

He takes off his tie. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘let’s not talk about that. We’re on holiday!’

He begins to unbutton his shirt. I fight the instinct to look away, remind myself that he is my husband, that I love him.

‘I packed the bags,’ I say. ‘I hope yours is OK. I didn’t know what you’d want to take.’

He steps out of his trousers and folds them before hanging them in the wardrobe. ‘I’m sure it’s fine.’

‘Only I wasn’t exactly sure where we were going. So I didn’t know what to pack.’

He turns, and I wonder whether I catch a flash of annoyance in his eyes. ‘I’ll check, before we put the bags in the car. It’s fine. Thanks for making a start.’ He sits on the chair at the dressing table and pulls on a pair of faded blue jeans. I notice a perfect crease ironed down their front, and the twenty-something me has to resist the urge to find him ridiculous.

‘Ben?’ I say. ‘You know where I’ve been today?’

He looks at me. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I know.’

‘You know about Dr Nash?’

He turns away from me. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You told me.’ I can see him, reflected in the mirrors arranged around the dresser. Three versions of the man I married. The man I love. ‘Everything,’ he says. ‘You told me about it all. I know everything.’

‘You don’t mind? About me seeing him?’

He doesn’t look round. ‘I wish you’d told me. But no. No, I don’t mind.’

‘And my journal? You know about my journal?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You told me. You said it helped.’

A thought comes. ‘Have you read it?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘You said it was private. I would never look through your private things.’

‘But you know about Adam? You know that I know about Adam?’

I see him flinch, as if my words have been hurled at him with violence. I am surprised. I was expecting him to be happy. Happy that he would no longer have to tell me about his death, over and over again.

He looks at me.

‘Yes,’ he says.

‘There aren’t any pictures,’ I say. He asks what I mean. ‘There are photos of me and you but still none of him.’

He stands and comes over to where I am sitting, then sits on the bed beside me. He takes my hand. I wish he would stop treating me as if I am fragile, brittle. As if the truth would break me.

‘I wanted to surprise you,’ he says. He reaches under the bed and retrieves a photo album. ‘I’ve put them in here.’

He hands me the album. It is heavy, dark, bound in something meant to resemble black leather but it doesn’t. I open the cover, and inside it is a pile of photographs.

‘I wanted to put them in properly,’ he says. ‘To give to you as a present tonight, but I didn’t have time. I’m sorry.’

I look through the photographs. They are not in any order. There are photographs of Adam as a baby, a young boy. They must be the ones from the metal box. One stands out. In it he is a young man, sitting next to a woman. ‘His girlfriend?’ I say.

‘One of them,’ says Ben. ‘The one he was with the longest.’

She is pretty, blonde, her hair cut short. She reminds me of Claire. In the photograph Adam is looking directly at the camera, laughing, and she is looking half at him, her face a mixture of joy and disapproval. They have a conspiratorial air, as though they have shared a joke with whoever is behind the lens. They are happy. The thought pleases me. ‘What was her name?’

‘Helen. She’s called Helen.’

I wince as I realize I had thought of her in the past tense, imagined that she had died too. A thought stirs; what if she had died instead, but I force it down before it forms and finds a shape.

‘Were they still together when he died?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘They were thinking of getting engaged.’

She looks so young, so hungry, her eyes full of possibility, of what is in store for her. She doesn’t yet know the impossible amount of pain she still has to face.

‘I’d like to meet her,’ I say.

Ben takes the picture from me. He sighs. ‘We’re not in touch,’ he says.

‘Why?’ I say. I had it planned in my head; we would be a support to each other. We would share something, an understanding, a love that pierced all others, if not for each other then at least for the thing we had lost.

‘There were arguments,’ he says. ‘Difficulties.’

I look at him. I can see that he doesn’t want to tell me. The man who wrote the letter, the man who believed in me and cared for me, and who, in the end, loved me enough both to leave me and then to come back for me, seems to have vanished.

‘Ben?’

‘There were arguments,’ he says.

‘Before Adam died, or after?’

‘Both.’

The illusion of support vanishes, replaced by a sick feeling. What if Adam and I had fought too? Surely he would have sided with his girlfriend, over his mother?

‘Were Adam and I close?’ I say.

‘Oh yes,’ says Ben. ‘Until you had to go to the hospital. Until you lost your memory. Even then you were close, of course. As close as you could be.’

His words hit me like a punch. I realize that Adam was a toddler when he lost his mother to amnesia. Of course I had never known my son’s fiancée; every day I saw him would have been like the first.

I close the book.

‘Can we bring it with us?’ I say. ‘I’d like to look at it some more later.’

We have a drink, cups of tea that Ben made in the kitchen as I finished packing for the journey, and then we get into the car. I check I have my handbag, my journal still within it. Ben has added a few things to the bag I packed for him, and he has brought another bag, too — the leather satchel that he left with this morning — as well as two pairs of walking boots from the back of the wardrobe. I had stood by the door as he loaded these things into the boot and then waited while he checked the doors were closed, the windows locked. Now, I ask him how long the journey may take.

He shrugs his shoulders. ‘Depends on the traffic,’ he says. ‘Not too long, once we’re out of London.’

A refusal to provide an answer, disguised as an answer itself. I wonder if this is what he is always like. I wonder if years of telling me the same thing have worn him down, bored him to the point where he can no longer bring himself to tell me anything.

He is a careful driver, that much I can see. He proceeds slowly, checking his mirror frequently, slowing down at the merest hint of an approaching hazard.

I wonder if Adam drove. I suppose he must have done so to be in the army, but did he ever drive when he was on leave? Did he pick me up, his invalid mother, and take me on trips, to places he thought I might like? Or did he decide there was no point, that whatever enjoyment I might have had at the time would disappear overnight like snow melting on a warm roof?

We are on the motorway, heading out of the city. It has begun to rain; huge droplets smack into the windscreen, hold their shape for a moment before beginning the swift slide down the glass. In the distance the lights of the city bathe the concrete and glass in a soft orange glow. It is beautiful and terrible, but I am struggling inside. I want so much to think of my son as something other than abstract, but without a concrete memory of him I cannot. I keep coming back to the single truth: I cannot remember him, and so he might as well never have existed.

I close my eyes. I think back to what I read about our son this afternoon and an image explodes in front of me — Adam as a toddler pushing the blue tricycle along a path. But even as I marvel at it I know it is not real. I know I am not remembering the thing that happened, I am remembering the image I formed in my mind this afternoon as I read about the thing, and even that was a recollection of an earlier memory. Memories of memories, most people’s going back through years, through decades, but, for me, just a few hours.

Failing to remember my son I do the next best thing, the only thing to quieten my sparking mind. I think of nothing. Nothing at all.

The smell of petrol, thick and sweet. There is a pain in my neck. I open my eyes. Up close I see the wet windscreen, misted with my breath, and beyond it there are distant lights, blurred, out of focus. I realize that I have been dozing. I am leaning against the glass, my head twisted awkwardly. The car is silent, the engine off. I look over my shoulder.

Ben is there, sitting next to me. He is awake, looking ahead, out of the window. He doesn’t move, doesn’t even seem to have noticed that I have woken up, but instead continues to stare, his expression blank, unreadable in the dark. I turn to see what he is looking at.

Beyond the rain-spattered windscreen is the bonnet of the car, and beyond that a low wooden fence, dimly illuminated in the glow from the street-lamps behind us. Beyond the fence I see nothing, a blackness, huge and mysterious, in the middle of which hangs the moon, full and low.

‘I love the sea,’ he says, without looking at me, and I realize we are parked on a cliff top, have made it as far as the coast.

‘Don’t you?’ He turns to me. His eyes seem impossibly sad. ‘You do love the sea, don’t you, Chris?’ he says.

‘I do,’ I say. ‘Yes.’ He is speaking as if he doesn’t know, as if we have never been to the coast before, as if we have never been on holiday together. Fear begins to burn within me, but I resist it. I try to stay here, in the present, with my husband. I try to remember all that I learned from my journal this afternoon. ‘You know that, darling.’

He sighs. ‘I know. You always used to, but I just don’t know any more. You change. You’ve changed, over the years. Ever since what happened. Sometimes I don’t know who you are. I wake up each day and I don’t know how you’re going to be.’

I am silent. I can think of nothing to say. We both know how senseless it would be for me to try to defend myself, to tell him that he is wrong. We both know that I am the last person who knows how much I change from day to day.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say at last.

He looks at me. ‘Oh, it’s all right. You don’t need to apologize. I know it’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. I’m being unfair, I suppose. Thinking of myself.’

He looks back out to sea. There is a single light in the distance. A boat, on the waves. Light in a sea of treacly blackness. Ben speaks. ‘We’ll be all right, won’t we, Chris?’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Of course we will. This is a new beginning for us. I have my journal now, and Dr Nash will help me. I’m getting better, Ben. I know I am. I think I’m going to start writing again. There’s no reason not to. I should be fine. And anyway, I’m in touch with Claire now, and she can help me.’ An idea comes to me. ‘We can all get together, don’t you think? Just like old times? Just like at university? The three of us. And her husband, I suppose — I think she said she had a husband. We can all meet up and spend time together. It’ll be fine.’ My mind fixes on the lies I have read, on all the ways I have not been able to trust him, but I force it away. I remind myself that all that has been resolved. It is my turn to be strong now. To be positive. ‘As long as we promise to always be honest with each other,’ I say, ‘then everything is going to be OK.’

He turns back to face me. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’

‘Of course. Of course I do.’

‘And you forgive me? For leaving you? I didn’t want to. I had no choice. I’m sorry.’

I take his hand. It feels both warm and cold at the same time, slightly damp. I try to hold it between my hands, but he neither assists nor resists my action. Instead his hand rests, lifeless, on his knee. I squeeze it, and only then does he seem to notice that I am holding it.

‘Ben. I understand. I forgive you.’ I look into his eyes. They too seem dull and lifeless, as if they have seen so much horror already that they cannot cope with any more.

‘I love you, Ben,’ I say.

His voice drops to a whisper. ‘Kiss me.’

I do as he asks, and then, when I have drawn back, he whispers, ‘Again. Kiss me again.’

I kiss him a second time. But, even though he asks me to, I cannot kiss him a third. Instead we gaze out over the sea, at the moonlight on the water, at the drops of rain on the windscreen reflecting back the yellow glow from the headlights of passing cars. Just the two of us, holding hands. Together.

We sit there for what feels like hours. Ben is beside me, staring out to sea. He scans the water, as if looking for something, some answer in the dark, and he doesn’t speak. I wonder why he has brought us here, what he is hoping to find.

‘Is it really our anniversary?’ I say. There is no answer. He doesn’t appear to have heard me, and so I say it again.

‘Yes,’ he replies softly.

‘Our wedding anniversary?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s the anniversary of the night we met.’

I want to ask him whether we are supposed to be celebrating, and to tell him that it doesn’t feel like a celebration, but it seems cruel.

The busy road behind us has quietened, the moon is rising high in the sky. I begin to worry that we will stay out all night, looking at the sea while the rain falls around us. I affect a yawn.

‘I’m sleepy,’ I say. ‘Can we go to our hotel?’

He looks at his watch. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Of course. Sorry. Yes.’ He starts the car. ‘We’ll go there right now.’

I am relieved. I am both craving sleep, and dreading it.

*

The coast road dips and rises as we skirt the edges of a village. The lights of another, larger town begin to draw nearer, tightening into focus through the damp glass. The road becomes busier, a marina appears with its moored boats and shops and nightclubs, and then we are in the town itself. On our right every building seems to be a hotel, advertising vacancies on white signs that blow in the wind. The streets are busy; it is not as late as I had thought, or else this is the kind of town which is alive night and day.

I look out to sea. A pier juts into the water, flooded with light and with an amusement park at its end. I can see a domed pavilion, a rollercoaster, a helter-skelter. I can almost hear the whoops and cries of the riders as they are spun above the pitch-black sea.

An anxiety I cannot name begins to form in my chest.

‘Where are we?’ I say. There are words over the entrance to the pier, picked out in bright white lights, but I can’t make them out through the rain-washed windscreen.

‘We’re here,’ says Ben, as we turn up a side street and stop outside a terraced house. There is lettering on the canopy over the door. Rialto Guest House, it says.

There are steps up to the front door, an ornate fence separating the building from the road. Beside the door is a small, cracked pot that would once have held a shrub but is now empty. I am gripped with an intense fear.

‘Have we been here before?’ I say. He shakes his head. ‘You’re sure? It looks familiar.’

‘I’m certain,’ he says. ‘We might have stayed somewhere near here once. You’re probably remembering that.’

I try to relax. We get out of the car. There is a bar next to the guest house and through its large windows I can see throngs of drinkers and a dance floor, pulsing at the back. Music thuds, muffled by the glass. ‘We’ll check in, and then I’ll come back for the luggage. OK?’

