Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel Page 5

  ‘This is Parliament Hill,’ said Ben. ‘We come here often.’

  I said nothing. The city sprawled before us under the low cloud. It seemed peaceful. And smaller than I imagined; I could see all the way across it to low hills in the distance. I could see the thrust of the Telecom tower, St Paul’s dome, the power station at Battersea, shapes I recognized, though dimly and without knowing why. There were other, less familiar, landmarks, too: a glass building shaped like a fat cigar, a giant wheel, way in the distance. Like my own face the view seemed both alien and somehow familiar.

  ‘I feel I recognize this place,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘Yes. We’ve been coming here for a while, though the view changes all the time.’

  We continued walking. Most of the benches were occupied, by people alone or in couples. We headed for one just past the top of the hill and sat down. I smelt ketchup; a half-eaten burger lay under the bench in a cardboard box.

  Ben picked it up carefully and put it in one of the litter bins, then returned to sit next to me. He pointed out some of the landmarks. ‘That’s Canary Wharf,’ he said, gesturing towards a building that, even at this distance, looked immeasurably tall. ‘It was built in the early nineties, I think. They’re all offices, things like that.’

  The nineties. It was odd to hear a decade that I could not remember living through summed up in two words. I must have missed so much. So much music, so many films and books, so much news. Disasters, tragedies, wars. Whole countries might have fallen to pieces as I wandered, oblivious, from one day to the next.

  So much of my own life, too. So many views I don’t recognize, despite seeing them every day.

  ‘Ben?’ I said. ‘Tell me about us.’

  ‘Us?’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

  I turned to face him. The wind gusted up the hill, cold against my face. A dog barked somewhere. I wasn’t sure how much to say; he knows I remember nothing of him at all.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about me and you. I don’t even know how we met, or when we got married, or anything.’

  He smiled, and shuffled along the bench so that we were touching. He put his arm around my shoulder. I began to recoil, then remembered he is not a stranger but the man I married. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How did we meet?’

  ‘Well, we were both at university,’ he said. ‘You had just started your Ph.D. Do you remember that?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not really. What did I study?’

  ‘You’d graduated in English,’ he said, and an image flashed in front of me, quick and sharp. I saw myself in a library and recalled vague ideas of writing a thesis concerning feminist theory and early twentieth-century literature, though really it was just something I could be doing while I worked on novels, something my mother might not understand but would at least see as legitimate. The scene hung for a moment, shimmering, so real I could almost touch it, but then Ben spoke and it vanished.

  ‘I was doing my degree,’ he said, ‘in chemistry. I would see you all the time. At the library, in the bar, whatever. I would always be amazed at how beautiful you looked, but I could never bring myself to speak to you.’

  I laughed. ‘Really?’ I couldn’t imagine myself as intimidating.

  ‘You always seemed so confident. And intense. You would sit for hours, surrounded by books, just reading and taking notes, sipping from cups of coffee or whatever. You looked so beautiful. I never dreamed you would ever be interested in me. But then one day I happened to be sitting next to you in the library, and you accidentally knocked your cup over and your coffee went all over my books. You were so apologetic, even though it hardly mattered anyway, and we mopped up the coffee and then I insisted on buying you another. You said it ought to be you buying me one, to say sorry, and I said OK then, and we went for a coffee. And that was that.’

  I tried to picture the scene, to remember the two of us, young, in a library, surrounded by soggy papers, laughing. I could not, and felt the hot stab of sadness. I imagined how every couple must love the story of how they met — who first spoke to who, what was said — yet I have no recollection of ours. The wind whipped the tail of the little boy’s kite; a sound like a death rattle.

  ‘What happened then?’ I said.

  ‘Well, we dated. The usual, you know? I finished my degree, and you finished your Ph.D., and then we got married.’

  ‘How? Who asked who?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I asked you.’

  ‘Where? Tell me how it happened.’

  ‘We were totally in love,’ he said. He looked away, into the distance. ‘We spent all our time together. You shared a house, but you were hardly there at all. Most of your time you would spend with me. It made sense for us to live together, to get married. So, one Valentine’s Day, I bought you a bar of soap. Expensive soap, the kind you really liked, and I took off the cellophane wrapper and I pressed an engagement ring into the soap, and then I wrapped it back up and gave it to you. As you were getting ready that evening you found it, and you said yes.’

  I smiled to myself. It sounded messy, a ring caked in soap, and fraught with the possibility that I might not have used the bar, or found the ring, for weeks. But still, it was not an unromantic story.

  ‘Who did I share a house with?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t really remember. A friend. Anyway, we got married the following year. In a church in Manchester, near where your mother lived. It was a lovely day. I was training to be a teacher by then, so we didn’t have much money, but it was still lovely. The sun shone, everyone was happy. And then we went for our honeymoon. To Italy. The lakes. It was wonderful.’

  I tried to picture the church, my dress, the view from a hotel room. Nothing would come.

  ‘I don’t remember any of it,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He looked away, turning his head so that I couldn’t see his face. ‘It doesn’t matter. I understand.’