I pull my coat tight around me. The wind is cold now, and the rain heavy. I rush up the steps and open the front door. There is a sign taped to the glass. No vacancies. I go through and into the lobby.

‘You’ve booked?’ I say, when Ben joins me. We are standing in a hallway. Further down a door is ajar, and from behind it comes the sound of a television, its volume turned up, competing with the music next door. There is no reception desk, but instead a bell sits on a small table, a sign next to it inviting us to ring it to attract attention.

‘Yes, of course,’ says Ben. ‘Don’t worry.’ He rings the bell.

For a moment nothing happens, and then a young man comes from a room somewhere at the back of the house. He is tall and awkward, and I notice that, despite it being far too big for his frame, his shirt is untucked. He greets us as though he was expecting us, though not warmly, and I wait while he and Ben complete the formalities.

It is clear the hotel has seen better days. The carpet is threadbare in places, and the paintwork around the doorways scuffed and marked. Opposite the lounge is another door, marked Dining Room, and at the back are several more doors through which, I imagine, one would find the kitchen and private rooms of the staff.

‘I’ll take you to the room now, shall I?’ says the tall man when he and Ben have finished. I realize he is talking to me; Ben is on his way back outside, presumably to get the bags.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

He hands me a key and we go up the stairs. On the first landing are several bedrooms, but we walk past them and up another flight. The house seems to shrink as we go higher; the ceilings are lower, the walls closer. We pass another bedroom and then stand at the bottom of a final flight of stairs that must lead to the very top of the house.

‘Your room is up there,’ he says. ‘It’s the only one.’

I thank him, and then he turns and goes back downstairs and I climb to our room.

I open the door. The room is dark, and bigger than I was expecting, up here at the top of the house. I can see a window opposite, and through it a dim grey light is shining, picking out the outline of a dressing table, a bed, a table and an armchair. The music from the club next door thuds, stripped of its clarity, reduced to a dull, crunching bass.

I stand still. Fear has gripped me again. The same fear that I experienced outside the guest house, but worse, somehow. I go cold. Something is wrong, but I can’t say what. I breathe deeply, but can’t get enough air into my lungs. I feel as if I am about to drown.

I close my eyes, as if hoping the room will look different when I open them, but it doesn’t. I am filled with an overwhelming terror of what will happen when I switch on the light, as if that simple action will spell disaster, the end of everything.

What will happen if I leave the room shrouded in blackness and instead go back downstairs? I could walk calmly past the tall man, and along the corridor, past Ben if necessary, and out, out of the hotel.

But they would think I had gone mad, of course. They would find me, and bring me back. And what would I tell them? That the woman who remembers nothing had a feeling she didn’t like, an inkling? They would think me ridiculous.

I am with my husband. I have come here to be reconciled with him. I am safe with Ben.

And so I switch on the light.

There is a flash as my eyes adjust, and then I see the room. It is unimpressive. There is nothing to be frightened of. The carpet is a mushroom grey, the curtains and wallpaper both in a floral pattern, though they don’t match. The dresser is battered, with three mirrors on it and a faded painting of a bird above it, the armchair wicker with yet another floral pattern on the cushion, and the bed covered with an orange bedspread in a diamond design.

I can see how disappointing it would be to someone who has booked it for their holiday, but, though Ben has booked it for ours, it is not disappointment that I feel. The fear has burned itself down to dread.

I close the door behind me and try to calm myself. I am being stupid. Paranoid. I must keep busy. Do something.

It feels cold in the room and a slight draught wafts the curtains. The window is open and I go over to close it. I look out before I do. We are high up; the street-lamps are far below us; seagulls sit silently upon them. I look out across the rooftops, see the cool moon hanging in the sky, and in the distance the sea. I can make out the pier, the helter-skelter, the flashing lights.

And then I see them. The words, over the entrance to the pier.

Brighton Pier.

Despite the cold, and even though I shiver, I feel a bead of sweat form on my brow. Now it makes sense. Ben has brought me here, to Brighton, to the place of my disaster. But why? Does he think I am more likely to remember what happened if I am back in the town in which my life was ripped from me? Does he think that I will remember who did this to me?

I remember reading that Dr Nash had once suggested I come here, and I had told him, no.

There are footsteps on the stairs, voices. The tall man must be bringing Ben here, to our room. They will be carrying the luggage together, lifting it up the stairs and round the tricky landings. He will be here soon.

What should I tell him? That he is wrong and being here will not help? That I want to go home?

I go back towards the door. I will help to bring the bags through, and then I will unpack them, and we will sleep, and then tomorrow—

It hits me. Tomorrow I will know nothing again. That must be what Ben has in his satchel. Photographs. The scrapbook. He will have to use everything he has to explain who he is and where we are all over again.

I wonder if I have brought my journal, then remember packing it, putting it in my bag. I try to calm myself. Tonight I will put it under the pillow and tomorrow I will find it, and read it. Everything will be fine.

I can hear Ben on the landing. He is talking to the tall man, discussing arrangements for breakfast. ‘We’d probably like it in our room,’ I hear him say. A gull cries outside the window, startling me.

I go towards the door, and then I see it. To my right. A bathroom, with the door open. A bath, a toilet, a basin. But it is the floor that draws me, fills me with horror. It is tiled, and the pattern is unusual; black and white alternate in crazed diagonals.

My jaw opens. I feel myself go cold. I think I hear myself cry out.

I know, then. I recognize the pattern.

It is not only Brighton that I have recognized.

I have been here before. In this room.

*

The door opens. I say nothing as Ben comes in, but my mind spins. Is this the room in which I was attacked? Why didn’t he tell me we were coming here? How can he go from not even wanting to tell me about the assault to bringing me to the room in which it happened?

I can see the tall man standing just outside the door, and I want to call out to him, to ask him to stay, but he turns to leave and Ben closes the door. It is just the two of us now.

He looks at me. ‘Are you all right, love?’ he says. I nod and say yes, but the word feels as though it has been forced out of me. I feel the stirrings of hate in my stomach.

He takes my arm. He is squeezing the flesh just a little too tightly; any more and I would say something, any less and I doubt that I would notice. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes,’ I say. Why is he doing this? He must know where we are, what this means. All along he must have been planning this. ‘Yes, I’m fine. I just feel a little tired.’

And then it hits me. Dr Nash. He must have something to do with this. Otherwise why would Ben — after all these years, when he could have but did not — decide to bring me here now?

They must have been in contact. Perhaps Ben called him, after I told him all about our meetings. Perhaps some time during the last week — the week I know nothing about — they planned it all.

‘Why don’t you lie down?’ says Ben.

I hear myself speak. ‘I think I will.’ I turn towards the bed. Perhaps they’d been in touch all along? Dr Nash might have been lying about everything. I pictured him, dialling Ben after he’d said goodbye to me, telling him about my progress, or lack of it.

‘Good girl,’ says Ben. ‘I meant to bring champagne. I think I’ll go and get some. There’s a shop, I think. It’s not far.’ He smiles. ‘Then I’ll join you.’

I turn to face him, and he kisses me. Now, here, his kiss lingers. He brushes my lips with his, puts his hand in my hair, strokes my back. I fight the urge to pull away. His hand moves lower, down my back, coming to rest on the top of my buttock. I swallow hard.

I cannot trust anybody. Not my husband. Not the man who has claimed to be helping me. They have been working together, building to this day, the day when, clearly, they have decided I am to face the horror in my past.

How dare they! I think. How dare they!

‘OK,’ I say. I turn my head away slightly, push him gently so that he lets me go.

He turns, and leaves the room. ‘I’ll just lock the door,’ he says, as he closes it behind him. ‘You can’t be too careful …’ I hear the key turn in the door outside, and I begin to panic. Is he really going to buy champagne? Or is he meeting Dr Nash? I cannot believe he has brought me to this room without telling me; another lie to go with all the others. I hear him go down the stairs.

Wringing my hands, I sit on the edge of the bed. I cannot calm my mind, cannot settle on just one thought. Instead thoughts race, as if, in a mind devoid of memory, each idea has too much space to grow and move, to collide with others in a shower of sparks before spinning off into its own distance.

I stand up. I feel enraged. I cannot face the thought of him coming back, pouring champagne, getting into bed with me. Neither can I face the thought of his skin next to mine, or his hands on me in the night, pawing at me, pressing me, encouraging me to give myself to him. How can I, when there is no me to give?

I would do anything, I think. Anything, except for that.

I cannot stay here, in this place where my life was ruined and everything taken away from me. I try to work out how much time I have. Ten minutes? Five? I go over to Ben’s bag and open it. I don’t know why; I am not thinking of why, or how, only that I must move, while Ben is away, before he returns and things change again. Perhaps I intend to find the car keys, to force the door and go downstairs, out into the rainy street, to the car. Although I’m not even certain I can drive, perhaps I mean to try, to get in and go far, far away.

Or perhaps I mean to find a picture of Adam; I know they’re in there. I will take just one, and then I will leave the room and run. I will run and run, and then, when I can run no more, I will call Claire, or anybody, and I will tell them that I cannot take it any more, and beg them to help me.

I dig my hands deep in the bag. I feel metal, and plastic. Something soft. And then an envelope. I take it out, thinking it might contain photographs, and see that it is the one I found in the office at home. I must have put it in Ben’s bag as I packed, intending to remind him it had not been opened. I turn it over and see that the word Private has been written on the front. Without thinking, I tear it open and remove its contents.

Paper. Pages and pages. I recognize it. The faint blue lines, the red margins. These pages are the same as those in my journal, in the book that I have been writing.

And then I see my own handwriting, and begin to understand.

I have not read all of my story. There is more. Pages and pages more.

I find my journal in my bag. I had not noticed before, but after the final page of writing a whole section has been removed. The pages have been excised neatly, cut with a scalpel or a razor blade, close to the spine.

Cut out by Ben.

I sit on the floor, the pages spread in front of me. This is the missing week of my life. I read the rest of my story.

The first entry is dated. Friday, 23 November, it says. The same day I met Claire. I must have written it that evening, after speaking to Ben. Perhaps we had had the conversation I was anticipating, after all. I sit here, it begins,

on the floor of the bathroom, in the house in which, supposedly, I woke up every morning. I have this journal in front of me, this pen in my hand. I write, because it’s all I can think of to do.

Tissues are balled around me, soaked with tears, and blood. When I blink my vision turns red. Blood drips into my eye as fast as I can wipe it away.

When I looked in the mirror I could see that the skin above my eye is cut, and my lip, too. When I swallow I taste the metallic tang of blood.

I want to sleep. To find a safe place somewhere, and close my eyes, and rest, like an animal.

That is what I am. An animal. Living from moment to moment, day to day, trying to make sense of the world in which I find myself.

My heart races. I read back over the paragraph, my eyes drawn again and again to the word blood. What had happened?

I begin to read quickly, my mind stumbling over words, lurching from line to line. I don’t know when Ben will get back and can’t risk him taking these pages before I have read them. Now may be my only chance.

I’d decided it was best to speak to him after dinner. We ate in the lounge — sausage, mash, our plates balanced on our knees — and when we had both finished I asked if he would turn the television off. He seemed reluctant. ‘I need to talk to you,’ I said.

The room felt too quiet, filled only with the ticking of the clock and the distant hum of the city. And my voice, sounding hollow and empty.

‘Darling,’ said Ben, putting his plate on the coffee table between us. A half-chewed lump of meat sat on the side of the plate, peas floated in thin gravy. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Everything’s fine.’ I didn’t know how to continue. He looked at me, his eyes wide, waiting. ‘You do love me, don’t you?’ I said. I felt almost as if I was gathering evidence, insuring myself against any later disapproval.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course. What’s this about? What’s wrong?’

‘Ben,’ I said. ‘I love you, too. And I understand your reasons for doing what you’ve been doing, but I know you’ve been lying to me.’

Almost as soon as I finished the sentence I regretted starting it. I saw him flinch. He looked at me, his lips pulled back as if to speak, his eyes wounded.

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘Darling—’

I had to continue now. There was no way out of the stream into which I had begun to wade.

‘I know you’ve been doing it to protect me, not telling me things, but it can’t go on. I need to know.’

‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘I haven’t been lying to you.’

I felt a surge of anger. ‘Ben,’ I said, ‘I know about Adam.’

His face changed, then. I saw him swallow, and look away, towards the corner of the room. He brushed something off the arm of his pullover. ‘What?’

‘Adam,’ I said. ‘I know we had a son.’

I half expected him to ask me how I knew, but then realized this conversation was not unusual. We have been here before, on the day I saw my novel, and other days when I have remembered Adam too.

I saw he was about to speak, but didn’t want to hear any more lies.

‘I know he died in Afghanistan,’ I said.

His mouth shut, then opened again, almost comically.

‘How do you know that?’

‘You told me,’ I said. ‘Weeks ago. You were eating a biscuit, and I was in the bathroom. I came downstairs and told you that I had remembered we had had a son, even remembered what he was called, and then we sat down and you told me how he’d been killed. You showed me some photographs, from upstairs. Photos of me and him, and letters that he’d written. A letter to Santa Claus—’ Grief washed over me again. I stopped talking.

Ben was staring at me. ‘You remembered? How?’

‘I’ve been writing things down. For a few weeks. As much as I can remember.’

‘Where?’ he said. He had begun to raise his voice, as if in anger, though I didn’t understand what he might be angry about. ‘Where have you been writing things down? I don’t understand, Christine. Where have you been writing things down?’

‘I’ve been keeping a notebook.’

‘A notebook?’ The way he said it made it sound so trivial, as if I have been using it to write shopping lists and record phone numbers.

‘A journal,’ I said.

He shifted forward in his chair, as if he was about to get up. ‘A journal? For how long?’

‘I don’t know exactly. A couple of weeks?’

‘Can I see it?’

I felt petulant and angry. I was determined not to show it to him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’

He was furious. ‘Where is it? Show it to me.’

‘Ben, it’s personal.’

He shot the word back at me. ‘Personal? What do you mean, personal?’

‘I mean it’s private. I wouldn’t feel comfortable with you reading it.’

‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Have you written about me?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘What have you written? What have you said?’

How to answer that? I thought of all the ways I have betrayed him. The things I have said to Dr Nash, and thought about him. The ways in which I have distrusted my husband, the things I have thought him capable of. I thought of the lies I have told, the days I have seen Dr Nash — and Claire — and told him nothing.

‘Lots of things, Ben. I’ve written lots of things.’

‘But why? Why have you been writing things down?’

I could not believe he had to ask me that question. ‘I want to make sense of my life,’ I said. ‘I want to be able to link one day to the next, like you can. Like anybody can.’

‘But why? Are you unhappy? Don’t you love me any more? Don’t you want to be with me, here?’

The question threw me. Why did he feel that wanting to make sense of my fractured life meant that I wanted to change it in some way?

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘What is happiness? I’m happy when I wake up, I think, though if this morning is anything to go by I’m confused. But I’m not happy when I look in the mirror and see that I’m twenty years older than I was expecting, that I have grey hairs and lines around my eyes. I’m not happy when I realize that all those years have been lost, taken from me. So I suppose a lot of the time I’m not happy, no. But it’s not your fault. I’m happy with you. I love you. I need you.’

He came and sat next to me, then. His voice softened. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I hate the fact that everything was ruined, just because of that car accident.’

I felt anger rise in me again, but clamped it down. I had no right to be angry with him; he did not know what I had learned and what I hadn’t.

‘Ben,’ I said, ‘I know what happened. I know it wasn’t a car accident. I know I was attacked.’

He didn’t move. He looked at me, his eyes expressionless. I thought he hadn’t heard me, and then he said, ‘What attack?’

I raised my voice. ‘Ben!’ I said. ‘Stop it!’ I couldn’t help it. I had told him I was keeping a journal, told him I was piecing together the details of my story, and yet here he was, still prepared to lie to me when it was obvious I knew the truth. ‘Don’t keep fucking lying to me! I know there was no car accident. I know what happened to me. There’s no point in trying to pretend it was anything other than it was. Denying it doesn’t get us anywhere. You have to stop lying to me!’

He stood up. He looked huge, looming over me, blocking my vision.

‘Who told you?’ he said. ‘Who? Was it that bitch Claire? Did she go shooting her ugly fat mouth off, telling you lies? Sticking her oar in where it isn’t wanted?’

‘Ben—’ I began.

‘She’s always hated me. She’d do anything to poison you against me. Anything! She’s lying, my darling. She’s lying!’

‘It wasn’t Claire,’ I said. I bowed my head. ‘It was somebody else.’

‘Who?’ he shouted. ‘Who?’

‘I’ve been seeing a doctor,’ I whispered. ‘We’ve been talking. He told me.’

He was perfectly motionless apart from the thumb of his right hand which was tracing slow circles on the knuckle of his left. I could feel the warmth of his body, hear the slow drawing in of his breath, the hold, the release. When he spoke his voice was so low I struggled to make out the words.

‘What do you mean, a doctor?’

‘His name is Dr Nash. Apparently he contacted me a few weeks ago.’ Even as I said it I felt like I wasn’t telling my own story, but that of someone else.

‘Saying what?’

I tried to remember. Had I written about our first conversation?

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I wrote down what he said.’

‘And he encouraged you to write things down?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’ he said.

‘I want to get better, Ben.’

‘And is it working? What have you been doing? Has he been giving you drugs?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ve been doing some tests, some exercises. I had a scan—’

The thumb stopped moving. He turned to face me.

‘A scan?’ His voice was louder again.

‘Yes. An MRI. He said it might help. They didn’t really have them when I was first ill. Or they weren’t as sophisticated as they are now—’

‘Where? Where have you been doing these tests? Tell me!’

I was starting to feel confused. ‘In his office,’ I said. ‘In London. The scan was there too. I don’t remember exactly.’

‘How have you been getting there? How did someone like you get to a doctor’s office?’ His voice was pinched and urgent now. ‘How?’

I tried to speak calmly. ‘He’s been collecting me from here,’ I said. ‘And driving me—’

Disappointment flashed on his face, and then anger. I had never wanted the conversation to go like this, never intended it to become difficult.

I needed to try and explain things to him. ‘Ben—’ I began.

What happened next was not what I was expecting. A dull moan began in Ben’s throat, somewhere deep. It built quickly until, unable to hold it in any more, he let out a terrible screech, like nails on glass.

‘Ben!’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

He turned around, staggering as he did so, averting his face from me. I worried he was having some kind of attack. I stood up and put my hand out for him to hold on to. ‘Ben!’ I said again, but he ignored it, steadying himself against the wall. When he turned back to me his face was bright red, his eyes wide. I could see that spittle had gathered at the corners of his mouth. It looked as though he had put on some kind of grotesque mask, so distorted were his features.

‘You stupid fucking bitch,’ he said, moving up against me as he did so. I flinched. His face was just inches from mine. ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘I—’

‘Tell me! Tell me, you slut. How long?’

‘Nothing’s going on!’ I said. Fear welled within me, rising up. It did a slow roll on the surface and then sank beneath. ‘Nothing!’ I said again. I could smell the food on his breath. Meat, and onion. Spittle flew, striking me in the face, the lips. I could taste his warm, wet anger.

‘You’re sleeping with him. Don’t lie to me.’

The backs of my legs pressed against the edge of the sofa and I tried to move along it, to get away from him, but he grabbed my shoulders and shook them. ‘You’ve always been the same,’ he said. ‘A stupid lying bitch. I don’t know what made me think you’d be any different with me. What have you been doing, eh? Sneaking off while I’ve been at work? Or have you been having him round here? Or maybe you’ve been doing it in a car, parked up on the heath?’

I felt his hands grip tight, his fingers and nails digging into my skin even through the cotton of my blouse.

‘You’re hurting me!’ I shouted, hoping to shock him out of his rage. ‘Ben! Stop it!’

He stopped shaking, and loosened his grip a fraction. It didn’t seem possible that the man gripping my shoulders, his face a mixture of rage and hate, could be the same man who had written the letter that Claire had given me. How could we have reached this level of distrust? How much miscommunication must it have taken to bring us from there to here?

‘I’m not sleeping with him,’ I said. ‘He’s helping me. Helping me to get better so that I can live a normal life. Here, with you. Don’t you want that?’

His eyes began darting around the room. ‘Ben?’ I said again. ‘Talk to me!’ He froze. ‘Don’t you want me to get better? Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted, always hoped for?’ He began to shake his head, rocking it from side to side. ‘I know it is,’ I said. ‘I know it’s what you’ve wanted all this time.’ Hot tears ran down my cheeks, but I spoke through them, my voice fracturing into sobs. He was still holding me, but gently now, and I put my hands on his.

‘I met Claire,’ I said. ‘She gave me your letter. I’ve read it, Ben. After all these years. I’ve read it.’

There is a stain there, on the page. Ink, mixed with water in a smudge that resembles a star. I must have been crying as I wrote. I carried on reading.

I don’t know what I expected to happen. Perhaps I thought he’d fall into my arms, sobbing with relief, and we would stand there, holding each other silently for as long as it took for us to relax, to feel our way back into each other again. And then we would sit and talk things through. Perhaps I would go upstairs and get the letter that Claire had given me, and we would read it together, and begin the slow process of rebuilding our lives on a foundation of truth.

Instead, there was an instant in which nothing at all seemed to move and everything was quiet. There was no sound of breathing, no traffic from the road. I didn’t even hear the ticking of the clock. It was as if life was suspended, hovering on the cusp between one state and another.

And then it was over. Ben drew away from me. I thought he was going to kiss me, but instead I was aware of a blur out of the corner of my eye and my head cracked to one side. Pain radiated from my jaw. I fell, the sofa coming towards me, and the back of my head connected with something hard and sharp. I cried out. There was another blow, and then another. I closed my eyes, waiting for the next — but nothing came. Instead I heard footsteps moving away, and a door slamming.

I opened my eyes and inhaled in an angry gasp. The carpet stretched away from me, now vertical. A smashed plate sat near to my head and gravy oozed on to the floor, soaking into the carpet. Green peas had been trodden into the weave of the rug, and the half-chewed sausage. The front door swung open, then slammed. Footsteps on the path. Ben had left.

I exhaled. I closed my eyes. I must not sleep, I thought. I must not.

I opened them again. Dark swirls in the distance and the smell of flesh. I swallowed, and tasted blood.

What have I done? What have I done?

I made sure he was gone, then came upstairs and found my journal. Blood dripped on to the carpet from my split lip. I don’t know what has happened. I don’t know where my husband is, or if he will come back, or whether I want him to.

But I need him to. Without him I can’t live.

I am scared. I want to see Claire.

I stop reading and my hand goes to my forehead. It feels tender. The bruise I saw this morning, the one I covered up with make-up. Ben had hit me. I look back at the date. Friday, 23 November. It was one week ago. One week spent believing that everything is all right.

I stand up to look in the mirror. It is still there. A faint blue contusion. Proof that what I wrote was true. I wonder what lies I have been telling myself to explain my injury, or what lies he has been telling me.

But now I know the truth. I look at the pages in my hand and it hits me. He wanted me to find them. He knows that even if I read them today, I will have forgotten them tomorrow.

Suddenly I hear him on the stairs and, almost for the first time, realize fully that I am here, in this hotel room. With Ben. With the man who has hit me. I hear his key in the lock.

I have to know what happened, so I push the pages under the pillow and lie on the bed. As he comes into the room, I close my eyes.

‘Are you OK, darling?’ he says. ‘Are you awake?’

I open my eyes. He is standing in the doorway, clutching a bottle. ‘I could only get Cava,’ he says. ‘OK?’

He puts the bottle on the dresser and kisses me. ‘I think I’ll take a shower,’ he whispers. He goes into the bathroom and turns on the taps.

When he has closed the door I pull out the pages. I don’t have long — surely he will not be more than five minutes — and so I must read as quickly as I can. My eyes flick down the page, not even registering all the words but seeing enough.

That was hours ago. I have been sitting in the darkened hallway of our empty house, a slip of paper in one hand, a telephone in the other. Ink on paper. A number smudged. There was no answer, just an endless ringing. I wonder if she has turned off her answering machine, or if the tape is full. I try again. And again. I have been here before. My time is circular. Claire is not there to help me.

I looked in my bag and found the phone that Dr Nash had given me. It is late, I thought. He won’t be at work. He’ll be with his girlfriend, doing whatever it is that the two of them do during their evenings. Whatever two normal people do. I have no idea what that is.

His home number was written in the front of my journal. It rang and rang, and then was silent. There was no recorded voice to tell me there was an error, no invitation to leave a message. I tried again. The same. His office number was now the only one I had.

I sat there for a while. Helpless. Looking at the front door, half hoping to see Ben’s shadowy figure appear in the frosted glass and insert a key in the lock, half fearing it.

Eventually I could wait no more. I went upstairs and got undressed, and then I got into bed and wrote this. The house is still empty. In a moment I will close this book and hide it, and then switch off the light and sleep.

And then I will forget, and this journal will be all that is left.

I look at the next page with dread, fearing I will find it blank, but it is not.

Monday, 26 November

He hit me on Friday. Two days, and I have written nothing.

For all that time, did I believe things were all right?

My face is bruised and sore. Surely I knew that something was not right?

Today he said that I fell. The biggest cliché in the book and I believed him. Why wouldn’t I? He’d already had to explain who I was, and who he was, and how I’d come to be waking up in a strange house, decades older than I thought I should be, so why would I question his reason for my bruised and swollen eye, my cut lip?

And so I went ahead with my day. I kissed him as he left for work. I cleared up our breakfast things. I ran a bath.

And then I came in here, found this journal, and learned the truth.

A gap. I realize I have not mentioned Dr Nash. Had he abandoned me? Had I found the journal without his help?

Or had I stopped hiding it? I read on.