  ‘There aren’t many photographs,’ I said. ‘In the scrapbook, I mean. There aren’t any photos of us from our wedding.’

  ‘We had a fire,’ he said. ‘In the last place we were living.’

  ‘A fire?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Our house pretty much burned down. We lost a lot of things.’

  I sighed. It didn’t seem fair, to have lost both my memories and my souvenirs of the past.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What happened? After the marriage, the honeymoon?’

  ‘We moved in together. We were very happy.’

  ‘And then?’

  He sighed, and said nothing. That can’t be it, I thought. That can’t describe my whole life. That can’t be all I amounted to. A wedding, a honeymoon, a marriage. But what else was I expecting? What else could there have been?

  The answer came suddenly. Children. Babies. I realized with a shudder that that was what seemed to be missing from my life, from our home. There were no pictures on the mantelpiece of a son or daughter — clutching a degree certificate, white-water rafting, even just posing, bored, for the camera — and none of grandchildren either. I had not had a baby.

  I felt the slap of disappointment. The unsatisfied desire was burned into my subconscious. Even though I had woken up not even knowing how old I was, some part of me must have known I had wanted to have a child.

  Suddenly I heard my own mother, describing the biological clock as if it were a bomb. ‘Get busy achieving all the things in life you want to achieve,’ she said, ‘because one day you’ll be fine and the next …’

  I knew what she meant: boom! My ambitions would disappear and all I would want to do was have children. ‘It’s what happened to me,’ she said. ‘It’ll happen to you. It happens to everyone.’

  But it hadn’t, I suppose. Or something else had happened instead. I looked at my husband.

  ‘Ben?’ I said. ‘What then
?’

  He looked at me and squeezed my hand.

  ‘Then you lost your memory,’ he said.

  My memory. It all came back to that, in the end. Always.

  I looked out across the city. The sun hung low in the sky, shining weakly through the clouds, casting long shadows on the grass. I realized that it would be dark soon. The sun would set, finally, the moon rise in the sky. Another day would end. Another lost day.

  ‘We never had children,’ I said. It was not a question.

  He didn’t answer, but turned to look at me. He held my hands in his, rubbing them, as if against the cold.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. We didn’t.’

  Sadness etched his face. For himself, or me? I could not tell. I let him rub my hands, hold my fingers between his. I realized that, despite the confusion, I felt safe there, with this man. I could see that he was kind, and thoughtful, and patient. No matter how awful my situation, it could be so much worse.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  He said nothing. He looked at me, the expression on his face one of pain. Pain, and disappointment.

  ‘How did it happen, Ben?’ I said. ‘How did I get to be like this?’

  I felt him tense. ‘You’re sure you want to know?’ he said.

  I fixed my eyes on a little girl riding a tricycle in the distance. I knew this couldn’t be the first time I have asked him this question, the first time he has had to explain these things to me. Possibly I ask him every day.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I realized this time is different. This time I will write down what he tells me.

  He took a deep breath. ‘It was December. Icy. You’d been out for the day, at work. You were on your way home, a short walk. There were no witnesses. We don’t know if you were crossing the road at the time or if the car that hit you mounted the pavement, but either way you must have gone over the bonnet. You were very badly injured. Both legs were broken. An arm and your collarbone.’

  He stopped talking. I could hear the low beat of the city. Traffic, a plane overhead, the murmur of the wind in the trees. Ben squeezed my hand.

  ‘They said your head must have hit the ground first, which is why you lost your memory.’

  I closed my eyes. I could remember nothing of the accident, and so did not feel angry, or even upset. I was filled instead with a kind of quiet regret. An emptiness. A ripple across the surface of the lake of memory.

  He squeezed my hand, and I put mine over his, feeling the cold, hard band of his wedding ring. ‘You were lucky to survive,’ he said.

  I felt myself go cold. ‘What happened to the driver?’

  ‘He didn’t stop. It was a hit-and-run. We don’t know who hit you.’

  ‘But who would do that?’ I said. ‘Who would run someone over and then just drive away?’

  He said nothing. I didn’t know what I had expected. I thought of what I had read of my meeting with Dr Nash. A neurological problem, he had told me. Structural or chemical. A hormonal imbalance. I assumed he had meant an illness. Something that had just happened, had come out of nowhere. One of those things.

  But this seemed worse; it was done to me by someone else, it had been avoidable. If I had taken a different route home that evening — or if the driver of the car that hit me had done so — I would have still been normal. I might even have been a grandmother by now, just.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  It was not a question he could answer, and so Ben said nothing. We sat in silence for a while, our hands locked together. It grew dark. The city was bright, the buildings lit. It will be winter soon, I thought. We will soon be halfway through November. December will follow, and then Christmas. I couldn’t imagine how I would get from here to there. I couldn’t imagine living through a whole string of identical days.

  ‘Shall we go?’ said Ben. ‘Back home?’

  I didn’t answer him. ‘Where was I?’ I said. ‘The day that I was hit by the car. What had I been doing?’

  ‘You were on your way home from work,’ he said.