Later, I called Claire. The phone that Ben had given me didn’t work — the battery was probably dead, I thought — and so I used the one that Dr Nash had given me. There was no answer, and so I sat in the living room. I could not relax. I picked up magazines, put them down again. I put the TV on and spent half an hour staring at the screen, not even noticing what was on. I looked at my journal, unable to concentrate, unable to write. I tried her again, several times, each time hearing the same message inviting me to leave one of my own. It was just after lunchtime when she answered.

‘Chrissy,’ she said. ‘How are you?’ I could hear Toby in the background, playing.

‘I’m OK,’ I said, although I wasn’t.

‘I was going to call you,’ she said. ‘I feel like hell, and it’s only Monday!’

Monday. Days meant nothing to me; each melted away, indistinguishable from the one that had preceded it.

‘I need to see you,’ I said. ‘Can you come over?’

She sounded surprised. ‘To your place?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Please? I want to talk to you.’

‘Is everything OK, Chrissy? You read the letter?’

I took a deep breath, and my voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Ben hit me.’ I heard a gasp of surprise.

‘What?’

‘The other night. I’m bruised. He told me I’d fallen, but I wrote down that he hit me.’

‘Chrissy, there is no way Ben would hit you. Ever. He just isn’t capable of it.’

Doubt flooded me. Was it possible I’d made it all up?

‘But I wrote it in my journal,’ I said.

She said nothing for a moment, and then, ‘But why do you think he hit you?’

I put my hands to my face, felt the swollen flesh around my eyes. I felt a flash of anger. It was clear she didn’t believe me.

I thought back to what I had written. ‘I told him that I’ve been keeping a journal. I said I had been seeing you, and Dr Nash. I told him I knew about Adam. I told him you’d given me the letter he’d written, that I’d read it. And then he hit me.’

‘He just hit you?’

I thought of all the things he’d called me, the things he’d accused me of. ‘He said I was a bitch.’ I felt a sob rise in my chest. ‘He — he accused me of sleeping with Dr Nash. I said I wasn’t, then—’

‘Then?’

‘Then he hit me.’

A silence, then Claire said, ‘Has he ever hit you before?’

I had no way of knowing. Perhaps he had? It was possible that ours had always been an abusive relationship. My mind flashed on Claire and me, marching, holding home-made placards –

Women’s rights. No to domestic violence

I remembered how I had always looked down on women who found themselves with husbands who beat them and stayed put. They were weak, I thought. Weak, and stupid.

Was it possible that I had fallen into the same trap as they had?

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘It’s difficult to imagine Ben hurting anything, but I suppose it’s not impossible. Christ! He used to make even me feel guilty. Do you remember?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t. I don’t remember anything.’

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot. It’s just so hard to imagine. He’s the one who convinced me that fish have as much right to life as an animal with legs. He wouldn’t even kill a spider!’

The wind gusts the curtains of the room. I hear a train in the distance. Screams from the pier. Downstairs, on the street, someone shouts ‘Fuck!’ and I hear the sound of breaking glass. I do not want to read on, but know that I must.

I felt a chill. ‘Ben was vegetarian?’

‘Vegan,’ she said, laughing. ‘Don’t tell me you didn’t know?’

I thought of the night he’d hit me.

A lump of meat

, I’d written.

Peas floating in thin gravy

.

I went over to the window. ‘Ben eats meat …’ I said, speaking slowly. ‘He’s not vegetarian … Not now, anyway. Maybe he’s changed?’

There was another long silence.

‘Claire?’ She said nothing. ‘Claire? Are you there?’

‘Right,’ she said. She sounded angry now. ‘I’m ringing him. I’m sorting this out. Where is he?’

I answered without thinking. ‘He’ll be at the school, I suppose. He said he wouldn’t be back until five o’clock.’

‘At the school?’ she said. ‘Do you mean the university? Is he lecturing now?’

Fear began to stir within me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘He works at a school near here. I can’t remember the name.’

‘What does he do there?’

‘A teacher. He’s head of chemistry, I think he said.’ I felt guilty at not knowing what my husband does for a living, not being able to remember how he earns the money to keep us fed and clothed. ‘I don’t remember.’

I looked up and caught sight of my swollen face reflected in the window in front of me. The guilt evaporated.

‘What school?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he told me.’

‘What, never?’

‘Not this morning, no,’ I said. ‘For me that might as well be never.’

‘I’m sorry, Chrissy. I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that, well—’ I sensed a change of mind, a sentence aborted. ‘Could you find out the name of the school?’

I thought of the office upstairs. ‘I guess so. Why?’

‘I’d like to speak to Ben, to make sure he’ll be coming home when I’m there this afternoon. I wouldn’t want it to be a wasted journey!’

I noticed the humour she was trying to inject into her voice, but didn’t mention it. I felt out of control, couldn’t work out what was best, what I should do, and so decided to surrender to my friend. ‘I’ll have a look,’ I said.

I went upstairs. The office was tidy, piles of papers arranged across the desk. It did not take long to find some headed paper; a letter about a parents’ evening that had already taken place.

‘It’s St Anne’s,’ I said. ‘You want the number?’ She said she’d find it out herself.

‘I’ll call you back,’ she said. ‘Yes?’

Panic hit again. ‘What are you going to say to him?’ I said.

‘I’m going to sort this out,’ she said. ‘Trust me, Chrissy. There has to be an explanation. OK?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and ended the call. I sat down, my legs shaking. What if my first hunch had been correct? What if Claire and Ben were still sleeping together? Maybe she was calling him now, warning him.

She suspects

, she might be saying.

Be careful

.

I remembered reading my journal earlier. Dr Nash had told me that I had once shown symptoms of paranoia.

Claiming the doctors were conspiring against you

, he’d said.

A tendency to confabulate. To invent things

.

What if that’s all happening again? What if I am inventing this, all of it? Everything in my journal might be fantasy. Paranoia.

I thought of what they’d told me on the ward, and Ben in his letter.

You were occasionally violent

I realized it might have been me who caused the fight on Friday night. Did I lash out at Ben? Perhaps he hit back and then, upstairs in the bathroom, I took a pen and explained it all away with a fiction.

What if all this journal means is that I’m getting worse again? That soon it really will be time for me to go back to Waring House?

I went cold, suddenly convinced that this was why Dr Nash had wanted to take me there. To prepare me for my return.

All I can do is wait for Claire to call me back.

Another gap. Is that what’s happening now? Will Ben try to take me back to Waring House? I look over to the bathroom door. I will not let him.

There is one final entry, written later that same day.

Monday, 26 November, 6.55 p.m

.

Claire called me after less than half an hour. And now my mind oscillates. It swings from one thing to the other, then back again.

I know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I know what to do

But there’s a third thought. I shudder as I realize the truth:

I am in danger

.

I turn to the front of this journal, intending to write Don’t trust Ben, but I find those words are already there.

I don’t remember writing them. But then I don’t remember anything.

A gap, and then it continues.

She sounded hesitant on the phone.

‘Chrissy,’ she said. ‘Listen.’

Her tone frightened me. I sat down. ‘What?’

‘I called Ben. At school.’

I had the overwhelming sensation of being on an uncontrollable journey, of being in unnavigable waters. ‘What did he say?’

‘I didn’t speak to him. I just wanted to make sure he worked there.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Don’t you trust him?’

‘He’s lied about other things.’

I had to agree. ‘But why did you think he’d tell me he worked somewhere if he didn’t?’ I said.

‘I was just surprised he was working in a school. You know he trained to be an architect? The last time I spoke to him he was looking into setting up his own practice. I just thought it was a bit odd he should be working in a school.’

‘What did they say?’

‘They said they couldn’t disturb him. He was busy, in a class.’ I felt relief. He hadn’t lied about that, at least.

‘He must have changed his mind,’ I said. ‘About his career.’

‘Chrissy? I told them I wanted to send him some documents. A letter. I asked for his official title.’

‘And?’ I said.

‘He’s not head of chemistry. Or science. Or anything else. They said he was a lab assistant.’

I felt my body jerk. I may have gasped; I don’t remember.

‘Are you sure?’ I said. My mind raced to think of a reason for this new lie. Was it possible he was embarrassed? Worried about what I would think if I knew he had gone from being a successful architect to a lab assistant in a local school? Did he really think I was so shallow that I would love him any more or less based on what he did for a living?

Everything made sense.

‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘It’s my fault!’

‘No!’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault!’

‘It is!’ I said. ‘It’s the strain of having to look after me. Of having to deal with me, day in and day out. He must be having a breakdown. Maybe he doesn’t even know himself what’s true and what’s not.’ I began to cry. ‘It must be unbearable,’ I said. ‘He even has to go through all that grief on his own, every day.’

The line was silent, and then Claire said, ‘Grief? What grief?’

‘Adam,’ I said. I felt pain at having to say his name.

‘What about Adam?’

It came to me. Wild. Unbidden.

Oh God

, I thought.

She doesn’t know. Ben hasn’t told her

.

‘He’s dead,’ I said.

She gasped. ‘Dead? When? How?’

‘I don’t know when, exactly,’ I said. ‘I think Ben told me it was last year. He was killed in the war.’

‘War? What war?’

‘Afghanistan.’

And then she said it. ‘Chrissy, what would he be doing in Afghanistan?’ Her voice was strange. She almost sounded pleased.

‘He was in the army,’ I said, but even as I spoke I was starting to doubt what I was saying. It was as if I was finally facing something I had known all along.

I heard Claire snort, almost as if she was finding something amusing. ‘Chrissy,’ she said. ‘Chrissy darling. Adam hasn’t been in the army. He’s never been to Afghanistan. He’s living in Birmingham, with someone called Helen. He works with computers. He hasn’t forgiven me, but I still ring him occasionally. He’d probably rather I didn’t, but I am his godmother, remember?’ It took me a moment to work out why she was still using the present tense, and even as I did so she said it.

‘I rang him after we met last week,’ she said. She was almost laughing, now. ‘He wasn’t there, but I spoke to Helen. She said she’d ask him to ring me back. Adam is alive.’

I stop reading. I feel light. Empty. I feel I might fall backwards, or else float away. Dare I believe it? Do I want to? I steady myself against the dresser and read on, only dimly aware that no longer do I hear the sound of Ben’s shower.

I must have stumbled, grabbed hold of the chair. ‘He’s alive?’ My stomach rolled, I remember vomit rising in my throat and having to swallow it down. ‘He’s really alive?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes!’

‘But—’ I began. ‘But — I saw a newspaper. A clipping. It said he’d been killed.’

‘It can’t have been real, Chrissy,’ she said. ‘It can’t have been. He’s alive.’

I began to speak, but then everything hit me at once, every emotion bound up in every other. Joy. I remember joy. The sheer pleasure of knowing that Adam is alive fizzed on my tongue, but mixed into it was the bitter, acid tang of fear. I thought of my bruises, of the force with which Ben must have struck me to cause them. Perhaps his abuse is not only physical, perhaps some days he takes delight in telling me that my son is dead so that he can see the pain that thought inflicts. Was it really possible that on other days, in which I remember the fact of my pregnancy, or giving birth to my baby, he simply tells me that Adam has moved away, is working abroad, living on the other side of town?

And if so, why did I never write down any of those alternative truths that he fed me?

Images entered my head, of Adam as he might be now, fragments of scenes I may have missed, but none would hold. Each image slid through me and then vanished. The only thing I could think was he’s alive. Alive. My son is alive. I can meet him.

‘Where is he?’ I said. ‘Where is he? I want to see him!’

‘Chrissy,’ Claire said. ‘Stay calm.’

‘But—’

‘Chrissy!’ she interrupted. ‘I’m coming round. Stay there.’

‘Claire! Tell me where he is!’

‘I’m really worried about you, Chrissy. Please—’

‘But—’

She raised her voice. ‘Chrissy, calm down!’ she said, and then a single thought pierced through the fog of my confusion: I am hysterical. I took a breath and tried to settle, as Claire began to speak again.

‘Adam is living in Birmingham,’ she said.

‘But he must know where I am now,’ I said. ‘Why doesn’t he come to see me?’

‘Chrissy …’ she began.

‘Why? Why doesn’t he visit me? Does he not get on with Ben? Is that why he stays away?’

‘Chrissy,’ she said, her voice soft. ‘Birmingham is a fair way away. He has a busy life …’

‘You mean—’

‘Maybe he can’t get down to London that often?’

‘But—’

‘Chrissy. You think Adam doesn’t visit. But I can’t believe that. Maybe he does come, when he can.’

I fell silent. Nothing made sense. Yet she was right. I have only been keeping my journal for a couple of weeks. Before that, anything could have happened.

‘I need to see him,’ I said. ‘I want to see him. Do you think that can be arranged?’

‘I don’t see why not. But if Ben is really telling you that he’s dead then we ought to speak to him first.’

Of course, I thought. But what will he say? He thinks that I still believe his lies.

‘He’ll be here soon,’ I said. ‘Will you still come over? Will you help me to sort this out?’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course. I don’t know what’s going on. But we’ll talk to Ben. I promise. I’ll come now.’

‘Now? Right now?’

‘Yes. I’m worried, Chrissy. Something’s not right.’

Her tone bothered me, but at the same time I felt relieved, and excited at the thought that I might soon be able to meet my son. I wanted to see him, to see his photograph, right away. I remembered that we had hardly any, and those we did have were locked away. A thought began to form.

‘Claire,’ I said, ‘did we have a fire?’

She sounded confused. ‘A fire?’

‘Yes. We have hardly any photographs of Adam. And almost none of our wedding. Ben said we lost them in a fire.’

‘A fire?’ she said. ‘What fire?’

‘Ben said there was a fire in our old home. We lost lots of things.’

‘When?’

‘I don’t know. Years ago.’

‘And you have no photographs of Adam?’

I felt myself getting annoyed. ‘We have some. But not many. Hardly any of him other than when he was a baby. A toddler. And none of holidays, not even our honeymoon. None of Christmases. Nothing like that.’

‘Chrissy,’ she said. Her voice was quiet, measured. I thought I detected something in it, some new emotion. Fear. ‘Describe Ben to me.’

‘What?’

‘Describe him to me. Ben. What does he look like?’

‘What about the fire?’ I said. ‘Tell me about that.’

‘There was no fire,’ she said.

‘But I wrote down that I remembered it,’ I said. ‘A chip pan. The phone rang …’

‘You must have been imagining it,’ she said.

‘But—’

I sensed her anxiety. ‘Chrissy! There was no fire. Not years ago. Ben would have told me. Now, describe Ben. What does he look like? Is he tall?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘Black hair?’

My mind went blank. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. He’s beginning to go grey. He has a paunch, I think. Maybe not.’ I stood up. ‘I need to see his photograph.’

I went back upstairs. They were there, pinned around the mirror. Me and my husband. Happy. Together.

‘His hair looks kind of brown,’ I said. I heard a car pull up outside the house.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes,’ I said. The engine was switched off, the door slammed. A loud beep. I lowered my voice. ‘I think Ben’s home.’

‘Shit,’ said Claire. ‘Quick. Does he have a scar?’

‘A scar?’ I said. ‘Where?’

‘On his face, Chrissy. A scar, across one cheek. He had an accident. Rock climbing.’

I scanned the photographs, choosing the one of me and my husband sitting at a breakfast table in our dressing gowns. In it he was smiling happily and, apart from a hint of stubble, his cheeks were unblemished. Fear rushed to hit me.

I heard the front door open. A voice. ‘Christine! Darling! I’m home!’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, he doesn’t.’

A sound. Somewhere between a gasp and a sigh.

‘The man you’re living with,’ Claire said. ‘I don’t know who it is. But it’s not Ben.’

Terror hits. I hear the toilet flush, but can do nothing but read on.

I don’t know what happened then. I can’t piece it together. Claire began talking, almost shouting. ‘Fuck!’ she said, over and over. My mind was spinning with panic. I heard the front door shut, the click of the lock.

‘I’m in the bathroom,’ I shouted to the man I had thought was my husband. My voice sounded cracked. Desperate. ‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

‘I’ll come round,’ said Claire. ‘I’m getting you out of there.’

‘Everything OK, darling?’ shouted the man who is not Ben. I heard his footsteps on the stairs and realized I had not locked the bathroom door. I lowered my voice.

‘He’s here,’ I said. ‘Come tomorrow. While he’s at work. I’ll pack my things. I’ll call you.’

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘OK. But write in your journal. Write in it as soon as you can. Don’t forget.’

I thought of my journal, hidden in the wardrobe. I must stay calm, I thought. I must pretend nothing is wrong, at least until I can get to it and write down the danger I am in.

‘Help me,’ I said. ‘Help me.’

I ended the call as he pushed open the bathroom door.

It ends there. Frantic, I fan through the last few pages, but they are blank, scored only with their faint blue lines. Waiting for the rest of my story. But there is no more. Ben had found the journal, removed the pages, and Claire had not come for me. When Dr Nash collected the journal — on Tuesday 27th, it must have been — I had not known anything was wrong.

In a single rush I see it all, realize why the board in the kitchen so disturbed me. The handwriting. Its neat, even capitals looked totally different from the scrawl of the letter Claire had given me. Somewhere, deep down, I had known then that they were not written by the same person.

I look up. Ben, or the man pretending to be Ben, has come out of the shower. He is standing in the doorway, dressed as he was before, looking at me. I don’t know how long he has been there, watching me read. His eyes hold nothing more than a sort of vacancy, as if he is barely interested in what he is seeing, as if it doesn’t concern him.

I hear myself gasp. I drop the papers. Unbound, they slide on to the floor.

‘You!’ I say. ‘Who are you?’ He says nothing. He is looking at the papers in front of me. ‘Answer me!’ I say. My voice has an authority to it, but one that I do not feel.

My mind reels as I try to work out who he could be. Someone from Waring House, perhaps. A patient? Nothing makes any sense. I feel the stirrings of panic as another thought begins to form and then vanishes.

He looks up at me then. ‘I’m Ben,’ he says. He speaks slowly, as if trying to make me understand the obvious. ‘Ben. Your husband.’

I move back along the floor, away from him, as I fight to remember what I have read, what I know.

‘No,’ I say, and then again, louder. ‘No!’

He moves forward. ‘I am, Christine. You know I am.’

Fear takes me. Terror. It lifts me up, holds me suspended, and then slams me back into its own horror. Claire’s words come back to me. But it’s not Ben. A strange thing happens then. I realize I am not remembering reading about her saying those words, I am remembering the incident itself. I can remember the panic in her voice, the way she said fuck before telling me what she’d realized, and repeated the words It’s not Ben.

I am remembering.

‘You’re not,’ I say. ‘You’re not Ben. Claire told me! Who are you?’

‘Remember the pictures though, Christine? The ones from around the bathroom mirror? Look, I brought them to show you.’

He takes a step towards me, and then reaches for his bag on the floor beside the bed. He picks out a few curled photographs. ‘Look!’ he says, and when I shake my head he takes the first one and, glancing at it, holds it up to me.

‘This is us,’ he says. ‘Look. Me and you.’ The photograph shows us sitting on some sort of boat, on a river or canal. Behind us there is dark, muddy water, with unfocused reeds beyond that. We both look young, our skin taut where now it sags, our eyes unlined and wide with happiness. ‘Don’t you see?’ he says. ‘Look! That’s us. Me and you. Years ago. We’ve been together for years, Chris. Years and years.’

I focus on the picture. Images come to me; the two of us, a sunny afternoon. We’d hired a boat somewhere. I don’t know where.

He holds up another picture. We are much older now. It looks recent. We are standing outside a church. The day is overcast, and he is wearing a suit and shaking hands with a man also in a suit. I am wearing a hat which I seem to be having difficulty with; I am holding it as if it is in danger of blowing off in the wind. I am not looking at the camera.

‘That was just a few weeks ago,’ he says. ‘Some friends of ours invited us to their daughter’s wedding. You remember?’

‘No,’ I say, angrily. ‘No, I don’t remember!’

‘It was a lovely day,’ he says, turning the picture back to look at it himself. ‘Lovely—’

I remember reading what Claire had said when I told her I had found a newspaper clipping about Adam’s death. It can’t have been real.

‘Show me one of Adam,’ I say. ‘Go on! Show me just one picture of him.’

‘Adam is dead,’ he says. ‘A soldier’s death. Noble. He died a hero—’

I shout. ‘You should still have a picture of him! Show me!’

He takes out the picture of Adam with Helen. The one I have already seen. Fury rises in me. ‘Show me just one picture of Adam with you in it. Just one. You must have some, surely? If you’re his father?’

He looks through the photographs in his hand and I think he will produce a picture of the two of them, but he does not. His arms hang at his side. ‘I don’t have one with me,’ he says. ‘They must be at the house.’

‘You’re not his father, are you?’ I say. ‘What father wouldn’t have pictures of himself with his son?’ His eyes narrow, as if in rage, but I cannot stop. ‘And what kind of father would tell his wife that their son was dead when he isn’t? Admit it! You’re not Adam’s father! Ben is.’ Even as I said the name an image came to me. A man with narrow, dark-rimmed glasses and black hair. Ben. I say his name again, as if to lock the image in my mind. ‘Ben.’

The name has an effect on the man standing in front of me. He says something, but too quietly for me to hear it, and so I ask him to repeat it. ‘You don’t need Adam,’ he says.

‘What?’ I say, and he speaks more firmly, looking into my eyes as he does so.

‘You don’t need Adam. You have me now. We’re together. You don’t need Adam. You don’t need Ben.’

At his words I feel all the strength I had within me disappear and, as it goes, he seems to recover. I sink to the floor. He smiles.

‘Don’t be upset,’ he says, brightly. ‘What does it matter? I love you. That’s all that’s important, surely. I love you, and you love me.’

He crouches down, holding out his hands towards me. He is smiling, as if I am an animal that he is trying to coax out of the hole in which it has hidden.

‘Come,’ he says. ‘Come to me.’

I shift further back, sliding on my haunches. I hit something solid and feel the warm, sticky radiator behind me. I realize I am under the window at the far end of the room. He advances slowly.

‘Who are you?’ I say again, trying to keep my voice even, calm. ‘What do you want?’

He stops moving. He is crouched in front of me. If he were to reach out he could touch my foot, my knee. If he were to move closer I might be able to kick him, should I need to, though I am not sure I could reach and, in any case, am barefoot.

‘What do I want?’ he says. ‘I don’t want anything. I just want us to be happy, Chris. Like we used to be. Do you remember?’

That word again. Remember. For a moment I think perhaps he is being sarcastic.

‘I don’t know who you are,’ I say, near hysterical. ‘How can I remember? I’ve never met you before!’

His smile vanishes then. I see his face collapse in on itself with pain. There is a moment of limbo, as if the balance of power is shifting from him to me and for a fraction of a second it’s equal between us.

He becomes animated again. ‘But you love me,’ he says. ‘I read it, in your journal. You said you love me. I know you want us to be together. Why can’t you remember that?’

‘My journal!’ I say. I know he must have known about it — how else did he remove those vital pages? — but now I realize he must have been reading it for a while, at least since I first told him about it a week ago. ‘How long have you been reading my journal?’

He doesn’t seem to have heard me. He raises his voice, as if in triumph. ‘Tell me you don’t love me,’ he says. I say nothing. ‘See? You can’t, can you? You can’t say it. Because you do. You always have done, Chris. Always.’

He rocks back, and the two of us sit on the floor, opposite each other. ‘I remember when we met,’ he says. I think of what he’s told me — spilled coffee in the university library — and wonder what is coming now.

‘You were working on something. Always writing. You used to go to the same café every day. You always sat in the window, in the same seat. Sometimes you had a child with you, but usually not. You would sit with a notebook open in front of you, either writing or sometimes just looking out of the window. I thought you looked so beautiful. I used to walk past you, every day, on my way to catch the bus, and I started to look forward to my walk home so that I could catch a glimpse of you. I used to try and guess what you might be wearing, or whether you’d have your hair pulled back or loose, or whether you’d have a snack, a cake or a sandwich. Sometimes you’d have a whole flapjack in front of you, sometimes just a plate of crumbs or even nothing at all, just the tea.’

He laughs, shaking his head sadly, and I remember Claire telling me about the café and know that he is speaking the truth. ‘I would come past at exactly the same time every day,’ he says, ‘and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn’t work out how you decided when to eat your snack. At first I thought maybe it depended on the day of the week, but it didn’t seem to follow any pattern there, so then I thought perhaps it was related to the date. But that didn’t work either. I started to wonder what time you actually ordered your snack. I thought maybe that was related to the time that you got to the café, so I started to leave work earlier and run so that I could maybe see you arriving. And then, one day, you weren’t there. I waited until I saw you coming down the street. You were pushing a buggy, and when you got to the café door you seemed to have trouble getting it in. You looked so helpless and stuck, and without thinking I walked over the road and held the door for you. And you smiled at me, and said, “Thank you so much.” You looked so beautiful, Christine. I wanted to kiss you, there and then, but I couldn’t, and because I didn’t want you to think that I’d run across the road just to help you I went into the café too, and stood behind you in the queue. You spoke to me, as we waited. “Busy today, isn’t it?” you said, and I said, “Yes,” even though it wasn’t particularly busy for that time of day. I just wanted to carry on making conversation. I ordered a drink, and I had the same cake as you, too, and I wondered if I should ask you whether it would be OK for me to sit with you, but by the time I’d got my tea you were chatting to someone, one of the people who ran the café, I think, and so I sat on my own in the corner.