  ‘What job, though? What was I doing?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You had a temporary job as a secretary — well, personal assistant really — at some lawyers, I think it was.’

  ‘But why—’ I began.

  ‘You needed to work so that we could pay the mortgage,’ he said. ‘It was tough, for a while.’

  That wasn’t what I meant, though. What I wanted to say was, You told me I had a Ph.D. Why had I settled for that?

  ‘But why was I working as a secretary?’ I said.

  ‘It was the only job you could get. Times were hard.’

  I remembered the feeling I had earlier. ‘Was I writing?’ I said. ‘Books?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  So it was a transitory ambition, then. Or maybe I had tried, and failed. As I turned to ask him the clouds lit up and, a moment later, there was a loud bang. Startled, I looked out; sparks in the distant sky, raining down on the city below.

  ‘What was that?’ I said.

  ‘A firework,’ said Ben. ‘It was Bonfire Night this week.’

  A moment later another firework lit the sky, another loud bang.

  ‘It looks like there’ll be a display,’ he said. ‘Shall we watch?’

  I nodded. It could do no harm, and though part of me wanted to rush home to my journal, to write down what Ben had told me, another part of me wanted to stay, hoping he might tell me more. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s.’

  He grinned, and put his arm around my shoulders. The sky was dark for a moment, and then there was a crackle and fizz, and a thin whistle as a tiny spark shot high. It hung for a slow moment before exploding in orange brilliance with an echoing bang. It was beautiful.

  ‘Usually we go to a display,’ said Ben. ‘One of the big organized ones. But I forgot it was tonight.’ He nuzzled my neck with his chin. ‘Is this OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I looked out over the city, at the explosions of colour in the air above it, at the screeching lights. ‘This is fine. This way we get to see all the displays.’

  He sighed. Our breath misted in the air in front of us, each mingled with that of the other, and we sat in silence, watching the sky turn to colour and light. The smoke rose from the gardens of the city, lit with violence — with red and orange, blue and purple — and the night air turned smoky, shot through with a flinty smell, dry and metallic. I licked my lips, tasted sulphur, and as I did so another memory struck.

  It was needle-sharp. The sounds were too loud, the colours too bright. I felt, not like an observer, but instead as though I was still in the middle of it. I had the sensation I was falling backwards. I gripped Ben’s hand.

  I saw myself, with a woman. She has red hair, and we are standing on a rooftop, watching fireworks. I can hear the rhythmic throb of music that plays in the room beneath our feet, and a cold wind blows, sending acrid smoke floating over us. Even though I am wearing only a thin dress I feel warm, buzzing with alcohol and the joint that I am still holding between my fingers. I feel gravel under my feet and remember I have discarded my shoes and left them in this girl’s bedroom downstairs. I look across at her as she turns to face me and feel alive, dizzily happy.

  ‘Chrissy,’ she says, taking the joint. ‘Fancy a tab?’

  I don’t know what she means, and tell her.

  She laughs. ‘You know!’ she says. ‘A tab. A trip. Acid. I’m pretty sure Nige has brought some. He told me he would.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say.

  ‘C’mon! It’d be fun!’

  I laugh and take the joint back, inhaling a lungful as if to prove that I am not boring. We have promised ourselves that we will never be boring.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘It’s not my scene. I think I just want to stick to this. And beer. OK?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she says, looking back over the railing. I can tell she is disappointed, though not angry with me, and wonder whether she will do it anyway. Without me.

 
I doubt it. I have never had a friend like her before. One who knows everything about me, whom I trust, sometimes even more than I trust myself. I look at her now, her red hair wind-whipped, the end of the joint glowing in the dark. Is she happy with the way her life is turning out? Or is it too early to say?

  ‘Look at that!’ she says, pointing to where a Roman candle has exploded, throwing the trees into silhouette in front of its red glare. ‘Fucking beautiful, isn’t it?’

  I laugh, agreeing with her, and then we stand in silence for a few more minutes, passing the joint between us. Eventually she offers me what is left of the soggy roach and, when I refuse, grinds it into the asphalt with her booted foot.

  ‘We should go downstairs,’ she says, grabbing my arm. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

  ‘Not again!’ I say, but I go anyway. We step over a couple kissing on the stairs. ‘It’s not going to be another one of those pricks from your course, is it?’

  ‘Fuck off!’ she says, trotting down the stairs. ‘I thought you’d love Alan!’

  ‘I did!’ I said. ‘Right up until the moment he told me he was in love with a guy called Kristian.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ she laughs. ‘How was I supposed to know that Alan would decide to choose you to come out to? This one’s different. You’ll love him. I know it. Just say hello. There’s no pressure.’

  ‘OK,’ I say. I push the door open and we go into the party.

  The room is large, with concrete walls and unshaded light-bulbs hanging from the ceiling. We make our way to the kitchen area and get ourselves a beer, then find a spot over by the window. ‘So where’s this guy, then?’ I say, but she doesn’t hear me. I feel the buzz of the alcohol and the weed and begin to dance. The room is full of people, dressed mostly in black. Fucking art students, I think.