‘After that I used to go to the café almost every day. It’s always easier to do something when you’ve done it once. Sometimes I’d wait for you to arrive, or make sure you were there before I went in, but sometimes I’d just go in anyway. And you noticed me. I know you did. You began to say hello to me, or you’d comment on the weather. And then one time I was held up, and when I arrived you actually said, “You’re late today!” as I walked past holding my tea and my flapjack, and when you saw that there were no free tables you said, “Why don’t you sit here?” and you pointed to the chair at your table, opposite you. The baby wasn’t there that day, so I said, “Are you sure you don’t mind? I won’t disturb you?” and then I felt bad for saying that, and I dreaded you saying that, yes, actually, on second thoughts it would disturb you. But you didn’t, you said, “No! Not at all! To be honest, it’s not going too well anyway. I’d be glad of a distraction!” and that was how I knew that you wanted me to speak to you, rather than just have my drink and eat my cake in silence. Do you remember?’

I shake my head. I have decided to let him speak. I want to find out everything he has to say.

‘So I sat, and we chatted. You told me you were a writer. You said you’d had a book published but you were struggling with your second one. I asked what it was about, but you wouldn’t tell me. “It’s fiction,” you said, and then you said, “supposedly”, and you suddenly looked very sad, so I offered to buy you another cup of coffee. You said that would be nice, but that you didn’t have any money with you to buy me one. “I don’t bring my purse when I come here,” you said. “I just bring enough money to buy one drink and one snack. That way I’m not tempted to pig out!” I thought it was an odd thing to say. You didn’t look as though you needed to worry about how much you ate at all. You were always so slim. But anyway I was glad, as it meant you must be enjoying speaking to me, and you would owe me a drink, so we’d have to see each other again. I said that it didn’t matter about the money, or buying me one back, and I got us some more tea and coffee. After that we started to meet quite regularly.’

I begin to see it all. Though I have no memory, somehow I know how these things work. The casual meeting, the exchange of a drink. The appeal of talking to — confiding in — a stranger, one who doesn’t judge or take sides because he can’t. The gradual acceptance into confidence, leading … to what?

I have seen the photographs of the two of us, taken years ago. We look happy. It is obvious where those confidences led us. He was attractive, too. Not film-star handsome, but better-looking than most; it is not difficult to see what drew me. At some point I must have started scanning the door anxiously as I sat trying to work, thinking more carefully about what clothes I would wear when I went to the café, whether to add a dash of perfume. And, one day, one or the other of us must have suggested we go for a walk, or to a bar, or maybe even to catch a film, and our friendship slipped over a line, into something else, something infinitely more dangerous.

I close my eyes and try to imagine it, and as I do I begin to remember. The two of us, in bed, naked. Semen drying on my stomach, in my hair, me turning to him as he begins to laugh and kiss me again. ‘Mike!’ I am saying. ‘Stop it! You have to leave soon. Ben’s back later today and I have to pick Adam up. Stop it!’ But he doesn’t listen. Instead he leans in, his moustachioed face in mine, and we are kissing again, forgetting about everything, about my husband, about my child. With a sickening plunge I realize that a memory of this day has come to me before. That day, as I had stood in the kitchen of the house I once shared with my husband I had not been remembering my husband, but my lover. The man I was fucking while my husband was at work. That’s why he had to leave that day. Not just to catch a train — because the man I was married to would be returning home.

I open my eyes. I am back in the hotel room and he is still crouching in front of me.

‘Mike,’ I say. ‘Your name is Mike.’

‘You remember!’ he says. He is pleased. ‘Chris! You remember!’

Hate bubbles up in me. ‘I remember your name,’ I say. ‘Nothing else. Just your name.’

‘You don’t remember how much in love we were?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I could ever have loved you, or surely I would remember more.’

I say it to hurt him, but his reaction surprises me. ‘You don’t remember Ben, though, do you? You can’t have loved him. And not Adam, either.’

‘You’re sick,’ I say. ‘How fucking dare you! Of course I loved him. He was my son!’

‘Is. Is your son. But you wouldn’t recognize him if he walked in now, would you? You think that’s love? And where is he? And where is Ben? They walked out on you, Christine. Both of them. I’m the only one who never stopped loving you. Not even when you left me.’

It is then that it hits me, finally, properly. How else could he have known about this room, about so much of my past?

‘Oh my God,’ I say. ‘It was you! It was you who did this to me! You who attacked me!’

He moves over to me then. He wraps his arms around me, as if to embrace me, and begins to stroke my hair. ‘Christine darling,’ he murmurs, ‘don’t say that. Don’t think about it. It’ll just upset you.’

I try to push him off me, but he is strong. He squeezes me tighter.

‘Let me go!’ I say. ‘Please, let me go!’ My words are lost in the folds of his shirt.

‘My love,’ he says. He has begun to rock me, as if soothing a baby. ‘My love. My sweet, my darling. You should never have left me. Don’t you see? None of this would have happened if you hadn’t gone.’

Memory comes again. We are sitting in a car, at night. I am crying, and he is staring out of the window, utterly silent. ‘Say something,’ I am saying. ‘Anything. Mike?’

‘You don’t mean it,’ he says. ‘You can’t.’

‘I’m sorry. I love Ben. We have our problems, yes, but I love him. He’s the person I am meant to be with. I’m sorry.’

I am aware that I am trying to keep things simple, so that he will understand. I have come to realize, over the past few months with Mike, that it is better this way. Complicated things confuse him. He likes order. Routine. Things mixing in precise ratios with predictable results. Plus I don’t want to get too mired in details.

‘It’s because I came round to your house, isn’t it? I’m sorry, Chris. I won’t do that again, I promise. I just wanted to see you, and I wanted to explain to your husband—’

I interrupt him. ‘Ben. You can say his name. It’s Ben.’

‘Ben,’ he says, as if trying the word for the first time and finding it unpleasant. ‘I wanted to explain things to him. I wanted to tell him the truth.’

‘What truth?’

‘That you don’t love him any more. That you love me, now. That you want to be with me. That was all I was going to say.’

I sigh. ‘Don’t you see that, even if it were true — which it isn’t — it’s not you who should be saying that to him? It’s me. You had no right to just turn up at the house.’

As I speak I think about what a lucky escape I have had.

Ben was in the shower, Adam playing in the dining room, and I was able to persuade Mike that he ought to go home before either of them were aware of his presence. That was the night I decided I had to end the affair.

‘I have to go now,’ I say. I open the car door, step out on to the gravel. ‘I’m sorry.’

He leans across to look at me. I think how attractive he is, that if he had been less damaged my marriage might have been in real trouble. ‘Will I see you again?’ he says.

‘No,’ I reply. ‘No. It’s over.’

Yet here we are now, all these years later. He is holding me again, and I understand that, no matter how scared I was of him, I was not scared enough. I begin to scream.

‘Darling,’ he says. ‘Calm down.’ He puts his hand over my mouth and I scream louder. ‘Calm down! Someone will hear you!’ My head smacks backwards, connects with the radiator behind me. There is no change in the music from the club next door — if anything it is louder now. They won’t, I think. They will never hear me. I scream again.

‘Stop it!’ he says. He has hit me, I think, or else shaken me. I begin to panic. ‘Stop it!’ My head hits the warm metal again and I am stunned into silence. I begin to sob.

‘Let me go,’ I say, pleading with him. ‘Please—’ He relaxes his grip a little, though not enough for me to wriggle free. ‘How did you find me? All these years later? How did you find me?’

‘Find you?’ he says. ‘I never lost you.’ My mind whirrs, uncomprehending. ‘I watched over you. Always. I protected you.’

‘You visited me? In those places? The hospital, Waring House?’ I begin. ‘But—’

He sighs. ‘Not always. They wouldn’t have let me. But I would sometimes tell them I was there to see someone else, or that I was a volunteer. Just so that I could see you, and make sure you were all right. At that last place it was easier. All those windows …’

I go cold. ‘You watched me?’

‘I had to know you were all right, Chris. I had to protect you.’

‘So you came back for me? Is that it? Wasn’t what you did here, in this room, enough?’

‘When I found out that bastard had left you, I couldn’t just leave you in that place. I knew you’d want to be with me. I knew it was the best thing for you. I had to wait for a while, wait until I knew there was no one still there to try and stop me, but who else would have looked after you?’

‘And they just let me go with you?’ I say. ‘Surely they wouldn’t have let me go with a stranger!’

I wonder what lies he must have told for them to let him take me, then remember reading what Dr Nash had told me about the woman from Waring House. She was so happy when she found out you’d gone back to live with Ben. An image forms, a memory. My hand in Mike’s as he signs a form. A woman behind a desk smiles at me. ‘We’ll miss you, Christine,’ she says. ‘But you’ll be happy at home.’ She looks at Mike. ‘With your husband.’

I follow her gaze. I don’t recognize the man whose hand I am holding, but I know he is the man I married. He must be. He has told me he is.

‘Oh my God!’ I say now. ‘How long have you been pretending to be Ben?’

He looks surprised. ‘Pretending?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Pretending to be my husband.’

He looks confused. I wonder if he has forgotten that he is not Ben. Then his face falls. He looks upset.

‘Do you think I wanted to do that? I had to. It was the only way.’

His arms relax, slightly, and an odd thing happens. My mind stops spinning, and, although I remain terrified, I am infused with a bizarre sense of complete calm. A thought comes from nowhere. I will beat him. I will get away. I have to.

‘Mike?’ I say. ‘I do understand, you know. It must have been difficult.’

He looks up at me. ‘You do?’

‘Yes, of course. I’m grateful to you for coming for me. For giving me a home. For looking after me.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Just think where I’d be if you hadn’t. I couldn’t bear it.’ I sense him soften. The pressure on my arms and shoulder lessens and is accompanied by a subtle yet definite sensation of stroking that I find almost more distasteful but I know is more likely to lead to my escape. Because escape is all I can think of. I need to get away. How stupid of me, I think now, to have sat there on the floor while he was in the bathroom to read what he had stolen of my journal. Why hadn’t I taken it with me and left? Then I remember that it was not until I read the end of the journal that I had any real idea of how much danger I was in. That same small voice comes in again. I will escape. I have a son I cannot remember having met. I will escape. I move my head to face him, and begin to stroke the back of his hand where it rests on my shoulder.

‘Why not let me go, and then we can talk about what we should do?’

‘How about Claire, though?’ he says. ‘She knows I’m not Ben. You told her.’

‘She won’t remember that,’ I say, desperately.

He laughs, a hollow, choked sound. ‘You always treated me like I was stupid. I’m not, you know. I know what’s going to happen! You told her. You ruined everything!’

‘No,’ I say quickly. ‘I can call her. I can tell her I was confused. That I’d forgotten who you were. I can tell her that I thought you were Ben, but I was wrong.’

I almost believe he thinks this is possible, but then he says, ‘She’d never believe you.’

‘She would,’ I say, even though I know that she would not. ‘I promise.’

‘Why did you have to go and call her?’ His face clouds with anger, his hands begin to grip me tighter. ‘Why? Why, Chris? We were doing fine until then. Fine.’ He begins to shake me again. ‘Why?’ he shouts. ‘Why?’

‘Ben,’ I say. ‘You’re hurting me.’

He hits me then. I hear the sound of his hand against my face before I feel the flash of pain. My head twists round, my lower jaw cracks up, connecting painfully with its companion.

‘Don’t you ever fucking call me that again,’ he spits.

‘Mike,’ I say quickly, as if I can erase my mistake. ‘Mike—’

He ignores me.

‘I’m sick of being Ben,’ he says. ‘You can call me Mike, from now on. OK? It’s Mike. That’s why we came back here. So that we can put all that behind us. You wrote in your book that if you could only remember what happened here all those years ago then you’d get your memory back. Well, we’re here now. I made it happen, Chris. So remember!’

I am incredulous. ‘You want me to remember?’

‘Yes! Of course I do! I love you, Christine. I want you to remember how much you love me. I want us to be together again. Properly. As we should be.’ He pauses, his voice drops to a whisper. ‘I don’t want to be Ben any more.’

‘But—’

He looks back at me. ‘When we go back home tomorrow you can call me Mike.’ He shakes me again, his face inches from mine. ‘OK?’ I can smell sourness on his breath, and another smell, too. I wonder if he’s been drinking. ‘We’re going to be OK, aren’t we, Christine? We’re going to move on.’

‘Move on?’ I say. My head is sore, and something is coming out of my nose. Blood, I think, though I am not sure. The calmness disappears. I raise my voice, shouting as loud as I can. ‘You want me to go back home? Move on? Are you absolutely fucking crazy?’ He moves his hand to clamp it over my mouth, and I realize that has left my arm free. I hit out at him, catching him on the side of his face, though not hard. Still, it takes him by surprise. He falls backwards, letting go of my other arm as he does.

I stumble to my feet. ‘Bitch!’ he says, but I step forward, over him, and head towards the door.

I manage three steps before he grabs my ankle. I come crashing down. There is a stool sitting tucked under the dressing table and my head hits its edge as I go down. I am lucky; the stool is padded and breaks my fall, but it causes my body to twist awkwardly as I land. Pain shoots up my back and through my neck and I am afraid I have broken something. I begin to crawl towards the door but he still holds my ankle. He pulls me towards him with a grunt and then his crushing weight is on top of me, his lips inches from my ear.

‘Mike,’ I sob. ‘Mike—’

In front of me is the photograph of Adam and Helen, lying on the floor where he had dropped it. Even in the middle of everything else I wonder how he had got it, and then it hits me. Adam had sent it to me at Waring House and Mike had taken it, along with all the other photographs, when he’d come for me.

‘You stupid, stupid bitch,’ he says, spitting into my ear. One of his hands is round my throat, with the other he has grabbed a handful of my hair. He pulls my head back, jerking my neck up. ‘What did you have to go and do that for?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I sob. I cannot move. One of my hands is trapped beneath my body, the other clamped between my back and his leg.

‘Where did you think you were going to go, eh?’ he says. He is snarling now, an animal. Something like hate floods out of him.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again, because it is all I can think of to say. ‘I’m sorry.’ I remember the days when those words would always work, always be enough, be what was needed to get me out of whatever trouble I was in.

‘Stop saying you’re fucking sorry,’ he says. My head jerks back, and then slams forward. My forehead, nose, mouth all connect with the carpeted floor. There is a noise, a sickening crunch, and the smell of stale cigarettes. I cry out. There is blood in my mouth. I have bitten my tongue. ‘Where do you think you’re going to run to? You can’t drive. You don’t know anybody. You don’t even know who you are most of the time. You have nowhere to go, nowhere at all. You’re pathetic.’

I start to cry, because he is right. I am pathetic. Claire never came; I have no friends. I am utterly alone, relying totally on the man who did this to me, and tomorrow morning, if I survive, I will have forgotten even this.

If I survive. The words echo through me as I realize what this man is capable of, and that, this time, I may not get out of this room alive. Terror slams into me, but then I hear the tiny voice again. This is not the place you die. Not with him. Not now. Anything but that.

I arch my back painfully and manage to free my arm. Lunging forward I grab the leg of the stool. It is heavy and the angle of my body wrong, but I manage to twist round and heave it back over my head where I imagine Mike’s head will be. It strikes something with a satisfying crack, and there is a gasp in my ear. He lets go of my hair.

I look round. He has rocked backwards, his hand to his forehead. Blood is beginning to trickle between his fingers. He looks up at me, uncomprehending.

Later, I will think how I should have hit him again. With the stool, or with my bare hands. With anything. I should have made sure he was incapacitated, that I could get away, get downstairs, even far enough away that I could open the door and scream for help.

But I do not. I pull myself upright and then I stand, looking at him on the floor in front of me. No matter what I do now, I think, he has won. He will always have won. He has taken everything from me, even the ability to remember exactly what he did to me. I turn, and begin to move towards the door.

With a grunt he launches himself at me. His whole body collides with mine. Together we slam into the dresser, stumble towards the door. ‘Christine!’ he says. ‘Chris! Don’t leave me!’

I reach out. If I can just open the door, then surely, despite the noise from the club, someone will hear us, and come?

He clings to my waist. Like some grotesque, two-headed monster we inch forward, me dragging him. ‘Chris! I love you!’ he says. He is wailing, and this, plus the ridiculousness of his words, spurs me on. I am nearly there. Soon I will reach the door.

And then it happens. I remember that night, all those years ago. Me, in this room, standing in the same spot. I am reaching out a hand towards the same door. I am happy, ridiculously so. The walls resonate with the soft orange glow of the lit candles that were dotted around the room when I arrived, the air is tinged with the sweet smell of the roses in the bouquet that was on the bed. I’ll be upstairs around seven, my darling, said the note that was pinned to them, and though I wondered briefly what Ben was doing downstairs I am glad of the few minutes I have had alone before he arrives. It has given me the opportunity to gather my thoughts, to reflect on how close I came to losing him, what a relief it has been to end the affair with Mike, how fortunate I am that Ben and I are now set on a new trajectory. How could I have thought that I wanted to be with Mike? Mike would never have done what Ben has done: arrange a surprise night away in a hotel at the coast, to show me how much he loves me and that, despite our recent differences, this will never change. Mike was too inward-looking for that, I have learned. With him everything is a test, affection is measured, that given weighed against that which has been received, and the balance, more often than not, disappointing him.

I am touching the handle of the door, twisting it, pulling it towards me. Ben has taken Adam to stay with his grandparents. We have a whole weekend in front of us, with nothing to worry about. Just the two of us.

‘Darling,’ I am starting to say, but the word is choked off in my throat. It’s not Ben at the door. It’s Mike. He is pushing past me, coming into the room, and even as I am asking him what he thinks he is doing — what right he has to lure me here, to this room, what he thinks he can achieve — I am thinking, You devious bastard! How dare you pretend to be my husband. Do you have no pride left at all?

I think of Ben and Adam, at home. By now Ben will be wondering where I am. Possibly he will soon call the police. How stupid I was to get on a train and come here without mentioning it to anybody. How stupid to believe that a typewritten note, even one sprayed with my favourite perfume, was from my husband.

Mike speaks. ‘Would you have come, if you’d known it was to meet me?’

I laugh. ‘Of course not! It’s over. I told you that before.’

I look at the flowers, the bottle of champagne he still holds in his hand. Everything smacks of romance, of seduction. ‘My God!’ I am saying. ‘You really thought you could just lure me here, give me flowers and a bottle of champagne and that would be it? That I would just fall into your arms and everything would go back to being like it was before? You’re crazy, Mike. Crazy. I’m leaving now. Going back to my husband and my son.’

I don’t want to remember any more. I suppose that must have been when he first hit me, but, after that, I don’t know what happened, what led me from there to the hospital. And now I am here again, in this room. We have turned full circle, though for me all the days between have been stolen. It is as though I never left.

I cannot reach the door. He is pulling himself up. I begin to shout. ‘Help! Help!’

‘Quiet!’ he says. ‘Shut up!’

I shout louder, and he swings me round, at the same time pushing me backwards. I fall, and the ceiling and his face slide down in front of me like a curtain descending. My skull hits something hard and unyielding. I realize he has pushed me into the bathroom. I twist my head and see the tiled floor stretching away from me, the bottom of the toilet, the edge of the bath. There is a bar of soap on the floor, sticky and mashed. ‘Mike!’ I say. ‘Don’t …’ But he is crouching over me, his hands around my throat.

‘Shut up!’ he is saying, over and over, even though I am not saying anything now, just crying. I am gasping for breath, my eyes and mouth are wet, with blood and tears and I don’t know what else.

‘Mike—’ I gasp. I cannot breathe. His hands are around my throat and I cannot breathe. Memory floods back. I can remember him holding my head under water. I remember waking up, in a white bed, wearing a hospital gown, and Ben sitting next to me, the real Ben, the one I married. I remember a policewoman asking me questions I cannot answer. A man in pale-blue pyjamas sitting on the edge of my hospital bed, laughing with me even as he tells me that I greet him every day as if I have never seen him before. A little boy with blond hair and a tooth missing, calling me Mummy. One after another the images come. They flood through me. The effect is violent. I shake my head, trying to clear it, but Mike grips me tighter. His head is above mine, his eyes wild and unblinking as he squeezes my throat, and I can remember it being so once before, in this room. I close my eyes. ‘How dare you!’ he is saying, and I cannot work out which Mike it is who’s speaking: the one here, now, or the one who exists only in my memory. ‘How dare you!’ he says again. ‘How dare you take my child!’

It is then that I remember. When he had attacked me all those years ago, I had been carrying a baby. Not Mike’s but Ben’s. The child that was going to be our new start together.

Neither of us had survived.

I must have blacked out. When I regain consciousness I am sitting in a chair. I cannot move my hands, the inside of my mouth tastes furry. I open my eyes. The room is dim, lit only by the moonlight streaming in through the open curtains and the reflected yellow streetlights. Mike is sitting opposite me, on the edge of the bed. He is holding something in his hand.

I try to speak, but cannot. I realize something is in my mouth. A sock, perhaps. It has been secured somehow, tied in place, and my wrists are tied together, and also my ankles.

This is what he wanted all along, I think. Me, silent and unmoving. I struggle, and he notices that I have woken up. He looks up, his face a mask of pain and sadness, and stares at me, right into my eyes. I feel nothing but hate.

‘You’re awake.’ I wonder if he intends to say anything else, whether he is capable of saying anything else. ‘This isn’t what I wanted. I thought we would come here and it might help you to remember. Remember how things used to be between us. And then we could talk, and I could explain what happened here, all those years ago. I never meant for it to happen, Chris. I just get so mad, sometimes. I can’t help it. I’m sorry. I never wanted to hurt you, ever. I ruined everything.’

He looks down, into his lap. There is so much more I used to want to know, yet I am exhausted, and it is too late. I feel as though I could close my eyes and will myself into oblivion, erasing everything.

Yet I do not want to sleep tonight. And if I must sleep, then I do not want to wake up tomorrow.

‘It was when you told me you were having a baby.’ He doesn’t lift his head. Instead he speaks softly into the folds of his clothes and I have to strain to hear what he is saying. ‘I never thought I’d have a child. Never. They all said—’ He hesitates, as if changing his mind, deciding that some things are better not shared. ‘You said it wasn’t mine. But I knew it was. And I couldn’t cope with the thought that you were still going to leave me, going to take my baby away from me, that I might never see him. I couldn’t cope, Chris.’

I still don’t know what he wants from me.

‘You think I’m not sorry? For what I did? Every day. I see you so bewildered and lost and unhappy. Sometimes I lie there, in bed. I hear you wake up. And you look at me, and I know you don’t know who I am, and I can feel the disappointment and shame. It comes off you in waves. That hurts. Knowing that you’d never sleep with me, now, if you had the choice. And then you get out of bed and go to the bathroom, and I know that in a few minutes you will come back and you’ll be so confused and so unhappy and in so much pain.’

He pauses. ‘And now I know even that will be over soon. I’ve read your journal. I know your doctor will have worked it out by now. Or he will do soon. Claire, too. I know they’ll come for me.’ He looks up. ‘And they’ll try to take you away from me. But Ben doesn’t want you. I do. I want to look after you. Please, Chris. Please remember how much you loved me. Then you can tell them that you want to be with me.’ He points to the last few pages of my journal, scattered on the floor. ‘You can tell them that you forgive me. For this. And then we can be together.’

I shake my head. I cannot believe he wants me to remember. He wants me to know what he has done.

He smiles. ‘You know, sometimes I think it might have been kinder if you’d died that night. Kinder for both of us.’ He looks out of the window. ‘I would join you, Chris. If that’s what you wanted.’ He looks down again. ‘It would be easy enough. You could go first. And I promise you I would follow. You do trust me, don’t you?’

He looks at me, expectantly. ‘Would you like that?’ he says. ‘It would be painless.’

I shake my head, try to speak, fail. My eyes are burning, and I can hardly breathe.

‘No?’ He looks disappointed. ‘No. I suppose any life is better than none. Very well. You’re probably right.’ I begin to cry. He shakes his head. ‘Chris. This will all be fine. You see? This book is the problem.’ He holds up my journal. ‘We were happy, before you started writing this. Or as happy as we could be, anyway. And that was happy enough, wasn’t it? We should just get rid of this, and then maybe you could tell them you were confused, and we could go back to how it was before. For a little while at least.’

He stands up and slides the metal bin from beneath the dresser, takes out the empty liner and discards it. ‘It’ll be easy, then,’ he says. He puts the bin on the floor between his legs. ‘Easy.’ He drops my journal into the bin, and gathers the last few pages that are still littering the floor and adds those. ‘We have to get rid of it,’ he says. ‘All of it. Once and for all.’

He takes a box of matches out of his pocket, strikes one, and retrieves a single page from the bin.

I look at him in horror. ‘No!’ I try to say; nothing comes but a muffled grunt. He doesn’t look at me as he sets fire to the single page and then drops it into the bin.

‘No!’ I say again, but this time it is a silent scream in my head. I watch my history begin to burn to ash, my memories reduced to carbon. My journal, the letter from Ben, everything. I am nothing without that journal, I think. Nothing. And he has won.

I do not plan to do what I do next. It is instinctive. I launch my body at the bin. With my hands tied I cannot break my fall and I hit it awkwardly, hearing something snap as I twist. Pain shoots from my arm and I think I will faint, but I don’t. The bin falls over, scattering burning paper across the floor.

Mike cries out — a shriek — and falls to his knees, slapping the ground, trying to put out the flames. I see that a burning shred has come to rest under the bed, unnoticed by Mike. Flames are beginning to lick at the edge of the bedspread but I can neither reach it nor cry out, and so I simply lie there, watching the bedspread catch fire. It begins to smoke, and I close my eyes. The room will burn, I think, and Mike will burn, and I will burn, and no one will ever really know what happened here, in this room, just like no one will ever really know what happened here all those years ago, and history will turn to ash and be replaced by conjecture.

I cough, a dry, heaving retch, swallowed by the sock balled in my throat. I am beginning to choke. I think of my son. I will never see him now, though at least I’ll die knowing I had one, and that he is alive, and happy. For that I am glad. I think of Ben. The man I married and then forgot. I want to see him. I want to tell him that now, at the end, I can remember him. I can remember meeting him at the rooftop party, and him proposing to me on a hill looking out over a city, and I can remember marrying him in the church in Manchester, having our photographs taken in the rain.

And, yes, I can remember loving him. I know that I do love him, and I always have.

Things go dark. I can’t breathe. I can hear the lap of flames, and feel their heat on my lips and eyes.

There were never going to be any happy endings for me. I know that now. But that is all right.

That is all right.

I am lying down. I have been asleep, but not for long. I can remember who I am, where I have been. I can hear noise, the roar of traffic, a siren that is neither rising nor falling in pitch but remaining constant. Something is over my mouth — I think of a balled sock — yet I find I can breathe. I am too frightened to open my eyes. I do not know what I will see.

But I must. I have no choice but to face whatever my reality has become.

The light is bright. I can see a fluorescent tube on the low ceiling, and two metal bars running parallel to it. The walls are close by on each side, and they are hard, shiny with metal and perspex. I can make out drawers and shelves stocked with bottles and packets, and there are machines, blinking. Everything is moving slightly, vibrating, including, I realize, the bed in which I am lying.

A man’s face appears from somewhere behind me, over my head. He is wearing a green shirt. I don’t recognize him.

‘She’s awake, everybody,’ he says, and then more faces appear. I scan them quickly. Mike is not among them, and I relax a little.

‘Christine,’ comes a voice. ‘Chrissy. It’s me.’ It’s a woman’s voice, one I recognize. ‘We’re on our way to the hospital. You’ve broken your collarbone, but you’re going to be all right. Everything’s going to be fine. He’s dead. That man is dead. He can’t hurt you any more.’

I see the person speaking, then. She is smiling and holding my hand. It’s Claire. The same Claire I saw just the other day, not the young Claire I might expect to see after just waking up, and I notice her earrings are the same pair that she had on the last time I saw her.

‘Claire—’ I say, but she interrupts.

‘Don’t speak,’ she says. ‘Just try to relax.’ She leans forward and strokes my hair, and whispers something in my ear, but I don’t hear what. It sounds like I’m sorry.

‘I remember,’ I say. ‘I remember.’

She smiles, and then she steps back and a young man takes her place. He has a narrow face and is wearing thick-rimmed glasses. For a moment I think it is Ben, until I realize that Ben would be my age now.

‘Mum?’ he says. ‘Mum?’

He looks the same as he did in the picture of him and Helen, and I realize I remember him, too.

‘Adam?’ I say. Words choke in my throat as he hugs me.

‘Mum,’ he says. ‘Dad’s coming. He’ll be here soon.’

I pull him to me, and breathe in the smell of my boy, and I am happy.

I can wait no longer. It is time. I must sleep. I have a private room and so there is no need for me to observe the strict routines of the hospital, but I am exhausted, my eyes already beginning to close. It is time.

I have spoken to Ben. To the man I really married. We talked for hours, it seems, though it may only have been a few minutes. He told me that he flew in as soon as the police contacted him.

‘The police?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When they realized you weren’t living with the person Waring House thought you were they traced me. I’m not sure how. I suppose they had my old address and went from there.’

‘So where were you?’

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘I’ve been in Italy for a few months,’ he said. ‘I’ve been working out there.’ He paused. ‘I thought you were OK.’ He took my hand. ‘I’m sorry …’

‘You couldn’t have known,’ I said.

He looked away. ‘I left you, Chrissy.’

‘I know. I know everything. Claire told me. I read your letter.’

‘I thought it was for the best,’ he said. ‘I really did. I thought it would help. Help you. Help Adam. I tried to get on with my life. I really did.’ He hesitated. ‘I thought I could only do that if I divorced you. I thought it would free me. Adam didn’t understand, even when I explained to him that you wouldn’t even know, wouldn’t even remember being married to me.’

‘Did it?’ I said. ‘Did it help you to move on?’

He turned to me. ‘I won’t lie to you, Chrissy. There have been other women. Not many, but some. It’s been a long time, years and years. At first nothing serious, but then I met someone a couple of years ago. I moved in with her. But—’

‘But?’

‘Well, that ended. She said I didn’t love her. That I’d never stopped loving you …’

‘And was she right?’

He did not reply, and so, fearing his answer, I said, ‘So what happens now? Tomorrow? Will you take me back to Waring House?’

He looked up at me.

‘No,’ he said. ‘She was right. I never stopped loving you. And I won’t take you there again. Tomorrow, I want you to come home.’

Now I look at him. He sits in a chair next to me, and although he is already snoring, his head tipped forward at an awkward angle, he still holds my hand. I can just make out his glasses, the scar running down the side of his face. My son has left the room to phone his girlfriend and whisper a goodnight to his unborn daughter, and my best friend is outside in the car park, smoking a cigarette. No matter what, I am surrounded by the people I love.

Earlier, I spoke to Dr Nash. He told me I had left the care home almost four months ago, a little while after Mike had started visiting, claiming to be Ben. I had discharged myself, signed all the paperwork. I had left voluntarily. They couldn’t have stopped me, even if they’d believed there was a reason for them to try. When I left I took with me the few photographs and personal possessions that I still had.

‘That was why Mike had those pictures?’ I said. ‘The ones of me, and Adam. That’s why he had the letter that Adam had written to Santa Claus? His birth certificate?’

‘Yes,’ said Dr Nash. ‘They were with you at Waring House, and they went with you when you left. At some point Mike must have destroyed all the pictures that showed you with Ben. Possibly even before you were discharged from Waring House — the staff turnover is fairly high and they had no idea what your husband really looked like.’

‘But how would he have got access to the photographs?’

‘They were in an album in a drawer in your room. It would have been easy enough for him to get to them once he started visiting you. He might even have slipped in a few photographs of himself. He must have had some of the two of you taken during … well, when you were seeing each other, years ago. The staff at Waring House were convinced that the man who had been visiting you was the same one as in the photo album.’

‘So I brought my photos back to Mike’s house and he hid them in a metal box? Then he invented a fire, to explain why there were so few?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He looked tired, and guilty. I wondered whether he blamed himself for any of what had happened, and hoped he didn’t. He had helped me, after all. He had rescued me. I hoped he would still be able to write his paper and present my case. I hoped he would be recognized for what he had done for me. After all, without him I’d—

I don’t want to think about where I’d be.

‘How did you find me?’ I said. He explained that Claire had been frantic with worry after we’d spoken, but she had waited for me to call the next day. ‘Mike must have removed the pages from your journal that night. That was why you didn’t think anything was wrong when you gave me the journal on Tuesday, and neither did I. When you didn’t call her Claire tried to phone you, but she only had the number for the mobile phone I had given you and Mike had taken that, too. I should have known something was wrong when I called you on that number this morning and you didn’t answer. But I didn’t think. I just called you on your other phone …’ He shook his head.

‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s fair to assume he’d been reading your journal for at least the last week or so, probably longer. At first Claire couldn’t get hold of Adam and didn’t have Ben’s number, so she called Waring House. They only had one number that they thought was for Ben but in fact it was Mike’s. Claire didn’t have my number. She called the school he worked at and persuaded them to give her Mike’s address and phone number, but both were false. She was at a dead end.’

I think of this man discovering my journal, reading it every day. Why didn’t he destroy it?

Because I’d written that I loved him. And because that was what he wanted me to carry on believing.

Or maybe I am being too kind to him. Maybe he just wanted me to see it burn.

‘Claire didn’t call the police?’

‘She did.’ He nodded. ‘But it was a few days before they really took it seriously. In the meantime she’d got hold of Adam and he’d told her that Ben had been abroad for a while and that as far as he knew you were still in Waring House. She contacted them and, though they wouldn’t give her your home address, they eventually relented and gave Adam my number. They must have thought that was a good compromise, as I am a doctor. Claire only got through to me this afternoon.’

‘This afternoon?’

‘Yes. Claire convinced me something was wrong, and of course finding out that Adam was alive confirmed it. We came to see you at home, but by then you’d already left for Brighton.’

‘How did you know to find me there?’

‘You told me this morning that Ben — sorry, Mike — had told you that you were going away for the weekend. You said he’d told you that you were going to the coast. Once Claire told me what was going on I guessed where he was taking you.’

I lay back. I felt tired. Exhausted. I wanted only to sleep, but was frightened to. Frightened of what I might forget.

‘But you told me Adam was dead,’ I said. ‘You said he’d been killed. When we were sitting in the car park. And the fire, too. You told me there’d been a fire.’

He smiled, sadly. ‘Because that’s what you told me.’ I told him I didn’t understand. ‘One day, a couple of weeks after we first met, you told me Adam was dead. Evidently Mike had told you, and you had believed him and told me. When you asked me in the car park I told you the truth as I believed it. It was the same with the fire. I believed there’d been one, because that’s what you told me.’

‘But I remembered Adam’s funeral,’ I said. ‘His coffin …’

Again the sad smile. ‘Your imagination …’

‘But I saw pictures,’ I said. ‘That man’ — I found it impossible to say Mike’s name — ‘he showed me pictures of me and him together, of us getting married. I found a picture of a gravestone. It had Adam’s name—’

‘He must have faked them,’ he said.

‘Faked them?’

‘Yes. On a computer. It’s really quite easy to mock up photos these days. He must have guessed you were suspecting the truth and left them where he knew you’d find them. It’s quite likely that some of the photos you thought were of the two of you were also faked.’

I thought of the times I had written that Mike was in his office. Working. Is that what he’d been doing? How thoroughly he had betrayed me.

‘Are you OK?’ said Dr Nash.

I smiled. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so.’ I looked at him, and realized I could picture him in a different suit, with his hair cut much shorter.

‘I can remember things,’ I said.

His expression did not change. ‘What things?’ he said.

‘I remember you with a different haircut,’ I said. ‘And I recognized Ben, too. And Adam and Claire, in the ambulance. And I can remember seeing her the other day. We went to the café at Alexandra Palace. We had coffee. She has a son called Toby.’

His eyes were sad.

‘Have you read your journal today?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But don’t you see? I can remember things that I didn’t write down. I can remember the earrings that she was wearing. They’re the same ones she has on now. I asked her. She said I was right. And I can remember that Toby was wearing a blue parka, and he had cartoons on his socks, and I remember he was upset because he wanted apple juice and they only had orange or blackcurrant. Don’t you see? I didn’t write those things down. I can remember them.’

He looked pleased, then, though still cautious.

‘Dr Paxton did say that he could find no obvious organic cause for your amnesia. That it seemed likely that it was at least partly caused by the emotional trauma of what had happened to you, as well as the physical. I suppose it’s possible that another trauma might reverse that, at least to some degree.’

I leapt on what he was suggesting. ‘So I might be cured?’ I said.

He looked at me intently. I had the feeling he was weighing up what to say, how much of the truth I could stand.

‘I have to say it’s unlikely,’ he said. ‘There’s been a degree of improvement over the last few weeks, but nothing like a complete return of memory. But it is possible.’

I felt a rush of joy. ‘Doesn’t the fact that I remember what happened a week ago mean that I can form new memories again? And keep them?’

He spoke hesitantly. ‘It would suggest that, yes. But, Christine, I want you to be prepared for the fact that the effect may well be temporary. We won’t know until tomorrow.’

‘When I wake up?’

‘Yes. It’s entirely possible that after you sleep tonight all the memories you have from today will be gone. All the new ones, and all the old ones.’

‘It might be exactly the same as when I woke up this morning?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It might.’

That I might wake up and have forgotten Adam and Ben seemed too much to contemplate. It felt like it would be a living death.

‘But—’ I began.

‘Keep your journal, Christine,’ he said. ‘You still have it?’

I shook my head. ‘He burned it. That’s what caused the fire.’

Dr Nash looked disappointed. ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t really matter. Christine, you’ll be fine. You can begin another. The people who love you have come back to you.’

‘But I want to have come back to them, too,’ I said. ‘I want to have come back to them.’

We talked for a little while longer, but he was keen to leave me with my family. I know he was only trying to prepare me for the worst — for the possibility that I will wake up tomorrow with no idea where I am, or who this man sitting next to me is, or who the person is who is claiming to be my son — but I have to believe that he is wrong. That my memory is back. I have to believe that.

I look at my sleeping husband, silhouetted in the dim room. I remember us meeting, that night of the party, the night I watched the fireworks with Claire on the roof. I remember him asking me to marry him, on holiday in Verona, and the rush of excitement I’d felt as I said yes. And our wedding too, our marriage, our life. I remember it all. I smile.

‘I love you,’ I whisper, and I close my eyes, and I sleep.